Edward Hertzman - Athletech News & The State of Industry Media

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[00:01:45] with confidence and swagger. media network that we have and it's gonna be a lot of fun to finally highlight you as a person and the guy behind ATHLETEQ. I don't think you get out there nearly enough, so I'm trying to remedy that a little bit for you too. So let's start with this Eddie. You have a great backstory. The goal for what I want to get today is I want people to understand the man behind ATHLETEQ news, why you're doing what you're doing, why you see the opportunities in our industry.

[00:04:04] four months out of the year working with the biggest fast fashion retailers and the 7th Avenue Garmentos and really an amazing life experience doing that.

[00:04:09] In 2009, there was a cotton crisis, which kind of sounds weird to say, but the price

[00:04:13] of cotton was going up every single day and now we're horror buddies, Eric.

[00:04:18] And so I couldn't hold the price and every day, I would quote selling 24 hours later,

[00:04:22] it would be null and void and people were getting very frustrated.

[00:04:25] But I'm like, how is no one know this?

[00:04:27] Where is the Bloomberg of supply chain? blessing, he responded in five seconds. And within six months I ended up selling the business to him. And it was a real blessing because with having some real ammo behind me and the credibility that he gave the business, the business grew like 8X in the five years that I was there. And what happened when I was there is I got exposed to the Penske machine and I saw what was going on in film and I

[00:05:41] saw what was going on in music and fashion. And I'm always

[00:05:44] looking for the white space. You know, I can't, I don't have the

[00:05:46] financial bandwidth to go. I'm what I learned in one media entity. I said, let me apply to this industry. Never know how the industry is going to respond. But my hunch was it was a white space. And I'm very happy I did it. I'm very happy I did it. And I have a great team right now. Look, you and I are going out to connect to fitness.

[00:07:02] My head of sales, like, Catherine, I better like athletic. But if I make it tech, I don't know how I came up with it. And I got to tell you, there was like a lot of mixed feelings on it. And I had morning sprint AM warm up executive crunch, you know, sweat equity is really good. Maybe if we ever decide to start a private equity firm, boom, you got the name. I have about the derivatives of that domain. Yeah. Do it for stuff like that. Yeah. Well, I still own CrossFitBacon.com.

[00:09:42] I just haven't figured out what to do with it.

[00:09:43] So if anybody out there has an idea, let me know. The analogy really is like if you're in the financial industry or it's where the Wall Street community starts their day every day. Bloomberg, the terminal definitely, but from a publication, it's a business of record. It's a publication of record for the financial community and it serves the executives who

[00:11:02] are making decisions in that space. To this day, I don't think my mother ever really knew what my brother and I did because I don't think she has any interest in a military junta in Myanmar or the UFLPA or some shipping issue in the Suez Canal. However, as you and I, we talk about our Ora rings and we talk about our tonals and the workouts that we do. And we're all consumers of this.

[00:12:21] And we're all buying, we're all, I shouldn't say all,

[00:12:24] but a lot of us, we're working out,

[00:12:26] we're wearing the athleisure, I look at the way you go about media and the team that you're building systematically. And it's not something that I'm sure it's more traditional when it comes to media than what we've had. Because everything here in our industry has been like,

[00:13:40] the Vennaris, for example, or like they built it organically

[00:13:43] from a couple of guys.

[00:13:45] So when you look at the structure

[00:13:47] of what you. I mean, you saw Eric, who we had at NASDAQ, we were able to bring, and if you're an executive at an equipment company, you wanna know that we have the executives at the retail.

[00:15:02] If you're a tech, not like, we gotta be authentic,

[00:15:05] and that is about having the right content.

[00:15:06] And I think that mean? I have aspirations of getting into the event

[00:16:22] business. Yes. I think there is ways reps, reps, reps, reps, reps. I say this all the time, no matter how much money you have, you can't have a baby in less than nine months. You can't push it out at five. So I knew that when I started this, and I was going to have to be very patient, and it's going to take a long time to monetize, and you're going to be monetizing it slowly. And it's a people business at the end of the day.

[00:17:42] I think it's a little bit different than if in. I think if you're going to have, you and I spoke to Tom at F45, AI can't do that. Like AI is going to create a conversation. You know, oh, let's let 20 of us go to dinner and talk shop.

[00:19:00] Artificial intelligence can't like create that conversation.

[00:19:03] So really what I'm getting to is really the business is networking, connecting people, how do I do it where you could make one at a wholesale price that you could resell it or give it to your staff at scale? These are the ideas that start to come from being connected and inside an industry. Some of the problems I'll be able to solve, some of them I won't want to solve, some of them I'll pass along to friends, but that's the power of the media. And it's like you're looking under the hood every single day. To your point, very soon

[00:20:22] I won't be, quote unquote, an outsider me happier. And I'll ask you this question at the end of the podcast here. It's like, how can we help you as a community? Like, if you want people to reach out, what do you want them to reach out about? You don't have to answer it now because we'll get to it later. But nothing makes me happier than when I circle back with a guest and they're like, oh, something happened. Someone reached out to me and it turned into this great partnership,

[00:21:40] this opportunity.

[00:21:41] Or someone reaches out to me and says, hey, will you connect me with a recent guest?

[00:21:45] I have this.

[00:21:46] And I get to do the business, right? Then we're doing our job. We're doing our job. I also think, look, the hardest thing is you start making friends and bad idea. I think people are going to go to the gym or you know, it's we're reporting what the studies are saying. We're reporting what the doctor is saying. We're reporting how the fitness community is going to start leveraging that. But you and I also have an opinion on it. But there's different ways to interject that opinion. But you want people to know that that's an opinion. And these are the facts. And so that's a challenge of

[00:24:23] any media organization today. And like, you're going to have to really create very different verticals. So how many people are a personal trainer as a profession? A lot. And so if you take that market, you could say, okay, they are potential readers to Athetech, but I think that there would need to be a personal trainer vertical. We're launching

[00:25:42] in the next month a whole vertical just for the franchise business. I said this and I don't want to squash anyone's enthusiasm, but I don't want to keep hearing how passionate people are about getting people off the couch. Harsh. I think that's very important, but I don't understand the business of that. I want to understand the economics of the fitness and wellness industry. That's my curiosity. And

[00:27:01] I think there needs to be more conversation I don't know if young is the right industry. It's kind of like a young industry. It's not a very, like again, like the law goes to this summit every year. The fact goes, like there's an established network

[00:28:21] that like every industry kind of has.

[00:28:23] These are the events they go to.

[00:28:24] These are the things they read,

[00:28:25] use the people they look to. go into the PR companies. They're not, they don't have these markets. And maybe they got burned before, or maybe the hard thing is, again, there isn't 10 million places to go. You could call Fit Insider, you could call us, but who else you calling? But that doesn't mean you don't do it. And look, I don't want to have 10 other competitors pop up. That would be a real thorn in my ass. But I would say there's a lot more happening

[00:29:41] that it's getting credit for.

[00:29:42] But if people got to raise their hand and say,

[00:29:44] hey, Eddie, hey, Josh, we're doing this.

[00:29:47] Can we write about it? And so I think what's happening right now is, I don't want to pick on the connected fitness space. I'm going to continue to grow as a segment. I think there's been some bad connected fitness deals, but there's bad deals in every industry. But again, the problem in that space is the valuation was wrong, the expectations was wrong and the economics are just misaligned.

[00:31:00] And that's why a lot of these companies are afraid to talk because it's like, okay, well,

[00:31:05] we were worth $4 billion.

[00:31:06] Now we're worth a good job. Look, exponential fitness creates a tremendous amount of news every day. They have several

[00:32:21] PR companies they work with. They're's, there's several companies, a lot of companies actually that do that, but that's go just comes to mind because I see that they're,

[00:33:42] they're willing to talk and like, I, I, I ask Anthony all the time to talk, you know,

[00:33:46] whether he's going to talk a million times or that. I'm not saying I would say no to it if it happened in an organic way, but I have always believed that when I run a company, I want to be profitable. I want to know that I could pay my employees off of the EBITDA, the cash that I'm generating, I want to be profitable. And when you're a

[00:35:01] profitable company, then you're in a position of strength. You could say, okay, well, maybe

[00:35:04] I could take on strategic investors or maybe I can saying it just to talk. Maybe I'm interested in maybe investing into the franchise space and not because I'm saying that I necessarily have an operator. I would find a really great operator, but I think that there is some businesses that I'm learning about that make good economic sense. If I'm blessed, you're saying five years.

[00:36:22] Five years now, if my business is doing well, the idea isn't to go buy a Ferrari.

[00:36:28] That doesn't interest me. like, and that comes with a lot of headaches. When I say, Eric, you know, I have an idea to build this thing called active source lab, I can do it. No conflict of interest. I don't have a company saying, oh, you're restricted, all workable hours of us. I wanted to start after. So I started, and maybe I invest in your CrossFit make an idea and it fails, but okay, at least I can make that decision.

[00:37:40] Maybe it's a success, great.

[00:37:42] That to me is a, I don't know what price you put on that.

[00:37:45] Maybe it's freedom, maybe it's,

[00:37:47] that to me is real, they're entrepreneurial. They could speak to executives and understand the lingo a little bit.

[00:39:00] I want to give more resources to Leah and Kathleen and Sarah

[00:39:04] and everyone on the sales side.

[00:39:06] We're going to start building out more of an events team

[00:39:08] really preparing for 2020. that I think we're just getting started. We're just getting started. This company is going to look very different in a year or two. Very, very different. Not that I'm going to be sending drones to outer space, but I think the amount of times we're getting together, the amount of content we're doing, the people that we're speaking to, I'm blown away. The top executive

[00:40:21] CEOs, founders, we're having relationships with and talking to? But it's been a while, Ryan. That's gonna be a great series. I urge people to log into that. So here's the question I promised you at the beginning. If people are listening, people from our industry, and they wanna reach out to you, what would you like to hear from them about? What are some things we can help you with? You know, A, I wanna know how we could do a better job.

[00:41:42] It's always nice, oh, I like what you're doing.

[00:41:44] Like I appreciate that.

[00:41:45] That's a feel good, right?

[00:41:46] It's a dopamine hit.

[00:41:47] But like, what kind to how you say it, but to say it, like how do we do something better? And like I said before, reach out to us, like we want to cover, I want my team to be like, Eddie, we can't write 100 stories a day, okay? I'll figure it out how to get more editors and we'll cover more,

[00:43:00] but if the industry needs it and wants it

[00:43:03] and is consuming it, I want to be providing it.

[00:43:05] The rest will take care of itself.

[00:43:07] So help me help the industry. I'm not, my ego is not like that. Like I just reach out, but I'll say something. I don't, I don't want to like rewind the tape a little bit. I'm sure people are going to listen and be like, yeah, you know, this guy's full of shit. You know, you know, he's saying all these things, but at the end of the day, he's trying to sell an ad or he's trying to sell a sponsored content in my response to that, cause I know there's some people are going to say that, well, you got to do good to do good. Right. Like if I can't pay the bills, you know, it's like sometimes people are like,

[00:44:23] well, you know, they want me to write every single story about them,

[00:44:25] but they don't want to advertise. in this industry when it comes to merchandise and stuff. And if I could help solve a pain point and create jobs and make a profit doing that, I think that's a wonderful thing. And like I said, then my biggest gift will be one day to be on the other side of the table and give that back. And look, I have people reach out to me all the time just because I'm not a venture capitalist. I've very piped into that community. So people reach out and

[00:45:41] I've connected and I've introduced people that have made strategic investments. So people

[00:45:45] have been good to me and I want to be good to them. And the love being here. I love the work we're doing, but you've been a great friend. Great friend to the business and me personally. So thank you. Oh man. It's all my pleasure, dude. Yeah. Really appreciate it. That's a wrap folks. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Feminist. If you did, I'm going to ask you to do three simple things.

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