#85: Why Christian Guzman Never Walked Away - Even When He Should Have

0:00You could be climbing these mountains and then you look and realize your parents are about to be 70 or maybe your parents get sick. Like you've been so busy climbing the mountain when in reality, like you're 20 times ahead of where you wanted to be originally. Was there any ever doubt thought of quitting? I knew it was going to be very tough. The only what have I done moment was probably about five months into construction. This is like in the heat of COVID. My gym was shut down because of COVID. But thankfully, you know, we were able to get people back in and just like start chipping away at it.

0:28How do you think egos played a role in business? We pretty much hit a peak revenue year in 2022. All of the ego that was getting developed and the confidence in making launches bigger and bigger and bigger, that ended up coming to bite me in the a** when our profit margins started shrinking, shrinking, shrinking the following years. Any of the biggest kind of jumps I've ever done, you go into a lonely chapter. Definitely you're going to be lonely when you have to master your craft. If anything really bad happens, instead of giving yourself a week to like call your friends and call this other person, give yourself 15 minutes instead of a week.

1:02Call that person. Be pissed. But in 15 minutes, what's the next actual step you got to take? Take that step. Don't let yourself simmer in this like negative phase. It's just not going to do you any good. Do you feel like you've had to sacrifice anything to choose this path?

1:22Christian Gizman, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Talk to me about this place. We've first time here and I rock up and firstly, there's two entrances and this thing is not a gym, it's a compound. I want to know what your thoughts were before starting this and what you envisioned for this place. Yeah. So this is an 18 and a half acre property. It's called Alphaland. And if you rewind back to 2019, that was the year where essentially my financial advisors were saying, it's time to buy something, right? The businesses are going great. It's time to make an investment. And I was tired of renting the offices and the gym.

2:01We have a clothing brand, Alfleet, and a gym that was called Alfleet Gym at the time eventually evolved to Alpha Land. But the two businesses for the entirety of my career have always been separate at that point. And so it was always really tough to have the culture and the employees all feel like they're on one team when we would have to drive 10, 20 minutes away from each sort of business. So in 2019, looking for properties, I ideally wanted to build one building, about 50 to 60 ,000 square foot with a gym and also put on the second floor all this, like the staff, the clothing brand. Now, essentially there was nothing within a 15, 20 mile radius from the area that I wanted.

2:50and any of the spots that I was finding were gonna run close to 10, 11, 12 million all in. And so my landlord at the time, this is also after a few deals to kind of falling through. So I was kind of down in the dumps, like kicking the floor, upset that these projects weren't working out. He came and showed me a very oddball property, he called it. And he said, it's really big. Don't, this isn't at all what you're kind of dreaming of or imagining. but we should go take a look. So we came, take a look, took a look. It was 18 and a half acres, tons of responsibility, tons of property taxes, tons of just property maintenance that I didn't want.

3:34But once I saw this in person and walked it and kind of saw the potential for, wow, this could just not just be a gym. This could be like three different gyms and we could have all the office upstairs. I think we could really build something cool here. and it's big enough to sustain us for forever. If we move here, we won't have to ever think about it again because we can build, we can expand and we won't be bottlenecked like we have been for the first eight years of the business. So I decided the headache of a large property would be worth it. And so in 2020, I got the keys right before COVID, went through two years of hard renovation, severely underestimated how much I was gonna spend and ultimately completely underestimated how much to ask for from the bank.

4:21I only asked for a million dollars of money to renovate, ended up spending much, much more than that, which was all out of pocket. And it was just a very chaotic, crazy, probably the, I mean, 100 % the toughest two years I've ever endured. And in those two years, we were also peaking at Alfleet's revenue. and they were just very very tough very rewarding years where i learned so much in january january 1st 2022 we opened the doors here um and since then we've been operating the gym and continuing with the clothing and working on 3d energy and the bodybuilding show what what was so tough about those two years why was it why was it hard it was very hard because all the way up until that point and during that point my team was tiny to be frank uh and my team was always for either the gym for the clothing i had nobody to kind of assist me in this whole separate project that i wanted to do and so after working with the contractor for the beginning portion of the project and just getting the actual finding it like seeing how much I was actually spending versus what was estimated with all the change orders and things like that that were happening and I was just stacking up so much and it made me realize how unprepared I actually was for something like this I ended up spending I think four or five times the amount to just demo the building that I thought I was projecting so I ended up firing those contractors and sourcing a team on my own to do it.

6:04And so really like, I think building that out and just the chaos of COVID, the chaos of not being able to have staff here, the chaos of my gym that was running at the time being shut down for months, um, really was just a lot of pressure just to maintain this property without putting money towards renovations or build outs is$110 ,000 a month. And so essentially we were really burning through cash and I've never had investors, never taken any money other than that 1 million for the, on top of the property when I got the property from the bank. Um, so it was just a lot of pressure and not, it wasn't just building this building.

6:48It was running, trying on samples, doing all of the hard gritty work for the clothing brand um that got us to where we where we were in 2020 so because i i clearly remember when you posted a video back then when you acquired the property and you were on just dirt just like on a place i remember you were on like plain grass field and you were like painting the vision for what it was going to be but it was not even a thing anymore at that time it was just like it was just a fantasy, an idea. When you were in that time, like kind of going on, this is where this is going to be. We're going to have this year.

7:28There's going to be a basketball court there and X, Y, and Z. Like, were you kind of thinking it was going to be a whole lot easier than it was? I knew it was going to be very tough. I mean, straight up, I just didn't project the, honestly, the spend that well. And I didn't, I didn't account for how many times I would want to make adjustments and kind of, I don't like how that looks. If I'm going to do it right, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it right. This is going to be my forever home. I need to do it right. Like that, which ends up costing a ton of money happened in so many areas. So I think I just wasn't that prepared for that.

8:09I also think I was hyper fixated on making this place someone, something that I didn't want to have to redo and didn't want to have to retouch up in five years or you know ordering furniture that i didn't like and i just wanted to make it truly like a place that i would not have to touch and i would just know and tell myself like i did it how i wanted to do it um so that sounds all high in my you know really cool and stuff but that came at a cost for sure um and yeah yeah i think when you when you look at it it's just this wanting if i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it sort of nature where i'm not gonna half-ass the thing i'm gonna make sure i i do it but then the problem with it can come is you're waiting for it to be perfect and so you're kind of doing whatever it will take for it to be perfect do you think you ended up launching when it was near near perfect or did you kind of get later down the line you're like we just need to get this thing out we need to get some money in the no we definitely we definitely got it perfect i mean the only thing that was not technically perfect we were aligning the gym rows that night before we opened December 31st when you know we opened January 1 so I remember being here till like three four in the morning still like the quad machine needs to be this far apart like this whole upstairs everything down there was as it is now when we opened so it was just a lot of waiting on permitting waiting on you know the COVID just or COVID not the COVID just slowed things down dramatically but I was making so many mistakes space and redoing things that even if COVID wasn't a factor, I think I would have taken just as long, to be honest.

9:46Yeah. Do you feel like, like when you're looking at this space now, like, and you were to go, okay, high level speaking here, I've built this massive compound, but back when you started it, it was this side project. Like you're just explaining, you had all the other things that you were doing. You had the clothing that you were, that was the thing that was funding it all am i right um and so what looks like something that isn't even possible to achieve like i've never even seen anything like this you did this on the side of doing all of the other things do you think when you're looking back at it now that it's here do you think that like it's quite lucky in a in a sense that this even happened and it came to life Do you think you nearly went under many times?

10:35I think finding this property and this scale of wow factor was the biggest stroke of luck ever. I think that landlord or the realtor that I was working with, him showing me that oddball, even though it was something I totally didn't want to look at and just had so many bad feelings about and ended up being the actual gem, that's the luckiest I feel. That's the biggest piece of luck, I think. Um, I think as far as getting it open and everything, I mean, I, I honestly just worked myself to the, like, I mean, to no end, like I've never had such little sleep. I never had such a bad sleep schedule for so long.

11:19Um, and every month it was just like, all right, we just got to, I'm out of fuel, but we just have to find some fuel. We just have to keep going, keep going, keep going. Um, I would never want to kind of put my body through what I did those two years, you know, ever again, but I don't regret any of it because it's now the beauty of this facility, unlike an online business and unlike social media, this is here. I mean, the values here, the gym is doing fantastic. It's, you know, growing year over year and with very little of my needing to go and work on it versus, you know, the clothing brand, that's a constant every day.

11:58How are we evolving? What are our drops? What are the new items? What are the new fits? That's a constant fight, right? Fight I love to have, but it feels like now that all of that, it's like this business, the facility, the gym, that required a lot more upfront, paid the dues. And now I get to kind of see the reward for the rest of my life. That's kind of how I'm looking at this one versus other businesses are, you know, kind of the opposite. So when you're in the middle of doing this thing, you had a two-year sprint that was obviously amidst the, I don't know if you'd call it lockdowns over here, but amidst all of the pandemic that was going down, was there any ever doubt thought of quitting or was it always a, fuck, this is just going to maybe take a bit longer than I expected.

12:45It's going to cost a bit more, but was there ever a consideration of hanging up the boots? No, I mean, people around me definitely thought I should, I mean, people thought that I was going to quit or needed to quit or that, but I mean, there was not really an option to do that at any point. Once I committed to finishing this place, I mean, I was in it. So I just had to find a way to make it happen. The fear of failing, the only true failure that could have happened would have been, I am out of money and I can't fund the clothing and I can't do that. And that would be a huge mismanagement of funds.

13:19And I never, we never got to that point um thankfully but it was of I guess it was a outcome I could see happen to an extent if I didn't bust my ass and work as hard as I did yeah just before we pressed record I was talking about these delusional goals where like for me if we go if we go back in time a little but I was a young 16, 17 year old kid. And I thought I was going to be a multi, multi-millionaire at 20 years old. I remember setting these expectations on the life that I wanted to live. And then I embarked on the journey, went through way more challenge. It was so much harder than I expected.

14:02You know, we raised all this money for this software company we were building. We had to get our parents to sign the documents because we weren't old enough. I remember moving out of home and going through all these things. And then I like vividly go back to those times. Remember like solo walking around a golf course, just mind racing. Like, what have I, what have I done? Like my, I've left my family, all this stuff, but there was never a doubt of quitting because I set expectations on the life that I wanted to live before I knew what it was going to take to get there. And so it wasn't a matter of, oh, fuck, I, I would, let's just go do something else because that was my expectation.

14:41So if I don't meet that, then I'm not going to be happy. And so I was like, okay, well now it's just, it's not a matter of do I quit? It's just a matter of how fucking long and how hard is this going to be? And do you feel the same when you, before you start all of these things? And obviously you had some success through all the other areas before doing Alpha Land itself and building this massive compound. But did you ever have those similar thoughts where it's like, fuck, I'm not quitting. Like I've, I've, I've set these expectations. Like this is kind of what I'm doing now, but you're kind of a bit like, fuck, what have I done in a sense?

15:17I mean, the only fuck what have I done moment was probably about five months into construction. This is like in the heat of COVID when I was working out, I was working in that shack for the two years. It's underneath the parking garage for the whole two years we were building. And I came out and I was spending all my nights here, four nights a week at least. and I came out, multiple employees had COVID. No one could work in the property for like two weeks. And this is, my gym was shut down because of COVID. I couldn't have any employees. I was staring, I walked out and I was staring at this massive building that was completely gutted, had like 5 % of walls starting to be built.

15:56And I was like, I might be fucked, right? That's the only real, but thankfully, you know, we were able to get people back in and just like start chipping away at it. But I mean, if COVID, for example, if COVID regulations were that intense, where like they couldn't come back for six months instead of two weeks, yeah, that'd be a different story. So, I mean, I don't know. I don't really ever, in anything I've ever done, I've never really thought about quitting. It's always just finding a way to continue the path. And I don't even want to think of a, like that worst outcome of running out of money because I would have found out, I would have found something to, I would have found a way to make it happen.

16:33Like without a doubt. So it's, I never really have thought like that too much. Yeah, no, I resonate with that. What about personality types? Would you consider yourself quite addictive personality? Yeah. If you put some RuneScape in front of me, I'm on that thing all day, all night playing good. But really with everything I do, I get pretty addicted to it for sure. I will say like, I think my 20s were more so, I mean, I was blazing. I was going fast, right? Success was coming fast. I wanted to capitalize on any opportunity that I think I could have accomplished. That meant starting, I started two extra businesses that I needed to because I was just like thinking I could do, if I can do athletic clothes, I can do fashion clothes.

17:20If I can do this, I can do that. So it's like, I ended up wasting so much money. And, and, you know, when I was older, higher twenties and even 30 realizing like, there's enough on my plate. I need to focus on these four things and not try to do all six. And so like scrapping certain projects has happened in my career as well, you know, where we've lost millions of dollars just because of the overly confident me when I was 22, you know, starting too much stuff. So I think that all in my twenties, it was very fast paced. It was very, very, there was no fear, no fear, no lack of comp or no lack of like believing in myself whatsoever.

17:59And now that I'm 32, not that that's changed at all, but I just want to really take some time to refine things, right? I want to take time to refine our books, take time to refine the culture, take time to be sure I can find a system where it's not going to burn me out completely. Cause really, I mean, in my twenties, it was me chaotically running multiple companies. The staff will tell you that, you know, I could tell you that. And now this is the first time where I'm really trying to have a lot more effort spent on structure, a lot more effort spent on high-level employees that can talk to people and manage departments.

18:39So it's not just me having to do all the day-to-day. And I'm trying to shift my focus to starting a family and being able to enjoy a little bit more so much of the hard work from my 20s and also really try to put focus back into my content. because when I was super involved in the weeds of running the organizations, it completely took away from my number one passion, which is being on YouTube, being consistent, putting out content. And ultimately, whenever I was doing that heavily, that's when everything was going amazing, intends to go amazing. If I ever like let myself pull away from that and I just go dark to handle the real life shit, it ends up putting me in a worse spot.

19:26And so I find I'm finding that groove right now, I feel like. Yeah. It's like, don't forget the thing that got you to the dance. Yeah. I'm feeling that I'm going to selfishly hone in on this 20s period of your life. I resonate with that. I feel that right now, this unstoppable confidence, let's do everything. Let's risk it all. Let's go. I resonate with that right now. When you were in that state, did you have any mentors, people that are kind of walked some level of a walk and have told you things and gave advice that you shut down at all. And then you kind of got out the other side and was like, I should have listened to that guy.

20:01Was there anything that you would tell your younger 20-year-old self or 25-year-old self that's just sprinting? I mean, was there any mentors? No one really doing what you were doing. No one was, the only guy doing what I was doing, but almost like reverse engineered as he started the business without social media, was Ben Francis from Gymshark, good friend of mine. And so they're always, they've always been years ahead. So I always was kind of like chase, if he made a video on like Gymshark,$100 million, I wanted to hit$100 million, right? And I kind of like fixated on those things, but never really like talked one-on-one for advice or anything.

20:41I have a good friend's dad who is very wealthy, has his own business here in Houston. And he told me like a goal savings amount. And ever since that, I've just been fixated on getting that. so I could never have to worry about money in my life again. But on the day-to-day, I know there's definitely been no mentors. As far as motivation, when I was younger, Greg Plitt was my number one motivation. As far as like a fitness guy that I followed that would, you know, go on motivational rants. And I just really like use his words like as my Bible of how to kind of act and handle myself and conduct myself.

21:16What advice would I give to my 20-something? I wouldn't even tell him to slow down. I say go, go faster. When you have it in, you go fuck, do it all, you know, do it all. And I guess one, the one piece, so I would say have the hard conversations quicker. All that time I was developing those businesses. So many of my employees were so, I was so close with them. friendships you know even if they weren't friends to start they became friends became family but you know and just that environment made it very tough for me without any HR or without any higher level executive to be able to like have those performance reviews and actual tough conversations that ended up kind of getting really blurry and murky many times because I just never wanted to let people down and I just kind of loaded myself with more and more and more and would honestly settle for i would i took a long time to actually focus on getting higher level talent in the companies and i wish i would have done that sooner and not been so emotionally invested to where to the point where i was just like paralyzed to make to make anyone upset you know what i mean yeah having the hard conversations it's it's always that thing it's like um the the best the best people in business are the ones that can see opportunity fast but then fail even faster not stay in something for a longer period of time because of the sunk cost fallacy or whatever, the feeling of like, oh, I've already gone this deep.

22:47I can't, I don't want to backtrack. But your ability to kind of get rid of it and move on. Yeah, more people will always be the number one, in my opinion, challenge in business. Bigger team, bigger problems. If you have 20 employees to 100, that's a big difference. your time is going to be spent very differently. If you get to 150, it'll even be spent more differently. Right. And so I think like, I've kind of been through levels of that kind of different employee staff numbers. And, um, you know, then you learn, maybe I can outsource this portion of the business. Maybe I can do this and kind of make everything more effective, more efficient.

23:27And so, um, I think that's probably been the most I've learned the most from, I guess just like that from a zoomed out perspective, that is where CEOs will need to evolve is like, and understand people is going to be everything. And like, if you can find ways to make it a little easier on yourself, then I recommend doing so. How do you think egos played a role in business? I think staff's one of those big things as well. It's like, oh, I've got 300 employees. oh yeah you know just like i said the 100 million number that was 100 i was for the ego right and then same with staff people want to you know say they have this amount of staff and it just gives the illusion that things are huge and running efficiently and fantastic but i think ego can be the i mean for us for me especially we pretty much hit a peak revenue year a few years back in 2022 and all of the ego that was getting developed in the confidence in units and the confidence in ordering product and making launches bigger and bigger and bigger, like all the stats I was getting, that ended up coming to bite me in the ass when our profit margins started shrinking, shrinking, shrinking the following years.

24:46And so really the last year and a half has been a full reset with focus on the bottom line instead of gross revenue, aka the big dick number, right? the ego number, focusing back in on a healthy business, be sure we're like growing year over year, not overordering, not trying to be the biggest guy in the room. You know what I mean? Yeah. You mentioned earlier that the focus in your life is kind of pivoting a little bit where it's not the sprint and there's a bit of an emphasis on family and maybe building that up. Do you feel like you can't, because I kind of look at the main pillars of life being like health time and relationships time is business basically money is freeing up time but i kind of look at health time relationships being maybe the three most important things of life but i feel like maybe you can't go all in on all of them at once no and so you're in this stage where now you're going okay maybe like fuck marry kill but for those three three the three things you just said yeah that's kind of how it goes especially in your 20s and you know it may be you have to sacrifice what were they family time and health time relationships but uh but like health business relationships when i was the last over the course of me building this relationships had to take a back seat thankfully my now wife was able to put up with it and she kind of supported the decision to go and do this thing but that was also a lot more than we thought and it was very challenging on us uh so it's like relationships took a complete back seat for those times and i think it's always going to be a shift of you know you put more over here put a little less over here but right now i feel like i've got a really good balance and it's taking me 12 years in business to get to this balance level yeah i and you're not going to be balanced until you go through some shit i i agree i agree i i want to challenge the fuck marry kill though piece because i feel like there's an there's a kind of a responsibility to keep all of them at least at a maintenance level.

26:46I mean, it can be hard, especially when you're running a massive empire and you can't do anything but work. But when I think about what actually matters in life, I go, why would I be doing anything if it's going to mean that I'm going below my baseline, whatever you determine that to be of your health, your business and your relationships? I think that's the extreme situations. Yeah. You know, and like for me, this place was an extreme situation. And like I said, I don't want to go back to that again. So now it's like, but I think that far too many people are too scared of the potential of having to go to an extreme situation and will never do anything crazy or never do anything really out there that challenges everything they think they can do.

27:26So I guess that's like a really small percent of, you know, I don't even want to say that's just a very rare occurrence, I guess. It's a sprint. It's like a truly all out sprint. Balls to the wall. Don't give a fuck if you're going to throw up. while you're running. You just got to go like, that's going to happen a few times in your life. Yeah. You're not in this state of, this is my life now. It's like, this is one chapter. Yeah. You never, you're not in that massive sprint where your mind's racing and you've got a list of to-do lists that never ends. You're not sitting there going, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life.

27:57But you are kind of having to, I guess, attach yourself to what you're actually chasing and go, okay, there's a reason I'm doing this. I'm not just going through all this shit because I don't want to make it out the other side. Like I'm going through it for a reason because the light's going to be brighter on the other end in a sense. It's like you've voluntarily entered a tunnel. Now you didn't know how long that tunnel was going to be, but you know that there is another side of it. And it's like, okay, well, I've committed to the tunnel. We've just got to keep going, but there is going to be lights.

28:27And once you reach that end of that temporary tunnel, following through with your promises that I'm not going to just enter another tunnel right now. I'm going to make a change and like do what I said and disperse my energy elsewhere and like keep that promise. Cause I think also a dark hole could be like committing to things that are super extreme. Once you reach that goal, just saying, fuck it, what's next? And then you continue going again and going again. And then you have no chance of mending relationships or no chance of, you know, your health is too far gone. Right. So I I think that it's important to also catch yourself and be sure like you do pivot and, you know, give yourself the time to have all three.

29:10You know, I mean, I remember like in those years, I things were the weekends were a complete blur. I was so exhausted from I would just be waking up, eating, going back and falling asleep, not being able to stay up at my wife's like surprise birthday parties or my mom's events. and family was really concerned about me and like things like that and just not being not there like and i just wouldn't want to do that to them again did it feel isolating yeah but i was fine you're fine yeah i was fine it's like i never really because i had to be fine we had the you know i had to get it done yeah yeah it's it's interesting because as i said just before we even pressed play on the breath work or the recording i was like i can tell you've been through shit i look at the i look at the most people that have gone through the most chaos so like the criminals that i ever interview maybe that have been in jail that now are movie stars or something like this or the military men the navy seals or whatever it is like you go through these all the people that are in like bikey gangs filled with tattoos and you meet them and they're like the nicest calmest most respectful piece people you've ever met and i look at it and And I just go, the more chaos you go through, the easier it is to deal with the chaos.

30:28So you just feel more calm. And it's just this like stoicism approach of like calm in the chaos. The only way you can be calm in the chaos is by going through more chaos. I think six years ago, I would have been interrupting you every sentence. I would have been like kind of like trying to chime in, kind of scattered, my head being scattered and just really quick to answer. And I feel like you're right. The more chaos and things you go through, the more you can kind of digest it, take your time, think about what you're going to say and, you know, and just be smoother. Yes. So just on this calmness piece, your chaos tolerance is very high.

31:10It takes a lot for you to get phased. Do you struggle to have empathy for people that don't have the tolerance that high? So say someone presents you a problem and you think that's petty or little. Is it hard to be empathetic for those people? Because obviously being a leader, managing a massive team, I've even found it hard on a smaller scale, let alone having a whole organization that you're the person that people call to. It's definitely not hard to be empathetic. It just, I mean, in short, I think that any of the management that has worked for me has really been shocked at how are you not affected by things happening.