Get Smarter Today Than You Were Yesterday
One of the things I tell my kids every day is to try and get smarter today than they were yesterday.
As it says in one of my gyms, goals are attained not by strength, but by perseverance. Life is all about rolling with the punches. The good and the bad. Each day is a gift, but it’s also a new opportunity to learn and improve.
I got the opportunity to reflect on how far I’ve come just recently, when I was visiting a franchisee’s gym in Queens, NY for an interview with Fox Business.
“How did Retro Fitness start?”
Teenagers are always into fitness, and growing up as a kid, I was no different. I’m a gym guy. It was a passion of mine at age 13 — when I worked my very first job at the local gym — and it’s a passion of mine now.
I love walking into these places. I could stay here all day. The smell, the rubber, the dumbbells, the noise, the music — it’s so stimulating.
I was 23 when I first decided to open my own business. It was just an off-brand, sole gym.
Then, I opened up a second and a third gym of my own, and at that point, I started to think about scaling the business because I was running out of my own bandwidth. So, I talked to some friends and colleagues, and I realized that franchising was a great opportunity to scale the business and really be able to do it at a level I wanted to for the company.
Retro Fitness started franchising in 2006.
Today, there are currently over 150 Retro Fitness clubs serving 500,000-plus members across seventeen states, with another 150 in the pipeline.
It didn’t happen overnight. It started with a single gym, and the drive to work and build on that each day after. It was a grind, and with that grind, came a lot of learnings along the way.
One such learning I realized is that your foundation years of franchising are so important. Having good franchisees early on helped bolster the Retro Fitness brand, and once noteworthy individuals like former competitive athletes got involved, things got a little easier.
It became a feather in our cap.
How we did it, though, and how we continue to grow at the pace we currently are, is by building the business one day at a time. Even with all these new franchises, we make it a point to build really good relationships with the people running them. We care about things like customer service and attention to cleanliness, along with constantly evolving the brand to keep up with the times.
In essence, we’re heading into each day by trying to get smarter than we were the day before.
For more on the origin story of Retro, check out the latest episode of my new show, The Weekly Gain: Episode 4
