LIFTS Episode 136 – The Man Who Built Boutique Fitness Reveals What's Next | Anthony Geisler

Has everything changed from that fundamental eye or foundational eye that you had for what made boutique fitness important? So you sold LA Boxing, I believe, in 2012.

You then folded Club Pilates, which, by the way, I think when you acquired it, it had about 30 studios, maybe less.

Yeah.

Yeah, it

was somewhere maybe in the high teens.

It had five corporate stores and I think about 12 or 13 franchises that weren't making any money when we bought it.

And you scaled that to over 1,000 and into exponential.

I think it all kind of came into exponential in 2017.

But now you have SQL.

As you think about your journey… Are the things that you look for in a brand in what makes it successful still the same? Because clearly modality wasn't something that you feel I think was consistent because you look for other things outside of that.

What has changed from back from LA Boxing days to what you're looking for today in SQL?

I mean, really nothing.

You know, we're still looking for those experiences.

The experiences will change over time, right? We saw when COVID happened, you know, obviously it decimated the fitness industry.

And I don't think the fitness industry has actually ever recovered.

And it's been six years.

I don't even know that they're, actually back in some cases they might be in some modalities back but for instance we saw cycling post covid go down 30 percent globally right um you saw flywheel go to zero locations you saw soul cycle close half you saw cycle bar close a bunch If you think about it, if there was 30 percent margins just for easy math and revenue goes down 30 percent, now there's no more margin.

At the same time, post-COVID, you know, when I took over Club Pilates, the math was roughly 250,000 a year, something like that.

The stores were doing about 20 grand a month.

And right when COVID happened, Cycle Bar and Club Pilates were like neck and neck on revenue, on average revenue for the franchisees.

And people don't remember that.

I was bonusing Sean Grove and Ryan Junk.

back and forth for them to compete to who could do the best for the franchisees uh on their revenue because it was so close um and then post coven people just in general like someone you know put out an email to the globe said okay less cycling more pilates um i would love to take credit for We did something super genius in Pilates post-COVID.

But the reality was we were running the business well, but we just continued to run the business well.

And you saw this sort of global explosion of Pilates.