Barbell Shrugged - Building a Fitness Franchise w/ Brandon Cullen, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #788

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

Born into an entrepreneurial family in Ontario, Canada, Brandon Cullen was raised with a front-row seat to hard work and high expectations. Pushed by his father to excel both in life and on the ice, Brandon’s grit landed him a spot in the New York Rangers’ minor league system. But when a career-ending concussion shattered his hockey dreams, everything he’d worked for disappeared overnight. Instead of calling it quits, Brandon turned that adversity into fuel. Determined to create something new, he poured his competitive drive into the fitness world, building the type of gym he wished existed: one focused on aging athletically without the distractions of gimmicks or trends. He knew firsthand the power of structured training and wanted to bring that same purpose to others looking for more than just a “workout.” Teaming up with fellow pro hockey player Kirk Dewaele, Brandon’s first venture was a CrossFit gym, but they quickly saw a gap in the market for a structured, strength-based system. This insight led to MADabolic: a strength-driven gym built on precision, consistency, and science-backed programming, delivering real results for those who crave more. It was about giving people a place to train like athletes, with a methodical focus that cuts through the noise of fitness fads. “Cardio will keep you alive but Strength Training allows you to thrive,” Brandon explains. “Strength complements and enhances every aspect of your life.” For him, MADabolic is more than a business, it’s a mission to build strength, confidence, and a relentless drive for better in everyone who walks through the door, no matter where they start. Work With Us: Arétē by RAPID Health Optimization Links: Brandon Cullen on LinkedIn Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Brandon Cullen is coming into the podcast. He is the owner of the Metabolic Fitness franchise, which is very cool. One, you're gonna start to understand my borderline obsession with the NHL these days. Best product in the world, and he used to play professional hockey,

so you're gonna have to listen to me talk about hockey for a little bit. For all you NHL fans out there. Also, the first I actually heard of Brandon was probably about a decade ago when I owned my gyms and he was just starting to build this franchise. So it's very cool to kind of understand and see when he started it about a decade ago and then how it's grown, how many locations, kind of all the things that go into building a franchise, which in my opinion is a very cool pursuit, something I never really thought about

when I owned gyms, but now understanding kind of like the business landscape and fitness side of things, like how people put all of their ducks in a row to get where they're at, you know, call it a decade later of stacking bricks in the right direction. So very cool conversation. And as always, friends, you can get over to RTA lab.com. That is where you can learn about all things labs, lifestyle performance, testing, analysis, and coaching that we do here inside RTA, the signature program inside rapid health optimization. You can access all of that over at RTA lab.com friends. Let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Show. I'm Doug Larson, coach Travis Bass, Brandon Cullen. Yo, we had to start the show or I would have been talking to Welcome to the Barbell Show. I'm W. Andrews Marner. Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mast.

Brandon Cullen. Yo, we had to start the show or I would have been talking to you about minor league hockey for like the rest of maybe the day, all the way into the weekend. I could have done it forever. We're talking about the differences between each step up on the pro ladder. Hockey being, it's the greatest sport of all time. But as we'll introduce you, introduce you metabolic and all those fun pieces but let's talk sports performance man what uh where'd you play in college did you go to

college or play juniors no i played major juniors in canada and transitioned right to semi-pro there wait what major junior league oh yeah so i was lucky my final year we ended up winning the ohl championship which which was a wild experience so we got to play in the memorial cup so how many leagues are there can we just like for our audience here's how many leagues how do you get to the nhl oh well yeah what we're talking about here is the canadian hockey league and there's three divisions. So the OHL, the Quebec League, and then the Western League make up the CHL. Those are the top leagues in the world for 17 to 21-year-olds. So there's a lot of other leagues, but that would be like your premier league for that age prior to then going to professional.

And if you chose the college route, you'd be somewhere wedged in the middle there. And a lot of those guys that go into college now are like 20 that have played two years and like the queue and well you know it's correct major junior and then they go to college we know what's nice is when i played it wasn't an option as soon as you played one game in major junior you forfeited your NCAA eligibility which kind of sucked because you know depending on where you were from a maturity level like a physicality level I mean a 17 17 year old boy is very different than a 21 year old man and a lot of people get to get into college at that 19 20 where you're much more developed playing with men at that point. So it's now switched, which is great.

And you don't have to forfeit because everyone, when I was playing there, like we're talking, these are caliber players for full scholarships and CWA scholarships that you just took off the table, which kind of sucks. My favorite thing to do right now is one watch Connor McDavid. So second favorite we'll say is to like turn on a BC or BU hockey game. Yeah. And they're playing the other most awesome 18 to 22 year olds in the world.

But the problem is, is that like Celebrini was at what he he was at bc last year's bu i can't remember yeah i can't either one of one of them but he's like the best 17 year old in the world playing against men and no one can touch him the problem or the most fun part of watching college hockey is like sometimes celebrini's on the ice with like an accountant and like you just it's so obvious that he's supposed to be in nhl and that other guy's supposed to be behind a desk just he's just living out the rest of his years in college playing awesome college hockey but explain what you're talking about so So you had an NHL guy that went backwards? Nice. Well, so Celebrini specifically was 17 years old,

playing at BC or BU. They finished second in all of college hockey last year. Right. These guys that are coming up are so freaking good at hockey that they can essentially get drafted at 17 years old, but they go and play like a year of college hockey to just grow a little bit. So they're not out there with like 32 year old men. You just absolutely slay these people.

Yeah. When they're college, they just crush them. Yeah. But also Celebrini, who's 17, likely could have gotten drafted in the first round out of high school. Also has lined up against guys that are like the third liners on

colgate's team that's going to be like you're the guy you called to do your taxes at the end of the year well here's a good thing though to look at it the other way pretty good way to get an accounting degree play some hockey you know yeah yeah accounting degree that way. Yeah, exactly. Are the schools still going to be like Colorado College? Where's the best hockey? Hockey is blown up in college, too.

Arizona State used to be a really good club team. I think they're pretty legit. St. Cloud State, some Minnesota school, right? Even at the professional level like you know players now it's not as attractive to play the winter months in new york city when you can play in scottsdale arizona or you can play in florida so it's really shifted um and and even like when you think of the canadian teams right because of some of the

the money implications and taxes and stuff like that it's not as attractive to play in toronto anymore yeah when you have options like i'm in tampa today playing for the lightning would be unbelievable you know imagine making like a million dollars a year playing hockey and then trump gets elected now your cop your salary just got cut in half. Exactly. You're on freaking Canadian welfare checks playing pro hockey. It's terrible. Sounds like what I was paid.

Ride the bus. Last question about the ECHL. How many times did you have to fight somebody in a given week or did you score all the goals? No, I was definitely not a i would have been considered like a power forward so kind of like a utility guy that was good enough to play on some of the top lines um but also tough enough to step in when you had to um kind of like a generalist that was never a liability but also not the kind of like star player so yeah fighting especially yeah and fighting was part of the game when i played so unfortunately you know so much cleaner now it's like 15 to 20 times a season oh really

they don't fight as much now like even in the nhL they don't fight they can't man it's brain damage everywhere on that stuff go and look at all the guys from back in the day they used to fight every night and they don't it doesn't end up well it's yeah it's sad I know bare-knuckle fist fight every night yeah I know a lot of those guys from that generation too fought a few of them which is sad so um yeah there but there's another component to that story too right um you can do a lot more damage with body contact than you can with a fist like we said if you're flying that's exactly what i was thinking yeah it's like i'm like 25 miles an hour like oh like 40 dude it's like there's been like multiple guys clocked at 39 plus miles an hour

this year what dude that's a car wreck think about how small that rink is to be going nearly 40 the scary thing that i think is finally getting some more focused a lot of the horror and the really sad stories of substance abuse or um ct and all that stuff after the game like a lot of people that fell into the dark side of it there was a lot of layers coming into the head injury right there could have been like some substance abuse trauma that made them the type of player that they were that then you layer that on top of a brain injury. Like, I think one of the thing that helped me, you know, I had a career ending concussion, but I also had something that I got right into and a new passion to chase. And I think there's a,

there's this loss of identity that is just as scary, I think, for professional athletes than just the head injury itself. Now it's a trigger, but if you have something to work towards and something to chase again and something to maybe feed that ego or however you want to place it, if you don't have anything post the game, that's when things can really get interesting. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the RTA program, which we're all incredibly proud of. It's a culmination of everything Dan Garner and I have learned over more than two decades of

working with some of the world's most elite performers, award-winning athletes, billionaires, musicians, executives, and frankly, anyone who just wanted to be at their absolute best. RTA is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros and a workout plan. It's not physique transformation and pre- and post-pictures. Arate is something completely different. Arate is incredibly comprehensive and designed to uncover your unique molecular signature,

find your performance anchors, and solve them permanently. You'll be working with not one person, but rather a full team of elite professionals, each with their own special expertise to maximize precision, accuracy, and effectiveness of your analysis and optimization plan. Arte isn't about treating symptoms or quick fixes. It's about unlocking your full potential and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best, physically and mentally, when the stakes are the highest.

To learn more, visit aretelab.com. That's A-R-E-T-E lab dot com. Now, back to the show. I don't know anything about hockey, so I'm hanging out in the background here. Me too. I'm just loving it. To relate this to something I know more about. You guys can head out if you want we're just gonna talk hockey for another 45 minutes or so i'm digging this no but to your

point though brandon like whenever i watch mma i mean me too we'll have a show on grappling say what so we'll have a show on grappling for you next week so i just don't have anything to talk about at all well i'll give you an example Doug. Like I would be nervous for what could happen to Sean Strickland in a few years. That's the point I'm trying to make. Like if he doesn't have that thing and he has that big loss this weekend, he's already a trauma ridden, like laced individual. So it could go south quick for someone like that and you you know you hope they have the support um to to put them somewhere post-career right which is more

or less what i was getting to it's like every time i see like a like a ufc superstar that takes a couple years off and then like they have the title and they retired and then they're coming back i'm like no no don't do it don't do it Like he, he lost, he lost that, that thing and he doesn't have anything to move on to. And so he's trying to go back to the old thing. He just needs the new thing,

but he doesn't have that. He doesn't need the new thing. He can see it coming. Yeah. Which I think the UFC needs to do a better job of helping people step into that next role.

You know, like help them find their next thing. You know what I mean? See, we planned this transition. like a commentator or something. I'm like, Oh good. Something commentator, a coach,

but he's not going to, he's not going to start fighting. Yeah. Or turn into a gym owner like Brandon did in that phenomenal segue of me getting lost, talking about ice hockey for 15 minutes there. Yeah. Um, yeah, man, tell me, tell me uh how did how did that transition out

before you go and then obviously leading to opening a bunch of metabolics all around the country yeah um so fitness was a huge part of my game right because being a kind of fringe player the only thing i could really control was my off season. And whatever I did to build up my body allowed me to have a better chance against some of the best players in the world. So I kind of got just really obsessed with it at a young age. I lucked out to where I had a great personal trainer from about 16 to 20. And at that time, the hockey world would have done a combination of, let's say, bodybuilding and kind of spinning. That was kind of like the training program.

And the trainer that started working with me, his name was Jeff Benoit out of the greater Toronto area. He had me on bigger, faster, stronger, the football program. So I was Olympic weightlifting, doing a lot of foot speed, doing over speed development. up in camp in like a different type of shape than than my teammates and people that I play against. So the thing that was kind of funny was, at 21, you kind of go home in the summers, and you're doing your skates with people that you played with or against from similar leagues, college, major juniors, professional, and you become buddies, like in your local markets. And people started saying uh well cully that that was like my nickname and and they say do you mind if we just follow like your training program and i'm like yeah shit i better get a certification so i can charge people for it and i kind of fell into like smart training professional and collegiate people just as

partly like training with me so i would would, I would bartend at night, train people in the day, train myself, and then I would go into the season. Well, when the career ending concussion kind of happened, um, it just made more sense to look at the general public because, you know, I, everyone wants to be tom brady's trainer but there's a lot of luck and there's a lot of things that have to happen to get that title and i was real lucky because i kind of saw the very like early years of crossfit like i got introduced to it what year did i year so this is not exactly 2004 three or four i was boxing at a gym in downtown buffalo to prepare for the season and there was

some lunatic in the corner doing these workouts would have been me i was there. And he would put me through what essentially was a GPP finisher at the end of like my mitt work. Right. And that, you know, being obsessed with fitness, I'm like, what is this CrossFit thing? And I did the same thing we all kind of did. So we were involved in the first, the 125th affiliate owner in the world so we got to see where it went from military athlete to like general public and i remember sitting around and being like fuck i don't know if like this is what we should be doing with people coming from jazzercise um i've had that conversation a lot

of times too you know so we were like this is the way i kind of remember it you kind of had sports specific training which i would elude crossfit into and then you had like bally's total fitness like boot camps i was running away from that one really hard towards crossfit that was terrifying that was the worst that was the worst career path that I thought I could ever be on was being like the right. Ballet fitness. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Brian, Brian did that for a summer job. And I remember just going into ballets and training in there. And I'd be like, dude, what are you doing here? Like nothing is, this isn't anything that we do in real life.

And he was like, it's just sales. Man. I don't really know what to say. Like I got to slang these memberships right now. That's what they're doing. Yeah. we do in real life and he was like it's just sales man i don't really know what to say like i gotta slang these memberships right now that's what they're doing yeah selling selling training but here's what's funny and you guys will appreciate this so we kind of like all right where is a you know a strength bias approach in the middle that you could train like an everyday athlete past their sport let's stay away from the barbell strategically i love the barbell but let to build

a model let's stay away from it and find something right in the middle of training like everyday people past their sport and that kind of like morphed into what today is a living breathing organism metabolic that we now franchise the model here Here's what I think's funny. The same level of training that you got at Bally's Total Fitness is now just wrapped up in boutique brands with better colors and better marketing. It hasn't shifted that much to the level of quality you get in boutique. So we really try to offer a much more strength bias coach led system, even though we do, we play in pop culture fitness. I can't deny it. We just do.

It just is what it is. Yeah. So you don't do the barbell thing, but how is it different as far as like the class structure from something like a CrossFit class or any of the other, other gyms that have popped up that are kind of like CrossFit type competitors that don't yeah so we um we don't get into this from a marketing angle because it's just too hard for the uneducated consumer but I think like with your um follow ship I can so like we use energy system

training so we have three different kind of like styles of intervals. So one would be we call momentum. It's like a gradual build in intensity over the course of a workout. Very athletic in nature, like single arm power base movements, jumping and landing, foot speed, but all done to like a two to one work to rest ratio. We also have anaerobic based intervals that are very straight up and down straightforward more crossfit movement patterns where you're you're loaded and you're chasing it with um uh like tough cardiovascular efforts and then we have durability themed intervals that are super different like in our world which it it's like heavy carries, Turkish getup

variations. So longer, slower grinds. And we kind of blend those into a 52 week structure. We break them down into 12 week cycles with a deload week in between. So, you know, like in our world, this is foreign, like this is not what happens in boutique fitness. And I think it's why we get, it's hard to explain, but it's why we get it's hard to explain but it's why we get the results and the retention that we really do um so i did that break it down well enough

yeah yeah it's one level of distinction so it sounds like you have 12 week week blocks so as opposed to cross it that's kind of more random we'll say you actually have like a structured periodized 12 week block and then a series of 12 week blocks throughout the course of a year you know like a whole macro cycle setup we do as best you can in a group model right you have to weigh the idea of like what if someone's coming monday wednesday friday versus a shift worker that's coming friday saturday sunday you have to look at is the individual day providing enough of the stimulus and is any schedule getting overloaded within a seven day structure. So I think as best as you can do in a group model without training individuals, we would periodize

as best you can within a group structure. We even like the 12 week cycles, break down into two week micro cycles, where we are like repeating movement patterns on the days. Just, you know, everything in our industry is like variety, variety, chaos, and ours is very structured and predictable. Yeah. I'm actually super interested in the business model. When did you take it from one to what was the next goal? Really the system side of it. I went from one to two to three to one. Yeah. one to two, I went, Oh, this is now half as cool. And then three. And I was like, now it's definitely 30% as cool. Like that is, um, it did not get doubly as cool when I went to two as I thought it was going to at the beginning part. Um, how do you, how did you kind of one build number one and then realizing, Oh, we've got a good model here that works and then start to kind of begin that scaling process.

Yeah. So we owned a CrossFit gym when we started experimenting with this new model. So we were kind of out in the suburbs of Charlotte and then we went right into the downtown young professional market and started offering this new thing. And it was real apparent quick that we were onto something because all of the weekend warriors, runners, yogis, cyclists, now we're training under our walls when they were terrified of the barbell kind of thing. And I, again, like I said, I love the barbell, nothing wrong with it, but just for being honest about what opportunity was there. So me and my business partner, two guys, no fucking clue what we were doing for growing a brand. We were very cautious on awarding franchises.

We never marketed once to sell a franchise. So essentially, we were opening in markets with people we knew, good markets, not chancing anything. And in seven years, we opened 10 units. At that point, even at 10 units in a franchise model, we were I think what was good is we were pretty humble knowing that if we really want to do this, like we can't just do this, the two of us. So we did take on private equity in 2019. And we kind of reformulated a game plan. It was kind of cool because we had been approached by a few different private equity firms that wanted to like just remove the founders, like here's a check, we'll take it from there. And the check wasn't a nice check to look at. So we thought we were just getting going. And our new partners,

Z Growth Partners, which now is, you know, Metabolic, the franchising system, they said, listen, we're kind of blown away with what you two jokers have done on your own. You have 10 very successful units and franchisees seem to be happy, which is not always the norm. They said, so listen, like we're good at this kind of growth thing and we want you to keep making this thing even better and better and better. So we took about six months to just kind of like blend the systems together. And then we started putting our foot on the gas right as COVID started. But it didn't really slow anything down. So like as of today, we've added 30, I think we're at 41 or 42 units open today. I'm in Tampa launching one today.

We have another 40 under contract. We'll open three more in the next 45 days, Philly, Indy and Lauderdale. And then I think we have six planned for Q2. So we'll be at that magic number 50 sometime, I think this year, which is, I'm proud of the team. Like we have a great team. And I still, again, I think we're, it's weird. Now I almost, I'm saying again, I think we're just getting started. Like I think, but I think what we're doing today won't get us to a hundred like this next jump is another level of expertise we're gonna have to look at how to do it correctly because it's a lot fellas it's a lot yeah um coming from and seeing the CrossFit model and going from like 2005 to 2000, call it 15, 18, 20 and where it is now. Like, I'll just say it.

It feels more watered down and soulless than anything that I ever thought it would have been when I opened in 2010. What do you kind of like, first off, I'd love to know, like, where in your kind of like analysis, like, where is CrossFit these days? Like, what is it? What is it? Is there any impact that it still has on the industry? So it has no voice in where we compete but i'm not saying that's just fitness but like we're compared to sadly like an f45 or like an i i shouldn't say sadly like they they do good things for their consumer right but no one we're never worried about a crossfit in our neighborhood totally i wouldn't and to I wouldn't be worried about them at all. Yeah, one of my good...

No. I can't name drop here, but I do know some people pretty high up in the corporate structure at CrossFit. And they tell me the same thing. They don't really have an identity right now and they're trying to claw it back. I don't know if...

I'll give you my opinion when all the shit went down with glassman and they did have a chance to restructure i was hoping they consolidated and cut the fat and went back to like the best of the best chasing that but it's almost like they went to we're going to do this for everybody and now include medical and like it's a hell of a lift of what they're trying to do today what attracted me to crossfit was i walked into a room as an alpha and was met by alphas and i'm like god damn this is unreal like and being like 27 and ready to chase like it was the best i'm ready to go back right now so i hope and you know the other thing that i think is going to really hurt them i think like hyrox is going to take the CrossFit or the future. Yeah, the High Rocks isn't trying to create a fitness methodology.

They created a cool event and they're doing fantastic. CrossFit in its original form was creating a hypothesis about how to be fit for the rest of your life. That was like the, the going, the walking in and a whole bunch of lions being like salivating over a barbell was the reason I did it. I was, I was a decade in already. And I was like, wait a second, you do this too. Me and my friends are over here trying to kill each other. Now we're going to kill you. Let's do this like right now. Do you know the, the other thing i think this was my experience we when we ran a crossfit we wanted to stay true to the methodology like we didn't want

to have the filthy 50 every day because it was a more attractive business model to sell so we actually followed the wmg pretty much like um main site kind of style programming yeah and if we had a five by five back squat on a day that was the workout and your prep was to get to that core lift i think when all of the specialty certs got introduced, and then customized programming and open gym surfaced, you kind of fractured this community because you'd have this beautiful, singular voice that now in the corner, someone's like, well, I'm doing black box method. And they thought they were better. I'm an Oli CrossFit or I'm a CrossFit endurance person. And it just like, you had this, you had thousands of people in this one community doing this one workout

and now it fractured with everybody doing a different version of it. And I think that I would have loved to see them get back to a main site kind of offering. That would have been so cool. Those, that's that's i i can't remember who i was talking to but i i was joking around that this week it had to

have been yesterday maybe even friday it's like if somebody really wanted to if i really sat down i feel like i could give you the first hour of the level one like i watched glassman do that talk so many times and it's it's still to this day like kind of it's kind of like the methodology that i train to do like i want to go play sports all the time like it is the it's it's at the center of like what i want to be doing is playing non-stop and i lift a little bit i run a little bit I do airdynes a little bit I never will do a wall ball or handstand push-up or a split but um like it I still align with that vision of fitness very very well um all of that because I was wondering um in what you are building now, how do you keep the soul of an entity without it turning into just fighting as hard as you can for the middle like CrossFit seems to have done over the

past four years? Well, a franchising system allows you to control some of that, right? So there's a non-negotiable of what happens in our gyms. The same workout that's happening today in Tampa will be happening in my hometown in Charlotte, or will be happening in Austin, Texas, and me and my partner still design all of our workouts. So there's no, there's not a negotiation, like a negotiation there. That was built off of what I saw happen in CrossFit, I wanted to make sure that we were doing the same thing, creating a bigger

conversation and also to learning from successes and failures of what we were putting out on the floor. Right. So you can control it. But here's the one thing you can't control. Right. Like any franchise or that sits in my position, they always sell the same BS where they're like, oh, we have a turnkey model that'll just work anywhere. And I'm like, you know, there's no such thing as turnkey humans. Like there's a human factor that comes into doing what we do or not. So here's a golden rule of franchising that everyone, when I say this out loud, all the people in my position flip out that I actually say this, but so say you have a hundred franchisees or a hundred percent of your franchisees, you'll have 20% that absolutely kill it and they print money. But those are those same guys. Like

I could sell them a coffee franchise and they're going to kill it too. They're just that type of person, right? So you got 20% on the top, you got 20% that are kind of like your problem child. But nothing really surprises you there. You know, we don't have any under performing units where we're like, I wonder what's going on there. They just seem to be doing everything right. And it's just not like, that's not a thing. You can kind of see what's not happening. But then you have this 60 in the middle that do extremely well. And like, we made a commitment internally that we're going to build everything for the 60 in the middle. I just was on a franchise sales call before I was on with you guys. And I will never sell

him the dream of the 20%. And I also don't spend too much time talking about our underperformers. My goal is to sell a business model that that 60% of people do very, very well financially within our model. And we do everything we do is built for that 60 in the middle. And we let the outliers be the outliers. Yeah. I think that's brilliant. I think, I think spending too much time on either one is going to detract from your mission. I think you're right with CrossFit. When they started talking about weightlifting, so if you bring someone like me into CrossFit,

I'm going to start being biased towards weightlifting. All right, now you have a fracture right there, right then and there. You should have just stuck with their initial train of thought, which you're brilliant because you're not even trying to bring that even close in there. You just got what works. This definitely works. So make your money. I like this model.

It's brilliant. I actually remember when you guys, now that you say you were in Charlotte, I actually, Max, did you remember when they started opening these? No. Yeah. You started talking about the metabolics yeah they were down in charlotte and i i can't remember what i mean it was probably what year was your first one 2011 oh yeah i totally remember this it was like anytime that somebody had a crossfit affiliate

and then put their own name on it was like the biggest news in the world you'd ever seen so you guys definitely that's that's like um probably the first time i um remember hearing about it so that's awesome 13 plus years now 14 years of yeah and i gotta be honest we really have only decided to put our foot on the gas in the last five right and you know scale it is wild like it is this ain't an easy game. You know, when we look at, you know, we do really, really well. 80% of our members are between 25 and 45 and they're in a very high performing like nature. Right. So when we look at a Tampa market, like we'll go as far as like mapping software to look at where the, and we'll use psychographics, not demographics. So we'll be looking at purchasing behavior, core values. And then we try to place ourself

in neighborhoods and buildings that are surrounded by like our type of people. But it's not a science, right? Because I always say this, there's two ways you can look at this, right? It's the analogy I like to give is, you know, when you've went to like a restaurant or you think of the best meal you've ever had, and you always remember kind of like that best meal in your life, right? But if you go back to like the meal, you got to ask yourself, like, was it the steak or was it, you know, when I walked in, you had this really nice smiling person at the front counter that took me to my seat. The waiter came out and they explained the menu and helped me

navigate the menu. And then you have your cooks that are doing these beautiful dishes. And if you do it right, there's the right music that complements the vibe of the facility so like metabolic is a thing all of that in one so if we're not playing the right music that is grittier like we won't pay pop music right so we're going to play more grittier music our tone is a little bit more disruptive we're chasing a high performer but at the same time too right you still got to be kind to people like you can technique someone right out your door if you're an asshole. So it's not just as simple as you buy a metabolic, throw a sign on a building and all of a sudden you're printing money. There's a lot of elements

to running a business where I'm just not a believer there's a turnkey model in the world, especially in hospitality, which I would say we are in yeah the how present are the owners in your uh franchises in the gyms this is something i never got over in my own first business imagine that of like shaking every single hand at 6 a.m and 8 day. Yeah, that like runs you into the ground. Well, that's a tough thing to scale, right? I think, to your point, you can do it as a single unit owner operator. But you know that I don't know. And when we have locations that you could live off of that I lived off one, but if you want to do multi-unit deals, you have to start learning how to build teams underneath you. I would say the most common structures is an owner-operator model, but that's

going to be more of a single unit deal. An absentee investor is the one I don't love when someone just says, hey, this thing looks cool. I got a buttload of money and your ROIs look good. Let's just do this. That's not super attractive to me. I like the owner to still take the role of like, I'm going to manage a powerhouse team below me. They don't have to shake every hand, but they better have someone shaking everybody's hand. And they better look the part and be a nice human. Like, so, yeah, it's a combination of everything. Now, here's the thing. When I said scale is tricky

so now i'm looking at the absentee investor look at this i want to get on this train this thing is building i want to do this in denver i'm like well you know do you where do you do fitness and i don't do fitness but denver would be a good market i'm like i i don't get it but i don't get it, but I don't know if this is going to be the right deal here. Yeah. So we're a lot pickier than... We haven't earned the right to be F45. You throw an F45 on a building in America, enough people know we're not there yet.

We haven't earned that right. I hope one day we can create that level of traction, but we're not there yet. So we have to be a little bit pickier, I think. Yeah. Just even talking about F45, I'm, first off, done. Remember their awesome sales pitch?

Their 13 things. do you know that the rower uses 87 of your body i don't know what 13 it doesn't but i heard that twice in like a 15 minute long sales pitch and then a new person came over and said the same thing to me and i was like this is good this is why you guys have 7 000 locations inside the United States right now. Um, I have noticed, uh, and maybe it's just because it's, it's like more of an established brand. Um, when these things like, and maybe it's like a, uh, a critical mass of like, you guys hit a number, maybe it's like 200 or something along those lines. But I feel like there's all of a sudden there's a tipping point to the,

like, this is the thing and crossfit obviously went through it f45 totally went through it orange theory went through it oh that's where we were not at 45 it was orange theory um they they had their huge people chasing splat points i was in san diego and i saw their convention and it was like a zillion people dressed in orange at it i could not believe how but then they all kind of um uh it it seems like they they hit a plateau um not and i don't think it's of studios that they're opening but of general excitement for the brand is there um, have you noticed that with kind of those, those bigger brands and then how do you kind of hedge against that to keep the excitement

going when something does kind of hit a critical mass? So, you know, I can tell you my opinion and, you know, we have four main partners in the business now, and they may disagree with me because obviously our our private equity arm wants to grow. Right. So but like for me, but collectively, here's the decision we made five years ago. We said, so let's target the top 50 cities in America. And based on density, let's put two to five locations there. And we think if we do that without being greedy, that could get us to 150 locations. I can tell you this, if we do that, everybody is rich and everybody is very happy, right? What I don't know to your question is, does that now make you a noun, a living, breathing thing that everybody knows. And does that give you the opportunity to

chance sleepier markets you wouldn't have done in the past? I don't know. I know personally, I'd be happy opening 100 powerhouse units and be this, you know, I realize this comes from a little bit of ego, like I'm not looking really to fit in. I want everybody to know we're the best at what we do. And I want when we're in a neighborhood, people to know that these can be very successful companies, but if you want to be at your best, there's no question. Right. So if, if at the end of the day, we opened, let's even use those statistics. Like we opened 100 units and 60 of them were really good. 20 of them were unbelievable. And 20 of them were just underachieving a bit.

I could sleep. I'm good. I'm completely good. So my family's good. My loved ones are good. Life is great. I'm traveling. I'm in Tampa opening gyms.

And it was something we started on a napkin over a couple Guinnesses in 2010. And life is good. I got no complaints. Yeah. And all users are all standalone. You don't have any inside of something thing, do you? No. do you or no but like that's where i'm glad you asked that house because like where i would like to get creative is not like over saturating a market but if you could ever

at one point like at 45 chance going into like college like weight rooms like what a cool idea or so that stuff would be cool i don't think well i know what we i i don't how do i say this i don't think we would become a less mills type where any ymca could buy the concept and put it in their doors but let's say because we're you know we're chasing uh excellence right so let's say an equinox or a lifetime fitness wanted to have a conversation okay that's different yeah but i'm not going to the why that's not that's not happening right so at the right i see where you're coming from sure yeah yeah i think that you should go to every single giant state university because that was at NC State this weekend.

And their gym is four stories. Oh, yeah. Paul. Yeah. Sure. I could not believe it. It was like dark outside. So you could see all the lights on in there.

And I was like, is that the bat? Holy crap. Four levels. Every single level was different with all of its own special bot i was like we could just put one little crossfit pb in there and we would have been good one no i agree like no i i think it's you know and i think the industry is um evolving so rapidly but i look at it a lot different than what everybody's looking at. One of the most interesting things, I was in New York for a big, um, Athletic News held a thing called the CEO Summit. And essentially they had like some of the top people in a room for a day and we got to do the NASDAQ closing bell. It was a really cool experience, but I was like the smallest fish,

like in this room, like the CEO of Aura was speaking, the CEO of Whoop was there, like, and I was listening to like what they were seeing. Here's what I find super interesting. The biggest takeaway. So visits are up from 2019 to today. So before COVID, right? Like we're back, visits are up. Here's what I do find interesting. There's a consolidation. So there's less competition and the wellness wallet is what they call it. So people are spending more on themselves per month than they were, but we're not adding any new members. So like the same 20 to 25% of people that belong to gyms, they're belonging to multiple gyms now.

It's not like we're adding these new categories. So what I find super interesting about, you know, everyone talks about like, is boutique going to grow? Is GLP-1 going to play a big role here, which I don't think it's going to grow is GLP-1 is going to play a big role here, which I don't think it's going to create. I don't think it's going to have the effect people think on like a boutique market, right? Maybe it creates a new category. But the one thing I am noticing,

the big box gyms are actually getting cool. Like they're getting better. 100%. They're very cool. Lifetime're very cool lifetime fitness i've been in one for like the last three years i can tell you how cool they are i actually i want a lifetime i'm so bad the reason hi the reason in my opinion that big gyms are cool now is because high school kids are strong like adults move pretty well because they all watch doug larson do technique wand and learn how to move well and high school kids are super strong you like that you like that but i got you here love that plug um the um the plug to five years ago's series eight years ago series how to do a push-up first one um the but high school kids are super strong

like i watched i looked over at a kid the other day that had four plates and a 25 on each side and hit it for a set of five and it was beautiful and i went oh oh that's way different than when i was that age like that is and that's because you got to have like not way different than when i was a kid but go ahead ahead. Well, you're different. You're different. Well, here's the other component to it. You got to have young dudes and girls trying very hard to build culture and a gym. And when we were doing the CrossFit thing, it was like 24-year-olds trying to kill each other in there every single day to get their name at the top.

And that creates the culture and the vibe. And you can do that now. Everyone's just got headphones on. They got their own music, but everyone works really hard and moves well. Yeah. And you're so right because the hardest consumer to get in boutique, right? Because a lot of people think it's very female driven, which it is. We have a good split. We're like a 65, 35, which in boutique is like unheard of but the male consumer today 20 to 30 i mean bodybuilding is back like it's big right now and strength training is huge but the other component uh like what travis said about dying for a lifetime i'm the same way there's rumors in charlotte that equinox and lifetime are bidding on a site like right in the middle of the city which which would be cool.

Whenever I'm in, we have a place in West Palm Beach, I'll shoot to the Palm Beach location just for a day pass because it's fun to see the new shit happening. Right. But like picture this being a consumer, if the membership's about 300 a month, but you walk in and you're like, you know what? They have an almost metabolic class they have an almost soul cycle it's good enough and then they also have a sauna they have a cold tub and they have a beautiful juice bar and they have the scene is there like we've seen this in the uk for a long time they have beautiful health clubs and i think we're just seeing the first wave of these beautiful health clubs in the united states and i love that like i i love competition we seem to be best in markets that are the most competitive so i'm like bring it all like i love

it just more people doing cool shit yeah who's gonna win the the Stanley cup this year? The only answers, Connor McDavid. I want it for him so bad because as a player, I can't even fathom what this guy can do. He's unreal. Like if I, if I went out on the ice with my nine-year-old, I couldn't do what he does to the best players in the world to my nine, nine, nine year old like he is just a he's just poetry in motion to watch this guy play yeah um yeah whoever comes out of

the west is gonna gotta win florida doesn't have a chance this year um the problem is mckinnon and the dude that they just got from Carolina are freakishly fast. Like fast. It's awesome. You can't even watch it on TV. It's so fast. The cameraman cannot keep up when he takes three steps. Yeah.

And if McDaniels wasn't there, yeah. McKinnon is like, he's right. That he's there. McKinnon's awesome. One a and one. Do you think before we leave,

do you think high rocks will take over CrossFit? Do you think they're going to? I've never seen the financials, but I think that High Rocks actually has a more scalable, cooler chance because it's a very repeatable model. I just don't know much about the business of it. But CrossFit, I bet if you looked at the total number of CrossFit competitions that happen in a state from 2015, 2016, like that time to today, it's like 20% of that number. Well, here's my take. They wanted to partner with us.

And it's funny, at old drinking buddy is now pretty high up uh with them so like we were having conversations for the past six months and we were really close my biggest thing to your point is i didn't want to do high rocks programming within our walls because i'm like, we have people competing in your races, placing without doing any of the training. I really, it's not that I, I just think our training is better. Now here's what I don't like. The biggest thing that threw me off was, um, he just shit all over his buddy.

He's a good dude. And by the way, I sent them, i sent all over my buddies too it's cool i sent them all a nice letter of why i wasn't doing and i said listen it just doesn't help us you know in fact like we could expose a group of our membership and excite them about something we don't do i wish you all the best and and all this but I think for now we're going to keep having people do the races, just not take on the affiliation. And like maybe there'll be opportunities in the future to go back to will CrossFit or will High Rocks take over CrossFit? I may have positioned it wrong, meaning I think the person, us, at 25 that found CrossFit, I think that new wave of person won't go to CrossFit.

They'll chase high rocks today. Got it. So I don't think it's going to eliminate the legacy, the Kool-Aid drinkers. They're not going anywhere. But the new wave of fire breather at 25, what can he do today? Or she? I see right that happening are people still drinking the kool-aid though will they get any new kool-aid drinkers i mean they somebody just died like i don't know i don't think i don't know yeah i don't think so yeah and then something

like radical happened and it was like, we're going back to being the best in the world and F everybody else around us. I think that could change the narrative, but I, I think it's grown into something different. And by the way, too,

what they're trying to accomplish with this whole health approach is a pretty noble thing. I think it's going to be a tough lift, but fuck good for them. Yeah. Um, Brandon, where can people learn more

uh metabolic.com is you know if you're interested in like franchise information i think our instagram account is probably the like we got a fun cheeky tone so i think people will like uh just seeing what we do and then um i am super active on linkedin it's where i kind of have isolated all of my uh business of communications, stay away from all the other channels. So you can find me pretty easily on LinkedIn. Just, you know, my name. There you go. Travis Mash. Mashlead.com

in the next couple weeks. We're doing, finally got a really good team. Thank God. Did you win pickleball this weekend? No, but I got my, look. Not actually you. your actually you oh yeah yeah of course that got played he did good it was a weird thing he did uh for some reason there was a mix-up so he did the number one guy in the world didn't get to do singles but um but he got to do doubles he's doing great so uh yeah he sent me somedles I'm super excited to go play that

give that new hip I love that dude can you believe that I am becoming bestie with the pickleball guy I love this dude I'm helping him do his home gym I'm so excited

he's great he's the strongest man in the world and you found a pickleball guy I found a pickleball guy. I found a pickleball. Now that I have a new hip, I'm ready to get it. The old wise man himself, Sensei Mash. Doug Larson.

Yeah, I was watching him on YouTube just the other day doing the pickleball thing. Dude slays. I'm on his friend, Doug C. Larson. Yo, I saw a commercial with him on it on YouTube popped up. They were selling probably that racket you just held up. And one of my kids said something. I go, yeah, that's our client. And they were like, you know him?

He was doing some crazy pickleball thing. I don't know what they do. It's crazy. He's the coolest client ever. I love that guy. I'm Anders Varner. Ben Johns, you're my guy. We are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged.

We weren't supposed to say his name. Yeah, I asked him. Oh, did you? Get over to Arte.com. Yeah, I asked him if I could shout him out, and he said yes. That's where all the labs, performance analysis, and testing, and you can learn more. Schedule a call with me, ArteLab.com.

Friends, we'll see you guys next week.