The Action Catalyst
REMASTERED: Creating a High-Performance Culture, with Chuck Runyon (Fitness, Leadership, Franchising, Business)
Tue, 22 Oct 2024 05:00:00 -0400
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Chuck Runyon, the CEO at Self Esteem Brands including the wildly popular Anytime Fitness, covers ROEI vs ROI, the 4 P's of work, finding your purpose, the business lesson of It's a Wonderful Life, the balance of work and play, and why Anytime spends the big bucks as a company on tattoos.
Full Episode
I just believe that a business can do more than just make money. I don't really know how to measure it other than the fact that, man, it's like currency for the soul, right? I mean, not everything important can be measured. And so I just know that we've literally changed a person's life. We've changed tens or hundreds of thousands of people's lives.
And we may never know that impact, but it feels good to know that you stand for something.
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Chuck Runyon is the CEO at Self-Esteem Brands, which includes Anytime Fitness and also Waxing the City. And he and his business partner, Dave Mortensen, co-founded Anytime Fitness. It's just been an incredible, incredible success story. And they got a new book called Love Work, Inspire a High-Performing Work Culture at the Center of People, Purpose, Profits, and Play.
So Chuck, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. How in the world, wasn't Anytime Fitness like the fastest growing gym for like 10 straight years or something?
It was. And I want to take people back a little bit to this pre-digital era, right? We were launching this in like late 2001, 2002. And in fact, we launched our first Anytime Fitness before the first iPod. So there were no smartphones, there wasn't any Facebook. And so there was this idea of having a key fob that would open up every gym door in the world was just unheard of.
And also people mostly didn't think it would work because of lack of service or they might have some safety concerns. And so we really created the category of these type of clubs. They just didn't exist prior to Anytime Fitness. And, you know, I think like most entrepreneurs, they have that story where, you know, people would tell them this idea is not going to work.
And it was no different for us. I mean, friends, family, industry experts said this idea will never work. And that's always a reminder for any of the listeners out there that, you know, every idea seems crazy until you prove that it works. And now it suddenly seems pretty common. So but we, you know, we we stayed steadfast. Hoping the idea would work. We weren't 100% certain.
And we applied ourselves. We created this concept. We launched our first gym in May of 2002 in Cambridge, Minnesota. And then the first couple of years, I mean, we're just scratching and clawing to grow this. And we started to really reach some acceleration there in 2005. And then it just really took off. And from 2005 really until now. And number one, it's a testament to the business model.
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