The Mindset Powering Australia’s Most Elite Gym | Lachlan Rowston

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one thing that I found really interesting was you were in the middle of the CBD in in Sydney and you had so much demand that you opened up a second location and you were deciding between do we go to another geographical area but we have so much demand here do we just open up another location here so you've got two gyms within like 5 minutes walking distance from each other yeah less yeah they're one block away so what made you do that cuz most gyms would just be like this is crazy so I think about it as potential clients per

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square meter so if you take like a res Dental area your clients potential clients per square meter is really low right eventually you start exing out a massive amount of your suburb now you've churned your entire suburb you've churned your entire market and so they still live there but they don't attend exactly they don't want to come back and they don't leave the subb because they've got a mortgage or they've lived there and so your turnover in that square Meers like of new potential

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people coming in is super low whereas the city your client per square meter is super high right cuz you've got office towers that hold 8,000 people in them on today's episode of agency podcast I sit down with Lan Ron who is the CEO and founder of locker room gym which is Australia's most exclusive gym today we talk about what does it mean to build a Ultra Niche gym and it was a really great conversation on exactly what it takes to succeed in the world of Fitness Lan welcome to the Pod man thanks having

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me dude I'm excited and you're you're doing some really interesting stuff in the gym space and we'll talk talking before about how I did my time at World Gym and I kind of have cut my teeth in the fitness space but you're making some waves and you're kind of really tackling things differently yeah yeah we're uh we're Gen 2 is what I call it so I got that term from there's a Consulting Group in the US called fit Insider they basically have the most popular industry

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newsletter in the fitness industry they talk about new like Brands coming into the market like how Investments are going you know this private e company just bought this or this brand just rolled up with these Brands and yeah they're they're huge and uh we did a Consulting session with them cuz you know we're looking for Global expansion in the future and I was like you know does our concept have legs like what do you think about a US expansion blah blah blah and he's like you know it's super

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interesting so I was like what valuation would you give us cuz like some of the valuations that these gen One models are getting is like quite quite poor and I'm like I'm not going to go all this way just to sell it for that valuation he's like no you're part of Gen 2 and like Gen 2 valuations are like a bit unknown at this point so like gen one is like World Gym right Global gym formats you know low price point get HPS people in big space equipment leases then you've got like in the group fitness bace you

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got like the f45s bar boot camp orange Siri it's all kind of gen one because it's basically the same thing different coat of paint slightly different workout different music different instructors but what ends up happening at the top of those of those Brands is like the executive teams and the marketing and The Branding teams they're all the same people they just like take different salary packages and get recruited across the different brands but it all ends up looking the same to the consumer and so

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gen one is kind of stuck and then there's a lot of Brands coming out now a lot of gyms coming out now that are still copying the Gen one model we didn't want to do that we were a gen One Gym previously my old brand but when we went into opening locker room 3 years ago we like we need to do something different we need to innovate here and so hence a Gen 2 and there's some other Gen 2 Concepts that around I can go into if you want to but yeah there's like a new wave of gyms and I would just say

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it's more like it's just getting more Niche if anything and so like we've become like super Niche how how would you define like a gen one gym or gen to gy like how do you really separate the two yeah I think yeah the the niche is one thing like the consumer that they go after is like very different and like hypers specific and then I would say that from the consumer perspective CU it's probably most people listening the way to understand it is like when I go to this gym and say a new gym was to pop

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up you don't leave that gym because that current gym that you're at has something very unique that other gyms don't have so it's like for example there's a gym called change out of the goast I think it's the goast I did a workout there and what they are they're they're like a group fit workout so nothing like too special about that but it also combined with Pilates and they know their consumer which is like a hot 21 to 31-year-old single girl wants to do Pilates but she also wants to do grou

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Fitness and lift weights and so she's like well I can pay one membership and yet Pilates and group fitness in one it's not that Innovative truthfully but it's enough so that like if the next group if an f45 opened up down the road or a Bar's boot camp they'd be like I probably won't go because I'd rather spend my $80 and get two things for that so that' be an example of too there's another one in actually founded by an Aussie but in New York they've I think

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they've got I would say four locations three or four locations they started in Co the concept was so basically it's called I think it's called Squad Squad New York or Squad athletica or something like that um and the idea is that you train in squads like a like a footy team so like if we're in a footy team together you know it's the same group of guys and we' got practice on Tuesday and Thursday nights and we got game day on Saturday and so like when you join that gym you join a squad they allocate you

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to a squad so they go okay what's your preferred training time you go okay 6 a.m. go cool we've got one opening in the 6 a.m. Squad and it's with these six people and they put you with that Squad and you can only train with that Squad so like you become really close friends and I think you might do like some kind of personality test potentially to like fit you up with the the group they're like all right you're a really good fit for this group you know you're in finance and they're kind of in that

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Finance sector you're in that Squad and then you're training times are this this and this and I thought that was quite a cool concept and it's growing quite quickly and that's obviously very unique as well cuz most group fitness gyms you kind of just meet random people this is like no this is your group that you you train with so it's like way more focused on community building they have a lot of community events and like coffee stuff during the week and all that sort of stuff like they have an events manager

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as part of their head office which is like most gyms don't have that um so those like a couple examples of of Gen 2 they're like yeah it's a unique experience from the consumer perspective that goes okay I'm staying here because this is the only place that does this yeah and do you think like with a model like that and in your case you know we we kind of see it as like you're most exclusive gym for you know business Executives or founder types and in your case the Gen 2 component and which I

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find is really interesting is you know for someone to join up to locker room they have to kind of a criteria they have to hit a certain threshold and by the sounds of it you're turning down more applications than you accept yeah I would say there's a lot of applications that don't make it through because once we send them the pricing they're like okay I can't I can't afford this which totally fine can we talk about the price point Y so I understand it's 400 a week yeah I'd say the average year between

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350 to 400 a week paid up front in six and 12 month packages so entry point is like somewhere between $9 to $10,000 for most people to get in some people pay more off the bat but yeah average year spend to be like between $8 and $22,000 depending on stuff they add on yeah so when you talk about a price point like that I understand for a lot of people it would be turn off like hey that's ridiculous I can pay $13.95 to go to fitness first or I can go join this club and get all the same equipment and blah

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blah blah like clearly in your case it's not about the equipment that they're purchasing it's about the experience the environment in your case like what is it that you think these executive types and Founders are really buying when they buy a membership there's a lot of things about the current offerings on the market that don't work and so really the consumer that we're going after wants personal training right so when you look at personal training what works about it is you have like a a relationship with

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an expert right you get you know if you're a beginner or you have experience or even in some cases some Advanced people not many they just like the accountability and relationship that they have with the trainer where it falls short is that for our particular clientele that are super busy it's very hard to make their session times consistently and if a trainer is like really good they generally booked out or like they have a weit list and so it's hard to get in with the trainer and then

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once you're in he's like okay I can do 8:00 a.m. on a Thursday and I can do Tuesday at 400 p.m. you're like a [ __ ] I don't know if I can make those times it's all I can get so I'll do it but then you know they get a call up to Melbourne or they get a last minute CL call or name name your fire in the business that you know they have to they have to put out each day they just end up missing the session times and obviously the coach has 24-hour cancellation window so they're not

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showing up so they're not getting results and then when they do show up it's like it's just probably not it's probably not enough over the long long term to get the result that they're after and for one person to do everything for someone their nutrition their accountability their training program like it it becomes a lot for one person um and so we wanted to take all the things that were difficult about without PT also most of it's delivered in a globo gym right and if you've been

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to a globo gym at 6 a.m. it's like there's like a three person line for every piece of equipment so you might be paying this person $150 $200 an hour they're the best PT in the gym you've got Leg Day program all the squad racks are taken the leg press is taken the leg extension you can see the brain ticking like oh let's do this other machine instead I mean I go to a globo gym in bond and I go in there in the mornings and I watch the pts walk around and they're always changing the program I

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don't think it's ever done as written like ever and and so there's a lot of frustrations from the PT side and also the the consumer side and we just looked at that and go okay how do we just build a model that would just remove all that friction so for us they pay for obviously the personal training side of things the things that they kind of already get with a personal trainer but they we've removed a lot of the friction for them uh so they pay for conveniences so one thing being that we have

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basically a system where they can book at any time so it's like PT on demand so they open the app and they just look at all the availabilities of all the trainers and they can just book in whenever they need to so they get a lot more flexibility which means they get more sessions done which means they get a better result which means they're more consistent which means it's more valuable to them um so they get that and then they also get like a gym with more people like them and one of the common

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complaints is that oh you know it's intimidating or it's scary or like the crowd's a bit you know a bit rude or whatever it is you know we have Max eight people training at any one time in a big gym so it's like they all have their equipment they have plenty of space showers all that stuff so just simple things like that it's like we had a Google review the other day and uh one of the clients was like this is like the business class of gyms I think what he meant by that is like pay a little bit

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more or you pay a lot more but you get your own space it always like gets done on time it's exactly what you need you get a result so that's that's ultimately what they pay for nothing super Innovative but just removes all the friction points for them do you think that like when it comes to most gyms and you know behind the scenes here we we've probably worked with 19 or 20 gyms and the common uh conversation is we want to be Community Driven we want to be disruptive and Innovative we want to be

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something different and we better than all the other guys and every other gym sucks this is what the gym say this is what they say asking for this what they say to me and they they go look we want to work with you because we want to be Innovative then we dive into the workshop and the same kind of concept spits back out at the end it's like you know and I get it there's fear because you're you know starting a gym you're investing all this money into equipment you're buying Hammer Strength equipment

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you're signing a lease for 5 years you're setting up a reception you're hiring stuff like it's a lot to for sure yeah a big Runway and it's a high cost and then you're selling memberships for 13 bucks a week and then you're trying to get these tiny little margins and I think what what I've commonly seen both working in the gym and working with gyms from a strategist perspective is there's a lot of fear around well if we don't appeal to everyone we're not going to

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make it and they try to accommodate for classes for the people that want classes and they have the cardio studio for the people that like cardio then they have the CrossFit zone for the CrossFit people and then they have the calisthenics for the calisthenics people and then just the weights for everyone else and it just kind of ends up being back to gen one how how did you come up with the concept initially to go I kind of I'm kind of done with that because you owned three CrossFit Gyms or you had

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a Stak in them yeah at what point were you like I want to do something different here yeah it's a good question well first I'm curious what you what you tell some of those gyms but I just saw the trend like just going it was just going down right like group fers was getting super saturated like everyone had a group finish gym and then there was just more money going into startup brands like I don't know anyone that did a branding or strategy session with you know an agency when they first started

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gym people just slapped a sign on the door and just got started so the competition was pretty low but yeah 7 8 years later the competition's like way way higher you know people come in call I got $10 million of funding we're going to start with five locations you know it's all polished I'm like I can't compete with this anymore you know and I just saw the margins getting getting pushed there was not a lot of innovation in our particular model and then to overhaul it I was like just too hard you

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know I'd rather just sell it and then just start fresh so that's basically the point we got to is just the market was just dictating like the next move and I think sometimes it's hard because I see a lot of guys that I own gyms with in the beginning they're still doing the same thing they're still struggling and I'm like you just I I mean I know what the move was for me but I think it's it's tough to kind of let go of what you've built and then Sid step into something new but what what do you what

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do you tell some of those brands that like clearly are not innovating that say they want to innovate well I think people have a misconception around what inovation really means okay and and typically what we do with our clients and this is a really fun exercise for anyone listening is you you have a sheet of paper you you draw a line down the middle and on the left hand on the left hand side you write down what are all the assumptions of gyms so if you would have just canvas and Survey your local

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city and ask them hey when you think of a a local gym what do you think of and they would say you know typically something like oh there's a reception and then there's then there's like a weight Zone and then a and a kind of like a group fitness area and it's like it's the same kind of assumption all around then you might assume oh there's a vending machine for pre-workout and there's 247 access um and you get the little plastic key tag and there's a $100 joining fee like there's all these

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assumptions like every gym kind of does the same thing so you list them all out and you list as many just standard and boring and general assumptions you could possibly list then one by one you just ask yourself how would I reverse this so for example you get a crappy plastic key tag that cost 100 bucks what about if you gave them like dog tags that had a chip in it and it's kind of branded and cool like how do you just make everything interesting rather than a vending machine maybe there's like a

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free kitchen that they can have access to and it's just full snacks um or instead of like you know 24/7 access it might be like you get a like a card and you can level up your Cod like e games and you get access to different places in the gym it's just you want to just think radically different and hypothetical and then once you've reversed everything on that list you start to highlight okay which ones would we want to really lean into um and to me that's Innovation that's like it used to

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be done that way now we do it this way and a classical example I think of like what Innovation is is like ice so think about how we used to get ice you'd have to cut it off a mountain and then I was trying to figure out which ice we were talking about I'm with frozen water no not meth no so frozen water so so you'd have to cut ice off a mountain and then like hor and cut it down to the town and then then in the industrial area they would get these big Vats and these cryo chamers or whatever fill it up with

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water turn it into ice chop it up and then send it into town with a truck but then you could make like a home-sized like ice maker you know what I mean like those leaps are Innovation yeah and I think what you're talking about the Gen 2 is an innovation in the gym space where it's like used to be done this way now we flip the script and we do it radically different that's usually what we're trying to help people work with the challenge is once we go through that exercise and they start to pick some

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things they still kind of get a little nerve-racked and then they go well the status quo is this like we don't want to be too risky they like people like to say they're Innovative but it's really scary when you have to do it yeah yeah I Ag and in your case you did it like you've actually gone out and so so like what inspired you to go you know what like instead of 18 or 13 bucks a week 400 and they paid up front yeah yeah yeah yeah well not making the money I want to make is usually a pretty pretty

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good way to do it and then running in a spread Che if we charge him this much and do this it's way better so like let's do that but yeah there's always hesitation and fear around being a A New Concept on the market um I still remember yeah it's crazy but like I got this so I think we were maybe 50 60 members in at this point so we couldn't have been going for more than a year and we had just released we just got so one of the pivotal moments in the business was we got an AFR article that came out

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which was just about being Australia's most exclusive gym and it like really put us on the map and after after that probably a week later I got a phone call like a random phone call from this woman like the definition of aaren like she called up and she was like you a pig I was like excuse me who is this she's like how dare you build a gym for misogynistic white high affluent men she's like you you should be disgraced you should be ashamed of yourself she goes I bet you've like you don't have a

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sister or a mom she's like you're you're you're filthy and I'm like can I get your name and I almost think now I went on like this for like 20 minutes and I was like I was just saying yep yep all good and and then I was speaking to someone about it and they said you know I reckon what they were trying to do is set you up set you up to say something they had you on record you would have blasted something and then next thing you know you would have come out and like news.com that you on like a gossip

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piece or something yeah or maybe not maybe it was just some Karen out there who just like really wanted to see the end of us but I think that that was like a really good example how our brand and our messaging was like you know it was really polarizing at the time cuz it was like it kind of did look like a men's club kind of exclusive tall poppy we better than you kind of thing we've softened it up a little bit more now but initially to kind of make a name for ourselves we had to like rub some people

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the wrong way and I think when you do that it just means that the people that like you they really like you versus like you're kind of lukewarm with everyone yeah cuz you know I always come back to the rule like if you try to be everyone if you try to be for everyone you end up being for no one yeah so so how did you start to I guess find this particular crowd because you know when you look at a market you might see a hole in the market but then the next question is is there a market in the

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hole and can I monetize it can I actually pull this thing off so like you know was there a was there a defining moment where you're like I have a concept and I think it's going to work ah well I mean the first sale is always the first affirmation that okay we're on the right path here but yeah like I think what you're alluding to is like product Market fit right well when you started did you have the idea of how you were going to do it before you open the gym yes yeah so we had the we had the

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rough model built out and like the spreadsheets and the financials and stuff but yeah what we weren't sure of was like who exactly is the crowd that's going to buy from us we basically knew it was someone that was already paying for 2 to 3 pts a week and that so they're spending that sort of money as well so the price point is not outrageous but maybe in the format and how we're doing it they may not may not Vibe with it but what we did is we joined a uh a business club club United

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business Cub I think you we're in Cub y okay awesome yeah shout out to Cub yeah so Cub's awesome and uh we so I joined cub in 2020 like end of 2020 so they were just coming out of digital version of it yeah we've had Dan Hakim on the Pod awesome great Dan's a member yeah at the gym and basically it was like we went into the club we had the concept we were opening in probably 6 months and we started like asking people in that in the club at the time like would you join a gym like this and we probably signed

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up almost 10 people before it was open and so that was really like okay this is our target market these are the people that like it that was like our pre-sales and they were paying upfront like 10 grand yeah yeah yeah before it was even open so you made 100 Grand through a handful of sales through a networking group before the club even opened yes yeah so you're like okay the concept works yeah yeah it was just like okay we just got to get more of these people and then yeah referral networks and then I

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just like overd delivering for those initial clients and then it kind of built on itself and like I was telling you earlier it's kind of like Executives and business owners they're kind of like the two crowds that we have um now we definitely signed up a lot more Executives than we used to but in the beginning we signed up a lot more business owners it's not that we don't sign up business owners now but there's just a lot more Executives in the city business owners like either work from

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home or they have offices in all different they don't have to be in the city so we get less of them these days and I think where we're situated as well it's like right in the heart of the financial district so yeah you're right in the middle of Sydney essentially yeah yeah so business owners are also like well do I have to pay like 1,500 a square meter for like an office but where you know we got nothing to do with Finance it doesn't they don't have to be there whereas like for the financial

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sector it makes sense to be there cuz they're there so sign up a lot more Executives these days but yeah initially it was like we founded the business with like entrepreneurs other entrepreneurs so take me through the steps like you have let's just say these initial 10 and I'm just trying to think back to when I worked at gyms and it's like to to get 100 Grands you're signing up you know hundreds of members and getting initial deposits just to make that kind of margin in a in a World Gym in a World

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Gym in a globo gym you know Ben Stiller style and and really trying to really trying to to get like a large volume of sales and get a little bit of money from a lot of people but in your case you're getting a lot of money from a few people what advantages did that give you as a gym owner because obviously you've got equipment overheads you've got rents and you got all of the faculties and staff and everything that comes with the equation but what kind of superpowers did you get because you were making that

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kind of margin yeah because we take the money up front it means you can like get a little bit further ahead than you know you can hire sooner than you would typically need to yeah you can pay bills off like we're basically profitable a lot faster than than most gyms so that's definitely an advantage I think it means also that like the clients that you have you know they're locked in for a certain period of time so it's like if someone's week to week with whatever two we or 4E

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cancellation terms it's like you could churn out a [ __ ] ton of members in like a month that you just signed up so the fear like the retention issues that a lot of gyms have like we didn't really have we still don't really have as much of so cuz they're paying up front they're not just paying the subscription and they ah I want to cancel it exactly exactly like any health and fitness journey if you've been doing this long enough it es and flows right it has ups and downs and the problem is every time

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in the pay cycle that you give people is how often they evaluate whether or not they should be at the gym or at using the service or if they're getting value and if you've got people on weekly pay cycles that means every week they're reflecting on is this still valuable for me but we know there's health and fitness Journeys have natural es and flows right so in the Downs they look at the week like ah you know I'm going to cancel at a bad week I'm not really getting value for money that was a waste

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of money you don't want people that are going to live in the body for the rest of their lives that need to be healthy thinking that short term about their health and fitness commitment so giving someone a long enough Horizon they can have a bad month and they month four can be terrible but they're like it's all good still got two more months to like get back on track so from like an operational perspective from like a results perspective it just gives you more time gives you less pressure to

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obviously we we we dominate the the first 30 days that's really important but then after that like once they get a good Rhythm they get some momentum it's fine to have the natural abs and flows because their commitment is so much longer that their their time horiz is is pushed out so they're they're a better customer and they get better results because of that do do you see the psyche here as a it's enough pain to get him to show up the the money yeah cuz if I'm paying $10,000 to join I I want to get

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my money's worth versus like you know I can imagine an executive or business owner like I right now have five gym memberships and I don't even think about it right and perfect customer yeah and I like barely attend any of them and I'm just only now getting back into the motion of like hitting the gym and I like having a few memberships cuz I'll hit different equipment at different gyms and I like but like in in your particular case it's like well if I'm paying 10 grand man I

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I'm going to show up a little harder with a little bit more intensity and commit a little more do do you think that the pain of like putting that much money on the line up front is like okay I'm fully committing and there's enough tension there and enough money expended that I'm I want to get I want to get in there and actually get my values worth yes yeah yeah yeah if it's not painful then it's not going to work is what I think yeah cuz otherwise you'll just let that money go you're just like oh

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doesn't and and for some clients it's actually not painful enough you know there are some very wealthy people that yeah they're happy to let 20 grand go and they're like ah it didn't work out or whatever that's not really what we try and do I don't as as fun as that sounds just to take 20 grand not service someone we don't really want that reputation so if someone really isn't showing up we'll end it early and we'll refund them because it's like you know

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you paid and then what will you know people ask you dinner party oh locker room what happened or whatever they just took all my money and like I didn't I didn't get a result it's like they know they didn't show up but they're not going to say that they're not going to say I was pathetic and I didn't show up because I'm lazy going to say yeah I paid all this money and like it just wasn't a good gym and I didn't show up right even if it's fully their fault and

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they appreciate that so yeah we want it to be enough that it hurts that yeah they want to show up and for for for 95% of people it does yeah and say do you have like a bit of a significance or a status effect like a Rolex like I train at locker room you know do you find that people kind of wear it with a badge of honor yeah this is funny so like we do have merch in the beginning I don't have the the OG merch but basically it's like a huge locker room logo across the chest we still wear it a lot in the gym and

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we'd give it to clients for free like they get their own locker so we'd Fold It Up give them a nice note when they come they would only wear it in the gym and then we're like oh you guys like don't want to wear it they're like well first of all it's a massive logo so like walk around in the city after a workout saying like locker room is like kind of like having the GU FBI shirt it's a bit obnoxious and we like well that's really not the point of our merch if you just

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wear it in the gym and the point is like you rep it outside the gym some clients would but we're like why why don't you wear it they're like well it is is like it is a bit of a status symbol it's like saying hey I pay like an outrageous amount of money for a gym which when people do it with a bag or they do it with a jacket that's like a Louis Vuitton or whatever there just it's just been so cultur andrain that it's not that much of it iny face but for a gym it's kind of like I can't believe you

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pay that much for a gym like in the in one of the AFR Artic the original one there was a photo and in the background of one of the photos it was my founder co-founder raap and I so had our arms folded and the lockers were in the background you could see a few names on the lockers and and one of the clients his name was there and he said his phone and his email inbox was going off all day people giving him [ __ ] for how much cuz it said how much it cost in the article giving him [ __ ] for how much he

00:26:09 - 00:26:57

spends on the gym they're like I can't believe you spend this much on the gym absolute wanker he like just go for a run it's free so I think in I think in Australian culture it's like it's very tall poppy it's like you spend that much in a gym like what's wrong with you like just eat less why do you have to pay all this money so there is a status symbol to it however I think for a lot of clients they don't necessarily want people to know that they train there and

00:26:33 - 00:27:22

that they spend that much money on a gym so soel let of a flex for others and more of a like I'm investing in me yeah very introspective perspective and before we were talking about the two types of clientele that you get one which is the group of Founders people that build run and establish companies and then the executive types that might work for aari bank or you know they they're flying around the world and doing big things how how would you say that they're similar psychologically and

00:26:58 - 00:27:55

how would would you say that they differentiate yeah yeah so definitely their schedules dictate a lot of that their their personality type personality types of Executives I find by nature of their work they're a little bit more highly strong because they're like on the clock a lot more so they're like they're managing their time a lot more closely so Executives yeah definitely like more typ a more to the point like got to be time efficient got to be effective like can't talk got to keep

00:27:25 - 00:28:21

moving whereas the business owners I would say they they probably have a lot more ups and downs in their in their moods because you know if MCC bank doesn't do well you still get you know $10 million base salary so it's like I'm good you know like I'm not too worried I mean I'm I'm invested but when a business owner has an up and has a down you know can a few more things can go go wrong so they get bigger mood swings but generally overall because there's less time pressure on their schedule they're

00:27:54 - 00:28:39

they're a bit more relaxed I would say the business owners except when things aren't going well which has happened a little bit recently cuz of the economy but yeah those those are probably the big differences the similarities I would say that to get to and I was having this conversation with someone last night cuz they were like oh aren't all rich people like [ __ ] and I was like yeah interesting you say that no The Wolf of Wall Street like Gordon gecko kind of characters it's just like it's like a

00:28:16 - 00:29:09

Hollywood thing the truth is for people to become successful and you know this like you need a team can't do it by yourself or if you do it was like outlier Bitcoin you know put everything on Tesla kind of thing but for most people to be successful you need a team and for a team for a good team you need people to follow you you need people to want you to win and people don't want people to win that they don't like and so what I find is the clients in my gym they're very likable because they've had

00:28:43 - 00:29:33

to be because they have to have people follow them and work for them and like want to die for them and if you're not likable people aren't going to do that and so like all my clients are like awesome people they're like great there's anyone you would get a beer with I me I don't really drink so or go get a coffee with they all like that so like in terms of personality wise they are a huge range of personalities from like yeah like the kind of typical investment banker like ultimate Alpha Chad kind of

00:29:07 - 00:30:01

guys to like super dorky like introverted slightly autistic Tech founder like you've got the full spectrum but they're all awesome they're all people that you would definitely go and like you know have Christmas lunch with yeah so in terms of yeah personality similarities that that's that's for sure yeah and that's interesting and you touched on like leading a team right so running the Gen One Gym setup for team it's usually a revolving door of receptionists that get

00:29:35 - 00:30:34

paid nowhere near enough to deal with the crap they deal with and then you have a cleaner that's underpaid the equipment's yet never usually managed on a schedule uh and then you typically have like the pts pay rent to have access to the gym and then you basically sign up a member and go give him two free sessions what's that format for you guys do you hire your team and pay them a salary like how how how have you innovated that structure yeah this is this is I would say if the most

00:30:04 - 00:30:48

fulfilling thing about what I do is is this side of it because growing up in the fitness industry I realized that there's basically no job that you actually want the only job that you want is to like be an owner of something and so like being a you know if if if I'm just like hey I want to be a lifetime coach I just want to coach people I love coaching people don't want to run the business side of things your options are terrible it's either like coach group fitness classes most you can probably

00:30:27 - 00:31:13

make off a group fitness class is like 80 some gyms have incentives based off how many people do your classes you might make $150 a class but that' be pretty rare uh most get paid like $30 to $40 a class so you end up working all these classes at like all these different gyms because you know one class is sorry one gym might give you 10 classes the other gym might give you 15 you're kind of just piecing it all together so you drive between all the different gyms then sometimes the hours

00:30:50 - 00:31:42

get cut the gym doesn't do well so it's just a mess and then the other option which you talked about which is like the PT rental model which is what most people get into is like the some of the rents they charge them like5 6 $700 a week so your first 8 to 10 clients are just like making rent yeah cuz I think World Gym was like six at one point it was like 680 a week or something which is a lot something ridiculous like that yeah it's a lot and like they don't necessarily give you loads of clients

00:31:16 - 00:32:01

they don't make it easy for you you got to Market yourself you got to learn how to sell you got basically operating as like a full-time business as a oneman band and and there's resentment too cuz the pts are like ah the gym doesn't care about me they just give you crappy leads and then the gym doesn't like the pts cuz they complain all the time and the equipment's broken and then like both sides kind of hate each other it's it's it's an awful model and like it's a lose

00:31:38 - 00:32:26

lose because as soon as you start doing well in the PT rental model which I would say for most pts takes like five years to like build up a client base yeah to like get really good at your craft to get results to document those results to Market well to have a website to have a good social media like all the things that you need to be successful and then retain clients I would say takes yeah anywhere from 4 to 5 years for a coach to really be worth the money that they're charging then once you've

00:32:02 - 00:32:54

established a client book it's like okay now the only way to earn more money is to do more sessions or charge more per hour there's a limit to how much you can charge per hour right most clients aren't going to pay $150 an hour most most pts charge around $100 an hour 120 an hour some Elite pts charge 200 an hour but they usually been going for like 10 15 years and so or then your other option is all right maybe I make my session shorter and I keep the price up or I just work more hours but all

00:32:28 - 00:33:13

those scenarios are not very appealing scenarios because you know I've hired guys that used to do 40 hour weeks 50 hour weeks on the floor which is like complete burnout territory like it's just most pts can sustain about 30 hours a week 28 to 30 hours a week so based off that number there's a limit to how much money you can make and then you take the rent out now you can't go on any holidays okay you want to go on a holiday you don't get paid during the holidays and if you go on a long holiday

00:32:50 - 00:33:36

you got to not only earn no money but you got to give your clients to someone else at the gym that you trust and I've I know heaps of stories where those clients don't come back cuz they have a better experience and so it's just not really any scenario in which you win so what we created was just like a regular job like full-time employment so everyone gets a salary everyone has bonuses and pay banss and they can move up through the salaries and we pay like way more so this is one of the

00:33:13 - 00:34:07

advantages of charging clients a lot of money is we just charge we can pay way more than most gyms so like the most competitive salary at a gym I won name I KN I know a lot how much money a lot of gyms pay their coaches the best top coach at like a really really high performance gym that I know makes $90,000 a year our entry level coach can make $80 to $100,000 a year straight off the bat so like one coach has got a grind for like 10 years to be the top coach of their gym they make 90 grand we start our coaches at 80 to 100 some of

00:33:40 - 00:34:24

our top coaches ear $130,000 year plus bonuses so for them it's like cool I can set my life up here you know and a lot of until pts get to a point where they want to buy a house or they want to take loans or whatever if you're in the rental model and you submit your financials to a bank they're going to be like we're not giving you any money if you've got a salary a base salary and it's employment blah blah blah the banks go cool we can give you like x amount for a loan for a house or a renovation

00:34:02 - 00:34:50

or whatever so winds up happening a lot so we get a lot of these coaches that have been coaching for 5 six 7 10 years they finally get a salary they're getting pay away more they get paid holidays they get SI days they get all all the benefits being employed and then they can finally get a mortgage and so like we've had like four or five coaches get their first home with us as well which is awesome but it's just giving them stable employment and like they work in a team and like you know the

00:34:26 - 00:35:11

rental model is super isolating it's like you're kind of with your competitors all day and so you get to work on a team you get to innovate together you get to collaborate you get to work with the all the incentives are aligned so it just feels like a um like I tell the clients it's kind of like being a professional athlete you come in okay you've got like your physio guy you've got your nutrition guy you've got like your strength and conditioning guy you've got like your speed agility guy

00:34:49 - 00:35:29

we kind of hire all these Specialists and all these experts that come together and it feels like okay the client is like this high performance business athlete they come in and they've got like their whole coaching team to support them and the coach is working together and like we're all working to get towards the goals okay nutrition's not working speak to nutritionist okay you got an injury speak to the injury guy like it's super helpful rather than having to be the one person that does

00:35:09 - 00:36:01

everything for that client it's a lot because nutrition and Sport Science and everything like it's a it's a complicated art form and in your case like what has this done for culture and how has your internal culture impacted the client's experience yeah people talk about culture a lot when it comes to billing teams I have a slightly different opinion on work culture I read a book the name I remember the name his name is John Hitler that's why I remember his name oh goodness yeah

00:35:35 - 00:36:30

Hitler with a Double T and he is a business coach for mostly tech companies but he's got a great book called the little book of big scaling and basically what he did is he took he did like his own internal kind of research on all his clients and said okay what is the difference between clients that grow rapid which I think you said is 20 or 50% faster than the industry average so I think our industry indry grows at like 10% a year which quite fast um and so that means everyone is naturally growing

00:36:02 - 00:36:46

at 10% a year so for us to would' be double that we'd be growing at 20% a year something like whatever the math was and so he's like okay what is the difference between the brands that grow faster than the market rate or or go like Fast growth and then just like average growth and one of the things he said and he's got like data on everything which I love so it's like it's all it's all datab based is um they hire they hire for talent not for culture and so he's like gives the

00:36:24 - 00:37:11

example of he goes okay you could be in a social volleyball team you've known each other you grew up through High School you went to college together it's like the ultimate culture you guys are like the best of friends ever and you go up against so the six of you and you go up against three people that are ex retired Olympic level volleyball players who honestly have like never played together don't like each other and have like no communication or whatever they're going to beat you 400 to nil

00:36:48 - 00:37:33

every single time so he's like Talent always beats out culture he goes it's it's good to have a culture but if you hire exclusively for talent he's like all the he surveyed all the brands at one culture Awards and like the best company to work for and all that sort of stuff versus companies that hire purely on Talent they like never won a culture award and he's like these companies are way more successful so we hire exclusively for talent there's always like a gut feeling of like hey this

00:37:11 - 00:37:54

person won't fit in so we won't hire them so like we do have that as like a threshold but generally like we don't really talk about culture of the gym we just like if we get the best coaches the most talented coaches and we put them all together we're going to get the best results and that's that's how we do it what's generally like the vibe and and like and I appreciate like you being candid here around like cool like culture is one thing you see it different regarding the the talent

00:37:32 - 00:38:17

aspect like how do you define talent and and what impact has that made on the clients yeah I think Talent gives the whole company reassurance that like we're going to get results like we don't have to I don't have to worry about this coach coaching you because I know he's like top level and I think if there's any sort of hesit hesitancy in that it's like I don't really know about this guy like I don't know if I want to give him this client I don't know if I really

00:37:54 - 00:38:41

trust him and once you create that like I I don't think you're as good as me or the standard's not at the standard that we accept I just don't think you can make the the right result for the clients but when everyone has peace of mind that like Hey we're super high level here you get this culture of like ambitious young people that are really trying to push and they're like really trying to elevate each other and like oh have you learned this have you seen this thing have you read this book or

00:38:18 - 00:39:05

listened to this podcast I think you really like this and they have like debates on like better ways to do things and so it's what you get is just this constant upping of the standard and the client benefit from that from just getting better results getting faster results so when you look at people like let say that have extraordinary Talent would you say that they're typically a type personalities or there's there's certain traits or tropes that they carry like for example here at rival we have a

00:38:41 - 00:39:36

very high performance team and in our design room we've had people come in as a senior designer at another location and they come in here and they're like oh man the Juniors here are crushing me I can't keep up so like our pedigree of a Junior midweight and senior is difficult and different from the standard our bar is pretty high here and what we find is if people can't get up to speed quickly the team are kind of like yo catch up like they get a little tough and they're like keep up or get

00:39:09 - 00:39:57

out and it's interesting because we do have that high performance notion here where it's like we want to be an Elite Squad and there's a feeling that's associated with that like we're kind of like a SWAT team we're mercenaries and and people have to earn their stripes here it does create like a a weird dynamic is it something similar for you guys where it's like keep up or get out or like and it's not said it's just kind of felt and you can kind of sense it yeah I mean that that rings that Rings

00:39:33 - 00:40:29

true with our team for sure yeah I would say like we have two what I've noticed at the the top echelons of Fitness coaches there's basically like two personality types there's like the alpha Chad like was good at every sport like Elite bro like ultimate like not not cheerleader but just like the captain of the football team kind of vibe you know like this a dude yeah like a natural leader kind of guy not as interested in the science of training but like incredible at building Community

00:40:01 - 00:40:58

incredible at accountability getting people on board building relationships and then you've got the complete opposite type which is what I would say I was more of which is like the super insecure dork nerd that loves the science of training and has like measured every macronutrient done like the lifts perfectly to according to the science and read all the research and has just become like super jacked so they look the same on paper one guy was just born jacked and full of Charisma and one one guy like learned it through

00:40:29 - 00:41:19

science and and knowledge and just being a nerd and they complement each other really well because that really high energy relationship Builder is great for the community aspect and the just the the the vibe of the gym and then the other type comes in with like all the science and everything that works to get results and they're definitely a more introverted type of personality and they work really well oneon-one but like maybe in a bit more of a group setting they they'll they'll sit back a bit more

00:40:54 - 00:41:39

but the two are like the perfect ying and yang together if you have like all introverts nerds your clients wouldn't wouldn't Jael cuz you get in all different types of clients right but if you had like all Alpha Chads like maybe everyone would have a lot of fun but like you wouldn't get the results as as well so like that combination we hire for if we get like one super nerd then we get like one alpha chat and we trying one for one just to keep the balance there and that that's worked really well

00:41:17 - 00:42:09

for us yeah I don't know for whatever reason that's just as you ascend up the talent pool it kind of just splits into those two types yeah yeah interesting I find it fascinating and regarding the the community and the interactivity between members a lot of gyms again gen one gyms say we're all about a community how do you define community and and what do you guys do to stoke that fire yeah I think it naturally helps that we have a lot of similar type of clientele like you know at a well gym you're going to

00:41:43 - 00:42:29

get we get a lot of different people like the CrossFit guys and gals and then you've got the weightlifters and then the powerlifters and the bodybuilding and the bikini comps and then you have just the the students yeah the students and the kids and then you have like the guy who has no idea what he's doing he's trying to figure it out and everything in between yeah that and I think that makes it hard to build a community cuz they're all so different yeah cuz I remember bringing in like you know a

00:42:06 - 00:42:47

woman who's like in her late 40s and she just see the GM broke crowd and just freeze up and like I can't sign up here yeah you know you you see and it happens in gyms all the time you see a crowd that's not you and you're like I don't really fit here yeah totally yeah totally people want to be around people like themselves talking about video games earlier like one thing that I loved about like early days video gaming community that would Niche it's like ah these people are like me there was a

00:42:27 - 00:43:13

couple guys in Melbourne that I played Halo with that I mean if I bumped into them streets there I've never met them in person like we'd go hang out and chat for hours like we just got along so well because we were very similar type of people um and I think that's kind of what each game did it kind of siloed different types of people into different games you know like World of Warcraft people were very similar and then like Counter-Strike people were very similar and that is kind of in some ways now

00:42:50 - 00:43:35

that I'm thinking about it is what our gym is it's a very similar type of crowd they've all kind of in the same stage of Life they've got you know a lot of similar experience in in their jobs and so that has meant that it's very easy for them to relate and our model because it's two-on-one so each session is a two-on-one session yeah in what way what do you mean so two clients one coach so so it's a 60-minute session you'll do 40 minutes of Weights 20 minutes of cardio

00:43:12 - 00:44:01

but the weights portion is individualized so you might come in Dane and then you're with Pasa and then I'm the coach and you've got legs today upper body today I take you both through the program but it's kind of like a like a trio so like I'm having a conversation with the three of us Dan did this yesterday what do you think about that or did you guys watch you know both might follow the NBA or something you guys see the trade that happened on and so you get that kind of community

00:43:37 - 00:44:23

building which is what we carried over from group fitness and one thing we didn't like about oneone is it's like it's just isolated between you and that and that client and that that is okay some people do like that but the problem with it long term is that it gets boring it's like okay I've train with this person three times a week have the same conversation I winge about my wife again like kids and the mortgage just like all right and then on Tuesday we have the same conversation on Thursday we have

00:44:00 - 00:44:45

the same conversation so I've got tiring but being able to book in with different coaches and you got a different person training with you each time you still get an individualized program which is what they want so all the pts are like following this like you let's just say you assigned me with a program and if I'm booking in on the app at a different time with a different coach they they're still helping me with my program correct yeah correct yeah we have like a centralized programming software that

00:44:23 - 00:45:10

all the notes go into so whoever the coach is taking you for the session they'll see all the notes from the last session all the way and stuff so you stay on track with your actual training program but you get a slightly different training environment each time and that that model in itself helps to build community because part of this book was I mentioned before the little book of big scale he was talking about culture in there and one of the best ways to build it he said is just set your systems UPS in a way that it will take

00:44:46 - 00:45:32

care of itself so rather than need to do lots of events and like social media posts and stuff like that to build communities like just set up all your incentives and your systems in a way that it just naturally makes it happen and that's what not intentionally necessarily but just subconsciously in some ways we built it that way so it's like organically cultivating itself without needing to be forced hey once a month we have an event everyone attends but in this case you're putting two

00:45:09 - 00:45:57

people that might not have met each other before together in the same room with a PT that might not have met before which gives a piece variety yes so they don't feel so like much like their days monotonous and then everyone gets variety and it's kind of creating networking I imagine businesses being conducted because of this as well it yeah it has happened yeah we've uh had a quite a few clients do business together yeah which is cool yeah yo my name is Dane Walker and I am disgustingly

00:45:33 - 00:46:30

obsessed with branding I had to figure out a way to do branding every single day so I branded myself then I started my agency rival and hired a team of branding Mavericks hellbent on creating Brands so good that they'll make your competition with their pants so here's the thing you want your brand to go viral and rival makes Brands go viral that's why we're offering you a free 30-minute branding session to get an expert's opinion if you don't believe me the proof is in the

00:46:11 - 00:47:12

pudding here's what clients have to say about rival rival is trusted by Brands like nutrition Warehouse light my bricks and V so if you want to absolutely smoke the competition and make your brand go viral hit the link below and book in your free 30-minute branding session yeah interesting so how how has this perpetuated and and like how has this evolved over the years and and like where are you trying to take it now yeah so we we're just talking about this the other day but essentially we're going to

00:46:42 - 00:47:36

sell out our C sites our current Square meterage probably end of this year which we're going to look to probably this time next year either expand into some more floor space in Sydney which will just be in a similar area in the city um if we don't we're going to go and to a Melbourne site so we're open in Melbourne once we can successfully operate between two states then we'll look to expand internationally so yeah we'll when we expand internationally we'll still grow in Australia but slower

00:47:10 - 00:48:03

and we'll just focus more of our efforts in the US most likely yeah one thing I found really interesting was you in the middle of the CBD in in Sydney and you had so much demand that you opened up a second location and you were deciding between do we go to another geographical area but we have so much demand here do we just open up another location here so you've got two gyms within like 5 minutes walking distance from each other yeah less yeah yeah they're close how close are they they're one block away

00:47:36 - 00:48:27

yeah yeah they're like literally one straight you just walk across and you're at the other one so what made you do that and like what's being the benefits of of this model cuz most gyms would just be like this is crazy how are they doing this because it's kind of like the Starbucks model where you see a Starbucks across the road from a Starbucks it's just it's hilarious yeah yeah well so for us it's like one thing that we don't like about the residential placement of gyms is if you churn so I

00:48:02 - 00:48:47

think about it as potential clients per square meter so if you take like a residential area your clients potential clients per square meter is really low right because you know people live in apartments or they live in houses and you know if someone lives in everyone's spread out yeah everyone's spread out and the thing is like okay that's good in the beginning you get all these new clients but eventually you churn them right just natural churn of the gym and CH by churn you mean like they they

00:48:24 - 00:49:06

leave and they go elsewhere and yeah exactly yeah and so that amount of square meterage you actually lose that becomes like a Red Zone because if they got a mortgage for 30 years like that's that you you've exed that out now the problem is if you do that over a long enough time scale which is what's happening with group fitness gyms is that eventually you start exing out a massive amount of your suburb now you've churned your entire suburb you've churned your entire market and so they

00:48:45 - 00:49:33

still live there but they don't attend exactly so now you're kind of I get what you're saying so you're kind of like losing real estate yes because your opportunity of new revenue and sales is shrinking because people don't want to come back for whatever reason they don't want to come back and they don't leave the suburb because they've got a mortgage or they've lived there and so your turnover in that square meter like of new potential people coming in is super low whereas the city your client

00:49:09 - 00:49:59

per square meter is super high right because you've got office towers that hold 8,000 people in them so and those the people within those square meters are turning over quite a lot right because you got people being hired and new people coming on and new businesses signing leases and so even though you might churn a few people there's always new people refreshing constantly so your pool of people is always big and it's always growing and so because of th those metrics you're able to grow the gym quite well

00:49:34 - 00:50:21

whereas like Suburban gyms what you find in their tread lines is they grow quickly in the beginning as the churn rate starts to increase then eventually they literally can't market and bring new leads in because they've churn their their entire address they letter box dropped everyone and run local ads and it's just yeah they literally like that's it like when you when you map it out in a sheet it's like okay you need to sell it around like the third or fourth year or you just like you're on a

00:49:57 - 00:50:35

way to lose money yeah yeah how did you figure this out 10 years 10 years with the industry yeah well a lot of pain because like yeah the gyms that we had in those suburbs I'm like why are we just not growing we're spending more money on marketing we've got a better product now you know we've got we've got some new people coming in but it's like not coming in at the same rate anymore it's weird I know there's a little bit more competition but it's can't be that

00:50:17 - 00:51:02

and then we're just figuring it out going well maybe we've just churned the whole address ball market and then we started talking to f45s especially because f45 was the best example cuz they grew super fast and they shrunk super fast so like they grew super fast they churn the [ __ ] out of their market and then they just stopped growing and so they I mean some of them in pre-sales would sign up 200 clients in a pre-sale like I remember people that took franchise they ah screw CrossFit I'm

00:50:39 - 00:51:18

going to do at f45 and then they showed me their pre-sale I'm like oh my God that's insane I could never sign up 200 clients in a month and then next thing you know they're like they're closing their doors or they're selling and it made me start to think like all right we should go somewhere where it's like more dense so that this doesn't happen and the city is that option which is why people go you should open in the Eastern suburbs so people have money and this and that I'm like doesn't work cuz

00:50:59 - 00:51:53

eventually we'll churn out the whole Market there you know some people sit on th000 square meters maybe not the east 300 MERS a real estate I lose that client that 300 square meters is gone and the next 300 square meters is gone yeah yeah cuz I remember like chatting to Nathan James who owns Fitness cartel and he has like a criteria of like what a location must have and he tends to hit like suburbs that have like people renting versus like owners and he has like he tries to get like tow houses or

00:51:26 - 00:52:18

apartments like he really wants to kind of sit in like youth Suburbia okay where there's probably more churn yeah needs to have 200 car Parks needs to be next to a busy road like he's figured out a few metrics for you guys like how do you market like how do you advertise you know because if you look at Brands like you know maybe a similar concept which might be Lamborghini you know people are like oh you know how do Lamborghini get their clients because I've never seen a Lamborghini commercial like how how do

00:51:51 - 00:52:53

you guys generate the leads do people walk in do you run ads is it refal based how do you predominately get your your leads yeah this is your area so I'm interested to hear your take on it but we didn't run paid advertising until like the end of last year so we were primarily all just marketing activities that were yeah like no meta wasn't meta and Linkedin weren't getting any money from us so was all organic social media mostly through Linkedin walk past traffic referral campaigns letter box

00:52:21 - 00:53:12

drops email Outreach and uh like cold LinkedIn outreaches as well so those were our primary sources we still use those we try and get half our leads from those sources now and then half our leads from Paid advertising we're still figuring out the paid advertising game we get a lot of success on LinkedIn we do hit like our Roi numbers and our yeah cost per acquisition CPA uh so that that goes well but we just haven't cracked meta we just can't figure out meta we're going to have a few more few more goes

00:52:48 - 00:53:38

it but we just burn so much cash in it that we're like the budget's done for that for this year but yeah in order to scale how we want to scale all those little small kind of founder activities that we were doing in the beginning we've stopped doing and we're like okay we need to get like this paid funnel a lot stronger um so that if we open in Melbourne we can just like turn key turn on the advertising put money into it and reliably get a certain amount of leads that and now we're trying to really

00:53:13 - 00:54:00

invest more in the social social media organic social media so like we started our podcast the locker room podcast different to the the previous podcast we did to just kind of help build more brand awareness but yeah one thing that we've always uh so Conor who's our head of marketing and myself we're basically the marketing team with like a bunch of vas it's just yeah how do we want the brand to feel because the easy one to go to is all right yeah let's look at Porsche let's look at Rolex let's look

00:53:37 - 00:54:23

at Hugo Boss or whatever those Brands and how they feel do we want to feel like that is it that appropriate for a gym maybe maybe not because you look at a brand like Equinox in America I don't know if you've seen Equinox I've been in Equinox yeah I went in there to just use their bathroom okay and I was like hey can I come back and like do one session cuz I was um traveling over there for the podcast we were like catching up with Louis how and Chris D and a few others and I was like hey can I just get

00:53:59 - 00:54:45

a day pass and they're like no yeah but like in a snobby way like no like one day posses we don't do that and I was like oh I'm sorry but can I use the bathroom they're like sure and I was like oh thank you but I I like perked my head in the gym and I was like what is this place like the marketing was different it felt viby it was like kind of intimate and Nike esque oh you didn't know about it before you poked your head in no I just randomly walked in I was like what's Equinox and I was like this

00:54:22 - 00:55:09

place is rad were you in uh West Coast or east coast uh we were in Santa Monica I know the one you went to in Los Angeles yeah yeah like right on the the beach front yep yeah I've been to that one yeah so like I think they're an interesting example obviously an amazing business started in I don't know if you know about started in the east coast I know the story no yeah so they started east coast and they the whole the founder was like we want to Equinox on every block that was the guy I think

00:54:46 - 00:55:31

they've got like 36 locations or something in East Coast now so they are more of an East Coast brand and their their growth strategy at the moment is they're like taking over a lot of dying gyms in the west coast so the experience you get West Coast in terms of fit out it's not really what an equinox is supposed to look like they're supposed to be a little bit more high-end but I think that they they're a mismatch and I think a lot of stuff like this in America exists but there's a mismatch

00:55:09 - 00:56:05

between what they market and what they deliver and the experience they deliver so if I was to look at equinox is they relaunched their brand with like a slightly different campaign now it's very like asop kind of Louis Vuitton Prada kind of vibe to it very strange very like a cologne perfume ad and I I I get it but I also think then you go and get the experience of it I'm like it's just not the globo gym like it's not it's not that special packaged well it's packaged well still gen one exactly yeah

00:55:36 - 00:56:24

so I'm like how much does that I think in some equinoxes they have some really nice ones in the in New York they probably it probably matches really nicely but I think in most of their locations it's not like they just took on I think they just took on $1.6 billion of growth funding from a bank yeah so they're going they're going hard wow so they're a huge brand but yeah if I I look at brand I'm okay they're trying something different with how the brand feels I'm like is that appropriate

00:56:00 - 00:56:45

for us I don't know it's tough it's tough because American Marketing also doesn't work in Australia you probably know that right so how you Market to Aussies how you Market to the US is is very different so I think we're still trying to figure out how Our Brands supposed to like look and feel I think some of the culture from the US is bleeding out here in Australia in a sense where like if you look at cult Kings they took American culture sold it to Australia now we're selling it back

00:56:22 - 00:57:14

to America but I I feel like you know in particular Millennials and genz we grew up on the Internet like I had a lot of friends in the US I feel like it is Shifting and we've noticed that a lot of gyms now that we're talking to are like hey we want to be like the American gyms that has been in conversation quite a lot but yeah it's it's something worth looking at I think from my perspective the industry does need to shake up I feel like the whole industry or just Oz no the whole industry in Australia I'm

00:56:49 - 00:57:36

just because I don't know what it's like globally I haven't seen what the gyms like in Europe and all the rest of the world but I I feel like Australia is getting a little stale like we had the Box gyms you know the snap fitnesses which was like you know six bucks a week and it's like five pieces of equipment and you tag the door then you know I felt like the group fitness thing really took off and then the super gym thing like the good lives and all the rest of it kind of took off and now I just feels

00:57:12 - 00:58:04

like there's an evolution waiting to happen well we're we're a really interesting Market because we're very affluent right so we have plenty of money but we're population is so small that mediocrity can't survive and there's a lot of mediocrity in America like if you've been to some of the fast food chains there yeah I we felt like our experience was everything kind of felt the same like the food all kind of tasted the same yeah and I personally wasn't Blown Away by anything yeah so

00:57:38 - 00:58:30

like you'll get some fast food change you walking into you're like oh was that was okay and you Google the brand 850 locations how how do they have 850 locations that wasn't that good and you realize the American population is so big so wealthy that they can support a lot of mediocrity the difference with us is that for like you either go really low market like in Anytime Fitness and you just kind of expand and everyone can pay whatever $10 a week but anything above that it's like you have to be

00:58:04 - 00:58:52

extremely like you have to be top of the market otherwise you just literally don't have the population to sustain growth and so you have to be the best of the best and so it's kind of left the consumer in a weird space where someone that wants to spend $60 to like $100 a week they're kind of getting like some Brands like one or two locations three five locations but it's like uh it's okay it's not that good or you're getting like where where kind of sitting in is like a s Haven I don't know if

00:58:28 - 00:59:14

you've heard of that gym or or total Fusion it's like all right super Elite like super highend but like really really expensive High entry point because it's like that's kind of the only way Our Brands can survive because we're going into these really expensive real estate areas we need to charge a lot of money and so therefore we have to deliver like a super high-end service whereas yeah in America they can kind of exist in the middle and they can survive and grow so yeah we're a tough Market

00:58:51 - 00:59:46

from that sense which is why people will innovate and they'll try and expand and grow but you probably find they die or they have to move overseas pretty quickly or they go top end of the market like what we're doing yeah from me my perspective is like well branding is the art of communication essentially whether that's verbal visual or like it's IP or concepts it's it's transferring um data from my head to your head so like you know how like you might be in a conversation with your spouse and you

00:59:19 - 01:00:11

might say something and they get offended you're like it's not what I meant right and it's like in in our minds we have this code and we're trying to turn it into words and then send the words into someone else's ears and then they decode it so we like codify Concepts send it through language they decod ay and then they make a decision on what it means to them so like if I'm looking at equinox like how do I decode that and make an assumption of my head of like is that for me or not that's

00:59:44 - 01:00:40

kind of how I see branding but like I think what's interesting here is like the the concept of like actually delivering something different that's product so so like with you guys like the product is totally different two onone thing really cool the what I pay what I get access to the fact that I get privacy there's only eight people in the gym I'm working with a staff member not a PT that's a contractor who's been handed the free sessions like the whole experience the whole package the product

01:00:12 - 01:01:07

is so so different and then it's just okay how do we how do we code that so people get that quickly yeah and not get offended like Karen yeah uh you know to the point where they're like how dare you but I think what you're doing is fascinating man like for you like how how did you I guess this is so rare this is so uncommon that someone would do this where did you get the I guess kind of the audacity to pull this off you know I think I do think about this sometimes like how did we end up in this

01:00:39 - 01:01:27

position me me and my business partner I think a big part of it was to do with the podcast that we started when really yeah because if it wasn't for the podcast we were just another CrossFit gym owner and there were thousands of us but I think this is back when you had three CrossFit Gyms correct yeah yeah so when we started our podcast in 2014 the Mind muscle project we got a we got like like exponentially more success through that than we did through the gyms our gyms were like quite honestly just very

01:01:03 - 01:01:50

mediocre our CrossFit Gyms but we got this inflated sense of like we're better than all the other CrossFit Gyms because we have the podcast they don't have the podcast and a lot of them would be like your podcast is amazing and so we felt like from a status perspective I'm just saying how it is like we're like oh we're like the best gym owners but we weren't actually good gym owners we just were like really good podcasters with gyms and so because of that we got to like travel to like we did us podcaster

01:01:27 - 01:02:14

we did four of them we traveled to Dubai like we traveled all across Australia we got to interview like the who's who in the fitness industry got to work with like amazing Brands like whoop ag1 eight sleep all those brands that people know all these other brands and it always made us feel a little bit special I think we carried that into locker room as like okay well we're different like we're innovators like we we back ourselves more whereas I think if we just had three like mediocre CrossFit

01:01:50 - 01:02:35

Gyms we wouldn't have had our Horizons and our minds expanded and that's that's like a lot of what business owners ship is right it's like you go up different levels and your mind expands you go oh wait we can't actually do this like you have that self-belief when you see different things and you meet different people and I think going on a lot of those us podcast tours and meeting a lot of successful people we thought our Horizons really expanded a lot more than like if we just spent every day in our

01:02:13 - 01:03:04

little suburb in marville just like coaching people through CrossFit and so I think it was yeah big that had a big part to play with it is like all that travel all those interviews like seeing so much success in that podcast made us feel like okay the that we do like we back ourselves to do it and and I think that really yeah that was that was the big Difference Maker do you think that was the people you were meeting and just you know the quote of like iron sharpens iron like man I just met this person

01:02:38 - 01:03:31

they seem pretty human to me if they can do it I can do it like what was it that I guess gave you the confidence yeah I think that's part of it is like you think oh you're not actually that special you just kind of figured out a little bit of stuff and and now you're making it work so I think you definitely dis can't discount that I also think like just the the experiences and the rooms that we were able to get in with like honestly being like we're just like nobodies like why why is this person

01:03:04 - 01:03:52

taking interview with us and it just I know made us feel like not that we had a we were entitled to it but like that we could do it if we set your mind to something you have no right being here or speaking to this person or this much success and you achieved it you're like okay you back yourself more so there's just that like stretch goal achieve it next goal stretch goal achieve it and I think doing that enough times over 10 years or s years really before we started the locker room made us back and

01:03:28 - 01:04:15

honestly I think as well you know we we actually started the CrossFit gyms with five five business partners there's there's two of us now so the shedding of those other three business partners each time which was like a very painful process each time it made us so R my my co-host and business partner now it made us look at each other and be like okay if we're spending all this money to get rid of this person like why are we doing this and like what are our Ambitions and the reason that we were splitting off

01:03:52 - 01:04:33

from those people is cuz we had much bigger Ambitions we're like hey we want to do this we want to do that like no that's too risky we can't do that I don't want to do that I'm happy with how things are now it's like cool we need to get rid of you and so each time we did that it was because we had bigger and bigger Ambitions and eventually there were no business partners to get rid of when we got rid of the last one in 2019 we like sat in the model and we're like n no we're like because every every time

01:04:13 - 01:04:54

it was the focus was getting rid of this business owner cuz they were always the block to the next level and then there was no business partner blocking us the next thing that was blocking us was like oh it's the model we're in it's actually the brand that we've got now we need to get rid of it and so I think our Ambitions had gone way beyond the gyms that we were operating we just hadn't realized it yet because we were just maniacally focused on getting rid of the current business partner that was

01:04:33 - 01:05:21

holding us back but it was always just cuz we had big Ambitions and then eventually we got rid of the model and it was like okay what's this next thing that we're going to build because we need to get rid of the thing we're in now and so was yeah jumping from that CrossFit vehicle to the locker room vehicle was like a big part of it as well just ambitious what was I guess the hardest part of that transition was there moments of Doubt moments of wanting to quit like what was the toughest part of that transition

01:04:57 - 01:05:47

probably the tough part signing a lease in January 2020 and then being told two months later after $150,000 into a demolition saying that you yeah we've got a pandemic and you need to shut up operations and that you still need to pay rent every day so we've got the biggest rental bill that we've ever got we've got like a dwindling supply of cash and we're already invested in the space I remember we had a meeting with with rafh and I and we said okay people remember at the time but Melbourne and

01:05:22 - 01:06:11

Sydney were both in the lockdown the the first lockdown and we're watching every was watching the cases every single day and there was this one point where Melbourne had like a they their cases went up and they got locked down again and we were starting to slowly open and it was that summer the first summer of lockdown so December 2020 we were actually open but we couldn't leave the state so everyone went to Barron if you remember that period of time yeah I was uh stuck in jalong during that period

01:05:46 - 01:06:31

okay awesome like 276 days lock down yeah that year yeah so you yeah you remember it but yeah basically we were watching it and we said okay because Melbourne had that Spike obviously the lockdowns got more aggressive didn't really have a summer Sydney fortunately didn't have another Spike and so we're able to kind of just like live a bit more freely within the state but we said to ourselves hey if we get another Spike like Melbourne did which obviously Could Happen super easily this person speaks

01:06:10 - 01:06:50

to that one then next thing you know we've got 50 cases all right we're locked down again said if that happens we'll just let it go we we we we'll get out of the lease cuz at the time the government said you can walk away from any commercial lease and we just sat there every day and just was like okay either the cases are going to go up or they're going to stay where they are and we're going to keep the gym and it was honestly like a flip of the coin so yeah we just watched it every day and it

01:06:30 - 01:07:18

never happened and so here we are but if it' gone the other way we like handshake agree like we would have walked away from it and just I don't know figured out whatever the next thing was interesting and now looking at what you've done you know there's a quote from gr cut own and and he talks about this concept the 10x Rule and he you know said looking forwards things look incredibly difficult when you get there you look back usually there's regret of like man I wish I kind of like went a

01:06:54 - 01:07:44

little bit harder or thought a little bit big do you have those pinch yourself moments where you're like wow we pulled this off or are you more looking at the future and going man we can go harder and bigger and like let's keep expanding our Horizons and Go Global yeah I think I think we're the latter I think we're always future forward which has its downsides right because we did last last month we did our biggest month ever and then the first thing that came out of Ra's mouth he goes I think we can beat

01:07:18 - 01:08:06

it this month I'm like we didn't even spend half a second appreciating our best month he just literally said I think we can just beat it this month and that happened with us last month we broke a record and then like within moments I was like we can beat it next month yeah I think that's I think that's just like the double-edged sword of being an ambitious business owner is like you just want the next thing and the next thing the next thing and I'm cautious to not look back and I would

01:07:43 - 01:08:24

say like we're in the prime of our lives right we're healthy We're Young we're you know growing an amazing team building amazing business doing what we love working with people that we love every day I don't want to miss that part I don't want to look back and when I'm like 50 60 and go I just wish I could have appreciated it more at the time and so for me personally I try and have moments in my day where i'm just like really appreciative of of what I'm doing

01:08:03 - 01:08:56

always looking forward and and being ambitious but I spent so long just in that cycle with no appreciation that I do look back on it now and I think I do kind of miss some of those times when we were sleeping in in the gym upstairs and you know summer was 40° no air con and you know we were eating like cheap sweet potato from like an expired wholesale account so you do cherish those times but yeah in the moment it's always like what's next what's next what's next and I'm just worried as more time passes I

01:08:29 - 01:09:13

don't want to get stuck in that cycle Sam Harris who's like a podcaster philosopher I'm not sure if you know and he he say one quote once and it was like one day you'll wake up and realize like your entire life has passed you by and I do think about that sometimes and I think [ __ ] I don't want to do that cuz I can see myself doing it very easily and so yeah always looking forward always being ambitious cuz that's what you have to do you have to keep growing but like trying to appreciate the journey along

01:08:51 - 01:09:42

the way I I appreciate what you said there and and I you know sometimes I work you know at the moment we're in a scaling stage of the business I'm working 16 hour days six sometimes s days a week at the moment it's not always been like that it's just it EBS and flows there's been times where I work four days a week eight hours a day and it's just not one of those seasons and I got home last night and you know my daughter's four and I picked her up and I was like burnt to crisp yesterday

01:09:16 - 01:10:11

I was like man I'm so tired I'm working so hard and I miss the kids and and I was going through like this negative storytelling to myself in my head and I I like to to do what what's a tool in NLP called a reframe and it's like you catch yourself in a negative state of mind and you flip it and what I did last night was I was like man when I'm like 90 and I'm like in my deathbed I'm going to like wish I was in this moment and I just came back to the present I hugged my daughter and I was like this is

01:09:43 - 01:10:35

awesome I'm like at Peak in my business in a grow stage everything's good I got my health and and my whole biology just flipped within seconds and I felt incredible do you have in those moments of doubt like when the co situation played out and you were like oh my God man how are we going to pay for everything do you try to catch yourself out of those negative states of mind and flip it and how do you do that yeah there's a few Frameworks I like to use the first one is I can't I would love to

01:10:09 - 01:10:52

give credit to all these Frameworks I just can't remember where I picked them all up from we'll try and find it for you we'll tag them okay so the first one is uh you can only think one thought at a time so like your brain only has the capacity to think of one thought at a time and so when I'm having a negative thought I'm like well I can't it's like I can't look at all my tabs at the same time so I'll just open the good Tab and then that'll get rid of the negative Tab

01:10:31 - 01:11:17

and it's like you can feel the negative tab wanting to stay open but then you just click over to the good one and like just goes away yeah it just it goes away and you're like oh yeah cuz I the brain can only think of one thing at a time and so always understanding that that from a very basic human biological level I'm like okay I can just if I just focus on something else it can go away really quick that that old saying like oh change the subject you know it's awkward I'll change the subject soon as you

01:10:54 - 01:11:37

change the subject everyone's forgotten about what we talking about so that's always helpful knowing that because I guess people when they're ruminating about negative things it kind of feels like I can't get out of this like I'm stuck in this whereas like you actually are one different train of thought from getting out of it very quickly obviously you can switch back to it and think negative again but can get yourself out of it with one thought so I always like thinking about that another framework I

01:11:15 - 01:12:00

use which is like yes common is just like what's the Silver Lining right in a negative situation there's always something good and I can't think of any time where something bad happened and I wasn't able to find something good from it and I think that that just takes training just takes reps like I love the gym analogies because it's always applicable is like there are just like certain thought patterns that if you just like retrain them it's hard at first but then once you get good at it

01:11:37 - 01:12:15

like whenever something bad happens my brain automatically goes like all right what's the lesson here and this is like super cliche stuff but there is always a lesson there and in fact when it's going good I get more worried because I'm like it's easier when it's going bad because now I'm like all right there's some learnings here we can figure it out we can grow after this when it's going good I'm like it's just going to go bad soon when's it going to go bad so

01:11:56 - 01:12:42

I like to exist a little bit more in the negative moments I think I get more anxiety when things are going well than when things are going poorly because I think there's nothing to learn here because things are going well and when things are going well you're generally not learning anything you're kind of sitting back going oh things are good kick your feet up and that's when then things go bad so it's hard I find it hard to motivate myself when things are going well because I kind of just Coast

01:12:19 - 01:13:06

whereas when things are difficult and they're not going as well I work a lot harder I think that's like that es and flow so what I have to try and teach myself is like when things are going good keep doubling down on the effort keep doing more things try not to sit back too much but like I've also got myself like when you say I work 16 hour days and I'm growth period and stuff I'm like kind of jealous because I don't know I can't I just for however I've set things up I can't do that anymore like I

01:12:43 - 01:13:34

can't film my day with that much stuff anymore I think I've just delegated so much stuff I end up not having a lot of stuff to do sometimes I was even chatting I chat with um in the morning I'll come around the gym you come around the agency yeah and like I don't know if you use chat GPT on the voice thing you can have like a conversation with it that freaks me out okay yeah yeah scary man I go hey whatever the name whatever I call him I'm like you know I'm I'm like working not hard enough and I got

01:13:09 - 01:13:50

too much time in my day like what what would you feel my time doing if I'm like a gym owner and this and that and they they actually send some pretty interesting advice what did it say well firstly they're they're very agreeable so they're like ah it's great that you're doing so well and I'm sorry to hear that you're like upset with how things are going but like what I would like a great friend you know yeah yeah seriously I super smart great friend and they like I would suggest like these

01:13:29 - 01:14:12

seven things that a Founder is like better suited to because you've delegated so many things and like only you could possibly work on these things and I found that I found for me personally without a starting point I kind of don't know where to go but if someone can give me a couple of bit of stimulus like have you thought about this this and this I'm like all right awesome I can use those threads and like build myself some more tasks so that's what I'm trying to do more of the last

01:13:51 - 01:14:35

month or so when I find I can't fill up all my time very well and and as a you know coming from like the early startup phases where you're doing heaps and heaps of stuff when you come out of that phase it's funny because those are the days you wish for can't wait to just like have a weekend to myself and lie on the beach then you have the weekend lying on the beach like I need to work harder I need to fill my day with more stuff and so it just goes back and forth but yeah just for me it's having those

01:14:13 - 01:15:00

threads of like okay oh that's right I need to like read more books on leadership because if I become a better leader that's going to serve so I'll I'll buy some books on leadership or you need to think more about okay what are my scaling opportunities and it's like put the kind of real estate thing on the backbone okay let me call the agent see what's out there go look at some more spaces just stuff like that that they're not urgent tasks but their tasks that grow the business it's just very easy to

01:14:36 - 01:15:26

forget about them so chat GPT helping me out yeah thanks chat GPT and regarding the the the lockdown challenges and everything that came with that what was I guess the predominant thing that you learned about yourself in that season of business that's a good question yeah I don't like coaching that's for sure I was thrown back onto the coaching floor because lock down we put all our equipment in these trailers we drove the trailers out to parks and then just like coach people in the Parks and so every

01:15:01 - 01:15:44

morning I was like taking gear in and out of trailers and like coaching people I'm like [ __ ] doing this again I'm not I I grew out of coaching a long time ago so getting out of that because I think it's not that I don't enjoy coaching it's just that when I do it I know I'm not doing all the other stuff that's more important and that's like that's a head [ __ ] so I definitely knew like hey I really want to like work on the business that's for me and then I think

01:15:22 - 01:16:07

I just knew that a lot of people sat on their hands and took job job keeper job saver whatever it was like the free money from the government basically we had we had coaches that were like hey I'm not going to work they just took the money and played video games smoke weed and for me and for my business partner it was like okay how can we make as much money as possible here and we actually we actually did some insane profits during that time because it was like free leads we went to these parks in the

01:15:44 - 01:16:26

Eastern suburbs with like loads of Rich housewives that were just walking around the park every day with their poodles and didn't have anything to do and we were charging the same rate we were charging before and we just signed up loads of clients we were full we're in the park every day from like sunrise to sunset we were completely full and all our coaches were working how were you approaching them though like what was the pitch they were approaching us we just put a little sign on the ground

01:16:06 - 01:16:46

people were scanning it with the QR code and we were just doing PTs in the park oneon-one wow yeah and so people were dropping the same money they dropping down not up front because obviously we didn't know how long it's was going to go for but like $10,000 over you know installments or what have you yeah they were just like all right cool I'll buy 10 sessions or whatever you know at $150 a session and we were just signing up all these people like loads of them didn't stay afterwards like when things

01:16:26 - 01:17:07

went back to normal but like our Revenue didn't really dip during that time and we actually grew a little bit so just doing that was like hey I think no matter what happens here like we're not going to quit like we're going to we're going to push hard here yeah and when things like I said before when things go bad for me like that's when I really like to hustle and then things start going good and I'm like okay I can sit back now I got I got to fix the sitting back part yeah I love a good crisis yeah

01:16:47 - 01:17:36

that's where I really come online like you know a couple months ago like you know things just a lot was happening and I had to jump on the tools and I'm like this is really fun I miss this and being on the tools again was teaching me a lot about new content I want to produce and it was helping me with my Keynotes it was helping with the Pod content like it just fed everything it's almost like you can get too delegated in the business and so disconnected from the daily operations you kind of forget a lot of

01:17:11 - 01:18:03

the things you were doing and for me it was like being back in the tools I was like oh I forgot how much fun this was you know so what do you do dayto day what's your role so predominately what I do day to-day is I'm on the Forefront with the sales team so we're out there prospecting and lead generating and uh pitching and quoting which I find really fun CU I get to kind of jump in the hot seat with a client I'm like tell me about your business right and I'm kind of like dissecting we joke it's kind of

01:17:37 - 01:18:18

like an exorcism it's like let the demons out man like what's really going on in this business now like the money's not working here and the culture is struggling and we don't know what to do with content and our website doesn't work and our emails don't exist and it's like all the demons come out it's like great like what do you want to do about it and I really enjoy this process of like kind of brand therapy where it's like hey if you really want we can we can solve all this stuff pretty quickly

01:17:58 - 01:18:47

like in about six months we can put a plan together roll it out build develop support you with everything and they're like hell yeah so I really enjoy this kind of like problem solving issue where every time you get on a call it's a new business like one minute we're talking to a bus logistics company and then we're talking to a law firm then we're talking to a personal brand then we're talking to a comedian who's touring the US and it's just always a different challenge but it's kind of the same core

01:18:22 - 01:19:14

principles applied differently yeah so I spend majority of my time there and in the facilitation of the workshops so when the client comes on board we'll spend between 6 to 8 hours just allowing the client to completely unravel their problem and give us all their contradictions all their hunches all their all the things they're scared of and all the things they want to attempt and then we just start to like piece it together and come up with a plan um from there our team really take over and

01:18:48 - 01:19:43

develop the messaging sequences and then turn it into design and then we might build websites or produce content or what have you but for me I really enjoy being in the mud like it's super fun for me and I think you know there was a period where I'd kind of had everything running itself and I was like a little bored to be honest and obviously it's not super scalable but yeah it's fun to be back in the trenches with the crew and then we're hiring and scaling and I'm helping develop that and then we're

01:19:16 - 01:20:07

expanding into advertising so we're going to go all out on Advertising very soon you doing your own advertising yeah building an ad agency oh right yeah cuz we build Brands and we have done advertising but now we're like okay let's put together like we've mastered creative absolutely mastered it almost to Perfection and we're working with big Brands like nutrition warehouse and you know and so forth and now we're like okay cool The Branding system is almost perfect but the problem is once we build

01:19:41 - 01:20:25

these epic Brands these companies go to ad agencies and then it just they don't really grab the ball and run with it they kind of fumble it they don't execute the creative according to plan they don't read the guideline they don't honor the brands they're just like here's a template that we use it works put it online give us 40 Grand bom and the clients just unhappy and they keep coming back and they go we really want to do advertising with you guys like you guys are great I was like fine after

01:20:04 - 01:20:50

like five years I'm like fine we'll do an ad agency right so people were asking you for it but you didn't offer it I didn't offer it and I wasn't interested in it until recently I was like you know what like we build such good creative I want to control the roll out and I really want to be connected to our clients because we have really great clients and I was like I really want to be on the journey with them that's really fascinating to me yeah and some of our offer us Equity to like be super

01:20:27 - 01:21:13

invested in their projects and it's just getting to the point now where it's just all fun and we're scaling man yeah but it's stressful it's 16 hour days it's a lot of problems we're juggling but you know like last night I got home and I was like man like I'm going to miss this one day you know what I mean yeah yeah for sure you have to kind of come back to the appreciation side of things but yeah you see he like the billionaires and stuff on podcast and all they do is

01:20:50 - 01:21:49

reminisce about like the early days yeah the grinds right and so so for you man like as you continue to scale and go International and roll this thing out like you know how do you want to be remembered [ __ ] hard question how do I want to be remembered you take your time yeah yeah you know like I said earlier I think the the young version of me that gone to the fitness industry that loved training loved the feeling of of changing my body and feeling more confident and then went to go work in the industry and realized [ __ ] there's

01:21:20 - 01:22:09

actually not a lot of good career opportunities here being able to and like a lot of gyms out there and I know these gym owners as well they do say that they have like incredible career Pathways and all this sort of stuff and then I see the salaries they offer and I'm like that not you can't start someone on 55 grand a year in Sydney like is that even legal like how does someone pay rent survive and so for me like being able to create the jobs for like the young version of me that's

01:21:45 - 01:22:29

coming up through the industry well the young version of me wouldn't have got that job but 5 six seven years into the into the career if I made it that far giving that person like a you know a career where they can start a family they can have a mortgage they can pay for braces on their kids that's what I want to be known for I don't I don't have to be like the biggest social media star or whatever like if it meant that doing that would facilitate that be able to create more jobs I'll do it but yeah

01:22:07 - 01:22:51

for me just being able to create those real career opportunities where people like I really want a job at locker room you know there's like jobs in tech for example it's like working for Google working for meta working for you know Airbnb like these are like the ultimate resume jobs right I want to I want to create those jobs where people like I can't believe you got you got a job at locker room like that's it's crazy and we're kind of getting there uh but on like a big scale I want to make it like

01:22:29 - 01:23:12

the the place that everyone wants to work at not just for the culture but for like the the pay packet like for the money like to have a have a good life and I don't think there's anything wrong with that so if we can achieve that I think we're on the way then I think that's how we'll get the most transformation the most impact that's admirable man I really like that and I think not many people in your space are really offering that yeah yeah again Innovation what's a quote or aatro that

01:22:50 - 01:23:44

you've carried with you on your journey that you wished everyone listening to this would iMed immediately Implement don't know if I've got a qu I mean I always quotes always come to me at weird times I would say a belief of mine is that I believe that the most the most accessible and the best personal development tool is physical training like I've just seen it so many times that people try and think their way out of problems or they try and therapize or talk their way out of problems whereas

01:23:17 - 01:24:06

often because so much of you know our mind and our thoughts is rooted in our biology and our physicality when the physical systems aren't working working it's like it's pretty easy to see why a lot of mental things go wrong like if your sleep is [ __ ] up like it's pretty hard to be emotionally stable right it's pretty hard to like have good memory recall and interact with people in a way that is is just like normal for you to feel motivated about things when you have low energy you have low motivation

01:23:42 - 01:24:19

right it's like can't be bother to go to the gym can't be bother to speak to this person can't be bother to pick up my kids cuz you're just tired and that's just like a really basic thing and the transformation The Evolution that you get through if someone said I need to get my [ __ ] together I'd be like what are you doing for the health and fitness because it's so easy it's so accessible to so many people just start running just start doing some push-ups start

01:24:00 - 01:24:47

drinking more water cut out alcohol like all these things everyone can do not everyone can afford a therapist right not everyone has the discipline or the education to start reading books about psychology and and mental training something doesn't always work for every people like listening to a David goggin's podcast it's really motivating at the time but if you don't do anything with that motivation like then it's kind of for nothing right it's just mental masturbation so actually physically

01:24:24 - 01:25:13

changing your body I just think it's just the best starting point for everyone to like have a better life so yeah I think anyone that's like stuck or struggling I would just turn your health and fitness first even if it's good it can always be better yeah regarding how people are kind of you know high performance Executives and what you're talking about just there when it comes to like you know being the best form of personal development is to get in the gym get in your body and uh get physical

01:24:48 - 01:25:40

when you're working with the exacts and the founders do you find that when they when they come into the gym they apply this same thought process or behavioral patterns that they apply to business yes yeah what are some of those traits yeah I think ownership is a big one like understanding that I think it's a joer willings book extreme ownership like taking ownership one of my favorites yeah so taking responsibility in your workplace if something goes wrong and you're the leader of that team whether

01:25:14 - 01:25:54

you had nothing to do with it being like okay obviously I didn't train that person or I didn't make the the outcomes clear or whatever it might be also doing that with your body not being like ah it's cuz of my schedule it's cuz of my kids or it's cuz you know I'm traveling all the time like not blaming those things and being like okay I need to take ownership of this I need to figure it out cuz this I'm always going to be busy I'm always going to be traveling I'm always going to be XY Z so I need to

01:25:34 - 01:26:15

figure out how to make this work so taking ownership I think is yeah it's probably the biggest one and then I think the second one would be trusting in experts I think we were talking about it before like when you sign up like beginner clients versus like Enterprise clients Enterprise like I I've hired you for a reason you're the expert I'm just kind of do what you say have that immediate trust that's kind of the same with these top clients is they go okay I'm paying all this money I'm ing the

01:25:55 - 01:26:34

best I'm not going to question what you give me maybe there's a little bit of friction on some stuff they're like are you sure about you know fish over like red meat or whatever outside of that they're they're very trusting they're like you know what I'm just going to do what you say that's what we tell them like look there needs to be more trust here like you've got yourself into this position all your beliefs about fasting and like vegan and this and that and

01:26:14 - 01:26:55

running and they're not serving you so like just do what we say and if it doesn't work then it doesn't work but we we obviously know it's going to work so that ownership and then yeah just putting the trust in the experts is is what we consistently saying that's how they're successful I would agree with that and I find that the tendency is that people that are you know hyper successful are just like I paid you to tell me what to do so just tell me what to do and they have so much in their

01:26:34 - 01:27:19

mind that they don't have much neighborhood or or rent free space to to really give it much thought yeah you know when we were work with like a nutrition Warehouse Grant Mayo is so busy he's like what do you guys think we're like this he's like cool roll it out whereas someone starting a business is like overthinking everything all weekend all day because they don't have enough to do yeah if someone were to listen to this and go okay I'm at the start of my journey I'm not a high

01:26:57 - 01:27:46

performance executive or founder yet what what can Fitness do for me behaviorally to help prepare me to be a high performer like can can you transfer the other way you know what I mean yeah can you transfer what you do in the gym to the business Arena yeah so like if you're in the business Arena I can IM imagine that they have the mindset to go into the gym Arena pretty easily yeah because it's like okay I put in the effort I get the reward you know invest reward whereas the other way it's like

01:27:22 - 01:28:11

you know people that are like high performers in gym can they transfer to business just as easily yeah it's a good question you would think so right because you think okay well you discipline with your food you discipline with your training you appreciate that results aren't immediate and that like sometimes you got to put in a lot of work for like a result that's not immediately gratifying so the core principles are there but there are also a lot of Jack guys that are broke right so I know he yeah so I one of them well

01:27:46 - 01:28:37

there you go there you go so like not necessarily is the answer but if you can create the awareness and you can figure out I think business is more than than gy gy is is in some ways if you do it the it's very predictable the results right it's like I eat these Foods I do this training I get these steps I get this sleep I hit all these numbers the result is is like fairly guaranteed whereas like in business not really you could do everything right and [ __ ] something could go wrong the

01:28:12 - 01:28:58

market could explode or I don't know client leaves or some some crazy disaster and like I did everything right and it's still [ __ ] up whereas like also people can do a lot of things wrong and they can still strike gold so it's a little bit unpredictable but I think what what training gives you is one it just obviously helps you deal with the stress of business way better so like even if you're not seeing the progress in your business and you're trying to apply the principles from the gym to

01:28:35 - 01:29:17

business you're not seeing success I think the way you're going about it you're probably just like a little less stressed you're a little more less calm you're like okay I'm healthy it's okay I do think as well having some like business is about consistency and routine a lot of times right showing up each day doing the same stuff over and over and over again and having that having that routine with the gym as well helps you I think build out as like an anchor for other stuff in your business

01:28:56 - 01:29:41

like cool I wake up every day at this time I eat these Foods I do this I do these emails like there's a lot more structure to your day and I think like a lot of business people entrepreneurs they need structure to not not always but having a little bit of structure I think with the gym also really helps as like an anchor for a lot of people that that don't have a lot of structure I think that's a good point and I think even if it's just the discipline the self-accountability the rhythmic

01:29:18 - 01:30:11

operating system of like showing up and doing it that could probably translate but yeah I agree I know a lot of Jack guys that and Jack girls that I broke not that I'm Jack now but when I was I I was broke as [ __ ] so last question for you man like what what's a door you're trying to kick in right now to go to the next level as an entrepreneur uh advertising yeah yeah paid advertising it's like there's a few things there's a few operational projects that we're rolling out at the moment which from a

01:29:44 - 01:30:28

product perspective will kind of be I want to say nail in the coffin but like the nice bow around everything we're doing and so that's like in the Pro in in progress and once we've got that dialed in nicely it's the products more or less finished so we can really start to scale it it's just how do we get we're hitting our growth targets but just you know how do we get to the point where it's like all right we' got way too much growth here we need to like kind of pull it back and we've had

01:30:07 - 01:30:52

moments of that but we haven't consistently been able to stay on that trajectory and so we think or what we believe is that that is coming down to just better paid advertising and so being able to like do that because that is the key for us to scale is be able to like just put money into the system and just generate more leads being able to nail that part is kind of what what's holding us back and what will hold us back if we don't nail over the next 12 months yeah that's a good point and I

01:30:29 - 01:31:31

think a lot of people in the same boat for me my my mindset is like let's get crystal clear on on the communication piece visually verbally and how do we how do we bring something extra into the advertising space I I feel like creative is really making a Resurgence in in advertising for the last 10 years I think we've been drowned in seos and edms and like very technical massive numbers systems to get attention I think what I'm seeing Resurgence of is like really good storytelling great social

01:31:00 - 01:31:48

media content even founder content I think is something that that we could talk about like if you look at Britney Saunders we had her on the Pod she's scaled a fashion label just by talking about how it feels to grow our fashion label right so there there's there's so much that you're doing right now that's fascinating that I think the entire Australian business round would love to hear more about but for you men I think it's it's just telling the story dude it's a really cool story what you're

01:31:24 - 01:32:13

doing is remarkable and I was so excited to have you on cuz I was like man I've been working with so many gyms and like there's got to be something else people could be doing out here and then hearing about your story was like finally someone's like doing something that actually matters that actually has a story that really connects with with a niche audience in a way that is super monetizable yeah well you should come I mean you should come for a workout I'm in Next Step sign me up bro I'm there

01:31:48 - 01:32:37

like I'm going to come check it out like uh like yeah tonight even what what are the oper hours uh so I mean I could just you and I could just throw down together but yeah we could basically any get you anytime from 5:30 to like 8:00 p.m. yeah cool let's uh let's book something in man yeah yeah I'm King yeah yeah 100% Let's uh lift some heavy [ __ ] and listen to some heavy [ __ ] yeah nice yeah I mean well dude thank you so much for coming on the Pod it was a blast talking to you

01:32:13 - 01:32:59

about this and you know I'm really excited to see you guys scale into Melbourne yes and um I could make some introductions for you in the Melbourne scene and as well I I know Cub is scaling into all these cities so I'm sure there's opportunities there for you as well absolutely yeah they're a good little partner comeup yeah yeah those guys are great shout out to Dan and um but yeah man we'd love to have you back again sometime to talk to talk more about business awesome appreciate it

01:32:36 - 01:33:36

thanks yo my name is Dane Walker and I am disgustingly obsessed with branding I had to figure out a way to do branding every single day so I branded myself then I started my agency rival always and hire a team of branding Mavericks hellbent on creating Brands so good that they'll make you a competition their pants so here's the thing you want your brand to go viral and rival makes Brands go viral that's why we're offering you a free 30-minute branding session to get an expert's opinion if

01:33:15 - 01:33:55

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