How Fospha Built a Flexible Wellness Strategy with Wellhub

Fospha is a high-growth marketing measurement scale-up with team members across London, Austin and Mumbai. Its platform gives enterprise commerce teams an independent view of marketing performance across marketing and sales channels, helping them understand what is really driving growth. With Fospha, teams can make more confident budget decisions, reduce wasted spend and maximise revenue.

A Timely Opportunity

Fospha already offered a strong flexible annual allowance that employees could put toward individual health goals, but using it for individual fitness memberships still felt highly limiting. This typically locks people into a single gym chain, which lacks the flexibility required in the modern world of commuting and hybrid schedules.

Instead, the collaboration sparked when Wellhub popped up in the inbox of Fospha's CFO, Ashkan Valadan. Ashkan immediately recognised a cost-effective opportunity to improve their existing benefits package. He saw a premium employee benefit that offered high-impact wellness at a perfect price for a growing scale-up, letting employees save their flexible allowance for other goals. 

But Ashkan had an edge: he already knew the platform worked. Having personally experienced Wellhub as a benefit. He had been struck firsthand by the sheer variety of options available compared to traditional corporate approaches.
 

"What was striking and impressive was the range of gyms, apps, and different things you get access to compared to a normal approach where you can only access one gym. In a modern world where you're traveling to more places, working from home, or working from the office, having just one gym or club is quite limiting or very expensive to do. It’s an incredible way to stay fit and get access to all the different gyms without memberships." 

— Ashkan Valadan, Chief Financial Officer

Balancing a startup budget with the human side of scale-up life

Headcount rises fast in a scale-up and daily life soon becomes busy, and stressful.For Sarah Deardurff, Fospha’s People and Talent Lead, the goal was simple - How to give back to a team that are working in an intense environment.

"We're a scale-up, high growth, everything's very busy all the time and can be stressful. So we were trying to provide something towards wellbeing and show the team that we encourage them to take care of themselves." 

— Sarah Deardurff, People and Talent Lead 

Sarah knew that HR platforms can easily become administrative nightmares, admitting she initially hesitated when the opportunity arose during a chaotic period of internal performance reviews but it turned out that launching Wellhub was easy and with minimal admin from the HR perspective. 

But as a growing business that isn't necessarily flush with cash, Fospha’s leadership had to be creative. Benefits are hard to get right. Something for everyone, works for no-one. For example, childcare is a wonderful benefit, but might only serve a tiny portion of your team. Fospha required a flexible approach that could deliver value to the entire diverse workforce at once. 

"Sometimes benefits and wellness can be very specific. You introduce a childcare benefit or pension services, it’s only for a few people. Whereas this is for the many. You aren't just finding one benefit which keeps 30% of people happy and then you need to find another. There are mental health solutions, gyms, nutritional support, apps, etc. It’s the range which really ticks a lot of boxes." 

— Ashkan Valadan, Chief Financial Officer

Ultimately, it came down to budget efficiency. By partnering with Wellhub, Fospha avoided spending money on a single, rigid perk. This gave the business an incredibly inclusive, high-impact foundation for its first-year wellness strategy, leaving them perfectly positioned to expand the program as the company continues to scale.

The Launch & Milestone

Following the official rollout in April 2026, Fospha immediately saw an incredible 54% membership rate - higher than any other benefit Fospha provided. This spike in uptake gave Ashkan rapid peace of mind about the company's decision to invest.

Employees have actively embraced this variety, quickly accumulating 185 total check-ins across 22 different gyms/studios  in London. The engagement shows a balanced split between physical and digital wellness routines with 96 physical studios check-ins and 89 app check-ins.

To ensure continued and sustained success, the leadership is doubling-down on internal comms - leveraging key touch-points like new-hire onboarding. For a company that offered a gym reimbursement, timing is also a key element. Many employees may choose to wait until their current rigid contract expires. 

Talent acquisition

In the hyper-competitive tech sector, recruiting top talent is an uphill battle. It is not uncommon to lose out on a quality candidate, because another company provided a more compelling stack of benefits. Fospha adopted Wellhub as part of their approach to stay ahead in the tech talent war.

Fospha now features Wellhub prominently at the top of their recruitment collateral, embedding it into their internal benefits page and official offer booklets.

While still early to measure long-term hiring metrics, Ashkan highlights that it is already poised to be an absolute game-changer for a massive portion of their hiring pipeline: recent graduates. Saving £40 to £50 a month on a premium global fitness network, which would normally cost £100+ on the open market, significantly eases their financial burden and directly intercepts the lifestyle spending they value most.

Initial feedback: "Too Good to Be True"

The qualitative chatter sweeping through the office provided the real cultural victory. The feedback from the team has been overwhelmingly positive. When Ashkan checked in with his own team to see how the launch was being received, the response blew past his expectations.

"One of my direct team actually told me it's the best benefit they've ever had, which is more than I expected. But that was my reaction when I used it previously, it's almost too good to be true. Hearing those exact words was the verification I needed to know we made the right decision getting this over the line." 

— Ashkan Valadan, Chief Financial Officer

Why Wellbeing is a strategic imperative

For both Sarah and Ashkan, the personal motivation to champion a modern wellness ecosystem stretches far beyond simple corporate metrics. It stems from a deeply human understanding of what it means to work in today's intense, high-growth tech sector.
 

"We put a lot of energy into our work. Nowadays, it’s not just a 9-to-5, it’s the heavy commute and thinking about emails on the weekend. If an employee feels genuinely cared for outside these four walls, they bring their best, most engaged selves into the office. Benefits like this are the bare minimum a company can do. "

 — Sarah Deardurff, People and Talent Lead

Ashkan echoes this exact sentiment, bridging the gap between empathetic leadership and business execution.

"To be successful at work, people need to be taken care of outside of work. It's harder to build extensive benefit systems in a scale-up compared to tech giants, but the small things we do to put our team in the right state of mind will always return immense value to the business"

— Ashkan Valadan, Chief Financial Officer

The Final Verdict: advice to the industry

As Fospha continues to expand its global footprint, its leadership team offers straightforward advice to other professionals:

• For HR leaders navigating complex benefit frameworks, Sarah’s message is to cut through the administrative noise.

"If you are looking for a long-term strategic wellbeing partner, choose a flexible platform that actually works for the most amount of people while remaining incredibly easy to manage administratively. In HR, we too easily get bogged down in outdated platforms and endless spreadsheets for things that should be entirely seamless. Choose a platform that makes your team feel completely cared for but remains effortless to use. Wellhub perfectly aligns with that." 

— Sarah Deardurff, People and Talent Lead

• For finance directors and budget owners who still view employee wellness as an unnecessary luxury or an unrecoverable operational expense, Ashkan looks directly through a mathematical lens.

"If you look at this through a pure CFO lens, your absolute priority is making your team and business as efficient and effective as possible. You achieve that by looking after them outside of work. When a tiny investment of £10 to £15 a month per employee can protect and optimise over half of your workforce, the impact on your P&L is utterly insignificant compared to the value it returns. You can't even buy office snacks or host a team lunch for that amount. From a pure math perspective, it is an absolute no-brainer." 

— Ashkan Valadan, Chief Financial Officer