Planting a Fitness Facility During the Pandemic
To Start
There are a number of different things that I could say about this topic, and I am sure I will over the next few years but as I approach the one year anniversary of beginning the pre-sales process for Eat the Frog Fitness Naperville South I find that I have a decent amount of successes and failures to look back on. The summary of my touch points to follow? Planting any kind of fitness industry business is complex, during a pandemic, it’s almost crazy.
What Was My Goal?
I first started looking at Eat the Frog Fitness as a possible franchise to get into back in summer of 2019. I finally had gotten to the point where I felt comfortable enough in my industry background and knowledge base to seek out opportunities to start my own facility. I knew that there would be a million and one new things to learn in the process, but the experience and information I had would be a suitable starting point. I had previously worked with the biggest name in group training, Orangetheory Fitness, and at that time I still worked with them. I fell in love with the group training micro industry because of its accessibility to clients, approachability, affordability, and incredible culture. On the other side of the business, I found that it was more accessible for many trainers as well. It was a great opportunity for coaches to work with tons of different clients without having to worry about much other than being a great coach. This provided them with more security in income and scheduling than other business models or working as an independent trainer.
To sum, Orangetheory Fitness had carved out a wonderful niche for themselves, but I knew that the monopoly couldn’t last forever. There were already other brands that had existed prior to Orangetheory and also others who had come up after them that were trying to take a piece of the pie. I liked a few business models, but I had a specific list of attributes that were super important to me. I wanted something new, something that I could help grow and mold into a successful franchise from the ground floor or close to it. I wanted training science that I could stand behind and back with my integrity. I wanted high-tech and I wanted it to be accessible to people who were already a part of the group training industry while also able to attract people from outside of it. I wanted something that had not been conceived yet, or so I thought.
Eat the Frog Fitness
The franchise that won me over with all of their attributes was Eat the Frog Fitness. New, only started franchising a year earlier from when I discovered it. Training science, cross-training focus mixed with cardio and resistance-based training, everything that the general population could need to see major success inside of a group training facility. High-tech, heart rate training to help coaches track the clients, fully-integrated visual training systems that helped members follow along in real-time with what they are doing in the training session, and 24/7 access inside of a group training facility, something that has never been done before, incredible innovation. I was sold after my first workout in Carmel, Indiana, while visiting a newly opened studio.
December 1st, 2020 to Today
I began my pre-sales process for the facility on December 1st, about a year and a half later after deciding to pursue the franchise. Ideally, it would have happened sooner, but as all of you know the world has a funny way of getting in the way of things sometimes, especially in 2020. My new objective was to begin signing members up for our new facility while coming off of the cusp of this world-wide pandemic. Health and fitness had started to become a major talking point for news companies and social media, in my mind it was going to be a fitness industry golden age as we moved further away from the Coronavirus. We made some major progress as months continued to progress while starting out slow, but planting an unopened training facility in suburban Chicago during the winter with a pandemic still hanging on was harder than I initially anticipated. After some setbacks with construction and timing delays, we finally opened up our new facility in May of 2021 and started our business with well over one-hundred members, it was incredible.
The post-open studio growth over the summer was meeting all of our expectations and then we hit some bumpy roads with needing to hire on and train up new employees for the entire latter half of summer and fall, it was rough. The hardest part for myself was doing a good job at letting the new hires make some mistakes on their own in order to better help them grow as individuals on our team. The entire studio plant felt like holding glass in my hands, everything was so fragile. I was afraid to allow people to do things for me at times because I knew that I could do them better, alone. In hindsight, this behavior set us back, bigtime. I came to the realization that if I was good at something there was more reason to have someone else do that same thing otherwise there was minimal development taking place for the staff. If my team isn’t learning something new or improving one of their processes every day just because I know how to get things done myself, we would never be able to grow and scale. Everything would be stuck on my performance to survive.
In September of 2021 I finally got the infamous Coronavirus after the healthies 2 years I had ever had in my life. It was debilitating for the studio, and also the wake up call that I needed. My team was able to do the basics for operation, but I had failed to set them up for success without me, it was my own fault. On top of that, it wasn’t a couple of days away from the business, it was 2-weeks. After getting back to the real world everything in my perspective changed. I was meant to be the supporting staff, not the boots-on-the-ground lead. It was a lesson that I had learned a year prior when reading one of my favorite books of all time, The Dichotomy of Leadership. If I was stuck in the day to day operations of the facility, which are absolutely essential tasks for a successful studio, there was no one looking at the bigger picture and helping look at things from another angle. I made the decision to allow myself to follow the advice of one of the most insightful books I had ever read and get to the point where I could help look out for my team from above, we needed that.
Overall, the biggest challenges I have felt so far inside of planting this new fitness business are allowing others to run the show, communicating with large teams of people effectively, and building rapport within a new environment with new people. There is an incredible amount of distrust with the fitness industry no matter where we are, and every location I have worked at I did a great job at truly caring about the people I was serving and making sure that they believed that. It takes time, effort, late nights, early mornings, long weekends, and a whole lot of emotional investment, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I know that the people who do business with integrity stand out, they make a difference, and they last.
To finish, I want to be clear that it’s not peaches and roses (I know those are two different phrases blended together!), but it will never be. Business is hard. The people who elect themselves to work along side of me to serve our communities in all things health and fitness will always be trying to put our money where our mouth is, show people that we are the real deal, truly care about them, and want to help improve their lives. We will always be trying to grow the business while preparing for the members who unfortunately need to leave because of moving, sickness, etc. There are inevitable hurdles to cross, an ever-present race to run - but I love it, every single part of it. How many people can say that about their job? They love the hard stuff and also the fun stuff. It’s incredibly rare, and I will never take that for granted.
Coach Andrew