Miranda Alcaraz - Street Parking & Fitness Simplified

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over two years and running. It is 2021, and I am your host, Eric Malzone. I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Stop by futurofitness.co to subscribe and learn more. Hey listeners, this episode of the Future of Fitness is brought to you by our good friends at InsightTracker. Do you want to add more years to your life and more life to your years? Of course you do, which means you need to make a change. And that is what Insight Tracker is all about. Founded by leading scientists in aging, genetics, and biometric data from MIT Tufts in Harvard. InsightTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. So what's their secret? First, Insight Tracker uses its patented algorithm to analyze your body's data and offer you a clearer picture than you've ever had before of what's actually going on inside you. Then, Insight Tracker provides you with a concrete, science-backed action plan for living a longer, healthier life. And it tracks your progress every day, every step of the way. For a very limited time, Insight Tracker is offering future fitness podcast listeners 25% off store wide. Visit InsightTracker.com slash future to get your offer code and try to Insight Tracker today. InsightTracker, because change is an inside job. This show is brought to you by Level 5 Mentors, guiding entrepreneurs to achieve the highest levels of freedom in five critical areas: time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. So here's the deal: entrepreneurs and business owners undoubtedly walk a different path, which means they need a different set of metrics. The great news is that level five mentors is actually quantified it. Yep, that's right. If you go to level5mentors.com forward slash survey, you can take the freedom assessment, get your personal score, and see how you are stacking up. That's level5mentors.com forward slash survey. And don't worry, it's free. Well, I'll answer that question for you. You're not, because you can't until now. Morpheus arms coaches with accessible, intelligent, communicable client insights to save coaches time and ultimately increase your value and earn more money. By collecting lifestyle data from 90% of the current wearable market and combining that data with cutting-edge proprietary technology, Morpheus provides an accurate and reliable recovery score for all of your clients served up on a simple and elegant dashboard. No more guessing, just the real, honest data alongside the insights from Morpheus into what to actually do with it. The Morpheus platform also provides live heart rate training for your clients that can be tracked and shown anywhere. In the gym, in a home, outdoors, with personalized heart rate zones for each individual client. Combined with custom alerts, in-app messaging, and other amazing features, this is the ultimate coaching machine. Go to trainwithmorpheus.com to learn more. That's Trainwith Morpheus M-O-R-P-H-E-U-S.com. Please go check out our wonderful sponsors. And if you get value out of this show, I ask you to do three things. Please go subscribe, give us a favorable rating, and share this episode on social media or wherever you like to go chat with friends. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and once again, welcome to the future of fitness. We're live. Miranda, welcome to the future of fitness.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

I'm thrilled to have you. And thanks to EC Sinkowski, our mutual friend, who made the connection and helped me get you on the show. I've, as people who listen may know, I've come from the CrossFit world. And you, I would say, are a A-list celebrity amongst the CrossFit world. So it's a it's a pleasure to maybe five years ago.

Nowadays, not as long, but yeah.

Back in my day, let's put it that way. Um actually I think I may predate you if I'm aging myself. But yeah, it's a pleasure to get you on here. And of course, I would love to ask you questions all about CrossFit, but that's not really the point of the show. You are one of the founders with your husband, right? Of street parking.

Yes.

You I guess we were just you you we're an athlete, you're not as competitive as anymore because you have two kids now. So you are a busy entrepreneur parent, and I'm sure that's keeping your days fairly full.

Very full, yes. Both boys are under four. I have a three and a half year old and a nine-month-old right now. And yeah, we have 40 employees now with street parking, and so it's a big family over here.

And you and you're located uh just north of Portland, is that right?

Yeah, we live in Vancouver, Washington. Yeah.

Yeah, it's an awesome area. Let's dig in here. For people who who don't know your background, Miranda, give us a little backstory on who you are, how you got to where you are now with street parking and CrossFit and all the goods.

Yeah, I started in the fitness industry, honestly, when I was like 17 years old, just teaching group fitness classes. I started out with spinning and then it was like cardio kickboxing, and I don't know, I had all sorts of crazy certifications like bosu ball and this and that, and anything I could get my hands on. It was mostly group fitness at first. And then I started working in personal training and I was doing some one-on-one coaching and the group fitness stuff, got into nutrition. I worked for a while when I was in my early 20s, basically like giving people meal plans and workout plans, and they would just come check in once a week and we would see how their progress was going. So we weren't actually watching them work out or knowing what they were actually doing, and then trying to help gauge their progress. That was weird. And then from there, I started, I went back to personal training and I was working in a small studio. I found CrossFit online in 2007, in the fall of 2007. Just I was looking for more. I was, I think the Google search, if that's what it was, was Boot Camp style training. Some I was getting bored of my own workouts, to be honest, of the bicep curls and the cable crossover and all of that stuff. And I wanted to add some more fun into my own personal workouts. There were no CrossFit affiliates in I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. So there were no CrossFit affiliates in that area. There were a few people, there was one up in Park City, which was Chris Spieler, and one up about 40 minutes to the north of me in Leyton, but they didn't even have like locations yet. They were just people who were affiliated. I taught myself how to do CrossFit, linked up with Spiel. He taught me a few things, started doing it with my clients, got kicked out of the facility that I was renting space to personal train because they didn't like the intensity of the workouts. They didn't like that I was trying to train more than two people at a time. And so I opened a gym, CrossFit 801 in Salt Lake City, in early 2008. Owned that gym from 2008 to 2011. During that time, I was able to get a job with CrossFit HQ on the seminar staff, traveling around the world doing the level ones. Eventually that turned into doing the level twos and doing all sorts of stuff with CrossFit. I worked in the media department during the games and yeah, basically I worked for CrossFit from 2008 to 2016. And a couple months after I had left CrossFit in 2016, honestly, mostly because I just couldn't handle the travel anymore. I had the idea for street parking. And oh, during that time you mentioned it as well. I I competed. I don't think of that too often when I'm telling this the path to street parking because it's, I guess, like a different side of it that feeds it and definitely feeds the early success of street parking. But the creation of street parking came more from my trainer brain than my athlete brain, I should say. And then yeah, street parking started late 2016, and here we are today, almost five years, we'll be five years old this year.

And I I think I don't know this answer, so it's a great time to ask, but street parking, I'm sure you get asked all the time. Where did you come up with that name?

So it's I like to think of myself as creative and it's a funny story. So you if you if your garage is a gym, then you park your car. At the time I lived in California and nobody has nobody can afford a driveway in California. Um we parked our car in the street. And it's a term that had been used actually by Rogue, which I didn't I knew that, but I didn't remember it at the time. So maybe subconsciously in my brain, I had seen that on a rogue advertisement about the garage gym. But yeah, it's just if you use your garage for fitness, you park your car in the street.

That's great. So you okay, so the model, I don't know. What do you call that? Is it a like an online membership model? Is it people are calling it OTT now? What do you okay? What does street parking do? Who do you guys serve? How do you serve them? Give us that information.

So it started out as an idea to, I had traveled a lot as I as we were talking about before we started. I worked over 300 seminars for CrossFit. So I was very and I was competing. So I was very well versed in trying to maintain fitness in a hotel. And more recently, when street parking started, I was working for Progenics, which is a supplement company, and also traveling a lot for them. So there was a lot of hotel fitness happening. And what I had noticed was when I would post, because I had a pretty large following based on my competitive story on social media, when I posted workouts of me with dumbbells in a hotel gym or me doing a workout in my hotel room with no equipment at all, the interaction was different. And it seemed that what I was providing in those posts was much more helpful than the post where people were just fans of me as an athlete. And because I can't, I've always identified more as a trainer than an athlete, I thought people need these workouts. Like there are people there are flight attendants. At the time, I wasn't necessarily thinking of people who wanted to train at home. It was like there are people who are flight attendants or they're busy career people and they work. So we should myself and my now husband, he was my boyfriend at the time. We said we should start an Instagram page and just post our workouts that we do at home, like the simple stuff, so that people that are in these situations can benefit from it. And so we started the Instagram page and then we thought, wouldn't it be cool if they could they could connect with each other somehow? Like we should allow them to enter their scores and log and get and see the other people and and all of this. And so we I was comfortable and knew Wattify. And so I called up What if I said I wanted to set up this thing and we set it up and it was we thought it would be cool if we had a hundred members that we we could help pay our like expensive California utilities. That's as far in our brains as we had taken it. And within the first month, we had 700 members. And we were like, I had a full-time job, I was pregnant. Boolean had a another business that was a meal prep business in Southern California, like providing like paleo or macro type meals that people would order, and he would drop them off at the gyms and things like that. So it just kind of took off, and we were very surprised by it. And since then, it has evolved into I would describe street parking as an online fitness program and community. So the community is a big aspect of it for us.

That is fascinating. It's so funny that you're like, yeah, we'd be stoked with 100. We got 700. That's great. Yeah. When you're in the early days, when you're investigating this through your Instagram channel, were people doing the workouts and then posting what they were doing like in your comment section? Or what when did you come up with a community idea?

So we wanted to be able to help people. We pre we tried to provide uh more than just, I know a lot of programs at the time, and it's evolved a lot since then, especially in 2020, it evolved. We tried to provide more than just a written workout on Wattify that they could read. We wanted to provide, because again, I came from being a coach, I wanted to provide a video demo that showed what the movements should look like, and also some modifications. So if you find yourself with, well, maybe you don't have a pair of dumbbells and you only have access to a kettlebell, like how you can make it work with that. But also, hey, like maybe you just like these workouts and you do have access to a barbell and a pull-up bar. It turned quickly into three different versions of the workout every day. One with very minimal or no equipment, one with, yeah, I've got a barbell and some plates, but I don't have things like a rower or all of that stuff. Or the third version of the workout was I have access to everything and I might even be doing this in my CrossFit gym. I just like these workouts. And the idea was they're all the same workout. It's just we call it customizing, not scaling, because it's not necessarily making it easier. It's just picking the version for what you have available. And then we would show a bunch of different modification options like ring rows instead of pull-ups and all of that. And yeah, and it is so the community aspect came. We added the Facebook group so that we could help answer people's questions, is the answer to your question that you just asked.

Yeah. Yeah. So fast forward today, where is street parking at now? What does it look like? Are you guys? Do you think we'll get into the effects of 2020 on a business like this? Because I am as as difficult as 2020 was for many segments of the fitness industry. I always like to focus on when good people with good businesses, when the market comes to them. And what an amazing situation that you guys work. I have no doubt that you work very hard street parking and you were made it successful from the get-go. But then also you get this unforeseen market shift right in 2020 that probably really brought a lot of attention to what you guys are doing. Okay, let me go back to my original question of what do you guys do? What does street parking look like now? And today's recording date is February 2021.

Yeah, so now we have 34,000 members. And we can talk again about 2020. We had 19,000 before the pandemic. So we did have a big uptick, but we had a pretty, we were doing again way more than the 100 members that we expected before people were forced to work out at home. And not much has changed about our program since early 2020. So what it looks like now is when people join, they gain access to a members-only website that has the daily programming, the three versions that I just mentioned. We added a fourth version, which is a more of a beginner version that's used for people who we actually have quite a lot of members who have never done any sort of CrossFit type training. So this is a great place for them to start to do more simple versions of the movements. It also is great for people who are maybe haven't worked out for a really long time, are returning from injury, pregnant and postpartum moms. So we added that fourth version of the daily. There's also seven accessory workouts that they have access to each week that are optional. If you love Olympic lifting, here's an Olympic lifting workout you can throw in this week, or here's a powerlifting, or here's a gymnastics accessory, or endurance, or whatever. So there's seven of those programmed a week. We have a bunch of like extra programs where, hey, you want to focus on just improving your push-ups or your ability to do the push push-ups from your toes, or here's how to get your first pull-up, or a bunch of stuff like that. In the members only website, they have recipes and nutrition tips and guidance that way. And then as far as the community goes, actually, it's been more tough since the pandemic hit because we were doing large meetups actually. We did a in 2019, we did a summer camp where 200 plus adults came and stayed at this summer camp built for kids before it opened for the kids, and we paid to use this the space. And we did a summer camp with, and it's different than what you would normally see, I think, from the CrossFit community at least. Like this wasn't power monkey, let me help you get your first muscle up and let's practice snatch technique all day long. That's not at all what it was. It was let's slip and slide into a pool full of jello and try to find puzzle pieces and run them back while you're sliding all over the place. It was fun. It was summer camp with adults and we did work out, but it the emphasis was on connecting with each other and having a good time. And people were allowed to bring their kids, and some people did, and it was awesome. We we would do meetups in Vegas. We did a couple of times. We went to the Ultimate Hawaiian Trail run. People were doing meetups on their own every weekend. There was like 10 plus like random. This group in Chicago got together, and this group in Texas got together, and they were sending us their photos. And so that the community now is almost exclusively, obviously, online. There's not a lot of meetups and things like that happening, but that was a big part of what we were doing before the pandemic hit. We do challenges where it's four to six weeks, and there's like specific goals that they that they have to reach and number of points that they have to get in order to win a prize or things like that. It's definitely more than a workout on Wattify and a video on Instagram, which is how we started.

Yeah. Yeah, that's wild. So it's 2000, so five years you've been doing this, right? Give or take.

Yeah, almost, yeah.

And it's not overnight success, but that's pretty fast. That's that's it must have felt really. Do you ever look back and think to yourself when 2016, five years ago, we would have been happy with a hundred and now we're 34,000? Do you ever does that ever blow your mind?

You know, it does actually, and we have to remind ourselves, and and Julian and I, I feel like do a pretty good job of not neither one of us has an attitude of more, more, what's next, what's next, what's next. We we do get asked all the time, and I've been on several podcasts and been interviewed where people have said, What's the goal? And we have no numerical goal. 100 was the goal, and now it's just we will we want as many members as we can effectively help and keep streetly parking what it is without losing control of our message.

So what about your lifestyle? There's a lot of different types of entrepreneurs, right? Me particularly, I'm all about my lifestyle, it's what I value most. And I want you know, a business that will support that. But sometimes it's hard because if you put yourself for me, and this is totally my reflection on is like I'll fail at a bunch of business endeavors and then I'll find one that works, and then sooner or later I'll be like, oh my God, it's taking over my time. Yeah, what what's that with that accelerated growth? What have been some of the challenges that people would say, Oh, these are quote unquote good problems? What has that journey been for both you and your husband and your family?

So I think so. I've told this story a bunch of times, but in case listeners have never heard it before, I think it helps answer this question. Two days after we launched the street parking Instagram page, which again was just meant to be like a fun little hobby. I found out that I was pregnant and it was not intentional, this pregnancy. So it was uh, but it's been the best thing to have happened because of what you're asking. Both Julian and I were CrossFit Games athletes. And with that comes, I'll do whatever it takes to be successful, right? Like I will work and not have a social life and eat perfectly clean and we're willing to sacrifice to be successful. And both of us are very driven by success. I think becoming parents has saved us from ourselves in that sense. And now we have two little boys where they mean so much to us, and we have such a strong desire to be connected to them and spend time with them that we won't allow street parking to take that from us as a family. And I know I don't know where we would be without our boys, as far as having any sort of balance whatsoever.

Yeah, that's a really important angle, having that force, not forced into your life, wanted, right? But just happen.

Just earlier than expected.

Yeah, yeah. Sure. It changes everything. When you've been growing, I presume in order to, like you said, safeguard your family life. You must you have to make hiring choices. And how did you guys, as you guys start growing, how did you start making decisions? What did you decide you needed first? How did you find talent? What has that been from just being solo really to now? I think you said, how many people are you guys at now as far as employees? Quite a bit, right?

Like 40 plus, yeah.

Yeah. So that's a lot of hiring. Yeah. What is what how's that transition been from being solo to an actual business owner and executive?

I think that's honestly the hard one of the hardest things, especially because we talk about this in our team meetings all the time. We're not selling a product. This isn't like a shampoo or something like that. This is a message that we all feel feel very strong, especially Julian and I feel very strongly about. And so anybody who's going to have their hands on delivering that message, whether it's somebody answering support emails or making videos or creating content for social media, like anybody that's going to touch the message needs to at some level understand the message and at some level agree with the message. You can't just hire for skill when it's something like this. I do give a lot of credit to my time on this on the CrossFit Seminar staff for the level of accountability and just what they, the standard that they held us to was very high. And I was in that system for eight years. So I got to see that. I got to see how feedback works. I got to see how the hiring process there was very strict and stringent. Where we found the most success is hiring as much as possible from our membership, our member base. Because if somebody's been a member for a year and they're so gung ho and they're reaching out to us saying, I'd love to work for you, at least I don't know much about your skills, but I do know that you value what we're doing and that you value the message. And so we've gotten a lot of people that we didn't that didn't necessarily have specific skills, but great people for support. Our very first hire, her name is Kim McIntyre, who's like basically our office manager now. She heard we were moving to Washington and she lives um near here. So she reached out. And honestly, I hired her because I was so overwhelmed with the support emails and she was very well written and everything was punctuated properly. And so she was hired to help me answer emails. But the most successes that we've had is from people within the membership or relationships that we've had for years before street parking, people that we knew.

Yeah, it's so interesting. It seems like such a I had uh Jared Moon from Garage Gym Athlete was on the show uh a few months back, and similar but different journeys were in that. He really found the best and most passionate people came from the community and they didn't have to train him on the message and what the community was all about. And that's so hard to do to bring someone in from the outside who may qualify qualified on a resume or have great experience, but then to teach in the community, it's really really hard to do. It just takes time. They have to do it through osmosis.

Yeah, and I would say, especially in the fitness industry, because um, somebody who's worked in the fitness industry, even somebody who's worked in quote unquote CrossFit is not that doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna understand the nuances and the message of street parking, because there are ways that we have tried to be very different in our messaging. Like we don't focus on the competition aspect at all. Zero percent, you'll never see us rewarding somebody for having the best score. We don't know rep people and we don't we don't call it scaling and we encourage people to make the workout work for them. And if they don't even track their time one day because mentally they just couldn't deal with whether or not they did a good job. So there's a lot of stuff that even if you came from CrossFit, which would seem like a perfect fit, there's a lot of retraining and and unlearning that people have to do from that background, even when we've hired them.

Yeah, interesting. We skirted around in this conversation, but the mess, what is the message?

We just finished our New Year's challenge that we did, and the underlying theme of it was swim against the tide. And the video that we put out to encourage members to sign up for the challenge was in January, especially all year round, but in January, especially, you're gonna hear these pitches of this really over-the-top program where you need all of this equipment and all of this money and all of this time to do, and that's what you need to be fit. Or you're gonna hear the opposite of no, you don't need to do any of that. Just do this cleanse or this, take this supplement, and that's the missing piece. And our goal is to go against the grain of this marketing-driven, sales-driven, constantly trying to sell you something new, fitness industry, and just let's take it back to the basics. And the challenge was called the control your fitness challenge. What do you what can you control no matter where you are, no matter where you live? We have members all around the world, no matter what your economic situation is, no matter if you're in the pandemic and stuck completely at home and your kids are at home, or whatever, what things can you control? And it's eating your veggies, eating your fruit, working out four days a week, trying to get the best possible sleep you can, drinking enough water and trying to limit things like sugar and alcohol consumption, not to a completely eliminate those things, which is what you're gonna see in a lot of these like hardcore challenges, because that's not sustainable or realistic, and you're gonna do it for 30 days and then quit. But what's a realistic amount of this stuff? And can you just feel more in control and not have these things come across your Instagram page that make you think that you're missing something because you're not, you just need to be consistent. So, our our message is that it's consistency, it's being in control of your fitness, it's remembering the basics, it's not overcomplicating your fitness, it's a pair of dumbbells, is all you'll ever need. And it's not sexy, it's not an easy sell. Um people, that's not what people want to hear, but we're very adamant about that message and have been since the beginning.

Yeah, it's God, that's great. Thank you for doing that with your business. I think that messaging is so important. We were talking pre-recording how I've said this probably more times than I remember, but as a as an industry, fitness professionals have a tendency to overcomplicate fitness in order to make us feel like we're necessary, right, in people's lives. Yeah. And to have it bowl down somebody, and it's bold because you and I were both gym owners for a long time. It's people want those hardcore challenges. But if you come in, if people come in for say a new person comes for a consultation in your gym and you tell them, Well, actually, we're just gonna work on some habits. This is probably gonna be like a three-year journey. And I just want you to show up two times a week and then manage your sleep and do a list of things. You're not, they're gonna walk down the street and then you go to someone who's like, Yeah, we can cut 20 pounds in 30 days, no problem. And it's just a hard sell, but you guys are doing it, you're showing that you can build a community around that. So I really appreciate it. Have you run into challenges because you stuck to this?

Yes, and no. No, they're not challenges that we're not willing to take on because we do believe in the message so much. And I think that's the only way. Honestly, if I was delivering a message that I didn't feel passionate about just because it sold more memberships, I think we could have double the members that we have now, and I would be far less happy because I wouldn't feel this sense of that I'm actually helping people, that I'm actually making a difference, even if only half of these people or less than half really get it, like to have the light and bulb moment of oh my gosh, for my whole life I've been overcomplicating this and it really is that simple, then that's success to us. So there are challenges because we do we have to combat. You should see our Facebook group, like people will post. Hey, has anybody tried this 30-day cleanse? What do you guys think and think about doing it? And that stuff pops up on our page daily because of how many people are on there when we have to go in and try to explain, please don't. It's just not and explain why they don't need it. And we had a bunch of members that were doing 75 hard. I don't know if you've heard of that. No, but it's two workouts a day. And it's anyway, it's just it's a challenge. It's like an it's like a TikTok thing, I think, where it's like this hardcore show us your mental toughness type thing, which is fine. But we had a bunch of members who had no business doing it, doing it because they thought it was going to improve their results and they were like getting injured, and it's the same stuff that you honestly, it's exactly everything that you dealt with in an in-person gym with 30,000 people instead of 150 or 300. That's the the bickering with each other we have because we we have a Facebook group that's our gym, that's where people come to talk to each other and ask, hey, what workout did you guys do today, or whatever? It's exactly the same thing.

Ah, it's so interesting. Yeah, I wonder being and people who have been in the CrossFit community and especially those who have owned gyms, they're like, wow, there's a lot of drama in these little communities. And I can't imagine at 34,000 large that you're not seeing some drama, but not having the in-person thing is can can be a savior in that because I don't know, I'm making vast generalizations, but do you see a bit of drama in the community?

Oh, yeah. We have draw so we're 75% women, and I think it's mostly just because I've gone through two pregnancies, and again, I have a pretty big social media following, just me as an individual. So I think a lot of that has fed the membership. So we're 75% women, and or maybe 70. Not that that brings more drama than guys or anything like that, but it the draw 2020 was drama everywhere you turned. And our Facebook group was not immune to that. We have people from all over the world, from all different backgrounds, races, religions, political beliefs, everything. You if you saw it on regular social media, we had we had to deal with it the best that we could on our page. And I think that the community and how involved we are in our Facebook group is part of the reason that we are more successful than a lot of these other programs that have popped up. Julio and I are on there. Julian will go live on our Facebook group almost every day and just chat with people.

Wow.

And I post on there a lot. We answer, we have a whole step. Part of those 40 employees are four additional coaches that are answering questions when people have questions about the workouts of their movements or something's bothering them, they have a tweak or something like that. So we're very involved. And I think it is what sets us apart, but it's also it let me put it this way it would be much easier for us to throw a workout on an app. That's the workout, that's what you're paying for. You're not paying to like interact with us at all. And a lot of people have that system and it works well for them. And then they just throw the workouts up and they go on without with their day, and people cancel and people sign up, and they don't ever know these people or hear their grievances or anything. That's definitely easier. But we're trying to also make an impact and help these people, especially even before the pandemic, that are stuck at home working out because they have little kids or they live in the middle of Montana or something like that. And so they give them a little human interaction, give them what they're missing from their gyms.

Yeah, that's great. And you guys are doing what you know. If people could say in the finance community, can say a lot of things about CrossFit, but what you can definitely post a lot of credit to is that approve prove am I saying that right? It proves the importance of community and how powerful that really is. And you guys are doing it exceptionally well. You're just doing it at a much larger scale now. So looking at what 2020 did, I don't think I think it's obvious, right? People weren't going to gyms, they were looking for communities. That obviously bolstered, you know, you went from 19,000 to roughly 34,000 now. When everything starts to what do you think is going to happen in the next three years? Do you think people are going to be going back to gyms? Do you think people are going to stick to the home workouts? You think what is your what's your vision for what's going to happen next in this crazy fitness profession?

So I'm actually super excited about everything. Like you said before, like I'm not excited about the pandemic, obviously. But I I think this is something that the that the fitness, not the fitness industry, the it's not what the fitness industry needed, but it's what fitness needed was to force people to simplify it, right? To force people to be like, what am I gonna do? All right, I have this sandbag or I have these dumbbells or I have nothing, and I fitness is important to me. I think I put a post up in the summer of 2019 and I said that I believe that someday working out at home is gonna be as normal as going for a jog for fitness. Like seeing people work out in their driveway is gonna be as normal as seeing somebody jog through the park for a form of exercise. And I think I posted that in 2019 and reposted it sometime during 2020, like I told you. I think it's gonna be a combination of both. And we talk about this when our team meetings a lot as well. Is I believe in-person coaching. I believe in gyms. I think there's power to that. Obviously, seeing somebody move and coaching them on the spot is something that I we can't do. We can do it over video and we try our best when people post stuff. But there's there is value in-person coaching, 100% for sure. I think they'll be that people will have a mixture though, because the the seal has been broken on working out at home being possible and effective and normal. That seal has been broken, and I don't see that going away now, whether it's a $3,000 Peloton bike or it's your pair of dumbbells. I think people see working out at home as a viable option now. But I think people will start to go back to gyms as well because of the social aspect. And we have quite a few members who, even before the pandemic, did both. They had gym memberships. And when something came up, or when they were traveling, or when they missed class time for whatever reason, they would do the street parking workout. And it was a little bit of both. We know that, and you and I know because we had cross-fit gyms, that the price point is always gonna be a little bit higher for that type of training because you can only have so many members in there at a time. And there are people who will never be able to afford that. And so our goal is to provide them the best quality program that we can for the people who that's never gonna be an option for them, even if they wanted it to be, or people who just live in places where it's not feasible for them to drive as far as they would need to drive to go to a good gym. But I do think it, I think it'll be a mixture from now on.

Yeah, I agree. And I one of my good friends and colleagues, Shane Farmer, has dark horse rowing, who, you know, similar model. And their whole similar, the whole thing is if you have a rower and you're alone in your basement, you're one of us. And that's pulling people together who, like you said, maybe in the middle of Montana, like me or wherever, who can't, you know, easily access a gym, I can, but a lot of people can't. Rural areas or specifically they just don't have the budget for $100 enough for a membership. I think it's really powerful for them to have this option. And let's face it, like even pre-pandemic, there is a very small percentage of the population that actually went to gyms or engaged in you know, some kind of fitness professional. I see the numbers stagger all the time, but it was less than 20%.

Yeah.

But yet, as a fitness industry, we always fight over that same 20%. But what we've seen, what you guys are proving and many other models approving, is that we can now tackle the other 80% and we can start expanding fitness and health into people maybe who didn't even engage or never would have engaged otherwise. So I think it's a really cool thing. I agree. I think it's gonna be here for a while. It's proven that it's it's the genie's out of the bottle, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

What do you guys final question for you is looking into this year, the remainder of the year, what what are some of the biggest challenges you guys are facing as a business?

Our biggest project that we're working on right now is as I mentioned earlier, we we've used Wattify for our logging, and we still do, and they've been great. Their platform was not at all built for what we are using it for. It was built for gyms, people, facilities with 200, maybe 500 members, and we've got 34,000 people over here entering their scores and trying to open the leaderboard. And a lot of the features on there are meant for gyms, and so it doesn't really make sense for our members. We've been working for a while on a bed a better logging system for our members. And anytime you build something with, I know almost nothing about technology, it just takes forever and it's the more simple you want it, the harder it is to make. And so that's probably our biggest challenge and the thing that's the burden that I'm carrying heaviest on my shoulders right now until it's released. But just continuing again, you know, we to put our message out there and to and to stay strong with it and to measure success by the lives that we're changing, not the number of people that we convince to join. But are these people staying? Are they seeing results? Are they are they getting the message? We focus a lot more on the people that are already members than on marketing or anything like that. And I think that will always be the case. So that's always been where we're focusing. But yeah, this year with the logging thing, that's the biggest thing that we're hoping goes well.

Yeah. Are you guys so you guys are doing a custom build-out?

Yep, we had again, we had a member reach out who that's what he does, and he has built a team, and they are they've done a really good job so far. We we people used to join even using the Wattify app. So they would join and Whattify processed our payments and everything. So the first step that we took was to start processing our own payments and to have our own sign-up experience. And they did that first and they did a really good job, and it went really well. So the next step is this logging thing. So the good news is we don't care about your scores. If it you'll still have access to the workouts, if it has a few glitches that we have to fix along the way, that's fine. We'll still keep we're still gonna keep the website. So we're not gonna try to transfer everything over into one app or anything like that. We'll see how it goes. Technology is hard, and that's a whole part of being a coach that I never thought that I would have to deal with is all of this stuff for sure.

Yeah, it's uh I'm working, I have the pleasure of working with Joel Jameson and his his Morpheus coaching platform. And getting in on these meetings every week where it's so much the development team takes up an hour and a half telling us everything that's gone. Whoa, this is complicated. And I've came to the same conclusion that what you said you alluded to a minute ago is that simple is expensive. Yes, it really is. That's the hardest part is making it super simple. That's where things get really complicated. And that's that's so funny. But as a non-coder developer, I'm starting to learn that it sounds like you are too. So welcome to the party.

I'll call these guys and I'll be like, no, I have an idea. It seems super simple to me, but maybe not every time when it's I'm sure they're just pulling the hair out.

Yeah, it reminds me of uh, I don't know if you ever watched Saturday Night Live when they had like the IT guy. You would ask, like, someone in the office would be, you know, ask for the IT guy and then be like, hey, I just want to switch the wires on this fax, whatever. They're like, idiot. You'd be so stupid. Yeah, that's what you feel like sometimes. Awesome. Well, Miranda, where where do people find you? Where do you send them online?

Yeah, so our website is streetparking.com. Our public Instagram is at streetparking. My personal Instagram is at fearlessmiranda. And I mean that oh, we also have a lot of stuff on our YouTube channel, actually. So you can find the street parking YouTube channel.

Right on. Well, Miranda, so great to connect with you. It's a pleasure after all these years, just being a fan of you as an athlete and now a business owner and what you guys are doing. It's really it's really cool. So I appreciate coming on, spending the time with me, and uh, yeah, keep up the great work.

Awesome. Thank you. You're thanks for having me.

Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, Miranda Elkraz. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Finis. 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 futurofitness.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.