 Next question is from PSTC Teacons. What tips would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur who wants to open their own gym, starting small of course? All right, don't do it. Yeah, you cut me off. I always feel like I crush people's dreams. Don't do it, bad idea. If you're like, okay, here's the deal. If you're an entrepreneur and that's what you are, then the excitement for you has more to do with creating successful businesses, meeting the challenge, selling them. If you're into your passion, you might be labeled as more of like an artist or someone who's passionate about something, that's a little bit different. Usually people are a mix of the two. If you wanna build businesses that are successful, it's hard to pick a business that's harder than gym business. Oh man. That's just a fact. It's a brutal business. Yeah, the gym business is a very difficult business to really, it costs a lot, it's a lot of capital. There's a lot of risk involved. There's not a lot of money too. Not a lot of money, there's tons of competition. You are working your, I mean, I managed some of the most successful gyms in these big chains. And I'm telling you, man, I worked, you know, minimum 12 hours a day, minimum just to do well. And this was with the huge marketing machine behind me, lots of capital, then I owned my own. And it was, it's hard, man. It's like opening a restaurant. Like look at the success rates of restaurants. It's like opening gyms, so it's gonna be real tough. What are my tips gonna be for you? Make sure you have a lot of money to float yourself for a while because you're gonna be in the red, I think for a little while. Focus on your local community. A lot of people forget this when they open gyms, they start, they think digitally and they think they're gonna do this huge like internet marketing type of thing. If your business is your members, I think what is it, a 10 mile radius? That's where you get a majority of your members. Last time I looked at the statistic. So old school marketing is actually quite effective still for small gyms. You work with local businesses, you go to houses around you, you're trying to get 10 miles around your gym. The digital marketing more is like for, almost like your business card, but I would spend much more time on the ground walking around meeting people. You know what I was thinking about too, and it's like what's your definitive difference out there in the market, in terms of like all the rest of the gyms and what are you offering specifically? I just think as an example, something I've seen lately, which you guys have seen sort of the trend of women really wanting to grow their glutes, right? So there's been a few of these like smaller type gyms that are just literally hyper focused on this gym provides you this service. We're just gonna grow your glutes and they're exploding, right? That's the thing though, it's not like what you think, like I'm just gonna service everybody, everybody wants to come work out, like I think in terms of what's out there now and the big gyms are already established and they've had this whole formula of like, oh, I'll take your money because I know you're not gonna show up. You know, like I think that's, you let them have that. If you're just starting out, I think you gotta be really creative and really pinpoint that very specific thing that people are actually like gonna drive to your place to go get. Well, so I know I came out hard on it right away, but I always say terrible idea and that's me personally, I would never do it. And the only way I would do it personally was if I'm at a place in my life where I'm not financially driven anymore and because I like the idea of having a gym. Like I like the idea of having a- You wanna be the guy that retires and then goes to this gym and sits in there and he's like, yeah, I'm filthy rich, I don't give a shit if it's profitable. Yeah, I 100% will own a gym one day. I'm not to make money. Exactly, like I'll buy all the equipment outright, I'll own the building that it's built in. I'll buy a gym and a bar. It'll be closed at the hours that I wanna work out so me and my buddies can come in and lift and I don't give a shit that kills sales for me. Like that's how I wanna have a gym. And so I think you really have to understand what your desired outcome is going into the gym. So if you are somebody who you desire freedom and autonomy and the cool factor of walking in at any time to lift in your gym and that trumps paying your bills and making really good money and thriving financially, then so be it. Like who am I to judge and say that's a bad idea then? Cause you could definitely make a living doing that. But I think the last time I looked up the stats on what the average gym owner made, it's under $50,000 a year. You better love it. Yeah, exactly. Cause you're gonna use your trainers in there and make more money than you. You know that's gonna happen. So 50 grand a year depending on where you live in the country is not an easy living. It's Bay Area you're struggling. And you're working a lot. And the average entrepreneur works 62 hours a week. So that's average entrepreneur. If you're a gym owner, I think it's even higher than that cause you're gonna probably be there. If it's open, you're probably there at the very beginning. So I think you need to consider that. I think you also need to consider the different types of models and what you're trying to do. Running a large box gym. I mean, even when working for companies like 24 hour fitness, those were not their most profitable. So going big is not a great idea. I think that's a lot of risk and there's not a lot of money in that. The most profitable gyms right now are the little boutiques that are about 3000 square feet to Justin's point that are more specialized. So it's an EFT base. So you get a, you know, only need about a hundred and something. Yeah, they're high service, high dollar. High service. Yeah, because you're looking at, that's what I was just gonna say. Cause kind of your two options are low service, low dollar. So you're cheap, right? Like planet fitness, right? Low service, but it's very cheap. You need a lot of volume. Lots of investors need to be involved with that. Right. Or high service, high dollar, low volume, right? So I only have a hundred people but they're all paying me 250 bucks a month or something like that. The other thing I would suggest to this person also is you better have gone and killed it as a trainer or killed it within a gym first before you even want to think about doing this because becoming a great trainer and keeping your schedule filled with clients is already hard as shit for people. That's hard to do with a huge company taking care of everything or all you have to do is contract a space out. So you better have been the number one performer at a big company as a gym and at a big box gym for a long time or you better be the top dog in a contracted place out. So if you were somebody who's renting space for $600 a month, you best be the dude who's making a hundred, the girl who's making $150 to $250,000 a year just doing that alone before you think about trying to start a brick and mortar place while also trying to scale a training business. Cause you're going to want that. If the only way I would consider it back then to even do something like that is, okay, I've got a good safety net of $150 to $200,000 a year that I've built off of being a great trainer, now I'm going to try and build this gym and create a livelihood for 10 other trainers in my gym. At least I have this to fall back on that I can at least cover my bills. Let's see how good I can manage the gym. I owned a small facility. And when I say small, it was tiny. I had a cage. You were on your 3000 square feet. Oh yeah. I had a cage. I had a cable machine. I had some benches, some dumbbells. That was it. It was just a small area. I had some offices. My gym was packed. So I had trainers that were paying me rent. I had massage therapists paying me rent. I had acupuncturists paying me rent. I had my schedule full and I had trainers making as much money as I was in my facility because they would pay me their rent and then they'd train their clients. And there were definitely times when I would think to myself like, why am I owning and managing and taking all this risk when I could just pay rent at some studio and make more money? Now for me, I chose to do that because I would rather be the owner. I'd rather have that autonomy. I loved it. So I lived there all the time. It didn't matter for me. But I'm telling you right now, if you're thinking financially, good luck. It's a really, really tough business. Not only that, but wouldn't you go back and tell the younger self? You're like, you know what? Knowing what you know now, a better strategy would be to go build a business like Mind Pump, make a bunch of capital, take that capital, then go buy out your equipment, buy out your facility. Yeah, I mean, of course. And then still fulfill that dream. So if your ultimate dream is I want to own a gym and that be kind of my livelihood, I think there's faster ways of getting there than actually opening the gym. I think go be... Go into finance first. Yeah, exactly. Right, go do something else that drives more revenue, that you're more likely to be successful. Which by the way, if you can actually build a gym and make really good money, you're probably pretty bad-ass at a lot of other things too. Because it takes quite the entrepreneur to be able to build a successful gym. It's not some dumb meathead that builds a gym and actually makes six-figures. No, look, if you open a tiny studio and you're starting from scratch, it's gonna cost you $100,000, at least just to buy the stuff, set it up and float it. That's minimum. Here's the other thing. If you're a high-service, high-dollar, low-volume facility, that means you're gonna have to be in a wealthy area, which means you're gonna pay high rent. So you also have to consider that as well. Now, you open a small gym that's 20,000 square feet. You're up in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or million dollars just to get started. So... Closer to a million. I know because how many times I thought about doing it, right? Now, of course, hindsight is always 2020. Would I change anything? No, it led me to doing what I'm doing now, but I don't know if I would have lasted just doing that forever. At some point, I would have got out of it. I mean, I know we're all gonna own a gym. There's no doubt about it. We talk about, the question is when the timing. When do we wanna do that? And I think we all know it's when we don't care if it's profitable or not, that literally it could have five members and we're not gonna be stressing out to keep the lights on. Buy out all the planet fitnesses. Which I think it's really similar to owning a bar. I think that's some of your bars that everybody thinks are probably cracking and successful. I think there's a huge overhead in owning a bar, but a lot of the people that keep the bars that are going for a long time are people that don't need the money. It's like their favorite local spot to go to and they've got other businesses that they make a lot of money. Now that being said, if you took us and put us in a big box gym that wasn't doing very well, I'm confident we could definitely increase their revenue and increase their profitability, but it's a lot of damn work. One of the most challenging things. Like I said, I have an uncle that owns a restaurant. It's very comparable. Like my uncle lives there all the time. Like he's always there. That's what it's like running a successful gym. You are just there all the time. You have your morning crowd, you have your evening crowd. You're always putting out fires. Oh yeah, totally.