The Athletes Podcast
The Athletes Podcast is a leading source of information, inspiration, and education for anyone interested in optimizing physical performance, maintaining good health, and living an active lifestyle. Join David Stark as he interviews some of the world's biggest athletes and fitness professionals, The Athletes Podcast provides practical advice, expert insights, and real-world strategies to help listeners achieve their health and fitness goals.The goal is to entertain, educate & inspire the next generation of athletes!
The Athletes Podcast
Randy Hetrick - Founder of TRX Training - Episode #223
As we wrap up with Randy's latest venture, Outfit Training, it's clear that his journey is far from over. Overcoming personal fears, like a deeply rooted aversion to public speaking, and rebounding from business setbacks has only sharpened his leadership skills. Randy's commitment to facing adversity head-on is a lesson in courage, and his strategic pivot to outdoor mobile fitness with Outfit demonstrates an innovative approach to wellness that resonates in today's world. Tune in for an episode that's packed with the kind of wisdom that only comes from someone who has relentlessly pursued excellence and pushed beyond boundaries to influence an industry and change lives.
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Other episodes you might enjoy:
World Strongest Man Mitchell Hooper, Taylor Learmont (Little "T" Fitness), Bruce Boudreau (Vancouver Canucks), Rhonda Rajsich (Most Decorated US Racquetball player), Zach Bitter (Ultra Marathon Runner), Zion Clark (Netflix docuseries), Jana Webb (Founder of JOGA), Ben Johns (#1 Pickleball Player in the World)
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All these coaches kept telling me you know what a remarkable thing this was, and eventually I was like, yeah, what he said, you know.
Speaker 2:Hey you, welcome back to the Athletes Podcast. This is episode 223, featuring Randy Hetrick. If you don't know who he is, he's the founder and chairman of TRX Training, the creator of the Suspension Trainer amongst the most prolific pieces of exercise equipment out there on the market in history, and he's the founder of one of the world's leading fitness training brands. Over three decades in the industry, randy built a record of unique accomplishments, including being a collegiate athlete, a 14-year Navy SEAL officer, bootstrapping entrepreneur, inventor with more than 30 patents, and growth company CEO whose company earned multiple placements on the rosters of Inc 500 fastest growing companies, as well as outside magazine best places to work. Randy earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California and from the Naval Postgraduate School of Monterey, as well as an MBA from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. He's also a contributing lecturer at USC and Stanford on entrepreneurship, branding and leadership. Randy is also the founder and CEO of Outfit Training, a new mobile training franchise that leverages a sophisticated technology platform to coordinate a network of tricked-out sprinter vans to deliver expertly coached outdoor group fitness and private training to parks, schools and cul-de-sacs in neighborhoods across America. He's also an investor and advisor on the boards for several other ventures outside the fitness industry, and Randy speaks on entrepreneurship, leadership, branding, as well as culture around the world and is currently working on his first book, a Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:Obviously, if you folks have listened to the show, you know I have a passion for entrepreneurship, athletics and overall high performers, and Randy is one of those individuals and he's probably helped you in your fitness journey. If you've ever used a TRX, without further ado, if you've used a TRX suspension trainer, any form of it, this man has impacted your life. So listen to the next hour-long conversation. I hope you're able to gather something from it. I also have to mention the fact that we're powered by Perfect Sports Supplements. If you guys don't know, it's the best supplements on the market. Diesel protein, the number one ranked protein in Canada for the past five years. My favorite is Canadian maple. I also love vanilla, but try out your favorite flavor. Let me know what yours is down below. Thank you so much for tuning in. Let's get to the episode number 223, featuring Randy Hedrick. Here we go.
Speaker 3:You're the most decorated racquetball player in US history, world's strongest man, from childhood passion to professional athlete, eight time Ironman champion. So what was it like making your debut in the NHL? What is your biggest piece of advice for the next generation of athletes, from underdogs to national champions? This is the athletes podcast, where high performance individuals share their triumphs, defeats and life lessons to educate, entertain and inspire the next generation of athletes. Here we go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's. There's no rhyme or reason for what we do here on the show. Our goal is to educate, entertain and inspire the next generation of athletes. Randy Hetrick, you are likely going to do that today in a variety of fashions, given your experience with Outfit, most recently previously with TRX and as well within the Navy SEALs, I think between that, that's probably a good place where I'll let you take over, give a bit of background on who you are, how you've been able to sell, reacquire your company and stay in amazing shape throughout this entire process.
Speaker 1:Hey man. Well, you know the last part might be too generous by half a day because, you know, this 2023 was not my pinnacle training year, that I can tell you, with all the other stuff that I had going on. But it's nice to be on your show and you know I'm excited to talk to a bunch of the next generation of great athletes. That's something that's near and dear to my heart. I grew up as an athlete.
Speaker 1:Southern California, you know, played a whole bunch of different sports, some better than others, and ended up after, you know, after having been a wrestler, played a whole bunch of volleyball because I, of course, you grew up in the SoCal beach area. You kind of have to and then played a little bit of sort of what I would call very poor football. I ended up going off to college at the University of Southern California and becoming a rower, which really was right up my alley, because it turns out, you know, between wrestling and rowing, I tend to like these masochistic sports where there's a high pain threshold and not a lot of crowd approval, right. That seems to be something that I gravitate toward and, uh, and then that led me down the path toward the SEAL teams.
Speaker 2:What was the transition from wrestling to rowing, everything in between? Like you gotta have a little bit of a different wiring to be able to pick those sports and to go after just pain. Grueling, hurdling like hurdles is very similar like track and field sports. Just you know you got to be able to push past the lactic acid, put it that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, you know, I don't know what exactly did it, but those seem to be the kind of sports that I gravitate toward. I spent a bunch of time in jujitsu as well, competing in sport jujitsu, and that's kind of a natural extension off of wrestling. But you know, I think the psychology of a rower, of a, you know, a track and field athlete, particularly the ones that, do you know, middle distance and long distance, where it's just, I mean, sprinters, you got to have an incredible respect for their physicality but it's over so quickly, right, you get somebody who runs the 800, good Lord, there's a ghastly human being, right Because somebody who can perform at almost at the top of their maximum output but they can hold that right over a miserably long period of time, and that sort of where where rowers come in, you know, a two thousand meter race is two thousand meters of hell and it's, uh, you gotta, you gotta, love it, and that's, frankly, the easiest part of a rower's week, because the rest of the time you're doing so many more meters. Um, but yeah, though I, there's something about the idea of being an individual sport athlete within the broader context of a team, which both wrestling and rowing are I mean especially rowing.
Speaker 1:You're most definitely a part of a choreographed movement of eight people that if you don't get right, exactly right, you're going to lose. Of eight, you know of eight people that if you don't get right, exactly right, you're going to lose. But each of those individuals is in their own little world right, where you kind of go inside yourself. You just keep telling yourself, like you know, I got 10 more strokes in me. Or you know, in the SEAL teams my motto was always focus on the next 10 meters of trail.
Speaker 1:Right, because you can certainly make it over the next 10 meters of trail. Right, because you can certainly make it over the next 10 meters of trail. If you think about the next hundred, you might start questioning yourself, right, depending on the pitch. And if you, if you think about the next kilometer or beyond that you know, then you really start to get yourself psyched out. So I was always one of those guys that could kind of go inside myself and just focus on the next 10 meters or the next 10 strokes. Right, and pretty soon you know you've traveled miles, the next 10 meters.
Speaker 2:I love it and, hey, I'd love to travel miles. I feel like you've traveled a couple of miles in your day. Take me back to 2004. You spent 14 years on the sail team. In 2004, you found a TRX in Delray Beach, florida, after inventing this suspension trainer as a SEAL team squadron commander. You're also a Stanford Graduate School MBA recipient no big deal. This is, like you know, something that you've been able to do because you had to. You had your Brazilian jiu-jitsu belt. There Was that, the backstory behind it, that's all it came from.
Speaker 1:I'll condense it. I'll condense it for you. I was at the special missions unit on a counter piracy operation and I accidentally this is a little secret that not a lot of people know TRX was a complete accident. This is a little secret that not a lot of people know. Trx was a complete accident. You know, I was loading up for an op, grabbed a flight suit off the floor of my cage and under the flight suit right, which we used to wear around mission planning and stuff. Whenever you were back, you know, in your facility, you'd just be wearing a flight suit and I'd accidentally scooped up my jujitsu belt, which was on the ground with it, stuffed it in a bag. And then I ended up on the other side of the world, you know, in this little warehouse, hoping that this counter piracy op is going to go, and as it stretched from, you know, a couple of days into a couple of weeks, we're trying to figure out ways to train. And I just happened to.
Speaker 1:You know, as I unloaded my stuff, I discovered I had my jiu-jitsu belt there on this operation, which was kind of goofy, and I had this brief moment of inspiration where I was thinking about climbing a caving ladder right, a caving ladder is two pieces of wire with little aluminum rungs that go across them, right, they call it that because I think people originated it for caving, for going down in caves, and we use those to get upside of a ship. And so I'm thinking about how to train the muscles, basically pull-ups, when you don't have a pull-up bar. And I just had this weird moment of MacGyver-like inspiration and said, well, what if I tied a knot in the end of this thing and threw it over that bathroom door in front of me, shut the door, lean back, let my body lean away against gravity, and then reverse that with my muscles right, lifted my body against gravity, and I was like, well, that's kind of cool. And when you think about it, I'm sure, dave, you're familiar with functional training, right, and functional training didn't really exist back then, or at least it existed, but not by name, which you know loosely defined as training movements, loaded movements that mimic or reinforce movements that you need to perform in your life or in your sport, right, and so a tennis player might load a movement on a forehand or a backhand right in the training room, or they might do a rotational core movement, because that same movement pattern is what they need when they're out there on the court. That would be a definition of functional training. So this was kind of the early version of that.
Speaker 1:I was trying to figure out how to climb a caving ladder ladder and I didn't have any you know, machines around that would let me do that. And I came up with this idea to use this jujitsu belt against gravity. And then, as I started playing with it, I went wait a minute, if I moved the knot in the middle I'd have two ends coming out of the top of the door and now I could grab them both and I could do rows, I could do curls, you know. And I kept playing with it and got some webbing out of our extra gearbox and, you know, tied it in the middle of the belt, put the knot on the end of it and all of a sudden you had I don't know if you suffered on the black and yellow suspension trainer a time or two. You looked like you probably have. We had something that looked like the caveman version of today's TRX.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Hmm, so wild to think of how many iterations have probably been through. I remember using it as a kid, growing up playing hockey. You know it was something that was always in the gyms available, and now, as an adult, I'm using it. It's because it's still in the gym and it's.
Speaker 2:I heard one of the interviews you've been on previously talk about how, as a SEAL member, you're expected to maintain elite fitness status but you don't have access to a gymnasium or you don't have access to all the tools that you would expect, as an athlete, to be able to stay in that shape. So you ultimately saved the ability for people to stay in shape on the move, on the go, ultimately saved the ability for people to stay in shape on the move on the go. There's individuals like mind pump media, who are creating programs based on your equipment that is available. So you've ultimately changed the fitness industry for the better because of out of necessity and out of need, and it's something that also is interesting because you can progressively overload this tool that you can't typically do on other platforms.
Speaker 2:Put it that way um well, you bring up names like steph curry, lebron james insert, any other celebrity that used trx over the years, over the years, sorry, and you're interviewed on bloomberg, now the athletes podcast. You know, 15 years later it's basically a seamless transition between those times, but there's got to be those highlight moments for you. Is this something that you thought about growing up? Had ideas for being entrepreneurial business within the fitness space, like I'm trying to. You know, take me back to early, randy years as to how you get into this space from a jujitsu belt Like was his fitness always been a part of your life, or who introduced it to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, well, I mean I've been as an athlete, right, fitness became part of my life and then, and that it just stayed part of my life, and then when I went, I went into the teams and training is such a huge piece of what you do. You know you're essentially a pro athlete in uniform. I mean very much, so you got all the facilities you got. You know the game is obviously for about as high a stakes as it gets, and so you are highly incented to be the best that you can be. So I think the thing that certainly pertains to your listeners is you know when your athletic career can be. It doesn't have to be over the day you stop competing, right. There's a lot of different ways that you can integrate that experience into your life. If what you were doing gave you joy and for me, you know, as I was promoting out of the field as a commando, what was I going to do next? Well, you know I was going to go into business, and if I'm going to go into business, why not pick a business that is in the space that I loved, right? Physical training. You know health and happiness and other people's wellness always kind of mattered to me. So I think that, combined with you know I grew up with the original MacGyver as a dad. My dad was a dentist but really all he really wanted to be was an auto mechanic. So you know he would have me out in the garage a lot more than I wanted to be holding flashlights for him while he worked on engines. And you know we I grew up around dune buggies and ski boats and you know my dad was an RV nut and and over over the period of your youth you can't help but pick up sort of skills from osmosis when you've got a MacGyver for a dad or a mom. And so those things all just kind of came together right. I had come up with this cool idea to train on the road.
Speaker 1:I was then at business school thinking about business, and one piece that I forgot to tell you is I had a buddy who was one of my classmates that had played football at Stanford and got us access to the athlete training center and we'd go out there with my straps and hook up and you know, work out on this crazy strap gizmo in the middle of this world-class, you know training facility and, over a period of time, all the S&C coaches for the various squads would come over and go all right, you got to tell me what this thing is, and then we'd start talking about it and 10 minutes later, they'd be telling me all the things this did for athletes right, that nothing else in this gym could duplicate.
Speaker 1:Stupid, simple, though the strap was right, and if you get your toes in, you know, and you're in a plank and the challenge that that puts on your core, on your shoulders and your chest, you know, every bit of stabilization that you, you know, can generate comes into effect. And so all these coaches kept telling me you know what a remarkable thing this was. And eventually I was like, yeah, what he said, you know that's what it do. And uh, and I just decided, all right, I'm going to go try to make a business out of it.
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Speaker 2:Uh, hydro splash to stay hydrated Good combination here. Great flavor in the peach. Use that post-workout after the sauna sessions. You know we got to get those in. And then creatine it's the most research supplement in the market. Obviously people have been using it for decades and the research is there. If you want to be putting on size, adding strength, creatine is a supplement that you should be adding to your repertoire without further ado. Let's get back to this episode. Thank you for tuning in again. Big shout out to our partner. Perfect sports supplements for powering the Athletes podcast. Back to the show, so unique because I think. Did you ever realize that it would have the impact that it did?
Speaker 1:Oh, no, no, no, no. I mean I thought it was cool. You know, as an officer in the teams, if you put something together that the guys, that the other guys in the squad would think is cool, you check that off as a major victory, because usually what they do is just take the piss out of each other constantly, right, and so that was kind of all I ever really expected. And then I thought, well, it'd be fun to see if there's a business, a little business, in this. Maybe that I can. You know, I can get started and then sell it to somebody. Right, I can license it to, you know, to a bigger Nike or somebody who's you know a bigger company. But it turned out, you know, that once we got going, we found there was an opportunity there in this nascent space of functional training, which didn't exist yet. In fact, it was so early that I actually bought the URL for 15 bucks online.
Speaker 1:I kept hearing people talking about functional movement and functional training, some of the early thinkers in the, you know, in the, mostly in the physical therapy space. Frankly, those are the, those are most of the guys that kind of start, some of the new waves in fitness, and I thought, man, functional training, that's got some legs to it, I wonder if I can get the website, you know, and I went on GoDaddy or whatever it was at the time and there it was, so I bought it and uh, and then we, we forwarded it to TRX, you know, ever since. But, but, uh, but yeah, that was that was way it ended up being way beyond your question, way beyond what my expectations were. I took it on originally as kind of a fun hobby idea that probably wouldn't work and I'd have to go get a real job. But damn, if it didn't take off.
Speaker 1:And then it led to us becoming a much broader, stanced company. Obviously, the straps are still a big part of what we do, but you know, we've added pretty much every every other tool that a trainer you know would use with a, with an athlete other than we don't do powerlifting stuff. But but you know, in the functional realm, trx pretty much does everything that you can imagine. And we've built out a really incredible digital platform too, called the TRX Training Club. That's kind of our version of a Peloton, like you know. Uh, subscriber, uh, digital platform.
Speaker 2:Interesting. I haven't heard of that. I'm going to have to do some more research on that. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, well, we can get you set up with with yeah, I mean you would like it, it's, it's got. I mean I'll bet you we have got I don't know 10,000 pieces of content in there workouts, so it's a very user-friendly platform. So for anybody who's looking for a cool, you know, digital training assistant basically it's like six bucks a month and it's, you know, more workouts than you could ever do in 10 lives amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think one of the aspects that I like uh it, like I said, the trx is in the gym that I've been going to, and weight lifting is great. That's what I typically am starting my workouts with. But at a certain point the weights start wearing and tearing on the body, and body weight exercises can be just as effective and your body can typically recover quicker from those. So my thought process is at least after I can rip some body weight, trx and then I've, you know I'm getting the best of both worlds, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, we we've never, you know from day one, one of the cool things that we did at TRX. Because I'm a very kind of eclectic cat, right, I like what works, and so you know, we were never in the place of saying, oh you don't need to lift weights. That would be garbage. You do need to lift weights, right, and depending on the sport you play, you may need to lift relatively more or relatively less, and you know, either lift it in a, you know, heavy strength configuration or maybe more of a muscular endurance you know heavy strength configuration or maybe more of a muscular endurance.
Speaker 1:But we, what we always said was, hey, no matter what you do, your ex can help you do it better. So if you're and you know, we got guys like Jay Cutler right, who, who you know, no stranger to lifting a few weights, but early on he showed up and was like man, this is going to tie together my joints in a way that you know big heavy inertial loads doesn't necessarily do, and you know this will help with my stabilization muscles and all of the things that make you a better athlete. So we just, you know, we don't care what you do, we just want to be part of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I love it. I'm a big fan. I'm excited that we've been able to actually finally get you on the show, because it's been months in the making. We're almost celebrating your 20th anniversary, which is incredible. This episode will probably go live during that time. I guess, when I look at this now and you kind of touched on it there you went in, you were able to sell a control of a majority stake and then get back into an organization that you built. Can you describe what that process was like? And you're like hey, I still love the business, I want to be back in it, but I want to be able to do more. I want control back. What was that whole.
Speaker 1:I wish it was that story no what I did is, I sold control to some private equity guys who just turned out to be complete bumblers and took the business off a cliff trying to be the operators of it, and I stuck around as long as I could tolerate them and then eventually just said, all right, I've sort of had it If they were sure they were the smartest guys in every room and knew the answer to every possible question without having done a single rep in any of the areas to you know, to rate that sort of self-assessment. But you know, they put up the money to buy control of the business and so you know, by God, they were going to control it. So I decided at that point which really I stayed on as CEO through the end of 2020. You know, we had our best year ever, but largely on the back on as CEO through the end of 2020. We had our best year ever, but largely on the back on the winds of the pandemic. Right. We did almost 90 million in revenue but just over 20 in EBITDA, and at that point I was ready to go and start Outfit, which had been a concept that I was very interested in for a very long time at TRX, and we just could never really, you know, muster the energy to birth this whole new thing inside the company. So I decided, all right, well, you know, these guys are going to, we all thought, sell the business on the back of a year, like that, and I figured that I might get back involved with it when, you know, whoever bought it took over and probably would come back and say, hey, founder, come back over here and help us. You know, but what I was super passionate about was going and starting this new concept called Outfit. So I left.
Speaker 1:Well, as I was off, you know, in the very short period that I was off doing this startup, those guys somehow figured out how to run the unsinkable ship into the rocks and it was, you know, taking on water and threatening to go to the bottom of the ocean. So I had the opportunity to, you know, be involved in the acquisition of the business at a much lower price than it had been sold for. And I found a great partner who was a friend, a guy named Jack Daly, who was involved in the SEAL community, big, big supporter of the SEAL Foundation, treasurer of the Navy SEAL Foundation, and I started talking to him. He'd been in business for, you know, he'd been a partner at Goldman Sachs for 20 years, buying and selling large cap companies, and then at TPG for about the previous six years, and had recently retired. And I, you know, knew that he was a type A cat that wouldn't love retirement too much. So I called him up and said hey, you know, I got good news and bad news. The bad news is those clowns that I sold TRX to are I've run it into the reef. The good news is, you know, that might present an opportunity.
Speaker 1:And Jack took a look at it, called me back and said, hey, let's go buy it. And. And so you know me back and said, hey, let's go buy it. And uh, and so you know, largely with his capital, because most much, if not all, of mine was still tied up in the business right, I have rolled it into to the acquisition, sadly, uh, you know, I was able to get a little out, but not nearly enough, and so I couldn't. I couldn't be the, you know, the, the financing source. I needed to get somebody, who, who, who, had those resources. But since I was the guy that built Humpty Dumpty, I was in the best position to put it back together. And so we formed a partnership and uh, and that was, you know, 18 months ago and the business is back to profitability and, you know, probably in a better place, honestly, than maybe ever before 90 million profit, 20 million EBITDA, 90 million revenue.
Speaker 2:Sorry revenue.
Speaker 1:I wish, I wish I was going to say.
Speaker 2:I just had to clarify 90 million, wow and so, and you've been able to turn this around within 18 months, which is a testament to both you and John's work ethic type A personalities. Well, I tell you what.
Speaker 1:Jack Daly, like you don't get a guy that's more of a type A grinder than him, and yeah, but between the two of us, I mean, frankly, I'm surprised. I never thought I'd meet somebody that was more of a grinder than me and I think I've met my match. So between the two of us and the team we've assembled, honestly it's mostly, you know, we do very little other than agitate. They're the ones that you know that make the magic happen. But yeah, it's been a pretty remarkable recovery, I got to say, and I'm really happy with where it's ended up, Although I do have a few more gray hairs and a few more wrinkle lines as a result of it. Hey, hopefully a few more wrinkle lines as a result of it.
Speaker 2:Hey, hopefully a few more decimals and zeros in the bank account and that'll make up for those gray hairs, right? Or at least that's what they say. Who knows, is money by happiness? Who knows, maybe you'll be able to tell me after this Wait.
Speaker 1:I'll let you know when.
Speaker 2:I know it's interesting because I think people would look at your experience, having been in the built the business. They're like, oh, like you know you might be tired or, like you know, not want to get back involved. Is there still that fire? Because you know there's so much more out there and opportunity to do good in this world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I mean, I am tired that I can talk to.
Speaker 1:I am tired and you know, at I mean, the first time I built this thing I was 37, right.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, 20 years later it's a different, it's a slightly different dynamic when it comes to psychic energy. But you know, the opportunity is so great and we touch so many athletes and general. You know population folks and you know it's pretty special when you get to be part of something that you know helps athletes build these amazing careers, some of the most amazing, you know, careers in athletic history. We've gotten to be a little piece of right and that's exciting. And then, just every day, folks coming up to you and telling you, I mean, I can't go to a trade show, dave, where somebody doesn't come up to me and bring me to tears, telling me this incredible story of transformation about their life that they wrongly attribute to me and the straps right. And I'm always trying to remind them like, hey, I didn't do this, you did it, but it's pretty remarkable. You get, you get to have some of those in your life and, uh, it has a way of motivating you, you know, to stay in the game and keep swinging.
Speaker 2:Anything, you'd go back and tell that 37 year old Randy.
Speaker 1:Oh man, so many things I wish that dude knew. You know, I wouldn't have had to learn them by face planting. You know, pothole after pothole, yeah, I mean, you know, one is just the. I've had to come to peace with the reality. That number one I'm no longer surrounded by.
Speaker 1:You know, special missions, unit commandos, right that working with regular folks, just like when people come off of an elite athletic team, you know, prepare yourself for a fall, because you're going to be disappointed when you come up in that kind of an alpha culture. Not everybody's that way and it's okay, right, but it took me a long time to kind of be okay with it. Right, but it took me a long time to kind of be OK with it. Another thing I had to learn was, like you know, every day, the to do list, like the pile of to do's, will always be there, no matter how hard you grind to try to grind it to zero, it'll reappear the next day. So at some point you've got it. You've got to become OK with the idea that, hey, I'm going to go like a bat out of hell today and I'm going to put in you know however many hours I've got in me and then I'm going to say that's it for today, I'm going to go home and I'm going to come back tomorrow and start again, because you know otherwise you make yourself neurotic, right.
Speaker 1:And and then probably the last message is is just, people worry about failure. I'm not a believer in that concept. I really literally think it doesn't exist, unless you decide to tell yourself that you quit and you're a failure. I suppose then it would exist, but otherwise shortcomings are just part of life.
Speaker 1:In every athletic competition there's a winner and there's a loser. It doesn't mean that the one that didn't win is a loser. It just means that on that day there was going to be somebody who finished in first place and somebody who finished in second place, and there's nothing wrong with that. The next day you take whatever you learned from that shortcoming, you put it into the hopper, you hit, blend right and you absorb it into your body of knowledge and experience. That makes you better next time. And so I really you know I think a lot of people worry about failing and so they don't try things because they're afraid they might not be able to be great and instantly successful. I think that's a mistake, because you know, all success is built on a pile of failure. That's just the reality of it man, every single one of them.
Speaker 2:I, uh, I can relate. You know, we've done 220 plus of these episodes. Every time I look back each week I'm like, oh, there's opportunities for improvement. You know, and, uh, you know you can't be hard on yourself, uh, you're doing the best with what you got at that moment and at the end of the day, if you can look back, know that you did do the best that you did with what you had available, you can typically be proud of that. But again, being able to identify those areas for improvement is what is important. As an athlete entrepreneur, whatever position you hold and I guess that would be where my next question would lie is like how do you identify those, maybe shortcomings that you had growing up? Or were there opportunities, whether it's athletics, entrepreneurial, were there ways that you reflect? What does your daily routine look like to be able to recognize those?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. Well, there's, it tends to be your body. You know your, your brain will tell you the things you don't like to do. Right, and so you can just run from them. But what makes a little more sense is to ask yourself the question of like, why is my brain telling me I don't want to do this? And almost use that as a provocation for doing the opposite. Right, and I'll give you an example.
Speaker 1:Like I used to, you know, I used to not like, uh, public speaking, because when I was growing up I came from this, you know this Scottish, you know German and British stock. Well, all of those are like the most you know emotionally repressed groups you could ever want to come from, right. So so I just kind of came with this idea that you know you're supposed to just kind of kind of go along, get along, don't make a, don't make an ass out of yourself, don't put yourself out there. And that wasn't going to serve me well in the SEAL teams as a leader, I had to get up in front of a squadron, in front of a very critical squadron of alpha males right every day, and present the agenda persuasively in a way that these dudes that many of them were much older than me, had more experience. You know we're going to absorb and and then agree to follow and and then when you get into business, right, that becomes equally important that you can get up in front of, in front of your company you know company, your people a conference, because of course, in business, the enemy of any startup is obscurity. So you got to get out of obscurity and you know this from your pod, right, the enemy to you in this podcast is obscurity. I don't know how many millions of podcasts out there. Well, how are you going to be the guy that breaks out and, you know, becomes the next Huberman or Rogan or and and so you got to figure out how to do that. Well, generally that involves getting your ass out of your den and getting out there in front of the world and presenting what makes you special. And so I had to.
Speaker 1:I had to kind of overcome an aversion to that because I knew it was going to, and I remember when I first started getting up in front of crowds, you know I'd get all nervous, and almost the point where I was ready to pass out, and that just takes reps, right, it takes reps, self-analysis, you know, kind of a hot wash. Each time you step off a stage ask yourself, like how'd I do there? Where are my high points, where are my low points? And over time with the reps, I got to the point where now, you know, I still, if I'm getting ready to walk out on a conference stage in front of thousands of people, all right, I'd be lying if I said I still didn't get a little bit of butterflies, but I know what to do with them, right, and I know how to get out there and immediately sort of break the ice, as much for me as for anybody else. Because once you can get out of your head, you know, then you can start to perform. And so, you know, I've kind of approached in my career, tried to approach it that way, whatever.
Speaker 1:Whatever it is that I am not good at, you know, or or don't want to do, I try to lean into and force myself to do it, because a lot of times it's just the boogeyman. You know there's nothing really there, it's just the boogeyman. And once you look under the bed you no longer have that aversion, you know. So if you don't like to run, well, go run. If you don't like to lift probably means you need to get your ass a barbell. And if you don't like math that was another one of mine Well, go try to get an MBA at Stanford right, because one way or another it's going to force you to at least improve. Whether or not you ever get good is a different matter. I would still not claim to be good at math, but know I can do it I equate it to working out right.
Speaker 2:If you're an athlete listening to this, your first deadlift, your first bent over row, your first shoulder press probably isn't going to look that pretty, but if you do that 10 000 times, your lift is probably going to improve and it's probably going to look more refined and you're probably going to be able to do more weight. Add to that like it's progressive overload. It's all of these things that you know, these consistency, repetitions they keep coming up in conversation, and even to your point of having a team like these are all just important factors of life. Whether it's applied to business, sports, athletics, whatever the case may be, they all seem to to overlap. So this is why I love having conversations with people who are athletes as well as entrepreneurs. I think that's just the two overlap in so many different ways, and I I also want to know about outfit, though, like you, you've touched a bit. Give me the bare bones structure of the entire business now with John structure of the entire business now with John, with John, correct?
Speaker 1:Jack is with me at. Jack is with me at TRX outfit. I spun out of TRX, so outfit is you know I'm. That's basically why, when Jack and I negotiate our deal, I said look man, you got to be the CEO of TRX. I cannot go back into that role because I'm already CEO of another, of another startup.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Did you. There was no non-compete discussed at any point. Did you just avoid that subject?
Speaker 1:No, I mean, we're not. Well, first of all, we're not competitive at all. Outfit takes everything that TRX does indoors, outdoors. So the concept is a fleet of tricked out cargo vans, right, think elevated, extended, amazon kind of delivery van, fully customized as a world-class functional training gym on wheels. And then the network of vans is controlled by this really sophisticated tech stack that we built. You know that is, our members call us Uber, the Uber of fitness. Right, and that that's actually pretty accurate, because our app is very Uber-like and all the gear inside the van is TRX. Right, it's all everything we make TRX. So, really, outfit couldn't be more complementary to TRX.
Speaker 1:And people ask me all the time like, well, are you going to put them together? I think the answer is no there, because one is a product and education business and content business that's TRX. The other is a fitness services business that's outfit. And it's hard to mash up business. It would be like saying, well, can't you play baseball, basketball and football with the same team of great athletes? Yeah, they're great athletes, but they're not quite interchangeable in that way. Right, and similar with businesses. If you have more than a few degrees of separation in the functions, it's probably better to have a partnership with another business than to try to mash them up together, because there aren't that many businesses that have succeeded as mashups.
Speaker 2:Right, You're just vertically integrated, that's all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, that's one way to look at it, but that's theoretical. When you then go try to bring that to life in practice, it ends up being tougher than you can imagine, especially if you're Amazon, okay, but as a small, medium-sized business where you're not super deep in any of your functions, it's a little bit harder. To do a vertical integration plan, make it work. So we've kept those separate. And so Outfit has its own set of investors. Do a, you know, a vertical integration plan. Make it work. So we've kept those separate.
Speaker 1:And and so Outfit has its own set of investors. It has its, you know, its own executive team. And and then I'm the CEO of Outfit and I'm the chairman of TRX. So I I sort of sit on on, you know, in Jack's pocket and help him navigate you know, all the challenges at TRX, whereas at Outfit I am, you know, wearing the CEO hat and uh, and I get to deal with all the delights of uh, of being the guy in charge, which, which there are many days when that is overrated, dave, I can tell you.
Speaker 2:You uh, it's a firefighter. I uh the day job. We create firefighter law enforcement training in VR and you're putting out fires all day as a CEO. That's all you do, man.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right, and all of the mucky rivers run across your desk. That's just sort of how it goes. But we built something with Outfit that I think is pretty cool and your listeners might be interested in, because when you think, if you are an athlete that is reaching the end of your career or you're a coach and you know, and you're thinking about your next, what your next opportunity is going to be. We created a franchise structure around outfits, so we're going to scale as a franchise, which means that you know we partner with people who own their own outfit businesses under our brand, very much in the way that McDonald's and many of the other big franchises have Orange Theory. But what's cool about it is that not only can you do large outdoor group training and personal training where you can roll up to somebody's house, and personal training where you can roll up to somebody's house, but the third category that we call custom services is actually really cool because you know there's a lot of schools, a lot of club sports teams that don't have access.
Speaker 2:Take your time Sincerely. I can't thank you enough for, honestly, what you've done for the fitness space. You've transformed thousands, hundreds of thousands of people's lives. Soudos to you for that and thank you for continuing on with outfit training. You're helping a ton of people along the way. Here's to our workout in person and running this back again when we're able to do it without the need for technology. Thanks, randy, take care, I appreciate it. You know that's the 223rd episode of the athletes podcast. Thank you, folks for tuning in. Don't forget about our athlete agreement. If you have not yet hit the subscribe button, it takes two seconds out of your day and it makes my job so much better because I know that you're watching and you're subscribed and that you'll be here next week, where we'll see you for the next episode. Hope you have a great rest of your day. Bye.
