 Question is from Cam J. Lyons. If you guys took over an average population gym, what are the common problems you would look for to change first? What issues with personnel or equipment would be at the top of your list to fix? Oh, this is great. I know, this is a fun one for us. Yeah, so. Sal has this dream that one day Mind Pump will actually do this. Oh yeah, I think so. This is like his ultimate dream. I think it would be so fun. It would be so fun for us to go in like a restaurant, what do they call it, a restaurant rescue, a rescue restaurant? Bar rescue. Bar yeah, where you go in and you turn around a failing business or whatever. I would love to walk into a gym and do that for like a month or whatever. Everything's half off. Yeah, yeah. I literally think that we probably would all start, I'm guessing, in the same place, which is the personnel side because we used to have a saying. That's the culture. Yeah, in the industry that there's no such thing as bad clubs, just bad leaders or bad managers. And so the personnel and the culture and the people that run the facility really do make the facility. So and people that I would advise in this used to hate to hear this from me and most people will be scared to do this. I'm gonna say it. And someone's probably needs to hear this but you're still probably gonna be too scared to do it. But I'm telling you right now, you have to is go in and clean house. And man, that is so hard for people to do. They just, they're scared. I'm gonna have to get rid of all these people and start over, like what am I gonna do? I was gonna put so much stress on me. But the reality of it is, whoever had a hold of that facility before I got there ran things the way they ran things. And if we are going to completely recreate a culture and around the philosophies that I believe that make a successful gym, that I need my people. I need the people that since day one, I've onboarded them and I have taught them how to do things and I've coached and developed them up. If I do that, I might go through the growing pains of three to six months of the firing and rehiring and the training and developing. But after that six month time, boy, the job gets way easier. Versus what I had done in earlier parts of my career, which was the opposite, which was come into a new place and try and change the way everybody did things and they were already used to the guy or the girl that was running the place before, that boy was that a battle. So I for sure would start there and start to build my team first. Yeah, the two people in the gym, the two employees or category of employees that actually, believe it or not, have the biggest impact on the culture of your club or your front desk staff and your trainers. Those are the two people that tend to have the biggest control of the culture in your club. So those are the first places that I looked. So when I would take over a club, I would go in and I'd hang out with the front desk on the first day. With every single person that showed up, I'd stay at that front desk, I'd meet members and I'd hang out with that front desk person and start to develop a good relationship with them. I would of course start, I would schedule a big all staff meeting and I'd set up my expectations for everybody. And then I'd spend a lot of time training and developing my trainers because the trainers were the ones on the workout floor, they're the ones everybody sees, that's trained, they're the ones responsible for making sure that the dumbbells are off the floor and that they, they're out there all the time. Now the sales people, the sales people oftentimes, you would have to, I would have to at least fire because sales people either wanna be there, make it happen or they don't and oftentimes I would definitely have to get rid of those people but it's always crazy to me. I'll tell you what, I learned this from one of my mentors years ago. When you walk into a club, you can almost tell, almost to like a 100% accuracy the culture of the club at the front desk. You walk in and that front desk person, the way they check you in, the way they talk to you, the way the energy is up there, that tends to be a reflection of the rest of the club. And to a member it kind of is, that's the gatekeeper of the facility but I can't stress this enough. Adam made the point that it's all about the person outlook. I've run clubs that were old as fuck. I mean- I've run clubs that were- The pools were swamps. They used to be flagships locations but they'd been around for 20 years and the ceiling would fall when it would rain and I got a pool that doesn't work half the time. This is true story. The heaters on during the summer. I ran 24 Fitness Sunnyvale. So for you guys at 24 Club 506, when I took it over, this was before they redid the club. This is one of the older clubs. They used to add a racquetball. Okay, so racquetball, by this point, nobody was doing it anymore. We had racquetball courts and the pool was broken, I don't know, 50% of the time we'd have to put cones around it. When it rained, the ceiling in my operations manager's office would fall. My weights didn't match. I had some plates that were one way and other plates that were another way. The equipment, it was one of the old school clubs where they separate everything. So like free weights and this closed off room and machines over here and cardio, which that's a terrible layout. We know that now in gyms. You want everything to be open. And that club had a massive goal because some of the best managers in the company had gone through that club. These people at that point were all presidents and vice presidents and they had gone through. It's kind of like a proving ground. And I go in there with this huge goal and it's like, how do I turn this club into a machine? It's been maxed out. It's old looking. We have competition now. There's gyms up and down the street that are brand new and phenomenal looking. How am I gonna get a person to wanna work out in my gym when the gym down the street is better and cost the same amount of money? And the way I would do it was by the team that I had, because when people go into a gym, yes, there's equipment in there. But you know who they really show up to see every single time? It's a true story, the people that work there. Yeah, it's like cheers, bro. Always, a good gym has that kind of environment. And if you want that kind of retention, in fact, that was part of one of my sales pitch when somebody would ask me, well, why would I join here versus Gold's gym up the street that looks so much better? And I said, well, because I don't work at Gold's. If you go work out of Gold's, you're not gonna see me. But if you come here, you're gonna see me. And people love that shit. And it was true. It was a true story. People would come in, they'd see me and it was a great environment. Was 506 Sunnyvale your first big box that you manage? That was the first big, so I went from Salinas to Sunnyvale. And then I ran after that. It's probably, how funny is that? That's probably what developed us that way so quickly because I had 505, which is even older. Yeah, capital. Then 506. And arguably- Like a year apart, I think. Yeah, shittier. And I had to learn that. That's exactly what we had to figure out. Like everybody had a nicer gym. Everybody had better equipment. Everybody had better everything. And so you had to figure out. And as I didn't get a break on my revenue targets based off of that, we had a budget. We had to hit it and it didn't matter if our place was falling apart or not. But some of the things too, like speaking to culture, like what does that mean? What does that look like in a gym? And one of the things I would love to teach trainers, and when we do some of these seminars, when we go around to these local gyms and we talk to trainers, I really urge them to make a conscious effort every single day to proactively go on the floor and not put your head down and rewack weights and not pay attention, but to engage with all the people on the floor and help people. And if you can actually lead a place where you've got five, 10, 15, maybe 20, if it's a big place of trainers and front desk people like Sal saying, and they walk in the door and the front desk smiles out, smiles that you scan you in, says something to you by your first name and makes you feel good the moment you walk in, then you go to the locker room and change, you come out, you cross past another trainer, trainer says something to you. Hey, what are you working out today? Oh, good to see you, Mike. And you can give that feel to your members. Holy shit. I don't care if your squat rack is falling apart, if your pool is green, if your urinal is broken, people will forgive you for all those things because you make- You gotta make light of it. Well, look, you guys, remember when we went to Texas? How much did you guys love that gym? I was one of my favorite gyms ever been. Oh, it was all kinds of falling apart. Dirty, dusty, nothing rewrapped like you, but the feel and the vibe. 100% Smelled like power lifters. 100% 100% was awesome. Here's a specific thing you can do. This was like one of my calling cards. I would teach my trainers sales training constantly and I would teach my sales guys training constantly. So I would have seminars on my sales guys and it was like, I'm gonna teach you about the human body. I'm gonna teach you about exercise. Oh, yeah. I'm gonna teach you about fitness and fat loss and muscle building. And that would make them phenomenal sales people. It gives them all new talking points. But my trainers, they know all that shit. I would teach them sales training and they would be amazing because you focus on those things that would make them better at their jobs and it was always fun and exciting. But the culture is everything, and I'll say this last thing here, the person that creates and leads that culture is the manager. And if you're a manager and you spend a majority of time in your office, you're not creating a good culture. I knew people like this, they'd sit in their office and do their paperwork and call people in their office. To that point, I think this is so important when you come into a new facility. And this is, I spend the first two weeks watching and observing. So the first two weeks, I'm not saying much. I'm just kind of sitting back. I'm letting my staff think that maybe there's a lazy manager who just likes to watch us and doesn't do anything. But all I'm doing is observing who is gonna see me like that and let off the throttle themselves and who's gonna self-regulate and manage themselves. That's who's probably I'm gonna keep initially when I cut everybody else. And then after that two weeks is up, then I actually get my ass in gear and show all of them without saying anything that I can do their job better than they can. And that's so important in my opinion because in the fitness space, in gym culture, there's so much ego. And I don't care how long you've been training, how fit you are, how many degrees you have. So much ego. So much ego. Every fucking trainer, my whole career, okay? 10 years of leading trainers to this day, I'm sure if you were to ask all of them that worked for me, all believed they were better than me. And that's okay, that's part of it. That's part of being a good leader is knowing that you are, that you don't need to tell them that or say that and building them up is so important. But they need to see what you're capable of if they're going to respect you as a leader. And I think that was one of the biggest mistakes I saw on my peers. Dude, my first week as a fitness manager is 18 years old. I'm just a kid, right? Running this club. And a 35 year old, roided out bodybuilder trainer that worked for me. First week he comes in and I'm like, hey man, you didn't do what I asked you. He's like, well, what are you gonna do about it? And I said, you're fired. And I fired him on the spot. And he's like, this fucking kid just fired me. Yeah, get out of my gym. You're fired.