Fitness Business School – Fitness Business Growth with Fred Zoller

Full Transcript

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Hey, Pat Rigsby here and back with another episode of the fitness business school. I decided that instead of me just doing my typical solo episodes, I’m very much a team guy. I have been a team sport guy forever. And I’m, I am hyper aware of the fact that I’ve got a great team that works with me to coach business owners to, to help them build their ideal business. I thought it’d be, it would be cool to, Bring on members of the team that coach alongside me and talk about their journey because that one of the things that I think that we do that’s unique is that our coaches are all really successful in their own right and are paying it forward.

They’re sharing the experiences they’ve had, the lessons they’ve learned along the way. So I’m going to kick off this series with my good friend, Fred Zoller. So welcome, Fred. You know what, listening to this, you may be aware of Fred, but Fred, could you give us a little bit of Just the State of the Union with Fred Zoller right now, and then I’ll start to unpack some stuff.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So right now, I’m living in Slidell here. We own an Anytime Fitness. That’s a two story training gym that is what was one of the five betas for Anytime Fitness when they changed their model right before COVID actually got away from doing satellite gyms, started doing what they call coaching gyms.

And so that’s where I sit today. I’m married. I’ve been married for 14 years. I have seven children. That’s how I’m mostly known. Take care of eight, actually, right now. Also a coach for all my kids teams, which is a lot of teams. I usually coach usually four to six teams at one time. Head coach. I like to be in charge.

And while running the gyms. I also saw a part owner in this gym. I also am a partner in three other locations, so four locations total. We do close to 2 million a year between the four. So yeah, life’s been pretty busy. And that’s not to mention all the work you do with me and serving the clients.

So one of the things that I thought might be interesting is to just talk about some of the businesses you’ve owned and how you built those and how to what level you grew them. Because I think sometimes people tend to try to go buy or study what people tell them to do instead of what they actually did.

So Fred talk about your first training business. So I had worked in two, actually three commercial clubs coming up in the training industry. That the last club that I was at, particularly the club that’s one of my, still my competition here in the community that I live in now, it was called Cross Skates Athletic Club at the time.

Now it’s Cross Skates Family Fitness. I was there for five years working with them. I was Employee of the Year all five years that I was there. I typically did between 140, 000 a year in training. Just as a trainer there, and this was back before boot camps and a lot of group training. No, we were mostly just doing personal training.

So you can imagine that was like 4 o’clock in the morning till 10 o’clock at night, five days a week. And then most of the day on Saturday, and I would even train people on Sunday. But I’m also very into my faith. What I wanted to do while I was there, this is what sparked the whole entire thing. What I wanted to do while I was there, I wanted to do, I wanted to use personal training as a way to raise money for charity.

So I brought the idea to the owner at the time who was a very faithful guy, pretty charitable at the time, but he basically told me no, which was fine. This is business. So that idea did not go away. And then one day, so I was running the whole training business. I was the fitness director at the time.

I was the top trainer at the time, pretty much doing everything. And I just realized, I was like, wait a second, I’m doing all this stuff, I have these ideas. The ideas that were just like going crazy inside my brain. So I just went home one day and told my wife, I’m like, I think I need to open up my own place.

And she’s what? I’m like, I just had too many ideas. I’m tired of giving them to other people for them to grow. I went back to the gym one day and met with the owner and told him what I was going to be doing. And he wasn’t happy about it, but I stayed working there actually while I was building out my facility.

They wanted me to stay there, kept it quiet. They’d try to, do anything to hurt their gym or anything. And that was in 2013. In May of 2013, I opened up my first facility. It was 1, 000 square feet. It was about 800 square foot of training area. At this point, I was still doing mostly personal training every now and again.

Back in the day, we called it partner training, whatever. You might have two people at one time. I opened up May of 2013 without any loans. Obviously no bank will give you a loan, but a crazy idea about being a trainer in a little space. So I opened them up on credit cards, believe it or not. I had some money saved.

My wife thought I was crazy. She was pregnant with number three at the time. So we had already had two kids, actually. We had three kids. She was pregnant from before. Yeah, there’s been so many. So we opened up in May and I was a little bit nervous. I’ve gotten there. I didn’t really recruit all my old clients from the gym.

I just left and didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to start my business with a bad reputation in the city. I left on a Friday. This is the funny thing. I finished my last client at Crossgates on a Friday afternoon and I left and I never showed back up. Nobody knew anything. They didn’t give me any parties for leaving or anything.

They wanted me to keep it quiet. I made a Facebook post on Saturday morning. All my current clients were like, Wait, what the heck did you do? And I was like, I just made a commitment not to say anything. This is how I’m doing it. A few of them came over eventually and started training with me.

But when I was sitting in this gym, I’m thinking to myself, okay, this is scary. I’m sitting here by myself. I know it takes a little while to grow. I started getting real busy, probably about two, two months into it. And I was doing personal training and I realized now that I have a facility and expenses, the money’s not the same.

Yeah I’m busy, but I wasn’t, I thought I’d be making more. And that’s when I had got some consulting early on and realized that I should be doing semi private, which was new at the time, small group training, semi private training, whatever. And so I switched my model. I started doing semi private once I realized that the numbers would be drastically different.

I just came in one day and said, I’ll no longer be doing personal training. I’m going to be doing two to five people at one time. And so started in May in December, I was so full at the gym that I had, I was training people outside. Inside and outside at the same time because my facility was so full at this point.

I started doing some group training because I was trying to figure out how to get packed more people into one hour. That was how group training started in my head there. And seven months later, I realized that the place was way too little that I had grown out of it. I signed a two year lease, but I was completely, my clients were like, look, like people are just like, there’s no more rooms in this place.

So I started looking for my second gym. I found a really nice location. I opened that up in January of the next, the following year, I was still paying that first lease. We opened up the second facility. It was 5, 500 square feet. We built that out. And then that’s when I realized, okay, now I have a real business and I can’t do it all by myself.

I started getting behind with the numbers. I started getting behind with all my bookkeeping and everything. And that’s when I met you. So I stumbled upon the virtual fitness mastermind through a Facebook ad. I joined that at first. I did a producer challenge, which was awesome way back in the day. I did really good at that.

You crushed the producer challenge. Yeah. You were a wall of fame guy there. You were a wall of fame guy on that producer challenge. You were a top performer. Yeah, somehow I won like a, it wasn’t a half day. It was like a day, a one day seminar or something with you and a group of other guys. So that’s how I got into your ecosystem basically.

And at that point, again, I still had more ideas. I was getting some trainers that wasn’t really what I wanted at this point, I was being desperate. Anybody that wanted to. Train could come in and work out in the gym, whatever. After I did that one day workshop or seminar, whatever it was with you, you had sent out an email one day and I was like, man, I’m going to email Pat back because I got to change something.

I was busy and it was great. Trading was no issue. Getting clients was no issue. But when you’re in a bigger facility. You just can’t do it all by yourself, right? No secret. You can’t do it all by yourself. And so I initially got with you to do regular gym training. And then I told you I had some ideas about online doing some product type stuff.

So we switched to the online mastermind at the time and I’ll never forget my first actual mastermind that was in, it was in Miami, no not Miami, Orlando. So I go sit in this group and I remember you saying, hey raise your hand if you’re making over 100k. Everybody in the room raises their hand but me. I’m like, oh man.

It sucks. This was the part I walked out and I remember I asked one of the guys, I’m like, I don’t know. I might’ve

been up more than I can chew with this. And they were like no. Just hang in there. Hang in there. And that’s when I told you I had my first idea was the program design product. At this point, I had, I was made a connection with the university that I graduated from.

I was going to speak at the university and we started a relationship where I was getting interns. Fast forward, I got three really awesome interns from Southeastern Louisiana University. They came to the gym to do the internship. They all ended up becoming trainers, employees of mine at the time, which that was at a time where I was like, if I don’t get help, I’m going to have to find something else to do because I was just overworked, underpaid by the time.

I had a lot of good ideas. Things were in place, but not like they should. Then I, so I got this idea and then I switched to the higher level of your all mine mastermind, which no idea why I did that. But now I know why I did that. And so this was probably end of 2015 going into 2016. We launched the expert program design in January.

No, I’m sorry, February of 2016. But from September of 2015, when I did the producer challenge. That year, in that little bit of span of time working with you, I think I ended up with around like 385, 000 for the year, which was not bad at the end of 2015. Because I had got some trainers, we started getting clients, we started doing marketing stuff, learning all of that stuff.

At that point I had, I still had some money saved, but we were doing, I was able to pay them and invest into doing this product thing. And then we launched in that online product in February. We did really good. I think we did 30 grand in the launch. I’m not mistaken, which was really opened up my eyes to like, oh, wow, this is how this works.

Okay. And I had all kind of other deals for products at the time, and they were all based off of training my new guys. I was like, wait a second. I can’t just bring these young trainers on and expect them to understand programming and how I coach and how I want my sessions to be run and customer service and all of this.

And so that’s how the other ideas were born. And I think we did, you and I did, I think we did five products that year in 2016. And that was the year I remember you shooting a picture of my W2 where, I had finally made gross, netted over a hundred K for the year. I actually ended up doing really good, but I was reinvesting it at the time, all of the money that I was making.

And in 2016, we grew out of the next facility that I had when I got the trainers, we completely grew out of that, right? I was, I had about 500 members at the time. We were also doing, we were doing sports performance. That’s when I was really into training baseball players. So I had 11 teams at the time. We, in two years, we grew out of that gym, built the third gym out, which was 10, 000 square feet.

And that place was awesome. That’s my favorite gym so far. I like the one that I’m sitting in, but that was a cool gym at that time I had 11 full time trainers. We had 11 sports teams, mostly baseball, but I did have some volleyball girls at the time. I’m not really sure how I got into that, but we were rocking and rolling in 2016.

We did 794, 000 and we kept that going all the way until 2019 right before COVID. We also did, I think you and I did, if I’m not mistaken, I created 50 digital products that you and I affiliated together. That wasn’t the stuff that you and I, we also did some products and stuff together that generated multiple six figures.

My online was doing 100, 000 a year or more as a side gig every year and has been pretty much ever since. And that’s that’s where we’re at. Going back to what I was saying in the beginning, one of the things that I wanted to do was charitable stuff. I don’t know the exact number of fundraisers that we did, but we did to date today, I’ve raised over 500, 000 for charity through all of my facilities.

We’re known for doing we did we raised thirty nine thousand bucks in one hour with one fundraiser in my gym We got to be very well known for raising money. The community’s still doing it. We have an event coming up That’s a 5k that does almost a hundred grand for the last three years It’s a sad story, but it’s a great it’s a great cause and so in 2019 and we gonna unpack all this 2019 post a guy that I grew up with said he was gonna be building in anytime fitness here in my city so I just He commented underneath, congratulations, got a phone call about five minutes later and said, Hey, what’s going on with your gym?

And I said, nothing. Why? He said, what do you plan on doing? And I’m like, I plan on doing the same thing that I’ve been doing. We were doing very well at the time flourishing pretty good. And he said, anytime fitness changed their model, they’re now doing coaching. Cause he pitched it. I was like, nah, I’m not interested in any anytime fitness.

I already worked at one. My, my business model is different. We were doing. Large group training, a lot of semi private training. I had a lot of trainers at the time, so we were doing, we were pretty much doing it all, doing well. I pretty much stepped out of the business when I started working with you. I, for two years, I didn’t even go anywhere near my, I wasn’t even in the business.

I had built myself an office in the back. And that’s pretty much where I stayed. We also took 2, 000 square feet of my gym and created a Ninja Warrior course. We were doing child children’s training with the Ninja Warrior course. That was pretty fun. We did that for a few years until we just decided that it was out of our lane.

And then we opened that up and we started doing more baseball training. I made it pitching lanes and batting lanes. Lots and lots of cool stuff there. But in 2019, they reached out, pitched me on an idea. I told them no at first. I came back and I said, let me look at the plans. We looked at the plans. I didn’t really like the plans at the time.

They said, Hey, we’ll tear these up and start over. And I’m like, the gym’s just not big enough. I’m doing a lot of large group training. We have athletes, we’re doing all these things. We redid the plans, decided to do a deal together and they bought me out of my business in 2019. They wanted to just merge.

And I was like, nah, I didn’t do all this stuff for nothing. There’s no way I want to get paid out of this. So they bought me out of it. I got paid out of it. And then we reconvened a new LLC under an Anytime Fitness franchise and actually right before COVID, yeah, in 2019, and then COVID struck in March of 2020.

Good thing is we already had this deal. We already had the land. We had already made the loan. We had already purchased more than half of the materials. Outside of getting people to work, we had already had everything in place for COVID. It pushes back a little bit. We still opened up in November of 2020, late October.

November of 2020, we opened up here. We didn’t even have all of our equipment cause we couldn’t get anything. We opened up anyway. And then so by June of 2022, which was 18 months later, we had already done seven figures. And now we’re in a Costco doing seven figures. We’re doing way more than seven figures with all the facilities.

But the gym that I’m sitting in today, we’ve been staying around like 750, 000 800, 000 every year. It’s a lot easier than the training business alone, because we have the 24 hour access members. Still doing the same thing. We just threw in the 24 hour access, so now we have coaching gyms. They’re all being converted little by little.

I’ve been installing my training system in each one of them. And it’s been great. It’s been pretty much on autopilot. I don’t, I still don’t do any of the training. All I do is the marketing for the gym. I mostly do consulting with you. That’s what I really enjoy doing. And that’s where I’m at today.

Man, that’s a fun journey. And I think that you being able to walk through that sequentially is really valuable for somebody who’s checking out this podcast because. So many people see the destination, the end point, and they don’t understand how people arrived at that place. And starting out with a thousand square feet, 800 of training space, when you went out on your own, bootstrapping everything, and essentially growing into the next stage each time.

Hopefully that illustrates what’s possible. Because it’s not, hey, I had this kind of trust fund, silver spoon, I had a big loan to open this thing up. No, you, you built it, grew it, expanded all the way up. So along the way, I know you mentioned that in the beginning you didn’t really know marketing, I think somewhere in the middle of the way that you talked about that, like you learned marketing.

Tell me about that journey. So when I, after the first facility into the second facility, you don’t know what you don’t know. So it was a great facility. I had guys working for me, but then I realized I started looking at the proportion of expense to income and realizing that

there needs to be a bigger proportion of income that doesn’t come from me. That’s how it sparked it. And so I was still doing a lot of the training at the time I was. Slowly peeling it off to the other guys. Again, they were brand spanking new. They were young. They were in their early twenties coming directly out of college.

So it was a little handlement with a kid glove. And I remember all these stories are like it happened yesterday. I remember calling you one day and I was like, man, I got a freaking the five o’clock in the morning or whatever. I’m brain dead in the middle of the day. And you were like, so freaking show up.

That’s how easy that is. And I was like, I like being told what to do, make it easy. So I just didn’t show up anymore. I told all my

clients, I’m not training anymore. I’ll be in until eight o’clock in the morning. And then I reached back out and I said, wait a second, if I do that in the morning and afternoon, this is 20 hours a week, 80 hours a month worth of payroll. And I remember you saying the last time you were at your desk, you told me you ran a transformation challenge and you made 15, 000 bucks. And I was like, I did. And you were like, do it again. So it dawned on me. Okay. I need to quit being the head trainer and start being a head marketer.

And that’s when it really, it clicked. And also I was learning email marketing because we were doing the online products. You were teaching me how to build the list. At the time I built my own list. Which I still have today. Running ads to that, learning to do copywriting writing. I wrote my expert program design.

That was my first page I ever wrote 97 iterations until we got it right. But hey, I learned and we did good with it. That thing still sells. It’s kinda outdated ’cause there’s all the internet stuff, but it still sells the new trainers. But I just started to realize. As I do today and I still tell people like, I’m so much more valuable at my desk than I am on the training floor.

And I find that a lot of younger, not really younger trainers, I think this is probably across the board, I think you’ll agree that we get so obsessed with training. We’ll buy 97 million training courses. At one point I had 30. Active certifications, which is just stupid. Like every time something came out, I just wanted to have it.

I wanted to see if there was anything I knew that I can learn. Then I realized I should have 30 marketing certifications rather than training certifications. So I left that idea and started reading and studying and taking every single course under the sun. All kinds of copywriting, marketing books, everything you can possibly think of to try to figure it out.

It’s like blood in the water. Once I ran something and I started making money, I was like, oh, this is how this works. And so I almost had this love hate relationship with training at the time because I knew when I was on the floor I was making less money. When I started doing the info products and having that extra income and starting learning to do copywriting and email marketing, once I saw that I could launch a challenge just from an email list of 1500 people And it was a little easier back in the day.

Let’s be honest, put 70 or 80 people in the challenge. I was like, man, screw training. And so I was on a hunt to get that seven figure at the gym. And then I realized for a training gym, that was a monster. And so we decided to peel back, raise our prices. I wanted to completely out of the gym. I wanted to just do that.

And this was, I can’t remember if it was 2016 or 2017 when you invited me to come do consulting with you, which was a shocker. I was like, Wait, me? And you were like, yeah, I’m like, I’m still trying to learn how to do all this stuff myself. And you were like, nah, dude, you’re doing good. You’ll be fine.

I started studying marketing, email marketing, running my own Facebook ad. A, I like to keep my money. So instead of paying people, I was like, you know what, I’m going to learn how to do this stuff myself, even though I didn’t really like it. And then for whatever reason, I got good at it and I enjoyed writing, which I still do.

And then, and so I just stayed in the back and marketed all my programs and we just. We thrive. That’s just still what I do. I just do email marketing, run ads for all of our gyms. I still am in charge of the trainers, but they’re adults now. They’re all on autopilot. It’s been quite the journey But that’s where i’m at.

I’m obsessed with marketing. I really love doing it. I love messaging I love trying to figure out how to get clients. That’s the thing for me. That’s how people all the time I might have, might not have the most fanciest Facebook ad, but I promise you my ads work. I get ads to work. They’re self liquidating and they make you money.

That’s just the way I figured out how to do it. Make the thing work. Find out who you need to target and make the thing work. That’s what I’m good at. It’s been working good ever since. And that’s where I’m at. I think one of the coolest takeaways getting to Not only work with you like in a client relationship and then a colleague relationship But then getting to be good friends with you is seeing How let’s face it.

I talk about ideal business a lot and everybody’s ideal is different and the ideal in your situation obviously involves charity and it involves being able to coach your kids In sports, but it also involves making enough money to be able to send them to private schools and all that stuff. I think that as we have really stayed in the lane of helping people build their ideal business and that’s goal.

I think it’s really inspiring to see that mean, it can mean so many different things, right? You talked about raising half a million dollars for charity, but you also talked about coaching four or five sports teams at a time. Those things, a lot of things may think that they are, or a lot of people may think they’re mutually exclusive, that you can’t do both.

But you figured out how to do both. And I think some of it’s problem solving, and just being relentless, and coaching others to do the same. What, get closer to wrapping this episode up, like what is next for Fred Zoller? I forgot to tell you too, you missed with the audience though. So when I opened up in May of 2013, I also started my master’s degree program.

And so we had four more kids after that while we were growing all these gyms and I was competing. So I was competing, I was coaching, I was in my master’s degree program and doing the gym while having kids and four, two of those four were twins. All at the exact same time. And again, but now that home in my brain, and I had told you, I wrote being able to put my kids in a private school, actually put that on a vision board and stuck it in front of my desk.

And I basically took my, again, for me, I don’t like taking no for an answer. So for me. But there’s a will there’s a way that’s the way I look at it no matter what whether it comes to sending out an optimized email a marketing campaign or Creating your ideal businesses. Yeah, you got to crawl through some stuff for a little bit But it’s sunny on the other side.

So a lot of stuff was going on Right now what we’re doing is you might be shocked. We’ve been looking at real estate. The market got a little crazy I do already have one property. We’re still looking at getting some more properties We also opened up an art business for my wife last year. So she’s doing artwork.

She’s really talented at that So that’s another business that we’re operating and I don’t know that I want to open up another facility right now So I’m not really sure where we’re going with that. We’re mostly just looking at doing investing Which has been a little bit more of a challenge, just to be honest.

The world got a little bit more expensive over the last couple of years. We still have all of our kids in private schools, which is six. So add that up, one in high school, cost a fortune, but we’re able to do it. So right now, all I do is work on creating a bigger net. That’s what I do. I figure out how to create a bigger net, whatever we need to do to create a bigger net.

That’s what we’ve been doing. So we’ve been compiling the money like in the gym that I am in now. This was a 2 million investment and we have every single thing paid off except for the gym note, which we’ve been paying a lot more extra every single year. The goal is to own this thing outright. pretty soon, which will make a cash cow.

And then we’ll go from there. So right now we’re doing really good. It’s been pretty much been killing it ever since COVID, even with other gems popping up because I have a proprietary thing here. Commercial gyms just don’t replicate what I do with my community and how involved I am. Not just in a gym community with all the clients that I’ve had for multiple numbers of years, but we are, we have a ton of strategic alliances in our community, like strong, not on paper, real strategic alliances where we help each other grow our business.

I started my own networking group with a friend of mine that’s been going on for the past five years. That’s real solid. Very high level networking group that gives me a steady flow of referrals. I’m connected with all the schools, all the private schools, with my kids. And most people don’t realize that.

When we teach this stuff, and they say, Oh, I gotta go stop at some business and introduce myself. I’m like, yeah, but it’s more than that. It really is more than that. And when people figured out what skill set I had, and I could go in, and they didn’t know, like normal businesses didn’t realize that I was doing consulting.

When I would do a strategic alliance and say, Hey, I can help you with email marketing. I can help you with running your ads, creating an offer and all it was like, it just worked. And so now we sponsor everything at, we sponsor probably 15 or 20 teams throughout the city. We sponsor every single golf tournament, every charitable thing throughout the entire city.

And that’s where a commercial gym is just not going to be able to hang with me. I don’t care how much money they have or anything. They’re just not connected like I am. And that keeps us a good, healthy, steady flow of business where we can flourish. And yeah, that’s where we’re at. Awesome, man.

This was the perfect interview day to kick off this little series of kind of peek behind the curtain and we. I think we’re very fortunate to have you paying it forward for all the fitness business owners. We get to impact in a host of different

ways, not just growing their business, but showing how you can integrate that into a pretty, pretty amazing and fulfilling life.

So thanks a bunch for coming on, Fred. That ideal business principle is it’s pretty rock solid. I don’t think people think about what that actually means enough. Whatever reason, I’ll just say it like this. I got super lucky. It hit home with me. It went real deep into my brain, because I have a larger family and I just wanted my life to work a certain way.

And I was like, nothing’s going to stop me from doing this. I’m going to figure out how to do this. It doesn’t matter what I have to do it, how long I have to work, but I’ll eventually do it. And now I enjoy that. I enjoy the fruits of my labor and my wife and kids do too. It’s provided an incredible life.

I enjoy what I’m doing. I love helping younger businesses. The big thing is grit. They see what I’m doing and they’re like, damn. And I’m like, got to step it up. Let’s go. Let’s roll. I love it again, man. Thank you for all you do. And thank you for coming on. And that’s another. Episode of the Fitness Business School in the books.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School.

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

One of of the things that we’ve been doing with our current clients is taking them through this Ideal Business diagnostic and really what it is, this checklist that allows you to pinpoint exactly what your business needs next so you can keep improving, keep growing, and build a business that you love to own, one that pays you well, one that allows you to have the impact you wanna have and one that allows you to have a lifestyle that you truly enjoy.

In this diagnostic, we walk through everything and we do an evaluation and can instantly pinpoint what you need to do next to build that business that you want. I’m going to extend this opportunity to get on with either me or my team and take you through this evaluation and fix your business’s most vital needs fast.

So if we take you through this, you’re gonna be able to make those vital changes that you need to finally have what I call your Ideal Business. If you’d be interested in going through this entirely free, risk-free diagnostic with us and learn what you already have in place, what you’re doing well and where are your greatest opportunities for rapid improvement are just shoot me an email with diagnostic in the subject line to [email protected].

Again, an email to [email protected] with diagnostic in the subject line will get
you scheduled and take you through this evaluation to help you build the business you want.