LIFTS Episode 136 – The Man Who Built Boutique Fitness Reveals What's Next | Anthony Geisler

30:02There's$7.5 million of EBITDA, right? There's all these acquisitions that are happening that came out of Exponential. So, you know, there are people that made money. Are there people that lost money? For sure. But, you know, if you had 6 ,000 kids go to Harvard, all 6 ,000 aren't graduating as valedictorian. They all don't go through the system and do all of their homework. They all don't show up sober every day. You know, these are human beings that we're dealing with. And so we did our best that we could to support the franchisees. That's what we were dedicated to. You saw average unit volumes grow every quarter, quarter over quarter, for a very long period of time.

30:43You saw us continue to sell franchises. So franchisees came back to buy more. You saw the company opening 500 to 600 locations a year. So it's hard to do all of that year over year over year and do it thousands and thousands and thousands of times and then have it be this like crazy smoke screen. And so the reality for us internally was, it's a shame, right? That people, that there's some people that view it differently. It's a shame that some people, we would love everybody to come in and make money. And I don't think you have to look far past to see that probably 85 % of my employees here are the C-suite and entire teams from Exponential that followed me, right?

31:29I got employees here that it would be 15, 16 years. And so all of those people know the reality. And the reality was that, you know, we were operating a good business. Was it perfect? No, wasn't perfect. We were buying franchisees stores back that weren't doing well. And then we were telling the public, we're buying these stores back. We're holding these stores. And it was about 85 stores at the time. But when you think about having two, 3 ,000 open with 85, it's a few percent. Right. So, um, you know, but the numbers were big because a company was so massive, right. We were processing short of$2 billion in, in memberships, um, you know, through the system, through the point of sale system.

32:12And so, you know, for us, it wasn't really about being down in the dumps and picking ourselves up like the Phoenix.

32:19Matthew Januszek:What about you personally though, Anthony, like, are you the type of, are you a character where this doesn't bother you and it's just brushes off or did, was it, you know, did you have a bit of a tough time for a period? Oh, for sure. I'm human. Right. And to see people post lies that, you know, some lady in Wichita, Kansas, who's never met me, knows nothing about me, you know, posting whatever she wants on the Internet. Sure. I'm sure it bothers Kim Kardashian, too, if she, you know, reads it. And so, yeah, there was a lot of lies posted. And, you know, at the end of the day, you know, this is the business I'm in.

32:56I've been successful in this business. Like I said, the team followed me over to SQL. They were the driver of it. I didn't recruit them. When I left Exponential, the teams were calling me saying like, Dad, are you going to do something else? Because I'm leaving here and I want to go be with you. But if I can't be with you, then I got to go to somebody else because I'm getting treated poorly, right? And so that was kind of the start of it. where I was like, okay, financially, I didn't have to go do it, right? But from a perspective of those employees there that were treated poorly, they deserved a good home.

33:39They deserve to continue to be in the family. They deserve to continue to produce in their careers and have opportunity. And so with that, I was like, all right, let's keep going. But I only wanted to do it if everybody wanted to come along. I didn't want to go find the next Ryan Junk, the next Sarah, the next Verdeen, you know, all the, you know, the next Lindsay Junk. Like I didn't want to go find all these people to go. New construction teams, new real estate teams. I didn't want to do that. But all of those teams were calling saying like, we just, can we go? You know, will you start something somewhere?

34:19And those calls came, you know, the day of and during, Like, you know, the board and I were not seeing eye to eye on a lot of things. I thought that performance over time makes the stock price go up. I thought that continuing to provide support to franchisees as best we could, wherever we could to drive revenue would make the stock go up. You know, the reality is in the public world, that's not necessarily true. Which is interesting because you kind of founded this competing, in some ways competing brand. But I want to shift gears and just ask you a couple of questions around if you are still as bullish on boutique fitness, which clearly you must be because SQL is built on that.

35:02When you look at big gym operators, you look at the premium sector like Lifetime and Equinox, they're continuing to invest in boutique. Lifetime has invested in Pilates as Equinox as well. You also see it at the bottom end of the sector on the value chain when you look at brands like EOS or Choose Fitness or even AmFitness. They're all adding in Pilates and other boutique modalities into their offering. At the same time, you're seeing the rise of longevity clinics come in here. Your friend Adam Sedlak is opening up a wellness clinic within the UFC, I believe, in Corona. He's opening this new kind of built-in wellness clinic as well.

35:41Given all that, given how big box operators are now trying to do boutique, which they've tried before. It was Group X and they've tried to add boutique. Haven't really been able to capture that. But now they're investing more. Pilates is becoming this anchor tenant, if you will, of a box within a box. Do you still feel like boutique has room to grow it? And how have you innovated that with SQL? Yeah, look, I think there's two kinds of boutique, right? There is the buffet version, right? Which I love Brom. I love Lifetime. I love the Yees that run LA Fitness. All great human beings, great families, great operators.

36:19So nothing poor to say about those people whatsoever. But their job is a little bit different than kind of what we do at Sequel, right? Their job is to be a hospital, that has cardiologists, neurologists, nurseries that have babies, pediatrics, they have to use their square footage to do a lot of things well. And so it's more of a buffet approach. I'm a member at Lifetime. God bless Baram takes my$600 or$700 every month and increasing every time I get an email, right? And so I think it's great. But if you looked at the front desk of somebody coming into Lifetime, you wouldn't know what they were there for.

37:09They could be getting their hair done, their nails done, getting a smoothie, lifting a weight, going to Pilates, doing a HIIT class. They're just there for the sauna like my dad. Who knows what they're there for. When you walk into a Pilates addiction, you don't wonder if they're there to lift weights, go to the sauna and get their hair done, right? It's a very, very unique piece. So I tell people it's much like, you know, if you are part of the automotive group of America, or you're in the Porsche club of America, or are you a part of the motorcycle America, or are you in the Harley Davidson owners group, right?

37:49So there's two kinds of, when we kind of talk boutique, two different ways to deliver it, right? And so, you know, for us, we're delivering that one-off specialized, we focus on this, right? Like we're cardiologists, we're not dentists, we're not neurologists, we're cardiologists. And if you really have a cardiac problem, you're going to the best cardiologist. You're not going to an urgent care, right? And so that's kind of the difference. So they deliver a buffet version of it, right? They do it well. But we view that we deliver each of those modalities better and more specifically and tailored to a different kind of customer who wants to just do that.

38:37Matthew Januszek:I want to talk now a little bit about, I guess, a slightly new concept, which is your partnership with Gary Brecker. He's somebody that has really blown up on social media, got a lot of interest and a lot of people following him, which seems to be a really smart move. I heard you and I think it was last year when I was at the ATN event in New York, where I first heard about it. So tell us a little bit about the partnership and is that, from a brand perspective, is that slightly different having an actual individual that you're partnering with as opposed to a concept? And then also talk a little bit about what you're going to be doing with that, that, that may be a little bit new or different from what, what anyone else has seen.

39:27Yeah. I mean, look, when, when we did ATN, Gary was just my friend. You know, we were, I approached him and we were kicking around the idea of ultimate longevity center, right? So that would have been called the beginning of summer, you know, 2025. We announced it in December of 2025 at our franchisee convention. So, you know, Gary and I met, we had mutual friends, but kind of digitally, but really met Gary for the first time from Dana White ringside at a fight in Las Vegas where I was talking to Dana and, you know, Gary came up and it was like, oh, Gary, me, whatever. I'm like, yeah, I know who you are.

40:10And then we kind of talked and Callie Means was there and Sage, Gary's wife. And, you know, we all just kind of hung out a bit and exchanged numbers. And it was like, hey, let's let's keep talking about this. You know, Gary had always wanted to open a thousand locations. That was just kind of like a number he had always thrown out that, you know, he wanted to give, call it the average American, right? Not the one percenters, not the people in, you know, Beverly Hills and South Florida and Manhattan. Those are his customers, right? He wants to help those people. And he always helped the elites, right?

40:46Call it, that are out there, the famous people, the very wealthy people who had access. But what he really wanted to do was help the people in middle America that actually had never heard of this. And so he wanted to do it via the internet, via social media, via platform. He's got about 225 million views a month coming in. He's the number one podcast on Spotify for his market. So he really is the voice of longevity. There's nobody else out there mathematically that has the reach that Gary does. But he realized that once he said something and they watched a clip on social media, the number one question he always got was, well, now where do I start?

41:31Now what? Now what do I do? So it's like Gary hung up the phone. He gave you all this great information. and then you're staring at the phone. You're like, well, what do I do now? What do I eat? What do I drink? What store do I go to? What do I buy? And so he wanted to have these brick and mortar locations, has always thought of that, to really give access to people, access to these protocols. And so, you know, that was what we designed. And, you know, we partnered with Life force to run the medical side of the business. And then, you know, Gary is running kind of what we call the playground, right?

42:09Which is, you know, the hyperbaric chambers and red lights, lymphatic drainage, and, you know, hypoxia training and all these things that we have. And so, you know, that's kind of how the business is broken up. And then, you know, sequel obviously has the ability to sell franchises scale and, and drive revenue for the franchisee. And so that's kind of the, the tripod partnership between, you know, sequel between Gary and between life force. And he's had some experience with that. So he initially kind of teamed up with Brandon and 10 X health. And then they went their own ways. Was there any learnings that, that he had from that experience?

42:51and I guess also how is this new product different from what 10X Health offers? Yeah, I can't really comment on it because I don't know that I never saw 10X scale. So I was never in a 10X store. I don't know. I don't even know if they had a store or what their offerings were. So I couldn't really comment on kind of what they did. I can tell you from our perspective, you know, we'll have clinic rooms, right? So people will come in, we'll get baseline blood draws for people because people are supplementing for supplement sake. You know, they think they can't afford longevity, but they're really spending$300 a month on supplements they don't need that their body can't use.

43:35So you're better off spending the money to figure out what it is that you need. Right. Like my vitamin D is really good. I'm in the sun all the time. I'm a sun seeker. And so I don't need to swallow a bunch of vitamin D like I live in an igloo in Alaska. Right. So, you know, everybody has a different baseline and everybody's body genetically can process certain nutrients and can't process others. So, you know, we use life force to run a baseline so we can figure out what supplementation somebody may need. Hopefully they get that through a whole food diet, right, and movement, and sunlight, and fresh air, and all the basics, right, that are there.

44:20In the cases where people can't get those nutrients, either genetically or for other reasons, you know, we'll be able to supplement those pieces, whether that's, you know, testosterone or, you know, HRT type stuff, peptides is, you know, legalized and become available um you know all those different things we'll be able to do blood draws and injections have a full clinic um but we'll also be able to put people in hyperbaric chambers and you know lymphatic drainage and red light um you know we're seeing crazy things with red light you see our a red light bed that uh joe rogan bought live on the podcast with gary because he's crazy uh and he bought that and then he started using it and then you see him posting that he got rid of his reading glasses.

45:09He got his vision back. There's crazy things that are happening in this space for humans and getting oxygen back in the system. And so there's all sorts of things we'll be doing on the playground side. We'll have saunas, we'll have all that type of stuff. And then we'll have what we call the apothecary, which is a retail side. So Gary's protocols that people can take home, whether it's Baja Gold Salt or Perfect Amino or H2 Tabs. That protocol, by the way, is across all five of our brands and all of our locations with Gary. And we're starting seminars with Gary. We have our first one coming up August 16th in LA where Gary's going to appear.

45:57And right now we're on track to have 13 ,000 people registered to come see Gary. He's got 30 ,000 people coming in Romania. He's selling out arenas in Sydney and Asia. And so he is a global phenomenon, right? Not just a US-based person. And so, you know, we'll be doing that. And, you know, our target customer, you know, we go into LA, you've got 20 stores, Gary drops in, you have 13 ,000 people that show up, and now you've got 13 ,000 customers in LA for the franchisees, right? So the business model works. outside of him being on Megyn Kelly this week, talking about Ultimate Longevity Center, or he's posting a video for every opening.

46:40Hey, Boulder, Colorado, we're coming. Hey, Carlsbad, we're coming. Hey, Centennial in Denver, we're coming. So he's very excited about what we're producing here. We've sold about 225 franchises without a store open. um and uh and so the demand is there and you know we've sold that over the last four months or so um then we sold 325 pilates addictions uh those are coming out and getting open and doing extremely well franchisees are opening their second store their third store um and so we're we're seeing that produce you know we figured the thesis behind sequels like if you if you took the club Pilates team and you put them into the, what I'll call new version of Pilates, right?

47:28Kind of a younger demographic. We have like gold dipped reformers, right? Lighting systems, sound systems, dark rooms. You know, you take the club Pilates team and you put them into Pilates addiction, you should get the same financial outcome, right? That was the idea. and so far we're seeing that happen. You know, it's next month. We start a cadence of opening 20 of those a month for a little bit there, which is good. So we're getting a lot of these on the ground. We should be the, you know, my bet is by the end of next year, we're the second largest player by open unit count, you know, in the globe, second to club Pilates and number one in kind of that modern Pilates space.

48:19I think we'll be pretty close to that, you know, by the end of next year, early 2028. So it's developing quickly. And so, you know, we're excited to start getting Ultimate Longevity Centers open. The first ones are opening. We just started pre-sale in Boulder, which has been great, you know. So we're seeing good things coming out of that space. UBS has longevity pegged at$8 trillion over the next 48 months, which is, I don't know what AI was. I don't know what other tech booms were, but people get excited about a trillion dollar launch of SpaceX. I get excited about an eight trillion dollar launch of longevity.

48:58Matthew Januszek:Well, what about on just on that then? And I know this is a difficult one for you to answer because of your position, but let, let, you know, see if you can take off your sequel hat for a moment. And, um, you know, you're a, you're a young, inspiring entrepreneur want to get involved in franchising. You're based in LA. Obviously, it's a very competitive market. There's a lot of Pilates studios. There's spin studios. There's longevity studios. What would be one that you would start with? And I know there's a number of complimentary ones that eventually you want to open, but what's the one where that you seem as though there's going to be the most growth potential to build as a young budding entrepreneur that wants to open the first brand with someone unlike Sequel?

49:42Yeah, I mean, look, you don't have to look further than the brands we've acquired, you know, and that we're trying to produce, right? You look at Beam, for instance, right? You see all of the, you know, stuff that's coming out on saunas, right? Original kind of sauna work. You see an infrared sauna where you're seeing these 50 % cuts in morbidity, all cause morbidity from five days in the sauna. So you continue to see this. So we're excited about being with sauna and red light. So we think that is a great way to go. So I think we're 70, 75 open on that brand. We have body 20 for electric muscle stimulation, which as you guys know, being in this space, that's how people work out outside of the US.

50:32It's not known in the US as well. And that was primarily because of FDA approvals on the equipment. But we now have dry suits that are fully disconnected. So we can do boutique fitness small group for EMS. Gary and I just went and did a workout on the beach to show it was totally disconnected and dry. And Gary thought the workout was amazing. And so, you know, we just did that. We have iFlex, which is the team that took Stretch Lab from 300, Verdeen and Austin and Sasha and literally that kind of entire team that was over there. And we have iFlex. And so we're doing more recovery type work than we were at Stretch Lab.

51:20We've designed a smaller kind of half size box that allows people to get into that space. And so, of course, that's where I think the market is going. If I thought the market was, you know, cycling today, I'd be buying something and cycling, right? So you don't have to go much further than kind of the five modalities or brands, you know, that we're trying to scale. One of the things we love to wrap up with, and we're almost at time here, Anthony. So, Matthew, I'd love to start with you. Any key takeaways? I just have a ton of notes from this episode here, but any key takeaways for you?

51:55Matthew Januszek:Well, I love Anthony's resilience. I guess that's what makes a great entrepreneur and hearing some of the things that he's been through from being sort of like in his early days where when he's going into a town and having the local mafia come up on him. I'm not sure I'd have jumped on a plane straight away to go and sort it out myself. But yeah, certainly I think it's, you know, for me as a person in business, it's just I'm really impressed what you've done now with Sequel and just sort of keen to follow the journey. And I guess the second thing is really just, you know, obviously you're making an interesting bet on some of the brands that you're involved with from stretching to longevity.

52:36Matthew Januszek:And I'm sure that gives everybody an interesting signal about where we'll see the industry in the next few years. Mo, what are your takeaways? I think one, I'm just impressed by the story of Anthony. One, founding Boutique Fitness in so many ways. this is really, and maybe you've had other cycles, but really a third major push in boutique. I think I feel good about his commitment to boutique that makes me feel better about the boutique industry in general, because there's been a lot of people who've said that in some ways boutique might face headwinds, but I really think it's more of an evolution of what boutique means to people.

53:19And I think, Anthony, you so eloquently said this buffet concept where you could get everything here, but if you really want to be prescriptive and more personalized and behind 10, which is, by the way, where consumers are going at all ends of the spectrum on the lower, more value end, and also the premium. Personalization to me is what the consumer wants today. They want to be prescriptive on the treatments that they're getting, whether that is a workout or it's an IV drip. So I think I'm excited to see how SQL really leans into that. Yeah. I mean, we just launched what we're calling our sixth brand you may have seen it this week uh which is a move.ai app and um you know and we're trying to put all that together right that's the idea in it that we'll have this ecosystem um we have you know our five brands under there so that we can be prescriptive right that we can if somebody comes to the longevity business we can actually prescribe workouts for them on top of the longevity right and those workouts could be an ems workout for them if they're on a GLP one and they need to create lean muscle mass, a great way to do it is EMS.

54:25And so we have this ecosystem piece as well with the launch of our six brand to keep people there. We'll have Gary's protocols in there. We'll have nutrition in there. And then we also have the workouts in there. And it is exactly what you said, Mo, which is to be prescriptive, to give that customer who comes into our ecosystem to say, hey, you may be doing Pilates, but Pilates is great, but you also should have a baseline blood draw and you should be in a sauna and a red light. And you maybe have a baseline blood draw, sauna and red light, but what are you doing on nutrition, right? And what are you doing on supplementation and all these other things?

55:04So we're going to make sure that people come into our ecosystem and they live a longer, healthier, better life. You see in the blue zones, it is a whole food diet and it's sleep and it's movement and it's community and relationship, right? That's where it is. And in boutique fitness, we're able to build that community and relationship in these small boxes that you can't really easily build in a big box.

55:33Matthew Januszek:Final question to you then, Anthony, maybe instead of a takeaway from the conversation, but I'll call this the 3.0 version of Anthony. But what would you say is something that very recently in your career, and you've certainly grown and adapted and constantly learned new things. Like, is there anything that this version of Anthony has probably just learned or an important thing that maybe you can share for anyone that's listening that maybe you didn't have the realization maybe two or three years ago? Yeah, I mean, for me, it's about us having control of the business. You know, people don't realize that I sold control of Exponential, you know, to TPG and Club Plies in 2017.

56:16You know, so as much as I was running the business, I still had a parent. And the parent stepped in and told me what to do in a lot of key ways and times. And so what we like about today is that we own 100 % of the business. We have no debt. we're able to function on the best behalf of the franchisees. I mean, look at these brands we've taken over. We've, you know, like a Body20, we've put a ton of money into iFlex and Body20 and Beam just to come in and support the franchisees to try and drive revenue. And that's where we spend our money. You guys will see this next week, some key hires in Pilates in the industry.

56:58And, you know, we're out hiring people that are hundreds of thousands of dollars I've given away 20 plus percent of the company and equity at this point. So everybody that is on our payroll is also on our cap table. And so, you know, we're excited about that. And so we're, you know, we're pushing ahead. But we're definitely able to spend our time, effort and energy focused on franchisee success, which is where we've always been focused. And that's how we were able to grow the last business we grew because, you know, we had that success. in a material way. Well, it's been great to have you on, Anthony.

57:34Thank you so much for joining us. We can't wait to see the growth of what you're doing this year. I can't wait to catch up with you in a few months. I'm sure I'll see you soon. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and like. And we also have something called the Lyfts Brief that we launched at the top of the year. You could subscribe to that. It's a monthly brief that we send where we take good episodes like this, we summarize it and we send it out to you. You could subscribe to that on our website, liftpodcast.com so

58:30Thank you.

59:00Thank you.

59:30Thank you.

1:00:00Thank you.

1:00:37Jim, you know, out of Philly or Brooklyn or something like that that you've seen. It was a old dilapidated building off the beaten path. You know, it had an electrical fire in the corner years prior and they just never fixed it. The bags were more duct tape than they were vinyl or leather. literally the treadmill was unplugged because the motor died and people would just push the push the treadmill motor to go. I had a coin opt massage chair in the corner like it was out of an airport that was a quarter. And there was no real membership dues. The, you know, the people at the desk just took your 300 bucks in cash because that's what you could get out of the Circle K ATM next door.

1:01:24And they said, Hey, man, you're good for a year. Come and do what you want. So I joined that boxing gym after having, you know, poor health. I was basically doing the opposite of what we know today creates great health. So I wasn't sleeping, I was eating fast food and drinking Coke and donut holes. And I literally thought the brown stuff in the Lucky Charms was the good stuff and so i just separated and ate the marshmallows um so if i was feeling under the weather i i would eat frosted flakes uh good old tony the tiger because i thought that was that was really the health food um and so clearly 20 plus years ago i was lost i wasn't feeling good from that i went to a doctor that said hey why don't you try eating right sleeping and working it out and see how that goes.

1:02:19And I'd done the typical workouts that everybody else had done, where you hire the, you know, the big guy on steroids that he helps you lift the heavy weight off of you and counts for you over and over again. That was really the PT model, right, that existed, you know, call it 25 years ago now. And I stopped by this LA boxing gym that was in my neighborhood. It was owned by a couple of fighters. There was no marketing, no customer service, no membership sales, no retail, I mean, just no nothing. And I joined it. And what I figured out very quickly is that people were there for the workout and the experience.

1:02:57They weren't there for the customer service, the building, the retail, any of those kinds of things, but there was a massive opportunity. And when I went to USD's entrepreneur program, it was about a hundred kids got into that program every year and we pounded opportunity recognition, right and we pounded knowing the customer and we pounded solving a problem and when i looked at it i was like it's very interesting you have people pulling up in very expensive cars driving from newport beach into costa mesa um you have them paying really whatever and they're showing up dealing with poor customer service at the lap of david building why are they here and it was like any other good you know down home restaurant where you're like the location sucks the food sucks or food's great service sucks it must be the food right it's the only thing it could possibly be it's the only reason why anybody's coming back here is because the workout and experience and so with that i bought that location uh i opened a second one i opened a third one and then i was out of capital because it was mine i was begging borrowing whatever i could i didn't have any family that that had any money so i was financing things on credit cards i was able to get an sba loan you know back in the day uh for a few hundred thousand bucks and just use the profit from you know one and two to do three then i was out of money and i met a franchise broker who said you really should franchise this and and i knew as much about franchising as anybody else i knew McDonald's was a franchise and that was kind of really it.

1:04:37And so, you know, that was back in 2002 that we did that. I started franchising it in 2004. So I hate to tell you, Matthew, but about a decade before the UK got it, we were living it in Southern California. But boutique fitness wasn't a word. You know, it wasn't a Wikipedia word. And I continued to operate LA Boxing as a franchisor until the UFC came along. And they had five or six big box locations at that time. It was basically a 24-hour fitness rebranded into UFC. And Dana and the Fertittas came along and said, hey, we'd like to buy what you're doing. Because it's small. It's in the community.

1:05:27CapEx is light. You're franchising. these little boxes are, you know, producing money for franchisees and we like the model. And, you know, and so UFC came along and bought it and we rebranded it. And that was really kind of the birth of it. But we had memories a long time ago, but I want to say we had 60, 70, something like that open when the acquisition happened and maybe 100, 150, something like that sold. And so we put a couple of guys in a van with paint and stuff, you know, and they drove the country repainting and rebranding all the LA boxings into UFC gym. And that was kind of the first time that you had a, call it a multi-billion dollar brand come together with boutique fitness.

1:06:21And so that was really how my career started. And, And, you know, it really was until Orange Theory, you know, you can go back and look on the Internet. I don't know that there was a scaled boutique fitness, you know, that was out there. And there definitely wasn't a scaled boutique fitness franchise or. So we, you know, me and the team, the same team I have today primarily really went and paved that way. And we've been doing it for the last 20 years.

1:06:56Thank you.

1:07:28Thank you.