"Always Begin With The Customer In Mind"

About Today's Guest

Brynn Putnam is the founder and CEO of ​MIRROR​, a fitness technology company poised to revolutionize the way people work out by bringing the boutique studio experience in-home. For more than a decade, Brynn has been well-regarded as a pioneer of the fitness industry. She started her career as a professional ballet dancer for the New York City Ballet, spending years training to peak performance while also working in some of New York City's top gyms and boutique fitness studios. In 2010, Brynn took her learnings from elite trainers and physiologists across the nation and founded Refine Method, the acclaimed fitness studio dubbed “Best New Workout” by ​New York​ magazine. Now, Brynn is applying her deep expertise in fitness, both as an entrepreneur with a proven track record and an accomplished athlete, to transform the fitness industry again. Brynn graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in Russian Literature and Culture and is based in New York City.

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"Fitness is Too Important To Be Boring"

About Today's Guest

Michael Piercy is the owner-founder of The LAB, a member of the Under Armour training team and a TRX Master Course Instructor and Global Presenter. Mike is the recipient of two of the most prestigious awards in the fitness industry the 2017 IDEA Personal Trainer of The Year Award as well as 2013 TRX Overall Instructor of the Year award given by his peers and colleagues for a great attitude, community spirit, and inspirational teaching.

Michael came into the fitness industry full time following a career in professional baseball in which he played for Major league organizations consisting of (Pittsburgh Pirates, New York Mets, Montreal Expos. Mike has had the pleasure of working with and creating programs for many athletes from a vast array of major sports including competing athletes in the NFL, MLB, and NBA.

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Show Notes

Michael got into fitness to stay off the streets. At the age of 15, his mum signed him up to help out at a local health club to help him stay out of trouble. Michael also became fascinated with his elder brother's weight set and to help him not use it all the time, his mum purchased a Hulk Hogan Kit for him to use. Jump rope, a cassette tape, and some instructions later – Michael began to deepen his commitment to the world of fitness.

He got his start in a large gym chain which enabled him to experience the many different aspects of a health club. Michael encourages new trainers to also try this entry point when starting out. You will learn a lot about what to do and then also a lot about what not to do. You can gain a tremendous amount of experience in a shorter period of time when you have so many different elements of fitness in one location.

Michael moved into the world of baseball when he was drafted by the pirates. He spent 99.9% of his time in the minor league which taught him many valuable lessons. In the minors, you have to do everything yourself for the most part. You're your own strength coach, you travel a lot, you learn to eat a little bit better and in turn, become your own advocate for a healthier lifestyle.

When talking about what Michael learned from his time in baseball that he carried with him into the world of fitness he replied with, “It would be split-second adjustment.” The ability to be able to adjust to certain things when things sometimes go your way and when things sometimes don’t. During his time traveling in baseball he also learned of the importance of being able to get on with many different personalities, cultures, and people from around the globe, this too has also served him well inside of the fitness world.

Michael shares how his world expanded when he attended his first fitness conference. He was captivated by the energy and the other attendees and saw there was an entire fitness world outside of New Jersey that was waiting for him to step into. After working hard and applying several times, he became a brand ambassador for TRX and his career was put on a jumpstart.

Michael shares the importance of asking the right questions when it comes to building your future and to also set meaningful and inspiring goals. He invites us to do goal setting every year. Write down your goals, write down what you want your life to be like, write down how you want your business to be. Write it down in as much detail and breakdown into as many micro-steps as possible. Just like a fitness program, this is a life program.

Another lesson that Michael learned from baseball was that “you have to stay on an even line across.” This meant you can't ever really get caught up in the hype, and can't ever get lost in the doubt. To always believe that you're better than your bad days and to never believe the hype that you're so good on your good days. Remain consistent and keep a consistent work ethic, because the game will humble you. In baseball, the guys in the hall of fame, are only good 30% of the time.

Michael talks about the importance of looking at your processes that you create and the people you surround yourself with. The importance of creating a tribe of people who you trust and who you can grow with. He struggles, just like most of us to delegate, but Michael also believes in the delegate or die principle too.
Michael encourages us to find our lane, to really discover where and with whom you do your best work. Take the time to figure out where you want to be. And in times of doubt ask yourself these three questions:

1. What are you worried about?
2. What are you protecting?
3. What are you waiting for?

"When It's Not Working Hit Delete and Move On"

About Today's Guest

Sara, CEO of SCW Fitness Education and WATERinMOTION®, is a visionary leader that has transformed the fitness education community. A successful business owner and advisor, she is a keynote speaker, published author, podcast presenter and sought-after industry leader. Sara has launched nine successful MANIA® fitness-professional conventions and over 35 live and online certifications. Her company has touched more than 100,000 Fitness Professionals face-to-face and engaged another 300,000+ in virtual connections. Having produced over 600 Fitness Instructor Training videos, written several books and been published repeatedly in magazines and newspapers, Sara is well-known for her creativity and impact on the health and wellness industry. She has a unique ability to share her passion and devotion towards fitness education through her humor, enthusiasm and her effervescent no-nonsense personality.

Sara is committed to sharing her knowledge and expertise as a fitness industry leader for the past 3 decades through speaking engagements across the world. She is a favorite presenter for the Athletic Business Show, Medical Fitness Association, International Council on Active Aging, JCC, Club Industry, YMCA, Illinois Park & Recreation Association, AYP, CanFitPro, IDEA, FitPro, Filex, IHRSA, Marriott Vacation Club, Gold’s Gym, WIFA, Nevada Recreation & Park Association as well as over a dozen international events throughout the world. Sara is also the former Owner and CEO of Les Mills Midwest, which she successfully led for over 10 years.

Sara is an attorney who graduated from Washington University School of Law and completed undergraduate work from Cambridge University in England. Sara was selected as a Gold Medal winner distinguishing her as a business leader who has contributed to the economic health of her community. She also is the proud recipient of the Illinois State Business Woman of the Year and AEA’s Global Award for Contribution to the Aquatic Industry.

Having been a former adjunct faculty member for the Kenneth Cooper Institute, ACSM, NASM, ACE and AFAA, Sara serves on the Gold’s Gym Think Tank, is on the Women In Fitness Association (WIFA) Board of Directors, and is a proud inductee into the National Fitness Hall of Fame. Sara has left an indelible mark on the fitness industry as she continues to make her impact on fitness professionals worldwide.

Stay In Touch With Sara

SCW Website

Sara's Website

SCW Facebook

Sara's Facebook Page

SCW Instagram

Show Notes

We begin the show by reflecting back on how I remember first meeting Sara. Her event was the first fitness convention that ever I presented. I still remember the nerves that I felt, as I took to the stage for the first time.

Sara’s memories go back a little further to the time when I was introduced to the Reebok Faculty as the new “face of Reebok.” Well, maybe you can imagine how that went down. Just like anything I needed to earn the trust (and respect) of the team and that was going to take a few years.

Sara shares that inside her business she is always looking to hire people with stronger and different talents to her own. She believes that working this way elevates both her business and also her own path to success.

Sara talks about how her father encouraged her from an early age to share her voice and have it heard by others and she goes on to talk about the importance of surrounding yourself with good people. People who will lift you up and see the best in you. She shares that while you can’t choose your family, you can choose your extended family and the people who will be there for you when things are going great and also there for you when you are in the struggles of life. During the more challenging times, if things are not going as planned Sara shares how her husband invited her to simply, “hit delete and move on.” Not always easy, but always worth it.

Sara currently runs nine very successful conventions but we go back to a time where she had to cancel her first event due to a lack of attendance. She shares how she managed to get to the others side through the kindness of some vendors and presenters, and even in her darkest times, her husband would remind her of all that was still so good and positive in her life.

We go back in time to the time when Sara first moved into the world of fitness. It began through the world of dance and she shares that it was only when she was dancing that she felt beautiful. She was also a runner at school and it was the combination of athletics and dance that brought the world of aerobics into her world.

During her start as a fitness instructor, Sara attended the IDEA convention, which was and still is one of the most recognized fitness conventions in the United States. She loved every moment but realized that the cost was going to be prohibitive to attend every year. It was this thought that propelled her to create and develop her own fitness events. She began by renting space in a hotel, asking friends for help and Sara City Workouts was born.

Sara shares her thought that not everyone needs to do fitness full time, and that teaching fitness part-time is a fantastic way to contribute to the industry. She then shares if you do want to try to move into fitness full time, to try different things and see which types of projects and people resonate with you and where you do your best work.

Sara encourages us to take risks and to learn from our mistakes and the “seeming” failures that happen as we go for our dreams. She reminds us that what social media shows is only half of the story and for any success to happen we will have to have setbacks along the way.

Sara believes the future of the wellness industry will be both in bricks and clicks, meaning both the online portals along with face to face connection.
Sara believes that one of the best ways to get where you want to go is to simply show up, work hard and persevere. She invites us to choose carefully the people we choose to listen to and to schedule and plan our time carefully so that we can create our best future.

Imagine, Get Clear, Create

I loved this conversation with Mark and we begin by him sharing that the reason he got into the fitness industry was because he was not very excited with his body when he was in middle school. Wanting to be an actor he knew he would need to take some to feel confident in his body, but unlike many in the wellness industry, he did not enjoy his first experiences with exercise.

However the period of many years, he slowly fell in love with fitness. He became fascinated by the experience of seeing the body change in response to different inputs and metrics.

Mark moved to New York in his twenties, in addition to acting some of the time he needed to make money doing other things and essentially developed a clientele among fellow performers, actors, Broadway performers, teaching them about fitness. Fast forward to the summer of 2010 when a number of serendipitous things happen, not the least among them it was the summer he adopted a practice of reading two to sometimes three books per week and became very serious about visioning and goal setting exercises. Within a 12 month period of making the decision to focus a little bit more on his training business, he started Mark Fisher Fitness.

Mark talks about the importance of goal setting in all areas of our life. He believes there needs to be a balance of having the ability to see a clear vision of the future, something that's compelling, something that's inspiring, a future version of yourself you want to live into AND also the importance of developing the executive functions that allow you to do the day to day things that will move your vision into goals and then turn those goals into smaller goals and then turning those into habits and skills.

Mark shares, “I'm fond of saying, having a clear vision of where you want your life to go will not guarantee that it's going to happen. However, to not have any vision for where you want your life to go will make it very unlikely that you will accidentally create the life that you truly want to be living.”

A large part of what Mark does is time management and speaks to the idea of a planning fallacy, meaning as humans we are not great at understanding how long things actually take to complete and this includes our fitness goals. He also encourages us to look at money and compensation for our time as an energy exchange. That when we can take in information, consolidate it and then transfer it onto others to help them live better lives, is all worth being compensated for – and well.

Mark gives us some great questions to consider when starting or continuing an entrepreneurial venture:

1. Is what I am creating going to help the people I want to serve?
2. Is this something I am excited about and prepared to do the hard work for?
3. Is this something that will make sense financially?

We talk about authenticity and how important it is to be yourself when doing your work. Mark shares his journey on how we flipped fitness on its head especially when it came to traditional marketing by using the power of magic and unicorns to stand out from the crowd. The one element that was consistent throughout this part of his business growth was keeping his (target) audience in mind and creating offerings that would resonate with their dreams and desires.

Mark also encourages us to have the courage to have the confidence to narrow down our market so that in fact we may not attract and appeal to everybody. Know who you want to serve, know who it is you want to help and then write them a love letter with your work.

Stay In Touch With Mark

Mark Fisher Website

Business for Unicorns Website

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Books Mentioned In This Episode

This is Marketing by Seth Godin
To Sell is Human by Daniel Pink

Blog Post mentioned In The Show

The Quick and Dirty System for Goal Setting

"Keep Moving Forward and Look For The Gaps"

About Today's Guest

Colin Milner is the CEO of the International Council on Active Aging and founder of the active-aging industry in North America. Milner is also a leading authority on the health and well-being of the older adult and has been recognized by the World Economic Forum as one of "the most innovative and influential minds" in the world on aging-related topics.

An award-winning writer, Milner has authored more than 300 articles. He has been published in such journals as Global Policy, and the Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics. He also contributed a chapter to the World Economic Forum book Global Population Ageing: Peril or Promise?

Milner's speeches have stimulated thousands of business and government leaders, industry professionals & older adults worldwide.

Whether Fortune 100 companies or governmental organizations, Milner's efforts have inspired a broad spectrum of groups to seek his counsel.

In addition, Milner received the CanFitPro "Lifetime Achievement Award" for his contributions to the Canadian fitness industry, and had been recognized as one Canada's Top 100 Health Influencers by Optimize Magazine and as one of the "Who's Who" in the Fitness Industry, by Club Industry Magazine. Milner's tireless efforts have leading-edge publications, television networks and radio stations seeking his insights. Among these outlets are: CNN, US News and World Report, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Dow Jones Market Watch, Money Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, WebMD, The National Post, Globe and Mail, Parade Magazine, and Fox Business Radio.

Show Notes

As always, we begin the show by finding out how the guest got into fitness. For Colin, it was wanting to become a professional soccer player. After traveling and putting on some weight he decided to become (what was called then) a weight training instructor for the club where he was working out.

Colin was pegged later in his career as someone who could also be successful at sales, although he had little interest at the time. He accepted the position of Assistant Manager and realized that during the selling process he could also create meaningful relationships with the potential clients. He realized that he was able to help people reach their goals by getting them involved in the process.

One of his mentors told Colin that “nothing will happen until somebody makes that commitment ” and that his job of representing the club was to help them make that life-changing decision. Colin realized that he could help others live a better life through fitness and all of that started with them making the decision, to begin the journey to a healthier lifestyle.

Colin was one of the first to really embrace the active aging market. He saw that the fitness industry kept going after the same market, and believes that as much as we have all this creativity, we also have a lack of vision. When it comes to the demographic of the boomer market he believes that what we sometimes fail to remember is that more people have gone into the 50 plus segment than ever before. And that segment has grown in wealth. Their disposable income has also grown from 50% to 70% which is a huge leap. He invites us to decide if you want a piece of that action or not? Or do you still all want to scrape over the 20%, who we are already working with.

Colin believes we haven’t done a great job of using our creativity with this generation. He goes onto say, “If you don't explore this market, you have nobody else to blame but yourself for being ineffective with it. If you put in a poor effort to serve this segment of the population, by thinking that you can just do the same thing and you don't get the results and then you turn around and say, oh, but they don't come to my facilities, all you have to do is look in the mirror because you haven't made the commitment. You have to explore, make the commitment and then sustain that commitment.”

Colin reminds us that the older generation can sniff out BS, but that is what also makes it really exciting. The active aging market is diverse because as you get older, you become more yourself. We have more, life experience. We have more disparities in income, in functional levels and so on. This is not a one size fits all approach that you can just use. Colin says that the first thing to do is to make a commitment to yourself that you will actually understand who you are serving before you serve them.

This incredible generation wants to reignite their lives and they want to discover delayed dreams.
Colin gives us a great reminder that the only people who think health isn't worth it are healthy people. Once you start becoming unhealthy, whether it is through a health condition or whatever, a lot of times you'll pay you whatever you have to - to regain that health.

Colin reminds us that there is also the importance of building social connections. So much so in the UK right now they offer social prescriptions for patients to go and connect with people. He also shares that the new definition of healthy aging according to the World Health Organization is now the ability to keep your functional abilities at a high level. It is no longer about the absence of disease.

We touch on a few of the failures along Colin’s journey and how they shaped him for the better. At 29 he needed to declare bankruptcy and it was his sports background that helped him survive this turbulent time. The discipline of showing up even when things were tough.

Colin shares that what he is really excited about for the future is that wellness encompasses virtually everything. This means you can get into it in a multitude of different ways. You don't have to be a fitness trainer. You can be someone who is a spiritual leader and then blend into all the other dimensions. You can be someone who is there to help people emotionally. He also reminds us of the startling fact that by the year 2020, the second leading cause of premature death and disability is expected to be depression.

He encourages us to think of ourselves as agents of change as each and every one of us will experience an awful lot of changes. He sees one huge opportunity that has been untapped is what he calls change management. Whether you lose a boyfriend, whether you lose a husband, whether you lose a house, money, whatever it is, we all go through change and to help someone navigate that change, is a terrific opportunity, especially as they get older.

As we begin to close our conversation Colin reminds us that even in times of challenging change that tomorrow will come and the sun will rise and so will we.

Stay In Touch With Colin

ICAA Website

Active Aging Week Website

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