Are You Insane to Open a Gym?

Insane behavior

• Almost all small businesses are born into existence because of some kind of insane behavior from the founder/owner
• Be proud of the fact that you took the risk
• When you’re in your 30s and onward, it’s so much harder to take these leaps
• Don’t forget what got you started and try to find insane behaviors to keep the fire alive
  

“I own and operate a gym.” That was always my answer to the often asked, “What do you do for work?” whenever I met someone new. There was an immense amount of pride in those words. I knew that I was fortunate to work for myself, and my business made a tangible difference in the lives of every person who walked through my doors. Upon hearing my response, the reactions usually included something about how cool it must be to run your own business or a joke about wearing sweatpants to work every day. What I didn’t comprehend at the time was how odd my lifestyle and career choice must have looked to someone who has not experienced the roller coaster ride of running a small business. After chewing on this thought for a while, I wanted to put together some thoughts for those of you who are either running a business currently or have plans to open a business in the near future.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that almost all small businesses are born into existence because of some kind of insane behavior from the founder or owner. I don’t mean pathologically insane behavior, but rather behavior that is very much counter to the comfort of working for an established company that delivers paychecks every two weeks like clockwork and has a 401k match. I opened my gym when I was 24 years old. I had a clear mission to create a gym that served my community and I thought I’d be owning or operating gyms in some form or fashion for the rest of my career. Some may call that naive, and they might be right. What was beautiful about that sentiment is how pure it was. I distinctly remember running into another small business owner I was friends with a couple months after opening my gym. We were chatting about how things were going and I remember uttering the words, “I have yet to wake up and feel like I’m going to work.” This produced a small chuckle from the gentleman I was chatting with. But it was his response that sticks with me to this day a decade later: “Don’t worry, one day it will.” I thought he was a moron and that could never be the case because I’m a special snowflake that will never tire of the daily whirlwind of owning your own business.

What I want to tease out from the exchange I just mentioned is how important the “naivety” I had at this stage of my life. I use quotes around the word naivety because I struggle to think of a better way to describe that state of mind. Maybe it’s ignorance? Maybe hubris? Or maybe a delightful combination of all 3. Putting that thought aside though, I think it’s massively important to understand that I would not have, possibly even could not have, opened a business without that mindset. There’s this knife's edge of confidence and ignorance that has to drive someone to open a business, let alone a gym. Somewhere along that knife's edge is the insane behavior that leads you to think that you can take what you’ve created in your daydreams and make it a reality. I don’t think it can be understated how crucial this is to understand. Not only do you need to understand it, but you need to fight with everything you’ve got to stay on that knife’s edge. It’s a constant battle trying to avoid sliding into repetition and the often mundane reality that is forced upon you from the pressures of life.

I think a fantastic example of this balance of the rational vs irrational is how most young men and women begin their journey with strength training. You don’t have any real technical prowess when it comes to writing programs and you definitely don’t understand how to create the desired adaptations you’re looking for with your training. You’ll do things like massive drop sets where you do max rep bicep curls starting at the 40lb dumbbells (let’s be real, it was basically a back extension with an elbow bend) and run all the down to the 5lbers. Maybe you benched 5 days a week or worked up to a 1RM every single time you trained. While those workouts were objectively silly, they were important in your growth as you strove to learn more about training principles. They didn’t need to be perfect workouts. You just enjoyed the work. One could make the argument that since you did enjoy those grizzly workouts that you actually did get a great training response because you pushed yourself. As you learned more about sound training principles, you likely ditched some of those 150 rep drop sets and used a periodized approach to improving your maxes. This doesn’t mean that every training session has to be a perfect sequence of optimized exercises though. There is room to experiment and do things that you won’t find in the NSCA study guide for your CSCS. Finding the balance of best-practices and the irrational behavior I have been talking about is where I think success truly lies.

If we want to draw parallels between the example above and owning your business, I don’t think you need to squint to see them. When you first started out, you were likely a one-man shop. You were the janitor, head coach, salesman, and marketing director all while you were responsible for steering the business towards success. Oftentimes, you assume all of those roles by necessity since you don’t have the cash flow to hire specialists for all of these roles. If you were fortunate enough to have a large financial backing, maybe you did hire specialists from day 1, but you likely wore a lot of hats that you probably had no business wearing. You probably worked more hours in a week than any sane person would recommend. If you had a website, you probably built it yourself and it was almost certainly slapped together with duct tape and super glue. But if you skipped all of those painful steps, you never would have learned the ins and outs of operating your business. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for you to perform all of the jobs for your business for the entirety of its existence, but there is an immeasurable amount of lessons learned during that period where you were irrationally stretched beyond your limits. Where the magic lies is understanding how you can continue to keep that naive or irrational edge so you can not only continue to enjoy your work but you can also weather the inevitable storms in your path.

Let’s play the opposite side out for a minute. Let’s say that opening a business does not require a trail of irrational behavior, but rather creating a business from scratch requires a calculated approach and mindset rooted in the realities of modern life. What happens if you struggle to get investment from a bank or potential partner? What happens when you can’t find the perfect location with the perfect layout and square footage? What about hiring your first employee that’s crazy enough to sign on to work for you? Going back to the example of strength training, what happens if you only get 5 hours of sleep? What if you have a 12 hour day on the coaching floor ahead of you? Do you completely neuter the training you had planned for the day to avoid “overtraining?” There will always be hurdles and potentially cataclysmic events that might require a resolve that isn’t rooted in reality at times. Most of the issues you face in the first stages of your business would be the final nail in the coffin for the rational person. For you, the one that is still doing it or wanting to do it, you don’t even think of what could happen if it doesn’t work out. You trust yourself to work it out and are willing to put in massive amounts of effort to will your idea into existence.

What I would urge you to do is cherish this irrational existence that you live. As a 33 year old with two young kids that is 3 years removed from owning a gym, I would be terrified to open a business at this stage of my life. My exuberant, blindly optimistic 24 year old self has been calloused into someone that is only thinking of the downside. I look back on my younger self and wonder how the heck I even thought I could do it. But in that very thought lies the magic: it didn’t matter if I had the skills or the know-how. The fact that I believed I did have the ability to run a business, or at least believed I could learn how to, is why I was able to do it for almost 9 years. Through the birth of my two children, a worldwide pandemic, staff turnover, and a myriad of other snags, I maintained that my business would survive. Whether it survived through sheer will-power or through sharp business acumen didn’t matter. These just felt like normal problems that I could overcome and I didn’t need to think of how I could plan my exit.

Age isn’t just a number. There’s so much more to the aging process. It’s experience, it’s scar tissue, it’s wisdom, and hopefully it’s filled with successes. As you carry on with your life and your small business continues to operate, I hope that you reflect on where you came from. I hope you can see the irrational behavior that lead you to where you are and appreciate that part of yourself. Keep looking for the next irrational choice that would make a saner person's knees shake. Stack all of the lessons you have learned or will learn and marry that experience with the same naivety you had when you first hatched your business idea. Find that same fire that drove you to work 12 hour days and find solutions to problems that seemed too large to tackle. Stay crazy and I hope that you never wake up feeling like you have to go to work.