What's Your Story?

People connect with stories, everyone has a story and every business has a story of how it came to be. But, not many use it or share it with their fans. Telling your story or specific parts of your story can give you an advantage. It shows you are transparent and allows people to feel more connected to you and your business. Along with creating a greater sense of personality for your business and brand.

So here's my story...

From an early age I knew that I wanted own a business. Why?  I don't like being told what to do or having to report to someone. I'm just naturally entrepreneurial. While I learned this early I didn't always know that I would end up in the fitness business.

That being said, I've always been drawn to fitness. Growing up as the "skinny kid" gave me a greater than normal interest in exercise. I started "lifting" (that was the term when you were 12) at age 12. It was at this point that I began to fall in love with fitness. I saw results fast and by the time I was 14 I was stronger than most of the other kids my age and began to see my athletic performance improve. This motivated me more and continued through high school and into adulthood, which has lead to my professional career.

When it came time to look at colleges I decided I wanted to major in Exercise Science and own my own gym, I mean "health club" or "athletic club" that would be the correct 90s term - if you want to date yourself open a gym with words in it.  Oh and I also needed a school were I could play football. So that was how I went about picking a college. This lead me to Mount Union College where I played, I mean majored, in football until transferring to Slippery Rock University in my sophomore year and graduating two years later with a degree in Exercise Science.

So now what? My plan was to attend graduate school, which was narrowed down to Northeastern University, Central Florida University, and Slippery Rock University. However, getting my master's in Exercise Science didn't make much sense to me. I was going to be putting in a lot of money and time into writing papers and doing research on theories and other stuff that I had already studied during my 4 years of undergrad. This didn't make sense to me. I didn't want to spend my career doing research and writing papers. I wanted to own a gym and help people get into shape. I briefly entertained the idea of getting my MBA, because that seemed somewhat useful. But, again I didn't want to work for a company, I wanted to build one and at the time very few schools were offering entrepreneurial programs.

So instead, I took myself to school through reading, watching, and attending everything I could about business and fitness. This also including spent time learning from experts in the fitness industry who owned successful gyms. This was my master's degree and if you add up the total cost of everything spent to learn and mistakes made it's probably is enough to pay for two MBA's. Probably more so from mistakes, but those would have been made most likely anyhow. This also built a passion for continuing education that has stayed with me.

So let's get back to how I came about owning my first fitness business.

Not having much money at the age of 22, I decided to continue working at the gym that I began working at as a personal trainer in my junior year of college. It paid decent and I had a decent size clientele built up of 1-on-1 personal training clients (yep - that was how you trained clients back in the day) which allowed me study and learn what I needed to own a business in the fitness industry.  However, after a few months I began to notice that the owner needed help. The business had grown too large for him to handle himself and he needed a partner. So with some financial backing from my Dad I bought 49% of the company. Never buy only 49%, but that was a lesson learned and mistake made by an over zealous 23 year old.

This gym, that I was now 49% owner of, was your typical 90's health club model. If featured a ton of fancy, shiny fixed equipment, treadmills, ellipticals, and bikes. We also had a free weight area, but it consisted of a bench press, incline and decline press, Smith machines, dumbbells, and of course the leg press. Kettlebells, bands, foam rollers? No there was not much functional equipment. And that is were things began to go down hill. At least one of the reasons.

As I began to attend more conferences and workshops in the industry I was seeing a shift away from the traditional gym model because of how it was failing the member. At the time the only training we offered was high priced 1-on-1. If you didn't do this, you didn't get help. In our gym people were buying a membership looking for a solution to their problem, but if they couldn't afford 1-on-1 all they got has a workout card that took them through the circuit of machines over and over forever. That didn't work and we knew it, but that's what everybody was selling back then and the way things had always been done.

I wanted to change this and start providing training on some level for every member. Completely remove most of the fixed equipment and bring in more functional equipment. However, my business partner didn't have the same thoughts. The way he saw it everything was working well and didn't need changed. While I was able to convince the purchase of a squat rack, he frowned upon the use of it and deemed it too dangerous for the clients.

Things went this way for about two years. We were butting heads hard, money was beginning to go missing, and some questionable business practices were beginning to take place by my partner. I knew it was time to get out, things were only going to get worse and I didn't want to be associated with this type of person. But, at the same time I was scared to go out on my own.

It was at this point that Tammy and I (my future fiance and business partner) attended our first Perform Better Summit. I remember sitting in the first lecture of the weekend listening to Bill Parisi and that was when I decided I'm done. I finally realized that if I wanted to do things the way I believed in, I had to get out on my own and Tammy felt the same way.

It only took about three months from that weekend at Perform Better to when we opened the doors of Defined Fitness, now called Pittsburgh North Fitness. Fortunately for us the majority of our clients followed us and gave us nice client base to start with out of the gate. However, we made some mistakes.

1. We opened in a bad market. The average household income was about $30,000 in our five mile radius and a good portion of that was unemployed and government assisted. The location was not bad, but the town was a dying steel town. This made it very hard to be successful for the type of business we dreamed of having.
2. We didn't invest in flooring, instead we used the carpet that was already in the space. Flooring makes your gym look like a gym, without it your space just looks off.
3. We didn't have our own HVAC unit and had to share the thermostat with the space beside us, which was an office, which had a different definition of a comfortable temperature than us. And our landlord was not willing to fix the problem, or anything in the building for that matter.

So after two years of struggling we decided that it was time to move our business to a better location. This better location was 30 miles south and is were we are currently located. Surprisingly enough we had about five clients follow us.

With our new location we had the right market, but still made a few mistakes that almost cost us our business. In fact, we were about one month away from bankruptcy. We didn't dream big enough. In fact, our original goal was to get 65 members and gross $10,000 per month. So with that goal we leased a space that was too small at only 2,100 square feet. This caused us some bigger problems when we finally started to dream big. We also, didn't invest enough money into the facility. This was primarily because we could not find a bank to loan us the start up money needed. So doing what most start-ups do we used credit cards, cashed in our IRA's and got a loan from family. Needless to say in opening our business and funding it for the first two years we racked up a lot of debt. Most of which was credit cards. After the two year mark, and with the help of Thomas Plummer, we had finally got our business to support itself and provide us both with a paycheck. However, we now found ourselves in another predicament. We needed to expand. We needed more space, more staff, and more equipment. So we went back to banks to be told yet again that they could not help us. We showed them how refinancing our debt and taking on the additional debt would allow us to grow and that we were able to make our payments. They didn't care and we were told that revenue didn't matter they wanted cash assets. So we were resourceful and added slowly over the next year.

Things were beginning to look good. We had had a full year under us of making a profit each month, added one coach to our team, and added more equipment. Our schedules were full, Tammy and I were still working twelve plus hour days, (we did this for the first 5 years BTW) and it was evident that we needed a larger space. Growth was slowing and we were becoming limited as to what we could offer. We still had two years left on our lease, but all this meant was that we would have to either sublet our current space or buy it out. Neither ideal, but it would work. When we began looking at other available spaces we soon found out that there was really nothing available that would fit us. Everything was either too small, over priced, or both.

We hung in there and with less than a year left on our current lease and nothing looking promising a landlord who was building a new complex contacted us. It would be new construction and built to our specifications.

Which brings us to where we are now. On December 1st of this year, 2015 we will move into our new 6,400 square foot dream facility. But this isn't the end of our story only the closing of a chapter. The next one looks better and I can't wait to start writing it. Will it be easy? No, but nothing worthwhile ever is.  Will their be challenges? Absolutely, that's part of life. Am I living my dream? Yes, and that is all that matters!

What's your story? Go tell it...