 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump. Mind pump. With your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Pedro's. Coolian. Or is it Quailian? You could do the movie. You could do the movie guy. One man. Yes. Takes on the world. One man. The world of trainers. Three children. Trainers who don't know shit about business. One man is there for them. My voice is almost like that. It's Beidros. Because I have a cold. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Can you do anything like, can you do any voices, Adam, or are you stuck with your- No, I'm stuck with- Anything, anything outside of that is- Squeaks. Yeah, I can do- It goes, it goes different- Gotta stick with me. Yeah, it's all I got. You know, it's a trade-off. It is a trade-off. You're like- I'm really, I'm distinctively your voice though. I'm really good at me. Yeah. Really good. Like, I feel like you had a magic genie at some point. And he's like, grant me a wish. And he's like, okay, whatever you want to go. I want the best radio voice of all time. And he grants it to you, but there's a twist. Right. You can't do anybody else. That's all you have. Limited. You can't- Purely limited. You can't yell across the room at your girl. You can't call anybody. Call anybody. Yeah. Like anytime you push it- You can just turn the shit out of that radio voice. Do you think, do you think a lot of those guys- Like, I think of Bruce Buffer, right? Like, does he talk like that in real life? You imagine if he did? Yeah. It like, as he's having sex. All right! We are here today! Let's get ready to do this! I always said he had the best job. Like, all he does is he gets up and fucking talks for one minute. Do you know a couple of his one-liners? He's trademarked that. Oh, he's trademarked him. And he makes a- You have to pay money. A ton of money just to say that stuff. Yeah. God. I don't know. That's brilliant. Yes. Oh, so you can't say, let's get ready or not. Like, we're probably- We've been trying to push Doug to get the motherfucking qua. Like, I want to get that before it's too late. That's ours? Yeah. I don't think anyone's going to want to steal that. Not right. You say that right now. But I bet you that Bruce Buffer didn't- I mean, obviously he realized it early on. I mean, when he actually went out and thought about trademarking it, but I'm sure the first time he said it, he didn't go like, oh my God, everybody around the world still say this. Man, it's so funny. You know what's going to be- You know what's funny about this episode, people are about to listen to is- One of the most common messages that I know I get, and I know you guys get too, is from trainers who really appreciate when we talk about like how to build their business as personal trainers. Because you get nothing. You get no training there at all. No certification provides like any valuable business information to go along with it. Arguably, that's the most important part. That's what's going to keep the lights on. Yeah, because like the whole reason why you're a trainer in the first place is because you want to be a good trainer. So you're automatically going to hopefully learn how to be a good trainer. The other part isn't so obvious, which is to be a good trainer, you need to know how to like run a business and sell yourself and market and all that shit. And you get zero training. It's like they throw you to the sharks. It's seriously appalling. No, you started with Adam, so you had somebody show you. And then Adam, when you started, you were just talking to people. Yeah, no, I was a lost puppy dog for sure when I first started. I remember the first day of work, the boss came in and he handed me this stack of... Oh, you had the shit leads? The stack of papers. They wanted to go in Gary leads? Bro, they're like three, four years old. Call logs for days. Just all these people that I came in and done a free fitness assessment when they bought their membership and then never either came back to the gym. I'm forever grateful for that though because that's how I met my wife. Right. You cold called her. I cold called her. Right? Yeah. Did you really? Yeah. And she just... Yeah. She was just down. She was in some store like Burlington Coat Factory. I remember this vividly. Really? Yeah. And I got her into the gym. Now when she walked in and you're a trainer... Yeah. Did you... Were you like... I was like gold mine. You were like, oh, this is going to work. Yeah, I was like, I'm going to make this one happen. You knew right away? Yeah. Did you... I'm going to close this. Did she end up hiring you or did you just train her for free because you liked her? No. No, I got more skills than that. Come on, she paid. She actually hired you? Hell yeah. She gave you money to... Yeah, this was after because those sessions, they have to burn through those sessions. Oh, right, right. Yeah, so they're like... She had like five sessions. Do you know my... Sold her 20 pack. My furthest memory back of Courtney is she used to come in and train with Justin, and she used to wear this shirt that said, nurses do it with patience. Right. It's my favorite shirt, dude. I used to love that shirt. I remember that. She was a nurse for those that don't know that. So that's what made it really fucking funny. It was a funny shirt. Yeah, did she like you right away, or was she like... Did you have to work out? No, no. She didn't like me at all. For reals? Well, I mean, she liked me. She just didn't really find me attractive. Really? Yeah, because she was with somebody. Oh, shit. Yeah. I didn't know that. Did she cheat on her boyfriend with you or did she break up with him first? That's a good question. If we know the answer. That's a good question. The timing. I don't know how that syncs up. I definitely know who the winner was in that one. You were that guy? I didn't know that. I was aggressive. You know how many people get jealous of their girlfriends or whatever training with trainers? Yeah, yeah. There's some truth to that for sure. Oh, of course there is. Oh, do you remember when I posted like two years ago some... I remember reading an article on some stats on that. I think, God, it was like 70-something percent of trainers like sleep with their clients and shit. It's a fucking crazy stat, dude. I know, it's terrible. It's deep on my Instagram. Somewhere way back there. It's actually terrible. Pop, 5 or 10 stigma. It is, and I think it's just because it's so personal. Do you know what's another one that's really bad? Hospitals. Oh, yeah. You guys were just a fucking... You guys are made for each other, exactly. We're just fucking... Scandalists. We're like desperate half-slides. Do you guys ever role-play? Do you ever play like a trainer client or nursing patient? My favorite is in the gym. When you train her? Yeah, well, just like pretending, you know. Just doing some Ben O'Roz or something. This is getting weird. Okay, I'm going to stop right there. She's like, every time you train me, Justin, you do glute exercises. I can never do anything else. We've never done the, oh, I'm a patient. There's something to be said, though, about the importance of doing those things. And I know a lot of trainers. It always told me a lot about the trainer's character when I would drop that book on him and be like, listen, this is where you start. You start here. You start getting it. And it does kind of weed out the weak ones. The weak ones, but at the same time, it also highlights the terrible training because how many trainers could become, you know, relatively successful if they just got the right training? Yeah. You know what I mean? How many people do we lose? Like when I first became a trainer, which was a while ago, right? It was over 20 years ago, I walked into the gym, got hired, and I'm 18 years old, so I'm a young kid. And the top trainer, this is what they did. Okay, follow this guy around on his fit start appointments. You guys remember fit starts, right? These are like orientations for new members, which really the goal is to get them to buy training. So I followed the top trainer who, let's see, it was, I think it was like the middle of the month. So like the 13th or 14th of the month. And he'd already sold, I think, like $1,400 or $1,500 in personal training, which back then was a lot of money. We're talking the, you know, 97. So this is 1997. Back in those days, if you sold, you know, two to three grand in personal training in a month, you were like king, right? And he was, he was like one of the top guys. He'd already had sold like $1,400. So he's like, he thinks he's like the shit, right? And I'm this young kid, like an idiot, that's in his mind. So I follow him along. He doesn't really pay much attention to me. You know, just follow me and don't talk. And I did for a couple of his fit starts. And then this lazy fucker's like, hey, listen, you just, I'm just gonna have you take my next three. Because back in those days, they didn't view these appointments as anything other than just you have to do them. Now I later learned like this is where you get your clients, you moron, like getting leads is one of the hardest things. And you only get paid minimum wage to do them. But if they hire you, if they hire you, then you get paid much more. I think you got like 20 something dollars an hour, which is a good amount of money for an 18 year old kid, especially, you know, 18 year old, you know, in fitness. That's a decent amount of money back then. So he leaves and he gives me three appointments. And he's like, yeah, yeah, you can take them and don't worry about it. So I, when he left, before he left, I said, so is this how we get paid? We just do this. He goes, well, kind of you get minimum wage. And I'm like, I thought I made like 15 to 20 something dollars an hour. And he goes, well, that's if they hire you, then you get, you know, paid more. And I'm like, they hire me. I'm like, well, how do I do that? And he hands me this, this sheet with the prices of personal training. So I'm like, okay, cool. That's all I need to know. So that day I sold almost, I think almost $2,000 of training with the next three guests. He comes in the next work the next day and he was so, so pissed off. But I was one of those dudes that it's just, I talked and that was my thing. Most people need some of that training, especially if you go into fitness with a passion for fitness and a disdain for sales. How many trainers have a disdain for sales? Well, the irony in that to me is so it's crazy how any other profession you could think of, you know, when you, when you're training or you're learning the craft, you're learning the job, you're spending 80, 90% of the time learning the skill sets that you'll need to sell at that job. For some fucking weird reason, personal training is different. I don't know a single successful personal trainer that won't tell you that, that the skill set of having a sales background or learning sales is not a majority of your job. You're selling yourself at all times. If you can't, and even when you have all that information and knowledge, if you can't convey that to the person sitting across from you, it's worthless. Getting clients is good sales, keeping them as being a good trainer. If you're a good trainer with shitty sales, you can't get to that next step, right? Because you never got them in the first place. But don't cap. Didn't you guys find that crazy that they didn't put a lot, like even your, all your national certifications, like all certifications to become a trainer that everybody goes after, like, oh, this is the best one or do this, like, there's no fucking training, nothing around, but yet 80% of the job is that. We've talked about this ad nauseam, just us, but I, this was something I thought about for a long time. I said, if I ever made a certification, I'd want to have the best results in terms of successful trainers, not necessarily trainers who know the most shit. That will be part of it too. But trainers who afterwards can write back and be like, hey, because of your certification, they're thriving. I'm a successful personal trainer. So when, you know, when I first heard of Bedros and what he was doing, I was like, well, fuck, like there's a huge, like open market for that. And the dude in that, in that arena knows what he's talking about. He knows how to build, how to teach trainers and fitness professionals, how to build their fucking business, and there's a huge need for it. Oh, no, he came in, when we were up and coming, he was the only one, man. I mean, everybody else was talking about the latest and greatest tool, the latest and greatest certification that came out or whatever new supplement line was out. Like that was the talk of trainers forever, except for Bedros. Bedros was this guy that was pushing the sales summits, right? And he was the marketing guy. And I remember part of the reason why I didn't buy into a lot of stuff is because there was, in my area, in my circle, there was a lot of kind of hate towards him. It was like, a lot of people hated on him because he was this sales and market guy and he, oh, he's not a real trainer. He doesn't know shit about fitness and this and that. So crazy. That was the attitude towards him. And I didn't know enough to, at that time, that it didn't promote me to go research him. I just thought like, okay, like I'm the new kid on the block. I don't know much about this guy. And I, you know, all these trainers are saying, talking all this shit, but I didn't know anybody that actually had gone through any of his summits. Then I get later on in training and all these successful trainers that I met that had gone through his training. I thought, okay, well there's got to be something to this guy. These are the trainers that are having the most success. I went to one of his summits way back in the day. What year was that? Do you remember when you went? I think it was like, Was it before or after me? It was after me. It was after you. It was when I was independent and I was on my own and it was just like I needed more information as far as like how to like market myself online. And got a lot of valuable information from his summit from a lot of speakers that he brought in. And it was, it was great, man. Like literally, like you said, nobody else was like listening to this guy. And like I was at a point where I was just focused on business and he was the only guy that was like there with a voice for how to market yourself as a fitness professional online. Absolutely. I mean, there's a huge market for it. There's a huge need for it. It's arguably the most important skill or set of skills you can learn if you want to be a successful trainer. You definitely need to know how to train people. You need to know exercises. You need to know all that stuff. That's a given though, right? You're a trainer. Obviously you need to know that stuff. You can't be crap and you can't hurt people. But the other part which isn't so given is the other half of your job is knowing how to build your business. And I don't care if you work in a gym where you work for a big company like a LA fitness or 24 fitness or whatever. Or, and especially if you're private. If you don't have those skills, then the odds that you're going to succeed are slim to none. Absolutely slim to none. So in this interview, we talked to Bedros and we talked to him about what he does. We talked to him about him and his story. He's got a very fascinating story. I was not privy to a lot of it and he talks in depth. The guy does not shy away from questions. It gets pretty intense in a couple moments or in a couple sections of this interview. And the guy is just, he's an open book which I really appreciate. It's a great interview too just for just entrepreneurship in general. Oh huge. So even if you're not a personal trainer but you're building a business, I mean there's a lot of gyms and lessons from this episode. And like Sal said, you'll definitely hear a couple times where he gets riled up for sure. Oh he gets really riled up. Now I will say this, if you are a trainer and you're listening and you do want more tools for skill, I will say this. That's why we created Prime and Prime Pro. I was just going to say if you want, obviously learn how to sell yourself, market yourself. You're going to get a little bit of that in this episode where we talk a little bit about that. But if you also want to invest in the skill of being a trainer and get the most return, easily I could say, and I'll debate anybody with this, if you want to build your value as a trainer, learn how to correct imbalances, learn how to promote excellent recruitment patterns, learn how to improve mobility. For the average client, that will give you way more return in terms of business than almost any other skill. Like learning how to just train someone real hard and make them sweat and all that other stuff. For people, if you can solve their pain issues, get them to move more, that translates into real life very quickly. Pain clients are lifers. That's a thing, 100%. Now our programs Prime and Prime Pro were specifically designed to be tools to be used for either yourself or if you're a personal trainer, you can get these two together in a bundle, which is discounted. And these are tools you can use on any client. You can take them, apply them, and then start to individualize them. Your clients, in terms of your skill, will get tremendous amount of value. The other thing, too, is this one. Bro, don't forget, too, it's 30 days, 30 days money back guarantee. So if you do not see how much it helps your business out and helps you out, then fucking return the thing. That's right. And it also comes with free forum access this month. So on our forum, we have a private forum, a nice chunk of people in there are personal trainers. So it's a great way to be a part of a training community, talk to other people about training clients, building a business, if you have questions, whatever. And then, of course, Adam, Justin, and myself are on that forum daily, as well, to get access to the Prime and Prime Pro programs or the bundle with the free forum access. Just go to mindpumpmedia.com. Now, Bedros Kulian, you can find him on his website. That's Bedros Kulian, B-E-D-R-O-S-K-E-U-I-L-I-A-N.com. You can find him on Instagram, at Bedros Kulian. And he has a podcast called Empire Podcast Show. So without any further ado, here we are interviewing Bedros Kulian. I bought a building by mistake, which was across the street from the men's prison in Chino Hills, or in Chino. So I bought a different office building, and then I was stuck with this, what we call the million-dollar mistake. A giant, 6,000-square-foot industrial building. It's like, fuck it, we're gonna build out BK strength. My coaching clients who come out and work with me can work out there. My staff, I got a staff of 40. I can work out there, and I can work out there. No more 24-hour fitness or LA Fitness gym. So it's got a nice lobby area that we're building out. And so I'm gonna do the BK strength. It's basically comedians and cars getting coffee. Entrepreneurs and people who interest me and fascinate me working out, talking business, or whatever they're... I just found that Netflix series. Did you have you guys found what he used to be? I haven't seen any of it with C-Series. Yeah, I just found that. Oh, the comedians and cars? Yes. Yeah, I thought you mean like the gym version. Like what? That's me. I mean, people used to go on the golf course to talk business and make connections, but you got a gym. Dude. You know, gyms are a great way to do it. Oh, yeah. How many times have you met someone and like, hey, let's go get a workout. And in between sets, you just talk brilliance because you got the dopamine's going, the endorphins going, like all the great... You're vulnerable because you're in pain, you're sweating, you're not looking your best necessarily or whatever. It's great. And the whole time the guys are... I got a team of four videographers and the guys are gonna catch us shooting the shit the whole time. You finish it up in the lobby, you have a protein shake or whatever, a high protein meal and peace out. It's a great business. So it'll be just video then, that's the podcast. Yeah, it's gonna be all YouTube and then we'll just strip the audio and put it up. Nice. Oh, excellent, excellent. So now you have a... And you've told this story on another podcast, but there's parts of us that I think are just... Our audience needs to hear if they're not familiar with it that are absolutely... I mean, gyms, they tell a lot about who you are. Who you are. Yeah. And like your family escaped communism. So the Soviet Union, you guys came to the U.S., were extremely poor. Like tell us about that story. How old were you when that all happened? What was that like? Yeah, man. So my dad was part of the Communist Party. And we lived in Armenia, which was under the Soviet rule. And in 1980, in 81, my brother was gonna join the Red Army. And of course, the Soviet Union was at war with Afghanistan, just like we are at war with Afghanistan now. And my dad's like, the hell if my son's gonna go and fight a war that he doesn't believe in and all these Soviet soldiers were dying. My brother's significantly older than me. So he was about to go. So my dad saves up all this money and bribes the Soviet government. And we escape into Italy in June 15th, 1980. I was six years old. So we escape, go to Italy, from Italy to the American consul. And that's when they were doing the whole hey, if you're a communist and you wanna come to the United States and get your freedom, come on in, we'll take you. And so we entered the United States legally on June 16th. So actually we left, I'm sorry, we left around June 1st, June 2nd. And by the time we entered the United States it was June 15th, 16th, JFK. We landed there from there to California. My dad had under 200 bucks in his pocket. Family of five. I was the baby of the family, six years old. And man, it was quite the fucking shocking experience of all this. I grew up eating caviar as a kid. When your dad's a member of the Communist Party you're eating caviar in the morning. It was sourdough bread with butter on it and a slow scoop of caviar. My mom would put 10 to 20 pieces out and give me tea. And I remember that as a four or five-year-old kid. So now we come to the United States and I'm crying for caviar. And we're literally eating out of dumpsters. Living in a two-bedroom apartment, right? A two-bedroom apartment. Some guy rented out one of his spare bedrooms to us so he was using one bedroom. So a family five in one of his spare bedrooms. Damn. And we kept moving around getting evicted. And one of the places we lived was so shitty I got lice as a kid. And, you know, we couldn't afford lice treatment. We were broke. We were poor didn't speak English didn't understand the culture. And my mom made my dad siphon out gasoline from a car and she washed my hair in the grassy area. That's the old school way of drinking lice. Yeah, that's it. I mean, he's like, well, we can't afford lice treatment. We have to buy food, right? And so that's kind of how you survive. After diving on a nightly basis, you know, behind grocery stores, foods that are expired that have to get thrown away but aren't necessarily bad yet, right? And so, you know, I jokingly say that I was the breadwinner because my dad would hoist me up into the dumpsters I'm the smallest one. And I'd pull out, you know, bread and cheese and milk and lettuce and my mom would just peel off the bad leaves until we got to the core of the lettuce and it was fresh. Let's do this, let's eat. And so it was a pretty interesting upbringing but through all that adversities and the resourcefulness, those are all the things that I use now in business as an entrepreneur to thrive. And that's why it's so fascinating. Now, was it just your brother going to fight that motivated you guys to escape? Because that's a very, I don't think people realize like if you get caught escaping, they'll put you to death, especially if you're part of the Communist Party. Right, because he was part of the 18%, only 18% of the population was part of the party. And so to denounce communism and escape, like if my dad was caught, it's over, it's dead. How did he escape? Because I heard you on another podcast talk about how your dad saved the money because when you're under Communist rule, you work for the state. You really don't get extra money. But people don't realize at the times those countries had massive black markets because people would try to figure out ways to... Exactly. And the black market was huge there. Just like if you worked in a flower shop for the state, well, maybe a couple of dozen roses disappeared and then got sold under the table and that person made some extra money that way. So my dad oversaw a men's clothing manufacturing center and all these tailors working under him. And he knew that... I forget what the number was, but I think they gave him so many yards of material and he could make 13 suits out of it. Well, he figured out that if he has his tailors put the patterns really tightly close together for every, like, whatever, 20-some odd suits, he can come up with enough material for one extra suit. And he would take that home. And of course, he used to be a tailor before he was the overseer of these guys. And he took enough material home and he'd make suits and he'd sell it to KGB agents. KGB guys would come to our house. Shut the fuck up. The guys that were... Right, right. The guys that were... Because they're going to buy it cheaper from my dad, right? And so the guys that were supposed to ultimately put him in jail or send him off to Siberia were buying from him and he did this for years, and raised 25,000 rubles and bribed the right member in the Soviet government where we were able to escape into Italy. And we escaped under the guise of my mom has a sister in Italy, which she didn't, and we're going to go visit her sister. Because if we said, hey, we're going to the United States, no way. No way. It's over. Yeah, you would have been executed. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, you're extremely successful, very hard-working, but you started in a very difficult situation. You come to the U.S., you have no money. You said your dad had under $200. I find... Maybe it's just my own perception, but it seems like people who come from other countries that are so oppressed that come to a country where there's more opportunity, even though they start off very difficult, they tend to do well. Are the rest of your siblings like you or in the sense that they found their way in or successful or were you the anomaly in the family? I am the anomaly, but keep in mind, I'm also the youngest. My brother is 14 years older than me. My sister is 16 years older than me. My sister works for me. She does all my customer support for my digital info products from home and hangs out with my parents. And when I say hangs out with my parents, I take care of my parents during their 80s. And thank God they're in good health. My brother's a real estate agent. Does well for himself. Yeah, so I guess we do well, but it's because of this immigrant edge. I call it the immigrant edge. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gary Vaynerchuk, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, PayPal founder. Like when you have lived in oppression, whether communist rule or whatever kind of rule where life didn't offer you much, you can come to a country like this and even in the worst case scenario, you can see opportunity when one's not present. You can be resourceful when resources are not around. You can take disadvantages and turn them into advantages. Gary Vaynerchuk did in 2009. He started VaynerMedia. You know, on the tail of the biggest economic crash we've ever had. I started Fitbody Bootcamp, one of the nation's largest and fastest growing franchises. Same year, 2009. And in fact, one of my videographers at the time was like, he literally stopped filming and he goes, what are we doing right now? Why are you even making a pitch video to sell a franchise when there's 12% unemployment rate? I go, the money didn't disappear, Rob. His name is Rob. He said, the money just exchanged hands. Who got the money and sell them this franchise and teach them how to be successful? And so, I constantly see resourcefulness and opportunity where others don't but it's because I come from a place of oppression and I think that's that immigrant edge. My dad says the same, so my parents are both immigrants. They were very poor Sicilians and my dad used to tell me the same thing and another thing that my parents told me was, you know, when you live in a poor country without much opportunity, you learn to lie a lot. Whether it's selling something on the black market or figuring out a way to create your own opportunity but that's against the rules. And he says you live in a kind of a life that's not necessarily as honest as when you come to a place where you can be very honest. There's lots of opportunities and you can make things happen without fear of prosecution or without fear of people taking your stuff away from you necessarily. And so my dad, you know, did very well as a result coming over here worked very hard and so I'm very familiar with kind of this, you know, what you're talking about, the immigrant edge. What got you from this, now over here, how did you get into fitness? I heard a little bit about your story. I guess it was a way to improve your confidence and that's what kind of changed your... There was a girl involved. So imagine when you're eating out of the dumpsters as a kid, growing up, you kind of develop a palate for white bread and bologna and velvete cheese and peanut butter and sugar and so that palate kind of continues throughout elementary school and junior high and high school and so as I entered high school I was 35 pounds overweight. I had man tits. I don't know how to describe it. I had sharp tits. You couldn't milk me, but otherwise I had tits. Madonna looking. Yeah, exactly. I started the fad before she did it. And here's a funny part is around junior year of high school I'm like, man, prom's coming up, you know, and there's this girl named Nakaya who I had the hots for. She had no idea that I had the hots for. By the way, did she know what you do now? I suppose I can look her up one day on social media, but what's the point? Wife wouldn't love that one. The fuck you doing looking at a high school sweetheart? Checking my surgery. Yeah, yeah. And so the summer before senior year I start reading flex magazine, muscle and fitness. Every muscle magazine I can get my hands on and a guy, and I was a Pryan school by the way, like every no kid wanted, the nerds didn't want I didn't do with me because I got bad grades, I didn't do with me because I was a horrible athlete and I was not an athlete. Even the Gothic kids, like I didn't have all the cool stuff to wear because my parents weren't depressed enough. I was slightly too happy, yeah, exactly. And so I hated lunchtime because I would just walk around the quad until lunch was over. But thankfully I had one friend, he played the center on the high school football team in science class. We made friends because we were science partners and he's like, hey, I'll take you into the gym. So I learned to work out through muscle and fitness you know. The basics. The basics, the very raw basics of eating well, which is don't eat sugar and don't eat white bread, right, don't eat bologna. And so that summer, dude, I lost the 30 pounds, I come back senior year more confident, more self aware. People are like, man, you're a whole new person. But I never had the balls to ask Nakaya out to the prom, so I never made it to the prom. She never knew that I had the hots for her, probably still doesn't. But that changed my trajectory. I was supposed to be a smog technician. Well, I imagine, right, that's probably when that first that was probably your first real taste of health and fitness and you're probably loving it, right? Oh, dude, you're getting attention. It's transformative. It is. On more than just the physical level. At every level. The biggest transformations, in fact, you're absolutely right, Sal, came to me in self-esteem, self-image, and self-awareness. Not actual physical change, right, even though I had lost 30 pounds of fat, which is substantial for a young man. And so I'm like, you know what, I'm not going to be a smog technician. I'm going to help more people do this. And I'm like, and I remember when I was reading the Muscle and Fitness magazines, seeing a little ad in the very back of the thing that said get certified as a personal trainer earn $100 an hour. I could do the math. If I train just six clients a day, I had 600 bucks a day. I'm going to be rich. Right. I did the math, got certified. Zero clients. So I was a certified personal trainer through the American calcine exercise. Fry Cook at Disneyland. And then in the winter times, I have a lot of nieces and nephews. I was a bouncer at a gay bar. All that just to make ends meet. Now, I heard you say that on Sean's podcast and what led you to go to a gay bar to be a bouncer? Very good question. So Disneyland is the happiest place on earth. Okay, so you're not trying to figure out your own sexuality? No, no, no, no. No, Disneyland being the happiest place on earth has a lot of gay employees. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. You walk into any other store and I don't know what the straight to gay population is as far as employees are concerned. Let's say whatever, 80 to 80-20, right? It's probably more like 60-40 in Disneyland. Wow. 40%, 50% being gay. So I made a lot of gay friends and one day I was just griping about, man, I don't have enough clients. I only have like three clients. I don't have enough personal training clients. I'm not getting paid enough here as a Fry Cook at Disneyland. I'm just griping. And one of my gay friends is like, hey man, you know, there's a bar that I go to. They pay $14 an hour for bouncers. Whereas the other bouncer job down the street for a straight bar is like nine bucks. I'm like, oh, shit. I hang out with you guys all day long here at work. What's wrong with hanging out at night, right? Right. And what he didn't tell me, the reason they were paying more is because skinheads would come at night to gay bash. Wow. And I'm not a fighter. Like, I'm a big guy, but I don't fight. I can talk my way out of any fight. I can hug you and make you love me like, I don't want to fight. So next thing I know, I'm getting into fights, right? And I didn't like that. But I did enjoy working there because I got to learn to talk my way out of fights and to calm down situations. And to me, that's like objection conquering, right? That's sales skills. Yeah, it really is. And we were talking about sales skills earlier. Like I got to really fine tune my sales skills on highly angry emotional people and talk them down. What a great training ground. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And only the first week and a half you get groped and after that you're like, hey, I'm straight. I'm straight. Yeah. And after that, everyone's cool with you. Yeah. So it was a fun experience. But I remember thinking there is no cop who's also a bouncer or a I don't know, a doctor who's also a fry cook. Why in the fitness industry do we have these side jobs? And so that's really when I started kind of searching out a way to kind of do this full time. Yeah. That's when that really happened. And of course clients took mercy on me and goes, here's a Tom Hopkins sales tape. You're he goes, you're an order taker, not a closer. Listen to this tape every night until you learn how to sell. That's so funny. Tom Hopkins is the first sales course I ever took. They 24 fitness actually hired Tom to create like some think it was mastering the sales master in the art of membership sales. Right. And he taught, you know, tie downs and, you know, you know, you had to overcome objections in the wagon. I mean, I learned all those first through Tom Hopkins. It's hilarious that you did the same thing. Didn't you say he's like in. Yeah, that's such good. A good friend recently told me that he's somewhere in Ventura County not in the best place. Really? Yeah, financially. Yeah. You know what? I think a lot of people and especially people like you, like myself that didn't come from a lot, you know, a lot of our motivation is to have things or to build a business or be successful. And you kind of get there and you realize that there's more to it. It's not that doesn't fulfill you the way you thought. Did you ever go through that? Like were you, you know, chasing this, you know, going from eating government cheese and bread and dumpster diving to all becoming this multi-millionaire and then also going like, fuck, I'm not that much as happy as I thought I would be. Were you ever like that? You know, I can't say that I was throughout my career as I ventured into other businesses that didn't have to do with helping people. I was like, I don't like this. And ironically I shut all those down or had a fallout with all the business partners in those areas. But anything that has to do with personal training, fitness, nutrition, where I get to help people, I just love. So I actually stumbled upon my passion and my purpose early on in life thanks to that 30 pounds of fat that I had to lose when I've diverted and gone into other spaces for a little while I was in the dating niche. Not me because I've got no game, but a business partner. It wasn't fulfilling to help young men get laid. Good luck. I didn't get laid. I turned out all right. You know, go suffer. I don't actually, I don't want you to get laid. How about that, right? That'll build more character. Blue balls all day. Yeah, because that gives you a chip on your shoulder to go and do something different. Go sell something, right? Sure. Yeah, so anyway, so whenever I venture outside of my lane, I realize I'm not happy. Now, when did the success start to come? Because now you're a trainer, you're learning how to build that business. When did that start to take off? Yeah, so Jim Franco, one of my personal training clients who was this kind of rough and tumble older dude in his 60s, he'd work out with me. I'd train him Monday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 2.30 in the afternoon. And I would see that, you know, he'd roll up in a different car, a Mercedes, a Cadillac Escalade, some sporty car. I didn't know what it was at the time. It was ended up being a 64 Shelby Cobra right? Yeah, yeah. And I was like, Jim, like all those cars you come here, are you retired? He's like, no, I have a job, I have an office, but I leave early and I come work out here. I go, how do you make your money? He goes, I take a little bit of money from a lot of people. Those were magical transformation awards for me and I hope anyone listening to this, it could serve them well as also I take a little bit of money from a lot of people. Well, he owns a software company that serves independent auto parts stores. Like if you owned your own version of a Pet Boys, right? And, you know, the software has to be updated because Fram oil filters are changing the part numbers, etc. And so he's charging these guys like $99 a month and there's literally thousands of these private auto parts stores. And so I go, well, how can I do that? He goes, hey, dummy, you're selling me 10 sessions at a time while the gym is charging me a membership fee. I have to pay $40 a month to come into the gym, but you keep selling me chunks of training at a time. So I was probably one of the first guys, if not the first guy in our industry to switch from 60-minute workouts to 30-minute workouts and then to introduce EFT, electronic fund transfer. Yeah, month to month payments on a $600 to $800 a month program. So I started selling, I was like, well, if he's taking a little bit of money from a lot of people, I can take a lot of money from a little bit of people, right? And the math will work out the same. And it did as I learned sales skills through him and ultimately opened up my five personal training gyms over a three-year period, ended up getting a really good offer. Here's the crazy stuff. The skill that he taught me how to take money automatically from people's bank accounts, right, is the reason that my five gyms got bought out. They were buying my future receivables. You had a dues base. I had a dues base. Thank you. So had I been making the same amount of money but constantly selling blocks of sessions. You wouldn't have been worth nearly as much. No, sir. No, because you can show when you do that, if you learn this from working in the gym business, you can show that guaranteed, you know, monthly revenue, that annual revenue, then usually you could sell your business for maybe two, three times that amount. A higher multiple. But if you don't have that, then it's maybe one time your amount or half because you're not there, you're not the one selling it basically. Exactly. What year was this and how much did you sell the five gyms for? So the year was 2001. Okay. And I sold the five gyms for just $200,000. It wasn't much. It was like tiny little personal training studios, right? Like twice the size of this room, each one. And I was like, holy smokes, like I got a lot of money right now in hand. Yeah. Well, as the internet was taken off, I had also started, came up with this idea of high-tech trainer, which was supposed to be an online personal training software. But except the idea was that it would be on palm pilots because this is pre-iPhone, right? This is actually how I found you. Really? Through high-tech trainer? Yeah, because so back when I used to work at 24-hour fitness with these guys and then decided to leave and do my own thing. Yeah. And there was just nobody out there like speaking to business and fitness together. So I kind of just put the search terms in there and then it kind of led me into you and high-tech trainer in that direction. But I remember you saying on somewhere else where high-tech trainer wasn't sort of your best product you put up. No, man, it wasn't my best product. And so much of it has to do with, you know, I was great at marketing the fitness software, but I didn't know how to code it or program it. So I had gotten someone who was a coder. He wasn't up to date on it. He wasn't as excited about the software as I was. Like the three of you are so jazzed about mind pump. Like this is you guys live and breathe mind pump and when you, Sal even told me when you guys met, you guys were on the same wavelength. This is what we want to talk about. The coder had one idea for it. I had another idea for it. We're constantly in the struggle. In hindsight, Steve Jobs says, when you look back the dots connect, I look back the dots connect. We should have never started high-tech trainer, especially with Apple coming up with iPhone a few years later. But we had these palm pilots and the idea was to sell it to gyms and if you couldn't afford a personal trainer you check out a palm pilot and you walk around the gym and it puts you through your workouts, wraps, etc. Yeah. And then, you know, videos and workouts. Actually a pretty good idea around that time. It was. And here's how... In theory. In theory, yeah. The couple of clubs that actually allowed us to test it in, people were walking out with fucking palm pilots. Oh, thank you. No, don't leave. Didn't think about that part. Can we put a big chain on this thing? Zap them or something, right? So they're like, hey, like half the palm pilots, each the two gyms that we tested with, we gave them each 15 palm pilots. Within like 35 days, half the palm pilots were gone. Oh, shit. I didn't know if it was gone by the staff, and they're like, hey, your palm pilots were gone. I'm like, mine? Like, yeah. Yeah, they were yours. Shit. Right? So I burnt through the $200,000 so quickly. Wow. But in that time, Sprint. I guess one of the two gyms, there was a Sprint executive who worked out there. They're like, hey, we like to put the workouts on this on our jukebox. It was their app store. And so for $2.50, Sprint was selling high-tech trainer workouts. $2.50 a month. And we got money from a lot of people all of a sudden, right? And so this executive reached out to us and says, we'll do a 50-50 ref share on $2.50 reoccurring, but we have 26 million subscribers on their cell phones. Sure. Yes. I had a big surge in my revenue all of a sudden. Wow. So the app, or the palm pilot thing didn't work out so well, but thankfully, it being out there, it caught the eye of someone who was like, I see a vision. So before there were apps, like I created the app store, it was on the Sprint jukebox. Wow. I did not know that. And you're making a buck 25 a person that's downloading it basically. Now it wasn't from 26 million subscribers, but that's a huge pool to pull from. We were getting like 30 grand a month and I'd never seen that kind of money before. Oh, that's crazy. Now the quote, entrepreneurship is jumping out of a plane and making a parachute on the way down. Do you think that's accurate? Oh my God. I mean, there's a great example of it. I didn't know how to open up gyms and my client Jim Franco taught me how to open up gyms. I just wanted to be an entrepreneur and I was going to sell blocks of sessions and they were going to be one hour long and he's like, dude, can you just deliver results in a short amount of time? He goes, how come the industry goes to one hour? I'm like, I don't know. So it's thinking differently. Entrepreneurship is thinking differently. It's taking a leap with palm pilots and the palm pilot's not a parachute. Oh, look, sprint jukebox, that's the parachute. And if it wasn't that, as long as you're willing to keep trying to make a parachute, you will make one before you hit the ground. Most people just give up on the second or third attempt and then they go splat. When did you decide to help others in fitness build their own business? I want to know how old are you? You're making $30,000 a month at this point. Any idea to put your feet up, buy some nice cars, take chicks out, have a good time? What are you going to do more? What's going on in your head? By this point, I was married. So it was 2003, 2004. My wife and I got married in 2003. And I'm like, hey, we bought a little house in Chino Hills, cool. That felt good. No fancy cars. But we were sharing one beat up Ford Taurus and now she had a car. I had my own car, which was great. And they were both new cars. I had like a Chevy Tahoe and I think she had like a Toyota Camry or something. But better than the Ford Taurus our lifestyle changed. We went from drinking water to spring water. We went from regular Cantuna to Albuqueruna. Those things mattered because I was like saying, oh my God, my lifestyle is improving. We bought a dog. So no, I wasn't balling by any stretch of the imagination because I also had a business partner and high-tech trainer. So you're not actually walking away with $30,000 a month quite yet? Well, we all have a business partner, Uncle Sam. He takes away anywhere from 30% to 40%. Good point. I don't remember signing that contract. He's a guy really telling you what to do. And then of course then you have another business partner, which is your business partners. But I was taken enough where we were bringing home like probably $5,000, $6,000 a month personally. My wife and I, because she worked in high-tech trainer with us and I was like, this is really cool, man. I don't have to be in a gym running my gyms selling training programs. And I got to the point where I was the district manager of my own gyms. But I was still floating around between my five gyms making sure my managers are selling. And the fact that I could work off a laptop, a Toshiba laptop at the time, it felt good and I saw the vision. So I said, I think there's more here. And the other thing I was doing was we had scraped the internet for email addresses for personal trainers. I didn't know what an opt-in page was. This is 2003, 2004, right? So I would type in, let's say, San Jose personal trainer. I'd find your website, scrape your email address. It's probably me. That's how I got you, man. And we would add you to constant contact our email database. So we had 1,400 people in that database and I would send out an email every single day. Horribly written, no direct response. I would use the best salesmanship I could. But there was no infotainment. Today I'll talk about infotainment. I give information and I entertain in my videos, blog posts, emails, etc. Back then it was just blah, right? Here's how you make money as a personal trainer. I would throw up information digitally. And trainers would reply back and go, man, I wish I was as consistent with my emails to my prospects and clients as you are with yours. Like, well, if we created a content-rich email that you could send out automatically every week, would you? Would you pay me money for it? Yeah. I created FitPro Newsletter, which today is a $3 million a year software that I own. Wow, for 10 years now. And FitPro Newsletter is like automated eye contact or e-mail-chimp or whatever. But for the fitness industry, done for your broadcast, you write the content that goes out on your behalf to your clients and prospects. But again, it's jumping off the cliff and making the parachute. Listening to the market space. Enough trainers tell me I wish I was as consistent as you. I'm going to go, what if you don't have to be? What if I do the work for you? And that's where I quickly learned instead of teaching them do it yourself, make it done for you. And my business really started to change when I started teaching done for you marketing instead of go do it yourself. How long did it take to scale it up to where it was making that much money? Oh, man. Four or five years. Okay. Yeah. In fact, probably four years to make the first million with high tech trainer. And then probably another two, three years after that. And then now we're starting to make FitPro Newsletter. Now our lifestyle is really changing now. Yes. Okay, lifestyle is really changing now. Still, we've got the motivation and drive to continue to grow and get bigger. And by this point, the biggest loser was hitting television. And Jillian Michaels, of course, was pretty, pretty hot, right? And everyone's like, man, she's an awesome trainer. She's like America's trainer. I'm thinking like, no, she's not. I am. I am because through all these thousands of personal trainers who are using high tech trainer, FitPro Newsletter, and now buying closed clients and PT business course, my two courses of selling and marketing, through them, I'm probably impacting more end users than she is, but no one knew of me. And then in my head, I'm like, fuck that. I always had someone that I was battling in my head. There's another thing, right? And so it was, the first one was Jillian Michaels. And I'm like, she's not America's best trainer. I am. I'm impacting more lives just through all these other trainers. And so it really felt good. But to me, it was always service. I was still the trainer, just not hands-on. Where did that chip come from? Where do you think that chip came from? Have you guys read Relentless, Tim Grover? No, I have not. I highly recommend it. He was the personal trainer for Michael Jordan when the bull's trainer couldn't deliver the results. Tim Grover was called in. And he ultimately ended up being the trainer for Charles Barkley, Kobe Bryant, Dwayne Wade. Like, you named the best and badass. I can't believe I heard that book. Great book, Relentless. Read it. And when you do, you're going to see there's a section where he talks about he's working with Dwayne Wade, getting him through an injury, and I'm not going to be the best as I'm going to be. And he tells Dwayne, I want you to go on that court and bring 48 minutes of controlled rage to your opponents. And when he said that, I was like, holy fuck. And I read the book just this past year in 2017. I told my wife, you got to listen to this part, because that was his audiobook. I've been bringing controlled rage for 15 years to the fitness industry. And where it came from was on exercise, I'm doing 30-minute workouts. Let me come speak at IDEA, because they're in cahoots with IDEA. Rejection letter. Hey, NSCA, let me come teach fitness marketing, because I was the personal trainer for I Cook and a Bouncer, and I know there's a whole bunch more trainers who are also having side jobs. No, we don't need that. They just constantly wanted to teach more pilates and certification and core strengthening. What is that with academia just not interweaving like, listen, I love Peter Davis to death and I ran into him at an event two years ago, and I go, hey, Peter, twice I got rejected from IDEA. Like, he's the CEO of IDEA. He goes, ah, I wasn't part of the panel. Whether you're part of the panel or not, man, we need marketing and sales information. Like, you three met because you guys understood sales, and you guys are now doing this and you're still selling. You're selling knowledge, information, and wisdom, right? Our fucking fitness industry is so ass-backwards. Any certification organization doesn't have a single paragraph of learn to sell or market yourself. I had countless trainers with very little knowledge on fitness who became extremely successful trainers because they were good at communicating their ideas and what the and of course the knowledge can be learned and they became excellent trainers. And then on the other hand, I would have trainers that come to me with a master's degree in sports medicine or four different certifications and they just did not take that communication and just didn't succeed. That's such a big part of it. And bitter and angry about it because they know how smart they are. They compare themselves to the other trainers and they see these guys that maybe don't have as much knowledge as they do. Rule number one, like a client is going to, if they're going to work with you for one to three days a week for hopefully years, they got to like you. That's like rule number one. If you're not a likable person, you can't communicate well. It doesn't matter how knowledgeable you are. Talk about the personal training market. Like that being a really tough market and everybody has such big egos in the space and like you're talking about kind of making things turn key for them, which I think is really the only way you can do it in the space. Well, I learned very quickly that I can't come to you as a trainer and go, hey man, I know you're great. You got the masters, you got the NSCA distinguished strength coach, etc. I had to wait for you to feel the pain of being broke. So the young trainers in the mid to early 30s, like all the way to 3132, they were not my fans when I would reach out to them because, hey man, I got this. You don't understand. Yeah, I think they know more than you already. Once they open up their gym, sign a lease by equipment, all this stuff, and then the wife or the fiance is going, hey mother fucker. We're broke. Yeah, go get a job. Guess what they do? A little Google search called fitness marketing or personal trainer business secrets. And so I realized very quickly I need to dominate these key words. And so I started two blogs, PT Power and Renegade Fitness Marketing. And I just owned the 25 keywords in my space that I knew struggling trainers would look for. Because I would start reaching some, those who reached out to me, I'm like, how did you find me? Fitness marketing expert, fitness marketing. So much fucking brilliance in that, dude. So I said, I'm going to wait till you're in pain and then you'll look for me and you'll spend money. But when I come to you, like fuck you, get away, Baderos. The reason you weren't successful is you don't have a PhD or a master's because I don't have any of that stuff. I was an enthusiastic trainer. And I was telling you guys earlier, my enthusiasm is what help people show up and get workouts and get results. What seems to bug the fuck and really academia. Which I don't know why. Did you get a lot of pushback with that? Have you had battles with that? My whole life, I've been the black sheep in this industry. I bet. I bet. People hate on that guy. They hate on the guy that's doing really, really well in fitness, but he doesn't have a PhD in one of the fields. I don't know where every muscle originates and inserts. I don't. I still don't. I'm 43. And some of the best PhDs are now my clients in the industry, right? Like Dr. Dan Ritchie and Dr. Cody Sype. Actually, I co-infunctional aging institute with them. And Ben Pekulski that we talked about. And Jason Phillips and Vince Del Monte, all these motherfuckers are my clients. And yet I can't get on the stages that they were getting on. So I was bringing so much controlled rage, as Tim Grover says in this industry. I brought EFT, went to 30-minute sessions, took the outdoor boot camp that everyone thought was a stepchild in our industry. Oh, outdoor boot camps. That's just how you make side money. It's like, no, we can bring out indoors now that the economy's crashed, make it a legitimate fucking business and bring the cost of personal training down, make it more affordable and convenient to people. But I was like, it was like, I was speaking fucking alienese, right? The industry's like, you're wrong again. I'm like, I've been proven right four times, motherfucker. Now all of a sudden I can't catch lightning, right? These fucking hands are made to catch lightning. You know, there's the timing that you did that. This is when I switched and transitioned into boot camps. And I saw the writing on the wall with the crash. I'm all sweaty. We went from 01 to 0304-ish where it became, especially in California, it was like almost a trendy thing to have a trainer. Like if you had money, you had a personal trainer, and selling training was the easiest thing in the world for me. And then from like 04 to 09 era, there's, now all of a sudden we start to see this dip, the housing market crashes. Now everybody wants a personal trainer, but they can't afford it because their house is upside down $100,000. And that was like instant light bulb went off of my head. Okay, I got to find a way. I'm charging $100 an hour. These people are telling me they want to train with me. They just simply can't. And I believe them because I had a house at that time that was now $100,000 upside down. So I get it. So I thought I got to find a way to train more people for a lot less money. And that was when I made that transition. So you obviously were one of the leaders in that group. It's so brilliant that you saw that and you made that move. But yet still, people just giving you a recognition. I'm a sell out. Yeah, I'm a sell out. What do I know? Personal training is, it's in the name. It's personal. You have any emails and DMs I still get it's in the name personal training. I'm like, look dude, if you want to go be a loser the rest of your life and not have a life, be my guest. That's the reality. If you do one-on-one personal training, unless you're Gunnar Peterson, right, who I love to pieces where he can go, hey guys, like Tim Grover, I'm going away for a while. You guys are going to keep paying me and do the program that I wrote up for you. That doesn't happen to regular personal trainers, right? Now, you're super motivated by this competitive rage. That's what drives you. What happens when you're accepted everybody likes you because you're on your way, right? You're fucking great. Now, Bedros is the man. There's no boarded fight. Like, what are you going to do? I'll find a fight. I literally came out as a footling out of my mom, like foot first and they pulled, because this is what the communists do, they just pull you out. They don't straighten you out. Do you guys have kids? Yeah, I got two. So if you have kids, I don't know if they came out but they're supposed to come out head first. I came out the same way. In America, they turn you around, right? In Armenia, they just pull you right out. Apparently. Yeah, it creates rage, exactly. I got the same thing. Thank you. And so, I come out that way, of course, in the process, my mom's bleeding and, again, in a communist hospital for 43 days, now my dad and my sister are boiling rice and feeding me rice water, because there's a formula in communist Russia, right? So I come out as a footling. I'm living off rice water instead of breast milk, right? Fucking really bad things happen to me between ages of four and six in Armenia. Really bad things that traumatized me sexually. I think you get the picture at no point in going in a greater depth about that. I've talked about another podcast, but so there's that. Come to America. You're being called Herman, because your parents find a shirt, Herman Munster, from the Dumpsters, right? And I wear the shirt and now kids are calling you Herman. So much so that I start responding to them as Herman, introducing myself as Herman. I'm the foreign kid. Go back to your own fucking country. How many times have I heard that, right? Because I don't speak the language. And so, I'm the fat kid who doesn't get the date. I'm the personal trainer who's constantly bucking the industry. So, I'm always going to have a fucking battle to fight. That's my lot in life and I love that. That's my fucking superpower and I love that. Well, it's also normally Achilles' heel, too. So, I would speculate that at one point, because I've had a lot of people that I've helped in the same place. I'm a lot of this person, too, because I came from nothing. And so, I've always had this chip and Lewis Howells talks about our mass, mass of masculinity, right? And a lot of times, that chip or that attitude that we have is the result of all of our success. So, why the fuck would I not want to do it? But then sometimes, our body starts to rebel on us with either stress or anxiety or issues going on with your health. Did you ever start to have this? Yeah. In fact, so, I'm 43 now. At 37, I had my first massive anxiety attack and it was so crippling that I thought I was having a heart attack. Where were you? What were you doing? I actually write about this in my book. I was. So, imagine my house. I have a good life now. I live on a one-and-a-half-acre property. My house is here. There's a giant pool deck, big, giant, grassy area, then a separate garage and above the garage is a guest house, a two-bedroom guest house where Craig Valentine stays when he visits town, which I got to talk to him about that, but that's a different story. Is he overstaying his welcome? No, not that. He leaves so many protein bars and all men's and all this shit. I go up to I keep have a drum set in the guest house and I end up eating all his shit and even though it's healthy stuff, I still over-consume. Every time he comes like, Craig, take that shit with you. He's sabotaging you. He does. He does. But anyway, because I'm still a fat kid inside. But anyway, so one morning I go to get something from the guest house and I I'm 37 years old. I bend over to pick up my shoes. This is my shoes. I bend over to pick them up and I stand up and my throat's closing up. I get tunnel sweating. My heart's racing. I hear the thug lug, thug lug of my heart and my ears. All of a sudden my arms start tingling. It's just out of nowhere. Dude, out of nowhere. It's like a Monday morning. I'm getting ready for work. I was going to head to the gym first. And I wasn't didn't think much of it until my arms start tingling. And I remember reading somewhere that when your arm tingles. Heart attack. Heart attack. But I'm like, both arms are tingling. Holy fuck, this is the big one. Guys, I'm not the smartest fucking knife in the drawer. I'll take that right now. I'm like, I'm as sharp as a bowling ball. Yeah, I'm going to die. This is it. Fuck. So all I'm thinking, and I wrote this and I'm chuckling as I'm writing this, I'm thinking this, my wife and kids are going to find me sometime tonight in the guest house because they think I've left for work already. By then, Rigor Mortis is going to set in. I'm going to be all stiff and bloated. And the last way they remember daddy and the husband is stiff and bloated. So my philosophy was, if I could, I know, crazy, right? If I could just stumble down. I've already accepted death. Now it's like, how do I want to look when I'm dead? I know. It's fucking twisted. And don't talk shit until you've been there. Right? The good news is you accept death very quickly, fellas. I thought it's like, nah, you reconcile with it. No, no, no. I was like, OK, I'm going. Now how am I going to be gone? How am I going to be found? So I go, if I could just get down the staircase across the pool deck, my wife will find me sooner before Rigor Mortis, before I get all fat and bloated and whatever. I just picture myself yellow and veiny, right? And my kid's in a certain pose. Yeah, I'll get into my best pose, exactly. In the process of going down the staircase, I don't know if it was the fresh air or the movement. Everything clears up. Tingling goes away, throat opens up. I can breathe again. My heart rate comes down to normal. I'm like, holy fuck, I just cheated death. I just dodged a heart attack bullet. And so off to the gym I went. You can go to the doctor? No doctor. Jesus, I know. No doctor went right to the office, come home that night and tell my wife, like, hey, you're not going to believe what happened this morning. I cheated death, baby girl. How about that? Right? Doesn't that turn you on? What the fuck do you mean? I think I had a heart attack, but thank God I'm in good shape. I get a big turn to this, guys. So she goes, what do you mean? So I explain the whole thing to her. She goes, dude, tomorrow morning we're going to the doctor. We go to urgent care. They do the whole EKG test on me. Like, your heart's fine. Are you stressed out? And she's like, yeah, he drinks Nyquil and takes a Vicodin to go to sleep overnight, which I did. I'm not proud of it, but I was stressed out. At this point, Fit Body Boot Camp, the franchise that we started is $640,000 upside down. I have this, like, tense relationship, adversarial relationship with my business partner. We only had five employees at the time, and I swear all of them had it out for me. And it was just mounting. The stress was mounting. And so, boom, it came up as a big anxiety attack. So to answer your question, yeah, I did. And then subsequently I had five or six more after that that forced me to go seek out therapy because when I told my doctor about it that I can't control these anxiety attacks, he goes, well, here's Xanax. Well, of course. Now I'm waking up in the morning. I've got no motivation. I'm drowsy. I'm foggy. I'm drooling out the side of my mouth. I'm like, well, now this new franchise is surely going to go out of business, right? It's like, I can't take Xanax. I got to go find a therapist who can give me tools. I can't not be stressed. I just need to cope with the stress right now. That's the phase of life I was in. So I went to find a therapist and the 16 months of work began. What are you learning when going through this? Two very big things and actually stress and anxiety. People who suffer from stress and anxiety and anxiety attacks in general. Anxiety just comes from halt. Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Those are the triggers, right? If you're hungry, you're angry, you're lonely, you're tired for a long time. And the way Kevin, my therapist, described it to me, if you're a former recovering alcoholic, if you're hungry, angry, lonely, tired, halt, then you're more likely to go hit the bottle. If you're a recovering drug addict, hungry, angry, lonely, tired, you're more likely to go hit the drugs. So as entrepreneurs who deal with anxiety and stress, hungry and lonely, tired, you're about to have an anxiety attack. So control your halts was number one. Number two is anxiety is anticipation of future pain. He's like, this is a definition of it. Anxiety is anticipation of future pain. So let's, and he calls it the golden threat. He goes, give me a golden threat. I go, okay, my business partner stresses me out. He goes, okay, great. What is the future pain you're anticipating? Well, one day we're going to have a big blowout, and then we're going to get in a fight. Hey, I don't want you to work in Fit by the Boot Camp. He's going to say, I don't want you to work in it. We're going to be in court, and I don't want it. So I'm anticipating court cases and lawyer fees and all this stuff, right? And Fit by the Boot Camp just crumbling around me. He goes, well, will that happen? I go, it probably will. He goes, but what if you did something about it? Oh, shit. What do you know? So as it turns out, the only reason we have anxiety is because we're anticipating future pain, because we're not doing anything about it now. As soon as you take control back into your hands, he says, and do something about it. So I immediately went and had a conversation with the guy. We parted ways as friends. I bought him out, and everything I was anticipating never happened. Wow. Started doing that in every aspect of my life that was giving me anxiety. All of a sudden, this anxiety prone freak went to no anxiety in his life. But I'm a man of action now, which I wasn't then. Are there things that you have now learned to put in place as to watch out for these triggers or to if they do, something does trigger you to stop and, okay, breathe, box, breathe, or meditate? Are there any practices that you've now included in your life to try to mitigate that? One of the biggest things, and I have to credit Craig Valentine for this, before he ever wrote his book, The Perfect Day Formula, because we've been friends and business partners for almost a decade, I learned The Perfect Day Formula through him, but unfortunately, I learned it too late once I needed it, and I was like, Craig, he's like, remember, you'd laugh at me, because he'd want to have dinner at 6 p.m. I'm like, you're fucking nuts. That's like a late lunch for me. We're having dinner at 10, dude. We're in Vegas, we're in Miami, right, running our master. A-R-P kind of schedule. Exactly. So I've learned to create my morning rituals the night before. So I write down my list of things to do, my hardest thing that I'm going to do is I go out of the list, I go to sleep at the same time, 7 days a week, wake up at the same time. I've got 96 people that I've blocked on my phone, people who just send me long text messages of the sky's always falling. Some of them are clients, some of them are people just from my past who I don't want in my life anymore, but I've created filters and boundaries. That's so important. Yeah, morning rituals, and those are the things, the dominoes that if they fall, like if I get a text out one person, it's likely to put me in a tailspin, right? And so I've had tough conversations with friends, like, hey man, our paths are different now, and I'm just going to take a little break from you for now. And you got to have these talks, I've become a better leader, led myself first into better health again, and then lead my team. The best compliment you gave me was like, man your team is so communicative. Well great, they weren't before, now they are. Like you show up in our lobby and all 42 people walk by you, they're like, hey how are you? Do you need the wi-fi code? Does someone know you're waiting for them? Do you need anything? Can I get you water, coffee? And that never happens. So I became a great leader, turned my employees into a team, got clear on my vision, where we take and fit body boot camp, clear on the path, and I had the blinders on, like a racehorse, and like I told you guys earlier, I just dismantled any other business that didn't have to do with fit body boot camp, or me coaching personal trainers and growing their businesses, because that's my purpose. Order is so important for managing stress, because I think it's that chaotic nature of the unknown that tends to stress the hell out of people. Do you teach this with your coaching, do you teach your people who coach to have that structure to know what's going on? I do. Personal structure and discipline are the number one things. People come to me because they have a marketing problem? No you don't, you're undisciplined. We can give you the best funnels and you'll get 50, 60, 100 clients a month for the next three or four months. But you'll do things to not create systems, you're undisciplined with stuff, and so you have an adversarial relationship or passive aggressive relationship with your coaches and trainers, so they don't deliver the service, those clients leave, now you're having more anxiety attack, now you want the next marketing funnel from me. So I sell the marketing funnel, but I give them personal structure, discipline, and systems, which is what we all need. What does this look like for you, because I know you've done this probably for thousands of coaches and trainers. When you first go in and you're helping somebody out, just like when I help a client, I feel like there's common things I look for, probably over-consuming sugar, probably stress, probably not sleeping, and what are your things that you know right away to kind of look at, if you were to meet me as a trainer 10 years ago, and I'm coming to you saying like, man, Badres, I just can't scale this business past 60, 70 grand a year, I'm fucking struggling, what are you asking and looking at? The very first question is, alright man, so what are your income streams? You might say, well okay, so I do a small group personal training, and then I do, I have a myofascial release little workouts that I do, and I do boot camps, and I do, I have eight one-on-one clients. Great, got it, you have four income streams. What's the biggest income stream? Like, there's usually an 80-20, there's an income stream where 80% is coming from, and the other 20% are taking up time and energy and effort, and you'll tell me whatever. Let's say it's one-on-one training. Do you like it? Yes. If I paid for all your bills in life, would you do that for free? Yes. Great, we're going to cut everything else out and scale that, and so I'll figure out what the idea is that they like, they're passionate about, that's making the most money, and we go all in on that. And then from there we start reverse engineering. What are your best marketing systems? I don't know. Okay, where did you get the most clients from last month? Referrals. Great. What about Facebook? No. Alright, let's create a Facebook system. So we, I started reverse engineering by teaching them systems, a Facebook system, an email marketing system. Do you see how these systems make your business predictable? Yeah. Hey, I'm curious, in your life do you wake up? Which time do you sleep? Well, my wife, she gets home late and so we watch a show, and then sometimes 11 o'clock, sometimes at 8 p.m., you don't have systems. In life, systems are called discipline and structure. Can I help you there? So I help them get a win here in business, which is what they hired me for, which is also where the sky is falling, and we need to get them out of this limbic state of, holy fuck, I need money, why are you having this talk about discipline and structure? So we fix the money problem first. They stop being limbic, and I go, can I create systems in your life? Sure. Before you know it, they're like amazing marketers and entrepreneurs. That's excellent. The military discovered that a long time ago. That's why when you, in the military, it's like fold your shirt a particular way, make your bed a particular way, stand a certain way, wake up at a certain time, because they know that extreme discipline results in execution. On the flip side, however, too extreme discipline can sometimes stifle creativity, because creativity literally comes from many times the unknown, or comes from just things that are different and not necessarily the same. How do you balance that with the people you're working with? How do you teach them to be super disciplined, but also maintain that type of creativity? Or do you find it actually increases their creativity? I don't know if it increases their creativity, but I teach them to be curious. One thing that we're never taught in any of the certifications that are offered out there is to be curious, right? What if I can actually deliver one-on-one type results in a group environment of three? What if I go to 30 of three? Be curious. What if I can actually take a 60-minute workout and bring it down to 30 minutes? Let me challenge myself as a coach and a trainer. Can I deliver results in 30 minutes, and then teach them to do their cardio or their interval training on their own? Maybe I can, and therefore I can make it more affordable and open up the market to myself, right? So we forget curiosity because in the fitness industry, probably like a lot of wellness and health industries were taught, this is the way it's done. So I teach curiosity as the last and final piece to the puzzle where it's okay to be curious, man, and maybe it's not three, maybe it's 30 people. We have some of our top fit-bodied boot camp owners who are running 80, 90-person boot camps, but they have three coaches on the floor. I didn't create fit-bodied boot camp with three coaches on the floor. I created fit-bodied boot camp with one coach, 20 clients. They decided they're going to have three or four coaches, 80 clients, one of them is the ringleader, and then they put the other three coaches in the stations that are of highest risk. So you've got a trainer in that one station fixing form, right? And then the clients rotate. Wow, had I not taught our fit-bodied boot camp owners to be curious, they wouldn't have been able to help the model evolve, which now we teach that to all of our franchises. And so curiosity is a really important thing not to just personal trainers, all entrepreneurs across the board. When you first meet a trainer, do you feel pretty confident you can tell if this is someone who's going to be successful or not? It's not an hour of communication yet. Wow. Wow. What are you looking for? I'm looking for I'm looking for a fire in their belly and a chip on their shoulder. And if they come to me with the cowardly lion mentality, the sky's always falling panicky, they can't string their words together well, they're blaming everybody else. The competition is too high and I have one client in Las Vegas. The competition is too high because my competition was your client six years ago and he's got eight locations out there. Well, he's probably not going to know who he is, but who gives a fuck. I'm really honest with things. It's like, dude, I helped him open eight. I can help you open 18. It doesn't matter. There's overweight people all throughout Las Vegas. There's more than anyone can handle. So if they're pointing the blame out, they're likely not going to be a great entrepreneur. I call those crop dusters. If they're saying I don't know how to market, I'm a horrible leader, I got fired as a trainer. I built the training side of my business, but I don't know anything about the marketing. So I need help. The more responsibility they take, the more I realize I can help you because you're coachable. You're going to take feedback where the other guy is going to take my feedback and look at it as criticism every time. Right? So the fighter jet is open to feedback. The crop duster is views everything as criticism. The crop duster blames everybody else. The fighter jet takes responsibility. So within an hour of asking a lot of questions of meeting them, I know their success rate. They're still going to do better than what they did. But you're not about to have nine locations. No matter what, you know you can help everybody. But there's a percentage that you can see that in their eyes or with how they communicate like, okay, this motherfucker is going to be a big deal. Now when you see that, being a smart business guy like yourself, do you tend to latch on to those people or do you tend to stay close to them because you see that? Which ones do you mean? So like you meet somebody and we've already namedropped some people before we got on that are mutual friends of ours that are very talented, smart, building seven, eight-figure businesses. When you meet somebody like that, do you tend to attach yourself to them right away and keep and foster relationships? Yes, I do because they're going to grow so quickly that they don't know what they don't know and the next level of growth might be the tipping point that fucks things up for them. Give you a great example, Jason Phillips, and he doesn't mind me sharing the story so I'll share it with you guys. Jason Phillips was a horrible coaching client. He was a crop duster through and through. Oh, wow. Yeah, through and through. He would show up to one mastermind session with myself and Craig and then he'd disappear and miss the other one, then he'd start missing payments to the mastermind so we'd have to kick him out of the mastermind. I'm going to talk shit to Jay today. It wasn't until he told you guys the Thanksgiving miracle story where he didn't have any money and he reached out to me recently about maybe a year and a half ago. He reached out to me, hey, I'm ready for coaching from you. This time I want to do private coaching, your most expensive private coaching. I just replied, Jason, with all due respect, you couldn't afford the group coaching, the masterminds. I certainly don't want you as a private client and then we're going to have to chase you down for money. It costs a lot of money. 50 Gs, you can't afford this. No, thanks. No, no, no, I'm different. You just have to get on the phone with me. You'll know I'm different. The guy had transformed from the crop duster to the fighter jet. He had a point in his life. I don't know what it was. Maybe it was that Thanksgiving coffee morning. Maybe it was the fact that he's marrying someone or got married to someone who has, what, two or three kids and right now he just had his daughter. But something had changed and I say, he does and he just keeps making more money. Like he texted me as I was driving in. You're like, dude, I had the shortest month of the year because we're in February now. He goes, I made the most amount of money I've ever made and it's because he takes action. He has adopted speed of implementation instead of fear and doubt as his friend. He was just the chicken little if there was everyone. Has anybody else surprised you like that where you're like, I don't know if you're going to do so well. Yeah, Vince Del Monte. We were just with Vince last week. Okay, Vince Del Monte and he's a private coaching client again. Listen, I'm going to be honest. You meet Vince and you're like, is there any light in the attic? And Vinny's like a giant puppy and what I love about Vinny, he's so innocent. Like the innocence that I lost. The innocence that I lost as a kid between the ages of four and six, which is why I'm so protective of children and I see that in Vinny. So I was a really big Vince Del Monte fan but I'm like, is there any light in the attic? Does he understand what I'm saying here about upsells? Because one of the first things he said to me when I met him was, I'm doing Taguchi testing. I said, what is Taguchi testing? He goes, we're doing a split test with 12 different variables. Split test is A and B, not A, B, C, the E, F, G, H, I, J, K. Right? I was like, Vinny, stop that shit. Whoever's taking your money and doing that, stop it. Just because they named it Taguchi test. What the fuck? I've never even heard it before. It's Taguchi. But now, I don't know if you guys know this. Vince has, he wanted to start a mastermind. Great, within six months he's got a mastermind of 50 members paying $1,500 a month. 50 members paying $1,500 a month through the math, he's fucking killing it. Vince is the king of, hey, I'm not going to listen to my own voices. The theory that I carry with me, because the idea of Ferry wants to take me down a rabbit hole, I'm going to listen to Craig and Baderos. And every time he does, he's successful. And this isn't me being cocky, because I've got my own coaches that I listen to. Because they have outside eyes on my own life. Right? And so, when I listen and take action, I get rewarded. When I listen, don't take action, or take the opposite action, because I think I know better, I always get punished. Biggest mistake ever is thinking you know everything. That's a massive mistake. It's your ego and it'll take down, it's taken down empires, let alone, you know, your normal little weak ass or whatever. Is anybody surprising the opposite, where you thought, oh, this guy's going to kill it, and then just... Yeah, there's several of those who just come in like, man, I'm going to be your next. And they drop Vince Del Monte, Jason Phillips, Ben Pacalski, I'm going to be your next Matt Wilbur and Bryce Henson and Stephanie Flynn. Because they know the winners of my groups, right? Because I talk about them. And then they don't. And it's like, fuck, man. You started off looking the part, smelling the part, but then I saw that you were late to the second day of mastermind and you showed up hungover because we're in Las Vegas. Oh, God. You know, and I had to talk with them. And I said, hey, what fucking happened to you? How come you're showing up at 11 o'clock when the mastermind starts at 8? Well, we went, you know, the mechanical bull there. We went and rode the mechanical bull before you know it. We're having shots. And who else is having shots? That guy whose eyes are closing, that guy and that guy? Yeah. You motherfuckers don't ever ride the bull again. You're not here to ride the fucking bull. And in one of my four masterminds, in that particular mastermind, we have the whole, because we record everything, we show all new members that don't ride the motherfucking bull. Yeah. Like, you're not coming to Miami to go to Prime 112 and fucking get drunk with Jay-Z. You're coming to Miami to fucking sit with me and learn. You're going to Vegas to sit with me and learn. On your own time with your own money, you can go do ride the bull, but don't ever fucking ride the bull on my time. Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah, there are plenty of people. And I get intense about this because, man, that one trainer can impact hundreds of lives. And that's a fucking, that's what I'm, on this planet to do. And I'm running out of fucking time. I'm going to die one day, you know? Yeah. How angry does it make you to see wasted potential? It's... You take it personal. I really do take it personal because I've wasted so much time that I'm trying to make up time for it. When I see wasted potential, especially people paying me to give them the advice, but then they fucking go ride the bull effectively. I don't know this rage builds up in me, man. And maybe, you know what? Maybe I'm not an evolved human. Maybe I need to be more caring, more compassionate. I don't know. And I'm very open to that. Maybe you care too much. Or maybe I care too much. Yeah. Yeah. What would you say the big differences between scaling a six, a seven, and an eight-figure business is because... So different every step of the way. The leader. The leader. You can... And extreme ownership. Have you guys read extreme ownership? No. Choco Willings. Oh, okay, that's... Right? The Navy Seal talks about leadership. And he talks so in Buds, basic underwater demolition training, they have boat crews. And there were like seven boat crews. The boat crew that was in the last place had a great team, but a weak leader. And so they were in the last place. They brought the boat crew from the first-place team leader into the seventh-place team. And a great leader turned a weak team around. They were able to paddle faster, in sync, and start winning. They came all the way up to second place. When they brought that leader into the first place, a horrible leader took a great boat crew and made them mediocre. Right? Leadership is everything. And so I always say you have to build your leadership muscles as you build your entrepreneurial muscles. John C. Maxwell talks about this. It's the leadership ladder in that an eight can never develop any more than a seven. If you're an eight-leader, if you're a seven-leader, you can never develop anything higher than a six. And if you're a ten, you can develop nines underneath you. That's such a clear word picture. I love that. Right? Yeah. So true. How important is mentorship and having coaches? You've already mentioned how you have coaches. Yeah. How important is that? I think it's extremely important. It's outside eyes. So I've got my therapist now that I see once a month, because he really helped me get through the darkest times of my life. Now I see him once a month and just wrap with him about my personal life, right? I need outside eyes from someone who can go, oh, hey, Bader, have you thought about this path in life? Craig Valentine, where my personal structure and discipline is concerned. Ironically, I was his business coach when our relationship started. Now we're business partners and have a podcast together. And now I coach him in business again. He pays me and I pay him to coach me on my productivity, life management, et cetera. Joe Polish, I'm in his genius network group and he's making all the right connections. Joe, connect me with who you think I need to be connected to, because I think I'm connected to everyone I know. I need to know. I'm not. Joe Polish is the ultimate connector. So I pay him to connect me because he knows what my path in life is. Joel Weldon, he's in the speaker hall of fame, old dude, teaches me how to speak and sell from the stage, how to storytell properly, right? English is a second language for me. I'm an introvert. I get nervous. This is a better conversation for me on a couch, four dudes hanging out, put me in front of a thousand people. Like I know that's my purpose in life, but I get fucking nervous. Joel is my speaking coach and every time I speak, we film it, we send it to him and he sends me pages of notes and I take it as feedback. And those outside eyes and those four areas of my life have helped me so much. I've gone from a knuckle-dragging animal to somewhat of a knight in shining armor. That's cool. What are some of the key takeaways to learn how to speak in front of people? That's such a difficult, I don't know if it's as difficult as it is scary more than anything, right? That's like a number one fear for most people. What were some things that helped you with that? So one of the things was people don't remember what you said. They remember how they felt about you. Yeah, that was a very key take. I mean, transfer of energy, man. Yes, because I would get up on stage with my PowerPoint and just, again, vomit out facts, right? Stats and facts and numbers and figures and do this and don't do that. Well, if my energy is off and I'm nervous and it's a lot of facts, at the end of the day, people do want to laugh and get entertained. So one thing that Joel Weldon taught me that also Frank Kern taught me was point, story, metaphor. So make your point, right? And share a life story about that point and then a metaphor. And when you do that, if you have 10 talking points, point, story, metaphor, the Bible is written in stories. It's the number one selling book for a reason. We learn from stories. And also when you're sharing a story from your own life on the 10 points that you're going to talk about, people feel like, oh gee, I'm really connected with him better, right? So they feel different about you. So they go, hey, what did you learn from him? I really don't remember what I learned so much as, he's such a good guy. I bought his product. He's such a good guy. And that's really what you want because you want people to let down their wall and let you win. Because the way Joel describes it to me, there's a third bullet point for you, is everyone in the audience is listening to you with their arms crossed, leaning back with doubt. Who is this guy? What are you trying to sell me, right? Our job is to get him to bring the wall down and lean forward, uncross, so that they can be... You're watching the body language? Yes. Yeah. And if I can do that through my stories, now the information that I share is going to absorb instead of bounce off. Well, someone as connected as you are in fitness and being in fitness as long as you are, I value your opinion on the current state of the fitness industry. What do you see when you look at fitness now as a whole? What are the good things and the bad things that you see in it? Well, the bad things right now is what are we, 2018, is this March 1st? March 1st, 2018 is that, listen, here's why it's bad. The economy is booming. The economy is great. The economy is great just like in 2005 and 2006 and part of 2007. Everybody was a real estate agent, right? And they got a house to sell you and they were selling homes for above value. Wow, I'm such a great real estate agent. The economy crashed. Who stuck around? Only the best agents who had been around through the shit, right? So right now, there's tons of competition. Tons of competition because the economy is booming. People have money. They're buying fitness and personal training online and offline and group and one-on-one. And so yeah, for a personal trainer, for a small gym owner, it's pretty competitive. The good news is lots of people have money. So carve out your niche. So carve out your niche and define yourself. Like what are you known for? And I'm a big fan of being known for one thing. Like I do one thing and I do it better than anybody else. I do personal training, business coaching. I don't do Pilates or spin class or yoga instructors, personal trainer, gyms. Not 24-hour fitness and LA fitness and Equinox, personal trainers. And so I do one thing and I do it better than anybody else. So find your niche. What else? The internet has brought about, like what you guys do, right? All types of programming. You can reach clients worldwide. Holy shit! Like through Instagram and this podcast, you're gaining an audience. You're getting them to know, like, love and trust you. They're actually asking you, hey, do you guys have services that I could buy? In fact, we do. They're digital. Here they are. You could be sleeping and making money and probably happens to you all the time. So trainers now can really take their knowledge. They're a single income stream of one-on-one personal training or boot camps and parlay it by making an Instagram page and a YouTube channel and a podcast and now have a second income stream because we can all have an audience, no matter how big or small. So there's so many great things happening. So the drawbacks are, hey, it is competitive right now. It is competitive and that's because the economy's good. But the internet is there to create another income stream for you. Boutique gyms, right? Boutique gyms are fit by the boot camp. Boot camps. Take it off growing quickly. You look at CrossFit. You know, there are people who want to train pretty hardcore. You know, CrossFit's doing well. And now CrossFit itself is doing well. I know many CrossFit locations. Starting to fail. Yeah, they're starting to fail and that's because CrossFit HQ and I think Glassman, God bless him. He's doing a great job growing the CrossFit brand. But I think he also has an obligation and a duty to the owners. Like when someone says, I'm a firefighter and I'm a cop and I'm going to team up with my friend and the three of us are going to own a CrossFit. It's like, you can't have three jobs and fund a CrossFit. Your CrossFit has to fund your lifestyle. Could you imagine if I sell a fit by the boot camp franchise and I go, but you need another job to fund it? Like, that doesn't happen. See, I teach business. He teaches CrossFit, right? You just take people to regional games and then global games or whatever the games are. Good for him. He built the brand but he has an obligation to those people who signed the lease about the equipment and have families to feed, right? I look at it that way. I have that fucking obligation. And so all of our franchise owners who own a fit by the boot camp, I have to make sure they perform. They can choose not to. That's on them. But I'm going to give them everything. I'm going to give them the rope and I'm going to hope that they build a ladder and not hang themselves with it, right? So often in the fitness industry, do we see companies grow and then disappear and grow like curves? I remember curves. Curves came out of nowhere, exploded fastest growing fitness franchise at the time in the history of fitness and then just crashed. They had over 13,200 locations at their peak. At 1.1. We saw CrossFit explode. You're starting to see it really start to level out now. A lot of people start to fall off a little bit. Orange theory still on the upswing of explosion. Why do we see so many ups and downs in fitness like this? You see it in every industry, believe it or not. Look at the sub-industry, the sandwich industry. Quiznos came and went, right? Subway for the first time ever closed the most amount of stores in 2017. 973 stores they closed down in 2017. Wow. And Subway's been around for a long time. They have 26,000 stores. Jared really killed that, huh? And it wasn't Jared. It was the adversary relationship between the franchisee and the franchisor. Because as Jersey Mike's is coming about, as Witch Witch is coming about, as all these, you know, Firehouse Subs is coming about, Subway chooses to hang on to the, we're the low price leader. And they're saying, well, we have higher quality, better quality and it's better for you. And Subway franchise owners are like, hey, we have to change our message. HQ is saying, no, no, no. Yeah. So Papa Johns, it's on the down swing right now. So it happens in every industry where it's either a chain or a franchise. And it only happens when the guy up top isn't listening to the owners or the managers that are running. So why Starbucks around since 1974? Because Howard Schultz still listens to all the partners that run the locations, right? They're not a franchise, they're a chain. The moment you stop listening and go, I know better because I'm on the top. You don't man, the industry has changed. That's why I own my own Fitbody Bootcamp locations. I have my foot in the door. Smart. Your finger on the pulse. You have to because otherwise it's a massive ship and then you can't, how do you know where to turn it if you're not listening to the people that are in there? Exactly. And a massive ship turns one degree at a time. So it's a small, slow turn, right? So I want to know when the industry is changing as soon as I can. So I have trusted owners who reach out to me and know that I'm open to feedback, going back to feedback. I'm open to feedback instead of feeling like they're criticizing me. Because sometimes it can feel that way. You said something interesting about finding niche and I couldn't agree with you more in fitness. You know, you've had the big box gyms now which have kind of, you know, your 24-hour fitnesses, your LA fitnesses, your crunch. And I don't know when it started happening. Maybe early 2000s it was a race to the bottom in terms of who could sell the cheapest memberships for the most access with the hopes that nobody will show up and use your gym. And that's the general model. Good luck trying to compete with that, you know, on your own. And then you started to see these niche types of things like Pilates Studios, Yoga Studios start to kind of, and I feel like that's, how important do you think that is? Like they're finding that niche part for somebody. If you plan on not only surviving but thriving, like making really good money so that you can pull yourself out of it and open up multiple locations and have a lifestyle, a really good lifestyle, you have to be in a niche market, period, period. That's why when a Fitbody Bootcamp owner decides to add a juice bar, we have a compliance department that cracks down on them. They add a squat rack, we crack down. We're not CrossFit. We're not fucking 24-hour fitness. You don't need a juice bar. Don't add showers because you're going to have one shower because you can't afford to add five. You're going to have 26 people upset at you while one person's showering, right? Like don't let the idea fairy come in. So we go narrow and deep. We have a niche market. We do one thing. We do better than anybody else. And we continue to thrive. The moment you don't have a niche is when you decide that I'm going to serve everybody. I'm going to be everything to everybody and you're really nothing to no one. Do you have any businesses that you're watching in the fitness industry right now that really piques your interest? Business? Yes, yes. I'm looking at all the influencers right now who are, who have half a million to two, three million followers on Instagram specifically because Instagram has done something that Facebook and Snapchat didn't do which was we all have a network now. I look at that as my own MSNBC, CBS network and these influencers who have a massive following yet they're hawking someone else's product for 10 to 20% commission. I go, what the fuck are they doing? Or they go, they get in the Me Too game and they go, oh, everyone's got a clothing line. I'm going to create a t-shirt line as well. They're thinking too small with such a broad eye. It's almost like you have an atomic bomb but you're treating it like you're at a fucking knife fight and I'm waiting for them to either explode in a good way or fall apart because they go, I'm just constantly putting up, because it is a full-time job, all the content they're putting up, maintaining the page, growing the page, the DMs for 10 to 20%, so they're making what, eight, nine, $10,000 a month, maybe 20 grand a month. With that many people connected them, it's insane. We should be making millions. We share this all the time on the show that we get tons of different guests with all different size social media followings and more often than not, we will meet somebody who has two, three, four million people attached to them, barely making six figures. And then we'll meet somebody who's got 30, 40,000 people attached to them making eight, nine figures. So it's crazy that, and I think it's this problem that's being perpetuated by this young generation that's coming up that just kind of sees what this guy is, who's got two million followers, and everyone just starts to kind of copy of each other. And then you see all these supplement companies, t-shirt companies, preying on all these athletes or famous, you know. Be a sponsored athlete. Right. We'll give you 10%. To the point, right, product. To the point where that's, I remember meeting, and this was really, this is an epidemic in the bodybuilding game. And I saw this, it just blew my mind, you've got these guys that become, you know, on the Olympia stage, like a Ben Pakolsky, that has that much pull on social media because everyone's watching what they're doing, and they're selling all these other t-shirts and supplements for everybody else. They have no idea they've got a multi-multi-million dollar business sitting right in front of them, but they just don't have that. They don't think big enough. It's, you have an atom bomb, like I said, you have an atom bomb, but you're trying to treat it like a knife fight. Like, what are you doing? Drop the fucking bomb. Right, yeah. You know, let's just, but. If you can truly impact thousands of people, that's worth way more than just having a million followers on social media. Very well said. And I don't have quantifiable facts for what I'm about to share right now, but I can almost guarantee you, follower to dollar equation, Jason Phillips makes the most money, followers to dollars. Like, he has a multi, I'm not gonna share his numbers, but he has a multiple seven figure business, and I think his followers are under 15,000. Right? And so when you really look at it, when you really look at it, those that are in the same nutrition, coaching, fitness, wellness, coaching business, they should have at least 10 times what he's doing if they have half a million or more followers. But they're, they're, they're underthinking, which is unfortunate. Let's talk about you for a second. Like what, what do you, what's difficult for you right now? Like what do you, what are your weaknesses? What are you working on? Writing a book. Writing a book, yeah. But thank, thank God for Ryan Holiday. So as I was sharing with you guys, I've got a book coming out. It's called Man Up, which is about entrepreneurial leadership in September, late September. And I wrote what I thought was an amazing book, manuscript, 62,000 words, sent it to the publisher. And I didn't hear from them for like five weeks, so much so that I reached out to Lewis House. And I go, hey Lewis, when was the first time you heard back about the edits? He goes, oh, it should take like two or three weeks. I go, man, it's been five weeks. He goes, reach out to them. I reached out. They said, give us one more week. Right? There's so much shit we gotta clean up. Yeah. They sent me six pages of notes of things to change and modify and edit and why is this here? And I realized I bit off more than I can chew because because I can scale businesses, doesn't mean that I can write a book and I couldn't. And so they go, here's six pages of notes, fix these and you have two and a half weeks to do it. And so as my friend Dean Graciosi says, if you have a problem that can be solved by writing a check, you don't have a problem. So I reached out to Ryan Holiday and I said, buddy, I know you work off long time spans, but I got two and a half weeks. I'll send you $30,000 in cash in a brown paper bag if you can make this manuscript and these six pages of notes work. And he and his co-ghost writer came back with just brilliance, brilliance. And so I've got a great book coming out that's ghost written by Jimmy and Ryan Holiday. I forget Jimmy's last name right now, but I'm excited for it. But I'm a horrible author and that's because I speak from the stage. I do YouTube videos and I write thousand word blog posts. Totally different. So it was very humbling. It's like when Michael Jordan went to play baseball, right? I'm sure it's a humbling experience. So that's what I am not good at. So you thought I'm going to do this good? Dude, I thought in six or seven weeks I can knock it out. It was horrible. It was embarrassing. How are you balancing personal with business? Do you work a lot of hours doing all this stuff? No, no. Like I told you guys, I have this 5% rule that I talk about. I only work in my zone of genius. My zone of genius is my 5%. Most people are doing things that are in there like 95%. Like they're cleaning their own house. It's like you can afford a house cleaner. They're doing their own shopping. People can shop for you now. We forget because as we grow our income, we go, oh, well, I've always done my own dry cleaning. So I'm going to take my own dry cleaning. You don't have to do that. So my 5% is delegate motivate sell. So I work six to eight hours a day, sometimes 10 hours a day on my 5%. So I get a lot done, right? Because the other guy might be trying to do a whole bunch of stuff. And so they have to work 18-hour days like I used to. Like I used to. So I've got pretty, it's not balance. It's more of a good work-life mix. It's tough to narrow down that 5%. I mean, one of the hardest things that we've had to deal with with scaling this business is, you know, you work so hard to get it to a certain point. Then it gets to a point where you're actually really moving along. And then what happens is everything looks awesome. You know, everything looks like, oh, my God, let's go over here. We can make a million dollars doing that. Yeah, and we find ourselves scatterbrained instead of really becoming very myopic on what got us to this point and continue to excel at that. I think that's one of the most challenging things for people to do. Do you have things that you, to help people figure out what their 5% is? Yeah, I mainly tell people like, what is it that only you can do that no one else can do in your business? And so I always start off on a marker board with people and we'll draw the old Benjamin Franklin. Align right down the center and we'll write 5% on one side of it and 95% on the other. So Benjamin Franklin said, you know, yes and no, right? And if he had more yeses and noes, then he would do the yes thing. So I just write 5% on one side, 95% on the other, and I have him do a brain dump. I go, all right, Sal, what's in your 5%? Should you be vacuuming this room right now? No, okay, that's in your 95%. And we'll dump, usually we dump out all the 95%. Should you be doing this? Should you be doing that? Should you be dusting the place? Should you be booking the guests? No, no, no, no, no. Okay, so what's left? Well, I should be interviewing them like you guys can, right? What else? I should be, whatever else the thing is. I should be programming. I should go find sponsors. Great, those are your 5%. So once you write it down and you see it, and I go, hey, you see this little line right down the middle between 5 and 95? Yeah. I go, it's like a cell membrane. It's porous. And I start kind of scratching it out with my finger. I go, over time that line wears out and some of the 5% don't go into the 95. The 95 start pouring in. And what happens is people go, hey, man, I'm going to be late. Can you vacuum for me before you know it? Hey, man, I'm not going to have time to set up the mics. Can you set up the mics for me? I'll just set up the mics from now on. So you have to do an audit and go, am I still in my 5%? Holy fuck, I'm doing 22%. Start moving those other things over. Go back to your 5%. Life will be good. Excellent. How about your current fitness regime? You were talking about how you started training a little bit differently now. Yeah, yeah, so I'm the king of injuries because I just... You go too hard? What's going on? Bro, I don't know what it is. You know what? I think because I wasn't... I blame my mom. Because I wasn't breastfed, I've got weak connective tissue. And I told Ben Palkowski and he's like, I doubt it. I'm like, well, Ben, you know, we'll see. But so, you know, I've torn a bicep, ACL, meniscus, pecter, hamstring tear. I'm pretty bad. I mean, surgeries. Jesus, that's a lot. That parachute didn't open one time. And these are all different occasions, ironically. And so I realized very quickly that I probably don't have the best training. I don't have the guys in the gym doing. And so I go, man, some of the top elite athletes are my coaching clients now. Like Steve Weatherford, right? Like Armageddon guy with the biggest arms. Like, he's a coaching client. Hey, Steve, what do I do for arms? Hey, who the fuck did I just train with a Venice Beach? Michael Hearn, right? Mike, I've known you for a decade. We've never worked out. I'm going to come to Venice Beach. We're going to film it. You're going to put me through shoulder work out because I got all the shoulder pain. I didn't do it the next day in a good way, but I didn't have the pain that I normally do of what feels like a pinched nerve in my trap. So, you know, I'm doing this thing where I'm Ben Pakulski in the April. I'm going out to Tampa for two days, and we're going to crush legs, and I think back. You're going to hit legs with Ben Pakulski? I know. I'm going to die. Yeah, you're crazy for that. But basically my routine is now. So two people have really helped me with my diet is Freak Fitness. And then, of course, Jason Phillips, they've helped me dial in my diet, which now I can go anywhere and eat clean and have abs at the age of 43, which feels good. And then, of course, all my muscular friends that I've helped grow their business, now I'm asking them, hey, I'm going to fly out to you or drive to you, and you're going to put me through great workout and teach me how to grow muscle without tearing it off the bone. And so it's scary as shit because they're big and scientific and smart, but I trust the process. And just like they trust their business in my hands, I trust my muscles in their hands. So it's been fun. This is so true with a lot of trainers, by the way. We tend to train our clients much better than we train ourselves. Very true. All with your injuries, were you looking back were there signs leading up to it that you just ignored? Were you, like, disconnected from your body? Absolutely. Absolutely. So when I tore my bicep, I had trained with an MMA coach that morning, which is, you know, you have a lot of static contraction against your arms. When you're getting people in an arm bar, you're putting an arm bar or whatever. And then I did back and bicep work that day with Josh Carter, a friend of mine who also works with me. And then as we're leaving the gym, there's these two ropes. And I asked the gym owner, I'm like, hey, man, what are the ropes for? He goes, oh, you climb the ropes, and then you ring the bell up top and you climb back down. So obviously I had over-fatigue that muscle. And so I climbed the rope. I just hang off my right arm just for a second to give my left arm a break. And I go down. And Josh is like, holy fuck, you just tore your bicep and he rolls up my sleeve and you see it rolled up like a Venetian blind. So each time it was one of those. When I tore my hamstring, I was looking at someone in the mirror who was behind me and it wasn't even a chick. So I was like, was it a chick? No, I was just watching some guy in a fluorescent shirt walking in as I was doing alternating lunges. Focused. Been more aware of am I overusing the bicep right now or the hamstring or whatever. But with all my clients, what do I do? You pay attention. Focus. And we warm up with your mobility. We get them into the workout slowly. Everything that I would teach I didn't do. Wow. Why do you think that is? Why do you think you weren't taking care of yourself like you should have or like you like somebody else? I don't know. I honestly believe that there's some sense of I do... I enjoy hurting myself. Not like in the, I'm going to go tear a bicep to it. No, you've survived as being the underdog, dude. Yeah. You like being the underdog. I put myself in an underdog position often. Right. You probably self-sabotage and don't even realize that you do it every once in a while because you like to overcome. Yeah, yeah. I literally was learning MMA fighting from this guy for six weeks. Halfway through, my wife and I saw a three-week point. My wife and I take my kids to Maui. We're flying back from Maui. There's a guy who's raging out at the front of the plane. We're kind of in the middle of the plane in business class. And this guy's raging out and hitting the guy in front of him over the head. The flight attendants are trying to calm him down. So the other group of flight attendants are walking down my aisle with two zip ties linked together. And I'm like, ma'am, what's going on? Is everything okay? And I'm thinking this is post 9-11. This is like a few years ago. Sure. Everyone's going to dog pile on this guy. I was like, you know what? Ma'am, what's going on? Is everything okay? Well, he's a flight risk. He's a danger to the flight. We have to zip time. We're like over the Pacific right now, dude. I'm like, holy fuck. I travel all the time. Like nothing happens. Now I got my wife and kids with me. I'm like, this is going to happen? And so she goes over there and she's trying to get the zip ties on him. She looks up at me because he starts freaking out. I'm like, help. I'm thinking everyone's going to rush. No one rushed but me and this one other guy. I just went over there, got the guy in a chokehold. And the whole time I realized like, I have no idea what I'm doing because it's been three weeks that I'm doing MMA. But this guy's likely to kill me. But why am I putting myself in danger? And it wasn't to be a hero. In hindsight, I look back. I just do things to maybe hurt myself just a bit to be the underdog. In this case it worked out. I ended up choking the guy out and put the zip tie on him and then LAPD took him away when we landed. But all this, I've come to a lot of realizations lately that I do like to abuse myself. Do you fear like ultimate success where that no longer exists, where there's no more of that? Are you asking, do I fear like ultimate success? Yeah, like okay, now I'm so successful that I don't have any of this. No, if I lost it all, it wouldn't matter because I've been broken poor before. It's not that I just, there's a high I get off doing things, taking pain. And a lot of pain, physical pain, emotional pain. Bro, when you're molested for fucking two years straight by two older boys and you have to mentally fucking go away while that's happening to you, you fucking know how to zone out. Like I can put anybody in a box and put them away for good for life, mentally. And that's not a fucking thing I want anyone else to experience in their life. But that's pain, scarring pain. And I'm not asking anyone to feel sorry for me. Like I've gone through that with the therapy. I'm fine, I'm good. Like that's one of my superpowers now, right? But where that pain no longer exists, maybe I'm just giving myself other pain. I'm not trying to tear muscle. I'm just, I do things thinking I'm a fucking superhero. I could do it. And if I get hurt in the process, oh well, I survived that, I can survive anything. I accepted death in seconds as I told you. Like in that fucking guest house, I wasn't trying to resuscitate myself or call 911 off myself. I was like, all right, I'm gonna die. I just don't want them to find me stiff and bloated. Had a good run. Yeah, had a good run at 37, peace out. And so you know what? I'm human, man. That's my thing. And hopefully one day I'll figure that peace out too. But until then, and this is why I also serve people. The more people I serve, the less time I spend in the darkness. I was just gonna ask you, do you get a different rush from helping others become successful? Is it more fulfilling? Is it different? It is more fulfilling. It feels better. Yeah, it's very different. Yeah, I love seeing others succeed. I love helping others. Yeah, the help that I never got, I love giving. And I've realized that. And my therapist helped me realize that. You also have mentioned several times about not being the smartest guy or nutrition, physiology, biomechanics. Like you admit that. How long or if ever was that in security? I mean, and you have a multimillion dollar business that you've built within fitness, but yet you don't, you would openly admit, I don't even know that much shit about the body. That's fucking unbelievably impressive. And that's a huge insecurity that most people have a hard time overcoming. Or at least people in fitness. Right, yeah. But it's completely detached from what I'm amazing at. And I believe I'm world class at. I'm tip of the spear razor's edge at, which is scaling a business, a fitness business. And these days you give me a dental business, chiropractic business. I can ask you enough questions and learn about your business to see the opportunities that you missed for a decade and a half being in your business. So, you know, I'm not a great trainer, never was. But I understand how the personal training and fitness business works better than anybody else on the planet. You can, but Alan Cosgrove, right? Amazing coach and trainer. He can train. In fact, I haven't come speak at our Fit by the Bootcamp World Conference because he can teach them how to train. Right. Yet I help him in his business, right? Same with Craig Ballantyne. Same with Jay Ferrugia. Like, I just, I'm really good at one thing, at business development and... Trainers are all, I always remember, like one of the things managing gyms and having, I had salespeople work for me and have trainers working for me, front desk staff, the whole thing. Trainers, it was always a bit of a struggle or a challenge to get them to understand that they have to be good salespeople, they have to be good businesspeople. I didn't have to do that to my salespeople, obviously. But all my trainers wanted to do is be better trainers, which is great, there's nothing wrong with that. Like, be better at training their clients. But when it came time to teach them about how to grow their business, there was a lot of reluctance at first. And luckily, I'm a good salesperson, so I could eventually close them on knowing that this is very important. But I always remember that being a struggle. It was always something I had to, it was a conversation I had to have with trainers. Why? Because, like doctors, like dentists, we think that, well, because I've put all this education behind my name, people should come to me because of that. Does it show up? Yeah, the reality is you'll have a heart attack or a toothache and you'll go to a dentist. But we kind of walk around with 30, 40, 50, 200 pounds of extra weight. So people don't feel like they have to go to a trainer. So as a trainer, you have to influence and attract your clients where a doctor, dentist doesn't have to. Pain or a heart attack or disease gets you in. And the moment trainers decide to adopt that instead of fight that, our industry will become better and we will ultimately beat our competitors. You know who our competitors are, by the way. It's not the fucking CrossFit or the Orange Theory or the Fit Body Boot Camp. It's the McDonald's, the Taco Bell, the Coca-Cola, the Snickers. Who's gonna win? They understand marketing where we don't. So I still feel like I'm not doing my fucking job in this industry. Fuck, they're marketing better and they're putting better science behind it. Their science kicks ass too. I mean, they're hijacking our palates and finding a way for us to be addicted to the foods. Man, we're getting the shit kicked out of us when you look at the ratio of people that are actually getting in shape and getting healthy compared to how many people are. I mean, that's the thing that always saddens me is that here we are in 2018 and we're supposed to be smarter and better. Yet we're seeing more issues, more obesity, more autoimmune. That's kind of shitty when you think about it. When we know more today than we did 15, 20 years ago, but yet it's continuing to be on the rise. So we're really losing the battle when you think about it. Big time. Dude, Peter Diamantes talks about in his book Abundance that things are more abundantly available to us. In our hand, in our pocket right now, we all have an iPhone of some sort where we can Google answers to things. Yet we are more sick, we're more broke, we're more dependent on mood altering drugs than ever before. Yet we have so much abundance around us which means that the other guys are winning. And so people who look at marketing and selling as bad, bad, bad, I don't want to be a used car salesman, embrace selling and marketing because you're selling a solution that's saving people's lives. You have to be able to look, you could know the answer to somebody's problems, but if they don't know that it's the answer, if they don't buy into it, you might as well have no answer. It doesn't matter, it doesn't make a difference. So when I would teach sales training, I would change it to effective communication only because sales has such a bad connotation that people would be like, oh, I don't want to learn sales, so I would teach people how to communicate effectively. And really what it's all about and what I used to teach people was if I can take my feeling and understanding of what I know and just transfer into your brain, put it into your mind so you feel what I feel, now I've done an effective job, but it always has to start with integrity. And here's the other thing about fitness that we rail on all the time. There's so much information. There's a lot of conflicting information and there's a lot of bad information out there and there seems to be, and this is true for any industry, but we're in fitness, so that's the one we see the most of. There's a lot of charlatans. Like how do you, is that one of the most important things for you when the client comes and hires you that they have to have impeccable integrity? How do you talk about that with them? Oh, absolutely. In fact, I've turned away plenty of people who, hey, I'm starting a supplement company and the product does this. Does it? Show me. It blocks carbs. Show me. Yeah, because I may not know that it doesn't, I may not know how to figure it out, but show me the supplement. I'll send it to Ben. I'll send it to Jason. I'll send it to Joel Marion, who started Biotrust Supplements. I'll send it to the people who I know, because I'm so well-connected, and I'll say, no, you can't be a client, you're full of shit, because ultimately it's my reputation because in the past, I have brought on coaching clients who I knew lacked integrity, but I needed their money. I'm being very honest with you here and I needed, wanted their money. I brought them on only for them to erode our industry and I'll never do that again. I'll never do that again. How did that affect you negatively? What was it? Just affected your name or did you just not feel good about it? Well, the way, once I figured out what they were doing and how they were just burning bridges left and right and I parted ways with one of them and he went and created a blog and started to slander me for 18 months on that blog, right? And that was not a good feeling. What's crazy is the reason I parted ways with him and I saw this coming is he would slander all these people in the community that he served, right? The mayor and the whatever and I was like, wow, well, you know, he's a dick to them, but I'm sure he'll never bite my hand because I help him grow his business. I help him get to seven figures. Sooner or later, they're going to turn around on you and he did, yeah. Wow. What do you see for the future of the fitness industry like business-wise? What do you see the opportunities? Like I said, social media is going to continue to grow and as much as people think that it's just all about posting pictures for Aunt Millie to see while she's in Tallahassee, Florida, it's way more than that. You've got your own network. I tell people right now, if I could snap my fingers and get NBC, ABC, any of those affiliates to put you on their popular morning show, like how much would you pay me? Oh, I'd pay you 10 grand, 20 grand, 30 grand. Would you? Yeah, how come? Well, because I'd be on a national network and a big popular TV show. I go, but do you know if all the right people, the right audience is watching? I go, what if you can actually create your own network beyond at 24 hours and have the right audience? What if NBC let you do that? How the fuck would they let me do that? It's called Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, motherfucker. That's what that is, but people are still treating it like this place to go goof off on whereas I'm building multimillion-dollar industries. Like, we're building Strength Camp. You guys know Elliot Hulse? Yeah. Strength Camp. He's one of my coaching clients now. It's going to be the next fit-bodied boot camp but in his space. I helped build, I love kickboxing with Michael Pirella. He was a coaching client. We replicated the model there and it's all social media driven. We're not getting leads from entrepreneur and ink magazines anymore like franchises do. We're getting leads from Facebook by following the right people and attracting them into our business model. So more people need to start looking at these things as TV network channels and less as places to go goof off on or just to sell a supplement and get 10% commission on. What are some of the tips that you give to people with because I see a lot of mistakes in my opinion on Instagram. One of them in my opinion, I'd like to hear if you agree or disagree, is I view social media as a way for me to be able to connect to you and for you to kind of learn about who I am and my message, what I stand for. And I want to grow that with like-minded type of people. What I don't use it for is to market and sell my products. In fact, if you go through my personal Instagram, you don't see me pushing and selling that because I think it supports the rest of the business that we have right now. What's your thoughts on that and what are some of the mistakes that you see people making that are trying to build an Instagram following? The biggest mistake I see people making is they are not being their authentic and transparent selves. They're being in the entrepreneurial world. They're trying to be Gary Vaynerchuk and Andy Fersilla. In the fitness world, they're trying to be Joey Swole or what the fuck is her name, Paige Hathaway. Both wonderful human beings. But there's only one Joey Swole. There's only one Paige Hathaway. There's only one Jeremy Boudia. Be you. Be you. And the moment that I decided to be me and not a Gary Vaynerchuk or Andy Fersilla or Ed Milette is when my social media falling started to grow. Where I just started talking about, hey, I didn't take out a loan. I didn't have rich parents. I failed many times. Let me make a list of my failures instead of a list of my successes and wins. Let me show you every chink in my armor instead of showing you that my armor is impenetrable. Let me show you all the kryptonites that I have in my life that can weaken me. And the moment I started to do that, I was like, they're like, holy fuck, you're the real deal. Like you teach actionable stuff, not just focus on greatness and you will be great. What the fuck does that mean? Focus on lead generation. Convert those leads into paying clients. Keep them for a long haul. Ask for referrals, motherfucker. That's the real... I'll give you that kind of detail. Right? And then I'll give you the how-tos. That's much better than focus on greatness and you'll be great. What do you feel about some of the... I feel like there's a lot of this, especially now with Instagram and you name dropped a few of them. A lot of fluff around the motivation shit, man. It's just people just motivating, motivating, motivating. And I feel like motivation is so shortly. Wake up, be the best. You're awesome. Hard grind, like what? We can't get motivated from Instagram or from others. Motivation is just within. Like I've got this anger and this rage and this fire in my belly and the chip on my shoulder and I'm blessed to have that. And I will keep stoking that fire. I will tear more muscles to stoke that. You know what? I realized it in here. Maybe that's what I'm doing is I keep hurting myself through challenges and adversities. I just keep stoking, fanning that fire. Thank you. You guys just saved me a $185 session with Kevin. That's really what he... One day at the end of one of our sessions, by the way, he's like, hey, Baderos, because he's a horrible salesman, because he's a fucking therapist. And people... I always want to draw what he looks like. It's Einstein minus the eyebrows. So my therapist, Kevin, God bless him. If he listens to this, he's got no eyebrows. And the first four sessions you're just trying to find the eyebrows. The human face needs eyebrows. But one day he's just being awkward with me. I'm like... And he's handing me the receipt. It's tied to re-sign, right? Yeah. I go, Kevin, what's up? So my price is going up by $20. I go $20 a month a week. When? He goes, a session? Okay, great. Fantastic. I go, Kevin, $40, $50, $100. Like, you're helping me. You're helping a lot of people. No, no, no. The people calling for $20. I'm like, what am I doing giving business advice to my therapist? I'm here to get the help. $20 it is, Kevin. Like, I got to go now. Right? Like, times money. Yeah. But it took him like 20 minutes like the price is going up, you know? I don't know what we were talking about. I don't know. You got me into that story. That was a great story. You know what I'd like you to bring up? Because I think it'll create a very good discussion. You were, I think, on the flight over here listening to an episode that we just recently did where we scared the shit out of some kid who probably wants to... We shit on someone's stream. We shit on someone's stream, which those are the people you typically help. So there are ways to make money owning a gym. Yeah, well, let's first talk about what the question was. So somebody just recently, I don't know, asked us on one of our Q&As, you know, what was our advice for somebody who was just getting into the fitness industry and had dreams that owned their own gym one day and without getting into a long story about it, Sal, Justin and I, you know, nicely shit on that dream. Yeah, you guys even went on to say like Bradley Martin has his own gym, he's got over a million followers and I don't know if his gym's profitable. I don't know if his gym's profitable and lots of followers don't mean that your gym's gonna be profitable. Trust me. I know that for a fact because I've got clients who go, two million followers, I'm broke, as we talked about earlier. What do you have? A gym, a supplement line. It doesn't matter. It's always the leader. But yeah, I guess I'm young and it was at the 54-minute mark in case you guys want to go back and re-edit that. I'm not saying that. Wow. Well, no, I stand by what I say. This is why I want to have this discussion. Well, here, let me defend it for a second. So I've talked to a lot of trainers and people in fitness who want to do something or start a business and the first thing I do, because I was the opposite before, whenever someone would come into my gym and want to work for me, I found myself closing them on working for me on how great it is. And it didn't really work out that well because sometimes they get people who weren't that sure and then they come work for me and then I was like, why did I close that person to work here? So then I started talking people out of it and then the fucking really hardcore passionate people were the ones that stick around. And I'm wondering if that's where it comes from because now when I... Excuse me. When I... When I get that, I don't know. I got some on my throat. I think you almost died, man. Yeah, yeah. I have my own anxiety attack. Now when people talk to me like that, I do. I almost talk them out of it and then if they stick around, now we get to work. Yeah, what do you think about that? Well, I mean, here's what I think. That young man who sent in that question and said, hey, I think I want to open on my personal training gym. I'm a personal trainer, et cetera. From where we all come from, remember, I came from the LA Fitness World, right? Big box gyms, you're absolutely right. They're not there to serve. They're there to take your money and hope that you don't come in so that they can keep selling more memberships. Think about it. The big box gym that's in your town, whether it's 24-hour fitness, Equinox, LA Fitness, 10 years they've been there, they have 20,000 people. They should put a sign that says, we're full, can't come in. But 89% of gym members don't work out after 90 days, but you keep paying their memberships. That's the model, right? That's the model. Anyone who wants to start that model, don't do it. It's going to cost you millions and it's going to take a lot of time to build it out and you're probably not going to get money. On the flip side, we'll show you a boutique gym. Well, you can, but don't do the whole, let me buy a shit ton of equipment, go $200,000, $300,000 in debt. And I don't care if you're going to do your own boutique brand yourself, right? Or if it's going to be, let me invest into a orange theory type thing or a berries boot camp. That's a lot of treadmills you have to buy at $8,000 a piece. Now you're talking a $453,000 on average build out for an orange theory. Very true. Guess what? I'm not here to talk up Fit Body Boot Camp because you can start your own version of a Fit Body Boot Camp as long as you know how to sell and retain and ask for a referral. So those are the only four things you need. But you open up a 2,000 square foot place, light industrial or commercial. Your rent is about $2,200 to $2,500 to maybe $3,000 a month. You buy $13,000 of equipment, battle ropes, kettlebells, plyo boxes, pull-up bars, bands. You put carpet bonded foam on the floor from a gymnastics center, right? You buy that from Dallamar. So now you're 13, 14, maybe $15,000 in. Let's assume that you did a little fancy build out so you put a pallet wall up. And so now all in, you're probably $60,000 into a nice 22 to 2,500 square foot gym that you can do group training in, functional workouts, deliver results, sign people up at $147 to $197 a month, long 12-month programs that are auto debit or reoccurring payments, EFT Electronic Fund Transfer, and be the best at one thing. Just do fat loss or just do bodybuilding or just do functional training. And if you do that and start using social media, as we talked about earlier, a platform to use it as a network and position yourself as the leader in your community, be the Jillian Michaels in your community. Everyone just thinks that I have to have a $400,000 build out. No, you're starting upside down, man. You should be able to just max out two credit cards and be a gym owner and then learn leadership. You know, Maxwell Malt, not Maxwell Maltz, John Maxwell, right? Jocko Willings in his book with extreme ownership. And maybe when my book comes out, maybe they'll buy a man up. I don't know. But the point of this is it's leadership, it's marketing, it's building a good team, it's having, being focused on one niche, spending a little bit of money now and then using that money to build out a bigger, better gym in the future. I love how you weren't vague, by the way. I love how you were specific. Like, do this, buy this, buy that. It's going to cost you this much money. You don't get that much. You don't get that kind of advice normally. Normally, it's just really vague, you know. Now it's creating the turnkey sort of idea and model for, you know, somebody going into that, where I think the argument where we were presenting it was like, yeah, a franchise is going to have, you know, a more of a success rate in that direction because they've actually created the model for the formula. Why do you think the fail rate is so high? The other thing that I think, the other thing that I think that I challenge that, and I'm playing devil's advocate here, is that, you know, if you, this is my experience, and again, I want you to speak up if you disagree, is that, you know, at all times I was managing anywhere between 20 to 30 trainers that were on my staff. And if you worked for me at this big box gym that was spending $25 million a year in marketing and advertising, and you couldn't find your way to the top two or three trainers, thinking that you were going to go outside of a huge box like that and build your own, I've never seen it. I literally have not. When I do see them have success, they're always the ones that had a lot of success in a place like that. And even some of those fail because, you know, it's a different monster having a company who's providing all that, all those leads. You walk in a fucking 24 LA Fitness, there's a thousand people on the floor. Are you fucking kidding me? You walk out on the street and it's zero now. Now you've got to find out how to get a thousand people in front of you every day that you were used to. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Is it zero or is it now 50,000 people in the community? You're right. And this is like the shoe salesman that went to an island where they were all, what do you call it? They're all villagers, I guess, or whatever. Maybe they went to some uninhabited place where there was, well, it can't be uninhabited, an island where there's a whole bunch of tribal people, no shoes, right? He calls up the company, he goes, oh my God, these guys are villagers. They're tribal, they don't wear shoes. Send me back. So they send the other sales rep in. He goes, holy fuck, send all the shoes you have. These motherfuckers have no shoes. I'm gonna sell every motherfucker a shoe. So it's the mindset that you go into it with. So when I was in the LA Fitness, I'm like, fuck, man, the LA Fitness only signed up 300 members this month. And I did the math at $400 per new member because that's the math that we used in LA Fitness. $400 per new member. Here's how much money I'm gonna make. Fuck, that's not the commissions I want. These guys are neutering the amount of income that I got up my own gym because now I live in a town of 53,000 people, I got 53,000 prospects. Well, I later realized those are 53,000 suspects, but what can I do to make them into prospects? Right? Lead Generate. Right? Boxes, lead generation boxes at the local pizza store and supplement store and taco shack, et cetera. Hey, if you want to lose weight and tell me how much fat you want to lose, I'll give you free week of personal training. You might win the drawing. So I'd start lead generating before there was email and social media and all that stuff. God, it's so funny. Right? We've all done that in here, right? Yeah. There were a key component of lead generation. I don't think anybody does those anymore. No, no. Well, now you're not fishing with lead boxes. You're fishing with, you know, click funnel ads and I mean, dude, we've got this one promotion in FitBody Bootcamp called Drop Pounds Get Paid. It's a six-week program for 300 bucks and when you lose the 20 pounds, we give you your $300 back. Oh, wow. Or we'll double the $300 and apply it towards the 12-month program. So we get two to 300 people sign up on that program when we promote it for one of our FitBody locations and then about 50% stay. So I mean, look at the big conversion rate. Oh, that's huge. But now can they retain? So that's the other formula. Retention results, right? And then referrals, the 3Rs, retention results, referrals. And these are the things that trainers don't know, haven't learned, ASM, no one's fucking taught us this stuff. So we go open up a gym, go into debt and then have a lot. Will that ever happen? I mean, are you open to that for a moment? They go, hey, we want to license your stuff and put it into our certifications. I will go, here you go. License it. License it from me. I'm always open, but they always want to sell more level one, level two, functional this and posterior. Why do you think there's such a high fail rate for gyms? You think it's because guys go in there opening a gym like, I like to work out. So I'm going to open a gym and then that's it. I like to work out. I give my clients in 24-hour fitness or LA Fitness amazing results. Therefore I'll be really good on my own. And the big box gym is the bad guy. They forget as much as I hated the big box gyms, those are the trenches and I'm eternally grateful for them giving me the sales training they gave me, putting the pressure on me like they did. But again, it's a reframe. They put so much pressure on me. I look at it as, thank God they put that pressure on me so that I could learn and ask what I'm like. Prepares you. Yeah, exactly. Going into battle without a rifle. What the fuck? So they go into battle without a rifle and they go, oh, what happened? What a niche. What a niche is. And you certainly don't know how to deliver results and by the way, results are not just fat loss. Results come from confidence. See, most people think like trainers. You got to think like a coach. When you can become turn from a trainer to a coach. In other words, a trainer knows where the muscle originates and inserts. A coach knows, man, you know what? Sal doesn't look like he slept a lot today. How can I get maximum calorie burn and effort from him today and then get him to come in tomorrow for another day. A coach knows how to cajole you into getting a better workout. A trainer just knows how to program a workout and hope that you follow it and stick to it. So there's coaching. So results is showing them. Results is them coming in. Results is them sticking to the program. The confidence, the self-esteem, self-image. Results is getting referrals. No one teaches that stuff and until a trainer is like almost broke and they do that Google search to find my YouTube videos or my blogs, that's the only way they find me. I need them to find me in the certification for my videos. That's why I was saying that I think that going through a big box gym is so invaluable for somebody who's just getting into the fitness industry for those reasons because there's just not a lot of resources and places that you're going to find. And even the ones that do sometimes still don't even make the connection. I don't know how many conversations I had with trainers on their way out the door and saying, hey, Adam, thanks for the two years of training and teaching me how to be a great trainer. I'm going to go do this on my own. I'm going to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm learning in the morning and developing leaders. And so I was OK with them even though that was going to make my job challenging and I had to find another one, I like that. I like developing them, seeing them go off and succeed, but many times they wouldn't. And many times they wouldn't because they didn't realize what they were getting inside that facility. And I don't think there's a lot of people that talk about that. And I too remember being a trainer starting and thinking that the end goal was having my own gym but running just one gym and even the ones that make it, right. We talked about CrossFit CrossFit, you know, it's a great model of a low entry level to get in and start doing it and they pay they charge EFT You know 75 grand a year 50, you know Maybe a hundred if you're fucking really good at it and you're working six seven days a week and you're in there grinding like crazy And then maybe you get that model running 70 to 100 so you think I'm gonna open a second one Oh, there's a new motherfucking monster for you Right, it's one thing to build your own little box that you're in and that you're a great if you don't have systems Man, you're screwed. That's it. I look at systems like an acronym and systems to me stand for save yourself time effort and money and People forget to replicate themselves through other humans, right? It's like how many times you get that email? How much do you charge and every time you retype that email? You know, there's something called canned response in Google in Gmail. You've typed that email out once Save it in canned response and now you can have staff deploy that instead of you having to retype it every time Right same with how do you answer a phone? There's one of the top 20 questions you get over the phone Write that down record it and teach it and this is the stuff that this is why franchise have a high success rate because we just Systemized the fuck out of everything because a federal trade commission makes us because if we have a high failure rate like Quiznos Which is why it's going out of business. They can't sell any more franchises I would not be allowed to sell more franchises if I have a high failure rate So fit by the boot camps can't fail. We only have a 2% failure rate unlike the rest of the industry Which is only a 2% fellow person. How did we not cover that? Holy shit? Yeah, wow now, okay, so at one point you were 640 upside down you said earlier, yeah, and I'm assuming that you didn't have a 2% fail rate at that time or did you even at that time? We had a massive failure rate because we were teaching our owners here go do this run this Facebook ad Well, we don't know if they ran it We don't know if Facebook stopped that ad and they didn't try again because they don't have the emotional resilience We want them to have so it went from go do it yourself to done for you So now we have an in-house marketing campaigns that we run for them. We drive the leads to them We teach them how to do the selling and coaching and marketing and retention and all that stuff It's all as much done for you as possible now if we can go there and train their clients for them We would obviously we can't but we drive the leads for them help them sign their lease Negotiate their lease to build out the equipment Everything you have a coach a business coach step-by-step with you throughout the entire process We have some called the RSG program ready gets that go when you become a franchisee So that you don't fuck it up and open up a 6,000 square foot location when you only need 2,500 square feet And all those things help contribute to the success factor So what was okay your 640 and debt your fail rate is much higher. What did that transition look like? I mean how long did the transition look like this it took us three years to start breaking even Right, so in 2011 we were six hundred forty thousand dollars in debt I was a horrible leader had a business partner who I didn't share a vision with We had a very tense relationship and I had five employees who at best at best I was lucky if they showed up on time and I was really lucky if they Clocked out at five o'clock and not four forty five And this is a reality man. I was a horrible leader So as my leadership changed around 2013 14 the business began to change as I parted ways With my business partner and as I started hiring team members and Training them to become team members instead of employees employees clock in clock in a little late clock out a little early Do the bare minimum to maintain employment a team They go hey, that's our opponent. We're a unified team with one unified outcome, which is to win So I have team members right so for example if after this I'm going to Arizona But let's say I was with the family But if I was going to Arizona to go film something everything that Ed there captures here Right, I've got a videographer with me for those listening everything that he captures He's gonna go and edit while the other videographer would meet me in the airport And we've done this before Jonathan would meet me at the airport then we'd fly out to Actually st. Louis we went to st. Louis and he so I've got a team members who don't give a fuck if it's a weekend They don't like they are as determined to have chips on their shoulders I hire people who are underdogs now and I train them to become fighter jets and we give them a rope and We go build a ladder because if you don't you're gonna build a noose and hang yourself And you can ask it right now or after this like I have high performance coaching days for my team members Not just the stuff that I teach my coaching clients who pay me 50 G's I teach them because I need them to become the tip of the spear and Videography and operations and sales and marketing and compliance Right, and so we started creating these really badass systems And that allowed our success rate to go through the roof and we started raising our price franchise price went from $5,000 buy-and-fee to $25,000 buy-and-fee and by the way the more people pay the more they pay attention And so we're getting better qualified owners on board. They're not serious. Yeah, you know that right? Yeah Yeah, I remember charging more as a personal trainer and getting clients that were more serious. Absolutely When we interviewed Ben Pekolsky This was something I kind of dug in on him a little bit and you know I picked up on it real quick because he had said some things real similar to you And I know stuff that I challenge was challenged with was when you're kind of the underdog guy And you've got this chip on your shoulder a lot of your success has been on your own fight your own You've learned to be successful me. I could get into a I could go into any gym I don't care if it it took 20 trainers around that facility I'll get the whole fucking goal by myself boom and if you think if you and you either run with me or you get ran Over and so much of my success was that way now when I started to have to scale on I had multiple Businesses that I was running at one time and all these different employees and different goals and visions I fucking was failing all over the place seems like I was just kind of plugging holes everywhere and it really Took me developing my leadership skills What would you say is that the single best advice for someone like that? And I'm assuming you're someone who went through this similar transition where you probably kicked fucking ass by yourself for so long But then at one point you got to learn to run 40 fucking employees Right, what did that look like and what is some of the best advice you've had that looks scary because I just figured Gee everybody else will be as motivated as I am. They know we have to sell friend. Yeah, I know I signed the we all think everybody right I signed the front of the check Of course, I'm gonna be more motivated. They signed the back of the check. They're not as motivated, right? That's just a reality. My name is on the lease their name is not on the lease I have more to lose. They don't have as much to lose, but it's silly and I never thought of that I just figured I'm gonna pay you you're gonna work as hard as I do That wasn't the exchange that was happening. We just instinctively look for how can I cut corners? It's just a human way But as a leader I later learned that I have to set expectations and then maintain those expectations And then there has to be consequences if the expectations aren't met Consequences can only happen if we're willing to openly communicate instead of have this passive aggressive relationship where you didn't do What I wanted or you showed up five minutes late instead of me actually giving you feedback on it Me being huffy and puffy with you and therefore you're like, what the fuck is up with Pedro's? He's obviously on edge. So fuck it. I'm gonna work less effectively instead of more effectively, right? So communication become a better communicator be more decisive I make faster better decisions these days because like anything else decision-making is a muscle and you can improve it people go How do I make those big decisions really? Well start with the little decisions like if you and your honey are gonna go on a date night tonight Don't go. Oh, where do you want it? Where do you want it? Should we see a movie first or dinner first make a decision? We're hey, honey We're having sushi at eight o'clock and then we're gonna go see the Expendables after this because I'm a Sylvester Stallone fan. Okay, and if she has a problem with it She'll tell you and then I don't want sushi gives me diarrhea. So I'm gonna have steak or whatever, right? I've got a twisted sense of humor. So yeah, it would be the wife who would have the diarrhea So but but that's a small decision or you're in a group of friends Hey guys, who's gonna call the lift or the uber fuck it. I'm gonna call the lift an uber I'm gonna call it do it someone do it make all the little decisions your subconscious mind doesn't know That you're making a little decision or a big decision. It just goes. He's a decisive motherfucker So when big decisions come up, you're still making decisions fast. Am I gonna wear a hat today? Am I not gonna wear a hat make a decision don't him and ha take forever Just make a decision tomorrow's another day. You can wear a different hat or no hat, right? But it's so it's great communication skills. It's being open to give and take feedback It's being decisive having clarity of vision. I know I want 2,500 fit-by-to-boot camp locations by the year 2020 With less than 1,000 owners That means each owner has to have two to three fit-by-to-boot camp locations because I don't want to serve a lot of owners Which means I have to have a big bloated Team sure right? I want a small team of 40 or 50 team members serving a thousand owners whom 2500 locations Collectively and I know the date that I want to buy and I know the path that we used a week to get there Which is Facebook Instagram YouTube those are my marketing platforms and so clarity of vision is very important And finally you have to develop a team for you to develop a team You have to be a want to leader not a half to leader so I'll finish off with that I want to leader is someone that for example if I'm working for you guys I want to make you happy. I want to please you. I have to leader is oh fuck if I don't vacuum Sal's gonna get upset and get mad at me. So right I Have to be in a place where I don't want to let you down Instead of I fear you so many people Run with the iron fist right because they're passive aggressive They hold it in hold it and hold it in an emotionally go off at an employee and the employees now walking on eggshells Do I have the dr. Jekyll Sal or do I have the mr. Hyde Sal? Right, so so all those things matter, but you have to develop your leadership muscles You can't just overnight. It's not a light switch It's a dimmer switch and it took me three and a half years to develop those muscles How much are you enjoying the podcast space? Man, I am really digging it. I was a little awkward at first I spoke very fast when Craig and I did our first maybe dozen or so podcasts Like anything else I went right back to just black giving content. Yeah, I'm like wait a minute This is just like when I'm on stage, you know, it's let me take my time I've got all the time in the world we can edit out to whatever minutes we need it to be and Soon as I got comfortable went back to you know point story metaphor. It was awesome But it was pretty nerve-racking man like oh man, we're on camera. What's gonna happen with this? I Am enjoying it the feedback that we're getting is cool You finding it there I find it therapeutic as hell It's one of the most therapeutic things I've ever done the one that Craig and I do is very like we're gonna Talk about this one specific topic. So there is none of this stuff Which is why the the BK podcast that I'm gonna do at the my gym that I'm opening up BK strength It's gonna be very much like what you guys are doing here We're gonna work out together and we're gonna film and audio record the whole workout And they're gonna finish off in our lobby as we're eating a high-protein meal like final thoughts And it'll just be people who fascinate and interest me from high-performance entrepreneurs to world-class athletes or Navy SEAL friends that I have or whatever. Yeah, do you have a favorite podcast that you've done so far? A favorite podcast that I've done so far. Yeah, good interview question any good Yeah, the the model health show because Shawn just somehow He's a great listener. He doesn't wait to talk and I've been you know I've been watching right like because I'm trying to get into the podcast space myself He's a great listener. He doesn't wait to talk the ones that I don't like so much Lewis house great listener asks wonderful questions As my experience here with you guys amazing I'm not just saying that honestly. I would be very honest with you guys It's it's four dudes bantering and you wait to you listen. You don't just wait to talk The ones that I dislike was when you're coming up at the point and then the host is like, yeah Yeah, yeah, that's right. And then they go off on our tangents. I'm like, why why did you ask me to bear shift gears? Yeah, or they're always having a dick measuring contest with you on the phone on the podcast or whatever. Why are we on? Okay, if you're better than me then why are we here? Yeah So I've learned a lot I've learned a lot of what not to do and I've learned a lot of just how to chill like what you guys are doing here Which is why I asked it like hey remember the scene. This is how I want the BK podcast to be like The one that I do with Craig, you know, we're standing up. We're looking at the cameras We're teaching for 18 minutes and that's it, you know, totally different Totally different like this vibe is something that I want to do for my own personal podcast And I've learned a lot just watching you guys and listening to your podcast The best conversations are when everybody's when everybody's relaxed and they feel like they could just open up and the other thing that we learned Jordan Harbinger highly recommend you listen to his podcast He used to be the host of the art of charm now He has a Jordan Harbinger show and he said something that was just recently we had him on and we sucked at interviewing for a long time We were really good by ourselves as soon as we brought someone else in on the show It was like we lost our chemistry and it became like it became like a job interview like okay question one question two It just wasn't good and we slowly started getting better and then Jordan said something else fast And he said you know cuz I asked him I said God sometimes I find it hard to ask The tough questions because I want to be yeah cuz I want to be respectful like it's a guest It's like they're in my house like I don't want to ask this this guy about you know You know why he cheated on his wife or you know the drugs he's used or that kind of stuff Because it feels disrespectful and he says you're not doing the show for him You doing the show for your audience and right away. I was like click like a like a light switch went off and I was like Oh shit like if I have a question. I'm just gonna ask it and if the person gets pissed off Well, we got a viral gorilla in the room Sal pisses off bedrooms We're posting that shit Anybody you have your eye on in the fitness industry that you're not working with that you see in your thinking Oh shit, this is this is kind of interesting. Oh good question You know, I really wish a lot. There's no one specific the the fitness motivation influencers That have half a million or more followers are the ones that I have my eyes on because I know what opportunity there The opportunity and I know I just need to peel back a few layers and boom and teach them a few things I teach them to think bigger act bigger get more disciplined and organized. I get it It's also I don't know how much money Simon Panda makes or or any of those guys, right? So I'm not saying like but I look at what Simon's doing You know pushing ebooks and digital programs. That's fantastic. Like how do we think bigger scale? Multiply franchise license, right? Let's go there. Let's go there Let's just explore those things because again it goes back to being curious curiosity Let's be curious about what are the things you have in your wheelhouse, but it again It takes maybe they have a huge following, but if they're dim bulb, I can't help them So I don't know them because I just see them like everyone else does on Instagram But I'd like to get a whole room of them in front of me and then start asking a lot of questions and then saying get out Get out get out get out and then everyone who stays Let me work with you for three years and watch what happens. Is there a way you're targeting these guys right now I'm not I just wait for them tall to come to me. I don't target anybody Okay, anybody you've made a name for yourself by now like if you're not and you probably don't want somebody that you Have to go chase anyway. I want them. They're not ready Yeah, like Pukowski Del Monte Jason Phillips all these guys send me so many great coaching clients Because they talk me up to them and that's how I want people to come to me Versus like hey Baderus is trying to some of his coaching program his name dropping But I don't know if I want to work with him. I think if the resistance wall is up I don't want to deal with them. I'm in a place in my life. I make a ton of money I don't have to yeah, it's you know, I'm not gonna lie I had heard about you in the industry wasn't you know, there's so many of these like hype You know motivational speaker type people. I knew nothing about you So I can I thought maybe you were like one of them Then we heard a lot of good things about you from mutual friends and I'm glad You know, we had we had you on the show definitely a lot way more substance than your those You know motivational, you know kind of rah-rah raw type speakers like lots of substance you get very specific I really appreciate that in our space because I don't think a lot of people are doing that Thank you man, that's a lot true. Yeah raw truth man. Absolutely. Yeah, and thanks for coming on the show man Thank you. I appreciate it. 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