The Sevan Podcast - Berkshire's Plans Revealed & CrossFit's New CFO | Souza's Show

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

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advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. We're live. What's up everybody? Hope you guys are doing well out there. I usually start this with some sort of music, but finally the, uh, the sensors had YouTube caught on and fricking blocked it last time. So, uh, we'll figure out how to get some music in, pump the energy up when we start. I got some, uh, cool stuff for you guys today. We're going to do a little investigation, little speculation, little research. Um, I'm going to put up the live call in, uh, haven't done this in a while, but,

um, I would love for you guys to call in, give me your perspective on what you think, maybe I'm completely off base. Happens more often than not. Or maybe, maybe we're on to something. We'll find out. So a couple, a couple things. Number one, the affiliate video contest is over. As majority of you guys know. That'll wake you up if you listen to it in New Year's. We had our winners last week. Pretty great. It was weird because I was stressed about watching all of them and then doing like a live

watch with you guys and stuff like that. And then it was funny because it was over. And then I kind of missed it. I was like, oh man, we're not going to watch any more of the affiliate video contests. But we will still be playing them as you guys know during the shows

and what have you is there anybody out there comments are a little lonely right now the CrossFit got a new CFO chief financial officer in case you don't know now you know hopefully should thank God you're here. Oh crap. Oh crap. No shit. Yeah, no shit. Um, so CrossFit got a new CFO. It kind of just went, uh, it went unnoticed, slid on by, but we were gonna, we're gonna check out the LinkedIn. We're gonna scroll through. We're also going to, um, we're also going to see what Justin say Justin uh i can't decide if i want to read Hiller in the boys going off on grid league or watch this video what's on the agenda today suza um read are they live or something at the same time i'm alive

those bastards boo people are out here good Good Adam. Thank you. Thank you What do you mean read is that where is that is it somewhere should we look into that too what's happening? I don't know. I just got back from coaching. So I'm a little a Little behind on the times here Calm I want to know in a comment war protecting John Young. Oh dude. We gotta talk. So we'll talk about that too. Here's what's on the agenda. We're gonna talk about the new CFO of CrossFit. We're gonna check him out. We're gonna look at the LinkedIn. We're gonna just look at his background, what he's done in the past. And then we're going

to check out Berkshire Partners website. There's some interesting stuff in there because it'll show you all the companies that they manage. And it's kind of interesting to just see, it's like mostly technology companies, but they have a couple of consumer companies and CrossFit. Well, we'll go over it. So I'll show you guys the managing and the other businesses that Berkshire manages. So you could see all that. We're gonna kind of double-click into CrossFit and look at and try to

predict kind of what Berkshire is going to do. And then I think soon we should probably be hearing something about like the next season of the CrossFit Games, which will kind of tell us what they're leaning towards. Meaning are they going to get rid of the sport? Are they going to minimize the sport? Are they going to sell off the sport? Are they not going to change anything at all? These are all questions we have without answers.

But as we're going through this, please feel free. Call in. I want to hear your guys' opinions on what you think. I also want you, as I give my kind of prediction or speculation on different things that Berkshire is going to do with CrossFit in the future, call in. Tell me I'm way off base. Tell me I'm wrong or not. Whatever. I want to hear your guys' opinions. If you want to completely derail it and talk about something else you can I might hang up unless it's interesting

So there's that oh shit, and I'm gonna do this ahead of time. I'm gonna connect the phone right now to the To the road caster. I Just got a new phone to check it out. No more, no more beat up case, huh? Huh? Now what are you guys going to talk crap about? Okay. So before we get into all that, I know a lot of you guys don't live anywhere near me whatsoever. But if you do, I want to show you something.

I am doing this with, uh, with two other people. Jeremy and Savannah are their names. The podcast that I co-host with them sometimes is called TTG. It's called Through the Grapevine podcast. And it's mostly focused on Livermore. Small businesses in Livermore. We bring people in. We interview them. we bring in city officials like the mayor, the city planning people, like anything that has to do with the politics or the city of Livermore and the businesses in Livermore. The goal of that is to basically do the same thing that we do here on this podcast, but

I figured, hey, if we can make this work inside the CrossFit space, why can't it work inside of a local community? Meaning giving more people opportunities with a platform to tell their stories. We all know that people buy from people. And so if you're a small business owner, to get your story out there, to get your name out there, there's not a lot of opportunities

in local markets to do that. And so that's what we were hoping to provide. And with that being said, we're doing our second, we called it a mixer. Where the f- is it? Why aren't the damn tickets on sale here? This is absolutely preposterous. And I was going to show you guys because we made it big time. We got all the way up to the Bankette Theater here in Livermore where we're going to be

having our next miss mixer and This is already an issue because I can't find the fucking tickets to show you guys So clearly we haven't even got it together here TGG podcast let me show you Look it over. Oh look look, the little more downtown association. Yes, we're going to get right into all the CrossFit stuff. I just want to promote this first.

So if you're in the downtown area, this is our thing. It's Tri-Valley Rise. It's basically reaching inspiring small business entrepreneurs. And the idea here is to build a networking group where... Let me find the tickets. Yeah, there's the mayor. Mayor Marshawn. It's Jeremy, Savannah.

So let's bring up the link here. All right, here we go. Now we got the correct one. Click any click. Okay, so if you guys are gonna be around, you could come in and see us 6 p.m. on January 21st. There'll be a bunch of the small businesses in Livermore in there.

And then we're also gonna do a live podcast with like live on stage, kind of like a tonight's show style. We'll bring people on. We're gonna be interviewing the mayor. We're gonna be interviewing the city economic planning person, the zoning people, like all the things that make Livermore tick.

We're gonna bring them on there and interview them live on stage. I think we'll even have like a local band come and like join us with it. So anyhow, if you're in the area and you want to you want to stop by, you want to hang out, please come over by the Bank at Theater January 21st. I think the tickets are like 20 bucks or something like that. That took far longer. Trying to find that link. It should not have been that hard. Okay. Let's dive right in. Berkshire Partners. For those of you guys that don't know, these are the people that own CrossFit. This is them there. This is the private equity company. And originally, CrossFit was acquired by Berkshire partners in by Eric Rosa. Now I don't have any facts on this because it's all of the company's private. So all the information

I don't really have access to, but what I had learned in the past was that Eric Rosa put up a small amount of his money. And just a quick little recap on Rosa. For those of you guys that don't know, he was really successful in the software as a service industry, if you will. And he worked for a company called Datalogic. I do believe it was his company and they sold the Oracle years back for like 1.2 billion, but up a billion with a B and, um, Rosa was obviously a, a fan boy of CrossFit, especially the games athletes. And, um, I do believe parted up with Berkshire partners and, uh,

put some money of his own into the deal and basically said, Hey, look, I was a huge success over here with data logic. I could bring that same kind of success here to CrossFit and, and I'm super passionate about it. So he put up a little bit of money and then Berkshire put up a bunch of money and rumors have it that there was also other money that flowed into this deal to make it work. And again, we don't know where that came from, or we don't even know what that actually happened because it's all private information. But rumor has it that a lot of that extra money came from an outside source. So, go ahead. We'll accept the cookies.

So here's what this looks like. We have the private equity company and we want to see their portfolio, right? What that looks like. And what that means is just here's all the other companies that they are currently managing. Okay? Harley Last, I truly don't believe that people or companies will ever capture what the CrossFit community is looking for. Definitely not ones that are looking for dollars. It's... And you guys have heard us talk about this

all the time. This industry, especially CrossFit in general, is hard to look at in terms of like, hey, I'm gonna do this and get rich. It's... Yeah. Tough game. Okay. So here's all the different companies that they currently have under management. Okay. These are all former ones. So these are all companies either that they wound down or most likely sold to another larger company, another private equity company. So as I went through these and I went through each one of these companies, I wanted to know two things.

And we'll just start here up at the top in the left is number one, this. What type of company is it? What type of company is it? And then if you look at the investment type, this is Berkshire kind of why they acquired the company. Why they acquired the company. P private equity is P. Oh, got it. I truly don't believe that private equity people or companies will ever capture what CrossFit community is looking for. or companies will ever capture what CrossFit community is looking for. No, you have to...

We'll get into why I think that is too, why I think they're missing the mark. So this is one of the companies. Here's what we're looking at. What type of company it is and why they invested. So why they invested is important. Management recapitalization means that the company might have been in a little bit of trouble. It also might mean that it grew to a certain place to where they needed to bring other

people in to help grow and scale it from the point that it's at. And that's pretty common with certain companies. It's like you reach a certain point and you're like, damn, in order to make it to that next level, we need a lot more infrastructure. We might need some money for either inventory or people or whatever the case is. In this case, with the technology company, usually you're investing in more people in more technologies to continue to grow it. And so sometimes they'll do that as well. Now, if we go here where CrossFit's at, a couple of interesting things. So that one was technology company.

Oh, look at this. This was weird as shit. So I clicked it in in this company here, Access. It's a service in industrials. Again, management recapitalization. But look where it's located. It's in Livermore. What are the odds of that?

Crazy, right? Okay. So, as we go through, you saw that one was like services and industrial. We had a technology company. Majority of these when we clicked was all like communications and technology. So they're real kind of heavy in the tech and the software industry. Now, hold on. We'll bring up the exact... Okay. So, sorry, gotta get back here. I got so many tabs open trying to have all these prepped up. Okay, so management recapitalization.

Basically, and then here, we'll read the exact definition of it too so we're all operating on the same sheet of music. Essentially, it's the recapitalization allows the owners to sell a portion of their business while retaining enough to benefit from the company's future growth. The two most immediate results of a recap are the original owner's role in the business changes and the company's capital structure shifts. Basically, try to hold on to as much as your company has you can because once those guys come in with the money, typically they want to have some ownership.

A hardly last off topic, but could you look at Jeff CSCS video on why CrossFit is not, um, applicable for special forces? I thought he made a lot of good points being that I wasn't a part of that community. Oh damn, that's a thank you. That's a great suggestion. We should definitely, uh, look at that and break that down. Let me make a little note here.

Hardly last, maybe not for this show, but I'm definitely interested in doing that for a future show because I worked a little bit with a recruiting office for the Air Force special operations and yeah that was interesting learning about that. Okay so now you have the definition of recapitalization so essentially they want to grow. The owners don't know how to get it there. They need some more money. They need some more people. They need some more resources and they come in. So let's bring this back up here. So we got the portfolio so you could see him one more time. Okay. So here we go. So kind of interesting because as you click around and I'll click in across it in just a moment here, but, um, the Eldorado foods consumer,

right? Acquisition platform is what they're looking for. And if you look here, the current Berkshire team, these people down below are the ones who are managing. So they're the, they're from Berkshire, but they also help, um, out with, you know, they're, they're managing the, the company that Berkshire is managing. So these are Berkshire's people. They know their roles.

They come in and assist out. This is essentially like the board or people of the board, what they would make up though. Okay. So consumer, right? Because El Dorado Foods is a platform to invest in and build a portfolio of Latin inspired food and beverage brands. So this is a company that looks like it buys up a bunch of smaller food companies.

Latin inspired food and beverages to be specific. So here's the interesting thing. And I wish I knew before and I looked earlier because there was a couple of changes. So now as we click in the CrossFit, it's consumer. Which is kind of interesting, right? And like, I guess the affiliate model and because they sell training directly to individual people,

it might just be categorized as consumer. I don't know if it was that before and something changed. I'm assuming it was probably consumer the whole entire time. But if you remember the show I did a while back when we talked about Jenna Hocka being hired in the success she had over at Barry's X with like the app, the direct to consumer app.

And you guys have already heard me kind of talk about that, but it does raise some interesting points, right? It does raise some interesting points. So the investment type here was growth capital. So this basically means like, Hey, we're going to go ahead and own this company and we're going to try to grow it. We're going to invest some money into it. And we think that we could, we could do some, uh, we could do some great stuff with it, help grow CrossFit and then look to resell it for a really high multiple. Okay. So if we go down here, here's the two managing partners for Berkshire when it comes

to CrossFit. Marnie Payne and Ross Jones. Interestingly enough, there used to be a third one. And that's how I know there was some changes made to this because there used to be a guy named Howard that sat here. So something happened. He moved off. Maybe he doesn't even work for the company anymore Maybe it has nothing to do with CrossFit altogether, but just something interesting to note because he was on there Now he's not Okay, so That is uh the portfolio companies That Berkshire currently has underneath its management here.

So a bunch of different ones. What did I see the comment? Kyle, weird side note, fast growing cheese is actually pretty cool. I put two fig trees this spring and they are thriving. Nice. So you actually use, okay, so Kyle's referring to this. This is another company and they are thriving. Nice. So you actually use, okay. So, uh, Kyle's referring to this. This is another company that they have here. Um, again, management recapitalization and, uh, it's a consumer and technology company. Fast growing trees

offers consumers a broad variety of high quality trees and shrubs throughout its branded websites, frat, fast growing trees.com, brighter balloons.com and planting tree.com. Amazing. So Kyle actually used, Kyle's actually used this before. That's cool. All right. So let's travel over now.

We're going to take a peek at damn, this focus is always an issue. If Jonathan or tag is listening, he's going to yell at me. So I'm like, I told you how to do the setting to make it not do that. Okay. Um, all right. So LinkedIn, here we go. Here we go. I, you guys are going to have to phonetically spell his name out for me here. I don't know about that one. trying to pronounce that old old dal old Dale Okay, so this is a mr. Snyder here is the new chief financial officer at CrossFit LLC don't send me no messages main So this gentleman here Dali Dali

Kyle I had no idea they would, I had no idea they would owned by, they were owned by Berkshire. That's how those freaking private equity companies work, dude. Like when you actually look at it in terms of like food products or beauty products or different things like that. A lot of these private equity companies will take it from mom and pop owner. They'll do the management recapitalization. We already went over that. okay, now we hope to sell to Procter and Gamble or one of these other really massive companies. So that way, essentially, it's going through its phases. But the crazy thing is once it ends up in the hands of Procter and Gamble or one of these other massive conglomerates, that's why business ownership is so fucking important at an individual level. Because what ends up happening is like these private equity companies and these other massive venture capital firms, like they end up owning everything.

They end up owning everything. And we could do a whole other show as to why that is. But yeah, okay. Susan, are you allowed to post any of the affiliate videos on our social media? Yes, Ben, please post away my guy. If you were, um, uh, if you made a video for the affiliate video contest, please post those up, um, get them into circulation.

And uh, some people made more than five. If you guys made more than five and you want to put them on rotation, please email them to me at Matt at media launch.io and we'll put them up on the channel as well too. Uh, Hey Barclay, what's up, man? It's you too, buddy. Hope you're well. So, oh yeah.

Rambler knows private equity owns healthcare, pharma, auto real estate. Exactly, dude. Okay. So this is, uh, what'd you guys say his name? What were we going with? Dolly Dolly bore dolly dolly bore. Thank you judy You know that I have to have it spelt out that way Just so uh, just so I could pronounce it so, um

Super smart guy, like hands down. I mean, a lot of the people that Berkshire has, um, hired have a pedigree of prestige and a Mr. Snyder here is no exception. So first off going to, uh, education. He, um, he went to Harvard, Harvard and got his bachelor of arts government. It says he also played on the varsity men's tennis team at Harvard. I think you got to be pretty good to do that, right? But I don't know shit about school. Um, and then he went and got his master's of Administration, his MBA, at Harvard as well. So he's a Harvard guy, an Ivy Leaguer. And after that, he was a consultant for a little bit. He was a finance manager.

He was a consultant. Then he was a director of business planning at True Religion Brand Jeans. Then he went from director of business planning to CFO of Sugarfina. Sugarfina. And I want to show you guys these because of course we did a little research and we just went and checked out some of these companies. So here's Sugarfina's official website. It's basically like these like looks like a high-end candy store essentially. That's what I'd imagine this is. High-end candy shop Sugarfina with some Hello Kitty branding licensing deals. So that was the first place. And again, like, and I don't mean that as like I'm knocking on on him for working at

a place that sold sugar. Like it's fine. That was back in 2015, 2016. Then after that, he became the chief financial officer. I should bring this up so you guys could see it. Sorry. Then after that, he became the chief financial officer of true true religion brand jeans. Do you guys remember that? Did you guys ever wear true religion? I couldn't afford that shit. I think those are like the jeans are like a couple hundred dollars and they look

like they've been ran over and dragged through the mud. Is that correct? Sugarfin is a skin parent. No, no candy candy candy. Yeah, you got it rambler. You got it Jose I've worked with CFOs before and for sure they're going to Be some cuts. Oh, dude. They've already cut a shit. So yes high-end candy in LA. Yeah, that's exactly what it looks like didn't it? Oh high end candy in LA. Yeah, that's exactly what it looked like. Didn't it? Um, Oh, Tanner, sorry, Mr. Your comment up here. Susie as a successful affiliate owner, what single decision besides hiring two brain that you've, uh, that you've made, do you think moved the needle for your gym and for, for your gym? Sorry, I can't read today. The most engaging members. Okay. That's a great question, Tanner. We'll save that maybe towards the end or again, I'll put a little note.

Maybe that's a whole show. And actually, truth be told, in all honesty, I did not hire Two Brain Business. I just read all of the books that Chris put out for free, um, help first, uh, two brain business. I think 2.0 was the other one. Um, uh, what do you have farmer tinker thief, like the different stages of entrepreneurship. Yeah. So I read all of his stuff. I used to follow Chris Cooper's blog back in the day, and I would also read all the books he recommended, um, like profit first from Mike McConnett, um, uh, emith revisited from

Michael Gerber. Like there's just a bunch of stuff. So I actually didn't officially ever hire them, but I used all the free resources, uh, possible. Um, okay. So she financial officer of a true religion brand jeans. And I was thinking about it, too, because I was like, wait a minute. Like. What happened to that company used to be huge, and then it kind of disappeared.

And that is basically exactly what happened. So if you look at this, they didn't like go away, but they filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. And Mr. Snyder was the CFO that took them through that process. And I was just reading through this article here by Financer Worldwide. This was in September of 2017. So quite a ways away ago. But basically, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and the listed assets and

liabilities ranged from a hundred million to five hundred million. So basically like the company was just underwater and it couldn't pay back its debts. The company reached a restructuring agreement with lenders, which will reduce the company's debt by over three hundred and fifty million. So basically like, ah, we can't pay this. We're gonna go ahead and restructure it. We're gonna keep the company alive. We'll negotiate with our lenders as to what we can pay, and then we'll continue on.

Imagine if you had that same options and then just could keep rolling, but it's a little bit different when you file a bankruptcy on a personal level versus when a company files for bankruptcy. So two different things there. But again, there's nothing really that stands out in this article here. But Mr. Snyder did talk a little bit about some of the decisions that they made. And then it'll kind of go through and like, it explains it in all these really big words

that basically say like the company ran out of money, they had to go back to the drawing board, they had to negotiate with all the people that they owed money with, they lowered that, they restructured some shit and then, and here they are, now they're rolling again. It was kind of funny because they actually noted here why this happened. Right.

And basically they said, I can't find the exact portion, but they were like, oh, right here, the volume of retailers either going out of business over inventory or closing a significant number of physical locations has created a highly competitive promotional environment. And as a result, the company had to offer big sales to drive traffic. True religion said in its bankruptcy filings. And so basically they're like, yeah, a bunch of shit moved online and we couldn't keep up with it.

It says right here, the company went private in 2013 and it was acquired by Towerbrook for 835 million. Jeez. And shortly after, and this is in quotes from Mr. Snyder himself here, begin experiencing declining sales caused by general trend of consumers moving away from traditional retail to online shopping. So why is that particular portion of this important?

Well, let me ask you. Do you guys think that consumer behavior in the crossfit space has changed? Meaning, are people still buying a lot of seminars and his affiliates still opening up all over the place? Hi Elizabeth. Good to see you. True nutrition is probably one of my favorite products. Not only because it comes quickly, but because of the contents inside of it. at a very affordable cost I know I'm getting the best high quality grass-fed way That's anywhere on the market, but it doesn't just stop there. I like the debiterized

Hydrolyzed whey protein protein isolate. I know it's a mouthful. You can just call the DHWPI it is fantastic. There's one pound bags only $18 so if you are like me and your health is very important to you and you want the best for your body and you work out and are buff like me and need a lot of protein to maintain your muscle or you want to build more muscle like my beautiful son Avi, head over to True Nutrition and get yourself a bag of protein today. For a limited time, our listeners at the Sevan podcast get 15% off.

That's twice as much as seven and a half percent off your entire order when you use code SEVAN. That's N as in Nancy. Use that code at checkout and get 15% or 7.5% times two off your order at truenutrition.com with promo code SEVAN. Take the guesswork out of your nutrition with true nutrition. Almost perfect. Get with the programming, like moving away from in-person competitions. I hope that's just it. I hope that's just it. But that was just interesting, right?

Like, okay, so why is the company having issues? Oh, well, consumer behavior changed. Well, newsflash. Consumer behavior changes all the freaking time, all the time. And so, I don't know, just think just think about that okay let's just keep going I don't want to plant too many seeds in your guys's head because mine it's getting all crazy you know I'm saying Jar Jar Binks thank you for joining to the show welcome welcome also the fashion world is fickle and change change quickly and their designs are no longer desirable. Isn't that the truth? Like, one thing that will change quite a bit in the fashion industry is like, it's all

the rage. You're going to buy, you know, jeans that are torn to shreds that are 10 times too small and have holes in them. And then by spring of that same year, it's like, Oh my God, I wouldn't be caught dead in those. Now here's the problem. And the way that I see it is up until CrossFit, the chat, the trends in the, in the fitness industry were very, very similar to the fashion industry, meaning like everybody was on the Atkins diet and did Zumba. And then it was the South Beach diet and we all did this other craze. And you guys know all the stuff from the past that happened. Whether it's a jazzercise thing,

whether it's a Zumba, the most recent ones that we're seeing now are Orange Theory at 45. There was a thing called 9-. There's an Omni fitness type stuff. And that's just more or less brick and mortar. You guys have seen all the crap over the years, the electrical app belt that shakes your abs and everything else. If we're going to have to file some sort of bankruptcy claim or say that, If we're going to have to file some sort of bankruptcy claim or say that, um, you know, Hey, consumer behavior changed and there's not much we could do. We have to resettle all these and, you know, resettle our debts and restructure the whole thing and file for bankruptcy.

Um, P 90 X, how could I forget that one? P 90 X. I mean, I did that. Everybody did that shit. Um, Jazzercise,ercise clemens owned by How do you say your mom's name verna howell is still going strong 50 years That's fucking savage, dude That's awesome. Jr. You know, it's funny. Um yesterday when I was listening to uh

Get with the programming a bill and chase had tyler wakens on by the way If you guys haven't seen yesterday's show on, by the way, if you guys haven't seen yesterday's show, the discussions and the conversations, uh, towards the back end of that about just CrossFit and in there kind of where they see it at now and where it's going is great. You guys should definitely check it out. In fact, I'll probably play a little bit of it if we have time towards the end of this, but, uh, yeah, chase said something about maybe chase or bill said something about Jazzercise and immediately I thought of JR. I was like, don't say that because his mom's had a studio for forever. But anyways, a lot of the trends happen in the fitness industry

a lot, right? So I just like, that just raised the red flag for me when I realized, damn, that's the main thing that they're stating for true religion. Again, we're talking about genes versus fitness here. So, you know, there's quite the leap. The next one was back to Mr. Snyder's resume here. The next one was chief financial officer of Chrome Hearts. Chrome Hearts. Had to look that one up too. But that company, and there wasn't really anything that really like stood out to me, um, with that company, other than the fact that like, they just make cool little jewelry trinkets. So that's cool. Um, which is, uh, whatever it's selling widgets, but here's the thing. If I take that, you know, what he said with

the true religion thing, meaning like, Hey, stuff just like trends changed. And then we look at here what he was chief financial officer of each company. Every single one of these companies sells a product directly to the consumer. So true religion, the sugar, Fina, that was more brick and mortar. So it was true religion. Chrome hearts, I think was more of like an online thing. They might have some more brick and mortar stuff. Derma, uh, Derma logic, like all Derma logic, uh, all of these things are products that are being sold.

But when we jump up to CrossFit, it's kind of weird, right? Because you're like, well, you were selling items to people before, and now we're not necessarily selling items. Or are we? Dun, dun, dun. And that's where the speculation comes in. Another thing to note here, and I think somebody said it in the comments already. What did Bernie say? Hello, Bernie's

comments. Uh, Jr should run a studio for stoicized school of stoicism with Jr. Um, Bernie Mac C suite executives are usually in their roles for three years max. Okay. That was exactly what I wanted to touch base on. So if you look at all this, it's like two years at true religion. Then he was only at 10 months for sugarfina and then right back at true religion. So something happened there. He probably left true religion, uh, for the opportunity of CFO for sugarfina. And then I bet you like true religion reached back out 10 months later and was like, Hey, we need your help to take this thing through chapter, uh, 11 bankruptcy. Jenny what's up? Great work on all your stuff so far.

Dense updates with Jenny. Really cool. CK Kevin, I want my CrossFit fish oil. And not just a five panel hat. So something happened there. I'm thinking true religion was like, hey, come back and help us out with that. He was there until January of 2019 and then immediately rehired of in February. Now look at this. This guy clearly is good at what he does because look at the

dates, November 15th, right? Or 15th, November, 2015. And then he immediately starts in Trinca Fina, November of 2015. He leaves in August of 2016, immediately starts back up at True Religion in August. That same month. The biggest gap we see here is one month. January 2019, he leaves true religion. February 2019, a month later, he's hired at Chrome Hearts. June of 2022, he leaves. July of 2022, he's hired with Dermalogica. September of this year, two months ago, he leaves Dermalogica and he's hired in the same month by CrossFit. He's hired in the same month by CrossFit. So when I see somebody that's a, uh, C-suite level executive like that, that's just like moving that quickly.

The first thing I think is that this guy is hired with a skill set and they need that skill set over at CrossFit. And, um, that was the same thing we talked about with, uh, Jenna Hawke. Like if you look at the excess that she had with Barry's ex, um, you could tell that she was sought after for a specific reason. And, um, I just think that it's this guy, Justin, he's a specialist. Correct. So now the next question is a specialist in what, um, Elizabeth, he'll be at

Peloton Peloton soon. Hi Trish. Welcome to the show. We're, um, we're doing a deep dive into CrossFit's new CFO and we're checking out what's going on over at Berkshire partners. Um, yeah, so he is a specialist, right? So then the question is, is like, what does he specialize in? Now there's two things that come to mind.

Number one is, uh, he sells consumer, like consumer goods, direct to consumer products, right? Um, the second thing that came to mind was the fact that he took true religion through chapter 11 bankruptcy. So he filed for it. He helped the company through that process, which means two things to speculate there. CrossFit moving more to a direct consumer model, like we'd speculated in the past, or CrossFit getting ready to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Now the question becomes is, why would they file for bankruptcy? Are they looking for a restructure of currently their debts or the liabilities that are holding on the company? Or did they hire Mr. Snyder here because they're gonna pivot more to a direct consumer model and they need kind of the financial expertise to make that happen.

Justin's going with restructuring. Okay. If you guys have an opinion on this and want to call in the numbers across the bottom, don't be afraid. What debts could they possibly have? Well, that's a great question, Trish. So let's think about that. Um, what are some stuff that CrossFit has invested in in the past?

How much money have they invested into things, um, in the past? And were those things successful? Now, a lot of them, we don't know. Some of them I've heard like, you know, through the grapevine. Um, I know that the precision health thing or wild health or whatever it was called prior to this, um, prior to this second, uh, what you would call it, um, Jenny's comment threw me off because there's some other information I have on that too. Uh, Jenny, um, sorry, shit, Totally lost my train of thought. Okay. We'll just

go right to Jenny's comment. Maybe it'll come back. Oh, wild house was it done? Thank you, Tris. Yeah. So they invested, I heard quite a few million dollars into wild health. It was a complete dud. That was Rosa era. Correct. But these are all still debts that they're going to take on just because Rosa was there and Rosa left. Doesn't mean that all that money that was invested into, uh, initiatives in the past, like go away with Rosa. They're still carrying all that, you know, the financial burden, um, of those initiatives. And I know you probably know that Trish, um, I was just utilizing your comment here to, uh, um, what you would call it, make that point. So they had wild health. I also heard that CrossFit a while back invested into some sort of like clothing

manufacturer to make it easier for affiliates to get like t-shirts and sweatshirts and like that type of shit inside their gym. I heard that was a complete dud. Um, I heard they paid a pretty penny for the, uh, ham plan that programming that is now cap. Not to mention all this payroll. I do not think Mr. Dawn fall is sitting at the helm of CEO because he's just a good guy and wants to volunteer his time.

I don't think that Mr. Snyder here, our new CFO is also volunteering his time. I don't think that Mr. Snyder here, our new CFO, is also volunteering his time. I think that if you look at the pedigree that he has, the pedigree that Don has, I imagine that their salaries are in the mid to higher six figure range. And all of that is going to be stuff that the company is paying out. And depending on how profitable they are, which we know they've been struggling, who knows? That could all be money that's been reinvested. So that type of stuff and a bunch of other things that we don't know about could potentially be debts that they're carrying on the companies.

Lauren, bring in Elon. Agreed. Agreed. Wild health was a disaster. Yeah. I thought wild health was just a sponsor. No. So some of these things that these initiatives and different things that CrossFit is doing, including its current medical

society is not things internally that are theirs. And so what I mean by that is like, let's say Captain Rogers and I have this great plan and you know, we're going to say we're going to run a medical practice inside of our affiliate and all that, but we want it to be synonymous with CrossFit. Then essentially me and Captain Rogers would go to CrossFit, pitch our idea and they say, okay, well, what do you want from us? And we say, we want rights to use the name. And then CrossFit says, okay, well, here's the deal.

Here's what we agree upon. You're going to pay us or we'll get a certain amount of this revenue or whatever the negotiation is and ends up at. And then now Captain Rogers and I get to call ourselves the CrossFit blank without actually being internally owned by CrossFit. And so there's been a lot of things that kind of happened that way. The other problem is too, is that that's not debt. No, it's not debt, but it's money that Berkshire has dumped into CrossFit. Right?

Unless they're profitable and it's self-running. You know, it can pay for itself. I don't know about that. Trish, I reached out to them and figured what they were up to in their offering was limp. Like a limp handshake. It was worthless. They did blood work to determine some woo woo health metrics.

Oh shit, so licensing. Yep, exactly, Captain Rogers, exactly. So the issue with the licensing thing is like, I just wish they are more forthcoming with that type of stuff. Like, hey, this actually isn't owned by CrossFit. We, we're partnered with them or however you want to say it. And maybe they did, but then they kind of swept it on the rug. But I think that that stuff should be made more clear.

Uh, hardly last Dawn has been a disappointment when I heard a Marine combat officer was going to be taking over. I thought the BS was going to be squashed. Every Marine officer I met, um met so far was an absolute stud. And I don't know if we could personally tag Don with that because we don't know what he's dealing with on his end. You just don't know. So he might have ideas and different things, but the board maybe or maybe not might not

let him have the autonomy to do those. Some people I've talked to say that Don has all the autonomy, that it's up to him, that Berkshire is letting him just roll and like do his thing. And then I've also speculated that they don't have, Don doesn't have as much autonomy as we believe him to have. So, James, very interesting, my friend. Perhaps they are expecting to be sued into oblivion. Damn.

Uh, Captain Rogers, it may have been a disasters, but I don't see how they lost money on it. Well, what happens if the wild health thing wasn't going to be a licensing and they started to dump a bunch of money into it to fund it. And then it went nowhere because that's what I think what happened with wild health. And then I think they ended up learning their lesson and then maybe doing a licensing model with the current one that's on there, the medical society, current one. Um, again, I don't have any have any this information so it's just speculation people that know inside across it might be laughing right now and saying oh he doesn't know anything

he thinks you know so much and then I would laugh and be like you guys fucking suck at communication how about that? Alright so here's what we got going down just to wrap up here not Not a lot on this gentleman. Like I did a pretty big deep dive. He's not on any of the platforms, the Facebooks, the Instagrams. Captain Rogers, why would they do that? Dude, exactly.

Exactly. I mean, the same reason why they would pay a ton of money for CAP, the whatever, the affiliate programming. Exactly. I mean the same reason why they would pay a ton of money for Cap the whatever the affiliate programming. It's like Why would you pay millions of dollars? Did yeah. Yeah. Yeah And maybe they were just super flushed with cash at that time So they're just the you know And maybe Rosa was sitting at the helm and had more autonomy and just threw a bunch of money at shit. I don't know. Did you see that great league is coming after John Young? I hope so.

I love when John Young stirs up some controversy because he's like, his mouth gets him in trouble, but he's like one of the nicest guys ever. So it's like, you actually knew him. All right. So that's basically the rundown here on, uh, the new chief financial officer over at CrossFit. At least we don't have him at South by Southwest saying CrossFit sucks. So that's a plus. Um, and we'll kind of keep monitoring this as, as it goes along. Uh, Trish wasn't, um, grid founded by Craig Howard. No, it was actually founded I think by toting budding who used to be the media director for CrossFit. And then he left to kind of pursue the grid league thing. Now, Craig got involved with a couple other people to buy a team. It was called like the SF fire, I think was the team they bought or something like that.

And. That didn't go too well. You'll have to go to Craig for like the full story on how that broke down. Grid League Bro consequences have have action. Captain Rogers, maybe Wild Health didn't pay their sponsorship fee. Oh, well, could be could be. All right. This other piece here, which was interesting, was a. You guys have probably seen this before, but this, this just kind of led me to like Don's deal here where it was, um, his LinkedIn. So we have like head operations, a Pinterest VP of online operations for

Facebook, but at least there's like one month gap, one month gap. At least here there's a little bit more, right? February to whatever. And then he was there for six years. Then look at that. He's still sitting on the board here of a neuro international. So he's not exactly. And that's typical that CEOs it's a razor sharp focus on enabling people who face systemic barriers to move from substance farming to agriculture and a sustainable business model. Oh, interesting. Okay. We don't hear much about that. But then CEO from August of 2022 until now. It's kind of interesting, like some different gaps. Makes it look more a little bit more realistic, like it wasn't sought after, but he was just like doing stuff. Manager of

online sales and operations at Google. Platoon commander, States Marine. I mean these freaking guys are um they got a pedigree huh just for the hell of it. Look at the Koonz. Oh so he's still sitting on a board too. New Dawn Ventures is investment platform compromise of experienced founders and investors providing growth capital and shareholder liquidity to emerge brands in the consumer health and wellness space. Hmm. Hmm. The bar method was CEO to president. Yoga works. Highland Capital Partners was a principal Menlo Park, Santa Monica Bay Area, Seattle, Washington, Seattle, Washington. Oh, that's funny. He says hybrid. So Partners was a principal Menlo Park Santa Monica Bay Area Seattle Washington Seattle Washington. Oh, that's funny. He says hybrid. So the CFO said remote. So the CFO is totally remote working and

That's interesting but he's like a hybrid But it says in Seattle what is there a headquarters in Seattle? Where is CrossFit? Is there a CrossFit headquarters anymore? Is it still like Boulder, Colorado, or is that. Is that not a thing? I don't know. OK, let's go to Jenny's. Oh, hi, Heidi. Welcome to the show. Grid is just a Florida thing now. Yeah, it's got to stay a Florida thing out. Holy shit, I just checked it out.

This shit is a joke. What grid league or the comments going back? It's just an idea now. Grid League or CrossFit, which are you talking about? Remote sea level role is useless. I mean, do you guys listen to the Katie Henniger show this morning? I haven't got a chance to finish it. I listened to like the majority of it and started coaching and stuff and it was awesome to have her on and like I love how Saman

like she definitely was thinking it was just going to be all the invitational and I love how he like pulled it in different directions and was like, oh, well, we're going to talk a bunch now about the old days of rogue and how it came to be, which was really cool. What did you, um, when Sevon was like, wait, so you have like 800 people like ball, like, do you guys have, is everybody there? And she was like, yep. Everybody that works here is here, meaning no remote workers. I think it was because Heidi asked the question if she could be hired remotely, which when I said that you guys got all up in arms, huh? Huh? Huh? Katie didn't answer any of my really insightful questions. Some of you guys's questions were out of hand though. So you blame her. Um, yes, damn it. Just saying.

Just saying, more effective if you're all under the same roof. All right, so let's get back to our main topic here. So what does this all mean? Oh wait, no, no, no, hold on here. Remote work is real work. 100% it's real work. 100% it's real work. 100% it's real work. 100% it's real work. You're just more effective if everybody's in the same building. Jenny, where was your comment? Oh

right here. Yes, okay. So thank you, Susa. Dermalogica had some legal issues too. I read a class action lawsuits in 2022 when he was hired there, which, what was James's comment, perhaps they're expecting to be sued into oblivion. Very interesting insights. So whether or not he, meaning Mr. Schneider, is that what he's hired for, to kind of deal with some of these things,

like Dermalogica, he had to deal with, uh, clearly some sort of class, um, some class action lawsuits. And then, um, we don't know what the potential is for the outcome of what's happening with the, the last year's games and Lazar and all that stuff. So it's, um, it's pretty interesting as to how this is going to unfold. So we know that they hired Mr. Schneider with a specialty, either in selling direct-to-consumer goods or dealing with some sort of lawsuits or bankruptcies. And again, this is all just speculation. And when we went back and looked over Jenna Hocka, who was hired as CMO, as to what her

specialty was with the direct-to-consumer app the berries X now my speculation there was that we're gonna start to see more stuff go online and they would even try to do a direct to consumer kind of like work out like similar to street parking I might be off base with that but one thing that we can say for certain is they're moving a lot of the education to be online only. And so perhaps that was more or less the, the larger strategy for her. Because if you guys remember too, I was like, there's no way that they can move the L two to be an online course. Like it just, it didn't make sense. And like for those

of you guys that take the, have taken the L2 before, like you know exactly what I'm talking about because there's so much hands-on, um, seeing, correcting and teaching when it came to the L2. Like you're in small breakout groups. Like I don't know the exact on it, but it feels like you're in a small breakout group, like 80% of the time, um, going over movements, correcting other people's movements, moving yourself. So I was really like curious. It's like, how, okay, so how are you going to do that online? But apparently you could take this hybrid option that they're offering, which is like one day of it is online and then one day of it is in person. And then with the L one, you could either do it all in person or all online.

And I don't really know what their sales ratios are, but I imagine that they're probably selling more of them online than they're selling the in person. Now, let me ask you guys this. Question of the day. Do you guys think in terms of disseminating culture in the CrossFit space in terms of professionalizing the trainer, do you think that it's going to be more effective online or in person? I'm curious. Put in your votes now. three three one one five you guys remember American Idol back in the day. Um,

So I'm curious. What do you think like so Elizabeth said I did it online. It was fine. Have you done it in person? Elizabeth have you done it in person? Um, are we talking about what they're supposed to be announcing tomorrow? No one's supposed to know that information. What are you talking about? I don't know anything. Wow. Susa is live and got a whole ass network. Susan. Wow. Susa is live. Savon got a whole ass network. Yeah, I did. That was the goal in person. In person. I think online is good, but they should probably have some form of validation, um, some sort of validation day to have people go and show they actually know the material so that it would still end up having to be in person in person. I did in person.

This is Justin here. I did in person. Another coach did it, uh, at the gym online. Wasn't close to the same experiences from what I saw interesting I'm just curious to hear Elizabeth like if you did the online in person then how to like renew it online and what your Comparison Was from the two

Because there's just certain things I feel like that, um, just don't transmit online. Like even so, so when I talk about this all the time with the podcast and I was like, man, can you imagine, obviously this is a little bit of a pipe dream, but can you imagine if we had a travel budget so that way we could actually bring in every guest or majority of the guests we have like in person with Sevan. I honestly think that like the, um, the value of the podcast would go up because you just

make other connections when you're face to face and you're, you, you're, you're in person with somebody. Then you do just over like a video call. Um, and I don't think anybody else, uh, thinks it is different. Um, rising tide in person, it was much, uh, it was much better than fine. Okay. Cool. Um, Elizabeth, I've never done it in person, but I like the idea of one day in person and one day online. Now this is kind of goes to the remote work, right? Because we talked about it and all everybody on here last time attacked me and they were like, remote work is better. And I'm like, no, it's

not. In terms of like transmitting culture. And when you have a smaller company and you need to have in multiple people are wearing multiple hats at one time in person is always going to be better because you just communicate better. There's more clap. You know, you there's more collaboration. There's just a lot more that comes from being in person than would definitely come from, um, not be why the fuck are all these people texting and call me right now? It's the most distracting thing ever. I want to put my phone on, do not disturb, but I thought somebody would call in so I didn't. Fuck it. Now it's going on. Do not disturb

text. Um, okay. Uh, it depends. I know, honey, I know I'm trying to tell you it depends. So if you work for a major, uh, corporation or your job is to crunch numbers independent of the other stuff that's happening in the operations, then yeah, it probably doesn't matter as much if you're in person or not. But if you're trying to develop a culture, if you're trying to develop a high performing team, and you're trying to have a lot of collaboration to execute on multiple things at one time, you're never gonna beat being in person. And I honestly think that when we talk about the L1,

when I took mine many moons ago, I remember specifically, by the way, my L1 instructors were Neil Maddux, Pat Barber, Miranda Alcara's and Jason Kalipa. And I remember when I took that the first, the, the first time I took it, it was, they basically said like, this is where we disseminate culture of CrossFit. This is where we hold the line. This is where, where we say, all right, if you're going to be a CrossFit coach, if you're going to be an affiliate owner, this is the way we act.

This is the way we behave. This is the way that we teach. This is how we control a group. Like there's a lot to, um, being there in person and then also having that L one be the kernel of the culture, the way we conduct ourselves, everything. And so in terms of like, and you've heard people talk about all the, all the time, like, Oh, you need more quality control and CrossFit because you have one gym that's doing great.

And the other one's like chaos. And the thing is, is that like, you're going to have way, way more of that. If you don't have an example being set forth by being inside the same room with all those people at the same time. Just my two cents on it. Like, I'm sure it's, it's still effective and I'm sure it could still be successful in some way, um, as completely done online. But truth be told, I just think you're just way more impactful when you're in, in person.

I'm trying to be on a low performing team. Hi. Fair enough. I guess this what's going on here. What happened, dude? person. I'm trying to be on a low performing team. Hi. Fair enough. I guess this what's going on here. What happened, dude? Used to come and hang out with me on every show. Now you show up. You don't even know what's going on, man. So the speculation coming from Jenna is, um, that maybe it wasn't a direct to consumer, meaning they're going to send workouts and all that, like a street parking model that more or less they're going to bring education online. And slowly you won't be able to take an

in-person course or there'll be very, very few of them around. And from a private equity standpoint, like if you're not really worried about disseminating culture, if you're not really worried about quality control, then of course you're going to do it online because it dramatically lowers all your expenses that are tied with it. And it's still expensive. So you can still charge the same exact rate, but cut your expenses down significantly. So anyhow, it's just interesting, uh, the different people that they're putting in place here and the different skill sets that they are bringing to the company. So that is meeting the new CFO, Mr. Schneider. And that is some speculation

onto why they hired him. Nobody called in. All right. That's all I got for you guys. I hope you enjoyed it. A little bit of some research there, a little bit of food for thought for you guys to kind of ponder and think about. Have a great rest of your day. And as always, don't forget, if you don't want to suck at life, you could always go to school, but I couldn't bring it up in time because I didn't have the tab ready. We're going to try it one more time. Let me see if I get it. I have so many tabs. Do you guys use a little thing on Google to, uh, to, uh, sort out your town. Got it that time. If you guys aren't on this, then you probably

are leaving a lot of money on the table. You could be better at life and as a person. So anyways, all this is free, of course. We have all of our normal characters in here. But in the classroom section, there's a ton of cool stuff, including a year of event planning for you and your gym. Um, also a bunch of other stuff in here that hopefully provide, uh, some sort of value to you as a coach or an affiliate owner.

So, uh, there you go. You could always what? Yeah. Go to school. I meant to, I meant to bring it up and it was going to do the bumper and then it was going to be shown, but I couldn't do it in time. Sorry, Heidi, Elizabeth. Thank you for your brain and knowledge.

Well, hope it means something. I hope you got something out of it. Appreciate that. Um, hardly last check out that Jeff CC, uh, CSCS video, man. It's good. I will. Thank you. Um, hardly last actually appreciate that because I've been wanting to dive into some topics, uh, about programming for different things like first responders, military and stuff.

And that'll be a great way to, uh, talk about that discussion. All right, guys, thank you very much. Have a great day. Be good to each other out there. The end of the day. That's all we got.