What's your relationship with  consumption and creation?

Consumption of content, YouTube, podcasts, books – versus actual creation?

Could be Instagram posts.

Could be blog posts, Twitter,

writing, music, journaling.

The integration or the separation, right?

So using the analogy of a musician,

a musician is always listening to music.

And then you're playing music,

you're writing music,

you're thinking about visuals,

and maybe you're watching film

or looking at magazines

for inspiration on graphic designs.

And it's sort of this confluence

of all these different inspirations

that are sort of coming in, merging

with the unique thing that's inside of you

that makes you you plus all these kind

of external things

in where you live and environmental stuff

that also influences its way into you.

I think some people feel just almost

you have to get something out.

Like I feel like

I got so many different ideas and things

in my head that I just got to get out.

And if I don't get it out,

then it just keeps rumbling in my head

and it's like clutter

and it just gets just gets messy up there

where you just feel a sense

of like working out.

You just feel a pent up energy

that you got to get out.

Just the general process,

not necessarily the outcome,

but the process of making stuff

and putting it out

there is just a good muscle to flex

and get

good at and it's sort of therapeutic,

just pushing shit out.

And then you also just get better

at synthesizing your thoughts and ideas

and I think a cool byproduct

of the process and synthesis

is that you can own your own distribution,

you can create your own opportunities,

you can use democratization

that the world we live

in, in terms of media, of YouTube, of X,

whatever other platform that you want,

you can say something and other people

can raise their hand and start

following you and you can sort of

you can build a presence and

you can leverage that into other things.

But it's also super

hard to create distribution

and to show up consistently like, Well,

what do I have to contribute?

How do I want to contribute?

It is valuable?

Do you have to do all the kind of

growth-hacky things that you see

people commenting on, on X or whatever?

When you follow some of these 

personal branding

correspondents,

leveraging other people's audiences

and sort of having a conversation

with the idea to sort of

bring them back to your platform

and sell them something.

I don't think you just want

to just talk all the time.

And just means to an end in a sense.

I don't think it's just prolific output

that makes you feel good no matter what.

Maybe there's a piece of that art

for art's sake.

But I think to be able to leverage this

in terms of you turn it into freedom,

freedom to do what you want,

financial freedom, creative freedom,

freedom of and freedom to 

and freedom from.

And I'm sure there's this own sort

of chains and baggage that come

from content creation, kind of owning you

and being your own entity,

just thinking about your own relationship

to content

or my own relationship to content

consumption and content creation.

What's the overlap? What's the reason?

What's the purpose?

And am I too heavy in one direction

or the other?

And how does that sit in terms

of how you experience life?

We gifted an ASRV swag pack to our studio managers and head coaches.

Organized a photoshoot then put together the graphic for newsletter promotion.

Bambee, a nationwide remote HR service that we use, reached out for a testimonial interview. This is the final product. It was a fun shoot and great to meet the team behind Bambee.

You never thought about Uncle Franz without thinking about his books, too. 

You walked into his front door, bookcase on the right. You took off your shoes, bookcase on the left. You sat on the couch to watch the Vikings, and the books watched you. 

Civil War, Vietnam, Korean War, Revolutionary War, American History, WWI and II, William James, Fitzgerald, Kafka, Charles Darwin.

Leather bound, thick and meaty. Pages edged in gold. 

When Cindy and Franz moved from California to the farm in Wisconsin, Mom made sure the books got there. Uncle Jim flew out and built the bookshelves.

When it was decided to sell the farm, I heard the books weren’t making the trip back to California. Unless I flew back to get them, Jason said the books were staying on the farm. He and Wendy had a massive project moving Cindy and Franz back to California, and downsizing in life and business means cuts. I asked if I could have the books, so we could keep them in the family. Jason said yes, Franz would be honored. Heather said uncle Franz shed a tear because I wanted them. So I went into logistics mode, started looking at flights and uHauls, when Wendy offered to box and ship them out. 

I have a niece and two nephews who sometimes come over but we don’t watch the Vikings because I forgot to buy a TV. But I do have a lot of books. Marketing, business, copywriting , history, style magazines, classics, textbooks, sci-fi. 

On my 2nd shelf there’s a special stack of 4 leather-bound, gilded-edge books.

The other night, I received 5 boxes from Wisconsin. This video captures what I found. It’s a long video but now you have some context why.

I just finished the chronicles of narnia by CS Lewis and I want to talk about why I read fiction as a business owner.

Because it’s fun. Because it’s inspiring. And it makes you a better storyteller. Which is what marketers are. Religious texts (arguably the most persuasive) are stories.

Fantasy writers (like CS Lewis) are a Ven diagram of painter, army general, copywriter, salesman, advertiser. You design the whole world: name lands, invent geography, warp time. World building is a massive variable. Whereas if you set the story in 1950s New York, everyone immediately has context.

Big stories turn into big businesses with movies, theme parks, merch, niche-podcasts, toys… There’s some multi-national consumer goods company in the US paying salaries to executives, putting kids through college, renting full office buildings… all because a toy lion Aslan from the chronicles of narnia sells hundreds of thousands of units a year.

For those of you less cool adults who don’t spend your free time reading children’s books, here’s some context. The chronicles of narnia was written by CS Lewis in the 1950’s-1960s. There are seven books in the series, each about 100-150 pages.  Collectively they make up the chronicles of narnia.

The most famous and beloved book is the lion the witch and the wardrobe. And…

It was my least favorite and I’m not click baiting you. It’s because it lacked novelty and adventure for me. I knew what was going to happen. Plus my expectations were too high. But with the six other books, I didn’t know where they were going and that was the whole thing.

In the final book “the last battle” narnia is destroyed (which you’ve fallen in love with), you enter heaven, but some characters don’t, and CS Lewis threads reasons why. Faith, believers, nonbelievers, and allegiance to different gods w/ the afterlife gets explained in like 10 pages of a children’s parable. It was insane and I reread the last chapters because it was so good. It’s wild this is a children’s book. CS Lewis takes on huge, existential topics, distills them down, so you read it and you’re like, “holy shit that was dope i see what you just did there.”

CS Lewis is a Christian, you feel heavy religious references throughout the book. A few weekends ago, there was a Wall Street journal article on the endurance of the chronicles of narnia and lord of the rings. The argument was they endure because they’re built on the Bible, centered around concepts people infinitely wrestle with.

By the way – CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were friends who started a casual writers club – they’d meet at a pub and discuss stories. “If you could have dinner with anyone dead who would it be? “ Can you imagine how dope happy hour in an English pub with Lewis and Tolkien?

My favorite character in the chronicles of narnia is reepicheep, the valiant warrior mouse. A true gentlemen.  The alpha male.

Reepicheep stole my heart. He takes no shit from no body. He challenges people to duels to settle disagreements. He bows to greet you. His default response is to glory through battle. Oh we’re surrounded by the enemy? Let’s rush them swords out right at their strongest point and win head on.

I close with a quote from reepicheep:

“If you are a foe we do not fear you. And if you are a friend – your enemies shall be taught the fear of us.“

A couple of months ago, I tagged our HR company “Bambee” in this funny video I made about how they switched my reps and I wasn’t happy about it.

Then video got to their marketing director, who reached out to me about doing a video. And now we're doing a photoshoot, videoshoot, interview, testimonial at Allegiate.

You never know where something can go.

The moral of the story is start putting yourself out there.

Marketing's all about the "big idea." What's the big idea?

Well, today, the Allegiate Propaganda Department proudly presents its Q4 billboard masterpiece titled, “Not Strong? Weak? Afraid?”

Inspired by the rich Los Angeles billboard scene, this large-format shocker plays on the 1-800 INJURED attorney. But the debate is raging inside Allegiate:

Is this billboard too aggressive? Or do you love it? Let me know in the comments of the YouTube video here.

Today's convo starts with inputs and outputs: in business and life. Things you put in and things you get out. As simple as it is, inputs and outputs comes down to that.

Fitness? Marketing? Compounding interest?

Is Allegiate the Berkshire Hathaway of gyms? I've watched a lot of Munger and Buffett interviews and I drop some of my favorite learnings about staffing in this video.

And lastly, do you think this ad idea is gonna work or flop? Let me know in the comments because I'm going to install it this week in Santa Monica.

I wont make this mistake on the a sales call again.

What goes into designing and shipping merch for a 3 location gym in Los Angeles with ASRV?

How memes are about to rock Allegiate’s world, will members notice?

My previously unshared thoughts about the members and staff not wanting to listen to the same playlist for 1 whole month. Hint: get tougher and more appreciative.

Click here to watch and subscribe to my vlog.

Allegiate New York City? 👀 Not yet, but we pounded the pavement looking for potential locations and we cover the whole trip in this vlog.

Interested in investing in Allegiate? Drop me an email cody@allegiategym.com

We just launched a new ad campaign on TikTok and Meta. It’s a dope process but there’s lots to think about. Here’s everything that goes into it.

• What’s your goal?

• Who’s your market?

• How to write copy?

• How do you fit into the feed?

• Do you have the sales systems to support it?

• Can your staff execute it or is it all you?

• What’s your quality control system like?

Alright, Cody thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

We started with 1 gym. 4 years later we were supposed to open our 2nd gym. The day we broke construction on our new location was the day the stay at home order hit Los Angeles. All construction was paused, dream put on hold, and we had to figure out how to save our 1st business from closing.

For about 3-4 months, we just tried to survive. Then we got to thinking, “how can we look for the opportunity here? Let’s stop feeling sorry for ourselves for a moment and think about how we could use this as a positive instead of a negative?”

So we started looking for other locations and ended up finding a space for a killer deal at a time that no one was signing leases. The best time to make a move is when no one else is making moves and that’s what we did. We opened Santa Monica 2nd and then 12 months later we opened Century City. So we ended up getting 3 locations in the time we anticipated we were going to have 2 locations.

It was that mindset shift that helped us scale.

Tactically, as a founder and person in charge of marketing & sales, I literally couldn’t be in more places than one. So I had to figure out how to scale my operations and what I do. We had to find new great people, train them, retain them, and give them the tools to be successful. Then that new hire had to learn how to hire other people.

So we built systems and processes. We looked at sourcing and hiring people like we do advertising for our gyms: how can we market this position in a way that attracts the right people? Then the people start coming in, you interview them based on best practices, and manage your pipeline.

You’re quality controlling. You’re updating how things are going. You’re giving other people the tools they need to be successful and moving as fast as you can.

That’s how you scale, baby!

Link to the full interview here.

This brand is so god damn good at everything.

I can’t get these photos out of my head. The use of the white backdrop gives photo studio vibes but they’re obviously outside a soccer ptich. The balance and symmetry with the goal posts. The use of upright and sideways rectangle. The class and sport.

Derrick drives 2 hours for a workout in CC, why I recommend this gym because of these special things they do, what to do when a deal you want to close just won’t close and how to handle it.