Wealthy AF Podcast

Transforming Fitness Coaching: Innovation, Resilience, and Personal Growth (w/ Matt Reynolds)

• Martin Perdomo "The Elite Strategist" • Season 3 • Episode 507

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What happens when a seasoned powerlifter turns his passion for strength into a global coaching revolution? Meet Matt Reynolds, the visionary behind Barbell Logic, who has transformed the fitness coaching landscape through innovation and technology. In our latest episode, Matt shares his incredible journey from high school teacher and strength coach to creating one of the largest online strength and nutrition coaching companies. Discover how his collaborations with high-profile individuals like the US Air Force and his upcoming book, "The Undoing Urgency," are reshaping the conversation around personal growth and accountability in coaching.

Prepare to be inspired as Matt reveals the strategic decisions that propelled his business forward, even amidst the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. From developing Turnkey Coach, a proprietary software revolutionizing fitness coaching, to adapting his business model for consumer, business, and military contracts, Matt's insights are invaluable for anyone looking to harness technology for success. He discusses the importance of building a team of specialized coaches that cater to diverse client needs, including postpartum specialists and those experienced with older clients, ensuring personalized, effective coaching.

Finally, we explore the power of voluntary hardship in fostering mental toughness and resilience. Matt shares his personal experiences, including a transformative warrior training camp with his son, and practical strategies for maintaining health and fitness amidst a demanding lifestyle. Learn how embracing discomfort through strength training, cold plunges, and realistic goal-setting can lead to profound personal and professional growth. Whether you're an aspiring coach, business owner, or someone eager to build resilience, this episode is a treasure trove of wisdom and actionable insights.

CONNECT WITH MATT!
https://ryanmattreynolds.com/
https://barbell-logic.com/
https://turnkey.coach/

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Speaker 1:

Building wealth isn't just about personal gain. It's about empowering yourself and your community. This is Wealthy AF your ultimate guide to understand what it truly means to be Wealthy AF. Hey, everyone, welcome back to Wealthy AF. Today we have a game changer in the coaching world joining us Ryan Matt Reynolds. With 25 years of experience in strength, sports and coaching, matt is on a mission to help coaches move from traditional gym-based model to online coaching, allowing them to reclaim their time and scale their businesses. He founded Barbell Logic, one of the largest online strength and nutrition coaching companies in the world, connecting clients with expert coaches globally and working with high-profile clients like Brett McKay, from the Art of Manliness and NFL pro bowler Jordan Gross to creating AI-driven solutions for the US Air Force. Matt is redefining what online coaching can be. Also, he has an upcoming book published by Forbes called the Undoing Urgency on December 10th. Matt brother, thank you for coming on the show. It's my pleasure to have you here.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for having me, man. That's quite the intro. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

Well, today I want to talk about. There's so much to unpack, but I want us to kind of wrap the conversation around. Why is coaching important? Tell us first a little bit about you and why you decided to go into this business of coaching and coaching others, and then how you created this business. There's so much, you have so much experience and I just want to dig in. You have some government contracts. You're working with the US Air Force. I got a lot of questions for you. Just tell us your story. Tell us a little bit about why you got started here and how that happened.

Speaker 2:

Sure. Thanks, man. Yeah, I was a super competitive kid growing up, played a ton of sports, wasn't great at any of them, but hyper competitive and needed that competition in my life, which I think business provides that for me now. And so when I graduated high school I had discovered, at the sort of the end of my senior year of high school, weightlifting, powerlifting, all that kind of stuff, and in my freshman year of college I really discovered the sport of powerlifting and that you know, that's a sport where you squat, you deadlift, you bench press and you compete in different weight classes. And I needed something like that. And so I found that I got. You know, you could eat a bunch of food and you could drink beer, you can gain weight and get strong, and so I did that and did quite well in powerlifting. That was in the late 90s and early 2000s. And so I ended up totaling the top level called elite in powerlifting in four different weight classes in the 220 weight class, then the 242s, then the 275s, then the 308s. So I got my body weight all the way up. I graduated high school about 155 pounds and by the time I totaled elite in the 308 weight class, I think I weighed in at 304 or something like that. So I basically doubled my size over the course of maybe six or seven years, and so after that I wouldn't say bored with powerlifting, maybe bored with powerlifting competitions I still love to lift and love to lift heavy, in the main barbell lifts and I turned my attention to strong man and the and won my pro card in the world's strongest man circuit and competed on that circuit from oh six to 2010.

Speaker 2:

And so at the time I was, I was actually going to school, I was completing my master's in education, I was going to be a high school principal, I was a teacher, I was the head strength coach of a large high school here in Missouri where I live, and football coach and did all that sort of stuff. But I needed a place to train and do strongman and the kind of stuff that's available now. I mean, you can go to any big box gym and they've got barbells and they've often got strongman equipment and CrossFit equipment and things like that. That didn't really exist in 2008. And so we opened a gym called Strong Gym in 2008. And with really no delusions of grandeur I didn't think it was going to turn into any kind of big business whatsoever, but it just grew and I didn't know anything about business. I started reading as many business books as I could and by the time I got to 2010, 2011, I realized I probably wasn't going to stay in education and I was going to move into the gym space full time. And so, in 2012, I left education, ran the gym full time through 2015. That gym grew to be the largest privately owned strength gym in the country, and then I sold it at the end of 2015 and started the online coaching side of what we do now.

Speaker 2:

And so you know, man, there's some reasons for that, like one of the things that I saw when I was coaching in person. You talked about the power of a coach. I think a coach is incredibly powerful. I think we need those, not just in fitness, and certainly we do. I think often in fitness for just for the accountability and someone who's been there before, but in business, in life and like there's a lot of places that we try to find, the places that we're deficient and we need to bring those up, and we often just need somebody who cares as much about that thing as we do. And what we'll often find, man, I've been married 25 years, I've got daughters, and they're mostly grown at this point, and the reality is that my family and my friends they just don't care as much about my fitness as I do, and the only other person that cares as much about my fitness as I do is my coach, and I'm still coached on my own software and in my own business. Most of our coaches are because we see the value of that coaching. The concept of daily accountability and building a relationship and trust with a coach is something that keeps you pointed in the right direction, and so the way that plays out for us is in the strength world and nutrition world and conditioning. But I think that certainly applies across the board, and so one of the problems that I saw that I think technology has really fixed is that in the in-person business and in the gym I was in bondage to the schedule and the location of the gym. I couldn't leave If I had a client. At 5 am or 6 am Monday, wednesday, friday morning I had to be there, and not just me but for the client.

Speaker 2:

Personal training and personal coaching, one-on-one, real-time at the same location, regardless of the industry, is almost always prohibitively expensive, and so you know, if you're listening to this and you're a super successful executive and you can afford it, great. But most people can't. And for the up and coming entrepreneurs who just don't have their maybe even equity rich and cash poor, they don't have a thousand dollars a month to spend often on coaching, at least maybe once or twice. But doing that for two years or three years is difficult. And so so I saw this problem in-person model. It was very antiquated. I live in Missouri, kind of a rural area. You can imagine my client pool is not very large. For other people in other rural areas or less populated areas they don't have a good pool of expert coaches. Who do you find to teach you? And so I thought we have to be able to take the best of this in-person coaching model and figure out how to do this online.

Speaker 2:

And but the problem with the online coaching model with specifically in fitness but I think this also translates to other industries is that it was often like sell me a program, you know, sell me an education, like whatever a course that was completely passive for the, for the coach or for the entrepreneur. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, I just don't think it's coaching right, I think I'm selling somebody a program, and so, even today, most people, when they think about online strength coaching or online fitness coaching, they often think about hiring an Instagram influencer, paying them 50 bucks, a hundred bucks, 200 bucks, whatever, and they get a program. Well, that's just. You're just buying a program. That's not really coaching.

Speaker 2:

And for me, from even day one, I knew that I wanted to watch my clients lift, so they and the technology had gotten good enough by 2016 that our phone, our cameras on our phone were excellent, and so so what we did, what I started to do when I was a one-man show, is I I would connect with my clients. I'd do maybe a zoom call and intro call, hear about their goals, their injuries, what equipment do they had to deal with and work with. Um, they could be anywhere in the world, because this coaching was is asynchronous and yet there's still a lot of back and forth, and so I didn't want it to be synchronous, because I can't coach somebody in Singapore, because I don't want to wake up at 1.30 in the morning or 2 in the morning and coach somebody in Singapore synchronously. So the asynchronous model was a big piece, and so I started to provide very personalized programming to my clients. They would video their lifts every single workout. They would upload those videos to the app that we were using and within 24 hours I would break down that technique for the client. And so that did something for the client. When you hit record on the phone, you set your phone up and you're like coach is going to see this. Now there's accountability. I'm not just buying a program, I'm actually getting coaching, and I think that's the thing that really separates us from the vast majority of fitness coaching businesses. And so over the course of time that B2C business grew to be a pretty good-sized business, certainly a seven-figure business, maybe a low seven-figure business, and we, you know, there were maybe even low eight figures, probably a $10 to $12 million business working just business to consumer.

Speaker 2:

Over that course of time I ended up hiring 60 to 70 coaches to work for me, and that's important because we can now connect clients with the perfect coach for them. So you know, we've got female coaches who coach postpartum moms I don't know how to coach a post, I've never been postpartum right. We've got a surgeon coach and these coaches are the best, most educated coaches in the world. The surgeon he only works with clients over 50. We've got clients up to, I think, 87 or 88 years old that do online, and so, again, he's probably a better coach for that 88-year-old female than I am, and so that allowed us to do that.

Speaker 2:

So we expanded the coach talent pool. We were able to reach 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 clients over the course of five or six years, and then we started developing our own software to be able to provide what we really needed. We were the largest client of the largest strength software in the world, but we were pushing them too hard, so we started developing our own software. Within a couple of years a couple of million dollars we had this incredible proprietary software. It's called Turnkey Coach, and the concept there was that our business did everything for the coach all the backend stuff, all the administration and all they had to do was do what they do best, which is coach. And so we pulled all that waste away from them the payment processing and the payroll and the bounce credit cards and we handle all that stuff and we let them just coach and we let the client. So the vast majority of time spent by the coach and the client is interacting with each other, which was really important. I think that's a big importance of coaching.

Speaker 2:

Covid hits, every gym in the world shuts down. Our business as an online business thrives and we started to realize like there are other great coaches in the world that don't work for Barbell Logic online coaching that need this software. So we started licensing that software at the end of covid to other fitness professionals and that. So we moved from b to c, while still holding that flagship product, to b to b and started to license that out to other coaches and that's that's grown about 250 this year alone, just in 2024.

Speaker 2:

And then something magical happened. Last year we started landing government contracts for the same reason. So you know American military, they're super itinerant. They're all over the place. They're in you know Hill Air Force Base at Ogden, utah, for a year or two, then they're in San Diego for a year, then they're in Germany for two years and they're in Afghanistan for two years. And so how do they get excellent coaching and stay healthy and combat ready?

Speaker 2:

We've got almost 250,000 soldiers at any given time that have just overuse injuries. They're not combat ready. The American taxpayer is paying for them. And so when we went to the government and said, look, we can train these servicemen and women. We can rehab their injuries, we can keep them strong, not just when they're in basic training and at home, but when they're actually in combat zones. We can do that, and the government loved it, and so I think we won six or seven pretty good sized contracts at this point. So now, really, the business is pretty well split 33% or so of our revenue comes from business to consumer, about 33% business to business, and another third from military contracts, and it's just been gangbusters. And now it's really about training, not just coaching clients, but for us, I think we've really taken on the responsibility to coach other coaches and how to be excellent, efficient coaches in this fitness industry to help your clients reach their goals.

Speaker 1:

What is the biggest, biggest benefit of having a coach? So I also coach and mentor, um, mentor, um. What do you find that the biggest benefit for our listeners, right? I'm always talking to our listeners about coaching and mentoring and mentorship. The fastest way to get to where you want to get to is find someone that's done it and have the shortcuts right. That's the fastest way to get to where you want to get to is find someone that's done it and have the shortcuts right.

Speaker 2:

That's the fastest way. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. I think the biggest thing is when you have a coach who's been there before, who often again, I've lifted since the mid nineties and so 30 years. I have so many lessons that I've learned over the course of 30 years. I wouldn't lift the same way today as I did 30 years ago because I've spent three decades in the trenches. If you hire me as your coach, you hire one of our coaches as your coach, then you get the shortcut. It's what's beautiful about an incredible book. I mean, you get a book by Charlie Munger, like Uncle Charlie's Almanac, and you get 90 years of experience in a book. This guy's entire life's work is there, and so that's what coaching gives. So, one, you get the fast track to success. You still have to put in the work. And then, two, the other piece is if coaching is done correctly and I think with technology today, with the way that the world has just gotten so much smaller, we can interact across time zones on Zoom text apps, whatever you have the accountability piece. And again I think, if you don't have that accountability piece, I think I would argue that it's probably not truly coaching. I think at some point you have to interact with your clients, regardless of the industry, and so and as a client or somebody who's looking for a coach, I want that accountability. There's some, so what we? What that accountability does. That accountability is really the root of why it works.

Speaker 2:

But in the trenches, what we ended up seeing was online. Our clients have about a 90% compliance rating, and that's not. They perform 90% of all their workouts. They perform 90% of all the sets, of all the reps, of all the weight, of all the exercises, of all the workouts. That is way, way better than my clients had in person. Now why? Well, because the clients that can pay $1,000 a month for in-person coaching will often travel for business, or they travel for fun and they go on the cruise, and then they don't train Online.

Speaker 2:

You get to continue to train in the hotel gym, in the resort gym, on business trips, even in the hotel room, when you don't have weights and you just have body weight, you continue to train. You continue to get that feedback from your coach four days a week, five days a week, whatever it is, not just when you're at home in the home gym or in the big box gym in your town, and so I think that's the other thing that technology has really made. Incredible is that you constantly have these touch points with great coaches that can provide that feedback, and that accountability leads to consistency, and more than anything else in fitness, consistency is the number one most important thing. Everybody wants the perfect program.

Speaker 2:

Programming is a distant third after consistency and technique. After consistency and technique, if the technique is clean and smooth, you're not going to get hurt. If the consistency is there, you're going to get better. And then it's just putting it all together and having really simple, hard, effective programming works incredibly well. And that's in the fitness world. But again, I think I would translate that to the business world or any other places in Africa.

Speaker 1:

What has been the toughest conversation that you've had with your coach as it pertains to accountability in your history, of being mentored and coached right when your coach is just holding your feet to the fire, and what has been your toughest conversation with one of your mentees or one of the people you're coaching?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a great question. I think I was telling you before the show I probably did a thousand podcasts. I don't think I've ever been asked that question. I think for me and my coach, I think as the business, the worst thing I ever did for my own fitness was grow an eight-figure business Right. Many, many, many employees, thousands of clients. There's a million moving parts. You know you got B2C, b2b, military, the book, all the marketing, all this stuff.

Speaker 2:

It's very difficult to and I realize I'm making excuses because we all have 24 hours and that this ends up being the conversation I have with my coach, and so it's very easy for me to. I've traveled, I think, 25 or 26 weeks this year on business and so absolutely I wake up super early every morning. I'm extremely disciplined in everything I do, with the exception of as busy as I've gotten. It's often difficult to stay disciplined in my own health and fitness, and here I am the CEO of a health and fitness company and so it's easy to fall into a rut of too much alcohol at night door dashing food to the hotel room because I'm working, instead of going out and getting some healthy food or even ordering healthy food, it's like I'll just order food and I'll even work in the hotel room. Lack of consistency, I think for me has been the toughest thing over the last several years, and trying to find places where we can get little wins. The way my coaches approach that is, they've made it extremely simple. And so can you do 20 minute workouts every day. Well, who can't do a 20 minute workout? So I have to get out of the mind, out of the zone of this mindset of I'm no longer a world beater, competitive power lifter or strong man. I'm a late 40s CEO who's doing this for health and playing the long game. I want to be there, not just to walk my daughters down the aisle, but to see my granddaughters walk down the aisle. Hopefully, god blessed me enough to see some great granddaughters at some point, and so that's the thing I'm doing.

Speaker 2:

So it's the. Can we get 20 minute workouts in? What are the major metrics we need to track? So we track, like we track alcohol drinks a day, and I've got this two drink, a limit to two, limit per day for my drinks, and so it's. And that keeps like okay, I've had my two, like that's it Right. So there's just a budget there.

Speaker 2:

Quality of sleep quality of deep sleep I'll track because I know sleep is so important for me because I'm up most mornings at 3.30 or 4. I don't set an alarm, I just wake up super early and get to work, and so that means I have to go to bed early. Right, I've got to make sure. If I don't go to bed early, then I end up with five hours of sleep, which I can do for a night or two, but five nights in a row of five hours is low performance for me. And so those are some of the tougher conversations I've had with my coach, and they've done a great job of. I think a good coach stays flexible. And coming back to the very first point that I made, if I had a program or a template, a 12-week template, cookie cutter program, that doesn't fit my lifestyle Because I have a great home gym We've got great gyms in this town but, man, half the time I'm in a hotel gym that has dumbbells up to 45s. I can't squat and deadlift with those things, and so being able to be flexible as a coach is really important For me.

Speaker 2:

Having conversations with some of my clients honestly, man, one of the toughest conversations I have to have is about mental toughness and the value of voluntary hardship. So people start training and it's easy, because you start conservative and you add a little weight time, like maybe five pounds per workout, and they do that fine for two months. And then it gets hard and they start to give up on weights, like they start to deadlift. And they deadlift the first rep and it comes a few inches off the ground. They set it back down and they just give up. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are we doing? Or it's I can't do it, or it's too hard, or I'm afraid I'm going to hurt my back. I'm like your form's perfect. You're not going to hurt your back, right? So there's a mental toughness aspect to this that when you teach somebody how to grind through things or how to choose voluntary hardship and I don't think weightlifting is the only way to do that, I think there's lots of things you could do I think that voluntary hardship refines us and makes us better, and involuntary hardship is not guaranteed to refine.

Speaker 2:

We know we're going to get it when somebody's going to get cancer. We know guys that go to prison. They don't come out better you can, but most don't right. I think that if we choose voluntary hard things all the time. That will refine us and better prepare us for when involuntary hardship comes, when we lose the job, when we have the tragedy in the family, when COVID hits, when, like, whatever the thing is, we're better prepared than to handle that sort of stress. And so those are some of the tough conversations I have to have with clients, often in that kind of three to six month mark of their training journey. If they can get through that, they are super mentally tough and they can handle anything I throw at them, can you?

Speaker 1:

give us a couple of examples that our listeners can use to create, or strategies right to create voluntary what did you call it? Voluntary struggle, hardship, hardship, right, voluntary hardships. I can tell you that you know, I believe I'm a big believer. Like you, I'm up extra early. Sometimes I also have a coaching, small coaching group that I coach and mentor and oftentimes they tease me because I'm texting them. I text them every day something, some words of wisdom, some words of encouragement, right In our group chat, and sometimes it's 4.50. I mean, I think yesterday I texted him at 4.50, 4.45 AM. You know, it's just and they're like, dude, he was up at 4.45 AM. I'm like, yeah, most days I'm up at 5. I'm like I teach you, so I do the things I teach. What is a form of voluntary hardship that you can, that the listeners can? Just? One or two, three things that can just they can utilize now to help them become a stronger mentally.

Speaker 2:

Yep, that's a. It's another great question. I you know. I think that for us, anything that you really don't want to do but you know is good for you is voluntary hardship. And that might be mental, like it might be getting up and saying like I'm going to read for 30 minutes. I don't really want to read, but I know it's better for me. I know I'm going to continue to learn. It's going to give me an insatiable thirst for knowledge. I think that's a great mental voluntary hardship game.

Speaker 2:

Obviously, I think strength training is one of the most basic and general versions of voluntary hardship. No one's going to make you put a bar on your back and squat and nobody wants to squat right and just exercising is not voluntary hardship. I want to be clear about that, because a lot of people enjoy. You enjoy jogging around your neighborhood and you just really enjoy it. It's not really voluntary hardship. You have to do the thing you don't want to do but you know is what you need, right? So it's identifying that weak link and so putting a bar on your back and squatting is really hard and most people don't want to do it. Deadlifting is really hard and most people don't want to do it. Pushing their body to a place they haven't pushed before is really hard, and this is where I think things like even like cold plunges. I got a cold plunge and a sauna and stuff all back on my back deck. I don't think that necessarily makes me a better person. I don't want to overstate it, but no one's going to make me stay in the cold plunge for 10 seconds longer than I've ever stayed in the cold plunge in my life, other than me. And so you get comfortable with the uncomfortable, you sit through the thing and you're freezing to death and you're trying to put your mind in a different place. I do the same thing in the sauna. What I do in the sauna is, rather than time, I set my heart rate and I'll set my. What I do in the sauna is, rather than time, I set my heart rate and I'll get my heart rate up to like 175 in the sauna, just sitting there. I'm not exercising, I'm just saying I was so hot that my heart's beating so fast trying to cool my body down. That okay. Like I made it to 170, 172 yesterday, I've got to break 172 at the heart rate today. So I'm sitting in there. I'm sweating to death. I come stumbling out of that thing, fall into the cold plunge and again, that's a really minor thing. It's not a huge deal, but it's just taking myself.

Speaker 2:

I create this inner competition. I talk about how competitive I am. It's not just with other people or in business, and I certainly am. I'm competitive with myself. I'm doing those things. So I'm setting myself up.

Speaker 2:

Nobody's out there cheering me on at four o'clock in the morning in the cold plunge or in the sauna. I'm doing it. I'm like I'm doing this for me and I, you know, most of the time I don't talk about it, I don't get done and post on Instagram just set a new cold plunge PR. I don't know that I've ever even taken a picture of my cold plunge if you haven't posted it on on instagram, you know. So it's that shoot like, I think, for, I think, endurance sports, I think sign up for spartan race, I think that kind of stuff. That's just in the suck, right. It's just we're being out in the heat or be it like uh, two winters ago it's I'm in missouri. It got down to negative 16, that is, we were breaking all these cold records.

Speaker 2:

I forced myself to go stand on the deck for like 10 minutes. This is before I had the cold marching. That was like I just got to stand out here because I need to know what this was. You know, were you in a t-shirt? Were you shirtless? No, yeah, no, I was just in shorts and a t-shirt and and I mean, I kept tennis shoes on because I want my feet to freeze. So, in shorts and a t-shirt, walked out and stood on the back deck for 10 minutes, set my watch and just said, okay, here I'm now, like in the again.

Speaker 2:

In the grand scheme of things, does that make me a better person? Is that moral? Is it like I know? So I think a lot of this stuff is sort of amoral. It's just like it's not good or bad. It's just a thing that you say is like I'm just going to do this hard thing that nobody's, you're going to be fired from your job or you know what. There's none of that, and it's that's why it's voluntary, and so choosing whatever that thing is that you don't want to do to create some sort of uncomfortableness in your life, is the thing that I think refines us and makes us better.

Speaker 1:

How does creating those things that are uncomfortable in your life? So I'll share this with you before I get to my question, because it just came to my mind. A few years ago I think it was, let me say, 2018, 19, right around, right before COVID, I'm going to say my son, my youngest son, my youngest is 22, and he was 16. He was about 16, 17, about to go into a senior year, and my wife and I were. We were a bit struggling with him on direction. But just what a 16, 15, 16 year old is right direction, working work ethic, right, just normal stuff, right. So I'm all about personal development and doing the hard stuff and growing and getting better. And I I had, we had this opportunity to. I was signed up for this coaching program and it had a bunch of um it was. It had a bunch of seminars and things and there was one that was called warrior training camp and I told my wife we flew to California. I told my wife I got to buy him a ticket and when I spent I don't know I think I spent four or five grand to take him with me for his ticket and it was a week and man, what a great camp. We there, we walked on fire. We did they called it five peaks where we walked as a team up like five or six miles with rocks and we had to help each other. We got a tee, we went in a teepee. I don't know if you've ever been in those teepees. Yeah, indian teepee, that shit is hard. Yeah, we felt like throwing up.

Speaker 1:

My son and I. We did this together. It's a great memory. And today he's 22. And so we're in the real estate business and he's running our flip division where he's managing projects and things like that. And man, I am seeing it in the kid today.

Speaker 1:

This kid is just, he's up at six. I used to struggle with this. He's up at six. He's at the job site pushing the guy running to Home Depot, just running it out. Man, and I attribute a lot of this to this program we did. We did a lot of hard stuff, like a lot of hard, hard stuff that we finished that.

Speaker 1:

And today he tells me like, hey, that's the best thing I've done, like the best experience I've had as it pertains to programs we've been to. That program really toughened him up. It toughened me up right, it really trained me as well. But I like to know how doing things like that has helped you, uh, grow your business right. Like how, how has that helped you when the challenges of being a business owner you know getting sued, all kinds of shit happens. When you're a business owner, you know you just go through. So people stealing from you, people saying they're gonna do something, they don't do it. You know you have an eight eight figure business, so you know what happens. How does that help you overcome all that stuff?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think it just comes down to resiliency, like mental toughness, and you know, I was in a lawsuit in 2019. It was awful. In a federal trademark lawsuit, it was terrible. It's a man killer, but they're horrible, aren't they? They're freaking raw dude. It's awful and I'm not. You know, I can't really talk about the outcome of that, but it I was pleased with the outcome of this thing, but, man, it was just like a year of my life that was. I've never been in trouble, I've never been to court. So you don't know the. You know the discovery and depositions and all that sort of. It's just terrifying. Right, it wasn't, it was just a. It was a trademark case in federal court, but it was just.

Speaker 2:

You know, I think, many other owners I don't want to be careful not to pat myself on the back here, but I think many other owners would have just closed up shop. It's just too hard. I think, in doing hardship for so many years, it was never. It never even entered my mind that this is going to kill us. Only it could have. It could have killed us, but it didn't and we fought it and we did fine and we came out the other side and we grew, and I have a million examples of those. Not everybody knows this, not all my staff knows it, my executives know, my wife knows. There have been times where it's like you're 24 hours, 48 hours from going out. You're like we can't make payroll in those early days, like you know. You're like I guess I'm going to pull all the money out of my checking account and help make payroll. Like some people will do that, other people just won't because it's just too damn hard. And so I think, by exposing yourself to other pieces of hardship that maybe are not, don't have so much gravity to it, but just rewires your brain to be more resilient. I think, physically, the other part of this with strength is that when you continue to do these hard things, you become more resilient and less vulnerable to injury, and so a lot of people are terrified. You know we have clients all the time Like I got a bad back, I have bad knees, I can't do this thing. You're like, if you let me get the muscles around those joints strong, you're never going to hurt your back again. You're never going to hurt your knees again. Your knees are going to be healthy. Your hips are going to be healthy. Your shoulders are going to be healthy. So it doesn't just work mentally, it works physically, it works both. I also think that the really tough physical things refine you physically but also refine you mentally, emotionally, socially, doing that hard stuff.

Speaker 2:

You know, we raised a Series A earlier this year and I pitched man. I probably pitched the business, I don't know 100, 125 times. I mean sharks dude to shark investors. That's really hard. I did it in person. I did it in groups where maybe 100 people in the room, investors in the room, and I did it over.

Speaker 2:

And you think about doing Zoom calls and meetings. We do these all the time. We're doing the podcast this way and it just become life, especially post-COVID, for us. That's all we've ever done since 2016 because we've been all online and my staff's all over the world. I don't know that it gets more intense than having to pitch a bunch of guys worth $100 million plus on why they should give you money for your business, and that refined me. And so now you know you go in and we, and then we built a board and now we've got a chairman of the board and they're part some of these guys with the sharks that I pitch and you know how to run a board meeting and you know how to do.

Speaker 2:

These things are very difficult. And so you know, several years ago I hadn't been through a lawsuit, I hadn't raised money, I hadn't started a board of directors, and those were kind of the three major things that I hadn't done in business that I knew I needed to do. I certainly didn't want to get sued, read a lawsuit and then maybe I recognize this in the midst of the lawsuit, but I thought this is great experience for me. Now, knock on wood, hopefully there's never any other lawsuit, but with an eight-figure business, there probably will be at some point. It will be far less scary because I've handled the first lawsuit. Now I know what to expect. Now I know how to raise money with investors. Now I know how to talk to VC firms. Now I know how to run a board. Now I know, even if the board meeting gets contentious, how to disperse that and stuff down. And so you can't buy that without the experience. And so, while I think there's one piece that we do need to have a never ending thirst for knowledge I read books all the time, listen to podcasts. I mean I'm a huge fan of all of those things you can't buy or race or beat experience.

Speaker 2:

And so voluntary hardship and even involuntary hardship, the experiences through life. I think this is why guys tend to get a little in a good way, not a bad way a little bit softer as they get older. I was way harder 30 to right 47. Like the gravity of life weighs in and you're like, okay, I'm a little more of a softy, I tear up a little more often than I used to. You know that kind of stuff and I think that's from the life experience. And it's not because I'm softening on a break, it's because I feel the gravity of a situation and I know it's still going to be okay.

Speaker 2:

And I, I I never get teared up for sad things. It's the opposite. I get choked up for happy things. For, like you know, like man, this is a, this is a major life turnaround and I'll I'll choke up a little bit. And so I think that's just from the experience. Some of that just comes from 10 years, 20 years, 30 years of experience. That's also why I think it's so important to learn from those guys and those coaches who have gone before us and experience. If I can get a coach that has 50 years of experience or 60 years of experience. How much can I learn from them now? Try to bring myself as close to them as possible in my 20s, orirties or early forties, and then I'm ahead of the game when, as I start to have to endure some of those hardships, whether that's voluntary or involuntary.

Speaker 1:

True wisdom spoken, sure, true wisdom spoken. I mean, um, I could not have said it better. I, I always, always, always, say those similar words, similar words to what you say. It's what is my lesson right? So, when things are hard and shit happens and I don't expect it and I'm like man, this is hard, I got literally. I got a lesson book here in my library. I got a lesson book. What did I learn from this? And how can I? How can I get better next time? How can I identify this? And what's the new protocols moving forward? What's the new?

Speaker 2:

protocol, that extreme ownership, like taking personal responsibility which, of course, is you know without going down too much of a culture or political rabbit hole we live. We live in a culture today where so many people want to play the victim and the reality is is like there's lots of times that I think things have happened to me that wasn't my fault, but there's no lesson in that. So, even if I have to fire a bad employee which I've done before right, you have an employee that acts awful and you have to fire them.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, or not producing or whatever, trying to get over.

Speaker 2:

That's right. And then the first thing I do is I go how did I allow this to happen in my business? Not look what this person did, look how they treated the business, look how crappy this was. It's like look, I'm the CEO, I'm the founder, I'm the owner. I did something in the culture of this business to allow this to occur. This is my fault right Now, certainly maybe it's not all my fault but I don't get to learn lessons because of what some stupid employee did. It's that. How did I build the culture that allowed that? And so that's the lesson book that you're talking about. You take it away and you go. I have to make sure to hire better. I have to make sure to onboard better. I have to make sure to train better.

Speaker 2:

Did this not understand or weren't in line with our core values? What were those things? Those are those lessons that can come from any type of hardship, and this is the thing about the involuntary hardship. If you face involuntary hardship correctly, so again, the stuff that you can't control, the lawsuits that somebody steals from you, the bad employee, the whatever, the cancer if you approach it the right way, there can still be lessons learned in it. Right way, there can still be lessons learned in it. I think that we're more apt to approach it the right way, this involuntary hardship, when we choose voluntary hardship on a daily basis, because we're already in the mode of how do I fix the problem, how do I get better, what's the lesson learned? And that's why voluntary hardship is often such a phenomenal prerequisite to involuntary hardship.

Speaker 1:

This is really really, really good stuff. Brother, you mentioned you early on. You mentioned you read a bunch of books and I want to know from your business books, all the business books you've read what are the top two or three things you've taken away to build a? What are the top two or three things you've taken away to build a? What are the top two three things you've learned from businesses, coaches, mentors, whatever that has had the biggest impact in your business that's led you to build an eight figure business? What are two or three things, three habits or strategies or whatever that you've done?

Speaker 2:

So early on. I still think one of the most impactful books I ever read was the E-Myth Revisited, and that book that's a best-selling book if you go on Amazon. The E-Myth stands for the entrepreneurial myth and the whole concept of the book is that you get good at a technical skill often in America, especially in the Western world, and so you're a great coach, you're a great baker or whatever plumber, hvac guy and you think like I would be great. I'm a great baker, I should open a bakery. I'm a great coach, I should open a gym. No, you're a great technician. You don't have any idea how to run a business and every business has technicians in it, has managers and has owners. If you don't know how to manage and own, the business is going to fail. Even if you're the best baker in the world, you can make the best cakes and pies and cupcakes the business will fail and there's actually sort of a fictional story in that book about that very topic. The way to make sure that you don't fall into that is to learn how to write systems and standard operating procedures. So when I first switched from, I had already started doing this at the gym and I had a bunch of systems in place. We started with like how to clean, like for the custodian, like how to clean the gym. At that time I was charging maybe a hundred dollars an hour definitely charged more than that now, but back then I was charging maybe a hundred dollars an hour to coach. And this this is in maybe 2010,. Let's say, well, custodial work in 2010 in the Ozarks was like an $8 an hour job, let's say, $10 an hour job. If I'm spending two hours a day cleaning the gym, I'm losing $90 an hour. I'm losing $180 a day in value time value for my, for my time and so I could go hire a college kid, pay him $8 an hour, $10 an hour, give him a free gym membership and and then give them the system.

Speaker 2:

You can't just say clean the gym. You have to know how to write this. It's a literal in-order checklist of how to clean the gym. So you start hiring out the lowest wage work first, so that you can free yourself up to stop working in the business and work on the business. You take that and you just continue to multiply it out. You continue to write systems for more important jobs and pretty soon you've got a front desk staff and then you've got a gym manager and then you're hiring for other coaches and all those things at the gym In the business. Now we've got a chief operating officer, a COO, a CXO, a CMO, a CFO, and systems have been written for all of those top level C-suite executives that at one point I did all those jobs. I was all of it. I was the CEO and the COO and the CXO and all of those people.

Speaker 2:

If you do it well and you write systems well and standard operating procedures, you will hire somebody on day one who's 80% as good as you and you think that's a failure. It's not. You're hiring them for their potential. Today I can look at my COO and he's 10 times better than I could ever be a COO my CXO, kind of my head of HR, which we just hate the term HR she is. She is phenomenal. She's so much better at her job than I could ever be.

Speaker 2:

You can't scale a business If you keep trying to have superhero mentality as a business owner and do all the work in the business, because you'll never get to work on the business. And I think connected with that, another part of that lesson is that you have to know how to focus on the important things and not drown in urgency, which is what I wrote my book about. When we were kids, somebody asked our dad or somebody that we knew and said how's it going? A question that's been asked for many decades. The standard answer was good, how's it going Good? Now you say you ask anybody how's it going and they say busy, everybody's drowning in. Busy, everybody's drowning in urgency.

Speaker 2:

And so the problem with that as an executive or a business owner, I'm sure you've seen the video of the guy, the college professor. He takes the big jar, he puts the big rocks in and he asks his students like is the jar full? Yes, then he puts the pebbles in know, and he acts as, asks his students like is the jar full? Yes. Then he puts the pebbles in. Is a jar full? Yes. Then he puts a bunch more sand in. Is the jar full? Yes, and he pours water in like okay, so, and that's a great video. Here's the problem with that. I'm really good at filling my whole jar up with rocks, pebbles, sand and water. You know what I need to work on the big rocks? I gotta break the jar, bro, and not have pebbles and sand and water. You know what I need to work on the big rocks. I got to break the jar, bro, and not have pebbles and sand and water in it. I'm an executive. Big rocks are the needle movers in my company.

Speaker 2:

If I'm stuck sending emails out all day, responding to base camp notifications, keeping my Slack notifications cleared, screw Slack. If you're one of those guys that you just can't let those notifications build up, you're going to drown in urgency. So at some point you have to learn how to pull weeds and deprioritize the stuff that is urgent but not important, to focus on the stuff that's urgent and important and, most importantly, the stuff that's the most important and is never urgent. Spending time with your family is never urgent, but it's the most important. Your own health and fitness it's never urgent, but it's very important. Being the CEO and doing the stuff that only CEOs can do and building your business is important, but it's rarely urgent, right? Maybe? Spiritual disciplines, reading, knowledge, like whatever those things are best stuff is never going to be urgent, but it's the stuff that changes your life and moves the needle, and so we have to get out of this concept of our jar has to be full all the time.

Speaker 2:

Your calendar is a truth teller man. If you open up that Google calendar and you're booked for 8, 10, 12 hours a day, you've screwed something up. You've got to have some leeway in there to grow a business, to think about personal growth, to have your own coach, to get coaching for yourself, to refine yourself and make yourself better. And the combination of those two things the two stories I just told of like systems and standard operating procedures by writing those, eventually you hand those off to employees and they become their standard operating. They own it. You're not like follow the checklist. You're like this is your checklist now and there's going to be some inefficiencies here, and as they get to do that, that takes that load off your shoulders so that you can focus more on the stuff that matters. And so these things are still very interconnected between.

Speaker 2:

When I first launched the online coaching business man, I sat down literally like 16 hours a day for three months. Actually, this is before. This is in the few months before I launched the business Writing those systems. In the beginning, I knew that I was going to do all the systems. It was an employee of one business, right, but I knew the day would come when I had to hire somebody and I had to give out that system. So I needed to follow the system, refine the system, make it better, make it more efficient, eliminate waste, do all those things, and then, when you hire somebody, you hand them the system. Now, guess what? I don't have to worry about it anymore. Now it's theirs.

Speaker 2:

So what that's done is the business has grown as it's allowed me to work on the stuff that's most important, and I still struggle with this. I still. There are times where I have to gather my team together, my executive team, and go guys, you got to clear my calendar. I'm spending way too much time on phone calls, emails, basecamp notifications, slack, whatever, and I need to focus on the stuff that really matters for this business being a CEO, raising money, going on podcasts, doing the PR tours for the book, whatever those things are, even working with my CFO setting financial projections for 25, 26, and 27. Who can do that outside of the CEO and CFO? That's what we're doing. So if your schedule gets too full for me, it causes a tremendous amount of anxiety and I'm just anxious all the time and I can never get caught up. I literally feel like I'm drowning, I can't get a breath, and so focusing on the important things by first deprioritizing the urgent things, I think, is another huge lesson to be learned learned what, what, what a brother.

Speaker 1:

Great stuff, man. What an amazing interview. Thank you for all of that stuff, man. Really really good stuff. There was some really good nuggets there the prioritizing if folks Matt, if folks wanted to connect with you check out your business maybe they want to get a coach check out your book Um, where do they find you? How do they, how do they connect with you? How do they find your coaches and your people and your software?

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, thank you First off for having me on the podcast again. So, yeah, if you want to connect with me and go to Ryan matt Reynoldscom, that takes you to my personal website and the book. You can buy the book undoing urgency there. It's on Amazon for presale now to be out for a publication December 10th. Uh, you're looking for a coach? Barbellogiccom is where you find a great coach. You can actually do a get match survey. You can say it's totally free and there's no catch and we never have any contracts and that sort of stuff. You almost fill out like a little short five, six questions and it shows you what coaches you match up with best based on your age, demographic, who you're looking for injuries, things like that and you can get a coach. And if you are a professional coach or in the fitness industry at all, turnkeycoach is the software. So ryanmattreynoldscom, barbellogiccom for clients and turnkeycoach for fitness professionals Great place to go. Thanks again, man, for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you, brother for coming on.

Speaker 1:

This was a great interview, great stuff. You shared some really really good great great content, great knowledge, great experiences, great stuff. Man Appreciate you, brother. Well, thank you Same.

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