The Action Catalyst
Living in the Grey, with Dave Mortensen (Fitness, Leadership, Franchising, Partnerships)
23 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What does Dave Mortensen mean by creating win-win scenarios?
It is impossible to create a win, win, win, win, win scenario. What you don't want to create is a win, lose, lose, win, win, lose scenario. So I care more about creating some wins through the organization, but making sure we don't create losses while we do it. If you can create neutral to winning strategies for all of your stakeholders, guess what?
The value will get spread across your organization.
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In this episode, we continue our conversation with Dave Mortensen, the president and co-founder of Self-Esteem Brands, now Purpose Brands, including fitness brands like Anytime Fitness, Orange Theory, The Bar Method, and others. Weird question. You know, you have companies that are focused on, they'll say we're consumer focused, right? We're focused on the consumer.
And you have some organizations that might say we're focused on our team. And you can be focused on both. But Dave, if you were like said, hey, we actually, we're part of this culture where we focus on our team first and through that, the customer, or we focus on the customer and do everything we can. I mean, how would you explain that relationship? It's funny.
You either you're a team or you're a customer or you're or you're a product. Right. A lot of people get enamored with their product. And that can be a gap, too, because we're so enamored with what we have or what we deliver. We forget about some of the components we obsess about stakeholder value, though, and stakeholder value.
changes year over year over year in fact strategy has to be aligned to your stakeholder value and it's one of the biggest misses businesses will do because we get really excited about an idea we have that we think is going to deliver somewhere so an example would be let's say we have a new customer journey a new product we want to deliver to our customer and And our customers love it.
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Chapter 2: How does stakeholder value impact business strategy?
They love it. It is like the best thing they've seen yet. Now the but is, the but is to deliver it, it's harder for our operations people to deliver the product and there's no gain for them. So their stakeholder value comes in. How well do you think we're going to deliver it?
Even if our customers love the product and everything, but I have no value to it and it takes me a lot more work to deliver something and I see no gain by doing it. Guess what? Our franchisees aren't going to be attracted to that. So when we build something out, we build out what's called a stakeholder map. There's no perfection, right?
The stakeholder map, you put down a stakeholder map of every stakeholder in the business, and then you take your strategic priorities, your key things, and you go, how does this impact every stakeholder? And stakeholders can be your staff. It can be you as the investors. It needs to be our franchisees. It needs to be their staff. It needs to be our customers.
It needs to be our vendors, which we like to call partners. Think of all those stakeholders and you look at the impact points. Now, it is impossible to create a win, win, win, win, win scenario. What you don't want to create is a win-lose-lose, win-win-lose scenario. So I care more about creating some wins through the organization, but making sure we don't create losses while we do it.
So you can balance that strategy and redefine it to strengthen it so every stakeholder is either neutral or winning in the scenarios. And if you can create neutral to winning strategies for all of your stakeholders, guess what? The value will get spread across your organization. And every year, you're going to find out, yeah, we got to spend a little bit more time on our customer.
This year, we got to spend more time on our team. And it's going to flow.
Yeah.
But when you get too caught up on one stakeholder all the time, guess what? You're losing in other areas and you're blinded by, and that's where you create blind spots and you can't figure out why you're not executing that well. And it's incredibly difficult to find decisions that net out even neutral to wins. I mean, you have to iterate and think through all these angles.
You know, Jeff Bezos says you got one-way doors and two-way doors is a common reference he made in building Amazon, right? These one-way doors are decisions you got to really think about because when you walk through the portal, it's going to be real expensive if you have to walk it back, right? A merger and acquisitions, right?
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the 80/20 rule in decision-making?
We've had a little positive growth for 20 plus years and, And positive store openings for 20 plus years, meaning every year we have more stores than we did last year. That's really, really, really hard to do. But that's been a focal point for us to make sure that we always create advancement and not try and get too caught up in perfection.
Because when you try to be perfect, you miss a lot of the little pieces of the of the puzzle. And all of a sudden that perfection becomes really ugly. Or you never advance it. A lot of times you get caught up in the wheel of perfection and you never get ahead of the curve. I would rather, you know, it's speed over execution. You talk about that all the time. There's no left and right.
In fact, this would be, I'll go political for a moment, a world of politics. Yeah. Yeah. You live in the gray, you'll get a lot more done. When you start getting too far left, you get real enamored with a really good idea, but you're getting a lot of pushback. You're either going to try and get to the gray, which good businesses do, or you alienate the other side.
When you start to do alienations, guess what? At some point in time, we're going to run into a place where you burned your culture, the business isn't flourishing, and you're sitting there scratching your head going, man, this idea is so good. Well, guess what? It wasn't that great.
Yeah, I mean, you point to something and that that's interesting is that, you know, we in these institutionalized businesses that we all end up creating as we scale. When you get to a certain level of leadership, you can get to this place where the institution reinforces that you're always right. You know, it's kind of a scary place to be because you've done this, right?
I mean, gosh, Dave, you built this huge business. You must now always have the right answers. And the institution kind of reinforces that because if you say something and it sounds like you recruited really good people who are willing to challenge you, but it might be hard to disagree with Dave because he's got this evidence to validate that he makes great decisions, right?
And this leads maybe to one of my final questions before we do just a quick lightning round, which is how do you maintain a culture where people continue to challenge you in spite of your success? One, you have to be welcome to be challenged and you got to embrace it and ask for it. As leaders, as we grow in leadership, less people want to challenge you and you're absolutely right.
So you need to ask them to, I need to hear your opinion. And that's where you get curious about the voice not speaking in the room. Always ask the voice not speaking what's going through their head because that's where you're going to hear some great things. What we tell our company all the time, and I think this is important for business, is there's an 80-20 rule in almost everything you do.
And I'll tell you this, great ideas for our organization do not happen at corporate, do not happen out of my mouth. They don't. 80% of the ideas that come to the table are pretty good ideas. 20% is noisy, right? We all know that. But if you go out to your field, your customers, your franchisees and out there, 80% of what they give you is noise. 20% is value. But guess what's in that 20%? gold.
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Chapter 4: How does perfection hinder business growth according to Dave?
work the engine appropriately, right? So AI is a big one. I love Blinkist for an example. You know what Blinkist is? Yeah, it's the short books, right? Because my attention span is short, I need something that gets me to the answers quick because I also am not fast at reading. So when I read, I can get bored really, really quick. Blinkist helps me.
So that's something I utilize for my learning and education because I can get to the points and operationalize them really, really quick. So tools like that for me to advance my learning is where I get really intrigued. And I know that about myself. And that's part of having self-awareness of figuring out how you best learn, you know, and how you best educate.
And because you said you don't read full books as much, the different question I want to ask you here was who are the people that you've spent time with over the last year or so that you've learned from in the last year? You know, it's funny you say that. My closest mentors in life are the people I'm closest with.
An example, if someone said, who's a great mentor in your life, it'd be my business partner. He's been a mentor because he has different thinking. He'll challenge me. I'll challenge him. I would say my wife. Believe it or not, my wife, because she sees life in a way she lives in in the gray.
She will always take the hard route to figure things out and keeps me grounded in my approach in life and every aspect of life. When you look at. horrible things that are happening in the world, you understand everyone wants to take a side of what that is. And we got to take less sides. And she teaches me not to take a side and actually dig deeper into the actual solutions, which makes it great.
And then over the years, I've always connected myself with really smart people. And depending on what my topic is, I'm intrigued by it. I normally look... and find people that have those expertise so I can grow and learn as well. Love it. If you don't mind, just a quick follow-up to that one, because you mentioned IFA. Is there a franchise that you're kind of like, hey, that's really cool?
Because you guys have done extraordinary work in that. Is there a different sector, a different franchise where you really admired what they've built? Oh, Domino's. if you don't love Domino's and I'm not a Domino's pizza guy, but I'll eat Domino's pizza, but it's how they've taken an average pizza. Sorry, Domino's.
They've taken an average pizza and found a way to deliver it better than anyone else. I mean, they're operational excellence around the way they know their consumer better than anyone. And they know their consumer wants to know they, they made it the easiest way to acquire pizza. They made it easy way to deliver and track your pizza and they get it there fast. So, It's just an incredible brand.
So Domino's would be one. But there are so many franchises out there from big to small to average that you can grow and learn from. Chick-fil-A, it blows me away that you can go on a corner with Chick-fil-A. And I know why. And by the way, if you got into their organization, guess what? They have holes too. Don't think there's any perfection out there.
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Chapter 5: What strategies can leaders use to embrace challenges?
What advice would that, Dave, benefit from hearing you say? In anything you do, play the long game. I see so many... It actually concerns me today with all the things going on with equity and money. People want it faster than they... Because of all the things, speed is so important to us. We want to get there really, really fast. But, you know what, the journey... And embrace the journey. Yeah.
You're never going to be talking about your best balance sheet ever. You're not going to talk about how much money you made. You're not going to talk about, you're going to talk about the experiences you went through, through the journey that you took and embrace the journey. That is my greatest advice I can give to anyone in development.
Play the long game and give yourself time to learn, grow and experience. If you're always trying to go to what's next, you'll never get the most out of who you are. Wow. You know, it's spiritual, emotional, and mental and physical health. That is my belief. That's my, I call it SEMP. People ask me all the time, what do you do to ground yourself spiritually?
Emotionally is all the relationships you have. How are my relationships doing? Mentally, I feed my brain with learning and always learning. And then last, keeping a physical, healthy body. If I do my SEMP right, I'm usually in a pretty good place. And usually if I'm not doing well, it's one of the four. And your wife will let you know. Oh, yeah. And she'll let me know.
That's the most important relationship in my life. So if I don't have that right, the rest of the day is probably not going to go as well. That's great. This was filled with wisdom. One might even say this interview is better than the one with Chuck's since you're minorly competitive. Well, we're competitive, so I'll take that. Exactly. Oh, dude, this was really fantastic.
I appreciate you carving out the time for this conversation. I mean, you may have just inadvertently written your next book and all the little anecdotes. Thanks for taking the time and pouring into the audience here. Deeply appreciate it. Well, congrats on everything you're doing. I'll look forward to listening to how this all comes together and appreciate you taking the time with me as well.
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This is your host, Adam Outland. And outside of this podcast, I'm also the leader for a division of our company, Southwestern Consulting, and our division is the Southwestern Student Coaching Program. And that division, we started back in 2020 because the desire we had was to take all these skills that we've equipped executives with for
Over a decade, I've coached executives and managers and sales professionals on the skills, the habits, the motivation, and the systems to be successful in their job and in life.
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