Kickstarter Pre-launch – a home gym challenges the No pain No gain crowd, with Joey Atlas of SCULPTAFIT Global, USA

Episode Transcript

Balint: I'm happy to bring you Joey Atlas of SCULPTAFIT to this episode all the way from Florida. Thank you for joining, Joey. 

Joey: Absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me on here, Balint. 

Balint: As a short intro to the listeners, we got connected as you listened to a few episodes of my podcast. The first one you checked out was with Stephen Key, to my understanding, on licensing which came out at the end of last year and since then we've been in regular contact. Thanks for checking out the episodes. 

Joey: Total pleasure. It was by universal design. I am not inside LinkedIn a lot but Stephen Key is on my contacts list and by chance I caught the episode he was on with you. And if something interests me, I go listen to it, read it or bookmark it for the evening. And so that one interested me a lot and through him is how I found your podcast, dug into a few episodes and wanted to reach out because I felt there was something there worth exploring with you. 

Balint: Yeah. I appreciate it. Joey, let me start with a story of mine. As you know, I am also into sports like you. I go jogging mainly and at the same time I also do some fitness. I went backpacking around the world for half a year roughly two years ago and I still wanted to keep up with my routine of doing sports, at least some of my rou-tines. But it was challenging as I changed locations regularly due to my trips and I didn't have equipment with me. So, what did I discover then? Playgrounds. 

I remember doing circles running around the playground in Tokyo, for example, one of the locations that I remember vividly because I stayed there for a few days and regularly I went there jogging, and I used the outside machines at the playground. And in Honolulu, that's another example close to Waikiki Beach, there is another playground which I used. They were really, really helpful to do some of the exercises so I can put myself into the right mode, into the right shape to start off my day. 

Except when the weather was bad like when it was rainy then I either had to skip these exercises outside or I had to really scope it down, to narrow down the number of exercises I did so just like I did pushups or if I was lucky pull-ups, some light exer-cises indoors. And I wanted to start with this story because I believe it connects with yours, with your story and your product. So, can you tell us a little bit your story and also your product that you're coming out with? What problem you're solving? 

Joey: Absolutely. So, to put things into context, I just turned 48 and fitness and my health has been a priority my whole life literally from early childhood. I haven't always been perfect. I've had some major, major ups and downs. I've dealt with a lot of the things that everybody else deals with in life - emotional eating, body image issues, food codependency issues, even if you want to call it addictions to food, I've dealt with all those. But underneath it all was this ever-present desire to find a way to take care of my health, my body which is the vehicle that carries us through our entire life-time. And so that fight was always going and my life journey took me down the fit-ness path, it started in my teen years really getting into it after my father sparked my interest by doing stuff around the house. He was naturally doing things and myself, my brother and my sister we would just see him doing these things as a natural part of his life to stay strong, to stay healthy, to be fit and that was a blessing to us be-cause not many other kids’ parents exercised, let alone exercise around the house where you can see the example. 

So that sparked the early interest in me and I got heavily into it in my teen years and it became a priority and then eventually I went off to college and I didn't think of fit-ness as a career path. In college I was aiming for med school. I was aiming for being an accountant or maybe an architect. I had all these big career majors that I was looking at considering trying to see which one would really resonate with me and fuel my career endeavors to want to go further and study more. And what I found was all those things just bored me. Even medicine bored me. I was good at all the classes but it just bored me. And looking at my future I thought, “Well, if I go down one of these really good careers, I'm going to be locked into a job. If I'm going to be a doc-tor, I may have my own practice but that's going to be the limit. I'm going to be work-ing crazy hours, killing people who are making themselves sick and not taking care of themselves.” And then the other jobs were the same. Basically, go work for big com-pany or try to do your own thing where you're basically working a lot to maintain your own small business. 

So, I really didn't know what to do and so I started exploring a bit and realized that there is this major in our school called Exercise Physiology and I thought, “Wow, that sounds pretty cool. I love fitness, nutrition, I love taking care of myself.” I was already teaching people in my early years how to do all this stuff because it was very natural to me. So, I figured, “I'm going to give that a shot. That really interests me and I see no ceiling and no boundaries in that field because I can create my own path.” Because fitness was still so new and there's still so many people that need a lot of help. There's still room for creativity in the field. 

And so, that's what I decided. I applied to the Exercise Physiology program, got my bachelor's degree, came out of there and spent time at the Pepsi-Cola headquarters in New York doing my corporate fitness internship. During the internship I started my own personal training and fitness consulting business. This was back in 1992. I start-ed my own personal training and fitness consulting business in the New York-Connecticut area just north of the city. And before we knew it I had five trainers work-ing for me. We were covering so many people at their homes and their offices. I would eventually have enough trainers working with me where I would eventually travel with some of my very wealthy clients who had businesses in other places, they had second and third vacation homes in other places and they would want me to come with them at certain times of the year. So, I structured things so I was able to do that at a pretty high price tag but that's what they wanted. And money, it really wasn't about the money for them. It was more about the convenience and the exper-tise that they wanted to save them from getting hurt and to save them time with their fitness. 

So that business developed and eventually it was time to move to Florida which was 1999. So, I basically sold off all my clients to the trainers who were working with me, moved to Florida and started the regular personal training studio. And at the time I was still doing lots of the traditional type of training but with my own flair and style to it which was much more methodical, safer, a balanced approach to fitness. And in the first few years I realized that something inside me is making me want to move away from the traditional things that I had learned in terms of programming and ma-chine usage and weight usage. And by this time, I had already also received my master's degree. I was going to night school before we left New York to get a mas-ter's degree in Exercise Physiology as well. And so, what happened was in Florida I got so busy I was working from sunup to sundown with all these clients at the studio trying to raise young kids, trying to be married in my first marriage and I had no… I was burnt out and my fitness time was reduced to almost nothing because I could no longer spend 90 minutes on my own workouts. 

And something had to change. Yes, something had to change and I just stopped do-ing all the traditional stuff that was taking so long and really hurting my body. And I started training on playgrounds, like you were talking about earlier. I started getting into more and more body weight style training, natural type movements, functional type movements, multi joint movements. And I started exploring lots of different play-grounds. When I would travel if I went to visit family back in New York or if I was go-ing to do private consulting for a client, I would always look for the local playgrounds where I was staying and experiment and explore and create new moves, new exer-cises and new workouts on these playgrounds. 

Eventually, I started doing a lot more of this at home here in Florida and sharing it with people, sharing it with some of my clients and they realized that I was getting in better shape, I was feeling better, my joints were feeling so much better. I had no joint aches or pains, no backaches or pains and my clients wanted to start doing this with me. And so, basically, we stopped doing the traditional stuff with all the weights and the machines and the reps and the multiple sets and all that, and we just started doing this functional playground type training. And my clients were loving it because we were able to shorten the workouts considerably and they were able to feel good, get better results and have a decrease in all the common aches and pains that peo-ple get from doing the traditional health club machines and the heavy weights style of fitness training. 

Eventually, the weather thing came up like you were talking about. And when it was storming really hard or if we had some really cold weather up here in northeastern Florida, we had nowhere to train and so we had to make use of different things in-doors and just get by for whether it was a day or few days or a week if there was a hurricane passing through. So, I started thinking well maybe there's a way I could build a machine, one machine that allows us to do all this stuff we've been doing on all these different playgrounds and this machine can be indoors and maybe the ma-chine can even allow us to do more than what we were doing on the playgrounds be-cause I would build it with intention. And so, some of my clients were thinking the same thing. They said, “You know if you could do that, if you could make something, not only would you solve this problem but you might have something way, way bigger than you could ever imagine, like this could help a lot of people.” 

So, I drew up some sketches over the course of a week, took the sketches to some design engineers here in Jacksonville, they created some three-dimensional comput-er-generated models knowing what the intention of this machine would be and what it would have to hold up to. And I picked the best design that I felt would work. And then we had it fabricated by a company in Pennsylvania. They shipped it down. Now this is about maybe 10 or 11 years ago, they shipped that first one down. I put it to-gether, started training on it immediately and it was almost like a dream. It was like this thing that didn't exist a few months ago now exists and I'm using it and not only was I using it but it was even better than training on the playgrounds because this was made specifically for what the usage was going to be for. And so, I had some clients they were coming over to train with me on it. And everybody who would come over was just blown away like one that this imaginary thing now exists but second that it's performing better than we thought it would and making the workouts even better and the results even better. And it's fully adjustable. So, I could train all different kinds of clients no matter what their level was and no matter if they were begin-ners or super advanced like me or somewhere in between and their age didn't matter either because the challenge of what we were doing on the machine for what we were aiming for in any given training session could totally be adjusted. 

So, at the time I was in no financial position to further commercialize this endeavor. I had gone into plenty of debt to get it to where it was, to get that first one built and re-ally that was my intention to build it for myself and my kids and the clients I was train-ing. But I knew in the future if I was put in a position to commercialize it that that is what I would want to do. And I promised myself that if I was in that position, that that is what I'm going to do. So fast forward a bunch of years and… Am I given you enough of the background, Balint? You want me to keep going? 

Balint: Yeah, yeah. It's good. It's good. We are here now with the step of commer-cializing it later, much later. So, my question is how did you get to the point at a later point that financially you could afford more to bring it to the next level? Because the first iteration of was about 10-11 years ago that you fabricated and then after that you had the second iteration and even more iterations, right? 

Joey: Correct. So, the way I was able to financially get to a point where I could commercialize it… Now keep in mind I had already trained many, many super wealthy clients over the years and at the time I was also still training many wealthy clients down here in Florida. And literally one of them alone could have fully financed whatever my vision was at the time but I didn't feel ready to ask for that kind of help. I wanted to be able to somehow do this on my own as far as I possibly can even if it took five, six, seven, eight more years to be in that position. And then you know if I wanted to, I'd be able to turn to some of these clients or one of these clients and say, “Look, look how far I got this. Now I do need some help and support and really ele-vating this thing to reach the world.” 

Balint: Yeah. What was the reason for going down the self-funding route? Because many entrepreneurs are attracted to getting investors on board as soon as possible. And instead, you were waiting. You’ve been waiting. 

Joey: Right. Just a lot of factors in my life just made it feel right to keep using it, keep proving the concept and keep working on the other things I'm able to work on that I know could bring more profit and help me fund this next part of the business and in further developing the machine and then how I bring it to the world. And it was just something that I felt was the right thing to do. I felt by putting that challenge on myself that I would somehow force myself to rise to the challenge and figure out a way to make it happen even if it was going to take some time. So, what I did was, I told you I was getting burnt out at my studio in Florida because I had so many clients and I really needed a way to change how I help people and how many people I can help. So, I started creating my own DVDs and online programs. 

My idea was I could you know I'm helping a few dozen very wealthy clients here in my town but I can help a lot of people around the world, thousands and thousands and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands if not millions around the world. If they can get my information in their hands because most of them wouldn't need a full- blown health club or fitness center because they don't need equipment to do my types of programs. So, I started creating DVDs and online programs, I started teach-ing myself how to make websites. I was staying up all hours to get this all done. But I knew the vision. The vision was get my personal expertise into the hands of people who want it and need it and have them be able to buy it for $30-$40-$50-$70 for great programs instead of having to spend $1500 to $2000 a month with me training them and coaching them, they could get my best stuff for pennies on the dollar you know $50 dollars average for a program. 

So, I worked really hard at that and I found early success back in 2006 was when I first started putting my programs online and I saw immediate success. Enough suc-cess that told me that I'm doing the right thing and I have to do more and more of it. So, I kept doing a lot of that, kept developing programs, building websites, teaching myself good marketing, teaching myself how to use Google AdWords, Yahoo Bing, Facebook ads, taught myself how to do all that and just kept growing and growing the business. As long as I was bringing in more than I was spending I felt like I'm in a good zone. So, the short story is eventually some of my best programs went viral and they were picked up by some very big affiliates and they went viral and once one of the big ones went viral, five international publishers asked me for the rights in their language for this specific program. And before I knew it, within a span of just literally six months my whole life radically changed. I was so far in debt from going through two divorces and just had things that were out of my control happened to me that I was just really, really far in debt. I mean I stopped counting because it was so de-pressing and demoralizing. 

But I kept working on the things that I could control. And when those programs went viral and a lot of people around the world were being helped it put me in a financial position to completely turn the tables 180. So, I was able to realize I can now do this thing with the machine, this vision that I have, I can now do this myself. I can self- fund the next stages of the vision and that's how I got it. 

Balint: OK. All right. So, these were like the financial challenges. What about some other challenges that you had with respect to the manufacturing aspect? Because you're now at the stage that you have the prototype but you are even ready for serial production, right? 

Joey: Yes, great question. Great question. So, as we speak today we're way beyond the prototype we're like version 4 or 5.0 of the actual machine but it's been a chal-lenge to get here. So, the company that made the first prototype ten years ago when I had reached back out to them three years ago to now take things to the next big level they were no longer working on these types of projects. They had scaled down their business only to focus on a few certain things and exercise equipment was not one of them. So then started the search who's going to build the next eight of these units for the studio that I had in mind and in my vision. The studio was the next step. But I had to find somebody capable of building eight of these that would hold up to many, many hours of use every day, every week, every month. This had to be com-mercial grade. 

So, it took a while but funnily enough one of my neighbors who was in the agricultural business knew of a small group that did contract manufacturing for one of the biggest let’s say tractor companies in the US and he put me in touch with him because he did work on the side privately fabricating smaller jobs, put me in touch with him. Long story short was he was able to refine the prototype into the second version model that I made improvements on from the first prototype and he was able to produce the eight units for the studio. Now I paid a really, really hefty feed to get only those eight made because I was under a time constraint deadline to get the studio open so I couldn't really go shopping around for who could make eight of them at the best price with the best specifications. But that's where I was and that's what I had to do. 

Now. Got the studio open that was two years ago that the studio is open and before I knew it was time to add the next piece of this big equation into the mix and that was selling this all-in-one fitness solution to end users at home just like it all started with me having mine at home. The vision was eventually to have people have their own at their house and we were going to make the local studio a multipurpose studio. It's now going to become a video production facility when no classes are going on we're going to shoot personal training classes for different types of individuals in the family and they will be able to train at home on their unit. Now, I don't want to not answer the question of manufacturing because this is really important. When I went back to the gentleman who fabricated the eight for the studio and told him, “Here's the next step of the business. This is where we're going. If we're selling several hundred or several thousand a month, will you be able to do that?” And he said, “No way. There's no way I could ever keep up with that kind of demand.” I said, “OK, fair enough. That means I have to look elsewhere.” 

So, I started doing various searches on the Internet for all different kinds of steel manufacturers, custom fabricators, you name it, I did the search. And I spent a lot of time, a lot of phone calls, lots of sharing of files you know only to come up to certain dead ends at certain parts of the conversations. One of those being I know I know what my raw cost has to be on this in order for me to sell it at a fair enough price where the volume can go high enough to support the business. So, funnily enough I sent out an e-mail newsletter to my global lists and this particular e-mail I put the re-ply to me personally which I don't normally do. But the field was left… I left it in there by mistake from a previous e-mail that I sent out. So, the auto responses came back and I look at them just to see where these people are from who are on my list, what company that might work for gives me some insights as to who's following me, who's using my materials. 

So, one of them intrigued me. It was a business email address and something told me to go look at it and I go look at it and it's a U.S. based industrial steel manufactur-ing company. So, I reached out to the contact directly who is on my e-mail list getting my newsletters and I asked her, I said, “Hey, I noticed you guys build heavy duty steel products and you do custom manufacturing, custom fabrication.” I said, “I have a project. Would you be willing to take a look at it and quote it out if it fits your abili-ties?” So, she said, “Yeah, sure. Send us over everything. We'd be happy to look into this.” Long story short, they looked at the files. They said they'd be happy to be in-volved. They could make several hundred, maybe even several thousand a month and they could do it at a price that allows me to have the absolute best latest version of this machine ready to go and have enough of a margin in there to create a busi-ness out of this that works at a profit. So, the solution was solved. 

Balint: This was the way you got to the current prototype version. 

Joey: Yes. Yes. 

Balint: Excellent. To summarize then, the solution how you overcame this problem of finding the right contract manufacturer was that you looked at your e-mail list. So, in the end you did a lot of research but interesting you came back to your own list which you built up and you found this gentleman, this company that was doing exactly this heavy-duty steel manufacturing in big quantities. 

Joey: Correct. And so, while I was frustrating doing the search… Now keep in mind my goal was to keep manufacturing here in the U.S. for various reasons. During the search it was pretty frustrating. But that search gave me the information I needed to know whether this company was doing something of value for me. You know if they were coming in at specifications and a price point that was fair. The only way I would know that was if I did my homework first with all these other companies because I had relative comparison points. So, while the work was frustrating it was absolutely necessary so that I could tell where this company was coming in in terms of quoting the job and the volume levels for me. 

Balint: OK. That's good. It was not a waste at all. 

Joey: Not at all. It was essential actually. 

Balint: Yeah. Who is your target audience that you're looking at with your product? 

Joey: Great question. So, when we opened the studio two years ago I opened that for women specifically. And I did that by design because spending so many years in the industry and listening very, very closely to people, things people say and what they complain about and working with so many clients one-on-one they would open up conversationally and they would share information that was really insightful and helpful. One of those main things was that there are many, many women, lots more women that would ever go to a health club or a gym or a fitness center who would never go. But they still want their fitness, they still value their health and wellness, they still want to be their best for their family and themselves but they will never go to a public facility. They want to be able to do it at home or they want to be able to do it amongst women with female coaches who are training them in a way that is suitable to the female body and needs. 

So, my vision was OK, these types of women need a specific place. So, we're going to open this prototype studio that caters to the other 85 or 90 percent of the women who can't do the traditional hardcore routines or the boot camps or the grinding away your body kind of stuff. These are for the other 85-90 percent of women who need a gentle but effective approach to fitness and they want to do it in an atmosphere that feels safe, is not intimidating, is supportive, is compassionate and they're surrounded by all other women in the same boat who get each other, who understand each other and who are all moving toward the same goals. And so, I wanted that facility to exist for these ladies. And so, we opened that prototype. Now here's what happened. 

On day one, the first day, I wanted to be in there involved to see how we do the first classes and to see the reactions of our new target market for this unique type of facil-ity. Well, it wasn't one or two sessions in that these ladies started asking, “Hey, this is awesome but what about my husband? You know what could he do? Or are you go-ing to have a place for men?” Or you know… And then light bulb started going off. I thought, OK you know the next stage of this is going to have to come sooner as op-posed to later but it's going to be in the form of the home solution not a studio for men. Once we heard them asking that was validation to start moving faster on it. 

And so, to answer the question, the machine because it's so versatile and we can train so many different types of people on it at different levels, the target market is large. Now of course you know lots of business lessons say we have to focus on a very specific targeted niche in order for them to understand what you do. And there's truth to that. And I believe it. And so, the way we're looking at this is that our niche, our very specific niche are families who value health, wellness and fitness but are a very time challenged and want everybody in the family doing something and they want to do it together. So, this all-in-one unit serves that specific niche of people - families who want to do their stuff at home to save time and everybody wants to do the same method and they're all able to do it at their own house without having to worry about who's going to the health club at what time, they're paying all these dif-ferent membership fees, they don't know if they're doing the right stuff, they can't stick to the program. So, we're solving that problem for these specific types of fami-lies and that's our target market. Even though, we’ll of course have other people who this resonates with. That's the target market. Not that we won't have individuals buy-ing it as their own personal fitness solution but the family dynamic is what we're aim-ing for here. Does that make sense? 

Balint: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's important this to make it clear because you want to... It's like you know Apple when it came out with the iPod, it was with the silhouette of the people that they had in the advertisements, just the shadow of the people. It was you know reflecting values of the young generation. And then everybody even the old ones got attracted to it because you want to feel young. So yeah, this is the power of a very targeted marketing message. 

Joey: Yes. And you know on that note, I think the ease of use of the Apple products and the higher level of security in the devices themselves I think it opened up those markets naturally because of what the devices were capable of. And so, these other outlying markets naturally made these products their own because it served them well. 

Balint: Ease of use. I think it's also in your case important because you want to save time for families. 

Joey: Yes. Correct. 

Balint: This is a big selling point. You don't want people to go to the gym. That's also one way where you save a big amount of time. Usually, the gym is not just around the corner from your home but typically you have to make an effort 15-20 minutes, maybe even half an hour. And if you look at the amount of exercises you do in the fitness center the ratio is just not right. 

Joey: No. No, there's so much there's so much dysfunction and gray area in the health club market and the fitness realm. It’s still young. I mean there's a lot of other innovators out there like me doing specific things to fix these kinds of problems be-cause there are many, many different subgroups in our population who still need to discover their own health and fitness. And so, there are others out there. But yes, the time factor is huge especially in this day and age. If you can take somebody’s fitness training time from 70 minutes or 80 minutes down to 25 or 30 minutes, that's a com-plete game changer. 

Balint: Yeah, I agree. Now looking a little bit into the future, what considerations have you made when deciding to go for the Kickstarter campaign? Because we dis-cussed it before the interview that you're preparing for a Kickstarter campaign. 

Joey: Correct. Great question. So, I pondered this several different ways many dif-ferent times over the last, well it's got to be about eight or nine months now since re-ally decided we're going to launch this thing to the world. So, in addition to the clients at the local studio asking about, “Hey, can we buy one of these machines for the house?” or “Can we buy one for the vacation house?” My online audience has been following this journey for years. I share as much as I possibly can - be a video, blog posts, audios, podcasts, with my entire buyer base and my subscriber prospect base and in sharing the complete story, every step of the journey I naturally had people reaching out saying, “I want to buy one when they are ready. I want to be first in line.” Like actually some people are asking, “Can I send payment now to reserve one of the first ones?” So, I knew that the timing was right. That was the universe telling me, “Yep, this is it keep going forward.” 

So, I thought well, so this Kickstarter stuff sounds interesting. I've purchased at least one or two items off Kickstarter and I really enjoyed the process and what it stands for. But I went back and forth. I thought, “Well, if I already have a bunch of people who want to buy this, why would I need to crowdfund the startup of it?” And so I ex-plored a little more, I spoke to a few more people and thought about it more myself and came to the idea that if I already have buyers, that's actually a good thing to bring to Kickstarter because if you could launch it with enough momentum, Kickstart-er supposedly will give you more visibility in their algorithms because they see you have a hot launch, a hot product that's being backed very early and the collateral PR effects might make it so much more worthwhile in ways that you couldn't even pre-dict. 

So, the potential for lots of exposure and publicity by doing a public launch on Kick-starter in addition to what the Kickstarter community and backers could bring to the table when they see this is being funded early by my existing supporters, it really just made more and more sense to me the more I thought about it that either way I can launch this. Even if the Kickstarter campaign doesn't reach funding and it's not a funded campaign, I could still go back to all of my supporters and say we're going to launch this off Kickstarter even though the Kickstarter didn't work. We're just going to do it direct now. But the Kickstarter campaign made all the sense in the world be-cause of all the potential that lies beyond just my own little world with my own current clients and followers. There's a bigger world out there that Kickstarter would give us an opportunity to be exposed to in a faster and greater way. 

Balint: Yeah, that is good. But I would say maybe we could move on to the ultrafast round of questions and this means that I'd ask you four questions and it would be great if you could give short answers to these. 

Joey: Sure. 

Balint: In case we have some more time we could maybe come back to some of the questions, the remaining ones. 

Joey: Absolutely. 

Balint: If you could go back in time, like in Back to the Future to your early twenties, what notes would you give yourself? 

Joey: Yes, that's a really good one. The main note I would give myself is, “Joey, you're going to go through some really, really challenging dark times in your life but it's going to be those times that trigger you to become your best self and work toward your best potential to achieve your biggest goals in this world. So, when those dark and tough times come be glad they're there because they're there by design and you're going to need those to become the best person in this world to have the big-gest positive impact in this world for your family, your friends and the world at large.” That's the main note I would give myself. 

Balint: That's a very empowering one. I think a lot of people have challenges, life without challenges it's even boring. So, I think this is really good to look at it as an opportunity to further develop yourself and to overcome these challenges that we’re more, more fit than the challenges themselves. 

So, the second question. If you had to name a book, which one had the biggest im-pact on your entrepreneurial thinking? 

Joey: Great question. So, I was motivated very early on in my life, in my teens, to want to succeed financially in life. I grew up in a very hardworking blue-collar family and I could sense that money was always a challenge because of that and I wanted to change that. I wanted to create a life where money and finances were not a chal-lenge or an obstacle in life. 

So, I started reading investment books very early on and the one that I remember is Financial Self-Defense by Charles Givens and a lot of the principles are probably just as good today as they were back then. But at the age of 16 or 17 that book opened my eyes in ways that my own family could never even teach me because they were-n't financially savvy, they weren't investment savvy. So, I had to teach myself. So that book gave me a lot of key lessons and facts and resources to start investing. By the time I was 18, I was already investing in mutual funds, individual stocks and it also taught me to think about always having some kind of your own business on the side if you have a job or developing your own business so that you can create more and more cash flow to divert into stable long-term investments. So that book had a huge impact on me back then. 

And the other was Psycho Cybernetics, really a book about mindset, your own self- image, how to actually go about changing your internal dialogue and internal life and your internal position in the world so that you're able to achieve whatever it is you want in this world based on the powers of your own mindset and your own paradigm of where you fit into this world. And I still refer to that book quite often. I'll read a pas-sage here and there, I'll read a page here and there. So, Psycho-Cybernetics, it's a fascinating book because it was written by a plastic surgeon who became very inter-ested in the mindsets of the people who were coming to him to change something about their physical appearance. So, I'll leave it at that. It's a very fascinating book with very incredibly powerful insights from someone who you wouldn't expect to write a book of that nature but when you read why he wrote it and what went into it, it makes all the sense in the world. 

Balint: Yeah, I think it's not a well-heard, an often-cited book, two books that you mentioned. I'm really curious about each of these. 

Joey: Good, good books, for sure. 

Balint: Which cover two different areas. The third question. I'm amazed by habits and that they can have a positive effect on us. Do you have some routine, morning routine or during your day that you follow? 

Joey: Absolutely. We have to be the example that we preach, right? So, absolutely. The foundation… If you want to be healthy and fit in your life so that you can perform your best in all aspects of your life, then our priority has to be on our health and fit-ness. It just has to be. Period. So, if there's truth to that view, then we have to struc-ture our days so that we have time to tend to our health and fitness. So, my day starts at about 5:30 in the morning. I'm a single dad. I have a 13-year-old daughter. And so, I get up before she gets up to get ready for school. I get up, I go out, I do a 30-minute run. I come back. It's about 6 o'clock, 6:10. I do anywhere from a 10 to 20-minute meditation. I'll do a little bit of reading from any one of these books. It could be Psycho-Cybernetics, it could be the Book of Proverbs, it could be one of the philoso-phy books but I'll read a few pages to just to get good food and good thoughts into my mind before the day starts and I'll do maybe five to ten minutes of very simple journaling, just mostly gratitude journaling or any other thoughts that come to mind. And once I'm done with that, I hit the shower. And by that time my daughter is getting up and we get into our morning and I get her off to school. 

The other part of my routine is somewhere in the afternoon between 4:00 and 5:30 I take 30 minutes and I do my fitness training on the machine, on the SCULPTAFIT unit here at the house and that's it. It's basically a non-negotiable. I mean there's no reason I wouldn't want to do it because when I miss that stuff which I have in years past when I went through some challenging times, everything in my life got worse. When I got off my fitness program, every part of my life got worse. My energy got worse, my medical profile got really bad, my relationships suffered. I was unhappy with myself. My work suffered. My productivity suffered. My body hurt. I was just not the person who was operating at their full potential. And so that was a learning les-son. So, I make that half hour sometime in the afternoon before dinner, a half hour is the investment in me on the machine doing whatever training session I have mapped out for that day and that's it. Everything else after that stuff, life is good. When I do that and there's no reason not to because it's like a choice, just like you brush your teeth every day. Same thing with your health and fitness. Put it in your day. Make it happen. And not only is every day of your life better but the extent and the quality and depth of your life is also going to be that much better. 

Balint: Yeah, I heard it in the podcast that you should have some non-negotiable ac-tivities in your life. And this is also a non-negotiable for you. It's like when you put a stone, a piece of, a block of stone into the river, the water will flow around it. 

Joey: Exactly. And so, this is something we teach with our clients, my team teaches at the studio, if I'm working with somebody on a high-level consulting one on one, this is a paramount lesson: if you don't dictate the structure of your schedule, then other people are going to intrude on that schedule. So, you have to put in what's important, what is non-negotiable and everything else flows around that. Period. There is no other way about it. 

Balint: Agreed. The fourth question. In your work, if you had to pick some cultural differences because you want to sell globally but I'm pretty sure that you've worked with the international clients before, what cultural differences would you highlight that you could overcome? 

Joey: Great question. So, we have at the studio, we're in a really great community. It's a mixed culture community, we have lots of Indians, we have a good base of Asian and so culturally they will come in under the notion that we might be almost like every other fitness facility, even though they've read our materials and have seen our success stories and marketing and they see that we're gentle, we're unique, we're innovative, we're based on a proprietary method and approach to fitness that nobody else is doing out there, they will still be very apprehensive and cautious. And so, I be-lieve culturally they have come to believe that American approaches to fitness and workouts are high intensity hard core, they're somewhat painful, they're somewhat uncomfortable they're somewhat risky and they're somewhat dangerous. And I be-lieve they come to us with a certain degree of disbelief and suspicion. 

And I believe there is a cultural aspect to that because we're Americans saying something very different than most other American facilities are saying out there. So, what we do is we just let them try it for free. We say, “Look, just you know there is no obligation here. You're going to come in, try this for free and at minimum you will learn what proper exercise is supposed to feel like for you. And once you learn that then you'll know what to stay away from and you'll also know what you should be do-ing on your own if you choose to do this on your own. You'll know the approach that it's supposed to feel like.” So that's one of what I would consider a cultural difference. 

We have less resistance with the American women because we're able to communi-cate much faster and they are willing to believe our positioning in the market because of the terminology we use and the explanations we use behind why this is gentler, why it's easier, why it's so innovative and why it works. So, there's like two extra steps when it comes to women from other cultures, even husbands from other cul-tures because some of them will come, visit the studio for the first time with their wife to try to help them see you know, “What is this? What's so different about it? Should we even believe that it's so different?” So, the team talks to them both and it over-comes those differences one, by explanation in person and two, by letting them try it and be amongst the other women who are already part of the movement. 

Balint: Yeah. Free trial. It's good, very good examples. 

Joey: Absolutely. 

Balint: Regarding cultural differences. To close off this interview, I loved hearing about your stories, your very let’s say emotionally involving stories because you had a lot of ups and downs in your life but at the same time a very empowering story that you can overcome the challenges. And I think with your machine if one wants to summarize in one sentence, one could say it's like you're trying to challenge the no pain, no gain notion. Right? 

Joey: Absolutely. So, I've always questioned things in life and have always thought, “Well, if this is how something's been done, can it be done differently and/or much better?” Or can it be improved upon?” Or is there another way to do this altogether that we haven't discovered yet that’s still waiting to be discovered?” And so, as a fit-ness fanatic when I was young, I was so into this that it was really just a pure pas-sion, almost a dysfunction an obsession in my life to pursue this fitness part of my life and my physique improvement and competing and all that was involved with it. It took some time into early adulthood to realize that most of the population is not wired like that. They are not going to approach their health and fitness the way a serious fanatic is going to approach it. So, once I had that realization I knew that I had to find a way to make the notion of fitness and health as a lifestyle habit. I had to make it easier, gentler, more enjoyable and that would require, I knew it would require moving away from the traditional methods of fitness training. 

The way everything was being done in health clubs, with the weight lifting and the stack machines and you know no pain, no gain became one of the most common phrases and you know you got to be willing to endure some of the grueling effort. And you know if you don't put in the time and energy, you are not going to get the re-sults. 

And I started realizing that this is how true deep fitness fanatics think and that's fine but you can extrapolate that mindset and that way of thinking to the average popula-tion, that's not what they're going to do. They need different wording. They need a different mindset nurturing and they do need a different approach that backs it all up. So, my challenge became, “Look, if you really want to help people, they're not going to do the same hardcore stuff you're doing as the 25 you know 28-29-year-old, you're going to need to change the game for them.” So, in essence what happened was I still kept getting older and I realized I had to change the game for myself and that was going to be the realization to how I changed the game and the methods for eve-rybody else who needs a realistic approach. 

So, taking out the no pain, no gain, taking out this beast mode mentality, taking out the killing it kind of stuff and go hard or go home and that's fine if that's what you want to do and that's how you thrive. But 90 percent of the population isn't going be [53:50], they're not killing it, you know they're not going hard or going home. They want like, “Make this easy for me. Give me the health and fitness results without kill-ing myself and hurting my body and let it be enjoyable so that mentally and psycho-logically I can come back to this every day and look forward to doing it because it is enjoyable and the results and the benefits are showing the more and more I do this.” Makes sense? 

Balint: Yeah, absolutely. So, thanks again for the interview. I appreciate it. 

Joey: Absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me. So, I look forward to the next one. 

Balint: Thanks.