Why We Started PushPress and WHY It Matters to Your Gym

Why we started PushPress matters. Listen in as Dan talks about how PushPress came to be, and how his journey from gym client to coach to owner helped shape everything we did here at PushPress.

***
If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a short review on Apple Podcasts/Itunes. It takes less than 60 seconds, and it helps get our message out to those who need it. We appreciate it!

For links, show notes, and transcripts of episodes, click HERE.

Follow PushPress:
Twitter: twitter.com/pushpressapp 
Instagram: instagram.com/pushpress
Facebook: facebook.com/pushpress

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

speaker 0:   0:00
Welcome to the Gym OS podcast, helping fitness professionals become better business owners. One episode at a time. Have you ever taken the time to think about your story? Better yet, have you ever told your clients about your story? You may not realize it because you probably haven't spent a lot of time thinking about yourself in this way, But your story is important to your clients. The goal of this episode is pretty simple. I want you to know push presses back story. I want you and understand who we are, why we're doing this and how come we are the best people in this industry to fix the problems that we're seeing. I also want you to understand the power of storytelling and why telling your story is just important to your clients as it is for you to understand our story before we dig too deep on the push breast story. Let's talk about me. I'm Dan Uemura. See you of Push Press and the host of the Gym OS podcast. For some reason, I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I used to have paper outs when I was 12. I remember collecting baseball cards as if they were stocks. I would keep track of their value every month, the percent gain and loss. And instead of just jonesing for one can Griffey Jr rookie card. I wanted 20. I went to college right around the time the Internet started becoming commercially viable, and then it was a pretty exciting time. They were like cool ideas coming up left and right around this birth of the Internet and as an entrepreneur. It was like being a kid in a candy store. I remember being intrigued by everything. Everyone was building around this new age of information. I remember I used to hang out at the Graduate School of Management of my college because there were so many ideas flowing around and I used to just try and fit in and be kind of a fly on a wall to understand the types of things people were building and how they went about it. Throughout my childhood, I was also into sports fitness and athletics. As a child, I grew up playing basketball in baseball. In fact, for those of you who are into baseball, you know it's kind of a statistical nerd's dream, and I remember as a child just obsessing over all my stats. I had a spreadsheet that I created, and I recorded every stat from every game at bats, hits on base percentage, even feeling errors and fielding percentage. I was into it, man, and and I guess that was my earliest understanding of just how much I love data. Anyway. Through college, I was typical gym rat. I used to love being in the gym. I played rec, league basketball. Even today, I coach my daughter's basketball team. It's just who I am, and it's what I love. So, anyway, upon graduating college, I did what most on premier entrepreneurs did, and I tried to start a company which failed. And then I took my skills and I worked for a bunch of startups in the Internet space. This is a great experience. I got to hang with the entrepreneurial crowds I got to see. It was like to grow a business, but I didn't have the risk of actually being the entrepreneur during this time of Internet companies. They used to feed everyone every night, and the deploy was to get you to be more productive by staying at your desk and working. But what they did is they basically catered something like pizza or Italian food every single night. And free food is free food. I used to eat it. After about seven years, I easily found myself overweight, and I decided it was time for a change. After doing a lot of investigation, I found in this thing called CrossFit and I remember literally being halfway through my first workout and I fell in love with it. I couldn't see myself doing any other fitness. It was so fun. And it was everything that every other finish experience I had wasn't so for a period of my life. This was it. I would go into work from 9 to 5, being a Web application programmer for startups. And once I left my job at 5 p.m. I would hurry on over to CrossFit and do the 6 30 workout and then go home, eat dinner and call it a night. Like many of you out there listening to this, you probably fell in love with it just as much as I did. I quickly aspired to be a coach, and with my coaching expertise I helped a friend open a gym, and once I kind of went down that route of helping a friend open a gym, I started looking to the software of Jim Management, and I realized that there wasn't much out there that satisfied my understanding of what a good software platform should be, given that I was in the process of building them for all these startups. And this is where two worlds collided for me, having recognized the fact that most of the software out there was subpar in my opinion and also loving CrossFit so much that I decided I want to open a gym. The next obvious step for me was to open a gym and decide if I wanted to build a software for it. And that's exactly what we did. I found a couple other people from the gym I was going to who were keen on the idea of opening a gym and also who came from kind of a software in sales background. And we did that. We opened L. A X CrossFit in 2010 with the intention of exploring the idea of building a software around the gym management space. I think of you inspect any company. There's always these moments. They get lucky on nothing really planned. It just happened that way. And I think opening a gym was one of those moments for us. It really gave us insight into what it was like to own a gym. We had all these assumptions of what we needed to build for Arjun management platform, and it turned out none of them were right. Once we actually got into the weeds of running a gym, and with this realization came even a deeper understanding that all the gym software out there was flawed. It became really apparent to me that whatever software solutions were out there at the time were not built around whatever modern business practices we were deploying at our gym. And what we were deploying at the gym wasn't crazy, because it was all the same practices that a lot of these startup companies at work for, used, for example, landing pages, simple ways for customers to convert. Once they got to understand your business, no other system had a landing page. Today you'll see landing pages are pretty pervasive. It's an understood concept, but in 2010 that this just wasn't represented in the gym space whatsoever. So the first big realization we had it push press was we couldn't copy what the existing systems did, and from our observation and kind of picking apart the other systems. They all seem to kind of copy each other. And they were copying what we felt was an old, archaic and or flawed model for a modern gym. And thus we set out to kind of redefine the entire space and build something from the ground up, taking all the experiences we had from actually owning a gym. The other way, this dramatically helped us was we got to make friends with other gym owners. We talked to them. We learned from them. We got to understand collectively what best practices were because they genuinely were our peers. And last and probably most important, we got to understand what customers wanted. We got to understand what people who wanted to join our gym expected to see and what type experiences they needed to have to become lifelong successful gym members at L. A x CrossFit. And so the genesis of push press was pretty much formed. We had a team of people together who had a unique experience in building Internet based applications and knew what modern Web applications needed to look and behave like. And then we layered on top of that years of experience of actually running a gym, meeting gym owners and talking to clients of Jim's and really understanding what we needed to build. There was clearly a gap in the market, and we knew we could fill it. Funny backstory. We named our company Push Press because back then and probably today, a lot of Jim's were using WordPress to manage their websites. And our first version of push press was actually built to be a plug in to WordPress so you could manage your entire gym from WordPress itself. We quickly realized that building such a robust application from the confines of the framework of WordPress was going to be very limiting and difficult, and we scrap that version of push press pretty quick. But the name stuck. I think these early days of push press really formed a cynicism that we had for the software that was on the market and from that cynicism kind of was begat a counterculture mindset. We really did not want to copy what was out there because we really felt what was out there was wrong. And so we pretty systematically picked apart every aspect of running a gym and we built it from the lens of running a gym kind of in a more modern sense. I really feel like this counterculture mindset was embedded in our DNA really early in our company, and it's kind of what sets us apart from the rest of the field. We refused to look at what our competition was doing to solve problems, and we refused to solve problems in the status quo. Some examples of this, um, in the early decisions we made for one was choosing to partner with Striped vs, working with a merchant account the typical systems of the time. We're basically reselling merchant accounts to our gyms, and I had basically gone through the frustration of setting up a merchant account really ex CrossFit. And it was an experience I never wanted. Another gym owner to go through. The process of setting up a merchant account basically entailed one month of my time for about an hour a day, each day, trying to negotiate and haggle down the best rates I could against what I didn't realize was a professional sales person for the merchant account industry. Guess who won There he did. So at the end of the day, I thought that I had a merchant account at 1.9% which I herald it to all my partners as this huge win that I got for us, one of my members of L. A X CrossFit, who actually ended up becoming a co founder of Push Breast. Brian was in the banking field, and he basically told me that it was impossible for us to be getting 1.9% doing the business we're doing. And this is because he knew most of our transactions were not card president, not swiped. And in the industry, that represents a higher fraud risk, which brings with it a higher percent rating. He offered to analyze our credit card statements and the 1.9% that I had bragged for a year to my partners that I had gotten turned out to be about 4.5%. This is after all the statement fees and PC I compliance fees and batch transfer fees and non card present fees and fees, fees, fees that we're paying that we weren't paying attention to. Once we started push rest, we did. A bunch of credit card statement analysis is for Jim's as well, and we found pretty much the same thing was happening across the board for about 80 to 90% of Jim's. Everyone thought they were getting low 2%. Everyone is paying about 4%. Right around this time strike came out. Stripe was a new merchant processing system that was tailored around building on the Internet. They lowered the barrier to taking credit cards online. They made it really simple to integrate and best. Yet they allowed us to connect our clients with stripe with ease. Even better, they were advertising a flat and fixed 2.9% credit card rate. This beat all of the confusion that was happening in the credit card merchant processing space where people thought they were paying 2% and we're really paying for stripe. Recognize it just as much as we recognized it, and they aim to solve that problem too. They did this essentially by cutting sales people out of the mix. You see when salespeople are are involved in the process, they need to make it cut. Stripes sold directly to platforms like us who built it right into our product and essentially became the salesperson for them. And they solve the problem we had and that we needed a building platform. By doing so, they cut all of the middleman sales initiatives out of the equation, and we're able to offer a flat rate. So anyway, that's pretty much kicked off a long line of counterculture thought that became part of push presses DNA. We started coming out. The message that he's all in one systems were actually doing a disservice to their clients. You can't do everything and do them all really well. We chose to specialize. Our focus became in specializing in billing and membership management, CR M solutions and not trying to do everything like workout tracking and belt tracking and kilos door systems and all these other things everyone else was doing. And that way, by doing so, we could focus on being the best at the granular thing, we d'oh and integrating and working with all the people who are best at doing the things that they do a key example. This is early integration with Sugar Watch, one of the most well known workout tracking systems on the market. Every other one of our competitors and the CrossFit space was building their own workout tracking system. We realized pretty quickly that building a workout tracking system would be such a endeavor. We'd rather work with sugar water and let them continue to build the absolute best system that they could, allowing us to focus on building the integration to them and continuing down our path of doing what we do best. Again, I feel like a lot of these concepts came out of the fact that all of us here push press had come from an Internet industry background, and we understood how the Internet industry worked and the best ways to build software. So that brings us to today. That's the back story of push press. That's why we're here. That's how I became involved in my partner's became involved. I'm happy to say today we've achieved what's known as product market fit. We built a platform that is winning for Jim's. We're helping our clients become better gyms, and we're improving upon that daily. Not only have we built that platform, but we built what we feel is the industry's most stable platform. We never have billing issues, and we boast a 99.998% up time. Response time is fast to also customer service enquiries, and we do everything we can to keep our service speedy and keeping the user experience great. Something else I'm super pumped about is our team. Only gym owners understand this industry as if their gym owners and we put together a team of people who love push press so much. And there, Jim, that they wanted to join Push press as a success representative. Anyone you speak to on the front end of our service owns a gym and has been a push press client. They understand our product really well, and they understand your problems and your pains because they're facing them, too. The most ambitious product we're working on right now is this. The podcast education helping gym owners become better business owners. This is the number one problem in our industry right now is a lot of people open gyms because they love fitness and they didn't realize that they were going to come. A business owner Running a business isn't hard. There's a lot of playbooks and rules that you can follow to be a good business owner, and we're gonna work on those here. Our goal is modest and simple to give our clients everything they need to succeed. On one hand, that's our product, the software and the customer support. But on the other hand, it's education. The best way for you to have a client who stays with you for life is to show them results, to teach them how to live a better, healthier, fitter life, to give them the tools that they need to be happy. Similarly, the best way for us to have you as a lifelong client is to do the same to give you all the tools you need, as well as all of the education you need to build a stable business that will stand the test of time. Thank you for taking the time of listening to the push press backstory. I'm Dan Way Maria, your host of the Gym OS podcast from Push Press. I'm super excited for the upcoming episodes, and I hope you join me as we continue to dive deep into the business of fitness and help you make your gym more successful. If any of the information in this podcast helpful to you make sure you give us alike that way, other gym owners might be able to find it, too. And if you haven't already done so, subscribe to this podcast for more information on running a better Jim until next time I'm down.