Mark Fisher - The Unicorn Buys An Alloy Franchise

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Thanks for having me.

It's our annual visit, our annual checkup with Mark Fisher. And uh it's I always learn something. I always have a lot of fun, first and foremost. And uh there's a lot been going on, man. It's been uh it's been an interesting year. I think last time you and I checked in, we talked about uh I think the pandemic was started and we were talking about how to deal with that stress. And well, I guess we're coming out of a pandemic.

I guess we're coming out of the pandemic. Yeah. It feels like we are maybe getting out of the pandemic, but depending on how one reads the macroeconomic tea leaves, we are possibly jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. But I don't know that I would consider myself, or frankly, most people qualified to actually read macroeconomic tea leaves is probably the operative metaphor for forecasting what's going to happen. But it seems there's at least a possibility of some gnarly headwinds, but we shall see.

Yeah, we shall see, man. And it is, I think there's a lot of people who are freaked out. And just for some people know, as we're recording this, it's the summer of 2022. Summer just started, actually. And I'd love to get an update, man. I've heard a lot about the stuff that you've been doing. Um, you made some interesting moves for people who follow you within the market. And maybe you could just give us like an update of like what has the last year been like for Mark Fisher? And we can start with that.

Yeah, all kinds of things. So at the highest level, the quick updates are Mark Fisher Fitness is probably what a lot of people know me for, which is our very irreverent, quirky brand, sort of strange brick and mortar retail gym in the city. And I should say in Manhattan, the city is what we say. When you're from this area, there's only one. It's the city. So that business is still rolling as a brick and mortar. And this seems to be unique to Mark Fisher Fitness. I don't know if other people in this situation. We are still, on the one hand, really down in our in-person numbers. And on the other hand, our in-person Zoom virtual group classes are still a massive part of our business to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of people are still doing Zoom classes, which is inexplicable to me. And I feel like every time you and I have this conversation, I feel compelled to say, I'm pretty sure it's going to end any second. And yet here we are, and it's still jamming along. And no doubt, I think news sales have slowed a little bit, and we've definitely seen some attrition. But that is the interesting thing about Mark Fisher Fitness at the moment, is we're continuing to balance running an admittedly leaner brick and mortar location in New York City, with many of our classes and much of our revenue still coming from this online platform. So that's the Mark Fisher Fitness update. So weird times there. And um I would just note my observation generally is unfortunately, the toughest market right now for brick and mortar training gyms seems to be downtown tier one business districts. I think if you are in a rural market and even suburban markets, my understanding is for the most part, a lot of those businesses are back or better. I also think it seems, as a general thumb, if you do small group training or one-on-one, you've likely rebounded much quicker. Large groups seems to be understandably having a little bit of a longer road. So that's kind of the update with Mark Fisher Fitness and some observations from the way I see it for the brick and mortar landscape. Part of how I have opinions and observations about the industry at large is one of the other things I do is I run a coach and consulting company called Business for Unicorns. And in that business, we essentially coach, we're now up to 75 training gym owners, in addition to a handful of both corporate and individual one-on-one coaching clients. And that business is jamming along and continues to be lots of fun and seen of actually a lot of growth over the past year, in part because we were clever enough to bring up on one of our dear friends, Pete Depuis, who a lot of people know as Eric Cressy's business partner. So that's been fun because we have sort of organically, accidentally essentially created this whole separate niche specifically for performance gems. Because obviously, if you want to study what it's like to have a brick and mortar sports-specific training gym, you will, you could do worse than the guy who helped have Cressy Sports Performance. So that's that. And then the third business thing I got cooking right now, which maybe we can dig into a little bit because I suspect a lot of people are like, what when they heard this news is I have recently gone in as an investor and am planning to open up fitness franchises. And very specifically, there's an emerging fitness brand with a man named Rick May, who I know has been a guest and friend to the show. Love Rick. And yeah, Rick's a really smart guy. I had been looking into franchising just kind of for funsies over the past maybe two years, just because I was very interested in it as a model and was frankly looking at a number of different industries. I wasn't necessarily committed to going into fitness. And interestingly enough, it's actually not always allowed. And maybe we can bad two for you to open up a fitness franchise. If you are a fitness business person, there's reasons where that's actually usually not going to be welcomed, actually. But as it happened, happily I had an existing relationship with Rick that allows me to, you know, continue to do some of the other things I was involved in and have this opportunity to work with somebody that, you know, I really think is a smart guy that I really believe I can learn a lot from taking his play and having the opportunity to run it. So what that looks like right now is not much yet, only because it's relatively recent. The thing about the franchise space is it's a very long adventure to get a lot of those things open. It just takes time, particularly in light of the current environment when you're dealing with supply chains. Build out is already feeling very daunting. But I have a business partner in that particular business, a dear friend of mine and a longtime client, actually, who's going to be the operator. So we already have some letters of intent out to a couple of locations. So, in a perfect world, we'll get the first location up. If we can do it by the end of the year, that'd be amazing. Worst case scenario, as fast as we can thereafter. And then the plan is to actually look to grow and scale that business and open up essentially as many units as we can while still being profitable and good, right? As my old voice teacher used to say, sing as loudly as you can while still singing pretty. And I think that's essentially the heuristic I have in my head for how many can we open? It's like, well, I don't know. How many can we do good? 10, 20, 30. You know, I will say it will be interesting for us to experiment with this because the other thing I have observed is anecdotally as somebody that has really started to embed myself in franchising as a model, which is just fascinating. I think there's so much to learn, particularly if you're an independent owner operator, about the way these businesses are structured, the way these PLs work. I mean, you really will quickly, I believe, upgrade your business intelligence because you just get so much better pattern recognition because you're able to look at all of these models, which are by definition very simple. You know, for me, that was part of, I think aesthetically, what drew me to franchising is while I love Mark Fisher Fitness and it does Looney Tune revenues compared to your average training gym, it's a Bahamuth. It's a complex Bahamuth. There's not, and I'm not even talking as far as expense overhead, because actually our margins are particularly really good these days, but there's just a lot of complexity involved. Like when I'm looking at my PL, it takes me a long time because there's a lot of items I have to go through one by one every month to be like, oh, what's this thing? What's this thing? Whereas the PLs of a franchise are a thing of beauty and simplicity. Like there's like six expenses and four revenues. I'm I'm exaggerating a little bit, but um, all of that to say, so that's an exciting thing going on. And the the point I want to make there that is interesting, and then I'll open up for you to pillar me with any questions that you find yourself curious about is I am not sure, and this is something I'm maybe looking for, and I feel like I do this a lot when I'm on the podcast. I'm like, listener, contact me if you know the answer to this because I can't find it. It seems it's actually much harder to scale service-based franchises than what is in the trade referred to as QSR, quick service restaurants. So I just noticed anecdotally, there are a lot more owner operators of you know, yum brands, like of Taco of you know, KFCs and Taco Bells or Arby's or McDonald's. There are more, it seems, businesses that operate literally triple digits of units. I'm talking hundreds of locations of a lot of those QSR restaurants. I I haven't run across that as much in the service space. Now, ultimately, for my current life dreams, aspirations, ambitions, got a baby coming. I might be okay. I don't know that I actually need to have 300 units to feel like I'm emotionally fulfilled. And I have a business that for me is providing both income and personal professional growth. But it is just something I have observed and it's interesting as I think through okay, how big could this business be? And right now I don't know. I don't know, but I we would like to get it to 10 to at least 20 units.

Amazing. So that is something I want to dive into. I I've been asked probably three times minimum, why is Mark Fisher opening up an alloy franchise? Right. And I haven't even talked to you about it, but that that kind of started circling around the industry, and people who know you is like, oh, that's you know, he's it's Mark Fisher Fitness. This is kind of this iconic brand, which we'll get into later. And the question I have is like, well, that's great. And he's diversifying his portfolio. I think it makes a lot of sense, especially with the type of model that he has. And I don't know if that's the case, but the question I have, and I think it's valuable to people listening, especially, you know, you're very educated on the fitness industry. You've been around it for a very long time, you've been in it, you know, up to your elbows for even longer, and you you just know really well. So why alloy? Like what was it about that franchise as you're selecting them? What were the things that really made you uh attracted? And not just besides knowing Rick, who Rick is a great guy, I've had him on this podcast numerous times, really knows the stuff and he's you know put a lot of thought into how that business runs. But what what were the classifications that you looked at and and what eventually led you to make that decision with them?

Yeah, there certainly were a few things. I mean, one of them, to be clear, one of them was Rick, and not only because of my personal affection for him, but because quite literally I assessed, oh, I think this guy is smart. I think this guy really knows what he's doing. And to some extent, like any business, you are banking a little bit on leadership. Now, of course, a franchisee-franchisor relationship is a very distinct, it's very interesting thing because you're not a client and you're not an employee. It's this very unique type of relationship. But nonetheless, I'm still banking on Rick knows what he's doing. And I'm also banking on if Rick finds out there's pieces he doesn't know what he's doing, he's gonna fix it. He's a smart guy, he'll figure it out, you know? And it happens as it happens, the thing that was unique about Alloy that I like, which is certainly not gonna insulate, I think, Alloy or me from having challenges, of course. I expect that to be the case. I've been in business long enough to be a realist, is that not only is Alloy have, for me, the advantages of being an emerging brand, but it also has the advantages of Rick's previous experience having run licensee models all over the world. So, and that's a unique thing because when I was cooking up this plan, I have to give a lot of the credit, the original idea to a gentleman named Victor Brick, who some people might know, who is a very smart guy. He has run a smaller chain of health clubs in the Maryland area, I believe, called Brick Bodies, but he actually got in early as and with Planet Fitness and scaled Planet Fitness. So I watched what Victor Brick was doing. I remember listening to him on a podcast, and I was like, huh, because now, admittedly, Victor Brick is like, you know, 100x times me. I'm certainly not putting myself in the category of that guy. He's a very, very smart and successful fellow. But what occurred to me was listening to his assessment of his situation when he found himself inspired to go in on planned fitness, he was, and my understanding is, and I want to make sure I'm, you know, it's possible I'm communicating this incorrectly. So, but my understanding, my take was he was looking at his own businesses, which were successful by all accounts. But he was, I think, considering, gosh, this is just really hard to scale. What if I found another thing that was just designed to scale? And that I think kind of sums up a lot of my personal logic. So I think part of the inversion perhaps of this question is why not franchise Mark Fisher Fitness? And the answer is it's not really designed to scale. It's just not. And it's an amazing business that I love. It is both a very effective cash flow instrument that's been incredibly good for me in that sense. It's also been an incredible opportunity for me to create a love letter to humanity and express myself as a human in the service of a community that I care deeply about. And that has been amazing. But I think a lot of the things that I love about MFF, were we to attempt to franchise it, we would have to be out or systemize in ways that just, I think that would be hard to pull off. I think the other fact of the matter is, and this is what it is, this is not a complaint, and this is certainly not a criticism of my team, particularly the people I have now that are amazing. I don't know that the way Mark Fisher Fitness is currently constructed with this existing team and this existing group of clients would be able to make that transition. I think I would almost need to start over. And I think I'm almost in a place where I could do that. But the other thing I will share to answer yet another reason, okay, well, why go the franchise route is I have a few missing skills in my tool set. I know that, right? And very specifically, as it relates to understanding different markets in an intimate level, as it relates to really being a killer with negotiating leases, really managing build out and contractors in an effective way, really understanding how to hit the ground running in a market where you don't know anyone. So there is no word of mouth, and you really have to understand how to run the hell out of a pre-sale. Those are things that I just haven't done firsthand. Now, to be clear, to qualify that, I have to confess, I think I'd do okay, honestly, like if I hadn't figured out. And certainly I have helped secondhand coach a lot of clients that I've worked with to open additional locations. But the reality is, if you're an independent training gym owner, you're not going to get lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of reps at opening up multiple facilities. So one advantage you have when you're working with a franchise brand is part of what you're paying that fee for, which I suspect I'll be happy to pay once I'm doing it, is the support of people that have done that before. So part of this was one, to get help with that as I look to expand and diversify what I'm doing and open up more locations of what I think is another cool fitness business. And part of it, honestly, is also for my own learning. Right. And again, this isn't to suggest that I'm going to be running out there and stealing alloys IP and giving away to other people because, in fact, that's something I'm like hyper, hyper aware of and want to be protective of. But the reality is, you know, I love coaching, I love speaking, I love creating content, I love all those things. And I'm an operator at heart. You know, I love opera. I think I'm I'm good at it. I'm good at like running the plays. So I was very excited about this opportunity to create something that was not Mark Fisher Fitness that had some support from guardrails. And the other pieces I have to say is I really need to acknowledge having found a great operating partner in my friend Greg, who's my partner on this project, someone that I've known for several years. It was just lucky enough for both of us, this was the right time and the right project. And although it's a little bit played out now that everybody in the business space is talking about who, not how, well, there's a reason everyone's talking about who, not how. It's a good paradigm. So, for those not familiar, that is the title of a book by a main name, a man named Dan Sullivan, who runs a program I happen to be in called Strategic Coach, written with a co-author, Benjamin Hardy. And the premise of the book is don't try to figure out how to do things. Find the who that can do it. In this particular case, while I think I have skills that I could do it in theory, I don't really have the time because I'm operating market for fitness. Business for unicorns is growing very dramatically. So most of my focus needs to be there. So when I found somebody that there was a real alignment, knowing of our values, of our goals, how we'd like to work, it provided this amazing opportunity for me to have this opportunity to open up a third business without biting off so much that you know I get indigestion and choke and die because I can't handle all the commitments I've made and the things that need to happen. So, and that admittedly, similar to Mark Fisher Fitness, where I've often, and business for unicorns for that matter, where I've often given a lot of the credit to our success of the dumb luck of my business partner, Michael, who's been a very close friend of mine since, you know, the age of 15 years old. Nice. I think part of what is really allowing for this third business to have what I foresee the legs is because I knew the right person, right? I had the right person. And you could say, okay, well, I put myself out there a lot and I have a big network, and that's all true. But nonetheless, there's a certain element, it seems to me, of kismet and serendipity that this individual and I just found ourselves in the right moment where we each had similar designs, the similar interest to have the same relationship with this new business and, you know, see see what can happen. So I think those are most of my interaction. But happy to have follow-up questions.

Yeah, it's it's interesting. And I I'm just running through the filter of my own experience too, with you know, the single location that I had in Santa Barbara, California was, you know, across the Pacific Coast and became Gravitas Fitness, and now it's back to CrossFit Pacific Coast. But I built it with, you know, organically, right? Not a whole lot of, especially back then. It was like when I opened that thing in 08-09, there was there was no business coaching yet. There was no systems, right? I think we used anti-patronic systems from Across Fit LA, and that was about as, you know, that was as advanced as we were at the times, and it was really fairly basic. And so a lot of it was just built organically. It was like, okay, like I think about if I was building a house that way, it would have like an addition stuck to the second floor, would have, you know, a basement that was dug sideways in, right? It was just all these different compartments that were kind of pushed together. And then you look at it, you're like, well, can I scale this? Can I do another location? You're like, well, no, because there's it's just too personality driven, or it's too, you know, a lot of those things, right? And uh I'm like, well, if I'm gonna, if I want to scale this, because I did have people interested in helping me open the second or third location, I'm like, I'm gonna have to strip this all down and maybe just start all over again. And I'm I'm telling this story because I'm wondering if this is what's resonated with you. So like, well, maybe I could just start with a very clean, well-developed, simple system that is highly scalable. Listen. And yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, listen. I mean that. Yeah, that's precisely it. That's precisely it, you know. And a friend of mine, one of my many friends, I should say, had mentioned something at one point that was it's it's much easier just to start a new business than fix your existing business. Now, that of course is challenging because, like all maxims, but of course, for obvious exceptions, there's a context in which that's actually the worst message somebody can hear. But there's some context in which that's absolutely correct. Now, again, that's not to say that anything is wrong with Mark Fisher Fitness. Mark Fisher Fitness is an amazing business. And frankly, I still have intentions of using our continued opportunity to really lean it out to get it sexy and lean and tight to open up other locations of Mark Fisher Fitness in the New York City area. So to be clear, that is very still part of the plan. But yes, when I was looking for something that would give me guardrails and something that was clean and simple and give me a fresh start, that's part of what drew me to Alloy. You know, I think the other thing, maybe the last thing I can say, a part of the specifically why I went with Alloy as opposed to other brands is number one, I think not only do the numbers make sense to me and this particular model, because here's the other thing that's interesting. When you start studying franchises, particularly service franchises, because there were a number of different brands I vetted that were not in fitness. Again, you start to see patterns. There's these similar types of business models because there's not that much variation, right? An individual unit franchise for a lot of these service businesses, you know, you're gonna make a couple hundred K to maybe 1.5, 2 million. That's it, right? You're never gonna be bigger, you're almost never gonna be smaller unless you're doing some really solopreneur type of franchise, which is a model that I don't know as much about and for obvious reasons it's Not appealing to me because I don't have that much time, right? I have I have assets and I have expertise and I have judgment I can offer. So not only did I think it made sense as far as where I think the margins would land and as far as building in a lot of buffer, right? Because you have to build in a margin of error because you assume everything's gonna go bad. At least I do. I assume everything's gonna go bad. I assume it's gonna take much longer to ramp up than is I think a lot of people might assume, right? I'm not banking on best case scenarios, I'm banking on worst case scenarios as far as how much it costs, how long it takes to get to max capacity. And even in those bad scenarios, there was enough fat on the bone, meat on the bone, that it worked. So, and I also think that alloy from a training methodology was reflective of something that was near and dear to my heart in for two reasons. Number one, because Rick and I come from the same corner of the industry, what I often refer to as the Perform Better Teenage and StrengthCoach.com corner. So I think the methodology of program design just made a lot of sense to me. I think that was something that very much drew me to it, which is not to say there's no place for larger group models, but this is more in line, I think, with the way I was raised as a fitness professional, the type of programming and experience I would like to provide for people. And secondly, while I don't know this is completely unique to Alloy, I do think it is true that if you are targeting an older, more affluent demographic and you need less of them for your model to work, there's a lot to commend to that approach to business. And frankly, as somebody that is now 42, you know, my own joints, my own desires. In many ways, Alloy is the type of service and product that were I not in the industry that I likely would find myself drawn, that I would want for myself if I didn't know anything about fitness, right? This would be something for somebody with some income that knows they want a good product, it's not going to beat them up, it's gonna be friendly to their joints and provide really good training. That's something that I can get on board with. So that was something that had me drawn to it. Yeah.

Let's let's I I had Rick Mayo on, and people can go, listen, we talked about the alloy model, but maybe if you could just recap it a little bit, because I think we've been talking, you know, about it really got straight at it. Like what is the model? What, what, what makes it different?

Yep. So at the sim, at its heart, it is a small group personal training model. So this I would juxtapose versus the large group class model, which is what a lot of people, when you think of most fitness franchises, they are what I would probably define as you know, boutique fitness, large group. Boot camp wouldn't necessarily be the word I would use for a lot of these, but if you're thinking of spin classes, yoga, um, you know, Orange Theories, F45s, a lot of the exponential brands, right? Those are, again, those are great models. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just a different play. You're usually getting a lower price point per member. You usually need more total members, you need more total staff. Now, a lot of those, particularly depending on the model, not all of them, some of them you can get actually a little bit overall higher revenue. So there's a case to be made for it based on how you want to spend your time and your money and your energy. You'll often have a higher buy-in, your expenses will be bigger up front, but you still could probably do okay cash on cash because ultimately, you know, if you're doing 35% margins, true 35% margins on a million dollar business, okay, well, that, you know, that can be an attractive proposition. And there's an argument to be made that there, in theory, if you get there, which not everybody does, certainly you might say there's some more simplicity there rather than needing to have two or three, right? Which is often the case of these smaller models.

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On to the show. So alloy, the main difference is instead of you know 20, 30, 50 people in a room doing a thing all together, you're dealing with up to six people at a time. And you can, I think, correctly message it as personal training. It's personal training. As the consumer thinks of personal training, so you're marketing, you're selling personal training, but you're selling in a small group. And what that means is the price point can get as low as $30 per session, right? And a lot of markets, that's very great rate for personal training. Now, obviously, it's not as customized if you're doing one-on-one, but you can still get pretty customized. And they centralize the programming and it's good stuff. So you can come in and part of their system is you do get an assessment of part of it. It's a lean model, so you only need one to two to three coaches. So they're really able to keep their eyes on everybody in part because the way it's set up, you only need about 130 clients. And that notably is under Dunbar's number. Now, I can tell you as your annoying science evidence-based friend, that that's actually been coming to debate later. There's there's some people that are saying actually Dunbar's math was not actually correct. And that's actually not true. But suffice to say, I think we can all agree it's self-evident that a smaller number of people you get your arms around, right? Anybody that's run a brick and mortar gym, you know, a place like Mark Fisher Fitness, it's hard for me to get my arms around 600, 700, 800 people. That is tricky, right? The systems required to create high-touch customer service. You know, it just kind of can't happen at that point. And that's okay, but it becomes a different model. When you only have 130 people, that's a lot easier to really provide a higher touch customer service. It is a more organic process of understanding people aren't around. You can, to some extent, and there are obviously some things about this that are not ideal, but to some extent, you can rely a little bit more on your handful of coaches keeping some more things in your head. And they have they've done some smart things to, I think, use tech to scale and leverage that in a way so it doesn't have to be in the coaches' heads. But overall, that's basically the gist of the model. And then even the pricing, it's very simple, right? It's like month-to-month memberships, you know, one, two, and three times per week. Simple, simple, simple. Because I think part of, as I had mentioned too, what drew me to this, and part of where I realized, ah, this is the next thing for me to learn. And I've noticed this is, I think, has already been serving all my other business feelings. Is I think I've finally been doing this long enough that I'm finally willing to make the difficult decisions required to keep things simple. And that is new for me. And it's really new for me. And it is a joke, not a joke. And again, I really give Rick a lot of credit for this. Is the, by my estimation, the true symptom of Rick's mastery is the simplicity of the model. It's just simple, simple, simple. But it's counterintuitive. So if you're listening to this based on where you're at in your business, the challenge is in the beginning, you just try to be everything to everybody because you want to help everybody, because you need the money, you know, and then eventually you can build a Bahamuth where you find yourself painted into a corner because you're offering all of these different things and there's no elegant way to pull back some of these services and price points. And the joke completely ups, you know, to the logical extreme version is the you know, person that runs a training gym and they offer personal training and they offer a small group training and they offer large group training, and you can buy one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve per month, and you can do a one month, a three-month, a six-month, a twelve month, or a two-year agreement. And then when you do the math of it, they have hundreds and hundreds of memberships they can buy. That becomes very confusing. And it is counterintuitive because if you're in the sales conversation, yeah, listen, I get it, I get it, you know, because in the sales conversation, you're like, well, why am I giving this money away? This person, they, if we just had the seven times per month membership on the two-month agreement, that would be perfect for this person. We'll just charge them appropriately. And that, of course, doesn't work. It doesn't work at all because there's no way to, I think this is another thing that, you know, took me years to understand. And to some extent, I think I was a victim of our own success, quite frankly, that it is very, very difficult to actually quantify the opportunity cost when that sort of complexity starts to get baked into every element of the business. Everything from how do you explain things to the client to how do you onboard new team members? It can just really go off the rails very quickly. So it actually takes a great deal of discipline and focus to present prevent your business from getting out of hand like that, right? So that that I think is another thing. And admittedly that's not unique to Alo, I think any franchise, by definition, that's what it does. It has to be simple, right? Complexity is the enemy of scale.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And there's that, you probably read it, a beautiful constraint. Have you read that? Um, I know. If you haven't, but that sounds that's that's a great book for you, Mark. I'll just I'll I'll give the whole, I'll give it all to you right now is basically like constraints can be a growth factor, right? If you're constraining the things and options that you have, then it allows you to be more, I guess, apt or more effective at the things you you can do and limits options and then confusion and a lot of things. And I think that's what also a good franchise model does is like, yeah, yeah, you you may not have as much freedom as you would at a Mark Fisher Fitness to do all the things that you would want to do that you brainstorm about at three in the morning, but that may be a good thing in some circumstance where this allows you to just simplify and scale.

Yeah. Um I I feel like I have sufficient freedom in my life. You know what I mean? Like that was like that's the thing that's strange that I imagine is also potentially confusing to people that don't know me well. Is I think because the brand of MFF is so out there, and because admittedly, just from a financial perspective, it's been unusual what has happened. I think at times I have been pegged incorrectly as, and admittedly to some extent, I have, I've certainly cultivated, I think, some image of like, this guy's out of his mind, you know? This like, you know, but I'm not actually that wild-eyed visionary person who's coming up with millions of ideas of all day long, right? I have some of that in me, but if you look at, you know, this classic, you know, traction EOS dichotomy between the visionary and the operator, I have both. I have a strong operator leaning in me. And as it happens, I have two businesses where I have all the freedom in the world still. I feel very happy to have this third business now where I will run the play, I will play within the lines, right? And I realize for some individuals listening, that is a real consideration that's not going to be the right fit if you go into that model, right? Because some people, like a more true entrepreneur, arguably, would struggle in that system because they don't want to play within the lines. Whereas, man, give me a good play, give me the ball, I will run that ball so fast, you will not believe how hard I love operations. I love operations, which again, I imagine most people don't assume that's the case.

It's a balance of both things. I mean, I I have I love entrepreneurs like I've had over the last, especially five years since selling and moving on, and you know, probably starting and failing at multiple different businesses over the last five years. I've had a lot of freedom in doing that. But there's a part of me now that craves okay, I want to get into, and this is one of the things that Rick Rick and I talked about. I think he gave Rick gave me a mentorship session on my own podcast live, basically. And we talked about this. He's like, at some point, you got to get into that scalability where you can take all of your you know experience and knowledge and expertise and time and you know, efficiencies, everything that you built up, you know, in your in your career, and then just get into that that mode of like repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. And I think so it gets into like a it goes through waves in life and in business where it's like sometimes you just need that creativity, that freedom, and then you want to get into another mode for a period of time where you just want to like take something and just refine it and keep doing it better and better and better. Yeah, certainly it sounds that's what part of where you're at too.

Yeah, and it seems it's the classic, I think, balance between exploring and exploiting, right? And for the most part, at this point in my career, I'm pretty all in at exploiting my existing skill sets. But as I mentioned, part of the lure of this particular opportunity for me is there are just a handful of things that I don't think I can speak to yet, right? Like I want firsthand knowledge of an operator, what it's like to be in markets that are not in New York City. This is something that I've been thinking on recently too, that I think is that I think is probably a missing framework for a lot of probably brick and mortar business coaching broadly, but certainly in the world of training gyms and fitness facilities. Tier one metropolitan markets are are different in meaningful ways from tier two, are different in meaningful ways from suburban markets, are different in meaningful ways from rural markets. Right. So even if you get into the nitty-gritty, okay, well, what does that mean tactically? Well, you could make a list of maybe, let's say, 25, 30 things you could do for non-digital or offline marketing, right? Well, depending on what market you're in, some of those things are gonna work way better than others, right? Now, some are universally applicable, you're probably gonna be okay with direct mail in any market. But if you're in a rural market, well, you know, it probably remains to be seen what sort of critical mass of people in one place that would allow you to really leverage guerrilla marketing and get the word out, right? Of course, there are obvious exceptions, right? Conversely, if you are in New York City, it is very difficult for me to put an ad in my local newspaper, the New York Times, right? If I write the New York Times and I offer them the amazing opportunity for me to write a regular ongoing column for them in exchange for publicity, then my local paper, the New York Times, is not interested in offering that opportunity, right? So, and because of me only having this one experience, to some extent, business for unicorns, we have now started to really intentionally stack the deck for our coaching team, where that was part of the calculation. Our newest hire, Ben, who I call the secret weapon pickard, works in suburban Ontario, Canada. And this guy is a killer. He's one of the best operations minds I've ever seen. He's a spreadsheet genius, and it gives us really firsthand knowledge of a very different market than Mark Fisher Fitness, of a different type of business and market than Cressy Sports Performance in Boston or Massachusetts, I should say, and Florida. And I am very excited to continue to add to my own career and skill capital stack the experiences of running businesses first in North Jersey, probably in the Hudson Valley, and then we'll see where it goes from there. You know, and then maybe at some point there's some other thing maybe I'll do a long day for now or take those together, and maybe I'll just be pumped and just literally do this forever. Um, I don't hate that idea. Honestly, I think, you know, there's a there's a non-zero chance where, you know, I could see this all getting the place where like I'm I'm good. You know, I think, of course, the issue that everyone will run into, that we all run into, that is difficult, is we always, as humans, crave increasing levels of challenge, increasing opportunities for growth, right? Now, this often correlates with income, but it's not strictly income, right? And that's a, I think, a trap people can fall into when it's never enough. You, you know, what do you need? It's like I always need just 10 to 20% more income than I have right now, right? It's like this, the the great joke on the oh, I can't remember who brought this up the day in the Simpsons, where Homer Simpsons talking to Mr. Burns. He's like, Mr. Burns, I mean, you you you have everything. You you have everything. And he's like, I know, I know, and I give it all away for just a very little bit more, right? It's like the economy, like that is like the most brilliant joke because the ultimate summation of what most people do. And I am so adamant about not doing that and about staying curious and continuing to check myself on my own new desires for more things. But you know, admittedly, even if you take the financial piece aside, which I think is very doable, you know, humans want to continue to grow and develop. You know, and all I can say is a current, I feel very thrilled with each of these businesses or give me very satisfying challenges and opportunities for which I feel currently well compensated for and believe there's opportunity for even better compensation. But that is very much secondary to the opportunity to become more fully myself while I develop skills to express my unique talents in the service of communities that I I feel called to serve and care for.

Oh, beautifully said, man. So I want to make sure we with the remaining time that we have that we talk about this, you got a YouTube channel. Uh you're doing some some new content. Let's, I mean, you love you love content, right? And so do I. I mean, we we each have our own ways. I I can't imagine not making content. Like, yeah, I think about a day when I'm like old and retired and whatever that means, and not making content. I'm like, well, that'll be weird, right? Like, yeah, yeah. What's what's gonna how it's gonna happen? Yeah. Um anyway, you love content, you're very good at it. People haven't checked out the Mark Fisher Fitness YouTube channel. It's iconic in the way you branded yourself to a very specific niche and you made it entertaining and compelling and all those things. I mean, I have utmost admiration for that, but now you're doing something new. So lay it on us.

Yeah, well, basically, I am curious to play with video as both a content strategy, which will serve on the one hand as marketing, but importantly, also becomes one more form of self-expression and the creation of art talking about the things I'm most interested in that are dealing helpful for other people. So, as it happens, I already, to your point, write a newsletter for Business Free Unicorns that I really put a lot of work in. I love writing. So I, you know, once a week, I write the Business for Unicorns post, two emails per week I write for Mark Fisher Fitness, which is a very different audience, right? Which is for the end user for our avatar in that company. And the Business for Unicorns podcast has now been something that I usually at least one of our two weekly posts, I will also go on that as well. But the opportunity it occurred to me for YouTube was as somebody that loves the opportunity to do public speaking. Well, you can only do so many public speaking gigs per year, right? And even now, it's amazing because now we do virtual things, right? So for instance, last week, super amazing. I got the opportunity to do the keynote for Camp Gladiators Conference because it was virtual. And that was super cool. Cause when they first reached out, I was like, oh crap, I'd I'd love to go to Austin and do this. They seem like a cool company, but got a baby coming. Well, amazing. I could do it virtually, okay, which is super cool. Now, certainly there is unique value and unique satisfaction in doing a live talk. And I suspect and hope I will continue to do that to the extent that I can, knowing that I'm about to have a season where I'm likely very focused on this small human that's coming to live with my wife and I. But the YouTube as a platform allows some of certainly the creation of content and allows me to leverage my ability to hopefully synthesize useful information and to share it in a way that is distinctly me, love it or hate it, and in a way that I enjoy, in a way that feels creative and fun. So the play here is certainly not to be a YouTube creator, right? I'm not looking to monetize this. I don't really frankly care how many subscribers I have, because really the business outcome for me is of course, you know, more people knowing me and hopefully getting results in advance from the things that I share. So that at some point in the future, some percentage of them will come in hire business for unicorns or maybe hire me to your keynote or something, something. And of course, the benefit of YouTube is those assets grow in value over time, right? I also am not clear, speaking very candidly, what's going to happen with it. It's just the beginning, right? And I observe there's not really most of the people that do what I do, that at least that part of what I do, which is coaching brick and mortar training gym owners. Most of them are not on YouTube. And I'm it's not clear to me yet. This might be that thing where the old sales joke where, oh, this is an amazing opportunity, no one has any shoes, or be like, oh my gosh, this is terrible. There's no one has any shoes, right? It might be everyone is just smarter than me and figured out that it doesn't work. And I'm, you know, maybe just doing this for my own enjoyment. But my thought is, listen, I'm just gonna give it two years. I'm gonna go all in. And it's been incredibly fun. It's a different way of, I think, offering content. I think for some people, it's a better way for them to consume content. Of course, once again, who not how, I got lucky because a long-term client, again, that we'd worked in the business for unicorns, just went all in on YouTube over the past couple of years, really went in on like real YouTube world. And then essentially he's handling all of it with my feedback. He found an amazing editor, he found an amazing thumbnail creator, and I'm mostly just letting them handle it, right? Now it remains to be seen, I think, whether this is going to be a platform that people discover business for unicorns and my fitness business musings. But I do think while it might not be a no strategy for marketing, I do think it could build credibility and likability for the people that are into my work and and you know, not to be underestimated, have the people that do not like it run away screaming like never. And I wish them well and they'll run away because they don't like me. That's fine. Um so, but it's just been very creatively satisfying. And you know, my plan is to do at least one to two videos. And I'm just gonna do it for two years. We'll see the way it goes, right? I'll just put up, you know, 400, 500 videos, and at that point we'll see the way it goes. And even this has been interesting too, is this been one more example. Of like, oh, what an interesting thing that I've now happily have had enough goes at it, but it's also the meta lesson is in the beginning, you suck. You just you just suck for a while, right? And that's okay. It's okay. Like, like I know it wasn't like very good. It was like fine. I was like, I don't care. I just want to get out dirty. And for me, certainly, and there are things about this that are not as helpful. It was important to me in this whole process to really commit to doing this in the laziest way possible. Where I was like, I can give this like an hour per week. You know, I discovered quickly, like, okay, I have to do some bullet pointing. Cause in the beginning, literally, I was just like, I'm just gonna hit play and just talk, and then I'm gonna send a video, and then I want other people to do other things. Now I've gotten a little more strategic about okay, like maybe I need to like bullet point a little bit, right? How do I think how do I batch this as efficiently as possible to create both a title that has some element of curiosity? What is the few words that will go in the thumbnail image, you know, mid-filming, giving ideas and thoughts to my editor, like, oh, wouldn't it be funny? But at this point, let's cut in. Maybe you can cut in like a weird 50s robot for this thing I just said. Um, so it's feeling very fun because those are things I can't do when I talk, right? And certainly I like to use extreme metaphors and over-the-top imagery. But now there's this whole other opportunity to use graphics and music and sounds and visuals that was not something I'm able to do when I give actual in-person talks. So anyway, the whole thing is very being very satisfying. If people want to go to markfisherybe.com, I'll tell you, I'm I'm putting my whole heart and soul on this. I'm having a great time. I hope some people watch it. It's going great so far. I have a lot of subscribers compared to only having a couple videos, but um, but I would love for people to check it out. If they like fitness business things, I believe there will be some valuable takeaway frameworks for them.

Yeah, that's great, man. And I I've the likelihood of success on that is high. I mean, you you you obviously have a good time doing it. You're you're great on video. And you know, you have the right mindset and because you've done this before. I've helped a lot of people launch podcasts. I probably talk more people out of launching podcasts because I'll give them a couple simple truths. It's like, well, commit to minimum 50, minimum. 100's better. Right, right, right, right. Because you're probably gonna hate the first 10 to 20. The other thing is you got to pick a rhythm that you can sustain because just like aerobic training has got to be repeatable and sustainable. Yeah. And if you don't think you can do it on your worst of weeks, then you shouldn't be doing it because you got you just gotta stay consistent. And that's that that alone, those two things will get you to pretty closer to what you vision as success for the project. And you've already got those nailed down and you're already creative, and you kind of love doing it. So I'm excited to check it out, man. And yeah, Mark, it's always a pleasure to do it. I I I feel like I should do this more often just because I enjoy it so much and I know everyone gets a lot of value out of it. And sorry, I missed you in New York last time I was there, and uh sorry, I missed you in Ursa, but hopefully we'll get to we'll get to connect in real real person. Yes, pretty much.

Yes, I think it'll be interesting navigation here with the the the new chaos agent roommate. Um, but I believe she will allow her dad occasionally to leave to go things.

Right on, right on. Well, ladies and gentlemen, Mark Fisher. Thank you for joining me. Thank you so much. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minus. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. 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. 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, get in touch with me, simply go to the future of fitness.co. 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.