IN 2009, JUST AFTER the big financial meltdown, I came up with an idea for a new business model. I came up with this model out of desperation, but that’s how many business ideas begin. Fit Body Boot Camp was born out of a crisis.
As luck (or recklessness) would have it, in September 2007, months before the economic crash, Di and I had purchased a big house on a large property. Truth be told, the only reason we qualified for the loan was because at the time mortgage companies still accepted stated income—that law would change after the economic crash. Had we attempted to purchase that property a year later, there’s absolutely no way that we would have qualified for it. So there we were, having just bought a million-dollar home by basically giving our word that we made enough money to afford it and that we’d have the money to pay for the mortgage each month. Then a few months later the economy crashed (hard), and overnight our home value got cut almost in half. Yet another “holy shit!” moment in my entrepreneurial career. And if seeing the house that we couldn’t afford in the first place drop more than half its value weren’t enough, the day that we moved in, our second child, Chloe, was born.
Now you can probably imagine the fear and anxiety that I felt. I mean, there I was: the proud owner of a beautiful home on a manicured one-acre property in Southern California, with a stay-at-home wife, a two-year-old son, and a newborn daughter. The entire economy was crashing down around us, and I was losing coaching and consulting clients like Milli Vanilli lost fans. After the financial meltdown there weren’t a lot of people hiring personal trainers. Of course, if fewer people hire personal trainers, then a lot of personal trainers start to go out of business. And when they go out of business, they don’t pay me for my business-coaching and consulting services anymore.
The problem was that, like everyone else during 2007 and 2008, I wasn’t expecting a massive economic crash. My expenses were higher than ever—I had just taken on a big mortgage, welcomed a new baby into our family, and signed a lease for a small office space to run my business out of. I had no clue how I was going to recover from this shitstorm. By this point, however, I had experienced several entrepreneurial ups and downs, so I was better prepared to handle this battle ahead of me. I’m now convinced that we can build entrepreneurial resiliency just like we can build muscles.
So, as the economy crashed, I knew I could either react by panicking, allowing my emotions to get the best of me, and letting the whole thing consume my thoughts, which would only lead to inaction and fear-based decisions. Or I could respond to the situation with clarity and confidence. After all, I wasn’t the only one going through this economic crash. Surely there had to be other entrepreneurs who had risked it all and had their families on the line like I did. I remember thinking to myself, I’m not alone and I can get through this, but I have to make some hard decisions and act on them quickly.
Decisiveness and speed of implementation were going to be more valuable for the survival of my business, my home, and my sanity. That’s when I got the idea for starting a fitness boot camp franchise. At the time, most of the personal training industry was mainly offering one-on-one personal training. If you’ve never hired a personal trainer before, you can expect to pay $500 a month to train with them a couple times per week, up to $1,500 a month for four to five days per week. As you might imagine, one-on-one personal training was cost prohibitive for most people after the 2008 economic crash. The boot camp model made sense because it made working with a personal trainer much more affordable and convenient.
There was strength—and fun—in numbers. Instead of one personal trainer and one client taking up a whole hour, the boot camp model that I thought up would be one coach and fifteen to thirty clients working out together in that same hour. It would make losing weight, getting fit, and having the support and accountability of a personal trainer accessible for most people.
I knew I was onto something big and that this was going to change the fitness industry and the way people exercised. The model for Fit Body Boot Camp made sense, and the thing is, that model made sense for everyone: It allowed personal trainers to increase what they could make. It allowed people who might not be able to afford a personal trainer to work out with one so that they could get better and lasting results. I knew that if I could successfully launch Fit Body Boot Camp as a franchise, I’d not only revolutionize the fitness industry but I would also make working with a personal trainer affordable, convenient, and mainstream. Franchising the business would mean maximizing my impact—to give as many people as I could the opportunity to become fit and to grow a business that they would be proud of.
I was stoked! This was my calling. This became my purpose.
All I had to do was figure out how to turn a business idea into a global franchise when we were in what economic analysts were calling the worst economic crash in American history. I was financially tapped out and leveraged to the max. I had to find a way to sell a few hundred franchise locations to people who wanted to start a fitness business during a recession. I had my work cut out for me.
Once I discovered that it was going to cost nearly $100,000 to make this business model into a sellable franchise, it felt like someone threw me in the ring with Mike Tyson for twelve rounds. But this was my purpose. And I knew it, in spite of all the obstacles and noise in the way.
THE NEXT STEP
It turned out that even though I knew we had a great idea, we simply didn’t have the money to hire a franchise attorney or pay the state fees to franchise Fit Body Boot Camp. And so we decided to license it first as a business model until we could afford to turn it into a franchise sometime down the line. My plan was to make Fit Body Boot Camp a platform for personal trainers who once offered one-on-one personal training to purchase a new business model from me and run it inside of a 3,000 square-foot storefront with minimal equipment and overhead cost.
The problem: Nearly everybody was broke. The handful of people who had any money during that time were not about to part with it. Plus, most personal trainers didn’t have the money to sign a five-year lease with a landlord for a storefront, pay the deposit, then build out a Fit Body Boot Camp studio inside of it.
Maybe this whole thing wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Here’s the other thing: Until that point, boot camps were run outdoors, in parks throughout the country, which cost trainers nothing. But I was about to ask personal trainers to invest in my brand, lease a space, build it out, and run an indoor boot camp. I looked at it like this: In the fall and winter months, most outdoor boot camps get screwed by the weather. People don’t like to work out in the cold, wet, or snow. So if I could show the fitness industry that my boot camp business-model idea was better because it was weatherproof, systematized in every way, and helped their clients get better and lasting results, I was betting that they’d jump on board.
I knew, having run my own personal training gyms and outdoor boot camps, that if we could solve the space problem and show the fitness industry that this was a legitimate business model, Fit Body Boot Camp would have a chance. We wanted to test the indoor boot camp model ourselves first, just to make sure that we were on the right track before we rolled it out to the industry. That’s when I got resourceful: What spaces could we use to prove the concept? Karate gyms? Dance studios? Gymnastics centers? They’re all indoors. They’re rarely used in the mornings. The difference between gymnastics centers and the other two was important: the floor. Karate gyms often have thin industrial carpeting over concrete, and dance studios have hardwood floors, which are great for dancing but not so much for exercising. Gymnastics centers, on the other hand, have special carpet-bonded foam flooring that’s an inch-and-a-half thick, which allows you to bounce around, lie down, and even run on it.
That was the answer. We tested it. We went to a gymnastics center and offered them a small sum of money to use the space in the mornings. We were going month to month. We’d buy our own equipment and leave it in small plastic storage boxes. And we’d find clients from the local area and test the workouts, equipment, and the indoor factor. And it worked! It was a cobbled-together solution, at least at the beginning, but it was enough of a proof point to grow the model.
I started licensing the business model to personal trainers, and I encouraged them to find a local gymnastics center and offer a small payment to rent the facilities in the mornings and run our FBBC workouts. Our first sixty-seven licensed locations all operated out of gymnastics centers that were usually empty between the hours of 5 and 11 a.m.—the peak times that we would run our workout sessions.
This model was a smash success. With very little start-up cost, personal trainers were making money by running our indoor boot camp model inside gymnastics centers, and thousands of dollars in licensing fees started rolling in each month. We were in the black!
I could have waited for the economy to improve before starting Fit Body Boot Camp. I could have waited until we had enough money to come out of the gates as a franchise. I could have waited until we could afford to lease out an actual commercial storefront rather than starting out in gymnastics centers. But if had I waited then, we’d probably still be waiting around for Fit Body Boot Camp to hit the scene. Not having money and having to be creative at a time when everyone around us was losing money and tightening their purse strings turned out to be the advantage we needed to dominate in our space. I’ve since learned that when everyone else is contracting, you should be expanding—that will always give you the competitive advantage.
IT WON’T COME WRAPPED IN A BOW
The reason I’m sharing the origin story of Fit Body Boot Camp—the story of my purpose and my vision—is to show that they won’t always come to you in a tidy way or at the right time. My purpose and vision couldn’t have come at a worse time. But opportunity shows up at your door when you’re least ready for it. As much as you want things to happen on your time and terms, the truth is that you just don’t know when opportunity is going to strike, and you have to be ready to act on it when it does. It’s for this reason that decisiveness and speed of implementation can give the prepared leader a distinctive edge.
Another truth for entrepreneurs is this: Your purpose might be connected to solving a problem or pain point for someone else. But that often means you have to experience pain or a problem yourself to solve theirs. It’s how you know you’re onto something. In my case, I could see it right away: My bank balance was dropping because my consulting clients were losing business, so the first thing to go was me. I had to solve that problem—for obvious reasons—but the solution that came to me was a not-so-obvious one that ended up becoming one hundred times more profitable.
Would I have come to that idea by sitting lotus in a garden with waterfalls around me and birds chirping? No way. There’s a great line from former president Andrew Jackson. He said, “I was born for a storm. The calm does not suit me.” I’ve always thought he was talking about me and the entrepreneurs I know! The best of them are the kinds of people who thrive when times are worst.
The broader point is this: You’ll get told to “think about your passion.” You’ll be advised to “meditate on your purpose.” You’ll get sold on the idea that your vision will just “come to you.” That it’s about “attracting your purpose.” I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the number of people who truly have had that happen is far less than the number of people who go around talking about such experiences. In most cases, the successful business owners and empire builders I know came to their big idea because of pain, by taking action and by being obsessively locked on to the idea of making it happen no matter the situation. The most successful entrepreneurs I know simply took imperfect action rather than waiting for the perfect time. They didn’t look for their purpose, they worked at something until they developed their purpose. Real entrepreneurs are forged in fire, through experience, pain, and trial and error. Usually there was some crisis that led them to a response, and a business—a vision and purpose—was born.
EXERCISE
One of the best indicators of entrepreneurial success is resiliency. Your ability to stay calm and in control under pressure is critical to surviving and thriving in uncertain times. Think about the last time you had a “shit hits the fan” moment in your business or with your finances. Then step outside of yourself and ask, “If Elon Musk were thinking about how to solve this, what would he do? What would he make? What would he build? How would he come out a winner in this situation?” Write down a few ideas, no matter how outlandish they are, and see how they compare to how you responded.