Today we announced we’re opening our third location: Allegiate Century City. This is special for a handful of business and personal reasons but I want to focus on a specific lesson learned: turning setbacks into opportunities.

No one wants to talk about covid anymore including me but it’s central to the story. When covid hit LA, it stopped Allegiate expansion and closed our business. Literally overnight we switched mindset from new location to keeping the business alive. I was so bummed out because though I’m proud of what we’ve built with our first location (we didn’t have 2 locations at the time), our goal has never been one gym. We founded Allegiate to build a nationwide brand with 50+ locations. After 4 years of slugging it out as a small business owner, expansion was realizing that ambition.

So for 3 months, we sat on our hands and made decisions to survive. And then, we started thinking: “Could we flip this from the worst thing to happen to us into the best thing to happen to us? There have to be opportunities here, if we’re looking. Everyone’s terrified, retail is decimated, gyms are closing left and right, buildings are vacant, nobody’s signing leases right now, landlords have to be eager to make deals – might this actually be the perfect time to expand?”

The safer call was to sit on our hands, protect the business, and be thankful we’re still alive because a lot of places aren’t. Expansion felt irresponsible in an environment like this. But after we started thinking opportunities instead of setbacks, playing it safe felt irresponsible. This felt like an inflection point. And flipping our mindset – from this sucks to where’s the opportunity – changed the outcome. Instead of playing it safe, we decided to find another location while we waited for Century City to come back online. That lead us to Allegiate Santa Monica.

No one was signing leases when we signed Santa Monica. I admitted to Steve and Tim I’m nervous signing a lease right now, definitely feel like the rest of the world is playing it safe – am I crazy? They laughed and said they were feeling the same way. Then we signed the lease.

Now we’re on track for 3 locations instead of 2.

One location? Anyone can do it. It’s savage, but possible. Two? That’s better and definitely requires some business chops. But three locations? That’s a special number. It shows this is bigger than the founders. It’s proven potential. It shows you have operations, staffing, and systems in place. Scaling is no joke. Scaling a new concept is even harder. Three is proof: in operations, scalability, and differentiation.

If you’re crazy enough to start your own thing and go for it, you’re always at new frontiers. Because the skill set you had on Plateau A isn’t always the skill set you need for Plateau B. We don’t know what we don’t know. And it’s getting more complex and multivariate.

Success is more probability than guarantee. And there are things that increase probability. What these last 18 months taught me is that if you can switch your mindset, some problems become opportunities in disguise.