An interview I did on being a business owner

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.