From Finance Career to Leading Cult London Gym Founder - Nick Denby | The Midnight Pod Episode 67

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Maybe.

Yeah, something like that. And you're the first fitness CrossFit, obviously. Slebbon founder, if maybe not Founder.

Yep, co founder.

Just hold the.

So yeah, I'm co founder seven. Tim and I, we, we started The. Well, I'll. I'll take. Take you back to kind of. How far back do you want me to go on?

Yeah, I guess all the way back.

Yeah.

For like 18 or some. How old are you now?

I'm 38, so. Well, I'll take you back to my story first and then we'll talk about.

Is it worth me and Matt explaining why There's a random CrossFit Jim owner?

Yeah, probably.

In the apartment and how this has come about.

When did you start going CrossFit?

When I got sick of training at Gymbox in Victoria and my friend Jordan was staying at mine. And there's this, there's this gym behind my building where I'd walk past it occasionally, just see all these machines coming out looking like they've been hit by trains. Just put through the most treacherous workouts.

Yeah.

I was like, let's go see what they're all about. And then I met Nick and at first I've always been like this whole. In like bodybuilding crossfit. Nah, that's silly. But then ended up signing up and now I'm five, six times a week training CrossFit. And that's how we met Nick. And then obviously he joined as well.

And I finished my six month obsessive marathon training regime and then got gold medal syndrome. It was like running in gym box on myself for another six months just to do another marathon. So I sacked the next marathon off and went down to CrossFit, having never lifted a barbell in my life. I still don't like the barber. To be fair, I'm a cardio and calisthenics guy.

I like the barber. I was, I was into it.

Yeah.

I just, I was so like first, however many sessions I did hurt, like I was not fit by any means and then, yeah, get into it. And I think the thing I like about it as well is you're learning a new skill. You know, it is quite technical, but what you guys have built, the, the facility of the coaches, I think it's wicked. So, yeah, yeah.

So I'm Nick Demby. I'm 38. I think I'm much older than YouTube. You're what, 20?

26?

26.

27.

27, yeah. So bit older than you guys. But I'm just going to start with my story from the start.

Yeah, go.

So I, I was born and raised in Spain, so I lived in Spain TILL I was 18. My mother's British, my dad's American, so I went to like a American school there. Went to university in The States, did politics, international relations, and started working in finance.

Whereabouts in the states?

Virginia. Washington, D.C. okay, that's from Virginia. So I went to GW in DC. Big international relations. But obviously Hub being the capital and everything, that's what I really enjoyed when I was a kid as well as like history, politics, all that sort of thing. But then I was like, well, do I want to work in D.C. for some non profit or. I don't know, it wasn't super political at the time. And I think I got a lot more political as I got older, but I was too young, I think, for any of that. And then came to the uk. I was doing an internship in the States and like at UBS and some wealth management firm. So then I got some sort of gig somehow at J.P. morgan here in, In. In Canary Wharf. While I was in Alderman Gray.

In.

In the City basically sold my soul there. For eight years. I was working middle office. Like trade support and equity derivatives were.

Like 21 when you started just later on.

Yeah, yeah, 21, 22. Like just silly hours. Just. Yeah. Working or working like a corporate slave, really, which I don't think either of you have any other experience doing that. For me, all that experience doing long.

Hours inside my soul.

Yeah.

Not in the corporate environment.

I did a placement in, in the City when I was like 19 and decided then and there that Wolf of Wall street was fake. And actually I'll be on 50 grand a year, which after tax is 30. Working for 18 hours a day.

Yeah.

And I might be a millionaire by 50. Yeah. At which point my wife has left me and I've had three divorces. So I saw that side pretty early and decided, right, I'm going balls to wall with entrepreneurship, which I'm still trying to figure out. But is that a fair description?

That's literally the. That was my view of it. I just saw these guys that were just like. And I actually had a chat with one of the managers at the time and I said. When I decided to quit it and I said, look, I'm gonna do this CrossFit thing. I. And I'll explain my CrossFit story in a sec. But I was like, I really want to do this thing. I don't. I didn't tell it into his face, but I don't want your life. This is basically go to mortgage. And he basically said to me, do it now. Like, I don't have kids. I was like 20, 29. So I was like, it was kind of perfect age where had some, some sort of experience. In the real world, it wasn't just like fresh out of college and I was like, yeah, I got to go do it. And here we are about four, six, seven years later. And like you say. I know, I know what you mean, like with the long hours and selling your soul, but at least it's for something. For sure. I'm, I'm trying to build which is, which is pretty cool. And then kind of on the CrossFit side of it, I started that in 0809 in the very first CrossFit gym in the UK. It's called CrossFit London. It's south in Bethel Green. And back then it was a completely different landscape and there was no, there was no like rogue fitness black box. Like all these brands like Reebok and Nike weren't involved at all. It was, we were doing pull ups on a scaffold rig. It was like, it still had like cement and on it and crap. And you know, it was, it was completely like grassroots kind of like fitness. And it was like just kind of like your experience now was. My very first one was like I played football when I was a kid. I always like team sport environment. And then suddenly you go to university or you go to, you know, like the real world and it's like, oh, suddenly you're just doing bicep curls in a gym and you're like, the hell is this? Like, where's the fun in like sport anymore? And you know, especially with the working world, how do you do team sports anymore? And that sort of thing. And then CrossFit came and I was like, man, this is cool. And not just the, I, I think the methodology of it, which I think is, is amazing. But then also just the, the community and the culture that builds up around it. I think that's kind of the two things that really kind of engage everybody.

Was that literally the first one in the UK?

Yeah.

Was because I first became aware of CrossFit maybe in like 2015, watching Matt Fraser and Rich Froning.

Yeah.

Thinking these guys are fitting. I watched. I was rowing back then. That was my, I did like eight years of elite junior rowing, but then figured there's no money or pleasure in that when you're an adult. So psyched it off. But then went through the phase just being a gym bro at uni when I was like 19 and 20. I was like, this is boring.

It's boring.

And that's what I did for years until recently. Rowing or just well, rowing and then just being a gym bro and I got fat with my ex girlfriend. Because whatever. Like in. In Covid. Put on like two stone. Looking back. And then a year ago, got into shape again because of running primarily. And then I. I don't know if it just like fitness slipped my priority list. Yeah. Like mid-20s.

Yeah.

Which is a bad time.

Well, it kind of happens to us all. Right. Like, things get in the way things happen. Like, you lose the love of it. You know, you could be like deep into a program and then you get a bit of an injury or something like this, you know, and then you're like. Then you just get out of the habit and then. But I think, you know, the three of us, I mean, I don't know you guys that well, but obviously you're. You get back into it. You don't just let yourself go forever and that's it. But like, I think, like, we've all got kind of that. That little thing in us. We're like, oh, this is cool. Like the CrossFit thing where, you know, okay, I'm not going to do this for a couple months, but I'm going to get back into it. I need to get back into it because that. Yeah, this good.

Use the Iron man.

I did a.

And.

And Iron Man.

Yeah.

When I was 19. Yeah. But I hate cardio.

Cardioids.

Yeah.

Boring.

And like, that was just like the actual Iron man itself was fine. It was the nine months of training for two, three hours a day.

Yeah.

No social life. Sat on a bike saddle for seven hours on a Sunday. Wasn't fun. But, yeah, CrossFit is fun. But what, Nick, what. What was the. What was the thing that got you into that gym in Bethany Green was like a friend dragged you there.

Was it like my brother in the States, So my brother was doing workouts off CrossFit.com and he had a couple mates in university. And so my brother's also in the States and just. He just told me and I was. I was basically in your situation. Had been working in finance for a year, just kind of let things slip a little bit. He's like, he came home at Christmas, said, what the. You're fat. Get. Do something.

Well, skinny fat.

Yes.

And he just said, go. Just literally like, just Google this and go to this gym. And I mean, I knew nothing about the gym. It was just. It was. I mean, to put it was. It was a real shithole. Let's put it that way. I mean, it was our hole. It was a, you know, like, it was a great little community and everything. But Ethnogreen of the gym. Everything, everything, everything about it was like rough but it wasn't, it was the methodology and the culture that you kind of fell in love with. It wasn't the facilities or anything like that. And you came in and instantly, you know, you made friends and suddenly, you know, I've, I've had relationships like some of my best friends out my whole life is, is a revolt, like whole relationships. I mean this podcast here is coming out of CrossFit a weird way, you know, so it's like it just, you know, it's brings so many different people together and so many different walks of life. But then like we all have a similar mindset and it's, it's interesting that like all the people at the gym, it just get along with them because it's like they gravitate to a certain.

Kind of lazy like most people.

Or like I think in a, in a certain way we're all, we're all that we're all lazy but then some, then sometimes we just need to kick up the ass to, to, to get us moving. And then if I know that my mates are there and it's going to be a good time and I'm just put myself through a tough workout, then fine. You know, it's like makes it much easier than sitting on a bike for three hours on a Sunday night by yourself. I mean that, that honestly sounds miserable.

It was miserable.

It was miserable. Yeah.

Yeah, but it was good.

Yeah, but it's kind of like what we were saying before is something about discipline. It's, you know, there's something about that where it's like. Or that delayed gratification.

Yeah, for sure.

I always put yourself through it.

I would have been a little bitch for the rest of my life if I didn't do rowing because when I was 12 years old I was on a river in minus 3 being shouted out by a 6 foot 6 man who I still credit as being like the fucking godfather of my work ethic.

Yeah.

Which translated into other things bear ons and.

But you probably look back on that, you were probably miserable at the time but somehow you look at back on that quite fondly.

Oh yeah, definitely, yeah.

Like I think back to some of the worst times like in the middle of a workout, but then it's like it's something memorable in your life and it's just like, I mean imagine if every day when you wake up the hardest thing you do is the workout and then everything else is easier after that. I'm just like, oh, I'M just going to send some emails.

That's deep.

Yeah. Anyway, so I work out in the morning, but yeah.

So 2008, you're training at Bethany Green First CrossFit gym.

Yeah. So we were there and I Met Tim Maybe 2010, 2012. I can't remember when you started. He started coaching a lot more, a lot earlier than I did. I probably started coaching in 2015, 2016, around there. So that's when I pretty much quit my job as well. I decided I'm going to go full in on this, start coaching, get some hours and then figure out a way to start a gym in London.

Wait, so did it take you nine years in the city to realize you didn't want to do that or was it just.

It took about five years, but I did. Yeah, you just get stuck. You get stuck in that and then.

There comes a day where you're sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Yeah, pretty much.

And you just pushed up and you.

End up staying the same.

I was, I was living. I was just like, can't wait for the weekend, can't wait to the holidays.

Yeah.

This is not a way to live.

Then you escaped the matrix.

Escape the matrix.

I watch Andrew Tape it was 2012.

But you know, like. And we'll probably, you know, talk about it later, but you know, like, there's been some really hard moments obviously after that, but for sure very different. I mean, not hard moments. I didn't really have hard moments at JP Morgan because it was like, well, you have a cushy corporate job, like, you know, you're going to get your salary, you just have to show up. You know, it's, you know, once you're kind of in the machine, you're just, just doing the daily grind and you know, you didn't have to think too much about it towards the end. And obviously there's a steep learning curve at the start, but once you learn it, you learn it, it's fine. So 2016, quit my job, start coaching, don't know what's going to Happen. And then CrossFit London owned CrossFit SE11, which is the gym that we ended up.

Yeah. So I was going to ask you this. Do you know why it's called Slevin?

I just thought it was a tongue twisting run.

Yeah, Jewels. Jewels on me this week.

Yeah, yeah, so you see it there? So SC11 sleven.

Oh, no way. But why slebbon rather than.

So, so basically the people that used to go SE11.

Right.

People used to go to SE11 just called it Slevin. It just, it just rolled off the tongue easier. So. And then went Tim and I. Well, just. So that's why it's called that. But then it was called Cross SE11. And then the owners of CrossFit London were losing money from the business. They weren't really putting much love into it. They were mainly focused on the CrossFit London site. And this was kind of like the, the ugly.

But you were coaching at this one, right?

I was coaching mostly at the other one. And then a couple of sessions.

Full time coach.

I was a full time coach there and then just a couple of Sessions here in SC11.

And did you suddenly quit your job in finance and go straight into that or did you start like part time coaching?

Yeah, part time coaching and just gradually kind of got. Got involved through that. And then they said, do you want to come and manage CrossFit SE11? I said, absolutely not. If anything I'll. I'll take it off your hands. And I don't want, I don't want you. I don't want anyone to tell me what to do kind of with, with the business side of it. And then about a year later they came back and said, yeah, do you want to, do you want to get in on this? So I then approached Tim. So Tim's kind of a venture capitalist kind of background. So he used to work in lot on the legal side as well. So really good business partner to have. Obviously super experienced.

Is he in the gym?

Yeah.

I didn't know there was a second person.

Yeah, Tim.

So see the older guy.

The older guy and, and Tim, Tim's just come back from cancer. It's just probably why. Right, so we'll, we'll talk about that in a bit. So.

So what was Tim's background exactly in. In the VC world?

Well, just raising money, like angel investors and stuff like that. So.

So like running a fund or.

No, I think he was working at. Not Procter and Gamble is another one. Not Proct and Gamble. What's it called? Ernst Young.

Oh yeah. Big four.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So then.

So you were basically approached CrossFit London acquire.

Acquired. Yeah. They said make us an offer, basically.

Is that like a franchise? CrossFit box CrossFit London Is that official one?

Yeah.

Is that how we are? Is that what you have to do?

We're also, we're also. It's called an affiliate.

Can you just be gym number one? And you do CrossFit but you're not affiliated?

Yeah.

What's the Difference though. Like, why would people pay the CrossFit.

Brand see this one?

I didn't realize that CrossFit is a brand. It's not like a style of training.

It's like it's a brand. It's a, it's a methodology as well. So if you like implement the CrossFit methodology, you talk about giving CrossFit.

It's a bit like a cult, isn't it?

Yeah, massively.

It has all the bells and whistles of a cult.

Massively. Yeah. It definitely.

Scientology.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean it's interesting. I mean we're, we're kind of, I mean. Let me finish the story with Tim. Sure. We'll talk about the CrossFit bit because that's really important as well. So cross it sc11. Then we ended up putting in an offer and we bought CrossFit SC11. And it was a completely shitty white arch that you would have never even recognized from the old gym, even, let alone the new gym. So we went in there, put in some money, changed the rig, changed the format and actually the first thing and something I know you're really interested in is we, we sought a brand. We're like, okay, let's create ourselves a little brand here. What do we call it? Obviously it was, it was just so easy. Sleven rolls off the tongue. It's catchy. And we were a Seven CrossFit when we started out actually, so called it Seven CrossFit. First year went great and then Covid. Covid hit.

Oh, so this was when? 2000.

So 2000. November 2018.

Okay.

And then we bought it November 1st and then obviously March. What was it? 2020. 20 was, was Covid. So it was a little, little over a year and by that point we had done a massive refurb while we were running classes. It was a huge effort. So we're like trying to gain members but while also having a like construction site going on in there. Just getting things kind of in order, setting up systems, basically starting from scratch. We hired Laws as our first full time coach at the same time, which. Well, actually that didn't happen until March 2020. So it was just mostly me and Tim with, with Loz kind of helping out and a couple of the other coaches, but worked our nuts off, kind of got into a good spot. And then obviously Covid hit, which was fun and was fun and games.

So. So you literally acquired a business.

Yeah.

Spent a lot of money refurbing it, changing it, bringing in a team.

Yeah. And then, then wham.

If it hits.

Is that, is that in the original arch?

That was the original arch, yeah, yeah.

Did he train there for like a.

Month, two months ago?

Yeah, yeah. So it was. But you're right, it's a cult. And you know what? Like, basically like more than any other business, I think like CrossFit is like the members really helped us out. So they were like, a lot of members kept paying, paying their dues or we, we did payment plans obviously we put on lots of online stuff, lots of classes and what we were ended up doing was just kind of working on ups off in different ways. So like a lot more online just providing classes. And you know what, at the end of the day, you know, like for online classes, like, why would you do a Zoom class at a CrossFit gym and pay whatever bucks if you could do Peloton or Apple More Fit or all these other kind of like brands that have kind of like come out of that. But people just wanted to see each other on Zoom because we're all in, you know, we're all mates and we're just all dotted around London. And in the end these workouts became more of like a social thing. So I know before the classes would be like 15, 20 people just having a chat and be like, oh, how you doing? And what's going on and that sort of thing. And so like from that respect it was, it was a really nice thing. Like, I guess it kind of showed what the whole kind of that, aside from the fitness methodology, what, what CrossFit is as a, a community night organizer, it. Does that make sense?

What was the. I mean as, as much as you're comfortable sharing, what was the kind of structure of the acquisition? I mean if they were a business that was losing money, were they happy to pretty much let it go from nothing or.

He basically is buying. What were you buying?

Yeah, just to be honest, you just bought some of the assets in the gym and then some of the members. But it was. There was not many members and we kind of re. Pushed them down as low as we could. So. Sure it wasn't. Yeah, it was like you're saying it was a losing business, but we were just like, well we. It's much easier for us now because the, the landlord like to take on a lease and all that sort of thing. And there were members there that were super excited for us to take over and like install this new energy into the business. And a lot of people that had left previously came back. So that was a, that was kind of really, really cool thing. Which, which happened because I know it's a weird thing. So like, and it's interesting to see your guys insight about this is CrossFit businesses is fundamentally a very personal business. So like, I think as a CrossFit owner, like the CrossFit gym owner, I need to be there, I need to know all the members, who they are, what's going on. Because I think that's really important because I think that's like the, the real, like the nook and cranny of the business. But so many of these CrossFit gyms around London and the UK are just run by just people that aren't there and they just leave some. Somebody to run it. And it. I just, I just see them fail over and over and over again. I'm just like, why do you like, there's so many better ways to make money than running across the gym. It's not that profitable. You put a lot of work into it. But like, the reason why I went into it was like a lifestyle. I was like, well, I don't want to be a corporate slave. I want to be the master of mine, my future. But also like, I, I mean, I came away today and we had just, you know, I did a whole bunch of two, three hours of work, did some training with a couple of coaches and then we're just hanging out outside. It was just so nice and fun and it was just like, this is so cool, like that this is part of my job. And like, I think that's what you're buying that business for and not for millions of pounds because good luck on that.

I still think you could scale the. Out of it.

Yeah, 100. Oh, yeah. I mean that's when. That's literally what I'm working on at the moment. So I can, I can vouch for.

The fact that it had a difference for me when I, when I, I mean, when I first came in, just to find out more and I spoke with you and we had a good conversation and then I think it must be like four weeks later they actually joined.

Yeah.

But coming in, I'm very comfortable in new environments. I'm not, I would say I'm shy or anything, but coming in and you like saying, hey, Tyler, obviously remembering my name, reaching out, making an effort. Does 100 make a difference? And I felt very welcomed by the team and the coaches and I think.

It'S, it's the most important thing.

There's a lot to be said for that, for sure.

Because people are terrified when the first time they come in and we've made our brand as soft as possible like to make it as welcoming and. But people are like, I mean even people that are training at other gyms who go to, to a new gym. It's still terrifying. What are they going to think of me or what are they, you know, like. And I don't go to other gyms really anymore. I'm just kind of like, you know, I do go to other gyms for, for other reasons or like I am quite interested in looking at what other gyms are doing and not just cross the gyms but that idea of like, for maybe I don't move as well as I think or I don't know.

It's quite. Because I'm going in there with these athletes that are all interesting.

Yeah.

They know how to snatch and clean and all these crazy movements and I'm here like I, Yeah.

Don't know what to ask.

No.

It's a bench press.

Yeah. I went to Gymbox for like nearly two years and I don't think I spoke to it literally a single person other than two or three mates I knew already.

Yeah.

I, yeah.

Maybe I was just really antisocial but I could probably recognize 100 people from there. But I never spoke to any of them. All the stuff ever.

I couldn't name a single person that works at Gym Box.

Victoria I fancied on the desk who I spoke to once and that fizzled out because she got told to sell herself to Dubai. One of those. But that was short lived. She was the only person I spoke to.

What was her name?

I was a Sophia exposed to pre exposed.

I thought, I thought when you first joined you were tough nut to crack.

Why?

It's just probably because I'm so used to public places not being friendly.

Yeah. You, I, you were really cautious. Like you know, I think you're a lot, you're a lot more open but still a bit cautious. But you were just like, you know, a lot of the time I felt like, oh, why is this guy talking to me? I just wanted, I just want to shoot the. And just say, oh, what's going on, Matt Kelly? And you would be like Ro, don't talk to me. Then you asked me what's your podcast? Which I found very surprising.

I know he's coming to a flat pie and I have girls.

Yeah.

That's interesting. It's, it's a different way of doing things.

Yeah. I mean it's a personal business. This is kind of what it is. And then it's like you're saying this now, I'm just. All I'm trying to do is figure out how to scale everything. And just for me, I also do.

Think broadly, especially post Covid. The whole fucking world is fucked because no one knows how to speak to anyone that they don't already know, basically. And it's like, it's almost like if you speak to a girl in the street. Not that I do that because I'm also a fucking weirdo. I'm too scared to do that. If I did that, my first thought would be, she thinks I'm a creep. No, this is normal.

Yeah. Yeah.

Because the whole world now is just Instagram.

Yeah.

People literally forgotten human contact.

I talked to everybody the other day. I was in Zara with my girlfriend and I was just like, she ran off to get something and so I just started chatting to the. The guy behind the desk and he started telling me about his sick dad and all this sort of thing. And then Emma comes by, we pay, and I was like, oh, good luck with your sick dad. And she's like, what the hell? Yeah. I was like, well, yeah, just take an interest in people and they'll like, open up. And like, it's. It's pretty simple. But I think it's like you say. I mean, I walk into restaurants now and I have waiters walk by, like left, right and center around me, and they won't even say, I'll be right with you, sir, and that they just, they just ignore you. And I'm just like, the fuck this place.

Every business, right, they need some people like a moat, right? Which these kind of, I don't know, competitive advantage edges, if you like that, stop. Or make it difficult for competitors to compete with you or make it difficult from customers to kind of jump ship into another business. And I definitely feel now if I moved away or wanted to switch gyms, it's actually the relationships I have with you guys and knowing everyone, it kind of makes it a lot more difficult. Feel like I'd be going through a breakup almost. And I know Sarah, who lives in my building, that the trains at 7 as old. She was saying like her landlord is taking a place back, etc, and she was looking for a new place. She said, I need to be locals, I need to be near. And I was like, people are literally making decision where they want to live based on staying at the gym. And yeah, just, you know, proves effect.

Well, well, yeah, I mean, she's made relationships there and, you know, it's. It. Yeah. I mean, it is nuts. We've got a couple other members that are trying to move closer because they're going really far and one of their offers fell through to something and they're just like, oh, God, can't wait to live closer. You can come on the weekends. It takes us two hours to get here on the. Like, hell, you know.

It is very cool, Tish.

It is, it is.

But it's family.

I get all the best brands, though. Ultimately, I like a cult on there. Like, look at gymshark in the early days, obviously, easy example. But represent clothing now. But that's like a cult. I'm trying to build a cult. It just takes time. It's harder to do online as well, I think, because there is not that there's no in person.

No.

So I'm trying to do more offline stuff with my business now because I realize it's. So everyone's doing Instagram ads. How do you compete differently? I think the. No one's doing.

I know I've been to, like, fitness shows and a lot of the online kind of coaches, what they talk about is, even online is building that community online. So I guess, like, I. I was looking. We were talking about pure sport the other day as well. Yeah, they've done a really good. Like, they've built a community that's also physical as well. Like they're. They meet up and go running and stuff like that and fitness and all that, and. But then they're all buying the products, obviously. Well, maybe they're not. I don't know. But yeah, you know, I think that's. I think that's super interesting, I think. Yeah, I think if you build that community somehow, or I like to call it more like a culture, like, because if you just have community, like, I think a lot of CrossFit gyms have communities and they have like all these offshoot things, but they don't necessarily have a culture. So that thing where all the coaches made you feel welcome, like, we talk to the coaches, say, you make sure you know everybody's name, you know a little bit about them. You say hi when somebody walks in. If you don't know somebody's face, you introduce yourself. But, like, other CrossFit gyms aren't doing that. And I don't know why it's so easy, but it's just those little things that make you feel welcome. Then you're like, oh, I came four weeks ago and this guy still remembers my name and my face. I suddenly feel a lot more at ease. And I'm not just at a Random gym that no one gives a shit about me, you know? So, like, those are the sort of things that we try to instill with the coaching team, which I think, like, it's just so easy if you did that with other brands or. I don't know how you do that online. That's. That's difficult.

Yeah, I'm working it.

Yeah.

So the CrossFit franchise thing, how does that work? So I used to go to one first. Actually, the first CrossFit gym I ever went to, tell a lie to, say I hadn't done it before, was where Chris Williamson from Modern Wisdom used to go. You know, he's got a lot of podcasts now. Yeah, it's like on Rolling and. What was it called? CrossFit Tyneside. So in Newcastle, I used to go to uni there before I dropped out. And. Yeah, so. But I swear they branded it. They had, like, CrossFit stickers everywhere. I don't notice that.

Were you. No. So. So the CrossFit affiliate model. So the CrossFit was started by a guy called Greg Glassman.

Yeah.

Back in 2002 or something like that.

Is he rich?

Is.

He is rich. You know, but he. He had a big falling out and. Well, during COVID and he's no longer the CEO, so. And this is also a reason why you'll see a lot of CrossFit gyms that don't have the CrossFit brand on them. So actually he created the methodology, basically revolutionized. Revolutionized the market place. And he's a real. I would say libertarian, real kind of maverick. Just says a lot of things that are quite offensive. And I think in 2018, when the whole Black lives matter. Was it 2020?

I remember reading about this in 2020.

He made some comments that then basically everybody just said, well, you've crossed the line. And he had to step aside. A CEO. Basically, a lot of CrossFit gyms disaffiliated. So they said, we're not running the CrossFit methodology anymore.

No way.

And then how bad were the comments? Yeah, yeah, very expensive comment. I mean, yeah, it's. It's something that I'm very reticent to talk about as a CrossFit gym leader. And, like, I think, like, politics is not something I kind of want to go into, especially with, like, just a lot of the members, but it's quite easy to kind of find online. But he just said he made some comments on Twitter and stuff. And he was also very anti Covid, all the lockdowns and all that. Sort of thing, which I think is. Is very much a CrossFit thing anyway. It's like we're trying to promote a healthy lifestyle. So, you know, we are inherently going to be better protected against the, you know, metabolic diseases because we're training so much and we're fit and healthy, we're taking care of our nutrition and what we put in our bodies and all that. So he was obviously, you know, from the other side of it with the COVID The whole Covid thing, where he'd be like, well, instead of locking everyone down, why don't we get everybody to eat better, work out more, you know, go to CrossFit gyms and then.

Makes sense.

Makes sense, yeah. But I think back in pandemic times, when everyone's locked in their houses, you're not allowed to say that stuff.

Right.

But I think with everything we know now, it's kind of. It's kind of changed.

But.

So anyway, we. We ended up disaffiliating. So interestingly, it was. It was kind of a business decision. It was. It was, in the end, more of a business decision. And it's something we were gonna probably do and we would have probably realized in about a year or two later. So in a way, it kind of accelerated things for us because we were like, we're our own brand. We're a sleven. We're son already. Like, people don't come to us necessarily for the CrossFit. They're like, well, you know, we're seven, so why don't we make our own things out of this? Out of this thing? And we ended up doing that. We ended up creating a new class style called 24 7. And then we branded our CrossFit class as 7X. So anything that would happen potentially in the future, so say the new CEO says something terrible or goes down a route that we don't want to necessarily go down. Then we'd be like, okay, well, we're our own thing anyway, so we don't have to kind of.

But do you pay a large spread?

Yeah, we paid. Yeah.

Do you have to do that, though?

Yes. To say anything that you're a CrossFit gym to be on their website and.

Right, okay.

All that sort of thing.

But you're not an affiliate.

We are an affiliate. We weren't.

We said you disaffiliated.

We disaffiliated, but then we affiliated again. Okay, yeah, I forgot. That makes sense.

What's the difference between. Between affiliating and not? Can you be part of Crossfit without affiliate.

No. So if I would work, if I were to not be enough, if I, if I was an affiliate, I'd not be able to say I run CrossFit classes or do the methodology of CrossFit, you know, which, which is what we do and we're, we're proud to do it.

Would you get in trouble if you stopped paying a fee? But people were still coming because they thought it was CrossFit.

At what point does it become Crestfield?

How do they.

It's become quite a dubious line. So there's obviously lots of gyms out there that probably do a lot of CrossFit, but, or call it their own sort of thing. But they're not necessarily calling it CrossFit. They'll call it what class? Or they'll. Yeah, you know, they'll kind of get around it. But we're, we're more than happy to pay the fee. And on. I mean, honestly, Tim and I, we fell in love with CrossFit in the methodology and it like, has nothing to do with Craig Classman or anything like that. And if anything, the way the world is kind of moving and the, the way that fitness is moving, like, I don't think you necessarily want to just pin yourself on one specific thing going like, one thing like, okay, we're pure CrossFit. But I think where CrossFit was in 2008 and where it is in 2023 are vastly different. And we're trying to move with the times now and that's, that's including more things like the 24. 7 class, which is more strength and conditioning focus and having another option for people not just to do the crossword methodology, which, you know, I found very tough, I think, on the body and I think like trying to find a happy medium between doing the 7x classes, 24 7, doing a lot of the other classes that we offer as well. So we can give people longevity as well. Because if we're promoting a lifestyle, we've got to make sure that we, we're, we're going to provide a workout for people for life, not just the, you know, six months that they're there. And then you're like, okay, you just go nuts for six months and then you get injured or something like that, which, you know, could potentially happen at other CrossFit gyms. But, you know, I think that's the beauty of the affiliate model is every gym is able to kind of do what they want to do and then I guess the better gyms will come out of it. And then other gyms will copy that and then that's how kind of progress is made. I think that's a good general life thing. Anyway.

How much competition is there in London? I can imagine it's the most competitive city in the world. Is it?

Yeah, yeah. I, I, We've gone in Vauxhall, right?

Yeah, we've got one.

There's a buck in Darug within about Brixton.

We're not just competing with CrossFit gyms, we're competing with Bearings 1 Rebel gym box, the Foundry Manor gym.

F45.

Fishing brands, fitness brands. Like, there's one that's popping up now called BFT, which is another offshoot of F45 that's more strength focused.

I mean, Hyrox as well.

Hierops is pop time. Hyrux is, is helpful for us because H and turf games as well. So competitions for helping members get ready for these competitions have come to us to do that. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's interesting. I, I saw a gym that's opened up in Walthamstow and they've sold 50 memberships in like a second. And I just think back up there, there's no other gyms and I think, like, what did they do to sell those memberships so quickly? Is it just location for, you know, but the same, at the same time, it's just me and Tim here running the small business up against Barry's or, you know, other kind of pretty big brands. Jing Boxing.

Like, I probably are afraid to lose money on. Yeah, Acquiring customers.

No, exactly. I mean, I heard, I don't know if this is true at all, but I heard that the, the BFT gym that opened up in Battersea was spending 20k a month on, on marketing.

Oh, is that fake rules?

They, no, that's the Urban bmf. British Military Fitness.

Oh, okay.

The other ones, I don't know what BFP stands for. And then it. Get lost.

Yeah, I've seen it somewhere.

But, you know, that's just, that's just not, I mean, nowhere near the kind of money we're spending on any sort of marketing. So, you know, that, that's the kind of, that's the kind of market that we're up against. So we're, we're, we have to make sure everything that we do looks great. You know, like with the, the gym itself looks fantastic, obviously with a new reefer, but everything we put out online, our communications, like, I want it to look like that because I want to scale it now. Like, and what we're finding now it's all the events that we run. We've done the branding, we've done all the work, hard work behind it. And now it's like, oh, 7X Games is a competition that we're running in May. They've signed up with that. You both have signed up for. Well, I signed up, yeah.

His name down as well.

The sad thing is, if it was just rowing or skier, I would win the whole thing by far. But it's not because. Because just for the record, no one in CrossFit knows how to row. Probably.

I think there's no chance, though. We're in intermediate, but I just can't.

Do weights, so I'll be fine on the cardio stuff.

But it's.

I go, you go. So. Right. So I was.

You cannot do snatches. I don't carry.

You're not. There's not gonna be too much. There's not gonna be too much that ninja me. Just make sure you can rope climb.

They haven't got that yet, have they?

What's that? They haven't. No. No. But I'm pretty sure they rope climbs in there.

Yeah. Nothing. A little brown envelope under the table.

Nice. But I mean, it's nuts. So, like, just on this one event last year, I spent. I messaged 400 people on Instagram individually with like, oh, sign up for this. We got 24 total signups for the.

Sounds like me messaging girls with parties.

Yeah. And then this year we're. I think we're at about almost 60 signups for. Out of 18 caps.

80.

We've not marketed it. We not put a video out. All we've done is put a couple Instagram posts and then hounded and then just. But I haven't even, like, yeah, I haven't. I haven't spent time, like, doing just the boring. Just me kind of like going and messaging people and getting the word out that way. And the word.

But I think that is how you should scale up because I would instantly say, why the. You're not running Instagram ads?

Well, I did last year.

Did it work?

No, I built 24 signups.

Yeah, I suppose. I mean, it's different to DC, but have you, like, how do you. How have you historically tried to scale it or have you just thought about it like, it's a lifestyle business, organically. We'll see what happens.

I think.

Yes. For you, like, surely your costs don't increase much with members increasing?

No, the marginal increase is minimal.

It's like an asymmetric return.

Yeah. So we just need it now. We're so we're. That's all we're fighting.

So every new member is profit.

Pretty much every member now is just, we're just literally just fighting. We, we want at least 100 more members like then, which is all we're fighting for is, is that day to day and whether it's traditional word of mouth. So the way you guys, well you, you saw us and then you told Matt about us. So that's how we've got a lot of our members just through word of mouth. We've got, we're starting some fly in next week. Some, some really old school stuff. So just literally handing out flyers, 10,000 flyers in Vauxhall we've done two beds with. We do a lot of Instagram marketing. So we've got videos coming out this week about like the classes that we've put on and the space as well. So the videos of the space, you know, just putting out the A board on the street. So people see it and they come by and they just, every day they see it, they walk by to work and then they, they come in. I don't know. That's pretty much most of the ways but most of what we do is, is on Instagram like marketing wise and it, it seems to work. But it's interesting though, like you know that gym that's open up in Waltham still? I don't think they're doing any Instagram ads, but I think there must be just a pent up demand up there and there's a boom. That's really smart site location, location.

You're about looking fitness, fitness influencer come down and train.

Yeah, there are lots of, we're doing a lot of that now as well. So we've got lots of them coming down. We got a guy who's got 300,000 followers that's posting about us all the time and we've invited quite a lot of them down to come and train and take pictures of the space. And it's interestingly bringing a lot more influencers down. Not necessarily people that want to get fit and we want to get them fit and healthy and solve their problems. It's a really weird thing. We're like, okay, we'll get these influencers down. And we're also working with micro influencers. So people that maybe have up to about 5,000 followers that are coaches at maybe F45 or another kind of style of gym and inviting them to come down and train at 7 and post about it. So other people at those gyms might see it because that's the kind of market where we're at. People have just finished doing F45 and they're bored of the hit and they kind of want that a little bit more. They want to learn the skill stuff that we do at the gym. And you know, I don't know if it's working yet, but our membership is growing. So, you know, I think we're just going to try everything until we're kind of where. So they're scaling the. The gym now.

You have the one facility. What about scaling in terms, like, in terms of actually more facilities?

That's interesting. I've always been of the opinion and you guys are probably telling me I'm a retard for this, but like, well.

Sean met burn our death and Bryce.

I. I want the best gym in London.

Yeah.

And I want to build something out where it's like. And we talked about the lifestyle and once I think I scale it to more facilities, I'm not going to have the control. I'm not gonna be able to have the control of like how having real good staff. Yeah. The best events, the best blah blah. And literally all I'm doing right now is trying to script everything. So it's like this is our event that we run, this is the blah blah. And never say never. But, you know, I just want to put the best holidays on. I want to have the best events and, and be known to be the best gym and be like that quality product that I think if I start to open four more locations, that whole thing will get diluted. And I think another side of this which I've not talked about at all is like the employee side of it. I want to. I want to have the best employees, but also pay the best money for my employees. And that would be, you know, like, because we're basically a family there. Like, they're not employees. Like, you know, if Laws, Jules, Mateo, Fran, everybody, like they were there forever.

How many people do you have?

So we've got three full time. So Laws was the first one to join Benjules and then Mateo's the newest. The newest one to come on board and then obviously me and Tim and then we've got about 4, 9, 10 others that are doing part time. But ideally, as we grow, we can start to kind of add more members to the team.

So those part time people, do they have like dare jobs?

Yeah. So some of them work in other gyms. Some of them actually work in completely different careers. So Sam's A solicitor, Sam. The best athlete in the gym for the planning authority.

And hacking.

Yeah.

Which is that sand.

Well, he's a bit of a beast. Like this.

Speak. He's the best. He's the best athlete in the gym. And if anybody's from the gym here will recognize he is. And not to begin up, but here he is now somewhere.

I don't know if we've done a session with him.

Thursday night, 7.7x7:30. He wears a baseball cap.

Well, he teaches the class.

Yeah, yeah.

Can't think of him in my head right now. Such a ruperture.

What can I. We'll put him up.

This is just a. It's dead already with the charger pack.

Weird, right?

Turned off.

Yeah. Well, can show me?

I'll show you.

But you do realize that you'll never be able to like if you grow that you'll never be able to control everything and that's just. That's just a transition. Every business owns a version.

Real quick. Sorry, I should have paused then because I've done 45 minutes and I always issued calls after 40 minutes because quick one fellas. You probably heard a few months ago I dropped an E. Commerce. A very guru of me. But it's not that I promise you to one how to start a brand from scratch with no budget. Some budget. A bit of budget. Take your idea from a bedroom to reality to potentially 78 figures in sales like I've done a few times based on my seven years of experience in the trenches and my current experience building my current brand space goods. It's no bullshit, no frills. We've had like 75 people go through so far. Not a single person has asked for a refund. Plenty of people have actually built some seriously impressive covers every aspect of the business, not just the front end stuff like Most gurus on YouTube and Twitter are talking about. Not just product market and all that shit, but the real shit. The logistics, the back end, the supply chain, the customer service, the finances as well. This covers the whole spectrum, every part, 12 hours of video. If you're interested in scaling a brand zero to one, actually turning our idea finally into a reality, then click the link below, go check out Learn real commerce course and let me know what you think. I'll be glad to have you in there. Let's fucking go.

So I read a good quote today.

Tyler Newman exposed.

Bit off topic. Build a company that idiots can run because eventually they will. It's true.

Oh, as in you have to.

As in create the systems and SOPs.

Well, I've been having this, this debate with because of some recent hires myself who if I'm watching, I'm not saying about you, it's just sparked the conversation.

Do they still work for you?

Well, okay, the conversation is about people that don't. I guess in that case, yeah, I'm not gonna go down this road. But the point thing I struggle with is I've always been shitty delegation. I've got much better at it because I finally accepted to do what I want to do. I have to basically delegate everything, even like creative control to some extent because I'm never gonna build a hundred mil rare business which I want to do if I'm fucking even now I do way too much.

So you want to be creative than the operator.

Well, now I've finally hired an MD as of three weeks ago, which has been very weird, but I've just accepted that is the first step, like properly building a team. Because previously it was always relatively junior people that ultimately were coming to me for everything. Where now we've decided as of yesterday, like I said, everyone goes to you as if I'm dead and I just come in to speak to you and when I want to and on the things I want to. So it's not cheap, but I think long term it's worth it.

So back to scaling Slevin then. I mean, first of all, so you mentioned you want to build, create the best gym in London. What does that look like? What is the best gym in London? What is it? What needs to happen in order to you to say we've got the best gym?

I mean, I think we already have it. We just kind of now putting everything in place to do that. And it goes from everything from what I was talking about with the employees so, you know, having the best coaching team, but also taking care of them so that they have lives to buy, you know, buy houses, mortgages, have families, all that sort of thing. And I won't bore you guys on the fitness industry, but you probably realize that a lot of fitness coaches are working ridiculous hours for very little pay running around and they don't really have like high quality lives. So on that side of it and providing them a good quality of life, but that also comes with things like coaching education. So we've already started implementing our own program called Coach Z. So not only to build and Mateo has been hired to kind of take this on now and start to scale that.

And you're going to coach coaches.

Exactly. So not only our coaching team, but then also new coaches and then we can cherry pick the ones that we like to come onto the team as well. But then also just as another source of revenue, so, you know, come do our course that's certified and learn how to coach functional. Functional training. Learn how to coach CrossFit, learn how to coach X, Y and Zed. So that's one, one thing we're trying to scale at the moment. Uh, we just launched holidays, so that's something we'd like to do a little bit more as well. Um, so we're working with another company called More Life Adventures. So ideally at some point we've got two holidays running a year for the members, one summer, one skiing, something like that, uh, which, you know, again, promotes the lifestyle. People don't want to go. Like Sarah was saying, it's like, I don't want to just be close to the gym. I also want to go to on holiday with everyone from the gym and you know, other other gyms are doing this.

Have you had an internal slaven marriage yet?

Yes.

You ask this.

Yeah, we have.

I mean, I say that slightly tongue in cheek, but at the same time.

Yeah.

Well, they've met at the gym.

Yeah.

And they've got married.

Yeah. We've got a wedding in May. I'm going to stay next weekend.

And they met in the gym.

They met in the gym.

That's kind of, that's cool. I mean, it is a very good place to meet genuinely like minded people though, because even in a job, I.

Mean, I met Emma at 7.

No way.

Yeah, we met 7.

She a customer?

Yeah. What was your, what was your first imp like? Was it like love at first sight? Was like, I'm gonna close this sale first.

I think who Emma is, I have two people in my head right now.

Emma Wilcock Fitness is what we call her.

Tall and blonde.

Yes.

Yeah. Okay. I thought she was your sister.

Oh, God.

How did you arrive at that?

I don't know, because I thought the other person, who obviously isn't your girlfriend, was your girlfriend and then I saw her with you and I thought the chemistry seemed more than just friends. Yeah, I guess I was right. Just in the wrong way.

Yeah, probably. I don't even know who the other person you're talking about is. But anyway, so yeah, we met at the gym and that was before I had even bought the gym. It was a couple probably August, September. It was at some, some sort of event. But I probably know a few of the people from 7 may listen to this. So, you know. But yeah, it was, it was weird. It was other girls involved and. But in the end, Emma kind of fought through.

What do you mean there were other girls?

Oh, there are other girls. I mean. Yeah, I was. There was. There was other girls.

You were top of the food chain.

Yeah, yeah.

Hypergamy, I think the word is.

But I mean, going to other. Yeah. Other kind of relationships. There's. There's quite a few relationships that have kind of butted out of it and a lot of them that I don't know and then people that have hooked up but then haven't, you know, I'm.

Yet to have any women at Sleven fight over me.

So.

Yeah. So just put it out there. We are single. Oh, no, he's not. Sorry, he's not single. I often forget.

But yeah, I mean, for me it's. I kind of want to put this stuff on. I think it's important. I think London is a really lonely place. I mean, when you're working quite long hours and you have the. You have the time to go out. I mean, basically. Also, like the culture in London is either you drink and then that means you can go out and meet people.

True.

Or. Or not. But if I can make something social that's also kind of beneficial for your health and fitness, then kind of. I'm hoping people will kind of gravitate towards that and then, fine, let's have drinks after FNL on a Friday night and go for a couple of beers. And that's actually where you kind of start to meet people a little bit more.

I've never done a Friday session.

I've done one. I did one less Friday. Felt like a. More of a metcon.

Yeah, maybe.

I don't know if that was just the programming, but metcon's my favorite cardio based.

It's.

Yeah, yeah, it wasn't fun.

I love that shit. You would hate it.

You would love it. You would love it. You guys should.

The only stuff I'm actually like, good at, we've got.

So we got WIT coming down, which is a really big.

Yeah, I've seen that. Is that a CrossFit brand?

Yeah.

What does it stand for?

Whatever it takes.

Because I saw George, he. And we represented something with them recently.

The represent 247.

Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like they stole it from Sloven.

That maybe.

Yeah, probably.

Probably not. Yeah, that was a joke. But yeah, come on down. We're basically the whole gym from wit, which is also a clothing brand and, well, more it's merchandise that sprung out across fit. So there's a couple of guys that started this brand because they love CrossFit and they're like let's make a store where we sell CrossFit stuff to CrossFitters. And they've done just on wit.

I could be wrong because I was reading about them because some VC I've been speaking to, I've forgotten who it was either active partners. Red Rice is one of these big London VCs and they invested like 3 million quid into them. Have you ever thought about. This is going down a fucking tangent. But have you ever looked at that kind of way of scaling like bringing on institutional money?

I've.

Or angel money, but. Or both.

Ever since I met you guys. That's actually what I mean thinking because.

I know for a fact that we did that.

Yeah.

Just raise a shit ton of cash.

I know you guys doing this. Yeah. But I don't know, I kind of, I think there's certain aspects of it is like I like you. You're saying with your hiring an MD is like I really want control over what's going on and it's my biggest fault.

And you're aware of that.

I'm aware of it. I'm, I'm very aware of it.

What's just on that. What's the dynamic between you and Tim? What is partners in terms of you know, maybe official titles or who does.

What or we're both, we're both directors of the company. I have a majority share of the company. But basically, I mean so Tim got, he got mouth cancer last. We got diagnosed with cancer last. It must have been May or June last year. Basically went through hell for the last nine, ten months with radio chemotherapy. I'm 19. We're all, we all know that CrossFit saved his life. I mean it put him in a position health, health wise to take, take the whole treatment.

What a warrior.

I mean. Yeah, incredible story. And I mean he's, he's wanting to start coaching now again, which is incredible. You know and he's, you know, he's on his, he's on the way back, he's doing classes, he's. He's starting a program and all. A whole bunch of stuff. It's, it's an amazing story. He's 62, you know, and he's, he's, he's doing the stuff that you'd expect no 62 year old to be able to do. He's a beast. Yeah. I mean he was doing muscle ups. He was teaching muscle ups at the age of 61 before cancer and you know, hopefully we'll get him back, back to doing that soon. But I basically, I mean the guy was, I mean in another world, another place in hell basically for nine months. So I was on my own. It was probably the loneliest nine months of my life just trying to run this thing. Well, he gets diagnosed with cancer. We agree on the lease with Archco to move into this big facility. So I'm taking on a big projection, a big building works thing while we're running the business. While I'm running the business. And then the building works go to shit. So then I'm also project manager while I'm running the business. It's all delayed. It's like it was, it was a big shit show around October, November, December time and finally we got to, we got it over the line and in January and we opened up. But that was a very, very difficult time in my life. I mean it's really hurt my relationship with, with my girlfriend. I mean just my health wise and stuff like that was like, I mean.

You know, remember you literally when the transition happened from the one facility, you were literally there till the end of the day. And then sometimes I get in like I do a 6:30 session. Yeah, you're there.

It's.

I was like, yeah. Do you not sleep?

No, I, no. And I'm. My sleep is now. Yeah, I'm. I started taking melatonin like last couple of days never taken before. It's great. It's like first like full night's sleep I've had in probably a year and you know it's just been stress after stress is, I mean you're, you, you work in property. I mean, you know what building works are like, I mean it's a shit show. It's a shit show.

Nothing ever happens on budget or on time.

No, no, I mean we're completely over budget, two months delayed. Fucking project manager that just. Oh man, it was, it was a ride. But you know what? Like obviously grown a lot in that time and in a way also it's, it allowed me to kind of give some stuff to, to well laws and jewels a lot more and they really stepped up and they've been incredible really.

Shout out to them.

Yeah, shout out to them. Like they've been, you know, like I couldn't, couldn't speak highly enough of them and. But yeah, I mean doing all that stuff, I mean, I don't know how to say it. Like I don't think people would understand like that's the amount of stuff that needed to be done at all. Times and you get home from a full day's work and then it's like, I've got 100 emails and now I have to answer.

You got me emailing about 5. I've been charged for no show.

Yeah.

And it still replies in 10 minutes, literally.

Yeah, I still do that though. Yeah. Yeah.

You need to outsource that shit.

Yeah. So.

So, so, so you and Tim then. So what was kind of the. What are your skills? What are the things that you do within the business versus maybe Tim.

So Tim's. I'd say Tim, especially now he's coming back. He's a lot more on the side of, well, all the legal aspects of everything. Legal documents, contracts, just discussions with clients, I guess, compliance, health and safety. Literally all that sort of thing like HR stuff is. He's just been. Without him, it would have just been impossible. I mean, I don't know anything about all this stuff. So, you know, there's been a lot of negotiations with the landlord, not only just with the, with the new facility, but then over Covid with like, you know, like relief and stuff like that and a whole number of things. Now we're, we're dealing with rates as well. So just getting his legal expertise and things and interestingly getting Sam. Sam to help us with stuff as well. Okay. So the great thing about having a gym with people in all walks of life. So yeah, that stuff he's helping a lot of obviously with like facility management, but then also just sales and just, just general stuff. But then I'd say just everything else is like, I'm. I take that on board with marketing, a lot of the branding work. So one of the guys, another, I'm going to shout out to Max Crane, who's basically developed the whole seven brand. He's the creative director. He's a freelance creative director and he's basically understood Slevin's brand better than I could ever explain it. And he's kind of put that out there for the world. And we work together closely every month to put out the posts or animations or the Flex brand itself, which for those that don't know, the Flex is our kind of new personalized ecosystem where we do personal training and nutrition and programming and all this sort of stuff. And this is the stuff that he's kind of helped us develop. And you know, we were developing Flex while we're doing a build, while Tim's got cancer and all this sort of thing, but then also trying to run the day to day of people not signing into Oprah Gym.

And.

I reckon I'm the most annoying no customer you ever had.

No, you're not. You're definitely not top three. Not even. No, I think you're right. I think you. You don't. You haven't emailed in a few weeks now.

I just accept I'm doing 50 quid a month in overcharges.

I get charged here and there. I don't even know what it's for. Just must, like, book and then that's.

How they make a profit.

Yeah, you'd think so. But those late charges are just. I mean, but after fees and then after that you're just like.

That's probably the problem. The late fees are uncomfortable enough to actually.

Yeah, could be. We've had those. We've had. Yeah, it's interesting. We.

We kind of go to 20 pound ahead.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a. There's an argument to say if you no show, it's the cost of a class, which is £25. Yeah, but I think, yeah, people would kick off. I think. I think the reality of it is. The reality of it is people have busy lives, people cancel and stuff like that. And, you know, I get all sorts of emails every day about changing classes and no shows and all this sort of thing. And £2 50 for a lot of people. Like for yourself, for example, you're like. You email in about it.

Wait, hold on. Expose.

Why are you emailing 50?

No, it was more. How does this work? Yeah, now, I just. I was just interested at the start. Yeah, come on, bro.

You're like, why have I been charged £2 50? You didn't. You cancelled late or something. But what's weird is you're canceling late for open gym at 3pm, which.

Yes, I just don't anymore. I don't book that.

Just no need to do it.

So just on pricing, then, because, yeah, from an outside perspective, I would say CrossFit's definitely a pretty upmarket thing.

Yeah.

Like circa 200 quid a month. Most people, you know, would probably not even pay 100 quid a month. I paid up more than that.

Do you know what you pay?

I'm just asking. I don't know. I can't remember what I pay.

I guess by default, the customer base is relatively affluent to some extent, or they obviously care about fitness enough to invest in their health, but, you know, it's not fucking pure gym. Do you think that is limiting for CrossFit? And on that point, in terms of other locations, if you opened one in, say, Fucking Notting Hill or Hampstead. Do you not think you would send memberships out the door like nothing? Because there's more money around there. But then I guess, well, everyone. Central London's got money to an extent, but is that ever a consideration?

Well, I mean, I mean, you go to Wigan, it's 50 quid a month. Unlimited. Yeah.

Because my brother does that. New York, and it's like 45 quid.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So is that just a reflection of.

It's a reflection, you know, the cost of the. Everything. Right. So, I mean, if it was up to me, and it's. I guess it is up to me, but, you know, I, I think the product's worth a lot more. I mean, you're, you're, you're getting coaching, you're educated on how to train, you're getting programming, you're getting all these, all these things much more than if you're going to say, Barry's right, where you're getting a cheerleader, someone to be like, oh, motivate you. And maybe you get some screens or something to tell you what you're doing, but you're actually learning something at the gym. But that's just where the price of CrossFit is. I think it's, it's seriously under. Underpriced. But I also think the fitness market is about, well, like, everything. It's fast food, fast whatever, fast fashion, Fast Fitness. So F45. Get your hit. Your hit. Classes come in. Sweat. Sweat a whole bunch and you're going to be fit. But like, to get someone to buy in, to be like. Well, actually to get fit, you need to learn how to move. You got to sort out your mobility issues. Basically, what Tyler's doing now with, like, he's doing pts with jewels to, you know, sort out his mobility or. But also, you know, like, learn the skills and all that sort of thing. But that costs money. Like to, to learn how to do all that and like to fix your actual.

And shout out to Jules because my, My hips were my whole. Everything was so bad. But now, like, I'm overhead squatting. I'm getting my ass to the grass. Yeah.

And it's nuts how it's like a few sessions will kind of. And obviously mobility is. Is actually quite a long time, but sometimes you just need the guidance to kind of learn how to do something or. I know you talk about like, mentors, like, stop that. Being a busy body and get someone to, you know, learn from somebody and like, you'll, you'll get to the place a Lot quicker and I think for a lot of people they're like, well with fitness it's like oh I just need a six pack or I just need to like trim down for my wedding or something like that. But it like the long term vision of it. So like that ultimate thing where you get mouth cancer and you're going to get hit with double chemo radiotherapy, how are you going to survive that? Like people don't think about that and I don't think we should necessarily be thinking about that when we're joining a gym. But I think like, you know, all that sort of, all those kind of levels is, it's all part of it and you're not going to get that from just doing some hit classes three times a week.

I mean I will never be frugal on anything that comes to my health.

Yeah.

Whether it's gym food, whatever. I will always spend as much as I need to spend.

Yeah. I spend a lot of money on food and supplements and.

Yeah, supplements really?

And speed.

Well to be fair, supplements, athletic greens, like 90 quid a month. I buy my own which is great. It's like 40 quid a month. Why don't I pay for that? That's about it to be fair then. Fuel, fuel, protein.

Yes.

I spend a lot on like steaks, eat steak like three, four times a week which everyone tells me is bad.

But then breastfed or something like that.

Just fancy Waitrose shit down there. I don't know. Hope it's grass fed.

Yeah, I have the same one every day.

Yeah. Yeah.

I don't think it's bad if you have it. I think if you have something quite a lot, your body gets used to it.

Yeah.

But I also think when it comes to food you could watch a hundred hours of YouTube videos and why you should not eat anything. Why vegan is bad, why vegan is great while carnivore is bad. Just stick, just don't eat shit and work out and you're healthier than 99% of people.

Yeah, yeah.

So anyway back to scaling.

Yeah, it's the big, it's the big question this year. This is.

Yeah. Raise a ton of cash.

Do you have a goal in mind though with that? Because Chad, scaling as I call it, which I used to do in the past, just scaling for the sake of scaling isn't sensible.

Well, I mean I guess we. So I started talking was that the coaches education, the holidays, competitions is another great kind of revenue stream. So because you know we, we've got turf games coming at the end of this month as well. So they're hiring out the space. There's shared revenue on that. There's, you know, having our own competitions, like say we had a Hyrox down as another competition or some sort of brand like that. So I think there's just so much to do within the space before I even look to scale beyond it that I'm, I can squeeze everything out of it. I'm like just the brand ourselves. I mean we just launched all these jumpers and T shirts and stuff. And like I was talking to Tim about this, I was like, you know, in a couple years you got 400 members. You know, who's to say that suddenly people want to buy seven branded stuff and it becomes its own clothing brand as an offshoot, you know. And it's just that out of this brick and mortar, we're now starting to scale things further like online. So we start selling clothing online or something.

I just feel if you wait for the facility have to become the best version of itself, it'll just be a never ending process.

Yeah.

And you'll never make the jump to get that second facility or the third facility.

Yeah.

Also, how do you, how do you limit the amount of members in one facility? Where is the sweet spot? Because I mean, pure gym, even gym box. Like it was getting so fucking busy.

Even I think when you're in the facility before you are now I remember it was actually quite hard to book in on a few sessions and I thought this. But then you moved in.

Yeah, it worked. The council.

Yeah. Well, it's tough, I guess. You know, we, we think we're about 400, 450 members is what we're able to get. Or a couple hundred away from 450. But you know, we're, we're profitable now. Our rent's going up in July, so we got to get more members. We've got a stepped up rent from there. But you know, we're just, we're working, we're just pushing, pushing, pushing. But you know there's. And we're really pushing every avenue possible right now to make revenue and. But the sweet spot for us is just, just members. If we get members. Consistent, consistent recurring members. But it's hard, man. We're competing against so many different, like ideologies or methodologies, not ideologies.

But it seems like CrossFit as an interest is growing as a market.

Yeah, it's interesting. I get, I get two people that walk in one. That's inherently interesting. CrossFit. So my grand tour I'll take them through the 247 Arts, a small arch, explain to them the classes there, blah, blah, like this is this. You do benching and squatting and all this stuff that you do at the gym and cardio and stuff. And then I take them into the 7x arch, which is our CrossFit arch. And I'm like, oh, here we do CrossFit. Like no, no, no, no, no. And it's incredible. It's really, it's so many people would just be like, they're just instantly like turned off by that. And I'm like, oh, well, you know, come in to start with this. And inevitably, I mean, we've had members that have just said the same, no way am I doing CrossFit. I mean, you're kind of like around your borderline kind of saying the same thing.

I thought I'd do the, the 24 sleven strength and conditioning. Fine. I'll never do the CrossFit.

Yeah.

And then I was just, I'd look at all the guys who do CrossFit. I was like, well, they're in much better shape.

Yeah.

As an average. And I thought, okay, well I'd rather be in that room. Yeah. And I want to be in rooms where I'm uncomfortable.

Yeah.

And so I just.

Yeah. And now you basically do 7x exclusively. And f and L once.

Is that, is that the. You considered the primary hero CrossFit class 7X.

Yeah. That's how.

That's the one that hurts my back every time.

Yeah.

And I regret doing it.

Yeah. But this is, this is why I saw Jules and she fixed me.

Yeah.

Because prior my back would always flare up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jules is fixing my hips as well and it's working.

She's a hip fixer.

Yeah.

I've probably got a lot of pent up back abuse from years of rowing and weights and chad lifting.

Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's so many different things, so many different aspects and on that. But the reason why we created the 247 as well is to give people a bit of a break as well from the 7x classes. Like if you are beating yourself up too much, go into the other one. There's a lot more accessories. There's. It's a lot kinder to your body and so I think a lot more like long term. So like do the 7x classes but mix them up with some of the other classes. Metcon, mix them up with F, L or the 247 and I think you'll, you could have potentially A longer result. But I think when you're starting into like getting into CrossFit, you've got to do it because you're it. A lot of it is practice. So you got to practice your double unders, you got to practice the gymnastics, you got to practice these things under fatigue as well. And if you're, you know, doing single leg RDLs, it's gonna kind of bulletproof your body, but it's not going to get you better at doing high volume. Toast to bar, for example, which you got to learn by doing it. I'm pretty good at those, yeah. But you're a gymnast, right?

Well, not really, no. I, when I was younger, I used to like do some gymnastics. What about mobility class?

So mobility is, is a really individualized thing. We've done mobility classes before and they start great and then people get bored of it. It's just yoga. But I think when it's individualized, like what you're doing, what I'm doing, it, it's a game changer because you're doing. If you think of mobility like progressive overload, it's basically progressing your range and your strength through that range. Like if you then work progressively and just keep pushing that, then you're going to get better mobility through that. But if you just kind of, kind of come to random classes, it's. You start to do this or that you're, you're going to feel better after it, but not necessarily see the results that you're seeing or see the results that I'm seeing. So that's the reason why we don't necessarily have an a mobility class, which a lot of members have asked for. But within the Flex brand, that's something now through the physio work and like I'm, you know, Jules is, is working a lot now on, on doing movement assessments and like, I think I'm one of her kind of like case studies as well to kind of then put out to some of the members and be like, look, this is the kind of results you can, you can see because I've had three hip surgeries. So like, you know, I've got up hips. So, you know.

Is that from CrossFit?

Yes and no.

Everyone's injured in CrossFit.

Yeah. Yes. I've always been tight in the hips, but I think I've always been active and I've never. I basically had a impingement in the hips. So basically a bone, like within the socket bone was going into the bone and was like causing, causing damage into the socket. And that was exacerbated by CrossFit, I would say. But it also highlighted the fact that I had that issue which if I had been sedentary, might not have realized until I was 50 or 60 and then might have had a full hit replacement and probably been a lot more immobile than what I am now. Yeah, but, but yeah, I mean those are the sort of things that we're trying to help with, help people. People Do I think back to this idea of what do I want out of this gym? I want the best gym, not just all the events and all that sort of stuff, which is great for extra revenue, all the rest of it. But how can we help Tyler Newman? How can we help Matt Kelly? How can we help, you know Karen, who's a 40 year old mum at JP Morgan with a mortgage. She's miserable with her life, but I'll help her out. Yeah.

I can help her.

But, but, yeah, but how can we help, how can we help you guys out? And you're, you're all so different in individual. But like I think we have the facility now where we're able to do that whether it's through the group classes or through more personalized services.

Do you think you scare off the opposite, which is like elite purebred crossfitters by being so welcoming to like the civilian types like me or is that net beneficial to open it to all?

They all do open gym though.

Yeah, they all come in for the open gym and we're getting a lot more coming down, like more competitors. And that's another thing that we're trying to do is get members to do Hyrux or we went to battle for middle ground last week, which is a CrossFit event and you know, we had 15 members competing there, which is cool. And we had members come support and it's, it's kind of like a marathon. You prepare for that. So we give them something to prepare for and then we can give them programs and we can help them get better for that. So it's interesting, like I watched or listened to a lot of podcasts on gyms and stuff and they're like focus on one thing. And what we've done is said, fuck that, we're going to do everything. And we're, we're, we're helping everyone from, you know, people that are recovering from injury or they just want really individualized pts, don't want anything to do with the group classes, to people that want to be elite competitors, to just people that want to, I don't know, have Some fun and drink beers on Friday nights after class, you know. So I think that's also the big challenge for me is how do we market it to all these different people? Which is obviously a big challenge.

Do you have a specific customer acquisition strategy, though? Like you said, you're not running ads up to now. What has it mainly been word of mouth? Because I guess we do. You have massive LTV on like a subscription. 200 quid a month.

I mentioned Hormozi, the gym launch thing. You know Alex Hormozy that mentioned the other day, like the gym launch thing.

That he used to do.

It'd be interesting to look at the acquisition strategy.

Like you have a target cac, like cost per acquisition, or do you not think about.

We just have a budget for marketing, which is not very much at all. It's about a grand a month.

Because that's where I think if I was running this business tomorrow and I don't know the intricacies of it, I would just go and fucking. It's a great pitch to a VC because if you can work out your LTV, which you can call it thousand quid, your CAC could be up to fucking 500 quid, probably to have loads of margin left. But then the problem's just cash, which is for most businesses that work.

Yeah.

Then you can go and raise 2 million quid at. I don't know.

I don't think we even need that. I think we need. I mean, we pissed. I was hoping I pissed away 200k more than I wanted to on this. And I'm. Basically. Everything's in this business now. Like, basically my life depends on this business. But now I don't have anything to work with, so I'm like. So I've just basically got to do everything and build it. Build it from here.

Sure.

But now you have something that you can.

Yeah.

You can show to whoever. And I, I, I, I, I can see it. I can see it being whether it's a licensed model, a franchise model A, or under one holding company for sure. Across London.

Yeah.

And I think you've done such a good job of. Although we're talking a lot about CrossFit, it's not really. It's not really pushed too much as a CrossFit gym.

No.

It just seems like a social gym which has the.

Yeah.

I think you need to push the community first.

Yeah.

I think, especially like in 2023, I think people are waking up to the fact that the world is. Everyone's lonely.

Yeah.

You have to Be fit anyway, or you should be. So why not do it in a social place?

Our brand, Fitness Made Social. Yeah, Trademark that, you know, like we're, that's literally what we, what we're trying to sell. But it's, like I said, it's. I don't think that the issue is we work in a market where it's like people just want to go into fitness to just fucking burn calories. And it's kind of changing that perception, but it's a different way of kind of going at it and we're doing well out of it. But I think our big issue is how do we get the word out? And like I said, we're trying lots of different avenues, but within, within our means. I think, you know, maybe if we had outside help it would, it would make a big difference. But you know, I've been looking at license model as well. Like we've got our own programming that, you know, laws does a fantastic job of. And like, this is all like our ideas of like how we want to run a gym. And it's very unique to us. And I think the ecosystem allows people to start from zero and go to 100. And I don't think a lot of gyms have that, but it also allows people to kind of dabble into different things. So, yeah, there's, there's so many ways. And back to your scaling thing. How can we scale if we have a big enough name? Online programming is another way. So a lot of famous gyms do affiliate programming. So there's a big gym run out of California called NC Fit. They do programming for affiliates. So me as an affiliate could pay money to run their programming at my gym. But these are the sort of things that we're, we as a brand have always thought, well, I'm never going to have someone else's programming. Like, this is, this is my business. I'm going to have my viewpoint on this sort of thing. And that's kind of where that, that with the Greg Glassman thing back in 2020, we're just like, okay, this is, this is where we're going anyway. Like we're seven and we kind of even dropped the name CrossFit Fitness. We're just a seven. It's like this is what, what it is now. And that's, that's how people know us and we're more than fitness now. So that's, that's kind of where we're going. How do we scale it now? Is, is kind of the big, the big question. So what do you guys think.

Well, I just think you can't scale a business without consistent data backed marketing.

Put a dollar in, get a dollar out.

Exactly. And it's obviously easier in principle in theory than is in practice. Everything is. But I think there has to be a paid acquisition strategy, whether that's leaflets or influencers or brand collabs or Instagram ads. Yeah, I think it's probably an efficient blend of all of them. But I think the key thing is knowing what you're trying to achieve. You're trying to get more customers. All right, so what's the LTV? What can you afford? I mean, I'm talking D2C speak, but it's the same fucking thing. Yeah, it's a business and every customer has a lifetime value and every customer has an acquisition cost. So it's working out what's the balance and how quick could you fulfill 200 extra. Extra members? Because you could probably scale too quick if you did that next month. Right. And then. But yeah, I just, I think there has to be. It's acquisition strategy, Even if it's 3,000 pound a month to start with. Yeah, doesn't have to be.

Yeah. So we're, you know, we're looking at putting a bit more in now as well to the marketing. But we, we ran out, we just hit 5,000 followers on our Instagram, which is a tiny number, but hit that number, said we're gonna give out two free memberships. We had over 200 comments of people tagging their friends, all that sort of thing. And I'm like, hell, I've got. People are genuinely interested in this gym.

It's 200 leads there. Yeah, yeah.

So I spent all morning emailing, emailing all these people. Well, messaging all these people with, okay, you didn't win the thing, but here's a special offer for you to come in.

Yes. No one won the thing, did anyone?

I know people won it. Yeah, people won it.

Yeah, I know brands do that, but.

We'Ve messaged them and they're coming down and they're super excited.

You know, a lifetime membership or just a month?

Just a month. Yeah, but, but I got to sign.

A 12 month contract.

Yeah. No, no, it's just like, it's just a month and there's no, there's no contract. It's just they get to come in and train and we gave run up prizes which we didn't announce as well just because of the interest. And then I've also been like, well, bloody hell, there's all these people that want to join this gym. I'm going to give them some sort of offer, like a little bit of a buy in to come in and do it. And I've, you know, spent the morning doing that and I'm like, all right, let's see all these people come in. And still they're not like I haven't seen any like sign ups with the new kind of offer that I've given them. But I granted it's Saturday morning on.

Easter, but oh yeah, follow them.

Yeah, for sure. But I mean Maybe we'll get five or 10 members out of it. But it was a kind of pretty cool marketing thing that we did that just kind of came out of just oh shit, we're almost at 5k followers. Let's do something about it. But it was interesting to see how many people were on the periphery and that sort of thing that we're looking into and being interested in coming down and. But yeah, I don't know, I, sometimes I tell the team, I'm like, I don't get it. I'm, I'm 90% sure that I work 10 times more than a lot of the other guys at some of the other CrossFit gyms for like a lot less return and in the sense of like, you know, I see these, these other gyms launch and you're like, how did you get 100 members? You're not doing any ads, you're not doing any marketing, you're not doing all this sort of thing. Is it just the location? Could be.

But is there a gym globally that you look at or like a franchise or an owner and think they've done that really well? I would like to emulate that in my own way. Whether it's CrossFit or anything else. But a fitness business.

Yeah, I mean there's quite a lot. I mean I look at NC Fit, Jason Khaliba, he's.

Oh, he used to be the, he was one of the, one of the big.

It was the first time like I think he won the first of the second Crossing games. But I mean he's created, he basically, he's created a licensed model and he's created his own franchise within CrossFit itself and he disaffiliated after the whole Greg Glassman thing and I think they've reaffiliated, I don't know. But he basically offers similar product to what we do which is like all these different programs. He's got probably about 10 locations all around like California that, that are actually his. And then I don't know globally how many like affiliates he's got as well. Which confuses things because it's CrossFit and them they, you know. This is podcast a lot as well. A podcast I listen to a lot is this, this guy called Stu Brower. He's the WTF Gym Talk. And he created a, a gym in, in North Carolina and then he affiliated his thing but he licensed it out. But then where I think he made his money was he went into property with his, with his business. So he used his, his business. So he used his business to buy the land or so sorry, the, the location he was in. Paid himself rent through this other, this business. Paid. He created another like shell company or something and then paid that paid that off.

And then I can smell a Tyler Newman x Slevin collaboration.

Yeah. Yeah.

Slevin raises 400 million pound debt facility.

With JPMorgan which is really, really quite interesting. It's impossible where we are because we're in a network rail kind of arch and stuff. But that sort of thing really interests me as well as like a long term goal is like, okay, things are really going well. What do we do with this business now? Like that sort of thing.

Own the land that the business sits on.

Yeah.

The McDonald's strategy.

Yeah. Well, it's super smart. He's like, well, I'm just pay, I'm paying rent anyway, so I'll just do this. And.

It sounds like from a scaling perspective there's a lot of kind of these limiting beliefs that are holding you back. That, that I'm not going to be able to hire the same people, great people. I'm not gonna be able to manage this. I'm not able to manage that. And I think that's just a step. At some point inevitably you're gonna have to take.

Yeah.

But if you've like, if you create the, the systems, the procedures and you've got something that you can kind of copy and paste, it might never be perfect.

Yeah.

But it comes a point is like do you want 10 gyms that are maybe like a seven out of 10 or one gym that's a 10 out of 10?

Yeah.

Well, it depends what you want, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

That is a question to answer also.

What, what kind of revenue is the seven out of. Yeah.

Do you want an exit? Do you want to, you know, build something to sell? Do you want to build something that can just fund a lifestyle?

I definitely, definitely want to exit. I think it's a five year, five year plan. We've Five year plan at this point. What that means with the exit wise but, you know, doing something different, I don't know yet. But my life is so consumed with the gym that it's like, it's hard to even like, look at anything else that's going on. I mean, I'm sure you guys understand that as well. Your businesses.

Yeah.

You're like, oh, they're like, oh, I.

Really want an exit and I'm gonna buy 14 pink Rolls Royce. I've thought it all through, but I probably chase money a bit much, but there we go.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of, I'm, I'm tired of chasing now. I'm just like, I'm ready to start to enjoy the business a little bit more. But it'll come. I think, like at some point all the stuff we're doing is gonna work and we'll, we'll get to like a big success. But someone said to me the other night a couple of weeks ago, he's like, don't be a busy body. Like, you know, he's like, don't around with just the fact that YouTube emails, whatever, you know, like, I should stop doing that. But, you know, I just, I'm a idiot.

What's F45? What are they do you know, like what their valuation is or they raise money.

So they're down in the worldwide global franchise. You know anything about them and like.

Mark Wahlberg is an ambassador or something.

Semi. Barry's right. Like similar sort of go. Yeah. Especially in America.

Yeah. I mean they're an Aussie band. They started in Australia. I don't like sort of valuations of them, but I know that I think they're struggling at the moment. I think, I think where the market is going, I think they've kind of, kind of the. Their growth strategy, especially after Covid, it didn't pan out and I think they were expecting two times the amount of kind of growth that they. They got. And then I don't know, I think they're not, they're going through a restructure and sites are closing, but I don't know more than that really. I don't have time to be a.

Good example of some founder that just raised a ton of money.

Yeah.

Licensed out the brand or like expanded. Took loads of money off the table.

Yeah.

Now whatever happens, happens.

And yeah.

Yeah, I'm guessing that guy, he's. He's sitting pretty, Pretty rich at the moment. But I don't know, it's interesting. I mean, F45 closed down the road from us and we got closed. Yeah.

No way.

The one down the road, it just.

There's still an ad above that. I swear I see it every day.

I know. And I'm. It hurts me every day to see it. I'm just like, if I tell them that that's still there, they're going to realize it's still there and then they're going to want to charge me ten grand a month for it. But, I mean, who's paying for it? Obviously no one. So maybe we should just go up and.

Guerrilla marketing.

Paint. Paint on.

Like cross it out and do. Go to Slevin with an arrow.

Yeah.

We could do like F45.0. I would stay there for months. 1 nil.

Or just hire someone to just put something up there who wouldn't even know.

That is a strategy in itself. Guerrilla marketing. So I have a 5 meter tall inflatable mushroom which is sat in a box in my office around there.

Yeah.

Which is one of the first of many things I'm trying to do offline. Because I look at brands that I look up to and they don't rely 100% on fucking paid ads, which has pretty much been my entire life up to this point. So, like, we're doing some weird shit with that, which might be a flop, but it's just no one else is doing that. So you could apply similar thinking to the gym. Although I suppose maybe you want to piss off less people than I do. But. Yeah, that F45 sign would be the prime example.

Yeah.

Of that sort of thing. Like just high risk, potentially high return. What's the worst that can happen?

Yeah. What, just paste over it, Put something else up on there. I mean, it's not like they know.

I mean, then you take a picture of it and you get a PR firm to fucking push it in certain publications and before you know it, it's a big story.

Yeah, that's. I started talking to a guy in PR about getting seven out there a little bit more. And like, when you Google seven CrossFit gyms in London, there's like the 10 best CrossFit gyms in London.

Or even. I just thought of a great one actually. Sorry, this is genius on the spot. You should hire a lookalike of Justin Bieber to get really sweaty.

Yeah.

Like plan it. So get paparazzi that aren't paparazzi, they're just your fucking mates posing as them. Get a journalist who's already briefed. So we think Bieber is in town and he's with security and do like a look alike prank. But no one knows it's a prank. You push the pitch around. Bieber goes to Sleven. That's the sort of that. Will it be a coincidence now if.

Bieber actually went to Slevin next week?

Right.

We actually have a, we have a big celebrity goes to seven's Ollie Murray.

Yeah, I saw him actually.

Yeah, Ollie Murray comes.

Say where he lives.

Yeah, wow.

Yeah, I've met him a couple times.

Yeah, yeah, he comes down a lot. He loves it.

Is he ever posted?

Yeah, he's posted at 7. He's posted his first ever muscle ups like, you know. Yeah, he hasn't been for. He's only come since we've moved to the new site once but there was a time last year he was coming almost every day for a month or so but he's always on tours and coming in and out. But super lovely guy and you know, obviously he, he promotes it, he tells all his mates about it and stuff like that. But it's interesting. It's like he'll post about 7, he's got 3 million followers, but we'll gain 2 followers from it.

Typical influences.

Yeah, but, but it's interesting, like, you know, they think, oh well, surely we get some sort of traction or maybe a membership from it. But like nothing really, you know, it's just cool.

Probably harder when it's a physical location in that sense. Whereas if it was a brand online. Yeah, anyone's, anyone's relevant to it, which.

Is why we're targeting micro influencers. So I've got Sophie T. Just kind of working on just inviting micro influencers down and doing a week training with us and posting about it and because they're going to influence the 100 members at the F45 down the road or you know, a couple tube stops away. But oh, that's really cool that you're learning that stuff there. I might go try that out. So that's kind of like a strategy that we're, we're trying to go for and you know, it's quite hard to gauge how these people are coming through. I obviously ask everybody that comes through the door how they've heard about us. But it's always a mix of things, you know.

Yeah.

I literally lived in the building right outside your facility for two years and had no idea that you guys isn't it.

It's the difference that like frontage makes, the location.

For sure.

I mean now you walk by and you can see the sign outside, you can see Everything going in, going on inside. And people see us now from the back where we've got all the light blue. So we want to put up a couple of signs up in the back as well and get that a bit more visible. But I think probably the most successful gym in London, which is Shapesmiths, is obviously they run a great gym, but just also they're right outside the busiest train station I think in Europe.

What about Mashon? March on.

March on, yeah. So Marshon's a brand that we're talking about brands and I look up to as well.

And Poly March on or something, is that.

Yeah, maybe. So they've. So they've run. So they started in Harp, Harpenden or Harpington or something in.

Yeah, east half a year.

Yeah, I mean they got one in.

East London as well.

He's built, he's built an incredible brand out of that.

Nick is sending tonight.

So he's. He's built an incredible brand. I've never met the guy, you know, but I follow his podcast, I follow him online, I've looked his training programs and he's now scaling his business massively. He's in supplements obviously. He started a lot with the online program as well. So really easy way to market that. So I scale that and he's. They've just opened, I think in the last year, another facility in Stratford. Yeah, I think they've got grand designs now to have their own kind of brand all throughout the uk. But, but yeah, they're. They're also doing fitness events so they've just come out with a competition called, I don't even know how to say it, ATH X ATHEX or something like that. Athx. But yeah, obviously he's killing it. But. But yeah, I look up to what they're doing over there and seeing how like the brand that they've created and. But in a way it's, from my perspective it's quite different because I think the way he started his brand was him. So this is a. One of the most beautiful men you've ever seen.

Do you ever think about yourself as a personal brand, slash? Having a personal brand? I definitely think fitness is the perfect space that lends itself naturally to having a founder led or you know, ambassador led brand. Especially when you live and breathe it like you quite literally do.

Yeah, I guess I'm just not the. I'm not Ollie Marshon, if that makes sense. Like I'm not this ex rugby international. It's got, you know, just unbelievably in shape and you know, I mean, the way that I. I think that he built his brand was just literally through his Instagram. So. And I think for a lot of fitness. Fitness influencers. And my girlfriend, she works for another influencer called Chrissy Cella.

Oh, yeah.

So again, no stunning, you know, does all their exercises and just everyone wants her butt, you know, and the. The glutes.

I was reading about her. Her brand actually did like 20 mil rev or some. I mean, yeah, she's like a Grace Beverly esque.

Yeah, she's really sort of. And. And I think like, obviously that's what gets them the recognition at the start, but then there's obviously this. An incredible amount of work ethic and like just knowledge or, I don't know, whatever it is that they've got to get to where they are because there's a lot of beautiful people on Instagram that don't make anything of themselves.

Sure. There's a lot of.

Yeah.

So 99 of them.

99. So for them to even break through that, that sort of. Yeah. And create the things that they've done is. Isn't incredible. So it's something I've talked to Tim a lot about is like, well, how do we. I think what we have to do at Slevin is do it through the. Through the brand itself and do it through the like what we've built and like for people to recognize like. Like that as a gym. Whereas Marshawn is, is like you say Marshawn, you just think of Ollie Marshawn, which is his brand or evolve you. Which is like Chrissy Cella. So, you know, I think there's different ways of going about it. Whether I'm going to be the face of it. I'm not that interested in it. I just. I'd love it just to be successful and you know, I. I'm more than happy for not other people to be.

It arguably makes it more exitable if you're not. If you're not elite.

Definitely.

If you're not the full face of it.

Yeah.

Quite literally having your name like, it sounds like this March on guy.

Yeah.

Potentially a downside.

Yeah. Yeah. And. And I know his brother also does a lot of stuff as well, so I don't want to. If they ever watch this or whatever.

But like, you know, versus Marshall exposed.

But I, you know, this is just from an outsider's perspective on there. What. What's going on over there.

Competition between gyms.

Yeah.

Is that something that you've. We've done or.

Yeah, about. Definitely. So.

So you want to call out right now?

What do you mean?

Can I call them out for a competition?

What, to like invite them to a competition?

To a competition?

No, I mean I sent out, I sent out to all the affiliate owners in London, a little pack, like an affiliate pack to come down to the 7x games. We want to make it the premier kind of London box competition. So all the boxes in London come down and. And throw down at Slevin, which we've designed as a competition space as well. The rigs down the middle and all the way it's set out is perfectly set up for competition, more so than I think any other box in London. And I've got quite a lot of traction with a few gyms. So cross at London, sending about 12 athletes down. We've got the yard in Peckham coming down. We've got Tribe Hammersmith. I'd love to see more southwest London gyms as well, which is, you know, like district and shapesmiths and gymnasium. But, you know, we'd love to see them all come down and have like a throwdown. But there used to be back in the day, this thing called box battles where you would literally go to another box and like throw down against another box and it's pretty cool. So it's definitely something we could also pick up again. And a couple of members wanted to rekindle that and then covet hit, so.

But how expensive is gym equipment?

What do you mean?

Was it like. I just. I'm interested in that. Like it's got. Is. Are we talking like multi six figures? I'm just looking at plates that you guys have.

I'm just thinking they're not cheap and then times that by how many plates. It's.

Is. Is that the biggest cost in set, obviously in setting up the gym?

I don't know the biggest cost on that, that whole build. I mean the electrics were so much money. Just the building out, the lights are sick. The lights are sick.

It just was a full custom build.

Or did you go into a facility, full custom build. So my mate Tom, who's Tom Harrison from Habitation Ltd. In architecture, he's an architect, he's a mate of mine. He. I approached him, I said, look, want to do this? And he's helped us out with this and it's a full custom, custom design of the space and he's just done an incredible job really of like how it looks and everything. So I think building everything customers is where it costs money because it's not just, oh, just buy a Black table and plunk it here. It's that little, you know, like the little chill out area. Well, all those like cubby holes are custom built and the seating and everything. And so you need a carpenter or a joiner to come in and do everything by hand and all the rest of it. And like all those toilets are custom built. They were, you know, we had to put plumbing in for all that sort of stuff. It was, it was a massive job. I mean you'll know from luxury developments like how like custom, how expensive custom jobs could be. So yeah, that was, that was the most expensive aspect of it. And then working in a space that is super humid. There's leaks all over this place. It's not straight. Everything is, it's a Victorian archway. So you can imagine things are just all over the shop. So lots of difficulties with that. And then dealing with a project manager that kind of dropped the ball, which kind of made it. Project manager kind of made it made it difficult. But yeah, I mean, back to the, the gym equipment. Yeah, it's expensive. I mean, what do you think things cost?

Like, I don't know, like I know what rowers cost. Yeah, all that stuff, but more like barbels, weights.

It's interesting. I guess the kit out of a CrossFit gym will be less than a commercial facility because all the, like the, the standard kind of gym equipment you'd expect in a commercial facility, it can be like 2,3000 pounds for a chest plate, chest kind of machine, something like that. But I mean, we had to get out three gyms basically because we needed to make sure that we could run classes independently in all three spaces or we run competitions that we'd have enough plates to do all that sort of thing or the, the rigs and all that sort of thing where, you know, I talked to coaches at other gyms and they're like, oh, we've got eight wall ball spots. And I'm like, what, for a whole class? Like, yeah, I'm like, oh, we've got 20 on one rig so we can run like classes of whatever. And that's back to kind of like the idea of we want to run the best gym is like we've got the, the equipment for you to have a really nice workout because the workout that you do at seven, you're doing it without having to share equipment or kind of wait for someone to move out of the way. Whereas another rival gym, you'll probably have to wait to get up to the wall ball spot and your, your, your workout's Just not going to be that kind of higher level.

I'm never going to take those wobbles for granted again. No. Yeah.

And they're all like, you know, they're all branded and everything. The targets and everything. Cool.

How much do you reckon it cost to fit out the new facility?

Well, including the build?

Yeah, like, all in.

I mean, I know nothing about building. It's, what, from a blank tunnel?

Yeah.

Including equipment? Yeah, I'm gonna say 200k. 250.

That's what I was gonna say.

Really? Including equipment?

I mean, that's my guess. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

There's more.

Yeah, a lot more.

Wow.

A lot more.

Double?

Yeah, more than double.

Kidding.

That's a lot. I don't think it was that expensive. I mean, I know nothing about building.

Yeah.

What's the ratio? Equipment to build.

Yeah. But the build was about three to one on equipment.

Yeah.

Really?

Wow.

And what was the motivation for just capacity at the previous facility?

Capacity? I think, like, I don't know, I've. I've just had this idea. I just want to be like. I've been at gyms. I'm like, I don't want to be at a gym, I don't want to have a gym. I want to have the best gym. I want to have a really, like. I don't want people to come to Sloven and be like, oh, it's great there. Despite the facilities or despite the shitty coaches or the owners or anything like that, which I feel like happens quite a few of the other gyms and people stick to them. And I'm like, why can't we just make a really good gym where it's really nice to be in and people are great and the coaching is great and everything's, like, working well? And that's. That was my basic first idea of, like, what I wanted seven to be. So I was like, well, we've got to make it premium. I mean, people are spending £220amonth. We've got to have the best equipment. We can't, you know, they want to come in and wear Noble, which is, you know, £80 for a T shirt or, you know, 150 quid for a pair of shoes or Lululemon. Why are they going to work out in a ship facility? They're going to want to work out in a premium facility, or they're going to go to Barry's or they're going to go to One Rebel or this other brand. So, like, In a way, CrossFit's had to pick up Its game to stay in line with all that sort of thing. I mean, our fit out is nothing compared to Barry's or one of these other kind of brands. I mean, they must be spending 2, 3, 4 million on it. I mean, there's lights, there's music.

Gym box. Definitely. Yeah. Third space of that sort. Yeah.

Third space opening.

There's one opening in power station.

Yeah. Yeah. But I guess that's, you know, investors. I mean, it's just. It's me.

And how much over budget did it go as like a percentage?

I was 200k over budget.

It's typical, like builds.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a shame.

That was gonna be my cushion in case everything went to. So.

So everyone sign up since Lemon. We're putting a link in the bio.

Yeah.

Affiliate link in the bio.

Yeah.

Use Matt Kelly.

I mean, I mean, there's. There's certain things like there's a. There's 100k deposit that's just sitting there just with a. You know, which we had agreed on a 50, like 50k deposit, which right now. 50k with who?

With the lease. Which is never a crow, right?

Yeah, well, it's. It's. It's this company called Archco, which.

Is that just for damages?

Like, just like when you put a deposit down on.

This.

Wasn'T 100K?

Yeah. No.

Yeah. It's heavy.

Yeah.

Well, your dad put.

Yeah, but I mean, for a small business like us, that's. That is just a. Yeah. Massive amount of money that, you know, which obviously will. We'll get back someday. But it's just like.

Well, sits on the balance sheet, unable to do anything with it.

Yeah. Nothing to do with it. It's just. May as well burn it up. But there's just things like that we've. We've had battles with like the rates, the. The business rates as well. Like them charging us for eight months or six months of the build that we're not there, you know, extra costs with that and so many other things that we're kind of dealing with as well.

Like have you, have you raised any money to this point? Just been.

Either just. Yeah.

And Tim as well, right?

Tim. Yeah, me and Tim. Yeah. Put it all in. But yeah. This is like, this is my life now. So if, like, I've got to make it work, I feel that's the best.

Way to be as a founder, I think.

Yeah.

How else is it going to be?

Yeah, I mean, I know I'm doing a good job, but I know I could do a better job if I Had if I had help or advice and stuff like that. But I think you guys might know this as well is like, where do you find the time to stop and.

To stop and review things and review.

Things and be like, okay, I'm gonna spend a week teaching you how to do this now because obviously in the long run it'll, it'll benefit everybody. But I don't have the time right now, so we'll just keep putting it off or whatever. But that's, that's the kind of the challenge at the moment. But that and also I guess having the, the money and the comfort to be like, okay, we're just going to be like, I'm going to hire this person. I'm going to be like, if I had three extra hands to do whatever, then that would make a big difference, for example. But we don't have it right now.

So did you have any other areas you wanted to go into? Because I guess there's so many rabbit holes done. Two hours, nearly.

I'll let you.

Two hours.

Yeah.

Flies by nearly. Nearly.

Fucking hell.

One hour 45. I usually wrap these up with a few similar questions. We kind of covered one, which is where do you. Well, I guess we can expand on it. Where do you see Slevin going? You said in five years an exit. But is that you not involved or is that you just being this rich bloke that shredded tree training in the gym and you got a management team and 25 facilities and three girls, 10,000 members and 15 girlfriends?

Yeah, I think, I think two ways it would be either sort of like a licensing kind of model sort of thing and be like, okay, this is, this is. This is our model. I'm gonna sell this to Bannatyne or Virgin or whatever. So you guys want to go into the closet space, but you don't want it to be rough and ready like some of the other CrossFit gyms you want. So, so something like that. Here's a model that do it. Um, is one way or kind of the way that, that I see it is maybe going down all these different revenue avenues that I, I mentioned. Whether it's the coaching education, the online programming, retail holiday, any of these sort of things and be like, well, actually we're going to make a crap ton. I mean Marshon have done a great job with. They. They run a coaching education business called pfca and that's. That must. They must be making tons of money off that.

What does it cost if you want to go through that? If you're A coach and want to learn or you want to become a.

Coach, what does it cost you to sell information? He knows.

Yeah. I mean, the best market, I mean the cross at level one is, is 1K. And I mean that's, that's kind of where we want to start to sell our, our education, which would be kind of six weeks practical and that sort of thing, which would be a lot more involved than say, a lot of the other courses. But, you know, we've got a facility now. We could do it on Saturday afternoons and come get people in regularly, up to 10, 15, 20 people. And suddenly you've got this huge other revenue stream. But again, it's kind of like about building the brand first and being like, oh, what's the recognition? Why. Why does somebody want to come to seven to learn how to coach, for example? And it's kind of, I guess everything is helping each other. Every little bit is helping the other bits to kind of get that brand recognition up. So it's kind of like working on all the different bits and seeing like, well, what's going to stick? And I mean, ultimately it'd be great if it was something that was really easy, which would be like, just get ton of members in and like get them moving. But at the end of the day, that's not necessarily, necessarily going to keep people in because at the end of the day what's going to keep people in is like, what we're doing with Tyler, which would be, how are we going to help Tyler get better?

Tell you what I wanted to ask you about actually was corporate training classes. I was thinking this one, like for a community perspective. If there's a way I could pay for an hour class.

Yeah.

And then bring.

That's a great idea.

15 of my customers.

Yeah, we offer that.

Do you?

Yeah, but the fact we don't know that. Yes. The problem.

Yeah, I'd 100% do that.

Yeah.

Next month.

Yeah, let's do it.

And I think you should like do it with your guys as well. Just bring like 50.

There should be a new policy in, well, my company going forward. If you don't train, you get fired immediately.

Yeah.

Because people that train, I think, are more effective at work.

Yeah.

All of my team train waves during their sleep. Like it's a. Yeah, cool. Within our.

Do you track their sleep?

No, I don't track their sleep. Like on the team calls.

Are you on the whoop thing as well?

I tried.

I nearly got aura.

Yeah. Whoop.

Have you said it?

I didn't. I didn't I prefer the ordering, but like on the team calls in the morning, we're like sharing our sleep scores.

And yeah, you can see who's been fucking on the bender the night before.

Exactly. There's no hiding from me.

Yeah.

Anyway, so corporate events. I'll do one of those soon.

Yeah. So we're. Another way I'm trying to market the gym is getting on a corporate thing called Gym flex, where basically it's like salary sacrifice. So you're an employee at JP Morgan, your gym membership goes out like gross, gross salary. So then basically you don't even know and you're signed up to Sloven. Yeah, that sort of thing.

You know, the perfect acquisition, five years would be someone buys it and you use, I don't know, JP Morgan. Advise on the fucking sale or some shit. Yeah, some cunt that used to be your boss facilitates the transaction in some way or form. That'd be legendary.

That'd be cool.

Right, final question and you've got 20 years to think about. I guess I always say to people it's become a cliche. Three bits of advice, your 18 year old self. Knowing what you know now, broadly speaking, in fact, you might be one of the oldest guests we've had.

Really?

Not that you're that old, just that my guests have been unusually young because they've been all my mates, to be honest.

How old are you?

38?

400. So you got 20 years to reflect my question.

Years. Things take a lot longer than you think.

Yeah, that's true.

First thing, a lot longer. You don't know everything. I think, I think we all think we know everything, but literally know nothing. Second one, third one, I think probably it would be enjoy the moment a lot more. I think I'm always kind of looking in the future too much and not enjoying the present enough and I have to be like, okay, stop looking forward. Just kind of like enjoy what's going on at the present as well. So I think you guys will probably know that as well as like, you're always like thinking, oh, what's gonna happen there? Okay, just enjoy kind of like what's going on today. And like it, like as a little anecdote was just like today I really enjoyed just being outside with the, with the crew and just training and everything. It was just a nice, a nice moment and be like, okay, this is what we're kind of living for as well. Not just the numbers or the revenue or the members or whatever.

Very true. Deep, very powerful.

Love it.

And you'll enjoy that party that you have to come to after this as well. And hopefully enjoyed the pod, your first podcast ever. I think you are a very good storyteller. So you were warning me that you wouldn't be good, really behind a camera.

I think I mumble a lot. I don't know what it's going to.

Sound like, but I've still got man flu.

So, yeah, I think it was wicked and I, I just, I'd finish on saying, I think you have built something incredible. I think, you know, you've got great team, great community. Like you say you've had people getting married off the back of what you've built. I think, yeah, it's easy as an entrepreneur to get caught up thinking about the chaos that's happening on a day to day and thinking about the future. But for sure, 100% should be proud of what you've built and what you've created. It's definitely probably not been an easy feat. But yeah, thanks.

No, I think it's been, been great on the podcast and I just want to say as well, like, it's not just me, it's obviously, obviously Tim and Tim's been out, of course. Yeah. So, yeah, I think. Thanks for having me.

Pleasure as always. On that bombshell, subscribe to the pod. Go check out Slevin if you live anywhere near or if you don't, everyone that follows me.

Voxel London.

Well, let's announce a midnight podcast, Slevin.

Workout, as part of my Mastermind upcoming.

Yeah.

Which he keeps telling me to do. Yeah, so that's where I train. People always ask me, what are you doing post running? I'm doing fucking slaving.

So train with Matt Kelly.

Yeah, train with Matt Kelly.

Five grand an hour. We'll get 100 people in.

Do a revenue share.

Yeah, do a rev share. So, yeah, subscribe to board. Check out Slevin. As always. Cheers for watching. Peace. Boom.