Cory McKane, CEO of WeStrive, built software for personal trainers after watching them struggle with paperwork at a Wenatchee gym. He stresses preparation and patience in business, and uses customer feedback to drive product improvements. The platform lets him track client progress through photos and weight data without invading privacy.
Chapters
This is Professor Pete Alexander with the Winning at Business and Life podcast, where business leaders share their insights. It is 6 questions in 7 minutes because successful business leaders are busy and rarely have more time to spare. So let's get to it. Question number 1: In a few sentences, please tell me who you are and what you do.
Sounds great. I'm Corey McCain. I'm the CEO and founder of WeStrive. I'm from Washington State. Lived in LA for several years. Now I'm living in Austin, and WeStrive is a software platform for personal trainers to manage and scale their business.
Well, Corey, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Question number 2: What is something that makes you smile and/or laugh about working in your industry?
Uh, smile, I think it's incredible to— I'm obviously providing content for the personal trainers, but then through them, they're providing an amazing experience and sometimes life-changing experiences for their clients. So Uh, we don't have like— I don't allow us to see like, see, you know, sacred data. Like, I don't want to know what their actual body weight is or what their actual progress photos are because that's like private data. But from our analytics, we can see that they are adding their progress photos and they are adding their body weights. And so we can— we know that journey is occurring through the platform that we've built. So it's pretty awesome thing that definitely makes me smile every day.
Oh, I love that. And it's— yeah, to see all these different people benefiting and, and, and improving themselves. So it must be great. I love the passion in your voice about that too. Question number 3. I have a fictitious book with all the answers for business. What chapter would you think most companies should read?
Um, let's see. That's a really good question. Uh, I mean, there's, there's probably a lot of chapters in there. Uh, it's definitely not a short book. I would say preparation and patience. If that's— those are probably two separate chapters with their own chapters within them, but Being prepared is, I mean, I constantly still am underrating it. It's such an important concept. I mean, whether I'm going into a meeting or I'm building a pitch deck or I'm presenting to someone, whatever I'm doing, I need to be prepared and I need to actually take the time to study for it. And then on top of that, being patient is incredibly important. I feel like it's a huge asset to have as a CEO. Like, if you're able to be patient, you can wait for these updates to come out and you can focus on other things and it's not gonna drown you drown all of your thoughts and not allow you to focus on the rest of the life. So things take time, especially in the development world for apps. And so just be patient.
Mm-hmm. I love that insight, especially, you know, that the patience aspect of it, as you're saying, because so often, especially as the CEO, if you don't take the time to focus, you know, that's the high-value add that you're providing to the company and to the product or services. You get distracted What's going to happen is that then all of a sudden nothing gets done, right?
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Great. Question number 4: Other than the generic work harder, have a great attitude, and care for customers, what advice or insight would you give to other business leaders?
Uh, it was kind of similar to the last thing you said, but I would say to listen to customers. So not only care about them, but listen to the actual feedback they're giving, and not only listen to it, but actually record it. So whether you own an app or you own like a local supermarket, your customers are constantly going to be giving you feedback. And if you're just kind of like in one ear out the other, you're not going to be able to grow as a business. It's all going to be your ideas. So they're basically a sounding board for, you know, if there's anything wrong in your store, they'll be telling you, you can write that down. Um, if there's a problem with my app, they're going to tell me and I can write that down. And so actually listening to what they have to say and putting that into like a form or a format that you can basically use for, you know, making your business better and also making them happier because you're doing what they ask you to do.
I think that's really insightful as well because when you listen to the customers, they're the ones that are actually using it, and you're right, you can have blinders on and you don't realize, oh, there's something here that they didn't quite understand, or it's missing one core functionality that could really benefit them. So, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's great advice. Thank you for that. Question number Question number 5, what other business leader like yourself would you like to acknowledge and invite to be on my podcast?
Well, I used to have my own entrepreneurship podcast, so I've interviewed so many people, and so it's hard for me to pick one. My good buddy Farhaj, I'd say my good buddy Sam Lilly. He's an entrepreneur in Austin. He runs a company called Vinder. It's Etsy for local food delivery, and he absolutely just dominates what he does. So I would definitely say Sam.
Oh, that sounds good. I look forward to talking to him. Thank you for that referral. And our final question, question number 6, please tell me about your first job.
Yeah, so first, uh, besides like Dairy Queen, first job I worked at a local gym in, um, Wenatchee, Washington, where I'm from. So I worked there for several years, and that really helped me get to the space that I'm in. I mean, I got to see all the personal trainers, you know, what they went through, all the excessive amounts of notepads they would write down. And the only reason I wanted to start my startup in the first place was because I noticed that they had so many of these amazing fitness programs that they had written down, and yet there wasn't any way for them to sell those. They were just kind of like hiding in a book. So I thought, well, I should put this into a platform. So, um, yeah, I think that my first job is the— is the only— my first real job full-time for years is the only reason that I'm actually doing what I'm doing today with WeStrive.
Oh, I love that. It's so great that you took that idea that you saw from just being, you know, inefficiencies and stuff, and then being able to make it better for the health and fitness industry. So that's a great, great story.
And Corey, appreciate it.
You bet. And thank you so much for being on the show, Corey. How could people find you?
Yes, I mean, I'm personally on Instagram at Corey.MF, and then WeStrive across the board, WeStrive app, W-E-S-T-R-I-V-E app. And, uh, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, wherever you want to find us, we're the same URL. And, um, you know, westriveapp.com if you want to check us out. And if you're a personal trainer, we will absolutely help you transform your business. We're a 360 tool, build programs, handle billing, group inbox, client management, everything, all the above. So that's, that's WeStrive.
Perfect. This is Professor Pete Alexander with the Winning at Business and Life podcast. Get hundreds of amazing business insights from previous guest episodes on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening.
