Eric Casaburi - From Serotonin Centers to 108,000 Gyms: Solving Longevity's Distribution Problem

[00:00:02] Hey friends, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness and wellness industry podcast for over five years and running. I'm your host, Eric Malzone, and I have the honor of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the extremely fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. If you like the show, we'd love it if you took three minutes of your day to leave us a nice, supportive review wherever you consume your podcasts. If you're interested in staying up to date with the Future of Fitness, go to

[00:00:32] futureoffitness.co to subscribe and get weekly summaries dropped into your inbox. Now onto the show.

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[00:02:30] They've invested a ton into this platform and now they're bringing that European engineering excellence to America. The migration experts have arrived. Check out perfectgym.com where enterprise level sophistication meets operator freedom. All right, here we go. Eric Casaburi, welcome back. How you doing? Oh, it's great to be back, Eric. Thanks for having me again.

[00:02:53] Yeah, you're welcome. I mean, you're doing some stuff. I mean, you've been busy. I was looking February 2023 is when we had the last conversation on this podcast. And you've been busy. You've been watching the market, building, rebuilding, doing all the things that entrepreneurs do. You have no shortage of entrepreneurial experience. We know that. And what I'm really excited to talk about, and this is how I'm going to set the table for this, is in a recent quarterly report I do with Alex Alamnistiano and Juliette Storrette.

[00:03:22] Alex, we were talking about the productization of longevity medicine, right? How nobody seems to have figured out, well, what's the right mix of products? What does that look like? What's the price point? Da-da-da-da. We're still figuring it all out. And Alex made a really good point. He's like, well, I don't understand why we're trying to do this independently when the distribution channel already exists. It's the health clubs and the gyms. There's 20,000 plus gyms in the United States. Like, it's there. It's right there. So you're working on that solution. You're about to launch it.

[00:03:52] So maybe walk us through. Let's start there. Like, you know, over the last three years, how has it evolved from simply the serotonin centers, anti-aging centers, to kind of the evolution of where you guys are doing now with SLIM, which is great. I love it. I'll let you explain the acronym, a little double entendre. So yeah, go for it, man. Give us the background here. What are you up to? Of course. So we, Tim, similar to what you're talking about, we knew that this channel existed. My first experience with that conversation was my very first A4M meeting.

[00:04:20] So A4M is like URSA for fitness, or now it's the HFA for the fitness industry. It's that for the longevity space. It's a big conference. It's great. Everybody's there. It's wonderful. Great people, just like our industry. And the president stopped me on the trade show floor and said, hey, I heard you, you know, one of the guys that were the big fitness guys. And I was like, yeah, I built a pretty good size brand. Yes. And she's like, are you going to be that connection to this industry? And I said, well, I sure hope so. Interesting.

[00:04:47] So that was like, and I never forgot that I remember when I told my wife about the conversation I had with her. And today it, it really birthed out of a conversation I had with, with PD Mo, Pete Moore from Integrity Square. And Pete and I were at Beyond Active together and we were both speakers at different sessions and we were having dinner that night. And he's like, bro, he's like, you talk about these statistics with your best clients or your gym clients. And they are.

[00:05:15] So if you look across the serotonin brand, our highest retained client and our highest executed client is a client that is exercising three days a week. They're on our protocols, our weight loss protocols, our hormone protocols, our peptide protocols, our recovery protocols, all of it. And they're our best referral source. They are our best advocates. I mean, it's, it's, it's just such a stark difference than all the other clients.

[00:05:39] And we wound up, you know, our second or third year started making a concerted effort toward acquiring them. So we would go and set up at some of the big brand names, the big gym boxes that I had relationships with. And we, guys, I was friends with just from the industry and said, hey, I want to put a table on a Monday night or Tuesday morning. And we want to just offer your members free stuff. We're, you know, we're not going to, we're not going to try to kill them with them, spin the wheel, have fun. They come in for their workout. We'll give them a free IV. We'll give them a B12 shot, you know, an energy shot, a Mike B shot. And we'll talk to them about, you know, labs and we'll, we'll do all kinds of cool stuff for them.

[00:06:09] It was wildly successful for us because a week was, I came from the industry, 30 years in fitness. We know how to talk to that customer really well. I mean, my current marketing director was my former marketing director at Retro Fitness, right? So we brought KT over to this brand. And so we've got this team that all came from fitness. Bill Murray came from fitness. We came from fitness. And we built this incredible platform that really kind of works exceptionally well for a client that is inside of the gym. Because it is our target audience.

[00:06:36] Because we don't have to sell them on why this is all important. They're in the gym sweating their hands off, working out, getting sore, getting up in the morning before work, coming to the gym afterward. That client has made a decision that they want their health to be a priority. That's our client, right? And we can facilitate that. So when Pete and I were talking about it, he's like, you know, the math in this, and to the point of what you and Alex probably talk about is, hasn't even monetized this.

[00:07:02] The monetization isn't necessarily in owning the medical component of it because it can complicate a fitness operator's life very quickly. You got to have an MSO. There's HIPAA compliance as every email or text goes out has to have, you know, an encryption on. Everything changes. The world we work in is very specific. The box we work in is highly, highly regulated. So our looking at it was, we can do all that, but let me show you gym owner A or gym owner B.

[00:07:27] Why this is so important for you as a former gym operator and owner still of a gym franchise and on the board of one. The important thing that lives and dies by in our industry of fitness is retention and attrition. So as you know, it's generally 60% a year. So you're talking about this crazy 4% to 5% per month, you know, attrition issue that is unsolved in most cases for the masses.

[00:07:50] If we just had an impact and we know we can, because I have a friend who has multiple Pilates studios here in Orlando. He's got, you know, 14 of them. And we've got four stores in Orlando and many of his clients are clients of ours. So I was at a dinner party with him the other night and he said, I got to tell you, we know our best clients are your clients. I looked at him like, what do you mean? He's like, well, first of all, you know, we don't have thousands of members. We have a couple of hundred members in each studio. He goes, all of them, A, they come in wearing your t-shirts because we give them all.

[00:08:20] We always give them like serotonin swag. That's our gym trick. I love swag, by the way. Yeah. We're huge on swag. We have sleep masks now and we got everything. We take, we're making sure we're going home with you or in bed with you. You want to be everywhere? Yeah. Yeah. I'll send you my address. You get, please do. We have pre-made boxes. You'll love them. I'm a trick I learned from Rolls Royce. I'll tell you that on another podcast. It's really cool. We do it. So I said, well, let's talk about that a little bit. And I said, you know, you should be looking at attention and nutrition. You're, you know, you're in the, this is a fitness business. He goes, no, no, we do.

[00:08:50] He goes, and we know. So, you know, we were at first speculative about it in my original conversations, but really now we're more data driven about it. So we also know that our clients that tell us they work out in gyms, they're more compliant when we put them on our serotonin coaching app and say, Hey, go to a gym, show us your trainer. So Pete and I were talking, he's like, and he goes, we should kind of think about putting these into the gyms. And I was like, yeah, I'm like, that's actually a really good idea.

[00:09:18] We were, you know, we were looking at it. So, so fast forward to today, we have created what we call slim gym. So to your point, it's the acronym is SLIM. It's the serotonin light impact model. And slim, uh, is it's, you know, two to 500 square feet, uh, inside of a fitness center. It's could be the world sales office. This could be a former childcare room. It's space that they're just not using anyway. It's dead space. They're paying rent. They probably forgot about it. Maybe it was a spin room converted to something else. They're trying to do recovery. Everyone's trying to do recovery.

[00:09:48] And to your point and to, to the point of everyone that talks about this is no, what is it? What is longevity? Is it a cryo chair? Is it a cold plunge? Is it a massage chair? Um, by the way, it's none of those things. It's all of these, it's all of these, it's these different things together because it doesn't really work unless you're managing and seeing it through the blood work because you call it recovery, but how do you know what you're recovering from? You have high cortisol. They have high CRP, C-reactive protein. Um, does your testosterone being suppressed over some things?

[00:10:18] Do you have metabolic syndrome? Like what is it that is your issue? And you can't possibly know that. And this has always been the disconnect, right? I remember standing in the gym and I would walk in and wave, never forgets my first gym, my first gym, waving a prescription, a blue prescription piece of paper. My doctor said I have to come here. I was like, I don't know your doctor. And I don't have a medical person in this building unless they're a member. What are we going to do with this guy? He's like, oh, I had a heart attack. And right up there, oh my God, this guy had a heart attack. And now he's got to, he's got to sign that, you know, all the forms.

[00:10:47] And I'm thinking like our trainer, you know, okay, we're going to have him do some cardio. We're going to put him through a work. It was so non-specific and it irked me. Like back then it irked me. This is 25 years ago. And now I fast forward to today and I look at him like, now we can really be very, very specific with someone who's type two diabetic, post cardiovascular or something, you know, anything post stroke. I mean, there's so many things we can do to be really helpful. So when you define recovery, it really starts with understanding the labs, giving him an in-body

[00:11:17] scan, knowing their visceral fat, their lean body mass, their muscle mass, how's their bone density. That's data, that's information. And then we can kind of move forward from that. So we know that if we can just take half, I'm not going to fix attrition. Let's say we cut them in half and we believe we're going to do more than cutting them in half. That member sees results faster. So think about this. If we put a client and we do their labs and let's say they need a GLP or they're a candidate for a GLP and they might be a candidate for hormone replacement therapy because they're

[00:11:45] 35, 45, 50 years old. And they're that client that joins a gym. They want to do it. They're doctors when they have to do it. They come to the gym and in six weeks, 60% of them will walk out the door and they never come back, which is what we see from January to the middle of February in most gyms. Right. Come in, they join, surge happens. And then by April 1st, we say April Fool's Day and gone. We used to tell the regulars, don't worry. Most of them will be gone by mid-April. You'll be fine. Back to normal in the morning. You'll get your treadmill.

[00:12:11] And it was true and it was such a hard pill to swallow and we wanted them to come to the gym, especially at retro because we would sell them shakes. We had, you know, we had great post-workout protein shakes opportunities. And so we wanted them to show up. We didn't want to rent a key tank. We wanted them there. So we knew, and I remember I talked about this with Rudy Fabiano when he was designing my gyms and he was like, listen, you've got, you've got to get married. It'll make them stick. It's got to be points of contact. And we, we would talk through design and flow and making sure they would stay.

[00:12:37] And, and every sophisticated person that has ever talked about, it was really difficult for the software. And then the light bulb just went on with all of this. And we started doing arm placement therapy and we were into medical weight loss. Dude, this was seven years now. Like we've got, you know, we opened up our first store right around after COVID-21. And we were like in it, we were in it through 2019 doing all the research. Like we, I was working on this just a day I stepped down as a CEO of retro fitness. As I started working on this brand and the stuff that I learned was incredible.

[00:13:05] So if we just got that member on one protocol within the first three or four weeks, they see results. That's all it takes. Like you just get the hook. You got to get the hook in. You just got to get the hook in. And that is maybe it's two or three pounds on the scale or my God, my pants are loose on me, or I've got more energy. Oh my God, I could see my tricep. Whatever it is, it's got to happen in those first few weeks or you're going to be just a victim to the statistic, right? And you're going to hit the attrition number and you're going to, you're going to be like,

[00:13:33] oh my God, I kept going to replace half of my members at a Tate to get in here. And the back door is wide open. I just walk right at it. So our goal is to shut that back door. So if you do the math on a gym, that's got now 3000 members, 2000 members, and we drop another 800 or 500 without any additional cost to the gym, they just stay. They don't buy another personal training session. They don't buy a shake. They don't buy a drink out of the cooler. They just stay. Do the math on what that means. Keeping your front door marketing the same. It's, it's insane. Like your whole marketing budget could change over this. Like it could.

[00:14:03] So we know that that is a very well thought out opportunity for the fitness space. And we, we have the way of doing it. And now what we decided is we didn't want to just be a QR code scan here and order your medication because that is not a safe way to implement this. And you have no control over it. So we're in your gym. We're working with their trainers. We're working with their management. They're working with their sales teams. Like because we come from fitness, we know how to train that integration. And we use the same, some of the same products. We use an in-body scan. A lot of gyms have an in-body scan and we could share it.

[00:14:33] Hey, you want to do it? You want us to do it? We'll do it. Okay. We'll, we'll send it back to you. However you want us to integrate with your training program. We'll do it. We're very flexible that way. You want us to handle programming all your training because you don't have it. You're just a big box. We do that too. We'll put them on our, our app. It's we'll, we'll, we pay for it and we'll deploy it. So we wanted to solve and meet them where they are, meet your gym, where, where it is and how do you want to do this? But you need to do this because your, your client will wind up doing it somewhere else

[00:14:59] eventually, because I believe this is the next iteration of the fitness industry in general. I believe. I don't disagree. It has to be this all encompassing place you go into and you control my health. And I want you to, I don't want to go to five places to fix my car. Think about that. Like the only reason sometimes I go to the dealership, I might pay more, but they could do my tires. They could do my oil. They could do a dent. They could do everything. And they're going to do it the best. And they're going to have the exact paint code. They're going to have the exact braid caliper. They're going to have the exact type of oil.

[00:15:26] Like I'll pay a little extra for that comfort of mind and ease of convenience for me to do that. And you should be a one-stop shop. So what does that mean on the recovery side? So if we have additional space, we'll put in the hyperbaric chamber. We'll put in the red light bed. These pieces of equipment are $100,000 a piece. So you think about like, if you're a gym, what size gym you are, you're going to spend two to three, 400 grand on more equipment. That's a pretty big risk take for an operator.

[00:15:54] That's, you know, already operating with an X, Y, and Z on, on a return. So if we put the equipment in, you know, we'll happen to make packages out of it. We'll put it into our service packages and we'll make it part of their protocol, tying it into what they're doing in the gym, whether it's an IV therapy protocol, whether it's NAD or all these buzzwords you're hearing the different peptides at work, you know, and we, we work within the inbounds. We don't do gray market stuff. We only do FDA clear category one peptides. And I think that's going to get better.

[00:16:23] That's a whole nother podcast you may have already done already, but it's in and, and what we do is we make it, everything is our issue. It's not, it's not the gym's issue, right? So they're not having to deal with medical intake forms and, and being HIPAA compliant because, you know, cause we keep that in our four walls. We keep that to us and we keep up that wall. So there is a separation from the gym business to our business. And it's the safest way and the most effective way. Cause at the end of the day, you're a gym operator. You care about the member getting results, period.

[00:16:52] Like that's, what's going to give you retention. That's, what's going to give you a separate from maybe the gym down the street, that part of it, the complex part of it, we handle all that. And it's still very concierge. It's high touch. When people say, Hey, I'm going to make this affiliation with an online company. I just, my only challenge with that is the same way it's never worked in the supplement industry and still doesn't is it goes into the wild, wild west. And then people wind up going, bearing off and going on their own and trying, doing different

[00:17:20] things and, and you have no control of the outcomes of protocols and no one's really communicating back to anyone that's inside of your gym. That's responsible for retention, whether it's a trainer, a sales consultant, or, or whatever fitness pro being in the industry long enough. I've had making, I've made so many of those mistakes and over the years, we just know like what works and what doesn't work. And we felt that the slim model was something that could work really well. Well, in my belief there, and this is great. And I have, you know, I'm going to throw a lot of questions out there on this follow-up,

[00:17:49] but my belief is that, you know, this isn't a yes or no type thing. Like gyms and our industry just has to start pivoting this way. And it's not a hard pivot. It's a gentle pivot, right? It's just starting to adopt and, and you know, the options are build buyer partner, right? So if you were lifetime, you bill, Equinox, you bill, right? Others may have the capital to buy and that's great as well. This, with this mall that you're talking about sounds definitively like a partner, right?

[00:18:18] Like, so they are essentially, how does that really ship work? Does it come into like, um, you're there, you're renting space from them? Are they, yeah. We'll pay you a use fee to be in the gym, but we're going to, the added value that we can create is, you know, so our centers all have a marketing budget and it's pretty good marketing budget to acquire new clients. We would invest a portion of our marketing budget into your membership. So what we would do is we would say we are several by those three 60 in most places in the Northeast, for instance, it's that it's worth 1500 bucks, the full 70 plus panel,

[00:18:48] another, another hundred point, like we do all these different blood labs and we do incredible stuff, but we, it includes a consultation where we review all that includes your in body scan, where we tie that into the labs. Hey, you have inflammation, by the way, you got a ton of visceral fat. This all makes sense. You got metabolic syndrome, here's your blood pressure. Like it all ties in. So we'll give that for your, you know, let's just, I'll give you an example of one, one of back of the paper, you know, um, things we've laid out from one of the fitness groups we're working with. And it was, we'll give it to the first 50 members that join the gym every month or the

[00:19:18] first hundred members or whatever, whatever it is, depending on the size of the gym. Um, and we'll offer that. So that's an add value for your membership. So you say to a client, like, Hey, when you join our gym, you're not just going to get your complimentary first off training session or a free shake at the juice bar. They're going to get a full suite of medical services from serotonin, our, our, our vendor partner here. And we'll, we'll handle it all. And the great thing is, is it's a retentive tool, right? Because we're getting this information and we're getting a lot of data.

[00:19:46] And now we're the source of truth for them. So where are they going to come? They're going to come to your gym to see us as well. It's, it, it works really well. So for us, uh, the huge monetary benefit isn't the monthly payment that we would pay them. Huge monetary benefit is the annualized effect to attrition. Monstrous difference, by the way. So there's a, there's a lot of different models in the, in the partner. And, you know, I recently had, um, Dave Apple on from Corpel. So they're doing more of a telemedicine, right? So potentially viable path. I mean, it's simple, right?

[00:20:16] There's no, you know, it's, it's probably the least friction. You just send out a couple of emails to your membership, right? They sign up. Great. Very low risk. Um, yours is one step further. So what would be like the, the risk taking on for the health club or gym operator? Is it simply the space? I mean, obviously like, you know, legally that's all on you on the medical services, right? You have to know that really well. You have to follow the state regulations and all those things. So, you know, what, what, what's the, yeah, what's the risk that they would take under for this?

[00:20:45] I think what most gym operators don't realize, and because I've been doing this a while and I, we understand we spend probably more in the legal than anything else. I think in our infrastructure, they have to be very careful about stark law and referral stuff. So when someone scans a QR code that you send in your email and you get paid, you have to be very, very careful. You have now created a referral relationship and you got paid to sell someone medication. That is a very large violation of CPOM, corporate facts of medicine, both for both groups.

[00:21:14] I don't know how that model works going forward. I know we won't touch that with a 10 foot pole. I would never do that. I would never let a franchisee of mine do that. I would never let a friend of mine do that that owned the gym. In fact, one of our clients that we're onboarding with now said, you need to stop that because when they get tagged, everybody's going to get tagged. And it's going to be big because it's going to be so blatantly obvious because there is, it's an electronic trail. Like it definitely, this happened. Like you made this referral, you got a court and you got paid.

[00:21:43] They can wordsmith it however they want, but it's going to end. Like that model probably won't last very long, in my opinion, in my attorney's opinion. Because we could have done something as easy because we have an infrastructure. We have an infrastructure called serotonin RX, which we're going to launch. It's an online, but it has a whole concierge component to it. It's not just medications online. I just don't believe in malpractice medicine on the internet. I just don't believe in it. Can't take it. My arms are out. I've seen too many damaged goods clients come into my centers where, oh my God, my testosterone was this. And they're, and like crazy stuff.

[00:22:12] Like they had high hematocrit, which is hopefully someone watching this, you guys Google that if you don't know what it is. And they're onto like a dose of testosterone. They just should, they should be bloodletting or they should have like, they don't even know this stuff because they're doing it online and there's no one monitoring any of that stuff. Um, or people just comes in and say, oh, I tried a GLP. I tried, you know, C-moglutide and it didn't work. I'm like, no, those medications work. You just weren't titrated properly and you weren't, you had no oversight. Like this medication don't not work for most of the population.

[00:22:41] So knowing what we know, we believe in a little more of a high touch environment for that reason. So we have a physical presence. Um, everything gets shipped to your doorstep. Like that can send you, you know, if you're on a jackpot testosterone, we can drop it right to your doorstep. Like it's fine. I mean, we, we have all of those mechanisms in place, but it's the follow-up. It's someone overseeing it. It's someone meeting with you. It's someone giving you an in-body scan. If you're on a, if you're on a medical weight loss medication and you're not independently

[00:23:07] going somewhere to get a DEXA scan or an in-body scan to learn about your body composition while you're on it, you're insane. You're in your, you get what you deserve. You deserve to lose all that muscle mass and be a skinny fat person because that's what almost everyone that goes on those medications, it happens to them. And then you see our clients and they're just getting leaner. And if it's muscular, same medication, we just know, Hey, if this happens, we do this. We stack your protein here. We give you an IV of this. We'll do we, once we see it on in-body, okay, timeout, slow down the titration because you're,

[00:23:36] you're losing too fast. Like your body's just, it's like, think about the old bodybuilding world, right? Like if you overcompensated when you were getting ready for a show, like you lost muscle mass. And like, it was that balance of staying anabolic and being catabolic. Like we understand all of that stuff, especially for the fitness client, especially if you're working out. So we know we got to give you essential amino acids. We have a product called Cerebolex. It's a, it's a medical grade amino, essential amino complex. Unbelievable. But we put you on that. Like we put you on our Ceraline collagen.

[00:24:04] It's a collagen protein, but we added HMB to the product. HMB was used for sarcopenia patients in the hospital. And the dosing they use in the study, you can find the white paper study was three grams. So I called Dr. Monroe. I'm like, who's our formulator? I said, doc, how many grams are in my, my, my protein? He goes, how many do you think? I'm like three. He goes, of course it's three. Cause that's what the study was done on. But we know that. So I know if Eric's or his wife is with your, if she's losing weight too fast, you got to take this now. Just, you got to take this until you're finished the journey because we can't have you lose muscle.

[00:24:34] We, we love, listen, we're in the gym business. We love muscle. We know important of this. You got to have it. These are the risks around letting your clients do that. Your members, if you truly care about them, like if they just lose 30 pounds, unless they're morbidly obese, that's one thing. But if they're a fitness enthusiast and they lose 30 pounds, they could lose 25 of it can be muscle. That's a really bad day at the office for you as a gym owner, because that person's exhausted. They look like crap. Eventually they, they may look okay in clothes, but they look like shit naked.

[00:24:59] And it's, and that person doesn't value your gym anymore because that's not, that's not where the action happened. I just, we have a whole different view of this. It's just, I wear a different set of goggles. My team wears a different set of goggles when we view this challenge and how to fix it. Well, what's interesting about this, and this is the question I've always, I've had since GLP ones really started to be a strong conversation or industry, which is like two, three years ago. Is it actually, are GLP patients actually more likely to go into the gym? Like if they, if they weren't gym goers before, right?

[00:25:29] Is it actually okay? Is it the case where they're losing some weight? They're feeling more confident. Like I want to take the next level. I want to go to the gym. Or is it people who are like, well, that was super easy. Why would I have to work hard for it? I'm just going to stay out of the gym and I'll just take this shot. Like, you know, I'm sure it's different people. So what do you, what do you think right now? Where are we at? Yeah. Okay. I got two schools of thought. So I do think it's a gateway drug, right? I call it a gateway drug for fitness. Okay. And here's why, because how many times have we heard, and I've heard it, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of times in my 30 year career.

[00:25:58] Oh, I got to get in shape before I come to your gym. Oh yeah. Yeah. I would look at them like what? Like family members, friends. Now I'm going to lose 10 pounds and then I'll join. What? Like this is what we do. My first experience, I used to work for Chris and Mitchell Pacifico when they had Gold's gyms way back in the day. Now I'm dating myself a little bit, right? This is way back when I was working in their gym in Staten Island as a trainer. And I would stay after work and I would work out and close the place and hang out. And I remember it was a big heavyset fella. And I remember his name, his name is Michael.

[00:26:27] And he was looking through the door. Gym was closed. It's not a car in the parking lot, but mine. And the guy's cleaning. So I happened to be walking by the front desk because I was going from the strength area to the cardio area. And I looked, I was like, what's this guy? So I went over to the door because I worked in a place. So I went on, I unlocked the door. I invited him. He said, no, no, no, I don't want to come in. He wouldn't need to put his foot through the door. I'll say, my name is Eric. Put up my hand. Tricks hand. Who are you? Michael. I'm Michael. Come on in. It's just me here. Let's come on in. What are you doing here? You looking for real estate? Like it was a foot.

[00:26:56] You know, I kind of was trying to break that. He's like, I, you know, he goes into this. He goes, look at me. He goes, I, you know, I know I got to work out. I got two young kids. I got to join a gym. I'm not going to join a gym. I got to lose probably like a hundred pounds. I was like, well, listen, you may want to lose a hundred pounds. That might be very true, but you haven't lost a hundred pounds. And you're staring inside. Look at this gym. You need to come and work out in this gym. You need to get into this place. No, no, I can't. I'm not going to do that. I'm embarrassed. I'll tell you what. I'm back here tomorrow morning at seven o'clock. Not a lot of people.

[00:27:26] It's going to be, it was a Friday. So it was a Saturday. This guy was here on a Friday night. Think about that. Because it was a seven o'clock. It was the next day. It was a Saturday morning. I was like, I'll meet you here. We'll work out together. You're going to be my guest. You'll be with me. Not going to be a lot of people. I'm telling you, Saturday morning. It's a summer weekend. Everyone's going to go to the beach. Because we were in New York at this gym. Came back. Worked out with him. Put him through it. Talked to him about it. It was a therapy session more than anything else. But that was a real, and mind you, he became one of my most incredible clients. One of my greatest success stories as a trainer back in the day. I talked with Donnie Saladino about this story.

[00:27:55] And Bobby Cappuccio worked with me at that gym at that time back in the day. It was like, I still remember. He wrote me a letter. I opened up my first gym. It was a powerhouse gym. I opened up before I did retro fitness. And the letter went to the Staten Island Gold gym. And Susan, the manager, called me. She goes, hey, I got a letter here for you. You need to get this letter. My biggest regret is when I moved from my second house, I lost this letter. This guy wrote me a full page back and front letter.

[00:28:21] It had me in tears because he told me how important, how I changed his life, how for his kids, for his wife, for his marriage. I mean, it was such a, and I was like, I worked out with the guy the first day that just brought him in. To that end though, to the conversation, the point we're having is, some people truly feel that they do have to lose weight to join a gym. Sure. My wife, on the other hand, will say to you, Eric, some people just want the shot. Stop trying to get everybody to work out. And she's kind of right also. Yeah. So there's two schools of thought.

[00:28:50] There's people that I think it will be a gateway drug to get them to join because if someone could start that medication, they feel a little confidence, they feel comfortable. Now they want to be with the fitness people. I'm not realizing like everybody in that gym didn't start that way. Like they got that way, but it doesn't work. This is culturally, socially. It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't resonate, unfortunately, in the messaging that we put out in the industry. So I think there's a little bit of both. So it's hard to answer because I could, I could argue for both. And I think both are kind of true. I think some people will never exercise because they just don't ever want to sweat.

[00:29:19] Like this is something of, you know, this is how they are. And I think some people are willing to exercise and want to, but are embarrassed to join the fitness community. I think those medications are going to be huge for those people and the influx of people that will come into the gyms post that confidence builder will be enormous for the businesses. Well, and to your point, with the model that you guys are putting out there, they have to come in the gym to get it. Like that's part of the program. You literally have to physically set foot in the gym. Right. And that's a, that's a good thing.

[00:29:47] Cause once you're there, you know, that's one barrier that's been removed and that's a big one. Like just physically walking into the gym foot over the barrier of the front door is a big deal for a lot of people. And I think a lot of us have been around the industry or been fitness or athletes in our lives. We're like, oh, it's not a big deal. I do it all the time, but it is a big deal for a lot of people. We need to respect that. And, you know, it's, it's interesting to see too, cause like the psychology of, of fitness, like we don't sell French fries and burritos. Right. That's easy. You smell it. It's delicious. You want it. Right. It's great.

[00:30:16] We sell consistent work like, and long-term results, right. Delayed gratification. And I think pain, I still people, I sell sweat and pain for a living. I'd be around like a dinner with doctors. I'm like, oh, I sell sweat and pain for a living. Like look at me like this guy's crazy. Yeah, it's true. But if we can D, if we can give them a little bit of boost upfront, right. Give them, let them get them feeling better within a week or two or three. That's a huge win. Like that psychology of it is like, okay, they just have that extra juice coming into it where they're like, okay, they have more momentum going versus trying to get that flywheel spinning,

[00:30:46] which can be very difficult for someone who's just not used to it or hasn't had movement as part of their life. It's, um, I had a conversation with Donnie Saladino about this and he said, you know, you meet people where they are when it comes to fitness. If it's just sport, they want to go and, you know, play some volleyball or just movement. Like with young people, especially that's, that's always great advice. I tell people, I don't care what you do. Walk around the block, take your dog for a walk, do something you really enjoy. Just make movement part of your day.

[00:31:15] And then it'll iterate. Cause I have, even with myself, my own fitness journey, I have noticed I have climbed ladders. Of change. Like I do crazy. I remember I did P90X for a while. I was doing crazy work. I do hit worker. I do a little bit of everything because I want to, I want it to continue to grow because, you know, but I originally just started with, you know, football training, bench press, squat, and deadlifting. Like that was my, you know, that's, I did that all my, my formative years. And then I really got into all these other cool things you could do.

[00:31:41] And I, and I don't care if it just starts with a walk or a bicycle ride, but I think GLPs and, and other medications, you know, will be helpful. But to your point about visiting the gym, I mean, that's one of the things we also do is, you know, we also do, you know, the fat burning energy shots. So the might be 12 shots. So someone coming to the gym, we can give you a pre-workout shot and off you go. And it's an intramuscular shot. So you're going to, you're going to be playing with fire when you get in with a little L-carnitine in there and a couple of, like it's, it's better than any energy drink you're going to ever get. It's just, it's, it's real. It's natural. And it's, it feels awesome.

[00:32:11] And you're going to burn more fat when you're on these products and it's good for your liver and your kidney. There's just a lot of cool things we could do for the gym member that we've done at arm's length for a little while. And now we're just like, nah, these are our people. Like, let's just go get them. The Future of Fitness podcast is proudly brought to you by eGym. In an industry full of noise with more features, more screens, more promises, eGym is focused on something far more meaningful progress that counts.

[00:32:39] EGym is a global fitness technology leader building the infrastructure behind real results. Their open ecosystem connects smart strength equipment, AI powered software, and data-driven services to turn fitness into measurable, repeatable progress for members, trainers, operators, and communities. Now, what really excites me is how eGym brings this ecosystem together with WellPass, their corporate wellness platform.

[00:33:06] By combining their strength equipment with AI powered software in their corporate wellness platform, WellPass, they're leading the shift to proactive preventative health. Isn't that what we all want? That's why we're here. The result, members feel more confident and motivated. Trainers have better tools to support people. Operators see stronger retention and growth. And employers benefit from healthier, more engaged teams. This isn't innovation for show.

[00:33:33] It's progress you can see, measure, and repeat. To learn more, please visit eGym.com. When you look at the gym operator community and the different types of models out there, like who do you think is going to be your first takers here? Who's going to be the first beach that you get onto? I think for us, the first beach that we want to conquer is always, we do it by demographic, right? So you kind of know that in affluent communities, this is a very acceptable thing.

[00:34:02] I mean, it's just like anything else. It's like this business was elite athletes and Hollywood people were doing a lot of the stuff that we do. Hyperfire chambers, red light therapy beds. I mean, there's guys in the NBA that was one of the worst kept secrets that they were all doing photobiomodulation beds for recovery. When you're playing that many games a week, that intensely, and some of them are starting to age up, they were all, because the CEO of the company that we buy our beds from would tell me the craziest stories. He had to sign NDAs when he would put them in because they wouldn't let him tell anyone. So he couldn't use it in his marketing.

[00:34:29] Now he has like a ton of them that all, so his website has them all on there. They gave him great references, which is great for the business. But when I look at where we go, it's who we're looking for, right? We are, who needs it most really, especially the HRT stuff, the hormone placement and the hormone optimization is women. Because they are the group that was just completely left behind. You know, men were getting testosterone therapy for decades now.

[00:34:54] Women were discouraged from it and they are way behind the curve on catching up with their health. My wife was the inspiration, the entire inspiration for the serotonin brand. She went through early menopause. We didn't know what it was at age 40. I may have told you the story on the other podcast and it, it was scary for us as a family. Like it was, it was a tough time and she thought she was having a nervous breakdown. You know, her skin was on fire. It was a hot flash. Like she didn't know what was wrong with us. Like what's happening to my body? Like I've been fitting in shape forever and I'm like, all of a sudden I can't get in shape.

[00:35:24] So we look at demographics, we look at target audiences and is it boutique fitness? Is it some of the bigger boxes? It's a little bit demographic driven. And then we look at layers. So here's where we think is the most opportunistic place to start. Here's our next place to go. And then here would be the final place we'll go. So we, we have our destinations based on demographics and geo, you know, we, we kind of make this avatar of target. And then we, we have the conversations with gym owners because some gyms have a multitude

[00:35:53] of demographics in the box, right? It could be an HVLP club, but they can have a lot of affluent people there because they're in an affluent community. They just like the fact that it's, you know, 20 bucks a month or 25 bucks a month. That's great. And, but they're buying personal training. They're doing it. They're taking supplements. They're doing, they're probably doing services elsewhere outside the gym because the gym doesn't have those services there. So we look at that. We look at the gym membership together and the demographics. So we're one of the groups we have is multi, multi gym operator.

[00:36:19] But we're going to start with, you know, seven to 15 out of their big group. And then we'll go from there. We'll, we'll go in, we'll layer in, look at the impact, look at the data. See what we're doing. And then we'll, we'll go to the next place. And then we're, and that's how we're working together with some of the groups we're talking to. What's an agreement assigned? Like how long do you think it's going to take to be operational within a gym? It's actually pretty quick. I'll tell you why. I imagine it's fast, right? Yeah, it is. It's not like to build one of our centers. It's a lot.

[00:36:46] So we could, we still want to be aesthetically pleasing and do some of the nice things that we do. So no, it's for us, it's, it's, it's, it's all cosmetic. So it depends on the shape of the space that we're getting. If it's just, you know, one or two offices and we got to take down a wall or two, or if it's just one little big open space, it was a childcare room or maybe a group X room or something. And we just go in and we can put up some of our partitioning type walls, put in the cosmetic finishes we want, bring in the equipment we want. And then it's, it's as quickly as we ramp up the team. So we have an incredible aggregator for training right now.

[00:37:16] We have a couple of hundred courses in our LMS. We built this entire LMS system that's wildly successful for training new nurse practitioners and health coaches and our concierge people. So we put them through our intention. It's like, we're running one right now here in Orlando. As we speak, we've got the team here. We do two day lives and do five day lives. We bring them in as intense. And then we, but they can't even step in until they finish. Our concierge position has to take 236 courses, like their video. Some of them are a couple of minutes long. Some of them are 25, 30 minutes long.

[00:37:46] Um, and then our nurse practitioners have, they have 56 different courses going through case studies. And the cool thing about it is, you know, we do medical lunch and learns with our chief medical officer and they're recorded every single time we do it. So every single week. So our, our database of information just keeps growing. And with AI later on top of it, they can go in and they could search any, almost anything and ask the questions and it'll bring up that video. It'll bring up that case study. So it's just, we're, we're wildly efficient, but rather quick at being efficient, right?

[00:38:16] So we don't, we would never, we don't want to ever use speed in lieu of accuracy, right? We have to be accurate with our training, but we can actually be pretty quick right now because of the technology we've added into our training systems. So we ramp up pretty quickly. You know, we, we probably from, depends on how much build outs in there. It's all cosmetic. We could be up and running in it within 60 days. What about staffing? Is that difficult to find the right staff for this? So strangely for us, it's not as difficult because we know where to do it.

[00:38:43] So when I first got in this industry, holy crap, Eric, that was the worst thing. I used to think of Robux instructors and personal trainers were hard to find that were quality. Like finding a good qualified nurse practitioner was like, it was like finding a needle in the haystack, especially when we first started in the business. Cause there wasn't a lot of them that were trained the way we would need them trained. Cause we, we also do aesthetic training. So we have, we do microneedling, Botox filler, PRP, we do all kinds of wonderful things for the skin. So getting a nurse practitioner that was qualified in that and qualified in HRT, harm placement

[00:39:12] therapy or endor peptides and medical weight loss and medical weight loss, you know, GLP just started the last few years. Like it used to be fentermine or it was low dose naltrexone. There's always been, it was the HCG diet. Like there's always been medical weight loss. It just wasn't as, I mean, I think today it's probably the best medication available, but it always existed and it was always effective. So we have a proprietary way that we recruit and then we, we train and we bring them in and we know where to get them from. Like we know. So I struggled with, you got to use brokers and how to use this.

[00:39:42] And it was a disaster because they would come with these crazy bad habits, these insane thoughts on compensation. Like, oh, I worked for a dentist and he just said, Hey, you go run this. And I was making like, you know, X amount of dollars per hour, which was like three times where you'd like the normal pay for that for an NP or something. Like, I was like, that's great. Just stay there. Cause that gig doesn't exist in the universe. Don't leave. I would tell them that I'm not hiring you. You've got to stay where you are though. Yeah. Um, since then actually a couple of, cause they wind up closing because it doesn't work and they, they want them becoming available.

[00:40:10] One or two of them are actually work for me now. Um, and we've, you know, we've built, we built out really good competition models for that, but we also pour in a lot of training. So what we decided to do is rather than trying to just get recruiters and do that, we said, let's just create a training system and we'll train them. And that was an investment and it was investment in time and money. And at the time I was like, all right, well, I was more, I didn't more, wasn't as worried about the money. I was worried about the time I wanted to get these nurse practitioners out there.

[00:40:37] It has become crystal clear to us that the best way to do is what we actually do right now. Cause we bring them in, we bring them into our culture. We give a culture training to them. And cause it's difficult. Cause a lot of them may come out of a hospital where, and if they're in the emergency room, the ER was like, you know, set them and forget them. Like, see you later. And they're out. And they never talked to like our businesses not is the opposite of that. Like you're constantly managing. So it was a personality test that we do. Like we just do all kinds of really cool things.

[00:41:03] And the interesting part is there's so many young men and women that really want to work in our industry because it's, it's, it's kind of a cool place to be. It is. It's, it's not, listen, no one's going to die on your shift, knock on wood. Right. I mean, it's just, it's, it's a different type of care and you're preventative health. And especially with this younger generation, they're all about preventative health. Even from a education side, like my daughter's in medical school right now. And she embraces a hundred Columbia medical, which is a traditional medical school.

[00:41:30] Like she's learning amazing things, but she's also working on the Dr. Gigi at our serotonin up in New Jersey. Cause she drives down from New York every weekend. And what she's learning there, she says, that's just incredible. She's like, what I know the science behind this and why this and what happens about that. But seeing how you guys are taking a totally different angle on brain help, on, on physical exercise, on, on all the things that lead to all these other illnesses and disease later. It's just like, it's great. She loves it. So the younger people do, they really embrace it.

[00:41:57] So you'd be shocked how for us, I wouldn't say it's easy, but we've created convenience within that onboarding process. Awesome, man. Well, I really liked the model. You know, I'm, I'm really fascinated right now with anything that is combining medical and fitness. You know, you look at like Monarch, um, you look at, of course, uh, Miura, you look at what you guys are doing. You look at Corb, like anything, anyone who's in this realm of bringing these two things

[00:42:24] together, I'm seeing all kinds of creative models and a lot of thought, a lot of money being put into this, of course. Um, so it's, it's really interesting. I, I, and I appreciate, you know, your background too. I mean, 30 years, you know, you're retro and, um, you know, even in this longevity space for a while, you also have a great podcast, right? Eric's Longevity Lab. Uh, I was just checking it out. Um, so yeah, man, it's, it's, it's really cool. I mean, what, what do you need right now? If, uh, people are listening and they're within the industry, obviously you need partners, uh, anything else specifically? Yeah.

[00:42:53] And any, any fitness operators that are listening, it's a, it's a cool opportunity that we're, we're now, we're just bringing, getting through as many as we can as, because we have like, when we literally created a website for it and like we launched it at HFA and we just like, we're just getting through the list of people that are like, we're like clicking on it, which is great. Um, we created a company called Longevity Brands. So Longevity Brands for us is what everything will live under, right? So all of these, you know, we're doing a little bit of M&A. So people are looking for some consolidation, whether it's in the longevity and med spa space,

[00:43:21] where it's kind of like fitness was, I don't know, 20 years ago, maybe more, where you started to see consolidation just start to happen. And now it's really just, I mean, look at the last five years and 10 years. It's just, it, it is what's happening. Um, this is an industry that needs a little bit of consolidation because it just needs to get formalized a little better, which is to the, to the point of like, it's, it's hard for people, private equity groups, investment bankers to, to value what's happening because there's no organized group yet.

[00:43:51] And you know, that's what we're kind of doing. So we're, we're reviewing now a couple of M&A opportunities for us to take into the Serotonin flag and, and launch it. And then Longevity Brands will kind of sit there and, and just run the training and the, all of the, all the complicated stuff that a lot of business owners just don't want to do anymore. Like it's just a, it's a different type of, it is a more complicated industry for sure. It just is compliance wise, headache wise it is. Um, but what we're doing is, is just unbelievable. Right on.

[00:44:21] And Eric, uh, if people want to reach out to you or they want to follow you, what, what, what do you tell them? I spent, like LinkedIn's a great area to connect with me professionally. It's Eric Casaburi, it's, it's just easy to find me. It's my full name. Um, and same thing on Instagram. A lot of people also connect with me on Instagram, but, uh, a lot of our industry people, if they want to connect with me in my, I think my inbox for LinkedIn is probably the best source because that's the one that's the least crazy. The other ones get a little nuts. So, um, LinkedIn is a great spot and so is Instagram. Yeah. Awesome, man.

[00:44:51] Well, congratulations on getting this. I'm, I'm really keen on following. I think it's a great solution and it's something that's worthwhile for people to look into. And, um, yeah, man, thanks for spending some time with me. Thanks, Eric. It's always great to chat, man. Yeah. Great catching up. Ladies and gentlemen, Eric Casaburi. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Fitness. If you did, I'm going to ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it.

[00:45:21] Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it. iTunes, Spotify, CastBox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media. Talk about it to your friends. Send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it and we want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more or get in touch with me, simply go to the futureoffitness.co.

[00:45:50] You can subscribe to our newsletter there or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone and this is the Future of Fitness. Have a great day.