100 Starting Strength gyms in 5 years

[olekto]

I guess some of you have seen it: https://startingstrength.com/article/10 ... in-5-years

Is there a market for this in US? I don't have much insight into the gym business, but it does not seem to be an area where there is much room for new businesses.

And it will not be cheap. "Gym memberships will be priced at a premium. The cost will be less than hiring a Starting Strength Coach for individual coaching on a regular basis, but considerably more than a standard fitness industry gym membership." What kind of demographic can and will use this?

[strega]

" What kind of demographic can and will use this?

People that don't know any better but that will change.

I wonder what's going to happen to all the existing gyms that have a relationship with Rip.
They are not part of the franchise model so we'll they have to roll over or be kicked out?

[olekto]

I wonder what's going to happen to all the existing gyms that have a relationship with Rip.
They are not part of the franchise model so we'll they have to roll over or be kicked out?

The will continue as far as I can see: "The Starting Strength Affiliate Gym program will continue as it is. Not every market will qualify for a Starting Strength Gym. For example, Wichita Falls Athletic Club – A Starting Strength Affiliate Gym will remain an affiliate, because the North Texas market is too small to support the Starting Strength Gym franchise model. Smaller markets will continue to be served by the Affiliate program, and major markets can look for the logo in a prime location."

[hsilman]

and are known as the most important books on barbell training ever written.

In the meantime, and with a little help from us, barbell training exploded

We have the most effective strength program in the world

And even though 24 Hour Fitness and other globo-gym chains have replaced some of their less useful floor space with Crossfit-style rigs and barbells, no national fitness brand has brought a legitimate strength training program to the market.

Except for.....Crossfit? Which is what brought "Starting Strength" to the market in the first place...

Not to mention being the venue in which the vast, vast majority of "SSCs" practice.

[strega]

The will continue as far as I can see: "The Starting Strength Affiliate Gym program will continue as it is. Not every market will qualify for a Starting Strength Gym. For example, Wichita Falls Athletic Club – A Starting Strength Affiliate Gym will remain an affiliate, because the North Texas market is too small to support the Starting Strength Gym franchise model. Smaller markets will continue to be served by the Affiliate program, and major markets can look for the logo in a prime location."

So how's that going to work. He has an affiliate in Baltimore and one right outside of Baltimore.
If I come by with franchise money and say "give me Baltimore" he's going to say "?"

[Murelli]

and are known as the most important books on barbell training ever written.

In the meantime, and with a little help from us, barbell training exploded

We have the most effective strength program in the world

And even though 24 Hour Fitness and other globo-gym chains have replaced some of their less useful floor space with Crossfit-style rigs and barbells, no national fitness brand has brought a legitimate strength training program to the market.

Except for.....Crossfit? Which is what brought "Starting Strength" to the market in the first place...

Not to mention being the venue in which the vast, vast majority of "SSCs" practice.

I see it as my responsability to turn shitty threads into better off topic directions. So here it goes:

Whatever Charlie wrote when he was in Crossfit is better than anything he wrote afterwards.

[Chebass88]

It is a neat concept, and I hope a lot of people are exposed to some barbell training as a result. It might be a good way to meet up with an SSC for coaching in the StSt methods, and it might be fun to lift among other folks doing the same style of programming.

Overall, the StSt Gym model is selling a perception and an idea. The value added here would be the coaching, as it is incredibly clear that the StSt program can be done in any gym, anywhere.

Rip spends a paragraph discussing how something might not be allowed at an LA Fitness, including a long list of official-sounding positions that would allegedly have to opine on the matter. Nonsense. Whenever I travel for work, I go to whatever commercial gym is nearby, and have been to several LA Fitness gyms, in various locations. I pay the daily drop-in fee, and THAT IS IT. No sales pitch, no programming recommendations. The only "rule" that ever stuck out to me was prohibition of chalk. And since it is their facility, I carry my trusty Ironmind straps with me and use them when I need to row or deadlift. Or I plan my training accordingly, so I can deadlift at home. The equipment isn't always ideal (completely worn bars), but a barbell & some plates means I'm lifting.

NO ONE GIVES A FLYING FUCK WHAT YOU DO AT LA FITNESS. The biggest impediment to doing StSt LP or Texas Method is the "necessity" to occupy a squat rack for an hour, while using 8-10 minute rests (a dick move, in my opinion). However, this is more of a courtesy to other people who might have things to do with their own lives rather than a prohibition of a specific program. Then again, if you MUST spend 40 minutes with your thumb up your ass, you can invite other people to "work in", and spend the 10 minutes swapping plates around. If your conditioning is SO incredibly piss poor that this is egregious - that's a different story. The same can be said about every other commercial gym I've ever been in.

Then again, LA Fitness (and the equivalent) is not in the business of selling PROGRAMS, just access to equipment.

[chrisd]

Whatever Charlie wrote when he was in Crossfit is better than anything he wrote afterwards.

See, there's the thing. That original books had more than one author. So how much did Charlie write ? Lots of words maybe, but actual content ?

[mgil]

If current SSCs aren’t really working at full time capacity and the larger markets have coverage, I don’t see this as a solid business model.

4-year later edit…

viewtopic.php?p=158107#p158107

Direct link to someone that looked into the franchise documents.

[hsilman]

If it wasn't Rip, I'd wish them the best of luck. I think if there was a market for the franchise model, we would have seen it already. Despite Rip's protest that everyone else does it wrong, we all have or do train at "black iron gyms". If expansion was profitable, it would have happened.

Of course, this could just be Rip's rhetoric. They seem to have a smart guy on the business side, though maybe anyone who would take whatever they are paying him may be the smartest guy in the room, no matter if the product is viable or not.

[mbasic]

If it wasn't Rip, I'd wish them the best of luck. I think if there was a market for the franchise model, we would have seen it already. Despite Rip's protest that everyone else does it wrong, we all have or do train at "black iron gyms". If expansion was profitable, it would have happened.

Of course, this could just be Rip's rhetoric. They seem to have a smart guy on the business side, though maybe anyone who would take whatever they are paying him may be the smartest guy in the room, no matter if the product is viable or not.

The real goal to might be to get like 20 gyms underway, make it appear sustainable/profitable, then sell out to some investor group or something.

If Rip & Reynolds are serious, they will basically be competing with quite a few Crossfit gyms who have figured things out: i.e. the one's who have abandoned XfitHQ programming, have people lift heavy weights with a consistent program and do simple conditioning/HIIT as a secondary thing.
There's a few of these around here already.

About the only market that they could tap is like in a GreySteel model, or PT capacity.
Marketing to 50-85 year olds who don't want to go to a trendy globo gym with all those hit fit young bucks/chicks parading around....
....kinda like a geriatric Planet Fitness purgatory thing ... with barbells and eternal resets of SSLP.
That would "take", but at a much more still a modest level / less volume.

[MPhelps]

There's no way Rip wrote that article. Sounds like Reynolds ghost wrote that thing and multiplied all of the book sale numbers by 10.

[KyleSchuant]

If current SSCs aren’t really working at full time capacity and the larger markets have coverage, I don’t see this as a solid business model.

The seminar tests your ability to coach the lifts according to The Model. It doesn't mean you know how to build a community or a business. Meanwhile some fucktard with a bosu ball is raking it in. This is Tate's Clueless Trainer Paradox. If you walk around a globogym saying, "you gotta squat or you're a pussy" then the soccer mums put in a complaint about you. The personal comes before the trainer, and most people who call themselves a "coach" are hopeless at the "personal" part.

Given this is obviously Reynolds' idea, it's good to look at what he's previously said and done.

More than anything, I’m proud of our style of training. Our training is simple, hard, and effective. We have outstanding customer service and our gym is impeccably clean. Those qualities seem so simple, but they’re not. A lot of gyms have great training but are in shithole locations that are dirty—and that’s who we were too, at one point—and some people want that and love it. But when you get heat, A/C, and locker rooms, it’s amazing the people who come out of the woodwork to join. The training we had before and the training we have now is exactly the same, but now we have around 900 members instead of 60.

As HSilman noted, we already have lots of black iron gyms. But they're mostly pretty grungy, death metal is playing, and the owners are grumpy and sweaty and throw you out for not squatting. And nobody wants to go to the toilet after a sweaty 300lb powerlifter has been in there. Adding in customer service and cleanliness would make a big difference.

Now, whether it's a big enough difference to make a place wildly profitable, I don't know. But a guy who built a gym from 60 people in a dusty garage to 900 people in 14,000 square feet might know.

[mbasic]

What they should do, but they won't .... is sell it like those fat-people gyms ...where they kick the person out of the gym once they've lost a considerable amount of weight, and have learned how to lift, exercise, and eat on their own.

Kinda like Kwai Chang Caine ..."It is time for you to leave".

Narrative should/would be like this:
"look, in 3 months we are so good (coaching) we should have you squatting 315 3x5, Benching 225 1x5 and your technique should be rock solid, your LP over, and you understand strength training now....you don't NEED to pay us $250 / month anymore. We taught you to fish. Go now. If we haven't done this by now, we either suck and/or you suck and we're just NOT going to keep taking your money...so GTFO and let us get on with helping other people."

[Hanley]

you don't NEED to pay us $250 / month anymore

That's actually a good idea (rates that get reduced with training time at the gym) [pauses, considers].

[Monoides]

If current SSCs aren’t really working at full time capacity and the larger markets have coverage, I don’t see this as a solid business model.

The other problem is that some businesses just don't scale very well at all. They're natural cottage industries.

Even if we assume that the demand is there and there's just a matching problem due to logistical complexity, I'd predict that you'd rapidly run into a wall of exponentially increasing costs when it comes to enforcing compliance.

Gyms and especially coaching/training gyms are a natural cottage industry. They appeal to a fairly small segment of the market, and they require quite intensive involvement from highly skilled people. Those highly skilled people may not have the time resources or location advantage to maximise their own productivity (i.e. see as many clients as they can at full market value) but that's a limitation that you couldn't work around until very recently.

@KyleSchuant "Now, whether it's a big enough difference to make a place wildly profitable, I don't know. But a guy who built a gym from 60 people in a dusty garage to 900 people in 14,000 square feet might know."

He might know how to do it in one gym. Can he make that scale? Can he make 100 or even 5 gyms do it without running into a wall of exponentially increasing overhead?

SSOC seems like a fairly smart idea in that regard, in that it's trying to match the spare capacity of some of these guys with the demand that isn't/can't currently be met. HOWEVER, from a classical marketing 4Ps standpoint (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) standpoint, they've shown that at least 2 of those Ps are fucked. The Product is still down to the skill of the individual coach rather than the brand itself, and therefore can't be 100% reliable. The Price is pretty screwy as well in a lot of ways (as seen from their constant 'sales'.) Place in a digital business is basically the UX you provide for your customers, so they're limited to what their web developers can do/whatever software they can afford. And Promotion is... well.

When you translate it to franchise, the Place aspect opens up a bit, but both Place and Product bit become even trickier to enforce unless there's an SSC Compliance Squad frequently checking up on the gyms to ensure (a) a coherent brand experience across locations and (b) a parity of quality across locations. You'd either need people on the road, or local 'control centres' to do this, with a clearly defined policy for what is/isn't a breach of compliance, along with a procedure for redressing it.

Very quickly, you end up with a really, really big overhead. If you skimp on that overhead, you end up with members of the group that are particularly good, and which you therefore have to allow a greater degree of independence because you don't want to be fucking with their formula too much because their success is subsidising the laggards. Those can pose a threat of their own if they end up pulling a Bay Strength, which means in the long term you either keep people on a fairly short leash (at a huge cost to the parent organisation in terms of producing the necessary marketing/fitout collateral etcetcetc on top of enforcing compliance) or you face a crisis for the business in the medium to long term.

You also need a reliable training pipeline for your staff (lolinterns) which will also cost you money unless you get the people doing it to pay you for the privilege (lolinterns). Even if you get them to fund some of it themselves, you still need to compensate the people supervising them and deal with the additional administrative load this places on the system.

I'd say that even if they can find the demand to get it to work as a model, they'll hit 15-people-to-supervise-the-work-of-1-person levels of bureaucracy long before they hit 100 locations.

[KyleSchuant]

Well, let's face it, Hanley: whatever rate you charge, unless they're some precious athlete type, it's the first 3-6 months where you have to do most of your work with them. Then they get their technique down to 90% as good as it'll ever be and you have a fair idea of what sort of programming works for them. If they've been coming two years they're very little work, and in fact they're probably helping you coach and they make the community and all that, so in many ways they're giving more than they get. So really if you charged on that basis it'd be like $5,000 for the first 3 months then free after two years. Or something.

But like my idea to double my rates and then give them $10 every time they came to train, it's appealing but is terrible business approach. People who've come for two years are willing to pay, in fact they think you undercharge. People who've just started are still a bit sceptical.

Monoides, does it scale? I don't know. You raise important points, and speaking generally, business expansions like this often go wrong, because the skills you need at one level are different to the skills you need at the next level. I merely point out that given the relative success of Strong Gym vs WFAC, having Reynolds behind the SS franchise model is a different thing to having Rip behind it.

[mgil]

Yeah, it’s one thing to replicate a recipe, another to replicate a person.

[Hanley]

People who've come for two years are willing to pay, in fact they think you undercharge. People who've just started are still a bit sceptical.

I just think retention will prove tricky past 12 months in the SS Gym model. What percentage of SSCs are currently at lifetime e1RMs? You need to mix shit up. Having a suite of kickass cardio equipment and lots of Lulu-clad Amazons really helps (hey - I met my wife at the gym). As does a bunch of rando circuit-y classes. Tricky to add value after the first year when coaching is central to the business model.

Having a handful of superstar clients who are willing to pay full-price after 24 months of membership isn't the goal...it's mass-retention. I think the scaling fee would really help. IDK...

[KyleSchuant]

Well if you look at that article from 2014, Reynolds was mixing it up then. Whether he would now I don't know. But you're talking more about what guys like Alwyn Cosgrove and Thomas Plummer talk about, calling it just "the training gym."

But turnover in the industry is pretty huge, for just the reasons you say. Except at a globogym you stall out after 6 weeks instead of 12 months.