LIFTS Episode 95 - Dan Uyemura on Tech, Trust & Transformation in the Fitness Industry

0:00I think everyone has gotten to the point where they played with chat GPT or some AI tooling and they can understand the amount of leverage it can bring. People are much more apt to leave reviews for other human beings than they are for a business. Like I'll leave a review for the barista who's made my coffee but not necessarily for the coffee shop. You might wake up in the morning and AI could tell you, hey I did these 14 things for you overnight and here are the results of it and here's the things I need you to follow up on. I think churn is the most important thing people should look at. The technological advancements that have been put in front of us, I think are going to be greater than the advent of the internet.

0:37Matthew Januszek:Welcome to this week's Lyfts podcast. I'm Matthew Janjusek, and I'm here with my co-host Mo Iqbal. Mo, how are you doing today? I'm doing good. I just felt like it was yesterday that we were together in Westlake at the W3 conference. That was a lot of fun. We got our first run together. I don't think we've worked out yet though I mean I guess our runs are work but we actually haven't like lifted some heavy things together we need to compare our we need to compare our strength scores that's what we need to do that could be next for us yes so maybe the next time maybe in Dallas where I'll be seeing you tomorrow yeah yeah absolutely I think so we'll add it we'll add it to the calendar well look I'm excited to welcome our special guest this episode we've got Dan Umera who is the CEO and founder of PushPress.

1:24Dan's been at the forefront of helping independent gyms run smarter. I've been admiring him from the sidelines. He's given operators the tools to grow in an industry dominated by big box chains and enterprise platforms. Now, full disclosure, ABC Fitness, as a lot of you know, I'm on the executive team of, and is where I sit, could technically be considered a competitor of PushPress in some way. So this is either the start of a cage match or masterclassic collaboration. But look, if there's a cage match, I would put my money on Dan, even though Dan, you potentially might have an injury. But even with that, you would probably win and beat me out in a cage match.

2:06But either way, Dan, we are so excited to have you here. Welcome to Lyfts. Thank you. I don't know if I'm beating you today. I could barely get out of this chair, but it might be fun to see, for the audience to see.

2:18Matthew Januszek:Well, look, today we're going to, again, I'm outnumbered by these sort of smart tech heads, as I'll call you both. And in today's episode, we're going to cover a few industry reports that are from, I guess, potentially competitors for all of you guys. We've got the MindBody 2025 State of the Industry Report that came out in September, where we're going to sort of dig into a few of the subjects there. We've also got the WellHub report, again, that came out this month, which talks about the corporate wellness partnerships. There's the Explore Mariana Tech Insights, which again came out. I'm not sure whether it's something to do with this time of year where these reports come out.

3:03And then finally, we're going to dig into some of the ABC information as well, which is the ABC Usage Among Fitness Consumers report, which came out a little bit earlier this year in June.

3:17Matthew Januszek:So maybe we'll kick off with MindBody. I don't know if you can pull this up for those that are watching on YouTube, but they released a report just this month. And I think probably a good place to start is, which is quite interesting, is even with a lot of the economic headwinds that the industry is facing, cost pressures and signs of recession, certainly in the US market, 72 % of fitness and wellness operators report optimism about their business performance in 2025. So probably start off with the first question with you, Dan. One probably a good place to sort of frame this question is maybe share a little bit about the types of the demographic of the clients that you represent.

4:05Matthew Januszek:And then probably a little bit further into that. You know, what are you seeing from your side in terms of how optimistic or not that some of the operators that you work with are about the industry at the moment? Yeah, absolutely. So we at PushPress basically represent the single owner operator in what I would call group, usually coach led fitness. Sometimes it could be more one on one as opposed to a group. But kind of the boutique end of fitness that is more single owner operated have historically stayed away from franchise or anything of that nature. That's basically because I opened up a boutique studio.

4:43I was a single owner operator and I just have a soft spot in my heart for the, the number of wheels that these gym owners are recreating over and over and over again. And the a hundred thousands of gyms that they represent. Um, speaking specifically to that mind body report, this is gonna be interesting because I haven't even seen it. I haven't seen any of these reports. So it'll be interesting to get my, it'll be almost like a reaction off the cuff, if you will. I would, I would agree with it. I would agree with it. I think most of our operators are leaning into, the industry right now. They're being, they are optimistic about things.

5:14I think in general, in a single owner operator environment, there's always trepidation or worry about the near future because there's a lot of volatility in terms of performance and how they see their gyms. But in general, I think we've got tailwinds behind us and I think things are still good in the boutique fitness space. So here's what stood out to me, Dan, similar to you, It's the optimism. And I think we are all seeing in general, whether you're an SMB or enterprise or somewhere in between, or whether you're a boutique, big box or trainer led, there is general optimism in our industry today.

5:50I think the MindBody report reflects that. Operators who lean into tech are 9 % more confident in the future. And that's not coincidence. That is true correlation. The second biggest theme that I saw on this report was revenue diversification. So one of the things that the report highlights is growth in retail events and holistic services. To me, this tells us two things. Number one, operators realize that the membership model alone isn't good enough. Dan, I'm sure you've seen that they're adding in other services to complement existing membership. Second, members are asking for more integrated wellness experiences.

6:25And the third one I would probably kind of put in on there is personalization. Over half of operatives say that it is personalization is their most effective retention tactic. And in a world where churn is killing margin because acquisition has gotten so expensive, that's gold. And personalization, we're not just talking about sending a birthday text, right? That is incredibly unsophisticated, but it's really about leveraging data and tech to show members that you actually know them. And so I think a lot of what this report reflects is the trends that we've been seeing build up over the last three years.

6:58I would absolutely agree with that. I mean, even in the small business space, we've been kind of going to market and testing some AI type functionalities. I saw some of the tech related stuff in there. And what actually shocked me was I expected maybe a 50-50 split between I'm excited about it and I don't think we need it. And it's been almost 100%, even in the very small single owner operated space. I think everyone has gotten to the point where they played with chat GPT or some AI tooling, and they can understand the amount of leverage it can bring without a whole lot of training or understanding how to use the tooling itself.

7:31Matthew Januszek:The other thing I thought probably you guys would be able to comment on is that another one of the statements that came out of the report is tech investment distinguishes leaders. So businesses are actively investing in or evaluating new technology, especially AI, and are significantly more likely to be very optimistic on expanding in hiring, marketing and new services. So what are you seeing in terms of this tech investment? And I listened to a little bit of an older podcast with you, Dan. So this may be a touch out of date to where your company is now. But one of the things that you talked about is that you, as it relates to AI, is you created one of these tools that I think in this interview, you sort of whisked up over the weekend where you're able to sort of understand people's satisfaction and getting people almost to make sort of positive comments about their businesses.

8:27Matthew Januszek:and that you've seen certainly for some of these smaller operators, it made those people quite sticky in terms of their relationship. So, you know, in relation to that question and also the comment about tech investment, what are you seeing for the more smaller operator in terms of what they're investing in and why? That system you're talking about was a system I made called Jim Happy, which is you can't take, I always say like you can't take the coder out of me, so I'm always going to code something eventually. once AI popped a couple of years ago now, I decided to toy around with it. And I came up with this tool called Jim Happy, which the reality of it is it leverages technology to lean into psychology.

9:04And that's kind of like an angle that I preach a lot. Getting a review requires timeliness. It requires personalization. And I don't mean personalization, like just some robot automation that sends an email out or text out. But I also believe it requires a human to human connection. And I don't have, I don't have any data in front of me to prove this, but the general premise is the fact that people are much more apt to leave reviews for other human beings than they are for a business. Like I'll leave a review for the barista who's made my coffee, but not necessarily for the coffee shop. And so the thought of automation I built basically like 78 minutes after someone checks into a class or an hour and 20 minutes after it sends a simple request from the coach that says, Hey, how was class?

9:48Leave me some feedback. Simple as that. But it uses AI to reformat it every time to be a little bit more personal. And it's done very, very well, like completely blown away my expectations on how it would do. So to answer your other question about investing in tech, I actually don't believe that's the gym owner's job. I think that's like ABC's job. That's PushPress's job. I think our role in this ecosystem is to deploy our resources to build the tools, the technological tools that allow gyms to scale without them having to think about those things. Because that's not really their wheelhouse. Like I'm sure Mo would agree with me, but their job and their wheelhouse is to stand in front of clients and make them healthier.

10:30Absolutely, Dan. And I think the other job we have to do is to educate them on how to use our tools better. We spend so much time thinking about like you did with Jim Happy. Now you've got to encourage the gym owners to say, leverage your partners. And I think that's a really important point because I talk about this a lot, is now in the age of AI, it almost is more important than ever to actually get familiar with your vendor's roadmap. and because their roadmap is in a lot of ways your roadmap. So while I agree, you don't need to be investing in tech. I still think you need to be investing in operations, people, culture, that's going to be able to leverage and like utilize the technology that we are building.

11:12Absolutely. Yeah, your roadmap isn't to build the tech, but you should be spending time understanding the tech. That's right. Maybe probably tuning into webinars on how to leverage the tech as best as possible. and ideally if we're all doing our jobs like the tech becomes easier and easier and you don't have to spend a lot of time training and educating on it it just becomes usable right out the gate but

11:32Matthew Januszek:that's always the challenge with software i know um a lot of the headlines across all industries is that ai are going to be replacing most jobs and i think there was a certainly there was a surprise as some of these tools came out um that it wasn't necessarily some of the lower paid jobs It was more some of the sort of higher skilled jobs, like things like lawyers and that that we're seeing sort of being disrupted a lot more than maybe people anticipated at the beginning. It was interesting to see the, you know, what what MindBody reported in there when they spoke to a lot of gym owners, because they seem to be saying that despite AI adoption, only 4 % of fitness and wellness businesses reduce staff because of AI.

12:15Matthew Januszek:What do you what do you think is behind this? Do you think that there's going to be a lot more tools where businesses are going to be able to reduce costs and not have to rely as much on maybe trainers or people at the front desk to run things? Or do you think that the fitness industry that certainly from my perspective is very human to human is going to be an industry that avoids major disruption from AI? I think that's a really good question. And I'll bet you this is maybe where Mo and I diverge based on the client base we serve, because the gyms that I serve don't have tremendous staff and they cannot afford it.

12:54So a lot of times the owner is the front desk, is the salesperson, is the social media person, is everything. And so in my world, and I'd be interesting to hear what Mo has to say about this, but in my world, it's the opposite. It's actually going to afford them the ability to build a staff and make themselves more efficient at being all the things. And or like where we're positioning PushPress to be is we want to be a system of action. Like we want to just be your social, like we want to do the jobs for you as opposed to making you figure out how to do the jobs in the software. So software, in my opinion, is going to flip and it's going to become systems of actions instead of systems of record.

13:30And you might wake up in the morning and AI could tell you, hey, I did these 14 things for you overnight and here are the results of it. And here's the things I need you to follow up on. Like, that's where I think we're going to be able to create a lot of leverage for our single owner operators. So, Dan, it might come to your surprise, but I'm actually very much in alignment with you. And there's a lot of reasons for that. One, maybe pre-pandemic, we might have had different views as it relates to big gyms versus the person who's doing everything, the back office, the coach, the scheduling, the bookkeeping, all of it.

14:03But I think today there's a couple of reasons why AI is really going to change how all of us think about fitness. And there's a few reasons for that. I did a post yesterday on LinkedIn, and I got some texts. Not everyone commented, but I got some texts about being a little bit controversial and a little bit unpopular. I'm not saying that AI is going to replace everything or everyone. But the reality is that there are things that AI does today that even a tier external equinox might not be able to digest and consume in time. To me, AI is going to help us scale as an industry. It's going to help, if you think about acquisition and follow-up, even a big gym like a Planet Fitness deals with that.

14:46Answering the phone is going to take up, would you rather have your front desk person answering the phone or would you rather have an AI agent coming in, picking up the call, answering the questions on things like locations, hours, and so on? Secondly, when you look at personalization and personal training, it's becoming increasingly more difficult for even the best intention trainers to be able to digest information, to be able to create programs, to be able to do all the things that needs to get done. I think AI is really going to help trainers scale more. So ultimately, while AI is going to serve our respective kind of cohorts a little bit differently, I think at the end of the day, it's going to allow gyms, whether it's something run by a single person or a massive enterprise like a Planet Fitness, be able to scale more quickly, be more efficient, provide better customer service, and reach a broader market.

15:39Yeah, agreed. The interesting thing that I can see positioning, I have a position that AI as a technology is actually going to help the least sophisticated people the most. And, you know, if you compare a single owner operator like fitness person versus Equinox, clearly the single owner operator has the least amount of resources, business acumen, whatever. But because you have the power of all of the internet at your fingertips, you now have a business advisor and a financial coach and a GSB graduate who can be in your pocket to help you advance your business. It will be interesting to see how the different sides of the equation deploy and how it affects both of them.

16:22But I do think all in all, long answer short, fitness is not going away. I think that we've all lost our second place, meaning a lot of us work from home now and we don't even have a second place anymore. So fitness and gyms and especially community based gyms are people's place to be human. And so the coach and the trainer and the human component of it, I don't think will ever go away. If it does, we're already plugged into the matrix and we're so far down that rabbit hole. It doesn't matter anymore.

16:50Matthew Januszek:I'll move on to the next report, which is from, well, it's less a report, but it's more of a press release. So Explore have recently announced this next level, next gen analytics dashboard for boutique fitness studios, centralizing KPIs and reducing spreadsheet churn. On this one, again, question to you, Dan, but I'd be curious to see how the question relates to Yuma, ABC Fitness. But from an independent perspective, what are some of the headaches that independent operators have in terms of understanding the KPIs in their business? And what do you say, Dan, are the really critical KPIs that people should be looking at on a regular basis?

17:30That's interesting. Again, I haven't seen that report. I think just basic funnel metrics. We can keep it pretty simple for most gym owners. Basic funnel metrics, top of funnel, sales conversion, all the way down through churn. I think churn is the most important thing people should look at. I think the onboarding segment of churn, like three-month, six-month churn from the data I see is probably the most impactful for most gyms. So the interesting thing about that is I actually think like the challenge, I don't know how you guys feel at ABC, but the challenge I feel with reporting is every gym wants to see something a little bit different.

18:02Everyone's definition of a data point is different. Like, is it churn if they pause for 22 months or is it paused, right? Like you can go through all these scenarios and just say, like, how do you determine this? The definition matters. I actually think we've been playing with AI reporting and I think chatting with your data is going to be the next explosion with reporting. I don't think reporting is gonna be a thing pretty soon. It's just gonna be like, hey, tell me who my 23 worst paying members are and tell me what to do with them. Like you're gonna have an analyst pack into your report now all of a sudden, instead of seeing a chart with some KPIs that you've got to like interpret and figure out what to do with.

18:36Yeah, I think again, we are in violent alignment here, Dan. So your data is a new membership. If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. I always say with wearables, what is measured is managed. So from the ABC side, our benchmarks show that gyms leveraging advanced analytics can improve retention by 15 to 20 % annually. So that's the difference between a growing club and a declining one. To your point, Dan, and this is the key, the key is simplicity. So operators, you don't need data points. So in an age where you can measure and capture everything, too much of that is actually not a good thing.

19:11They really need three primary ones. And I'm sure you would agree to tell them where to focus. Retention risk, attendance consistency, and revenue per member. You can go deeper, but those are the three primary ones that we try to focus on. If you nail those, you don't just run a gym, you're actually running a business with predictable growth. And I think, to your point, we're working on chat-based agents as well, because the old school reports that you're seeing, I agree, you might need them, but it's not going to tell you what to do. But by chatting with, how do you point to your highest risk members?

19:47How can you improve your acquisition funnels? That's really where our products go. And it sounds like that's where yours is as well.

19:54Matthew Januszek:Yeah. Yeah. We'll stay on AI, but we'll move on to the ABC Wellness Watch report, which came out earlier this year. And so one of the points they make there is AI adoption is uneven across generations. So it seems so, and I guess you would expect this, but Gen Z and millennials are leading adoption of AI powered fitness tools, 64 % and 59 % usage respectively, while only 17 % of boomers have engaged with them in this ABC fitness watching 2025. So again, with your business owners that you're working with, Dan, clearly you're creating software for some of these owner operators, are you generally, you know, how does your demographic of clients split?

20:39Matthew Januszek:Are you, is it generally skewing younger? So some of the solutions that you create are readily adopted by those people, or is it a mix? And how do you get, I guess, some of the sort of more older, I'll call it more mature business owners to adopt some of the things that you're developing? Seeing that it's ABC's report, I'll let Mo go first on this one. Yeah, I just sent a message on that too. So, okay, let me go take this because I'm very familiar with this particular report. And Dan, we actually don't talk a lot about ABC on this, but Matthew came up with the agenda. So here we are, but it works out well with having you on the other side.

21:16So from the report, 49 % of consumers use AI powered fitness apps daily. So by generation, 64 % of Gen Z, 59 % of millennials, 41 % of Gen X, and only 17 % of boomers. So they use AI. But here's the glaring fact, 55 % of them are worried about privacy. That is the paradox of AI and fitness. Adoption is massive. Trust is factored. Half of the consumers are already using AI tools daily, but over half of them don't completely trust them. So the biggest adoption gap that the report shows is really generational. Gen Z and millennials are all in. Six out of 10 are using AI apps today. With boomers, only 17%.

22:05That's a 47-point gap. And I think for the operator, it's important to ask the question, who are you serving? Because if you're serving mostly boomers and they're not on it, then I would not be investing in AI tools and doing that. The opportunity, as at least we see it, is gyms could become the trusted bridge between the apps that are coming into the doors with and the gym itself. So AI gives the operator the ability to personalize and predictive power. Coaches, and these are coaches I believe have a really important role, can give them the human accountability and empathy, which AI is never going to do.

22:42And if operators can merge the two, in other words, the trust plus technology, I think that could be the retention secret and the perfect marriage between the two today. Yeah, that's a really good point. I think I take it for granted because I, well, I trust AI, but I also pay for the upper tiers where the AI doesn't get to use my information to train its own models. And I think that's an important distinction to make because I don't know if everyone realizes that. But like you realize there's four players in this ecosystem. There's the AI, LLMs, there's the software provider, there's the gym, and there's the consumer.

23:16Between the gym owner and the software provider, We have to create a barrier between like they're like if we build when we build AI stuff, we're going to be building it in a way that it's not going to be training the data sets behind it. And the consumer can rest assured that the data flow will stop with the gym. Right. Like the privacy is still there and we have to make sure that that stuff is really intact. It's actually a good note to self. Like I I personally take for granted some of these privacy things because I'm all in on it personally, even though I'm borderline boomer myself. but in terms of like kind of the report you're talking about i think most gym owners most gym owners are under the boomer range and i think a lot of them are looking for the leverage that i can create and help them run their business better so in terms of the b2b end of it i think we're okay it's the b2b to c or the b2c end of it that you have to be even more concerned about

24:03Matthew Januszek:the other part on the report again probably start with you mo and get down to comment is the is it It says trust and accuracy are major barriers. Now, I'm not sure whether that is likely to improve. I would have thought it is, but it says nearly 50 % of consumers report encountering inaccurate or irrelevant data in some of these AI apps. I've certainly, as I've played around with ChatGPT over time, you know, it can go a little bit AWOL in terms of what it's providing for you. And you've really got to go in and challenge it. So I just wondered, you know, the sophistication of some of these more, you know, B2B type of AI apps and, you know, in terms of the accuracy and people, you know, will they, as a user more, distrust them if they don't find the information or will that naturally improve over time?