In this episode, we talk with Candice about how she and her 3 business partners attacked the many tasks involved with starting a gym. She also gives us some awesome advice regarding the things you should consider when opening a business for yourself.
What is your business?
Candice: I am a co-owner of 30West Fitness and Recreation. 30West is a fitness center, aka a gym, in Chisholm Minnesota. But we are also a recreation company, so in the past we have offered stand-up paddle board rentals and things like that. We plan to get into more recreation as our business grows.
What’s your story?
Candice: That’s a loaded question. Myself and my husband, Joel, had a collective dream to open a recreation facility in Chisholm and our partners, Nick and Jen, wanted to see a fitness facility there. There were no other gyms in Chisholm so we saw a demand and need that we felt we could meet. Well, there was a small gym at the high school in Chisholm but it was small, old, and had weird hours. Basically, we knew that there was a need for a gym in town and we also thought it was something that the community wanted so that’s kind of why we decided to do it.
Ruthie: Classic entrepreneurship; see a need, meet a need. That’s awesome.
Candice: Yes
Ruthie: Yeah
Bekkah: So tell us how many people are in Chisholm? Like what’s the population?
Candice: Um, it’s right around 5,000.
Ruthie: So what is your success rate right now? With everything that’s been going on… It’s a beautiful gym. It’s awesome and it looks like you guys have put a lot of work into it. Talk about that a little bit.
Candice: We have received overwhelming positive response from the community. It seems like people love seeing young business owners. This is not our only business or our only jobs. I’m a stay-at-home mom to two kids, my husband has a full-time job in the mines, and then Nick and Jenna both full-time physical therapists.
Ruthie: Wow!
Candice: They also have two kids so this is like the side hustle of all side hustles so we’re busy, but it people love it! They love to see us making it work and right now. We have over 200 members which is great!
Ruthie: Wow!
Candice: So that’s working toward our goals. We want more members, we’re not done yet, but we’ve been very
surprised and encouraged by the response from people.
Ruthie: That is amazing.
Bekkah: Yeah so tell us about when you guys started putting it together. What was the process of deciding, “Is it gonna be profitable?” “How should we fill out finances?” What did you guys go through to figure out “Yep we want to do this.”
Candice: Yeah so I think that’s one of the benefits of being in a team of four. Those things are not my strengths. We we have different strengths and weaknesses and Jen, the other woman in our business partnership, she is a researcher of all researchers. She was on top of figuring out our projections for what the revenue minus our startup costs and running the business would be. She did a lot of that work with the help of a business consultant.
Ruthie: Talking to a business consultant was one of our very best resources and something that I would encourage anyone who is thinking about starting a business to find in your area. Look for a small business agency that can help you, or whatever that means for your area. I don’t know if the agencies look the same everywhere, but try to find somewhere where they have consultants who can help you start your business.
Bekkah: And was the consultant through the government or was this a private person you guys hired?
Candice: This was through the government.
Bekkah: Yeah, okay, awesome.
Candice: Yeah, so that was a big help. Um and okay what was the rest of your question? So yeah that’s how we
figured out how it would be profitable but then there was also the, “Okay, how are we going to pay for this?” Right? We did use some of our own personal finances, but we also met with the Community Development Agency (CDA) and the economic development agency or association, because they can offer loans at low interest rates. We were able to secure a very large loan from them, which was awesome; and then we also got a loan from the bank.
Ruthie: That covered the all the equipment and the building that you purchased?
Candice: Yes, the building came primarily from our CDA loan.
Ruthie: Okay, yeah, awesome. Was there a lot of renovation that you guys had to do?
Candice: Actually it wasn’t too bad. Our building is two-story and right now the second story is, as you guys saw today, still being renovated. But the bottom floor where the gym is wasn’t too bad! We painted everything. We added some structural elements like a small wall. We knew getting into it that weight machines weigh a lot and free weights add up when you have them all in one spot on the floor, so we had to have a structural engineer come and look underneath our building to make sure that there was proper support to hold all of that weight. That was an added cost but thankfully the building was secure, so we didn’t have to add anything to it.
We tried to keep a lot of the character of the building. If you’ve been to our space you’ll notice that it’s a super old building, which is something that we love about it. It has a lot of character, the old brick wall, the the wood floors that are marred and black in some spots, we love that! We didn’t want to rip all that out. It’s cheaper to keep it, but also adds to the character of the building so that kind of worked in our favor that way.
What’s the time investment of work to owning a gym?
Candice: Oh yeah! So the interesting thing actually with running a gym is that you can have a key code an automatic key code entry. That means that all of our members, when they sign up, get numbers that they type in in order to get in the door. We technically don’t even have to be there. That’s the wonderful thing about running a gym, and really the only thing that would make it workable for us since we have other jobs. We needed to have something where we don’t have to be there a hundred percent of the time and a gym gives us that. After you have everything up and running the gym pretty much runs itself. So I would say we’re only personally on site at the gym for about 20 hours a week.
Bekkah: Okay
Candice: Or possibly even less. As far as actually working shifts at the gym, being there to sign people up, clean, ask or answer questions, any meetings that we have… The time commitment is really pretty low compared to some other businesses, I think.
Bekkah: So is that 20 hours a week total between the four of you?
Candice: Yeah
Ruthie: So it’s just the four of you? Do you have any other employees at all?
Candice: We actually do have one intern. His name’s Anthony and he with us through a state run program. We found through a friend of ours that there’s a state-run internship program so the state pays for. We don’t even pay him. He works for us and turns in his hours, but then the state pays, or the county.
Bekkah: You should he send us the link to that!
Candice: I can give you my friend’s contact info.
Bekkah: Yeah!
Candice: It’s been invaluable for starting a business. We couldn’t hire somebody right off the bat. We don’t have the resources to do that, so to find out that, “Hey there’s this program, he can work I think up to 32 hours a week and there’s no limit on how long the internship can be…”
Ruthie: Wow
Bekkah: Whoah, yeah that’s very valuable.
Candice: It is wonderful.
What’s the best paid or free resource you recommend anyone using?
Candice: Yeah well, and I already mentioned this but I’d definitely recommend utilizing the small business consultant administration. They can give you so many resources outside of just their own knowledge so I would say connect with them. But other than that, we use Google Drive a lot. Being a team of four owners, we can communicate so seamlessly. So we have things like our shift notes on there so whenever we’re working at the gym we can add notes so that all four of the owners can see what’s going on. We have all of our documents loaded on there. That’s been great for us. We use Google Voice. Do you guys know what Google Voice is?
Ruthie: We both have that.
Candice: Okay yeah!
Bekkah: Oh, yeah! We love it!
Candice: Ok! It’s great to use as business where we’re not there all the time. If somebody calls
and we’re not there the Google Voice
takes it as an email. We can respond
right away even if we’re not at the gym. So that’s been great.
Ruthie: And it is totally free. It’s really easy to set up. It’s on the tools and tips page of our website, if anybody’s interested in looking into that. It’s definitely worth the time investment.
Candice: We also use a small company in Minnesota called https://recreogo.com/. They handle all of, or I should say “their software,” handles all of our rentals through our website. We initially started using their services when we started offering stand-up paddle board rentals in the summer. And so everything was online. People would book the paddle boards online and then we would just have them ready to go in our foyer locked up with a key code. Then we would just email the customer the key code so that they could just pick it up. It was very easy that way, so we didn’t have to be there all the time.
But now we’ve moved into also offering our day passes for the gym and week passes online through Recreogo, as well as all of our small group fitness classes. People can sign up online and they can have immediate access to the gym. Which is pretty sweet! I don’t know how valuable that would be for people outside of gym membership, but honestly, Recreogo isn’t even for gym memberships – it’s for rentals, so if you were going to have a rental business of any kind it’s pretty great, and they’re a really easy company to work with.
Bekkah: It’s like air B&B but for everything that’s not a house
Candice: Yes! And then as far as “paid for” things QuickBooks.
Ruthie: So Recreogo is free to use?
Candice: I believe it is! Because they add a tax on when people rent or whatever. You know, they add in a fee there and so I’m pretty sure that is free. Pretty sure, yeah.
Bekkah: Ruthie is gonna be looking into that. She’s going be Googling.
What were you most scared about when opening a gym?
Candice: Well it is very scary to open a business because you can run the numbers as much as you want – which I would say having an airtight business plan or a very detailed, comprehensive, business plan is super important and I think that you will definitely be more successful if you do that – but success will never be a for-sure thing, so it’s kind of taking a risk. Changing your life, adding something in.
I was scared because I like routine and I didn’t want my day-to-day to be changed and this added a lot of change, but for us having a team of four was great because you can flex and flow with each other and we have different strengths and weaknesses to complement each other. I think that settled my nerves a little bit. I don’t have to know everything because there’s four of us. But what would I say to somebody who’s going to be on their own starting a business? I’d say utilize the resources around you. Use your connections. “Yeah I know somebody who is a photographer and they take pictures” or “I know somebody who’s in accounting and they can really help.” Utilize those resources. Don’t think that you are an island and you have to do it all on your own, because there are so many resources around and so many people who are willing to help. Especially, if it’s somebody young starting a business.
What advice would you give someone who’s thinking about starting a gym?
Candice: There are a couple of things. Number one: it’s never the right time so don’t be waiting for it to be perfect and for the stars to align because it likely won’t happen. I remember thinking that was one of my fears. We have two kids and Joel’s at work all the time. Nick and Jenna have two kids and full-time jobs between them. Why are we doing this? It’s never the right time but it was the right time for 30West and so just be encouraged that everything doesn’t have to be perfect and sometimes you do have to take a little bit of a risk.
Is there something you would not do again with your gym?
Candice: I honestly don’t think we’ve made any really awful decisions yet.
Ruthie: Praise God!
Candice: So we’ve only been open just over a year and there are things I think we could learn from but there’s nothing that we’ve said, “We should have never done that.”
Ruthie: And I’d suggest that really stems from the power that you guys have had with researching and making really informed decisions. Not just kind of flying by the seat of your pants.
Candice: Yes, and I think if I can speak to the power of our team, I would say our team leader, Nick, Director of Operations, leads us well in our vision. He’s always thinking of the future a big-picture type stuff. One thing that he said, is that when you’re starting a business especially if you are on a team you need to have direct and honest conversations at the beginning. “These are my strengths, these are my weaknesses, these are your strengths, these are your weaknesses. Let’s operate within those things and not go out of them.” That way you’re starting off really knowing what you’re capable of and who should own what. You’re having you know super honest conversation about that.
