An Exciting Time for Fitness - Jonathan Goodman

Hey everybody. Welcome to the Future of Fitness, where we talk with entrepreneurs, researchers, and practitioners in fitness, wellness, and the health sciences. I'd like to give a big thanks to our sponsors, Level Five Mentors, helping entrepreneurs achieve the highest levels of freedom in time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. Also, Certified Course Creation, helping entrepreneurs create accredited online certifications that are not only lucrative but highly scalable. Go to levelfive mentors.com or certifiedcoursecreation.com and learn more. I am your host, Eric Malzone. And once again, welcome to the future of fitness. Boom. We're live. John Goodman, welcome back, my friend.

Yeah, thank you. It's been two years and you have settled down into the Buffalo Haven of Montana. That's awesome, dude.

As we're uh as we were just discussing, I can literally see dozens of buffalo from my window. In fact, I can feed it.

Which means you're never gonna go hungry. Yeah, exactly. This is you are you are pandemic proof. You are apocalypse proof. It's like if you can't have a Twinkie factory nearby, you just want a bunch of buffalo roaming outside. Yeah. You just know that you're always gonna be able to eat.

I I'm surprised more people don't have a MacBook and a rifle on their desk. I mean, I thought that was normal, but I guess not. Well, I mean, you can start the trend. Yeah, yeah, that's the goal. So, first question for you, John. When you started the online trainers academy, how did you know that we were gonna have a pandemic in 2020 that would turn everyone online?

Oh, that's funny, isn't it? You're a funny guy. Um, I didn't I didn't know that there was gonna be a pandemic. But I mean, it's not inconceivable to assume that there's going to be some large-scale interruptive event that's gonna happen at some point in the future. You don't need to be a great historian or futurist to know that like the world changes very quickly historically in very unpredictable ways. And so, I mean, Nassim Telly, Black Swan, who I wrote about this a long time ago. So, how did I know that there was going to be a pandemic and that online training was going to be important? Well, I didn't, but anybody who was paying attention back when I started teaching people how to build online training businesses in 2013 knew that the fitness industry was freaking messed up. And anybody who's worked in the fitness industry for any period of time knows that it's it's a pretty awful business model for basically everybody trainers, gym owners, and clients. And so, how did I know that? How did I figure that out? I got tripped playing ice hockey and I sprained, I strained, sorry, my hamstring, and I was two weeks off of my feet. And I was like, man, if a if an injured hamstring is gonna kill my income for two weeks, this clearly isn't a viable career the way that I'm doing it right now. Because at some point in my life, I'm going to want to take a holiday, I'm going to get sick, I'm going to have kids. You know, um, there's gonna be an interruption. And so I gotta build something else. And I mean, online business is like the smartest thing to build as a supplement to what you have. Did I know a pandemic was coming? I mean, no, obviously not. Uh I mean, people paying attention knew that something was coming down the pipeline in in January, February, but even then, most folks didn't pay attention to it or you know, played it off like it wasn't going to be much. Nobody expected us sitting here in October to be, you know, I I just told you beforehand for anybody's listening, like Toronto was going to announce again where I live this afternoon in 40 minutes that gyms are shut down for another month.

Yeah.

Uh I mean, it was that we were shut for a few months and then we were open for two months, and now we're shut again, right?

Yeah. And today for people who are listening, it's it's October 9th, 2020, is the day of recording on this. So I'm not sure when it'll release, but it's important to to know dates. And I've never in my podcasting career, which is, you know, three years old, four years old. I'd never had to state the date of recording as often as I do now, because three days from now, something could be different. We could have a vaccine, right? And that changes everything, and then the conversations will will switch again. It's been really and you know, you talk about Nassim Talib and the black swan event. And when this whole thing started, I actually talked to a lot of people about that book. I suggested it that book to a lot of people, and then Nassim Talib himself got on and said, No, this is not a black swan event. It's like everyone knew a pandemic was coming. It was just a matter of when. Right. And uh it's it's he's right. He's as usual, he's right. I mean, that's his his thing of expertise. But I do think people understanding what a black swan event is and the concept of anti-fragility is really important. I mean, I'm sitting on the phone.

I think the concept of anti-fragility, I think that's I think that's the key. And I think if you want to set yourself up in the future, you need to really understand anti-fragility, you need to really understand asymmetrical risk, and you need to understand how to mitigate loss and maximize gain and set yourself up for success no matter what's going to happen in truth. You need to appreciate the fact that you really don't know what's going to happen in the future. Anybody who says that they predicted what was going to happen in the future is either lying or disillusioned. We're really good as human beings at post-rationalizing situations and after something has happened, creating a nice sounding narrative and smoothing out the curve. And the reality of it is life doesn't work that way when you're going through it. It just looks that way when we're looking back at it.

That's a great point. You know, and I I reflected on this recently that on the concept of anti-fragility. And I looked at the man that we have in the White House right now. And say what you want, whatever opinion you have is fine. It's I'm Canadian. I played the fifth. Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah. Good for you. Uh but you know, talking about a man who's seemingly anti-fragile. You know, you could throw anything this guy, he only seems to get stronger. You know, that people first. Yeah. The more chaos that ensues, things that are anti-fragile get stronger. And that's kind of the essence of it. And really go go read the books because it's it's game changing and something you need to understand in life and seeing patterns. Yeah, man, the fitness industry is it's shifting so fast. I always, I think, similar to you, I noticed having been an operator for a long time, that business model was inefficient. The three major players in any fitness business, right? The coach, the owner, gym owner, and the client, at least in the traditional model that we're talking about. Not everybody was always winning. Very rarely, did you ever find a situation where all three extremely rare? So that had to change. And you started looking at all these things that were coming in pre-pandemic, you know, all the technology, the biometrics, the AI, the you know, social media aspect of fitness and online communities, and all these things were happening. And we all saw it was going to change, we just didn't think it was going to happen this fast. And it's uh, it's here, it's accelerated really quickly. And, you know, one of the things that you and I were, as we were uncovering, you know, important topics that we want to make sure we used uh or got through through this time is you know, are is this gonna be, is the fitness industry shifting so that the actual fitness professional, the trainer of the coach, is this gonna be the rising of a professional coach, somebody who's all in, or is it gonna be more leaning towards increasing amounts of side hustle and gig work, things like that? What where where do you sit on that? Both.

And I think that's a beautiful thing. I think there's gonna be both. I think largely why the fitness industry suffered so much. And if you want to, if anybody listening wants to read more of my thoughts on this, there's an article I wrote on my website, the PTDC, that's called uh the fitness industry is broken, a story of hope. And I go into more detail on this. But the the reality of it is that very few people were doing really well the way that the business model worked before. But almost everybody was doing just okay enough. And the most dangerous place to be in business is doing just okay. Because if things are really, really bad, you're forced to either leave or get better. If things are just okay, there's something called loss aversion, which is arguably the most important concept in in behavioral economics. And really it comes down to losses and merge of the gains. Basically, if we have something, we value it much more than we don't have that thing. So if I have a $10 bottle of wine and that bottle of wine goes up, buy a bottle of wine for $10 and that bottle of wine goes up in value to $100, I won't sell it for $100 because I think that it has a lot of value. But I also wouldn't buy a new bottle for $100. We don't want to lose things that we already have. And so if we have something that's just okay, i.e. we have a business that's just doing all right, even though there's a lot of potential gain by pay taking a very small risk of changing, that very small risk represents a loss, which means that most people never take it. It's a very dangerous place to be, is okay, way more dangerous than not good. And the fitness industry was okay for a lot of people. A lot of people were just gliding by, you know what I'm saying? They were still doing well, they weren't particularly happy, but they weren't put out on the street. Or the pandemic came and broke that shit down. And the result, while it's really painful while it's happening, which is right now, is going to be something really, really beautiful because it was a brittle broken business model that's now being forced to evolve, which is I call this the fitness industry shit or get off the pot moment to talk about it in really crude terms. Yeah, I like it. If you weren't you you are you are now forced to be really good at business if you want to be in the fitness industry. There's sorry, that's just how it is. That's how it always should have been, right? That's how it is. And so now you have a decision, right? Do you want to be a true professional, a true professional in any career that works for themselves, and basically every trainer, even if you work for a facility, kind of works for yourself. If you want to be a true professional who really works for yourself and who makes a good income, you got to act like a true professional, which means you need to be a responsible business person, which means you need to understand money management, you need to understand marketing, you need to understand business generation. Because at the end of the day, that's how the economy works, that's what society values. Or you need to either get out of the industry as a personal trainer, which doesn't mean you need to get out of the fitness industry, but it means you should stop as a personal trainer. You could go into management, you could go into design, you can go into all of these different things that support the fitness industry. Or you need to look at the fitness industry and look at look at uh personal training as a side gig. I mean, uh, some people looked at that before. Like there was a lot of people teaching spin, you know, teaching two classes of spin after their full-time job. It's a beautiful thing. Do it because you love it, not because your income depends on it. There's a line that we use in our marketing a fair bit for our we have a fitness coaching program called online trainer coaching that specifically works with personal trainers and nutrition coaches, and we help them with their fitness. And the line that we use is I used to love going to the gym until I started working there. And um, and it's true. So maybe if you're the type of person that's listening to this and you're like, nah, I really don't think like I really don't want to like grow my own business and learn all of that because that's just not something that I want to do. Totally cool, totally cool. There's nothing wrong with that. But know now in making that decision, the odds that you will be a successful personal trainer in any capacity moving forward are close to nothing. Which means that you're way better off looking at this as a side gig. Get a full-time job that pays your bills and train a couple clients at night because it's fun, because you love it, not because you need to feed your family. And I look at what's going to happen in the future and what's already happening is this kind of splitting off into those two pieces. And I think that that's a beautiful thing. I think that that's how it should be. If you're going to work in an industry, be serious about that industry, or be very upfront and objective about how you're not serious about that industry and you do it for fun. Both are fine. In the middle is not okay.

Yeah. It's a really interesting viewpoint. And I I'm reflecting too because, you know, as a as a gym operator, people who are in the middle are unattractive to bring on as coaches and trainers because you either want the full-timer who's passionate about it, and you want to be there as for me. I want to be there as a mentor for them and show them the way to make a full-time living doing this. And then you want the people who just really love to do some personal training and cover some classes, and they bring a lot of joy to it because it's the highlight of their day. And that's a very valuable thing. The ones in the middle that's super high energy.

Yeah, super high energy, super happy to be there. They can connect with the members so well because they often have similar jobs or they can connect in a much more professional way with the members because they run in the same type of environments and societal circles, whereas personal trainers often don't.

Yeah. And where you get in trouble was, like you said, in the middle, where someone who maybe, you know, is making a couple grand, one, you know, maybe one fifty one thousand fifteen hundred a month at your gym, had another job, had another job, worked a night job on the weekends. Those were those were troublesome because they were not happy when they got in the gym. They were always anxious about what happens if they lose one job. And that's just a tough situation to be in. And you're not really setting yourself up to be successful in any of the ventures. You're just half-assing a lot of it. And as you said, you're you got to shitter it off the pot. And now people's hands are forced because, you know, it's just tough, man. It's it's it's a hard thing to watch. You know, you talk about Toronto going back into shutdown. Like, well, what are gym owners going to do now? You know, a lot of them moved outside, right? Uh, that's great. I was talking to a good friend who's who actually got ranked in, I think, outside magazine as the top one of the top 10 outside gyms in the country. And now he's heading into you know, winter on on the in the Rockies. Like, what what are we gonna do here? And it was he's got a plan because he's smart, but a lot of people don't have a plan and they're wondering what am I gonna do?

Yeah, I I I don't have a good answer to you right now. You know, it's getting cold here. Gyms are shutting down again. I don't think people are going to go outside and work out the same way as they did when the first shutdown happened in the middle of the summer. It's certainly not as pleasant. So, what's gonna happen? I mean, a lot more people now have equipment at their homes.

Yep.

Uh, or some something to use at their home. There's gonna be a fair amount of inactivity. Uh, this shutdown is only stated for 28 days, is what it looks like the announcement is gonna be. So, you know, it is short term to try to control the spread. But uh, what are gym owners gonna do? I mean, what did they do before? They're gonna suspend everybody's membership and tack it on at the end, yeah, which is kind of what they were doing before. And like the smart ones are already doing fine, right? The not smart ones are already closed down. Like, this is not this is not gonna put additional gyms out of business. You know what I'm saying? The gym that I go to right around the corner from my office here, it's called Torque Bobelt, fantastic gym here in Toronto, and uh and they're fine. I mean, you know, the minute that they open back because he's got a really strong community. And so the minute that they opened the doors back up, people came back in droves. People, a lot of people were still happy to pay their membership to uh to support the gym. And why is that? Because it's not a crazy membership price, they don't do high-pressure sales, and they actually have a gym environment that encourages people to show up. Lots of these commercial gyms, their entire model was preceded on people not showing up to the gym. Well, those people are the people who are gonna get all their subscriptions to the gyms.

Yeah.

And they're not gonna start back up. And so, you know, these gyms that are that are sitting here with people who actually want to show up on an ongoing basis, and they've built their financial model around the majority of their members actually showing up to the gym and getting results. Well, those are the gyms that are still gonna thrive. Yeah, it's which is how it always should have been. Yes, I agree.

I agree, I agree, I agree. I mean, there was just there's a lot of gyms. I mean, I you know, the market I knew really well was, you know, Central Coast of California. And I could have sat or stood on the this roof of my gym with a pitching wedge and hit in most directions and hit a fitness facility. It was just a lot. You know, there's you know, we have to think was was the demand there. And I mean, demand's shrinking right now. But here's the thing is that the clients are still there. They didn't go up in a cloud of dust. Like people are still out there, they still have health and fitness. We just got to figure out how to meet the needs a little bit better. And I think one of the reasons I I want to get out of doom and gloom and get into some actionable things because you know, in the online world, right, obviously everyone thinks or their perception is that online training is booming, right? But you're in it. Like the OTA and the people that you work with, online trainer academy, and all the people you work with online, you actually know what's going on. So, what is going on in the online training game?

What's going on? There's a lot of people who are doing it that have absolutely no clue what they're doing. And as a result, are, you know, kind of hacking together a whole bunch of really not that well thought out solutions and not doing very well with it. You know, it's kind of like imagine if you started personal training people in the gym and you just kind of Googled a little bit and then bought a video camera and decided that you were just going to train people. It's it's kind of like that's happening. And the result is the core educators in the fitness industry, you know, the the kind of call and baseline accredited certifying bodies that everybody kind of, the gatekeepers kind of everybody has to go through them when they start, do such a lackluster job preparing you for the realities of the profession that nobody's business is really prepared. And these people don't even touch online training. A couple of them have put together solutions in three or four weeks and tried to sell them as additional education. And the reason that I know that they put them together is because all of them, the three biggest in the world, all tried to buy my certification when COVID hit. And when the negotiation and we got like very late in negotiations and contracts, and when they eventually broke down, we're still negotiating with one of them. Um and it looks like it'll happen, to be honest. Uh congratulations. When that when those all broke down, three weeks later, they came out with their own program and started selling it. And then we just started hearing from our audience. They're just like, Yeah, I bought this thing and it's God, it's awful. I mean, because they put it together in three weeks. Literally, they put it together in three weeks with no real know-how of how to they like, oh, online training, we're just going to teach people how to set up lighting in a video camera. It's like, no, online training is giving people what they need, when they need it, how they need it, whatever the situation is. And you need to build a business model that actually works within those constraints and allows you to scale within those constraints by leveraging technology automation. It actually has very all of nothing to do with being on camera with a client. And nobody who's not in it for a long time understands that. I mean, we've helped now close to 35,000 people in 87 countries that we know of add online training to their business.

Like awesome.

We know all of the models, right? We know what works, we know what doesn't work. We know what works from a financial, from a business model standpoint. We know what works from an actual training client, adherence, motivational interview, and how do you get somebody to want to do the workout? How do you get somebody to continually adhere to the workout? What do you do if somebody doesn't report in on their workouts for a while and doesn't respond to your messages? How do you assess people online appropriately? How do you advance workouts and programs? How do you adapt workouts and programs when you can't see people? It's not, it ain't getting in front of a camera and being like, hey guys, the work of the day is that like that's not what it is. Yeah, it's not even you on camera with the workout. Like, I don't want to look at your butt working out through a video camera for an hour a day. I mean, are you serious? Like, that's not, sorry, that sounds like an absolutely miserable experience to me for both parties.

Yeah.

And so what's also been interesting is in the last three months, there's been a billion dollars in investment into home workout solutions. Um, when you look at like Peloton and Tonal and Mirror and a few others, there's been a billion plus dollars in investments to it. And it's it's interesting because I really deeply don't believe that this home workout revolution is at all gonna stick. It's based purely out of necessity right now. The fact of the matter is most people, A, don't have appropriate space to work out at home, just work uncomfortable and in their way. B, there's a serious lack of motivation. C, part of the real benefit of working out is actually disconnecting in order to work out and going to another place to do it. And finally, I mean, none of these programs really appropriately progress or or or help you achieve any real goals. Like, I'm sorry, man, how many times can you do a psycho workout? I don't care how good the community is. You know, like what's your stick rate for that? And so some of those people will stay, some of them won't, but people are gonna flock. I mean, we already saw it when the gyms open back up. People flock back to gyms and droves. The problem is the gym model needs serious disruption as well. And that's what my company's gonna do in the next five years, but that's a whole different story. Well, let's talk about that story because one of the questions I want to ask you I'll tell you about most of that story, but uh basically basically we're gonna be leveraging AI and tech and automation to seriously disrupt the brick and mortar gym community environment. Build a much better model that has way higher profit rates, way more efficient, way leaner, actually work backwards from getting people results and and just a much better business and training model than what's out there.

I'm I'm into it. And the question I was gonna ask you because I was thinking about this, how to formulate this question, but the you know, the famous Henry Ford quote, right? If you asked the people what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses. And I think, you know, the industry sometimes you need to be detached to see what the disruption is gonna look like and what is gonna be, you know, the car for this industry because we are we're all on horses right now in the fitness industry. So, you know, maybe from a broad scale, I was gonna say two years, but you just laid the term five. So we'll stick with that. You know, where what do you what do you envision from what you can share with us? You know, is is what does that vision look like? What how is the fitness industry going to be different for the consumer? Is the gym a necessary piece? We've had we talked on this podcast with other guests about the decentralization of fitness, where it's no longer centralized at the gym, it's somewhere in the cloud.

Yeah. So tell me, what do you what are you thinking? It's gonna be centralized in the gym, for sure. It's no question. Gyms are going to radically change. You look at personal trainers. I'll call I'll call everybody who works on the gym floor a personal trainer just for ease. I mean, there's coaches, there's group exercise, there's small group exercise, there's SNC, there's all of us, right? But I'll just call all of them personal trainers for simplicity's sake. Got it. The the reality of it is for the last 10 to 15 years, really, as the modern fitness industry has evolved. I mean, keep in mind the fitness industry is very young, right? Well, we've kind of been in this like awkward adolescent phase for the last 10 to 15 years where we're just everybody's like puffing their feathers trying to show off and nobody really knows what they're doing, and we all have pimples. And it's this idea of like gyms have sold personal trainers as people who are not commoditized, but they've treated personal trainers as people who are commoditized. And they've paid personal trainers and viewed personal trainers as people who are commoditized. And the truth is, most personal trainers are commoditized. They're frankly not very good at what they do. And that's the sad reality. And that's not for lack of trying. That's because to be a successful personal trainer requires such a varied skill set that basically doesn't exist in a single human being. You need to be in good shape, energetic, motivational, empathetic, great at science programming, like interested in that, entrepreneurial, and good at sales, and probably 15 other things. Find me somebody who has two of those things, and they're going to be an outlier, let alone all of them. And the reality of it is if you do find somebody who has any kind of a national inclination for you know two or more of those skills, I'm perhaps a good example of that. For some reason, I'm just interested in a few of those things, which means I can put them together. Every single day that I went to the gym, that I worked at the gym, I thought my boss was an idiot and I could do everything better than him. He's not an idiot. He owns three gyms. He's a super smart guy. But the fact of the matter is anybody who has that varied skill set is always going to think that they can do things better and they're going to leave the gym. Which means that the type of job that gyms used to select for, self-selected for people who could not fulfill the requirements of that job and selected out people who could, because it just doesn't really exist. The gym of the future is going to identify that there are a whole lot of people on the ground floor who are really good, outgoing, motivational, empathetic people who are crap at business, who aren't good at programming, and who really should do neither of those things. And they're gonna there's gonna be a business model that is technology and then pulls other people who are maybe great at programming and puts everybody in the 5% in their unique ability and matches together people to work together like that. The people on the gym floor should not be responsible for building programs, no question. In fact, I will make a very perhaps controversial statement that I believe to be very true, which is computer algorithms can build better programs than about 98% of personal trainers right now. I agree. And unless you want to be somebody who be who spends 15 to 20 years becoming world-class at programming, you probably shouldn't even try. And you should accept that you want to understand what it is, they can get something better. You should be delivering that program, you should be coaching that program, you should be helping them in becoming a tremendous coach and making sure that they have success on that program. And then you should have the resources when it's time to adjust or when you have a question on the program or time to add variability or improve or whatever, move on. You should have the resources at your disposal to work with people or a system that provides that knowledge set.

I want to go back on a couple points here, John. I I love it. First of all, I love it. I do, I love it. You have made a couple key points. And I I think number one, I'm curious when you look at the two, you know, we listed things from programming to empathy towards sales, entrepreneurship, business, acumen, all these things, right? And you said, well, you maybe you got two things. What what what are the two things for you that you feel like you are your unique ability?

And I I I love that term too. I want to dive into that for a minute. Yeah, I mean, that's not my term. That's a Dan Sullivan term from a company called Strategic Coach.

Very familiar.

Uh, I mean, every every management professional writer guru has a different term for it. But basically get people to do what they're good at and as little of anything else as possible.

Right.

Uh is is kind of what that means. What are mine? I got good enough at fitness. I was definitely not great at it, but I got good enough at fitness. I understood psychology, and I was passionately interested in marketing and entrepreneurship. I was not empathetic, I'm still not empathetic, as you can probably tell from this interview. I had to actually study what empathy is. And I have like I have like a textbook education empathy, which is so unbelievably funny. Yeah. Because it's I don't think you learn empathy in a textbook, man. Well, you but you but you kind of can. Okay. Okay. I mean, that's why that's why psychology is so interesting, because I can recognize when I should be empathetic and I can and I can see when other people need empathy, right? And I also surround myself. A lot of our staff members score really high on you know emotional intelligence. And so I actually go to them sometimes. I'm like, how should I be feeling in this instance? If I was if I was a human being who felt things, uh, how should I be feeling in this instance?

Why don't real quick, Joan? What's what tests do you guys use? Do you use a Colby? Do you use something else?

Or we had everybody a couple years ago go through disk and we hired an independent consultant to analyze it and stuff like that. Got it. Okay. And then and then we had um, what was the one when I did a round of hires? Enneagram. That's what it's called. Oh yeah, yep. Yeah. So we use we use Enneagram for hiring, um, which I really like because you can do it like a quick 15 minute gives you like a really nice overview to do the full Enneagram. Anyway, I mean I think this is like geeking out on personality assessments. It's super interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what we're talking about, how I don't feel things. Yeah, yeah. Uh I think you're uh uh you're a robot. And uh really. No, no, no, not really. Yeah. But I do anyway, and that's that was it with me for sure. I've also just been somebody who's always just been like passionately interested in stuff and in understanding things. So when you're working with uh high net worth individuals, which you often are as a trainer, it's just kind of comes in the territory. You're working with very intelligent, very well-established people. You need to be able to connect them and converse with them. And so I was just interested. You know, I I wanted to know one of the things that I would do, for example, when I was training, is I got a subscription to the newspaper, to the Globe and Mail newspaper. And I would, I would open it every morning before I'd see my clients and I'd read the headlines, and then I would just basically ask them about it because I knew that they were on top of that type of thing. And that's partly how I would learn, but also partly how I would establish a lot of rapport with them, you know, with somebody that they could talk to about things they were interested in. I offered no opinion on religion or politics or anything like that. I was just interested in why they thought what they thought. It's a great way to connect with people, man. This is actually a great lesson from the esteemed people from one of his songs, and an actual lyric is ask for advice, get paid twice, ask to get paid, and you'll get advice. So basically, if you want to make a sale or if you want to create a rapport or you want to get somebody involved in your project, don't ask him for the sale, don't ask him to be involved in the project, ask him for advice, and you'll have a lot more success.

Wow. That's you know, uh that's the first time I've come across that concept. And I, you know, I I do a lot of reading, I ask a lot of questions. So that's new to me, man. That's it. I like it. And I'm gonna, but and where did that come from again? Because you broke out a little bit there.

Oh, pit bull. Pitbull, whoever the great the great pit bull. The great pit bull. The great as the great pit bull once said. See the great philosopher pit bull. I mean, Jay-Z, man, like you wanna you wanna look for business advice. Like, listen to the lyrics in somebody's song. Yeah. There's a reason that these guys raised above all the other hustlers. I mean, I don't know actually pit bull's story. I know Jay-Z's because I read it at like 50 Cent. Like, there's a reason that these guys rose above like dealing drugs and became what they are. I mean, you talk about a competitive environment where the best survive. Holy crap, you gotta be smart.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, let me bring us back. So we're talking about five years. Let me talk about the five-year vision for fitness, and you we are on the track of, you know, there's helping people do what they're suited to do well, put in their unique ability using multiple tools from AI and it's gonna be focused in the gym. What else? What am what are we missing here?

What's missing here from that that I can talk about is a better question. I mean, it was always important, but multiple income streams and understanding that if you own any kind of a physical location, you have to supplement it with revenue that comes from outside of the physical location. That's extremely high yield, high margin. And so, I mean, in a conventional gym, depending on where you live, but like 10, 15%, maybe 20% profit margin, there's no reason that you can't generate revenue at a 50, 60 profit percent profit margin outside of there that you then use to feed and maximize your profit per square foot in the actual facility and just below your competitors away. Sure. And I mean, that's why we have a lot of gym owners coming and enrolling in the online trainer academy for that reason now, because it's man, it's so unbelievable to me just how slow moving people are to this. I mean, I've been yelling this off the rooftops for seven years now. And even I mean, we've had conversations with uh some of the largest gym chains in Canada, US, Singapore. And it it's it's fascinating, these conversations with their with the VPs, sometimes even presidents of these companies, you know, hundreds of locations, right? And uh and they're like, okay, so we get that we need to do online training. What software should we buy? Like, really, that's your question for me. Like, is that actually what you think is important? But it's always going to be, and this is where the opportunity lies, right? And this is where the disruption lies. Is I I I think people seriously underpredict just how slow large corporate entities are to make any kind of a change. They have so much money and operations and systems wrapped up into doing things one way. I mean, every single one of them is like kind of looking at this as a side project that they kind of know they should do, but they're just like, yeah, give it to Jim. Jim will do it. It's like you've got thousands of staff members. Your company is hurting, and like Jim is the best you can do, right? I mean, the metaphorical gym, like literally one or two people. It's like a special project, right? Versus you're gonna have upstarts, i.e. me, who are gonna come up and just be like, we've got eight years of experience in this. We've pulled on some of the best talent in the industry in all these different departments, and we're going straight at you with a profit motion that's three times yours. Like it's that's what's gonna happen. And that's where small facilities, you know, whatever you what what's the fancy name that people use for micro gyms that are like more locations, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's where they have the opportunity now to intelligently add this as a key part of what they do, and like not add this as a key part of what they do, literally build their business model around this because most won't. And there's way more opportunity in that than any folks are doing. Yes. I mean, you look at like consumer trends, even low to middle class people are starting to pay, are starting to accept and eagerly pay premiums for fitness stuff. You've got people buying $3,000 spin bikes on payment plans crazy that say that they can't afford to go out for dinner once a month. Right. You've got people going to you know, F-45s, Orange Theories, those types of facilities at 20, 25 bucks a class multiple times a week for being shut into a group exercise class, 30 people in a room. Like these people are paying what, three to five hundred dollars a month. Yep. It's just it's all of that's happening, right?

Well, to your point, John, I think that you know, I was recently in a conversation with a guy, he's gonna be on my other podcast next week. His name's Bill, Bill Lee. Multiple, at least three. That name sounds made up. Yeah, right. It is. Um He's had multiple billion-dollar exits, right? Guy doesn't need to be back into business, but he's so excited with the amount of change. And the this is for an entrepreneur, truly entrepreneurs, people who love seismic shifts, they hate status quo. This is a dream, right? Consumer needs are shifting in so many different areas. Huge, you know, uh, huge industries are getting toppled from fitness to universities to, you know, uh anything brick and mortar. Like that he's he gave me such an incredible pep talk about why it's such a great time to be an entrepreneur and why he's coming back in as an actual operator. He's taking over CEO role in a company and he's getting back on advisory boards. He's coming out of retirement for this. And, you know, we talk about the fitness industry specifically, you know, the 24-Hour Fitness, the Golds Gym, these big box gyms that have had a stranglehold on much of it for a very long time, they're not nimble. They can't do it. But you can, listener, if you own a micro gym or you're a trainer, you have so much opportunity right now. If you can just get your head space out of the old model and just start looking forward and talking to people like John and his team and other, you know, people who are innovating right now and have seen this coming for a while. It's truly an exciting time. And I hope, you know, if there's one thing that I can instill in people in this particular interview and this conversation, is this is a really good time to be in the finest industry. If you're in, if you're committed and you want this to be your thing, there's a ton more opportunity coming down the pipe. You just need to be knowing where to look for it. You have to open your eyes for it. And it's there, it's everywhere. Would you agree? Absolutely, man. Man, I love these conversations, John. It's really cool. It's really exciting. Uh, it gets me fired up as you can tell. Of course, we're bumping up on time. What's new? What can people go check out from the OTA, from from what you're doing? Where are you sending people now?

Yeah, I mean, go check out the Online Trainer Academy if if you want to jump on this, go to online trainer.com/slash academy. Can learn all about it. We'd love to have you. Cool. John, let's not make it two years from now. What do you think? Hey, you're the one who didn't message me. I'm not the one who listened to this podcast. That's right. You're right. I've been I've been sitting at home waiting for you a call.

Yeah. Uh oh. Oh. Right on. Well, Mr. Goodman, thank you for coming on. It's always a pleasure. And uh, you and I'll be talking really soon, I'm sure. Thanks, buddy. Appreciate it. Hey, it's your host, Eric Malzone. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Future of Fitness. If you enjoyed it, please do me a huge favor by going to the website and signing up for our newsletter. The website is futurofitness.do. Again, that's futureoffitness. We've got some big, big announcements coming down the pipe, and we want you to make sure that you are on top of it. Thank you again. Signing off.