Latest / Hurdle with Emily Abbate / Episode 25: Randy Hetrick, Founder TRX

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Episode 25: Randy Hetrick, Founder TRX · Hurdle with Emily Abbate

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Emily Aboudi here. Welcome to episode twenty five
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: of Hurdle, a podcast that talks to top CEOs and
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: entrepreneurs who got through some of life's most difficult moments
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: hurdles of sorts, by leaning into wellness. Today, I am
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: so excited to give you my conversation with Randy Hetrick,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: the creator of TRX.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: It's an exciting week.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Here in New York City because it is New York
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: City Marathon Week.
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: Exclamation point. I'm ampt.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: I was running the last eight miles of the course
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: yesterday with my girlfriend Rachel. It'll be her first marathon,
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: and around mile five she was asking me.
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: What do you think you want your time to be
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: for this one?
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: And it's funny because I haven't really thought about it.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: I guess it brings me back to the conversation I
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: had with Women's Health editor in chief Liz Plosser, and
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: we were saying that we both kind of have two
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: goals when it comes to running races. There's like the
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: goal that you're kind of public about that you tell
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: your friends, and then there's this kind a more secret
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: goal that you keep in your back pocket that maybe
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: you only talk to yourself about when.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: You're alone in your apartments. I don't know.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: I mean my personal record PR is three fifty one
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: forty one, and yeah, I'd love to see something faster
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  Speaker 1: than that this time around. But I also just want
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: to have a good time and enjoy it and soak
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: in the city because the days so special. I'm just
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: gonna do my best and I can't believe it's finally here.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: A quick shout out to the sponsor of today's episode,
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Athletic Greens. When light is super hectic, like right now
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: leading up to race day, I look forward to my
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: morning routine more than ever, and it certainly includes the
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Greens powder. I just mix it up with ten to
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: twelve ounces of water and feel so great knowing I'm
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: twelve servings of fruits and veggies deep before even walking
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: out from the door of my apartment in the morning.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: They're offering a special deal to Hurdle listeners. It's twenty
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: free travel packs valued at ninety nine dollars with your
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: first purchase. Just go to atlt greens dot com slash
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Hurdle to claim it. No code necessary. Again, that's Athleticgreens
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: dot com slash hurdle. Now, let's talk about Randy. The
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: former Navy seal came up with TRX on a deployment
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety seven. And for those of you who
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: don't know what a TRX is, I'm sure you've seen
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: it before. It's essentially heavy duty Nihlon's jobs that hang
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: from an anchor in the ceiling with foam rubber handles.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: You can do different bodyweight exercises on it, like lunges
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: and pushups and pull ups and curls and all the things.
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  Speaker 1: Hetrick got out of the service, went to business school,
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: and then piled his savings into launching his company. But
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: he faced a huge hurdle moment in twenty ten when
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: he discovered counterfeiters were selling a rip off of his
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: products were cheaper on Amazon. In today's episode, we talked
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: about how he got through that, the way that he
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: incorporates movement regularly at TRX headquarters with his employees, and
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: the advice he'd offered anyone who feels like they're starting at.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: Square one over and over again.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: As always, please take a second to rate and you
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: hurdle in the iTunes store.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: Follow along with Hurdle on Instagram.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: And Twitter and Facebook, and pretty please post a screen
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: grab of you listening to the episode with some great takeaways,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: and there are plenty of them this time around, and
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: I'll make sure to repost that from the Hurdle account.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: If you need anything, you can always shoot me an
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: email Emily at hurdle dot us. And if you're in
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: the New York City area, come out to the next
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: Hurdle live taping tomorrow night, October thirtieth at Paragon Sports.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: I'll be sitting down with the co founder of on Running,
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: Casper Copetti. You can get all the details about the
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: live podcast at Paragon on Hurdle's website hurdle dot us.
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: And that's it. Let's get to hurdling today.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: I'm sitting here with Randy Hettrick. He is the founder
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: of TRX hi doing I'm doing great, great, I'm doing well.
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  Speaker 1: He came in here this morning and he told me
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  Speaker 1: about a nice little segment he did with the crew
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: at Fox and Friends.
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  Speaker 3: There's nothing to get a morning going like standing out
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  Speaker 3: on the curb in New York City with a bunch
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: of morning news folks on the suspension trainer. How do
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: you beat that?
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  Speaker 2: I love it?
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  Speaker 1: So why don't before we get going, you talk to
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  Speaker 1: me a little bit about what the TRX is and
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  Speaker 1: does that stand for anything?
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  Speaker 3: Well, stands for a lot of things, but it technically
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: stands for total body resistance exercise. Now I know that
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: should be TBRE, but that's not sexy. And being a
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: military guy, I had to have an acronym. So as
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: I was describing to people what this tool did, I
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  Speaker 3: would describe it as it's this total body resistance exercise system,
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: and over time that kind of morphed into t r X.
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  Speaker 2: I love it. Okay, So what is the TRX.
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  Speaker 3: It is in the most literal sense about you know,
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: twelve or thirteen feet of nylon webbing with some handles
• 5:06
  Speaker 3: and some foot cradles and some adjusters. But it started
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: out as a jiu jitsu belt and about six feet
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  Speaker 3: of webbing that we used in the seal teams to
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: repair parachute harnesses and for all kinds of different purposes
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  Speaker 3: that I had on an overseas deployment. I had kind
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  Speaker 3: of created this way to train the climbing muscles, primarily
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: because I was we were on an overseas deployment for
• 5:35
  Speaker 3: an underway shipboarding mission, and you need to be able
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  Speaker 3: to train the climbing muscles to get up side of
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  Speaker 3: a freighter with eighty or ninety pounds of gear on
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  Speaker 3: your back, and there's no way, no gyms, right, And
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  Speaker 3: so I had accidentally deployed with my jiu jitsu belt
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  Speaker 3: and whipped together this kind of this crazy idea to
• 5:51
  Speaker 3: put it over the top of a door, leaned back
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  Speaker 3: against it, and lift my body against gravity. And that
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  Speaker 3: was the beginning of it. And then you know what
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  Speaker 3: it has become is obviously much more than that. But
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: for your listeners, it's essentially a non elastic harness that
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: allows you to lean back against gravity and pull your
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  Speaker 3: body weight up against gravity, and that creates the weight
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  Speaker 3: that lets you do hundreds of exercises.
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  Speaker 2: So we just learned that you were in avc als.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: Why don't you talk to me a little bit about
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: how you got into that that.
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: That's a good question. How did I get into that? I?
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  Speaker 3: You know, I was a rower in college at USC
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: and I had an itch that needed scratching, and I
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: just got fascinated. I remember taking this anthropology class as
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: a I think I was a sophomore junior, and I
• 6:43
  Speaker 3: was studying this Indian tribe down in the rainforest in
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: Brazil called the Yana Mamo. And I got really interested
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: in this, this passage to manhood, right, this right that
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: they did to their young guys. And I started thinking,
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: when we have something like this, right, we just one
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: day turn eighteen and you're suddenly eligible to vote, eligible
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  Speaker 3: to draft. Still can't drink legally, but and I got
• 7:09
  Speaker 3: interested in this idea of, you know, maybe I need
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  Speaker 3: to go and test myself. And that kind of combined
• 7:15
  Speaker 3: with a desire and an interest in service, just sort
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  Speaker 3: of sent me in the direction of the military. And
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: then because I have this sort of pathology for doing
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  Speaker 3: hard things, I then the next thing was, oh, well,
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  Speaker 3: which one of the programs has the biggest attrition rate
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  Speaker 3: in selection? And that was the sole criteria for leading
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  Speaker 3: me to the seal teams, you know, versus the Rangers
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  Speaker 3: or the Green Berets or Marine Special Forces. Is eighty
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  Speaker 3: five percent attrition during selection, and I thought that sounded
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  Speaker 3: pretty cool.
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  Speaker 1: I can't even imagine what goes into becoming a Navy Seal,
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  Speaker 1: and I feel like people always pitch it all the time,
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  Speaker 1: like in the writing that I do in PR It's
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  Speaker 1: like try this Navy Seal workout, it's going to be
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  Speaker 1: so to off, but.
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  Speaker 2: Like, I'm sure that forty five minutes.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, the funny thing about it is there is
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  Speaker 3: no quote unquote Navy Seal workout. I always laugh when
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  Speaker 3: I see these things too, because one of the one
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  Speaker 3: of the hallmarks of the seal teams is that guys
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  Speaker 3: they tend to be very mission focused and very unified
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  Speaker 3: as a group, but very individualistic in you know, how
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  Speaker 3: they do things and what things they like to do.
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  Speaker 3: And so the idea that there's a quote unquote Navy
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  Speaker 3: Seal workout is just marketing hype. It doesn't happen that way.
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  Speaker 3: But in general, seals tend to do a lot of
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  Speaker 3: body weight training, right. A lot of them come from
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  Speaker 3: backgrounds and you know, things like wrestling and running and
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  Speaker 3: swimming and rowing, so they came up through traditions of
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  Speaker 3: body weight exercise. But guys do all different kinds of stuff,
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  Speaker 3: and you know, the all they have to make sure
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  Speaker 3: is that whatever the mission is that they're called to
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  Speaker 3: do that day, they're ready.
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  Speaker 2: So you went through basic training, Is that how it works?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, there's called BUDS Basic Underwater Demolition SLASH seal training
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  Speaker 3: and that's the you know, the infamous six month grueling
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  Speaker 3: selection process that's headquartered in Coronado, California, and that gets
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  Speaker 3: you to the point at which you then assigned to
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  Speaker 3: a seal team. And then at that seal team you
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  Speaker 3: join up with an operational unit and you know, do
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  Speaker 3: advanced training and become a real sealer.
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  Speaker 2: So where was your seal team based out of?
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  Speaker 3: My first one was based out of San Diego. I
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  Speaker 3: was at Seal Team one, and I spent four years
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  Speaker 3: there kind of deploying throughout Southeast Asia and Africa.
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  Speaker 1: So you were deploying through Southeast Asia and Africa, and
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  Speaker 1: it was when you were in Southeast Asia that you
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  Speaker 1: kind of started playing with these jiu jitsu straps.
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  Speaker 3: Later on, right when I eventually got the opportunity to
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  Speaker 3: go serve at the Special Missions Unit, which does all
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  Speaker 3: kinds of crazy stuff around the world, and on one
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  Speaker 3: of those deployments over again to Southeas Asia for a
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  Speaker 3: counter piracy operation, I was in a little warehouse stashed
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  Speaker 3: away trying to figure out how to train the climate muscles.
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  Speaker 1: Can you talk to me about what a counter piracy
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  Speaker 1: operation is?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, piracy sort of comes
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  Speaker 3: in and out of vogue around the world, and it
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  Speaker 3: tends to shift venues because what happens is, you know,
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  Speaker 3: some of the locals who are underemployed but have some
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: level of skills with boats, decide that the way to
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  Speaker 3: do it is to go out and take over these freighters.
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  Speaker 3: And you know, sometimes they take the freighter and you know,
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  Speaker 3: drive it up a you know, an estuary and reflag
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: it and steal everything off of it and then go
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  Speaker 3: try to sell it. Other times they do much worse things,
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  Speaker 3: you know, hurt the crew, steal, steal whatever they can
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: take and then take off. And so you know, at
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: various times. I'm sure everybody's seen the heard about the
• 10:58
  Speaker 3: Captain Phillips rescue, which was down around the Horn of Africa,
• 11:02
  Speaker 3: but during my day, it was really it was through
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  Speaker 3: the Straits of Malacca where a lot of piracy was happening.
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  Speaker 3: And so, you know, you go out and basically reclaim
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  Speaker 3: a freighter that's been taken over by pirates.
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  Speaker 1: So you decide to throw some jiu jitsu straps up
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  Speaker 1: over a doorframe and get to work, and to your
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: ex is born.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not much more glamorous than that I had
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: accidentally deployed with my jiu jitsu blue belt, which had
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: been in my cage back to the command and as I,
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: you know, scooped up some stuff to put put my
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: bags together for the deployment, I accidentally scooped that up
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: under a flight suit and I ended up sitting in
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  Speaker 3: this little warehouse along the coast of Malaysia, and I thought, well,
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: what the heck am I going to do with this thing?
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  Speaker 3: And you know, we were We had originally gone in
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  Speaker 3: and thought we were going to be there for a
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: little while, do the op and get out, and it
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: ended up dragging out, and so we need to stay
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: in shape. And I just came up with this sort
• 12:03
  Speaker 3: of crazy way to take a jiu jitsu belt, tie
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  Speaker 3: a knot in it, put that over the top of
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  Speaker 3: a door, close the door, lean back, and lift. And
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  Speaker 3: that was the beginning of TRX.
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  Speaker 2: Did the other guys think you were crazy?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah? Well, I mean it's the great thing about the
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: seal teams, right, It's like the most hilarious place that
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: you could ever work. I mean, guys just have this
• 12:25
  Speaker 3: incredible dark humor and they take the piss out of
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: each other non stop, and so yeah, the second that
• 12:33
  Speaker 3: you start, you know, doing anything, somebody's over heckling you.
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  Speaker 3: But they're also super resourceful and kind of innovative cats.
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  Speaker 3: And so ten minutes later, the same guy that was
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: heckling me is saying, all right, get out of the way,
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: let me try it right, And so, you know, we
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: kind of did a little quick brainstorming and the seeds
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: of TRX were sown.
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  Speaker 2: So this is in nineteen ninety seven.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you eventually get out of the sea and
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: you decide that you're going to go to business school.
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  Speaker 1: Is that because you had this crazy idea or was
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: that just like a natural progression, this is what's next
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: for me.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, No, it didn't. I never thought of this as
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: a business ever. I mean I didn't really until I
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: was well into my first year at business school start
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: thinking about this. I this was just something that you know,
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: I thought was kind of fun. Guys liked it. You know.
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  Speaker 3: I had a buddy who was a parachute rigger out
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: in the peril off to repaired parachute. So he was
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: basically a professional seamstress right in the Navy, and he
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: would make him for guys in exchange for a case
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: of beer, and I just thought it was kind of
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: fun and clever that that, you know, guys liked this
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: tool that I created. And you know, then I was
• 13:43
  Speaker 3: promoting out of the field. I was finishing my squadron command.
• 13:46
  Speaker 3: And I never, you know, I never really wanted to
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: be a Navy bureaucrat. That wasn't really my gig. I loved,
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: you know, being with troops in the field. And and
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: so I was, you know, nearing the end of that.
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: Just like guys in the NFL, right you get in
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: your thirties, you can hear the clock ticking, and so
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: I and I also had a baby on the way,
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: and you know, I had watched my buddies really struggle
• 14:10
  Speaker 3: with these deployments, you know, leaving for six months at
• 14:13
  Speaker 3: a time and leaving their two year old behind, and
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: it just looked brutal to me. And I wanted to be,
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: you know, the first of my friends to actually know
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: my kid. So I decided that I would apply to
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: a business school at Stanford, and if I got in,
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: then I'd resign my commission and go become a business
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: school student. And if I didn't, which I thought was
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: very likely that I would not get in, then my
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: you know, the die would be cast and I would
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: finish out twenty and figure out what I was going
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: to do next. And to my everlasting astonishment, they overlooked
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: my math skills and decided they needed to seal in
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: the recruiting poster. So I got it is.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: There is there like an essay component to this application?
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: Thankfully?
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: Yes, what was your essay about my GEM?
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: Well, I, you know, I can't even remember to tell
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: you the truth, but I know that my GMAT scores,
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: which are primarily math, uh, we're not stellar. So someone
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: there at Stanford had vision.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: We share a lack of great math skills. We do.
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  Speaker 2: I think I got to see institute.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: The worst class in college was statistics, and I, hands
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: down I think I got.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: To see it.
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well you can imagine how I felt dropping it.
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: And I'd never taken anything. I'm old enough that you
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: could kind of get out of high school with Algebra
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: two and get into college and take you know, some
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: like business math for dummies, And that was what I
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: what I had done. And then one day I wake
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: up and find myself at Stanford Business School in the
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: equivalent of like third or fourth year statistics I've never
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: taken statistics, and I'm surrounded by all these you know,
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: twenty eight year old whipper snappers who have been you know,
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: working at banking shops. And yeah, it was it was
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: not a fun first year.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: So you are at Stanford and you said it wasn't
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: until after the first year that you kind of started
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: to think about that thing that you were doing in
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: Southeast Asia.
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: Well, by that point. The funny thing is, by that
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: point I had become just a complete diehard on my
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: straps and I just, first of all, they go everywhere
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: with you, right, and I could do The ability to
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: create exercise movements is almost unlimited anyway the body can move.
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: You hang onto these straps or attach them to your feet,
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: and you load it with your body weight and you
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: can train it. And so I was really, you know,
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: at that point, it was kind of a renaissance for
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: me of discovering all the different stuff I could do
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: on these straps. So I had kind of stopped lifting
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: weights and this was all I was doing. And a
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: buddy of mine had been a running back on the
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: football team there as an undergrad and knew some guys
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: in the athlete training center and got us permission to
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: go out and train out there. So I would go out,
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: and Stanford as this world class athlete training center, but
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: I would go out with these mangy looking straps, hook
• 16:54
  Speaker 3: them up to the squat rack right, and just crush
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: these workouts. And the course of about I don't know,
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: five or six months, literally every one of the coaches
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: at Stanford who would be in there with their teams
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: would come walking over and say like, all right, you
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: got to tell me what is this thing? And five
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: minutes later they'd be asking me if i'd make some
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: for their team. And so you know, you hear that
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: enough times you're at business school, even you know somebody
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: with a thick nog and like mine, you start to realize, hey,
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: maybe there's an opportunity here. And that was when I decided,
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: all right, maybe i'll maybe I'll see if there's legs
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: to this idea.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: So what happens when you I mean, obviously you're in
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: business school and you're learning how to put together maybe
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: different business proposals and start something like this. But I
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: feel like there are so many people that feel like
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: they have a good idea and they don't even know
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: the first thing about creating this to be something. So
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: how did you go from like, Okay, this is the idea,
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: I'm using it. All the Stanford coaches are like this
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: looks pretty cool to like actually creating our product that
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: would one day be marketable.
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: Well, the question you're asking is a really great one,
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: and it's one of these you know, you can go
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: talk to successful entrepreneurs and almost all of them will
• 18:05
  Speaker 3: tell you that people come up to them all the
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: time and say, God, I had that idea, you know,
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: and it's I mean, you hear it all the time.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: But that's the easy part, right, That's one of the
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: things that you learned is an idea, even a good one,
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: is the really easy part. The hard part is the execution.
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: I'm sure when you started thinking about your podcast, right,
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: well that's pretty easy. And you even think about, oh,
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: hey I do it up based on you know, entrepreneurship,
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: and you come up with the concept, Well then you
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: got to actually figure out all the pesky little details
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: of well how do I do it? And so yeah,
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: I was at Stanford Business School and I had a
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: luxury right of being surrounded by great professors, a lot
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: of a lot of classmates that had you know experience,
• 18:48
  Speaker 3: but even there it was really you know, you're flying
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: at ten thousand feet And turned out that as I
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: found out right after I graduated, you know, I needed
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: to know the grass level stuff like, oh, I need insurance,
• 19:03
  Speaker 3: how do I get supply chain set up? You know,
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: I need an office, I need some warehousing? Geez, how
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: do I ship this stuff? All of that And that
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: was all sort of learned on the job.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: And I'm sure that you know obviously the way that
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: you designed the first set of straps that those are
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: not the TRX straps we had today. So talking to
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: me a little bit about the evolution of this, because
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: did you have test groups? Like how did this all
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: kind of yeah, ab and flowed?
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: Well, fortunately I knew how so so as a young
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: seal officer back in I mean I went into seal
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: teams in eighty eight, So eighty.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: Seven, and how old are you at business school?
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: I was thirty six, okay, so I was the granddaddy
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: of the Stanford Business Wold class of two thousand and
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: three by like six or eight years. It was pathetic,
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: so the the but I knew how to sew because
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: all old seals at least it's Okay.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: It's okay that I'm the granddaddy of business school because
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: I have a.
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: Mean so I'm a mean sower. Yeah, because back in
• 19:59
  Speaker 3: the day right there now, there's these boutique industries that
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: have grown up around the special operations guys, and they
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: do all this custom gear. Back in the day, we
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: got issued whatever the crappy Navy or Marine Corps issue
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: stuff was, and you had to basically take a raiser route,
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: cut off all the pockets and then refashion the stuff
• 20:18
  Speaker 3: that you needed for the seal missions. And so you'd
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: pay the rigor at case of beer, and the rigger
• 20:22
  Speaker 3: would teach you how to sew, and then you'd go
• 20:25
  Speaker 3: out and try it to stitch holes in your fingers
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: as you were learning to sew. So I knew I
• 20:29
  Speaker 3: knew how to sew pretty well, and that probably lent
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: itself to me creating you know, the TRX, because I
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: would sit in my garage. In fact, I took the
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: summer between my first and second year at business school
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: and I had this very chromagnon version of a harness
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: that worked, but nobody would have paid any money for it, right,
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: So in order to figure out well how to create
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: something that someone like you might actually you know, embrace
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: and buy. It needed a lot, It needed to adjust,
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: It needed to be optimized. It needed softer, you know,
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: comfortable handles and all that kind of stuff, right, And
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: so I took the summer between my first and second
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: year and I probably created I don't know, one hundred
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: different prototypes and says I had no money. Rather than
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: being able to make one, than if it didn't work,
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: throw it away. I'd have to take out the razor blade,
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: strip all the pieces back apart and fix whatever it
• 21:23
  Speaker 3: was that wasn't working. And so, but that was a
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: really great experience because when I talk to entrepreneurs now,
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: you know, young entrepreneurs, one of the things I always
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: tell them is like, you got to start at the
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: very bottom of your organization, Like you have to start
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: actually doing this stuff, because if you do, you'll be
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: much much much better as you start to succeed and
• 21:47
  Speaker 3: you bring people in to take over some of the
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: stuff that you know that at least you did, and
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: you understand it, and you understand what their challenges are,
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: and so you understand how to support them and help
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: them make it better.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: One of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: from someone David CK who is on the podcast. He says,
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: if you try to do too many things good, you'll
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: never do one thing great. So it's like that idea
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: that you're talking about about having knowing when.
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: Like you might not be the person that should be
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: doing X, y Z.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: Like you have people that manage your PR, you have
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: people that help you do advertising, you have people that
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: even work in HR.
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: How how big is your company now? How many employees?
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: Well, we've got about one hundred full time and then
• 22:28
  Speaker 3: about three hundred and fifty ten ninety nine course instructors
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: that teach our education, four.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: Hundred and fifty people around the country internationally that work
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: with TRX, and I'm sure there are some of them
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: that do a lot of things better than you do.
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well, I mean and I have so you
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: said it was David, That was David C. Yeah, yeah,
• 22:47
  Speaker 3: I mean I have a you know, a kind of
• 22:50
  Speaker 3: a I don't know what to call it, a little
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: framework that I use, a lens that I look through
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: to try to sort my to do list. And I
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: don't remember who it was who told me to think
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: of it this way, but it was brilliant advice that
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: like if you if you kind of look at your
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: to do list and you say, all right, there's too
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: many things here for me to do for starters, But
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: if I sort it based on what are the things
• 23:12
  Speaker 3: on this list that only I can do? Right, And
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: it's a weird way to approach it, but like, hey,
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: if I look at something and myself, obviously I might
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: be able to do it, but there's two or three
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: other guys and gals should go to them, right, Because
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: if you constantly keep prioritizing your list based on what
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: are what things on this list can only I do?
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: It's actually a really clarifying, you know, way to help
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: triage and entrepreneurs to do list. And I do that constantly.
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: I am I am a crazy delegator, and I you know,
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: I try to have really good folks on my team
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: and I can, you know, give them a lot of rope.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: This is going to be jumping around a little bit
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: because I still want to hear about what it was
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: like testing the first he rx's at Stanford. But what
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: was it like when you made your friend is higher?
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean it was briefly liberating, right because you
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: at first you're like, oh, yeah, that's so great. I
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: got some help. But then you start to realize, oh,
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: wait a minute, Before this gets easier, it's going to
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: get harder because I need to onboard this person, right,
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: I need to, you know, make sure this person has
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: all the supporting equipment that they need, they know what
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: their job is about. So that takes time and resources
• 24:25
  Speaker 3: before that person then turns around and becomes, you know,
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: a leveraged asset that can help you do more with less.
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean my first hire was actually, you know,
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: I had a friend who was waiting tables up the
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: street from this pathetic little armpit of an office that
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: I had rented, and I needed to start to figure out, Okay,
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: I can sit here in pack boxes, but is that
• 24:54
  Speaker 3: the best use of my time? Right? And coming back
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: to the lens, I just mentioned to a you a
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: minute ago, is there somebody else who could do this?
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: And so I reached out and said, hey, would you,
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: you know, would you like a day job? I know
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: you wait tables at night, would you like a day
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: job down here answering phones and packing boxes? And I
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: was a good friend of mine named Soameshri Summer Rompersad,
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: and she said sure, you know, I'd love it. And
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: so she came down and started doing some of the
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: stuff that I could do but shouldn't, and that allowed
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: me to focus on, you know, some of the things
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: that only I could.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: Do, the things that only you could do. Probably included
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: walking around campus having people try out your straps. Were
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: you like the old guy with the weird strops?
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: Like, how did you know? I think that's probably fair,
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: the old guy with the weird straps. Yeah, hey, I've
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: been called worse. I was in my first year when
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: I got the idea that all right, I'm gonna i'm
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: an experiment with this over the summer, and then if
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: I can create some prototypes that seem commercializable, then i'm
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: gonna come back my second year and I'm going to
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: turn the entire second year into an incubator. And that's
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: what I did. So I was like the weird guy
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: that was that was walking around, you know, recruiting people
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: from my class to every class project for every different course,
• 26:14
  Speaker 3: I bent to you know, my will and recruited people
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: to help me. So whether it was a marketing class,
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: you know, we'd do the brand plan for what would
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: become TRX. If it was operations. You know, we'd figure
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: out the supply chain plan for the company, and it
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: was really that was a luxury, right that I'm grateful
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: to have had.
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: So you launch the TRX in what year?
• 26:40
  Speaker 3: Well, I suppose it depends on how you define launch.
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: After I graduated, I went at it, but the first
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: you know, so that would have been the second half
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: of two thousand and three, but it literally was, you know,
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: you walk out the gates of Stanford Business School with
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: a diploma and one hundred and fifty thousand bucks an
• 26:58
  Speaker 3: MBA debt and no income. And so it really took
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: me about a year to figure out, Okay, well, geez,
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: I got to have some of these made. Well how
• 27:07
  Speaker 3: do I do that? Well, I need some money, you know,
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: And I had maybe fifty grand in lifetime savings after
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: fourteen years as a seal, and I poured it all
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: into the initial you know, the initial productions of some
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: working prototypes. I thankfully decided that I had created something
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: that was really unique and decided to apply for some
• 27:28
  Speaker 3: patent protection. And there went fifty grand.
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: I was going to say, because that's pretty expensive.
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So the very next thing I had to do
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: was figure out how to raise some money and how
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: did you do that? Well? I did it in kind
• 27:39
  Speaker 3: of the classic, you know, bootstrap finance approach with angel investors.
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: I went out and started out with you know, people
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: who knew me and friends of theirs who trusted their judgment,
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: and you know, it was it was one investor at
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: a time, going around and explaining what I the idea
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: that I had in mind, and kind of trying to
• 28:00
  Speaker 3: at some sort of a reasonable valuation. And then you know,
• 28:04
  Speaker 3: over the course of a couple of years, I think
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: I raised two or three rounds of about maybe five
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: million in total, but it was enough to get us
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: up and get us going.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: And the product that you are pushing at this point,
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: is that the same TRX that we know today.
• 28:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean today's has significantly evolved because obviously, you know,
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: any product company has to constantly be looking at materials
• 28:28
  Speaker 3: and designs, and for us, a lot of the evolution
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: that we've done around the suspension trainer has been the
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: supporting ecosystem of content and education, different ways to anchor
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: it in different locations. But you know, if you looked
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: from twenty yards away, yeah, the suspension trainer that we
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: sell today looks pretty much like the one that I
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: launched back in I'd call it two thousand and five
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: is probably when we first were out.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: In the public, and then by two thousand and nine,
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: five years after launch, two, r REX already has more
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: than one million users in over sixty countries.
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: Well, fortunately for us, we hadn't sold a million straps
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: by that point, not even close. But the model that
• 29:11
  Speaker 3: I chose to pursue was to make trainers and group
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: fitness instructors and strength coaches my business partners. So I
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: set out to give them a tool and the knowledge
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: and the support to take it into their businesses, use
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: it with their personal training clients with the gym members,
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: and for athletic trainers with athletes and make those people successful. Right,
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: So the stat that you quoted there, you know, I
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: don't remember how many gyms we were in by twenty ten,
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: but the reach through those gyms, yeah, I'm sure was
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: at least a million.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: So how did you first start getting the TRX into
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: the gyms themselves?
• 29:51
  Speaker 3: Hey, it's funny to be in New York. Every time
• 29:53
  Speaker 3: I come to New York, I am reminded of those
• 29:55
  Speaker 3: early days because I can remember vividly coming to New
• 29:59
  Speaker 3: York with a backpack full of straps. I would have
• 30:03
  Speaker 3: called in advance. Right, this was the earliest days of Google.
• 30:06
  Speaker 3: You could you could actually go and find I might
• 30:08
  Speaker 3: even have used the Yellow Pages right to find the
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: local gyms. And I'd call and I'd set up an
• 30:14
  Speaker 3: appointment with the fitness manager and say, look, here's here's
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: who I am, here's what I'm doing. Could I come
• 30:20
  Speaker 3: in and would you give me a half hour with
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: you and your staff, and I'll leave a couple of
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: them for you, and you know, I promise I will
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: not disappoint you. And that was basically my pitch. And
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: you know they heard like, all right, this guy, Navy
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: Seal Stanford, NBA, like he maybe a knucklehead, but he
• 30:36
  Speaker 3: can't be a complete knucklehead. So they give me a
• 30:39
  Speaker 3: you know, they'd give me a half hour of Usually
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: they'd try to coordinate it when they had their staff
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: in for like their monthly training, and they'd give me
• 30:46
  Speaker 3: a half hour and I would go in and dance
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: for my dinner and you know, hook up six or
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: eight straps onto. Usually back then it was like the
• 30:53
  Speaker 3: cable crossover tower, right, because we hadn't created the first
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: bodyweight training rack yet.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: And when you say and you said, use the word
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: anchor before. So these drops need to be like hooked
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: and secured onto something so they're stable, so then you
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: can use your body weight movement on that.
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: Correct. Yeah, they could go over the top of a door.
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: We have a door anchor. You just throw over the
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: top of a door and close it, lean back against
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: the door and lift your body weight. But in the
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: gym you need to hook them up to something overhead
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: to pull up bar or you know, the selectorized plate
• 31:24
  Speaker 3: crossover pulley towers, anything that's you know, wouldn't tip over basically,
• 31:28
  Speaker 3: So I'd go in and hook up five or six
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: of these and then you know, try to get the
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: trainers as quickly as possible to think it was genius
• 31:35
  Speaker 3: and sometimes it worked and other times not so much.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: And what was it like for you that that moment
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: And I'm sure you did see it time and time
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: again when you started to see that the people.
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: Around you realized that you had something that was really legit.
• 31:49
  Speaker 3: Well, trainers are funny, right, because they're skeptics. I mean
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: they're serious skeptics, and with good reason. There's a gazillion,
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: you know, fitness gizmos that come out every year, and
• 31:58
  Speaker 3: most of them are garbage, but they also are entrepreneurs
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: because trainers have to dance for their dinners, right, They
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: got to go out and you know, keep getting new
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: clients and keep delighting those clients. And so I targeted
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: trainers because they were quick adopters to the suspension trainer,
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: because it did things that nothing else had ever done.
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: And most of them would go like at first, they'd
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: kind of give you the stink guy, like, what's this
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: guy going to show me? Right? But a few minutes
• 32:25
  Speaker 3: later and I would usually I would pick whoever the biggest,
• 32:28
  Speaker 3: gnarliest looking guy was in the group, and I'd pull
• 32:31
  Speaker 3: him out and let him beast himself one of these things,
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: because then I'd immediately have the respect of the other trainers, right,
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: It's like, holy cow, if that guy's struggling, then this
• 32:40
  Speaker 3: must be real. But then I'd have to back up
• 32:42
  Speaker 3: very quickly and show how it was good for a
• 32:45
  Speaker 3: sixty five year old grandmother, right, because otherwise the trainers
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: would be like, yeah, I don't have any clients.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: That look like him, right.
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: So it was this really interesting but again back to
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: my initial premise about I'm a much better sales guy,
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: much better sales manager, and now an executive over you know,
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: sales organization because I actually had to do it. I
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: know how hard it is to sell somebody something because
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: I was the guy who was out there, you know,
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: with people looking and saying, man, that's an ugly baby.
• 33:16
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• 33:18
  Speaker 3: And how do you take that on board with a
• 33:20
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• 33:24
  Speaker 3: not that pretty, but let me show you how brilliant
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: it is, right and constantly be able to anticipate objections,
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: get in front of them and turn that you know,
• 33:34
  Speaker 3: skeptic into a customer.
• 33:43
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  Speaker 2: Let's get back to it.
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: I'm back here sitting with Randy Hetrick, the founder of TRX.
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: He's telling me about how he was going into all
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: of these gyms, bringing his straps, converting these people to
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: be TRX fans, and as successful as that proved to be,
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: there are probably some other things that helped get the
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: TRX name out there. So when you were young, what
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: else and young in age and young as a company
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: as opposed to old as I am. Now what you
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: mean when the company was young, Randy, what else were
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: you guys doing to get the TRX.
• 35:16
  Speaker 3: Name out there? Well, we had no money, right, and
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: I mean like no money. So because I had sort
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: of you know the little bit of life savings that
• 35:26
  Speaker 3: I earned as a seal had been deployed very very
• 35:29
  Speaker 3: early in this and we kept raising little rounds of
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: angel investment capital, but little is the operative term there.
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: So we never had money to really go in and
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: throw at you know, TV advertisements or anything like that.
• 35:45
  Speaker 3: And at the time I thought that was an inconvenience,
• 35:47
  Speaker 3: but I think in retrospect it was It was actually
• 35:50
  Speaker 3: probably fortunate because one of the things I've learned is
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: if you have money, you do some smart things and
• 35:57
  Speaker 3: some very dumb things with it. And we didn't have luxury.
• 36:00
  Speaker 3: So the way that we went about evangelizing was with
• 36:04
  Speaker 3: the trainers and the group fitness instructors and the strength coaches,
• 36:09
  Speaker 3: and we built a movement. And that's that's really the
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: way that I describe it today. You know, we have
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: millions of ambassadors out there around our brand that are
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: our customers, you know, but they they fell in love
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: with with the brand, and so we started early on,
• 36:28
  Speaker 3: you know, really encouraging word of mouth. It was a
• 36:33
  Speaker 3: very fundamentally different kind of tool that people hadn't seen.
• 36:37
  Speaker 3: It had some glitz and some glamor around it because
• 36:40
  Speaker 3: you know, it came from the seal teams, and then
• 36:42
  Speaker 3: very early we started getting really marquee level athletes. One
• 36:47
  Speaker 3: of my you know, first big blessings of this business
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: was becoming pals with a trainer, really great trainer in
• 36:56
  Speaker 3: the industry named Todd Durkin, who's subsequently and I've built
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: our businesses next to each other and he's become one
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: of my best friends. But through him, I met a
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: cat who was rehabbing his shoulder because he had torn
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: his labor him in his throwing shoulder, a guy named
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: Drew Brees who at the time had just been released
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: from the Chargers because of his shoulder injury, and Todd
• 37:17
  Speaker 3: was helping Drew rehab Well. Turned out, Drew rehabbed pretty well, right,
• 37:23
  Speaker 3: and he used the suspension trainer as a big piece
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: of what he was doing and became, you know, as
• 37:28
  Speaker 3: he was doing it in physical therapy, which a lot
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: of people come to our strafts through physical therapists, and
• 37:33
  Speaker 3: then they realized, well, this was great when I was hurt,
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: It's even better when I'm not hurt. And Drew became
• 37:38
  Speaker 3: one of those guys, and you know, he ended up
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: becoming just a great pro bono ambassador for the brand
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: to the point at which you know, a few years
• 37:47
  Speaker 3: later he said, man, I you know, I hope I
• 37:49
  Speaker 3: didn't miss my chance to invest and became one of
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: our investors, and he was absolutely critical to helping get
• 37:57
  Speaker 3: the word out right. So a big evangel like that
• 38:00
  Speaker 3: can go a long long way in a short period
• 38:03
  Speaker 3: of time for you.
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: So you start selling your straps in two thousand and
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: eight on Amazon. Also, just to backtrack for a quick second,
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: I need to start referring to my friends as cats,
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: Like I think that's something that started to say.
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: I do have some seal team parlance, right.
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: Some cats, I mean, my cats are growing up.
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: Later, you're selling on Amazon two thousand and eight, and
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: by twenty eleven, that's when knockoff listing start forming.
• 38:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it was a little later than that,
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: but it was. It was probably the first ones popped
• 38:35
  Speaker 3: up in eleven. And honestly, when somebody first told me that, hey,
• 38:39
  Speaker 3: I think I think I saw a counterfeit one of
• 38:42
  Speaker 3: your straps a counterfeit, I thought you got to be joking, Like,
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: there's no way, you know, we can barely sell these things.
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: Who wants to knock us off? But what started as
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: kind of, you know, a joke became not funny at
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: all within a couple of years because what happened was
• 38:59
  Speaker 3: the Chinese counterfeiting areas southern China that have a lot
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: of stitches. So got turned on to our brand by
• 39:08
  Speaker 3: this unscrupulous distributor that we had in Australia who jacked
• 39:13
  Speaker 3: the prices way up. We didn't know enough at the time.
• 39:16
  Speaker 3: I didn't know enough the time about how to set
• 39:18
  Speaker 3: up a distribution agreement, and so we ended up giving
• 39:20
  Speaker 3: this guy an exclusive with no performance requirements. And what
• 39:24
  Speaker 3: happens in that kind of environment usually is they become
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: profit maximizers, cranked the price up, you know, way above
• 39:32
  Speaker 3: what anybody else in the world is selling. But because
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: they have the exclusive, they can do it. And what
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: he did was, I think he had TRX's for sale
• 39:40
  Speaker 3: for five hundred bucks and that didn't take long before
• 39:45
  Speaker 3: some of the enterprising knockoff guys in China said, hey,
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: that's a great target. And so next thing I knew,
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: we had this explosion of counterfeit TRX's. I mean, it
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: was as bad as Gucci or you know, Louis Vuittant
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: or Rolex ever dreamt of and it really became the
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: single biggest challenge that I'd ever faced in the business
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: within a couple of years.
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: So you're a young entrepreneur. You're getting these TRX straps
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: out of people are buying them on Amazon, and then
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: you hit this massive hurdle, which is how in the
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: world do I figure out how to make this stop?
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: Because I'm sure at this point you're losing tons of money.
• 40:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: Also, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but how much is
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: the TRX retail for?
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: I think at the time it was probably around one
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: nine I'm still in that vicinity, but it depending on
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: the model. As I recall, at the time we only
• 40:39
  Speaker 3: had one model, and so it was about one hundred
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: and forty nine bucks. Which you know, if you just
• 40:45
  Speaker 3: look at something, as you know, an assemblage of some
• 40:49
  Speaker 3: materials might seem high. But the thing you don't realize
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: when you look at a branded product is how much
• 40:57
  Speaker 3: money is going into creating education, creating content for the
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: end user at you know, brand advertising to make somebody like,
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: how do you even see it? And people don't realize
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: sometimes when you look at a product and you think, oh,
• 41:11
  Speaker 3: that's so expensive for you know, in our case, so
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: it's just some webbing and some handles, and it is
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: first of all, that stuff isn't actually all that cheap
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: if you're buying quality materials. And then secondly, you're putting
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: all this money into the market to try to educate
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: the marketplace, right, and that money's got to come from somewhere.
• 41:29
  Speaker 3: So the counterfeitters prey on that because they they only
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: pick brands that are out there really doing well in
• 41:38
  Speaker 3: the market, which means spending a lot of money in
• 41:41
  Speaker 3: the market, and the counterfeitters come in behind them with
• 41:44
  Speaker 3: a knockoff that they can price at, you know, thirty
• 41:48
  Speaker 3: percent fifty percent less. They're not spending any money to
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: educate the marketplace, right, and usually they use really cheap materials.
• 41:56
  Speaker 3: And that's the other thing is, you know, we started
• 41:58
  Speaker 3: seeing a lot of people getting hurt around the world
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: who had bought counterfeits off of Amazon or the other marketplaces,
• 42:05
  Speaker 3: and the counterfeiters use really cheap components. And so you're
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: in the middle of you know, a steep leaning back
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: row and the next thing you know you experience is
• 42:15
  Speaker 3: the carabiner snaps and your head is smashing off the concrete, right.
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: And then those would come back to us, and you know,
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: people would call irate, telling us, you know, your strap
• 42:24
  Speaker 3: just broke. Well, we use we use componentry like you know,
• 42:27
  Speaker 3: aircraft grade aluminum. We use nylon that can you know,
• 42:31
  Speaker 3: lift twenty five hundred pounds, So we know there's no
• 42:33
  Speaker 3: chance that our stuff is going to break, right, And
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: that became a huge problem and a hurdle of epic proportions.
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: So in these counterfeit TRX straps, I know, I go
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: down to Canal Street, I want to buy a fake
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: Louis Vuitton and some of them even have the logos
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: on them. Were these counterfeits? Did they have the TRX
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: brending and everything on them as well?
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, technically to be a counterfeit, it has to
• 42:58
  Speaker 3: it has to have the mark, Okay, so you know
• 43:02
  Speaker 3: the the Yeah, the ones that you see down in
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: Canal Street, right, those are counterfeits. They are positioning themselves
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: as Rolex right, you know, Cardier Louis Vuitton. Same thing
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: happened with us. And what was funny is the package
• 43:14
  Speaker 3: at the time that we had had my back on
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: the cover, right, because I was you know, early on
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: in the forty models, so I was in pretty good shape.
• 43:22
  Speaker 3: So I said, all right, I'll double in for this,
• 43:26
  Speaker 3: and it was just it was so you know, irritating.
• 43:30
  Speaker 3: You can only imagine that you see these cheap, crappy
• 43:33
  Speaker 3: knockoffs coming out of China positioned as tear exits with
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: your own image on them, right, it was really it
• 43:39
  Speaker 3: was really a frustrating experience. And you don't know what
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: to do because you don't have money to go file lawsuits.
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: And even if you did, this stuff was all coming
• 43:50
  Speaker 3: out of these little shops in China. They're not going
• 43:53
  Speaker 3: to respond to a lawsuit. They disappear as quickly as
• 43:55
  Speaker 3: they appeared. But meanwhile, on the in the dot com,
• 44:00
  Speaker 3: you know, e commerce environment, you have uninitiated potential customers
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: that are coming. They're looking at an image. The counterfeiters
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: would rip our images off of our website and put
• 44:11
  Speaker 3: them on their advertisements. So to the uninitiated customer, oh, well,
• 44:16
  Speaker 3: why would I pay one hundred and fifty bucks for
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: this one when I can pay ninety nine for what
• 44:20
  Speaker 3: looks to be the same thing, right, And it really
• 44:23
  Speaker 3: began to just hammer our online sales. And you know,
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: we were in the earliest stages of trying to do
• 44:31
  Speaker 3: club retail and the clubs would say, well, why are
• 44:33
  Speaker 3: you pricing you, you know, yours at one hundred and
• 44:36
  Speaker 3: fifty when I can go online on Amazon and buy
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: one for ninety. It was a it was a real
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: problem that we had to figure out how to solve.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: So obviously, as a seal, working out has been a
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: huge part of your being for a very long time now.
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: I'm sure you know when things get hard for me,
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: especially God, I feel like whenever I'm going through a
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: major hurdle in life, I like start training for a
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: new marathon, like, oh, I should just start running my
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: brains out, and this is.
• 45:03
  Speaker 3: Going to help me get the rest stress away.
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: So for you, like, how how did you mentally handle
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: this hurdle? And that's what I want to tackle first,
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: and then of course I want to hear about, you know,
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: in your business, how you kind of took action.
• 45:15
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean, for me, exercise is my uh meditation, right,
• 45:23
  Speaker 3: I mean, it is my sanity maker. And that's part
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: of why I decided to go into this line of work,
• 45:31
  Speaker 3: is you know, I loved I really loved the idea
• 45:35
  Speaker 3: of an entrepreneurial venture. I loved working out, and I
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: had created this tool that you know, some high performance
• 45:43
  Speaker 3: guys thought was pretty cool. So that was sort of
• 45:47
  Speaker 3: the the ingredients, and I decided, well, you know, if
• 45:50
  Speaker 3: I'm gonna, if I'm going to pick any industry to
• 45:52
  Speaker 3: go work in outside of the seal teams, I had
• 45:55
  Speaker 3: to do something in physical fitness because I love it
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: and and that's that was a fortunate choice because I
• 46:01
  Speaker 3: think that the stresses of being a startup entrepreneur are
• 46:05
  Speaker 3: roughly equivalent in any segment of the economy. Right, It's
• 46:09
  Speaker 3: not that one one entrepreneur has, you know, has more
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: stress than another. I think I think we all deal
• 46:16
  Speaker 3: with with relatively similar demands. But one of the things
• 46:20
  Speaker 3: that was different from me is part of my job
• 46:23
  Speaker 3: was working out, right, So I would whether I was
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: out in the field doing sales presentations and demoing, whether
• 46:28
  Speaker 3: I was developing content with you know, the trainers that
• 46:31
  Speaker 3: I brought in to help build workouts for the for
• 46:34
  Speaker 3: the end users, I was constantly working out and I
• 46:37
  Speaker 3: think that really helped keep me sane during some of
• 46:42
  Speaker 3: these some of these challenges that are inevitable when you're
• 46:45
  Speaker 3: starting a company.
• 46:46
  Speaker 2: What did your fitness your team look like at this time?
• 46:49
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean it's pretty much been. I'm a creature
• 46:52
  Speaker 3: of habit so so I you know, I've been doing
• 46:55
  Speaker 3: more or less the same thing for almost twenty years now,
• 46:59
  Speaker 3: you know, ever since I created my straps, I you know,
• 47:01
  Speaker 3: two or three days a week minimum if I can get,
• 47:04
  Speaker 3: if I can get you know, four days in on
• 47:08
  Speaker 3: the straps. Now we have you know, we expanded our
• 47:11
  Speaker 3: product line over the years, so we have a whole
• 47:12
  Speaker 3: range of basically every functional training tool that you would
• 47:16
  Speaker 3: want to use, from kettlebells to slam balls, med balls, strength.
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: Bands, RX brandeds all this time.
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: We do all of that now, okay. And we started
• 47:26
  Speaker 3: doing that really because our big commercial accounts, our big clubs,
• 47:29
  Speaker 3: were coming to us saying, look, why are you making
• 47:32
  Speaker 3: me go I love your brand, I love your education.
• 47:34
  Speaker 3: Why are you making me go to different catalogs to
• 47:37
  Speaker 3: get my balls or my bands or why don't you
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: just make this stuff? And at first, you know, I
• 47:42
  Speaker 3: had this sort of you know, jobs and affinity for innovation,
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: and I was like, no, we're not doing anything that's
• 47:49
  Speaker 3: not fundamentally innovative, right, But when you hear your customers
• 47:53
  Speaker 3: ask enough times and they say, look, if you make
• 47:55
  Speaker 3: it all buy it. Then you got to kind of
• 47:58
  Speaker 3: put your common sense hat on and all right, we'll
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: do innovation every couple of years, but in between, let's
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: let's produce great gear that our customers need. And so,
• 48:09
  Speaker 3: so my my routine, you know, has been a few
• 48:12
  Speaker 3: days a week. I'm doing functional training, sometimes high intensity
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: sometimes you know, heavier loads. So I kind of I
• 48:20
  Speaker 3: kind of bounce back and forth between high intensity interval
• 48:24
  Speaker 3: training and you know, more strength based slower stuff. And
• 48:29
  Speaker 3: then I do you know, I was a Rower in college,
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: so I've been living on the concept too, you know,
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: Rower forever since before it had a digital you know, readout,
• 48:38
  Speaker 3: and I run, I keep you know, I'm not a
• 48:41
  Speaker 3: I no longer am a long distance guy because as
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: a Clydesdale over fifty, you know, anything above ten miles
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: starts to make you pay more than it gives.
• 48:53
  Speaker 2: A Clydesdale sounds so special.
• 48:55
  Speaker 3: Though I don't know how. It doesn't feel very special
• 48:58
  Speaker 3: when I'm clopping my way down down the road. But
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: you know, so I do. I like to mix it
• 49:05
  Speaker 3: up and I do different stuff. I'll go jump in
• 49:07
  Speaker 3: on a soul cycle spin class. I do a lot
• 49:10
  Speaker 3: of hot yoga, love a good hot yoga. Yeah, me too.
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: So you are doing all the things and you're trying
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: to sweat out this stress, and in the meantime, you've
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: got to figure out how to get these counterfeitters to stop.
• 49:25
  Speaker 2: So how does one even do that?
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's one of these there's no books for this.
• 49:30
  Speaker 3: Right you can go talk to a law firm and
• 49:33
  Speaker 3: they'll say, oh, well, we'll sue them. That gets you nowhere.
• 49:37
  Speaker 3: In most cases, right litigation is generally it's a last resort,
• 49:42
  Speaker 3: and for us, we ultimately did have to bring a
• 49:45
  Speaker 3: lawsuit because what happened was, you know, I built a
• 49:49
  Speaker 3: relationship with the folks at Amazon uh and became one
• 49:52
  Speaker 3: of their brand protection partners, so one of the brands
• 49:56
  Speaker 3: that works very closely with Amazon to help try to
• 50:00
  Speaker 3: keep the platform free of fraud. But the challenge is
• 50:05
  Speaker 3: the counterfeitters morphed and they realized if I put this
• 50:09
  Speaker 3: guy's trademark on my product, you know, Amazon and the
• 50:12
  Speaker 3: others will take it down. If I don't, somehow my product,
• 50:16
  Speaker 3: my knockoff stays up. And that's because the difference between
• 50:20
  Speaker 3: a utility patent and a trademark is a lot and
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: a utility patent. You know, litigation around a patent takes
• 50:28
  Speaker 3: a lot of money and a lot of expertise and
• 50:31
  Speaker 3: involves mechanical engineers, and it's a it's a drawn out process.
• 50:35
  Speaker 3: But eventually we had to bring suit against one of
• 50:38
  Speaker 3: the US based infringers to go win a case that
• 50:42
  Speaker 3: then I could take to Amazon and Amazon would enforce
• 50:45
  Speaker 3: across their platform. And that's ultimately how we did it.
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: And so in twenty and fourteen, this all kind of came.
• 50:53
  Speaker 3: We brought the suit in fourteen.
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, we tried to take three years. Wow, so
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: this is like not to long ago. You came out
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: on top.
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah last spring, So spoiler alert, and this is all
• 51:05
  Speaker 2: said and done, you are then awarded six point eight
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: million dollars in damages.
• 51:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah that was in lost profits. To think about that, right,
• 51:15
  Speaker 3: So you know that implied something around twenty to twenty
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: five million in lost sales over a four year period
• 51:22
  Speaker 3: to one infringer. So that just you know, what that
• 51:26
  Speaker 3: told us was, Wow, we waited too long to bring
• 51:28
  Speaker 3: this suit because we've been hemorrhaging you know, a huge
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: amount of sales to these knockoff guys, and so we
• 51:36
  Speaker 3: were really we were very glad that we brought it
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: now unfortunately part of a In most of these cases,
• 51:42
  Speaker 3: the victory is pyrrhic, meaning, you know, you spend a
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: lot of money to get this victory, and the second
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: you get it, they declare bankruptcy. And that is what
• 51:50
  Speaker 3: happened in our case. You know, these these bad actors
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: just instantly folded. But I knew that was coming, and
• 51:57
  Speaker 3: that was part of the strategy to create the partnership
• 52:00
  Speaker 3: with Amazon, because Amazon then did what I think was
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: a really great thing, and they said, hey, I mean,
• 52:05
  Speaker 3: I think Amazon is serious about trying to have a clean,
• 52:10
  Speaker 3: uh you know, credible platform. It's just a hard thing
• 52:14
  Speaker 3: to do in the age of online fraudsters. I mean,
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: these you know, these cats are the ones that will
• 52:20
  Speaker 3: you know, they probably when they were kids, they were
• 52:21
  Speaker 3: the ones that cut in the front of the line,
• 52:23
  Speaker 3: right and then all throughout their life they are these
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: these people that are just trying to figure out how
• 52:28
  Speaker 3: to cheat their way to the front of the line.
• 52:30
  Speaker 3: And the online marketplace is a great haven for fraudsters,
• 52:37
  Speaker 3: and so it's tough, you know, And I empathize as
• 52:40
  Speaker 3: crazy as Amazon makes me. Sometimes I also empathize with
• 52:43
  Speaker 3: the you know, the magnitude of what they're trying to
• 52:46
  Speaker 3: grapple with.
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: And now a year later to your ex sales are
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: I think I read up one hundred percent year over year.
• 52:52
  Speaker 3: In the online channels. It's more than that. Yeah, So
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: it tells you. It tells you how big a piece
• 52:59
  Speaker 3: of flesh those as we're taking.
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: I've got to ask you, you know, you were thirty
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: six in business school, and I feel like, having turned
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: thirty recently myself, I feel like there's so much stress
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: to like, know what you're going to do, what your
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: life's purpose is thirty Like, what do you have figured out?
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: Were you really scared at thirty six in business school?
• 53:20
  Speaker 2: Not being one hundred percent about the direction you were
• 53:23
  Speaker 2: going to go?
• 53:24
  Speaker 3: The hurdle that I faced, right and when in business
• 53:26
  Speaker 3: school was a little different. I came from a pretty
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: self congratulatory place. I was a squadron commander, a special
• 53:35
  Speaker 3: missions unit, you know, like leading the big squadron of
• 53:39
  Speaker 3: the most elite commandos that ever walked the face of
• 53:41
  Speaker 3: the earth. And I went from that to literally the
• 53:45
  Speaker 3: bottom of the curve in the first god, I don't
• 53:48
  Speaker 3: know thirty exams that I took at Stanford. I mean,
• 53:52
  Speaker 3: I wasn't near the bottom like I was it and
• 53:55
  Speaker 3: that's a really hard adjustment for somebody to walk off of, essentially,
• 54:01
  Speaker 3: you know, an elite pro sports team right in the
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: game of warfare, and then just find yourself just struggling
• 54:09
  Speaker 3: because you don't have the skills. And it was it
• 54:11
  Speaker 3: was actually a great experience for me in retrospect because
• 54:14
  Speaker 3: it was the first time in my life that I
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: ever actually came to the realization that, you know, I
• 54:19
  Speaker 3: used to think I had this kind of Darwinian approach
• 54:21
  Speaker 3: that like, the guy's not successful, it's because he's not trying,
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: and then I found myself in this place where I
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: just didn't have the skills. It would have been like
• 54:27
  Speaker 3: dropping into a fifth year Mandarin class having never taken
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: Chinese before. Right, no matter how hard you work, sometimes
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: it's it's just a it's just a tough slog. And
• 54:39
  Speaker 3: I think that was really valuable for me because it
• 54:41
  Speaker 3: was a sort of a dose of humility that maybe
• 54:46
  Speaker 3: I lacked. But I was never really afraid of where
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: I was going because I knew that I was a
• 54:52
  Speaker 3: pretty capable character and that if I had a high
• 54:56
  Speaker 3: pain threshold and thick skin, and if I just sort of,
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: you know, kept my head down, my feet moving, I
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: would get where I wanted to go.
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: I read a quote yesterday a friend of mine had
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: put up, and it said, if you fall on your face,
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: at least you're still moving forward.
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: Fall forward, always fall forward.
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: Always fall forward.
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: You said before that you're company one hundred employees three
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: hundred and fifty, not technical employees, but w nine employees. Yeah, contract,
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: contract employees. Thank you educators. You know that's a lot
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: of people to lead. So what would you say are
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: some of the best qualities that make you a good leader?
• 55:34
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I guess you'd have to ask my
• 55:35
  Speaker 3: team how good a leader I am. But the the
• 55:38
  Speaker 3: you know, the good news is I have a lot
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: of folks on the team that have been with me
• 55:42
  Speaker 3: for a long time. And you don't usually get that
• 55:45
  Speaker 3: if you're not doing at least a few things right.
• 55:47
  Speaker 3: And I hear over and over and over again across
• 55:50
  Speaker 3: the industry, like, man, I love working with your people,
• 55:53
  Speaker 3: And that's really the best compliment you could ever give
• 55:56
  Speaker 3: to a to a leader. I think I believe that
• 55:59
  Speaker 3: the two most important things in a in a teammate
• 56:02
  Speaker 3: in any venture or integrity and accountability, because those two traits,
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: you know, are priceless, and if you don't have them both,
• 56:14
  Speaker 3: you're going to be fundamentally limited in how much you
• 56:17
  Speaker 3: can contribute to a team. You know. Obviously, the integrity
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: piece is I don't I'm not. I'm not one of
• 56:22
  Speaker 3: those guys that thinks integrity is binary. You have it
• 56:26
  Speaker 3: or you don't. I think if you're a if you're
• 56:28
  Speaker 3: a person that cares about doing the right thing, and
• 56:32
  Speaker 3: that you know when you make a mistake, which, by
• 56:34
  Speaker 3: the way, we all make, and we make them of
• 56:37
  Speaker 3: all different kinds. Sometimes it's you know, a mistake in
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: judgment or or a technical mistake. Sometimes it's a mistake
• 56:43
  Speaker 3: in character. That's we're for humans, that's what we do.
• 56:46
  Speaker 3: We screw things up and you know. But but the
• 56:50
  Speaker 3: integrity that I'm looking for is that inner voice that
• 56:53
  Speaker 3: when you make one of these mistakes or you you
• 56:56
  Speaker 3: you underperform what you know your capability is, you're ready
• 56:59
  Speaker 3: to like your leg off to get a chance to
• 57:02
  Speaker 3: do better next time. Because if somebody has that, well,
• 57:05
  Speaker 3: then you can build on that. Right and then accountability
• 57:07
  Speaker 3: is the other one. Without accountability, an organization is sunk
• 57:12
  Speaker 3: because you know, everybody wants to throw their hand up
• 57:16
  Speaker 3: and say, yeah, I was in charge of that when
• 57:18
  Speaker 3: something goes well. I want the guy or the gal
• 57:21
  Speaker 3: that when things go to hell in a handbasket will
• 57:24
  Speaker 3: step up and be like, yep, that was on me,
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: and here's what I was thinking. It didn't work out
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: that way, and I'm going to do better next time.
• 57:32
  Speaker 3: Because if you have that kind of accountability, you can
• 57:35
  Speaker 3: find out why something didn't work, you can learn from it,
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: cross populate that across your entire organization, and the whole
• 57:42
  Speaker 3: organization is lifted up a level because of that error. Right,
• 57:48
  Speaker 3: And so those are those are a couple of the
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: traits that you know, we try to emphasize and build
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: our team around.
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: I really loved when we were talking on the phone
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: before you came in here today, you told me that
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: your company and the middle of the day always as
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: an opportunity to work out.
• 58:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I think that's awesome. Yeah, we have a we
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: have a staff class at one at one pm, I mean,
• 58:08
  Speaker 3: and and so everybody t Rex can walk into any
• 58:10
  Speaker 3: of that. We run about sixty classes a week in
• 58:13
  Speaker 3: our training center, which is downstairs, and that's you know,
• 58:15
  Speaker 3: that's a.
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: Boutique and this Issco San Francisco.
• 58:18
  Speaker 3: Batique functional training studio that's open to the public, but
• 58:21
  Speaker 3: all the all the teammates can go down in any
• 58:24
  Speaker 3: of the classes when they're space right. And then we
• 58:26
  Speaker 3: have one class every day at one o'clock, which is
• 58:30
  Speaker 3: the staff class and uh and and it's it's you know,
• 58:34
  Speaker 3: I think we let some of our some of our
• 58:36
  Speaker 3: die hard regulars come in with us, but other than that,
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: it's it's the team, only the team. And that's where
• 58:42
  Speaker 3: we test out all our new concepts and the you know,
• 58:45
  Speaker 3: the any program that you would see at your gym
• 58:49
  Speaker 3: has already been vetted, you know. And we are our
• 58:52
  Speaker 3: own guinea pigs. And it's awesome because we get down
• 58:55
  Speaker 3: there and we get after it and and everybody, everybody
• 58:58
  Speaker 3: has a good time and there's lots of joking and
• 59:00
  Speaker 3: you know, a gentle teasing of each other, and it's awesome.
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: You look back, I'm a guy that's in business school
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: and he's not so sure how this is all going
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: to pan out. What's one piece of advice that you
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: offer to him? And then what's a piece of advice
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: you offer to the guy that's handling all of those counterfeitters.
• 59:20
  Speaker 3: I guess if I was giving advice to somebody at
• 59:22
  Speaker 3: business school who was going to go start a company,
• 59:26
  Speaker 3: and this would apply to I think to people who
• 59:28
  Speaker 3: are outside business school too. There are some of these
• 59:31
  Speaker 3: tried and true adages that you may not fully appreciate
• 59:36
  Speaker 3: at the time, but they're tried and true for a reason.
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 59:39
  Speaker 3: One of them is this idea that cash is king,
• 59:42
  Speaker 3: and the reason that you everybody's heard it, but it
• 59:45
  Speaker 3: doesn't always you don't always understand it. And you know, really,
• 59:49
  Speaker 3: the way I interpret that is when you start something,
• 59:52
  Speaker 3: it's better to start slower and to invest behind things
• 59:58
  Speaker 3: that are working. The bigest mistake that I see a
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 3: lot of entrepreneurs make, and I made this, is you know,
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 3: you've got big ideas and big visions, and so you're
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 3: what I call casting, you know, like fishing. You're casting
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 3: out a front of yourself with borrowed money, and you're
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 3: betting that those ideas are going to be reeled in,
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 3: you know, to a great profit. Well, a lot of
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 3: times that doesn't happen, and if you're not very careful,
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 3: you can get ahead of yourself and end up creatoring
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 3: what could have been a really great business because you
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 3: got too aggressive with your big ideas. So I really
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 3: am a believer at this point in my career in
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 3: you know, do your homework, make the minimum viable product
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 3: to test whether it's a service or an actual product,
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 3: and invest as little as you can and till you
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: know something's working, and then once it's working, then you
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: invest behind that, right, And that's that's a piece of
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 3: advice that you know, I wish I had understood better
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 3: and taken more to heart early in my career. And
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 3: then another piece is just like, hey, if you're going
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 3: to be somebody who's out there trying to create something
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 3: new and cool and great, you got to go into
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 3: that with both eyes open and realize like it is
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 3: going to be a slog and there's gonna be moments
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: when you absolutely doubt yourself or a decision that you've made,
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 3: or a new teammate that you brought on, and that's
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 3: all natural, right, It's all part of the process, and
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: you just have to kind of keep your feet moving, right.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 3: I always tell people to focus on the next ten
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 3: meters trail because that's what I learned, you know, as
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 3: a CEL like on a big rock hump when you're
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 3: just dying. If you start looking off in the distance
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 3: at your end target, it just seems absolutely daunting, like
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 3: I'll never get there, you know, with this one hundred
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 3: and twenty pounds on my back and tripping and stumbling
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 3: through the dark. And you know, you just got to
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: focus on the next ten meters right, and get that
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 3: ten meters behind you, and then you look up and
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 3: take the next ten meters and if you keep going
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 3: through life that way, right, you can always get ten
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 3: meters down always.
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 2: So what's next for GRX, what's coming up? What's good?
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: Wow?
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: The biggest challenge I have right now is deciding what
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 3: things we're going to take on right because we have
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 3: so many opportunities. I believe we you know, the mission
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 3: from the beginning was to create the world's first great
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 3: training brand, and there's never been one. Right. There's great
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 3: big apparel in footwear, the sports apparel in footwear manufacturers,
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 3: there's big pure equipment manufacturers, Life Fitness, pre Core technogym.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 3: But when you look in the middle between those two,
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: you know polls and you look at the big blue ocean,
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 3: where do people go to understand what they should be doing,
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 3: what gear they should be using. We think there's an
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: opportunity for TRX to become that brand, and so we're
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: making some big investments in the digital technology space to
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 3: really try to create a comprehensive landscape that's all connected
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: between our consumer fitness side of our business, our commercial
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 3: club side of our business, the athletic training pieces of
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 3: our business, and connected all with technology, even as we
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 3: continue to bring cool new products into the market. So,
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 3: you know, the next the next couple of years, the
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 3: big app emphasis on us is really serving the consumer
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 3: at home because we've been largely at B two B
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 3: business for the first decade of the company's history. So
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: you know, we're coming to you and your home and
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: we're going to bring you, you know, the coolest tools
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: that the top pros and the world use in the
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: world of sport, and we're going to bring them to
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 3: you in your home.
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 2: Are you having just as much fun now as you
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 2: were when it started?
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 3: I do less of what I thought I would be doing,
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: but yeah, you know I have, I have. I have
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 3: a great time, and I think you got to enjoy
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 3: the ride because you know, the journey you may or
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 3: may not get to where you thought you know your
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 3: your in state was going to be. But if you
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 3: enjoy the journey, then you can't go too far wrong.
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 2: Randy, thanks so much for coming in and sitting down
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 2: with me.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 3: My pleasure. Thanks for having.
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: Please take a moment to leave a quick review by
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: clicking the link with the description to this episode. We
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: all face multiple hurdles in life. I want to hear
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: about yours. Reach out to me at Emily at Hurdle
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: dot us, connect with the podcast on Instagram and Twitter
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: at Hurdle Podcast. Randy, where do they find you? Where
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: do they find TRX?
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 2: Give them the.
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 3: Deep I thought you might never ask, So go to
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 3: TRX training dot com and you can check out everything
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 3: we do from for the home, for the gym and
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 3: for training the.
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 2: Great outdoors Instagram too, to your X training to your
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 2: X train beautiful.
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: Thing Again, I am at Emily, a body, another hurdle conquered.
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 2: Catch you guys next time.