Meet Mitchel Black of Strongside in Woodstock

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mitchel Black.

Mitchel, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
We should start the story with a little back story of my career. I was a personal trainer at a big globo gym for seven years. When I started I was very happy and I only did 1:1 personal training. I did very well from the beginning and was quickly promoted to manage their group training and at that point, I fell in love with teaching big group classes. I loved the dynamic and how getting more people in a class got others to do better with friendly competition. I taught all group classes for a few years and was then asked to move from GA to MN to work at the corporate facility and manage their group training because the ones in GA where doing so well. I have to admit that I was very young and the term “manage” boosted my ego and I took the job in MN (although I had not learned the difference between a manager and a leader at that moment).

I would say that the move to MN was the start of my disgust with big corporate globo gyms. I wanted to help people and make people better but all they cared about was money, revenue, sales, and profit. Yes, this is a business but it was a very sleazy business. I noticed that the gyms literally had thousands of members and they took pride on that fact. I then began to look around and noticed that it had about 200 pieces of cardio equipment and 2-3 sets of each weight of dumb bells and 12 barbells. I asked around and found out that these gyms had about 1,500 towels. All that sounds like a lot but then I asked myself “what if everyone shows up to the gym?” Seriously, what if 1/2 of the “thousands” of members they have showed up? They gym could not support that nor was it designed to. The big box gyms are only designed to support a small fraction of its members showing up every day. I then began to ask myself a bigger question…” Do they even want their members showing up every day?”

I began to realize that thousands of people who have memberships at big globo gyms pay for a membership and never go. This is the most attractive member to a gym because it’s free money. If you miss a few days or don’t come in for a month they don’t call you and if they do it’s DEFINITELY not out of the goodness of their heart, it’s most likely to sell you something. After about 1.5yrs in MN, I wanted to come back home to GA, which I did. In 2010 I moved to a gym in Woodstock GA which little did I know would change my life forever. By that time I have worked at 6 different locations but this one was by far my favorite. I began to fall in love with the people in Woodstock. They worked so hard and made my job just amazing! I was loving the members but getting fed up with the direction of the globo gym industry. It was sell this and commission that and they made us work 12hrs a day on the last day of the month to try and sell stuff. I just wanted to help people!! I did well and the group programs I ran did very well. I finished number one in the company for sales a few times and received several awards (I made the company millions and I got a piece of paper saying “thanks” and a gold star award) so it’s not like I had a bad career there but I just hated it. I was in my early twenties and making nearly six figures but as you’ll soon find out, money is not important to me.

So, long story short I became increasingly upset with the gym industries either unwillingness to change or lack of ability to change (whatever their problem is) and decided it was time to quit and open Strongside. I knew that quitting wouldn’t land easy with the company I was leaving or in general as starting your own thing isn’t easy. Either way in Nov 2013 I submitted my resignation and my last day in a big globo gym was Nov 30th, 2013. I was FREE!!! I wanted to build a place of excellence. A place that only cared about member results and stayed in contact with people. I wanted to build a place that was the best hour of someone day and a place that people looked forward to coming to. I wanted to literally build the best gym on the planet with the best people who are always welcoming, supportive and uplifting. I wanted to fill the gym with people who cared about progress and becoming better than yesterday while making others better. I do not care about money and didn’t want the gym to reflect that. I wanted to provide the best coaching and training program possible and have people flock to the pursuit of excellence, nothing more.

I knew all this would come but it would not come without the cost of some bumps in the road. Below are some bullet points of things that happened in our first year. Things that nearly put us out of business and things that kept us in business. It’s just all part of the journey :).

The Lawsuit
Shortly after opening, I received a “cease and desist” letter from my former employer. It threatened a law suite and accused me of stealing proprietary information, soliciting members, and being in violation of my non-compete. I thought this may happen but I was hoping that it wouldn’t happen. I contacted the best non-compete lawyer in the area and asked him how we should deal with this. He said that the non-compete will not hold up under GA law because the courts typically side with the small business. Also, my non-compete was outdated and was not current with new GA law. However, they were a big company and had they sued from MN first it would have fallen under MN law and I would have had to fly up there, etc and they would have drained us of resources before we could win. He suggested that we sue first so it’s under GA law. Taking his advice, that’s what we did and on Dec 13th, 2013 we filed a law suit against my former employer. It was a whopping $5,000 to do so which drained a lot of what I had saved after opening but I had to do it.

I never solicited anyone from any other gym and we had people sign a sworn statement stating that we did not solicit them from big logo gym when they joined. Then I started receiving harassing statements from a former employee I used to work with, rumors started flying, and more. It was just getting so weird and all I wanted to do was train people and separate myself completely from that company. Long story short, I sent the harassing text messages to my lawyer, our members agreed to testify against these rumors and we were ready to go to court. Once we had all these documentation things got really quiet from their end and several months later it was all settled. I got everything we wanted out of the suite. I still had to spend $5,000 though.

The Lost Check
When I quit I had stock in the company I worked for and since I wouldn’t be with them we decided to sell it so I’d have something to live off of for a few months after opening. It was thousands of dollars that had been accrued over my seven years. I cashed it in and they mailed a check. Well, wouldn’t you know it, it was mailed but my mailbox was broken into and the check was stolen. Great luck. The check was stolen and deposited at a local bank and the bank let them do it without ID. I received a copy of the check cashed and could see my signature forged, it made me so angry to see that. They just cashed it and walked out so there was no trace. I hired a detective but there was no paper trail at all so they couldn’t do anything. The holding agency doesn’t insure the checks so they could not insure the check and the money was just gone. Money that I had worked for, for years was just gone because some jerk decided to break into my mailbox and steal it. This was at the same time as the $5,000 for the lawyer and spending tons on opening a gym so it VERY tight. Like, counting how many pees you could eat for dinner tight.

Grand Opening
I planned a huge grand opening party and I was thrilled! I knew it would be a success and a lot of fun! The grand opening party went great, we had WOD’s all day and everyone had a blast! I knew that a good bit of my clients would follow me over but I didn’t know how many for sure. I was able to get the first few months of rent waived along with all our other bills waived for the first three months of business since we were a start up. I knew that in order to survive we would need just over 30 members to join on the grand opening. We had 24 people sign up on grand opening day and I was already in the hole from the two other “surprise” financial issues. When we got home, I sat down to go over paperwork and said “how are we going to survive? This isn’t enough money to pay rent.” I looked at the papers and said out loud “we are going to train people better than they have every been trained in their lives. We are going to provide the best coaching and programming in the world. That is all we are going to do, we will think of nothing else, and it will happen.” It sounded crazy but I was all in. I actually applied for night jobs of delivering pizza’s and other jobs to try and stay afloat. They didn’t call me back :(.

Sold My Car
Business was growing but not enough and things were still very tight. I had done very well at globo gyms and had built a lifestyle around that which included a pretty nice car. As things got tighter (turns out running a business is very expensive) I ran out of things to cut out. I jokingly commented on a facebook status of a friend who was looking to buy a car and told him to buy mine. He actually liked it and purchased it. HUGE RELIEF!! I didn’t really need a car since I just moved .50mi from Strongside.

Groupon
I was reluctant of offering a Groupon at first because so many people use it to jump around from gym to gym and don’t really buy into the program. We are different and didn’t want our members to feel disrespected by people coming in and out. Things had been tight since opening (as with any start up company) and I knew we needed to do something for marketing but I didn’t like the idea of mass marketing. I don like marketing because it’s spending money towards something that is not developing your core product and service which in our case is coaching and training people. I didn’t want to spend money on flyers or other promotional materials and not buy needed things for they gym. With Groupon you don’t pay upfront and you split commissions with them on Groupon purchased so I decided to do it. At a minimum, people would come and learn from us and see how we are trying to be the best. We wanted to give everyone the best possible service regardless of if they joined or not. We did want to make sure that people were serious about joining when they purchased the Groupon so we made it different than the others around us. We made our Groupon double the amount of anyone around us and we did a 30-day membership vs a certain amount of classes. We wanted to get people involved and make them love the community. We openly told our current members to make those on Groupon feel welcome and greet them by name. We expect every member to know and greet others by name and that goes a long way.

So we hit the ground rolling with Groupon and we just wanted 10 people to join. If we could get 10 people to join we could stay in business past March. I checked around and the gyms around us were selling literally hundreds of Groupon and we were not anywhere near that number. I knew that the average retention rate from a Groupon was about 10% so I was freaking out because by those numbers we would need 100 people to come in so 10 would join after the Groupon was up. We never veered from our strategy which was to provide the best coaching, programming, and experience in the world. I wanted to make people love it and we wanted people to believe in what we were doing, after all, everything we do is for the member. We got a good bump from Groupon and about 10 people purchased it the first week and then 20 the next week and 50 in just a few weeks. Then they all started to come in and they never left. We were able to retain 93% of people who came in on Groupon and convert them to members! People were seeing great results and they were reviewing us on Groupon and we never got a single review under 5 stars! Groupon literally saved Strongside!

Over the next few months, the classes began to grow like crazy and it was working! We never focused on anything other than making people better and giving the best experience in the world. I had no idea how many members joined and I didn’t want to know – I just kept to the process! Listening to every member and meeting their needs. We took the progress and ran with it and ran hard all the way until we hit over 100 members in just a few months of being open! We were finally seeing the light and knew we would say in business! This was way over my expectations but with more people comes more programs.

The City
Classes were growing and we were happy and thinking of expanding but we didn’t want to do it this way. Just as things were starting to look good the city came in one day unexpectedly and said “we have to shut you down, you’re not in code.” This happened while I was teaching a class so I had to keep my cool but I had no idea what he was talking about and he was a real jerk. After the class finished I spoke with him and he said that all the build out we had done was done so without any permits. A little back story, when we signed our lease part of the agreement was that the building owner would have Latimer Construction (don’t ever use them) do all the needed construction, painting, etc done for us. Part of this included taking out a bathroom. Latimer never got a permit from the city nor checked with the city to see if this was legal. We needed another bathroom because we labeled as “a place of assembly” and we must have two bathrooms. Latimer Construction’s lack of attention to detail and poor business practices just hurt us and we had no idea it was coming.

As soon as I found all this out I went directly to the landlords office ready for another law suite as this was in direct violation of our lease. I presented him with two options 1.) He could terminate our leases and refund us everything we had spent and pay for our move to another location or 2.) There was a vacant place next to us and I said that I would knock down the connecting wall and become one large unit, now having two bathrooms but we would need a discount on the rent. If either of the options were not viable for him we had already contacted a real estate attorney and were ready to move forward with that. Long story short we got the place next to us. It did work out a little in our favor but our rent still went up due to us now having a larger space which we were not planning for but since more people were joining, it was ok.

The Competition
Now we had a great membership base, we had a larger space, and things were starting to settle. We wanted to make our presence known in the community and we wanted to start an annual competition for charity. I wanted the competition to be world class and competition that we could build every year to be better and better. We wanted this to be a test of fitness and we wanted it to be a very difficult competition but we wanted 100% of the proceeds to be donated to charity and I chose Bert’s Big Adventure.

We got a lot of sponsors and had no limits on what events we could offer. We had seven events from swimming to a one rep max, and much more, it was legit! Speedo, Gold Swimming, Recon Photography, and more all sponsored it and gave great SWAG to the athletes. We had people from several states come to compete and it was a fantastic throw down. We had only been open 8 months and we were selling this thing out. During the competition, I stopped to look around and there were hundreds of people around cheering, competing, and the crowd was going wild! It got really choked up and started to cry (hope nobody saw this haha) because it was the first time that I felt like we were building something. I felt like we were starting to build a very special place for people to come and enjoy their fitness and increase their quality of life.

The competition was spectacular and would not have happened without all of our wonderful volunteers and sponsors. We worked for the greater good and although everyone was competing for self-gratification we all were working to raise money for a great cause. This competition has a lot of room to grow and over the next few years it will grow into something huge, something amazing and we plan to make this a staple of what we produce at Strongside.

The Expansion
By the time the competition came our space was again, too small. If I was after the money we could have kept the gym small, kept a small amount of equipment and just ran different WOD’s or gone in waves or something. I’m not in this for the money, we are in this for the members. The day after the competition, I reached deep into my pockets (very small pockets haha) and expanded the gym. We closed for one week and took out 40% of the ceiling, re-painted, knocked down all the offices, and got a ton of new equipment. This is a gym for its members, not us. We got more space and more equipment for the members so they would have a better experience when they come in.

I wanted to have multiple classes going on at the same time, I wanted a wider variety of equipment and more so we needed to do this. Most people hear that I don’t care about money and they think we don’t know what we are doing. I think that makes us very dangerous. I think it makes it dangerous to be our competitor because we don’t do it for money. I do this because we love it. I have an absolutely undying and burning passion to help people. I wake up every day looking forward to coming to work and I will work non-stop, 24-7, and I will not quit. Even when Strongside is the best in the world I will not quit, we will continue to make it better and improve upon ourselves. I am not in it for the money, we are in this to make people better. We are in it to be the change and that makes it dangerous to be our competitor.

When we re-opened we had everything we needed and we got to work! It’s only been a few months since this expansion but for now, it’s everything we need. What we have planned for the next 5yrs is something that nobody within hundreds of miles is doing but it will be outstanding. This is only the beginning and is just the start of great things to come.

Strongside Mission Statement: Thru the relentless pursuit of excellence, make people better.

Pricing:

• $150 for an unlimited membership that includes all of your training

Contact Info:

• Address: 9539 Hwy 92 Ste 110
  Woodstock GA, 30188
• Website: www.the-strongside.com
• Phone: 678-735-0563
• Email: bodiesbymitch@gmail.com