Teambuildr & The Decentralization of Fitness - Hewitt Tomlin

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, where we talk with entrepreneurs, researchers, and practitioners in fitness, wellness, and health sciences. I'd like to give a big thanks to our sponsors, Level Five Mentors, helping entrepreneurs achieve the highest levels of freedom in time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. Also, certified course creation, helping entrepreneurs create accredited online certifications that are not only lucrative but highly scalable. Go to level5mentors.com or certifiedcoursecreation.com and learn more. I am your host, Eric Malzone. And once again, welcome to the Future of Fitness. Boom, we're live. Hewitt Tomlin. Welcome to the show, man.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm excited to highlight you. I know you have uh I did a little bit of digging on you and your backstory and through athletics and starting team builder, but I have to first of all just give a quick shout out to Erica Studer, who recommended you for the show. So you can check her out at EricaStuder.com. She was also on a very recent podcast. So thank you, Erica, for pointing me in the right direction and getting Hewitt on here. Hewitt, man, there's so many things I want to get into. And you know, today's just so people know, the date of today's recording is May 19th, 2020. You know, we're kind of uh three months into this ish, into this pandemic, and you are aware, Washington, D.C. What's going on in your world?

Well, I am in DC. Things are good here. Uh, we've uh tightened things up. And uh, as far as I can tell, everyone here is following the rules and being considerate of others. So all good on my end.

Right on, man. So one of the first things I like to get is is understanding a little bit of your background, your backstory. And I'm curious to hear kind of the sequence of events that led you to being an entrepreneur, a founder, a team builder. How did you get there? I know it could be a long story, but give us what you got.

Oh, I'm used to giving the uh the short version, no worries. Okay. I started my business out of my fraternity house in college with my teammate and my roommate, actually. But it was not uh an overnight success story. We uh basically had an idea as we were related to this problem that we observed. And like I mentioned, we played football in college, and uh we observed this issue that everyone in our team was getting the same training program. And uh, whether you were a freshman quarterback or a senior D-lineman, you were going to get that same program. And when we started kind of getting curious about the problem, we basically found that you know strength coaches across the country, especially small staffs, were responsible for training hundreds of athletes in the collegiate setting. And they were primarily using Excel to do it. And if you consider um how much time it takes to individualize a training program or at least modify it to a development group or position group, coaches just didn't have a good tool at the time to do that. So, simply out of curiosity, we set out to build a software that would essentially replace Excel as a better alternative to writing better individualized training programs specifically for strength and conditioning for coaches. So it took years and years. You know, we actually didn't seek out venture capital. We essentially built our business uh bootstrapped from the ground up, just acquiring customers slowly. And eventually we we basically found that strength coaches, whether they were in college, high school, pro, or private facility, had some sort of use for a platform like what we were building. So today we like to say that we have a software for any strength coach in any setting.

Interesting, man. So give us the quality. Let's dive into team builder then. What what is it? And it's it's interesting because I I know this story. I started remote coaching. Well, I started doing strength and conditioning coaches in in 2008, 09, and everything was spreadsheets, right? I think I used Smartsheets for a while because it had a calendar setting on it, which was unique to it. And then I started doing remote coach around 2013, 12 and the the email and the spreadsheets, and it was just chaotic, man. And uh then you had to get on a phone call or that was Skype. There wasn't even Zoom back then. Tell us how, like, tell us about the product and the business. Like, how did you guys pull all this together? What are what are the qualities of team builder that makes it unique?

Yeah, so you know, originally in the beginning, we thought that the key to this business would be to build a really good experience for athletes on the mobile app side. And what we came to find out, you know, being first-time entrepreneurs, is that the value proposition has to be directed at the coach who's actually sitting down on the computer writing the training program. After all, it's the coach in the program who's going to cut the check. So the big pain point was not really whether athletes used a PDF packet or used a mobile app, it was whether coaches could save a couple hours writing their training programs. I mean, that raw time savings is a really strong value prop. So from the beginning, we've really put an emphasis on building a software platform that would just really save people time and make a really manual and technical process just easier to do. And that's what I think is the core of our value prop. And once we really kind of took command of that, we could expand on that and then build, you know, peripheral features on the platform, you know, Athlete Mobile App and these other features that we offer. But I like to think about if I set a coach down on Excel and set a coach down on Team Builder, or you know, set a coach down on any other tool next to Team Builder, the one using Team Builder can get more done in less time and spit out a higher quality program at the end of the day. I think for coaches that was really valuable. So we remember that. We're not going to stray from that. We always circle back to that part of our platform and make sure that it's up to date and that it's really continuing to improve for the end user.

Interesting. So there's, you know, the way I look at it, Hugh, and I would love to get your opinion on it. But you know, since this pandemic has hit, I've personally seen major disruption in the fitness industry coming for a long time. It's why I started really the future of fitness podcasts, is because I knew there was a modernization of the industry going on. I didn't, I never knew. I'm not going to sit here and say I knew exactly what it would look like. I did know remote coaching was going to be a big part of it. Technology was going to be a big part of it. This whole, you know, COVID-19 has just accelerated this whole transition so quickly. And the companies that I, you know, if you look at like online coaching as you know, the fitness industry's modern gold rush, you know, if you looked at the history of the gold rush, the people who made the most money were the people selling, you know, pickaxes and shovels, right? And I think platforms like yours, Team Builder, and then some of your competitors, you know, are those pickaxes and shovels. How has your business been affected? And has this been totally unexpected for you? Did you see something like this coming? Like what's what's your thoughts on the current status of things?

Yeah, look, the current situation has accelerated business for a few select sectors and remote training tools like ours and remote learning tools. Uh any any tool that facilitates some sort of transaction remotely is benefiting at the moment. And, you know, the businesses are gonna do well. You can't go wrong, but you know, competition will increase, of course. Feature development will pivot. We've already done that internally. We've had to prioritize different features over others based on the current situation. But you know, speaking to the customers who have to use these tools, I really want to make sure that the focus is still on the right place. If you employ all the correct tools, you know, you're solving a portion of your equation being a remote business. There are other parts of the equation that are equally, if not more, important. I like to bring up the saying that the highest quality training program is not always the best-selling program. More often than not, it's the training program that gets marketed better is the one that ends up winning in the end. So if you're a coach and your background is sound and your expertise is sound, you're you're using the right tools. If your marketing is not formatted to today's situation, if you cannot acquire a customer remotely, then you're gonna lose to a certain extent. And that that's a part of the industry as well. And that's an opportunity for companies like ours to help in that regard. You know, my business is a technical software, but our job is you know, in terms of marketing our software, it's not just talking about our platform only. It's about helping coaches holistically with all their pain points that they solve. That that's an opportunity for a business like ours. So the current situation, I think, is producing many, many opportunities in different ways. And it's also going to create multiple challenges that businesses have to solve as well in different areas.

So you mentioned just now, Hewitt, that there are some features that you really focused on given the current environment. I'm curious, just can you expand on that? What are some of the features that you find are more relevant right now than maybe they were six months ago that you're really focusing on?

Features that mimic like a social media platform, those have been expedited. If you think about teams and not just teams, gyms. You know, people go to the gym not to have one-on-one interaction with a coach and a barbell, but folks who go to their gym, you know, they're friends. I know my gym, I really enjoy the folks that I see there on a day-to-day basis. You know, that that's essentially gone. What we've done here is we've kind of expedited, you know, working on what we call our team feed. And the team feed is simply a social media feed where if you hit a new PR in an exercise, it'll post in the team feed. If you want to post a selfie or video up there, it's it's gonna uh notify everyone on your team. We've started working on that more than we ever have before because it's really, really relevant. Coaches want to be notified when people are submitting videos to the platform. Otherwise, you know, before coaches would just periodically go on and check, but now you know coaches rely on knowing when people are submitting content to the platform. So we built in push notifications that are sent to coaches and athletes and clients. So, you know, the the remote aspects like that for us have really taken to the forefront uh of what we're building.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, man. I think the social aspect is something that uh has been underrated for a very long time uh in the in the digital side of things. And you know, look let's focus on you for a second, Hewitt. Well, actually, I want to go back and before we get on on to you is like when you when you look at the market now, and you know, there's team builder, there's you know, true coach, there's trainerize, there's a lot of these similar applications that people can use. How do you see yourself fitting in the market? You know, what is there any differentiators that you guys have or what what makes you guys different?

Yeah, we've decided to stay true to the what we could call the strength and conditioning professional. Uh, in other words, if you're coaching someone and the programs that you're writing and the feedback that you want to get from the client have to do with strength training, load-based strength training, we're we're going for that customer. So, you know, if you go on Instagram and you see a trainer who's writing programs that you can sign up for in mass and it's made up of a lot of you know body weight movements and and banded stuff, I think it's great. You know, my my wife likes that stuff. There's a market for that, but it won't be our market. The folks who want to see people get stronger, want to measure that, who are really sticking to the principle of progressive overload, those are the folks that we're going to go for. And, you know, at some point I think we had a decision to make about which way we would focus because you can't be everything for everyone. Uh, we learned that really early on. And TrueCoach has done a really good job, but there are other applications of that space a lot more than there are in our sense. It's a bigger space. But that ocean's red. There's quite a few people fighting that ocean. There are fewer sharks fighting in our ocean. It's smaller, but I think there's more opportunity for us. We've made good traction there. And I think we've done a good job of not reaching for the shining object in the other ocean and staying true as long as we've seen the growth metrics that we want to see. And so far we have. So that's how I position our business at the moment.

So for that segment, the strength and conditioning professional, how how big is that market? What do you guys estimate?

Well, you can very easily estimate the market as it relates to what we call the team space. That's high schools, colleges, professional teams. And I don't get a little bit of, you know, we're recreational teams. These are uh club teams and so on. That market's growing pretty nicely. Strength and conditioning budgets have been growing, especially in the high school space. Uh, maybe when I started this company seven years ago, I was really hard pressed to see a high school strength coach with, say, college experience and a CSCS certification. That's becoming more common than I've ever seen it before for many reasons, namely job stability. Rather than moving your family from a college every few years, a high school will provide much better stability and a lot of fulfillment. But I'd say, thanks to CrossFit, CrossFit made barbell training really cool. You know, when I started as a freshman in college, strength and conditioning was something that you saw competitive athletes do, you know, using the primal fundamental movements in a weight room. And then, you know, maybe you saw bodybuilding and like a globo gym, but CrossFit really put barbells in people's hands. And I I think we benefited from that because folks who weren't necessarily doing CrossFit still wanted to use barbells and train like an athlete, and that style of training really got popular. So private facilities, that market's been growing as well. I can't put my finger on how big it is, but I know it's getting bigger. It's been you know a big part of our business, about a quarter of our customers. So across the board, uh, strength and condition professional market as a number, I think, are growing in total.

Yeah, really interesting, man. And you know, I know you come from um an athletic background. So, you know, let's let's talk about Hewitt for a little bit. Tell me about you know your entrepreneurial journey. Like what's what's been one of the biggest challenges you've had in as an entrepreneur personally?

Um, you know, when I kind of came up and building my business, we didn't know that we were building up a SaaS business, software as a service. And quite frankly, a lot of the the older business people, whether they be alumni from our college or you know, our parents' friends and folks like that, they didn't necessarily build technology businesses within the same business model that that we were building it. So a lot of the advice early on was not as relevant as maybe it would be if we had built a business say 20 years ago. So in that regard, we we kind of had to seek out direction on our own, my partner and I. But things kind of came together for us. So, you know, I like to and also the bootstrap thing, I like to think that, you know, we we kind of chose that route, but it kind of chose us. We kind of found that we could be self-sufficient in a lot of things that would make progress for our business. And we never really understood the the value proposition of taking outside capital. It it kind of seemed like it was putting a timeline on something that we enjoy doing. And I liked building my business. I liked our customers, and I liked the way things were going. I didn't really understand the concept of taking money to see if it would win or lose within a couple of years. I just wanted something that would keep growing and I knew could could be sustainable for myself. You know, it made me personally happy. So those are some of the concepts early on, you know, in terms of building a business that I kind of learned inadvertently uh in the beginning through now.

So have you guys taken on investors then, Hewitt, or are you guys still bootstrapping?

Never never taken on an investor. We've never taken out a loan. The first year we sold subscriptions, we maybe sold 10. We were working full-time jobs, you know, that were kind of feeding us at the time. We just reinvested everything back into the company until the little snowball turned into a bigger one. I'd say it was maybe four years ago, now, maybe more, where I quit my job. I was working for tech startups at the time, which was a good cross-pollination exercise, doing sales and marketing for tech startups, and then just coming home on nights and weekends and bringing that knowledge into my own little bootstrap business. But no, we've been bootstrapped the entire time.

And what year did you officially found the company? When do you think you what what date do you put on that?

I I put it at 2012. I think we made our first sale. Lynchburg College, a division three school in Lynchburg, Virginia. It was a cold call. You know, I think uh at that time I was getting advice that, hey, if you want to make sales, you gotta get on the phones and start banging out some calls. I was actually cold calling coaches using staff directories on the w on the internet. Um, a slow, slow, painful process, but probably a good learning experience. I wouldn't do it again. But I cold called a coach and and actually made our first sale that way. That was 2012.

That's awesome, man. Yeah, the old uh I started a lot of businesses with simply cold calling or walking around. You know, I started my gym in in 2009, opened the doors, and we didn't have capital. We didn't have digital marketing. Uh, we just went around and literally stopped in and talked to people everywhere all day. Yeah. There's there's something to be said for that that uh I know there's a lot of people out there probably will never experience that because there is Facebook ads and you know, these fancy things that kids use nowadays, but uh you know, which I employ as well quite a bit. But yeah, it's it's it's a really good learning experience. I would imagine through that cold calling, what are some of the more valuable gems that you think from that you got from that experience?

Well, I think I haven't cold called in a while. I probably still do today. I just don't consider it cold calling. It's a different level of expertise and confidence, really. I think um I think back back in those days when I was cold calling, I just knew that this industry in particular was going to take time. Trust is a big deal. The strength and condition community is pretty tight-knit. And I knew that it would take uh a little while to take that tiny snowball and get it to the point where it was something material. So that's probably worth anyone evaluating when they, you know, start off on a sales development uh enterprise. Is you know, is this thing worth doing in the long run? Do I need to get results quickly? If so, you know, you probably have to consider a pivot. I I don't know if cold calling today is necessarily the best way to scale quickly. Back then, it it worked for us in the beginning, but uh I don't necessarily say that it scaled our company quickly. It was a long road. Yeah.

Well, you know, I think uh when people start businesses, you know, whatever it may be, maybe it's if it's you know, coaching business, SaaS, e-commerce, you know, when you first start, it's ugly. It's just not clean, right? You're you're gonna try a lot of different things, your pricing's gonna be all over the place, you're gonna make promises that you wish you never made and just kind of get that first one to three clients in the door, and and that's okay. You know, it's just part of it. And then you start to refine your processes over time, which it sounds like you you've experienced. What do you have, what's your guys' goal with this company? Do you have an exit strategy or what do you guys what would you consider success here?

You know, we're pretty transparent with how we look at our long-term goals for the company. At the core, we want to build a company that is built to last, that is sustainable, because we really do enjoy this. I really love my customers. I like these guys, these women, uh, they're really great people. So I I'm not going to do anything that that puts my company at risk because if I'm doing this, you know, at the moment, this is how I see it. If I do this in 10 years and we're still growing, you know, well, I'll be happy with that. At the same time, I want to build a company that is attractive to people who are interested in buying the country club, so to speak. People have reached out before it's going to happen. And uh, you know, they're inquiring about the uh potential of an acquisition. And I I tell them more or less, I say, look, this is our country club. We have great margins, we like our growth rate, we have big plans as far as development. If you're you know wanting to be involved with this, you're you're gonna have to make a nice offer to you know take the country club out of our hands. So that's I think how we're taking the course. It's a really balanced approach. You know, we re-invest a lot into the company while still making sure that it's a profitable company and leaving the two doors open. But either door I'll be happy with. That's how we're kind of viewing it.

Yeah. I mean, it's it's such a great formula for success. You know, it's something that fuels you personally that you you enjoy doing. You have high margins and you're not managed by investors. I mean, it's a great situation to be in, and now you happen to find yourself in, you know, a space, you know, something that we couldn't have foreseen, but in a situation where, you know, a little bit of luck, you guys are in a great position to grow and help a lot of both coaches and users and athletes uh have a better experience overall training. Um Yeah.

And I think it took us to rejecting the dichotomy. Uh, maybe this is my fault for being on tech Twitter, but on tech Twitter, the dichotomy is that you run an aggressive high growth business by raising capital or you simply have a lifestyle business, right? Like those are the two options that are posed. But look, it's a spectrum. You can land somewhere in the middle. We reinvest a lot of money back into the company. I I want to hire good engineers, I want to bring more people on here. You know, we're we're building this thing at the same time. I'm gonna make sure that look, if if I have to work a hundred hours a week, you know, what's the point? I'm I'm personally gonna suffer from that. I'm not gonna make that happen either. So it's okay to to pick somewhere on the spectrum and go for it.

Yeah, and I I I reject that dichotomy too. I think there's a lot of different ways to build a business. I've never taken uh an investment dollar in anything I've ever done. I have taken out some loans, mainly to buy out, you know, a partner at one time. But I think there's so many different variations and that lifestyle business too. I I don't even know what that means, right? I just don't I don't I it doesn't my my brain doesn't wrap around it. You know, there's an interesting uh topic that I I want to go through with you because I I I I agree with it and I think it's an interesting conversation because we talked about this previous recording is the decentralization of the fitness industry. Explain your your thought on that, where'd that come from?

Yeah, I I take a look back at who was primarily responsible for distributing fitness programs, you know, back back before I was even born. And I'm looking at the Tybo videos and Beach Body and things of that degree, and you know, they're they're selling you know programs in high volume at a low price point and really getting it out there. And then I see CrossFit and uh you know Boutique Studio Fitness come along like they have in the last decade and uh kind of break up Globo Gym and giving people a better experience at a higher price, which is great. But I still think my belief is rooted in the fact that I know a lot of these folks, a lot of these coaches are just really high quality uh, you know, strained coaches and trainers and uh have a lot of knowledge at their disposal. Uh some of these people who've turned it into good businesses, you know, I'm talking guys who have 50 clients who are all remote and they're paying them, you know, a couple hundred bucks a month. That's a really good model. People can get really good outcomes by working with someone in that capacity capacity versus enrolling at a studio or a gym. So what when I talk about decentralization, what I envision is that when I see these really high quality trainers, you know, go out there and learn how to market and acquire customers. I I can see, you know, uh uh many, many small businesses, which I think is great. I'm a small business guy, you know, a coach building a book of business with fifty clients, giving them very personal, high touch training programs and nutrition advice and and life and stress management coaching. I mean, I think that's A really good model. And I think the only thing holding people back from doing that is probably marketing and the concept of uh acquiring a customer efficiently. I work a lot with businesses in Australia. Australia is very notorious for being made up of small businesses as opposed to the US. The US is well known for franchises and chains and scaling businesses. I'm not saying one's better than the other, but I do like to see small businesses do well. Australia is really great with that. People are very content having a local gym, local studio that has 300 clients and they work in Brisbane, Australia, and that's where they are, and they're they're very happy with that. And the people who go to those gyms are not getting any less of a quality service or product than they do at the franchises at uh here in the US. So that's my vision. I I don't know if it'll come to fruition, but I just believe in it because I see some of these coaches, and I think to myself, you know, I I see a coach like that myself. The person here in DC that I go see, he's a single business owner. He has about 200 clients in downtown DC. And he's not concerned with opening 10 studios. He has a good roster of customers who he likes. He gets to see them every day. And we train together, we do recovery stuff, we do nutrition. So I like that model. I'm a believer in that.

Yeah, I agree. I love it a lot. And I think what we're seeing is, and these are my own definitions, and I'll explain them to make the concept. My my thought behind is I think we're seeing maybe the quote unquote trainer, which I define as like the person who counts reps, right? Shows up, works per hour, right, counts the reps, has some small talk, moves on to the next client. I think we're gonna see that starting to move away, and we're gonna go towards the professional coach because the coach, no matter, you know, even now it's like, okay, we're we're stripped of temporarily the face-to-face work for the most part with a client. A coach can still guide that person to success using whatever tools they have at their disposal, whether it be remote coaching, Zoom, you know, occasional outdoor workout. The goal is still the goal. And even if the goal changes, the coach has a enough knowledge and expertise and understanding of the big picture all the way down to the minute details of periodization and training to make that client successful. And I think that is a very, very healthy evolution. When and also it's it's the professionalization of the industry. So many people think of the fitness industry as, you know, that $20, $40 an hour personal trainer, which is great. There's a lot of very, very good people who get into it for that reason. And I'm not downplaying in any way. It's a it's a critical thing. But it makes it hard to propose value that allows people to actually make a good living. And I think this is a forced evolution into that professional coach. And then if you are a professional coach, then you have a million tools at your disposal. You could use a team builder, right? Quite successfully if that's your market, plus some Zoom calls and, you know, like I said, the occasional in-person, you know, meetup, or now as things start to loosen up, you'll get more in-person. And it it just allows for a lot more freedom and creativity and in how and how things are delivered. And it's no it's less focused on per session and more emphasis on the result. And I think that's ultimately what people want anyway.

Yes, I I think uh ultimately the the fitness consumer will win from this trend and and notably from like you mentioned, the professionalization of the industry. Like again, you're you're right. Uh maybe eight years ago when I first kind of made my way into the strength and conditioning, it was hyper, hyper focused on you know building strength or building these physical properties, strength, speed, and agility, speed, strength. But nowadays, I I see coaches, you know, reading books about business, they're reading about psychology. I mean, they're there are a lot of coaches out there turning into you know very holistic practitioners, which is fantastic. I mean, they're they're tying all the pieces together. The people who do this really well are are really awesome at it. Um, I mean, who wins from that? The consumer does. I I really think so. It's hard to scale that kind of quality. Um, that's why I believe in it.

So, you know, the conversation was leaning towards you know, the professionalization and the consumer ultimately winning. And but I also think that the fitness industry is going to win too, because, you know, ultimately everyone wants respect, right? I mean, you look at like attorneys, you look at, well, I don't know. I don't know about attorneys. Um, but you look at people who, you know, even chiropractor, if you maybe we can compare ourselves, you know, in the fitness industry to a chiropractor, right? There's even there's a certain level of respect that chiropractors get, depending on where that's coming from. You can't argue that maybe that the personal trainer does not get as much respect as a chiropractor. And maybe, you know, we can, if we can take a step forward up to that point, then you can start seeing like people actually looking at the fitness profession as a viable option as a career. That's ultimately what I would love to see. I mean, and Australia is an interesting place. I'm glad you brought it up because you know, the fitness profession is very well respected over there compared to what it is here in the United States or even just North America in general. I mean, ultimately that's what I want to see take place. And I think the opportunities to leverage tech like, you know, like Team Builder or even at-home workout solutions like Tonal, Mirror, Peloton, you know, those can be tools for a professional coach. You know, it doesn't have to be the end-all be-all. It can be just simply a tool that people use. So hopefully it'll become, you know, the coach becomes the focus, and that would be a really, really cool thing.

Yeah, I agree. I I think that the profession that definitely has room to grow. And um the, you know, the certification process is kind of spread out and the definitions of a trainer versus a coach, it's all over the place. But I think it'll work itself out. I mean, ultimately that's how a market works, and I think the cream will rise to the top in a way.

Yeah, awesome. Hewitt, when um when you look at the current state of your your business at Team Builder, what what's what's the biggest need that you guys have right now? What's what's the biggest challenge you're facing?

Well, I think similar to other tech companies, you you know, finding finding good engineers and developers is really important. It is for us anyway. Uh I consider ourselves a product first company. We're not the the kind of company to bring on a big sales staff and try to sell the software, you know, to the people. Uh we're we're about building a really good product that is sustainable and scalable, and then, you know, kind of going from there. And in order to do that, you have to have people who are committed, uh, people who are talented developers. And, you know, we're based here in DC on the East Coast, it's competitive, but we're still able to find folks that are attracted to our culture, uh, attracted to the mission, what we're doing for coaches. You know, we we try to emphasize here that uh this this company is not existing to squeeze every little bit of profit, uh, you know, water from Iraq. We're we're gonna make sure that employees are taken care of, that the customers are taken care of, and then we'll worry about the economics after that. And that's kind of how we're addressing it is we're trying to grow a culture here that really fits with the kind of employees that we want. So I I think this is relevant to other companies that I've talked to. I obviously I keep in touch with other CEOs and uh you know talent acquisition and uh retention. It's a big part of the game, especially for technology companies. So I'd say that that's probably our biggest challenge, and that's what we're devoted to to addressing.

Right on, ma'am. And just for your corporate culture, is everybody located there in DC? Do you have a remote team or how how do you uh how big is your team?

Yeah, it's a good question. We actually have seven W-2 employees here in the office. We require that, you know, we have an office, obviously not now, we're we're all working remote, but we decided not to build a remote company, at least from the beginning. And the reason behind that was is we wanted to found the culture of the company. You know, we're not just founding a company and a product, but we're founding a culture. And when we bring someone new onto the team full-time, we really want them in here, seeing us face-to-face and being a part of the team. And I think once we kind of develop that culture and cultivate it to a point where we're a really, really solid foundation, then we can move into things by having full-time people remote. But right now, we're we're still a pretty new company. Seven employees is not very big. So we decided that, you know, for now, we're an in-person company with our full-time employees. And then we have contractors who work remote, and of course, we have some developers who are contractors who, of course, they have to work remote. We know we're not totally inflexible on that policy. But for the full-time W-2s, we do require that they come into the office. Yeah.

Interesting. Okay, good to know. And I know that you guys are, you know, with the current, I keep saying this. I'm so tired of these, there's specific words. I'm so tired of saying the new normal, the current state of things.

Yeah.

I just they keep coming out of my mouth. You you guys have some offerings that you're putting out there as far as templates to help coaches with the remote aspect of what's going on. Give us some insights and into some of the new stuff that you guys are putting out there.

Yeah, that's right. Our well, our product, uh, first and foremost is built for a coach to write their own training programs onto. But at the same time, we offer a lot of resources uh in the form of templates, uh training template. And um we actually had this five-week body weight at-home strength training program that was already built. It comes with our platinum subscription, which is one of our higher price plans. But uh, as soon as the uh the situation hit in March and we we figured a lot of training would be disrupted, a lot of coaches would be training people remotely. We took that template and made it available for free with any free trial and subscription to team builder. And then immediately we started getting on to writing new templates, you know, for competitive athletes, speed, power, and agility. Those are properties that can be fleeting if you don't train them. And so we built templates that were sprinting, agility, power, explosiveness, that had those elements in there so that coaches could quickly have these resources to incorporate into their training. So we actually built about three or four at-home templates that coaches could have access to using Team Builder so that at the minimum you had that something that was high quality uh and trustworthy that you could put in place and put it into your athletes' hands until you came up with another plan for how you're gonna address training those athletes remotely, athletes and clients.

Cool, man. Very cool. I appreciate you doing that for people. And uh yeah, you know, I going back to kind of where we started in the conversation of you know, my friend and colleague Erica Souter has been using Team Builder. I know she's your friend as well, but she speaks very highly of it. She she works with a lot of athletes and soccer teams all over really the world. So I know it's she's found it to be an actually you know super valuable tool in what she does and saves her a lot of time and energy too. So, you know, there's kind of a walking, talking testimonial for what you guys do. Hewitt, what uh where do people find you, man? If people want to get a hold of you, ask you some questions, or just talk to somebody in your team, where do you direct them?

Yeah, you know, if you want to connect with me on a professional level, uh my email is all over the web. You know, maybe LinkedIn if you're into that. Everyone's welcome to Facebook me, but uh on Instagram and Twitter, I I don't get into uh tech and uh strength and conditioning too much. I dabble in it, but really I try to you know just use those channels to kind of express my personality, which can be kind of silly sometimes. And mostly food-based, maybe pictures of food that I'm cooking with my wife or eating. I like to eat.

So I'm that kind of guy.

Yeah, a lot of food stuff. I I kind of live for it. So yeah, just if you search my name, whatever your preferred channel is, you can find it. But um, yeah, that's where I am.

Right on. Well, Hewitt, thank you so much, man. I I learned a lot. Um, it was really cool hearing about team builder and what you built. I very much respect and uh you know the way that you you're building it. You know, I think it's it's rare. So many people jump right to investor dollars and you know, scale and you know, all this, but you're you're doing it for so many, so many of the right reasons. I just can't imagine you seeing more and more success as you go. So yeah, man, I I hope uh you know people got a lot out of this interview. I'm sure they did, and maybe a little bit of inspiration as well. So thanks for coming on.

Hey, thanks for having me. I uh really appreciate it. I've seen some of your past guests. You've got some big timers on here. So when I was asked, I thought, hey, what an honor. I feel uh privileged. So thanks for having me.

Yeah, man, I feel the same way when I get to interview people.

So yeah.

Uh ladies and gentlemen, Hugh and Tomlin of Team Builder, thanks for coming on.

Thank you.

Hey, it's your host, Eric Malzone. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Future of Fitness. If you enjoyed it, please do me a huge favor by going to the website and signing up for our newsletter. The website is futureoffitness.do. Again, that's future of fitness.do. We've got some big, big announcements coming down the pipe, and we want you to make sure that you are on top of it. Thank you again. Signing off.