Matt Gluckman, Think Fitness Life

[00:00:00] Sanjay Parekh: Welcome to the Side Hustle to Small Business podcast, powered by Hiscox. I'm your host, Sanjay Parekh. Throughout my career, I've had side hustles, some of which have turned into real businesses. But first and foremost, I'm a serial technology entrepreneur. In the creator space, we hear plenty of advice on how to hustle harder and why you can sleep when you're dead. On this show, we ask new questions in hopes of getting new answers. Questions like, how can small businesses work smarter? How do you achieve balance between work and family? How can we redefine success in our businesses so that we don't burn out after year three? Every week, I sit down with business founders at various stages of their side hustle to small business journey.

These entrepreneurs are pushing the envelope while keeping their values. Keep listening for conversation, context, and camaraderie.

Today's guest is Matt Gluckman, founder and co-owner of Think Fitness Life, a remote personal training company. Combined with his business partner, Eric, the two have a combined 20-plus years’ experience in the personal training sector. Matt is based in Leighton, Utah. Matt, welcome to the show.

[00:01:04] Matt Gluckman: Thank you, Sanjay.

Thank you for this opportunity. I really appreciate it.

[00:01:07] Sanjay Parekh: So, I'm excited to have you on because I'm hoping to get some tips on how bad my exercise routine is and maybe you can help me get that better. But before we get into that, give us a little bit about your background and what got you to where you are today.

[00:01:20] Matt Gluckman: Yeah, absolutely. My background is I was a psych undergrad; just following my parents’ footsteps, come from a long line of service providers, grandfathers that were doctors and dentists and World War II and Korean War. And I always known that I was going to be some type of service provider.

I ended up doing door-to-door sales as my first job out of college, loved people. So, I love sales. It's really the same thing in my opinion, then few years down the road, bounce around to other sales jobs. I was in the gym just thinking about “Man, what do I? What could I sell that I love that I'm passionate about?"

I'm like lifting weights and I'm like, "Oh, duh. This, is what I want to sell to people, right?" Because every business has some type of sales component. You've just got to, it's the nature of the beast. If, you love what you sell, it doesn't feel like sales. You're just presenting to somebody how you can help them better their life.

What better opportunity to do that with personal training? So fast forward to 2017, I got my first gym job at just like a local gym near Boston University, actually. I was checking people in. I was cleaning equipment. I was like the janitor of the place, picking up trash. You know what I mean? I didn't even have my personal training certification yet, but I knew something felt right of this is the combination of skill sets and passion.

And then, ended up getting to go to Equinox in Boston, which was like a very prestigious gym. One of the best gyms on the East coast, Boston, New York, they've got locations all over LA. And that's where I met Eric, and we would have conversations in between training clients and eventually it rolled into kind of doing our own podcast and I moved out to Utah, and we started our own business and 2020 hit.

We were like, "Hey, let's, really try to actually make some revenue from this online stuff. All the blogs we're doing, the videos, the podcast, like we're creating an audience here. Let's try to like make this in a way that we can have some money coming back into our pockets." Because there's a lot of principles that I've followed, to get me where I'm at today. And I think a major one that I had to wrap my head around was, in order to be charitable, it has to be profitable. So yeah, I want to just give myself to the world. I want to give my gifts out to everybody. I just want everyone to be living their best life. But if I don't do it in some type of way that is keeping my shirt on my back, then eventually I'm just depleted and what good am I to other people?

So yeah, that's been our journey and now we're at a point where we both have a modified in-person schedule. I don't think there's ever going to be a time where I won't want to work with people in person, but then we have a good online following as well.

[00:04:04] Sanjay Parekh: What you said there was interesting, the door-to-door sales, and I think I've talked about this before on the podcast. When I was a kid, I did door-to-door sales of custom and printed holiday cards, and I think that teaches you a lot. It was one of those things in the back of the comic book I signed up for, and I didn't really know what I was signing up for, and I think it teaches you a lot having to ring the doorbell and the mom is mad because you just woke up the baby, and you're trying to sell them a custom imprinted holiday card.

This is back in the eighties when that was a thing; that is not a thing anymore. But what lessons did you, I'm sure you had a lot of rejection as a door-to-door sales person. I don't even know if this is a job anymore, door-to-door sales, but are there any lessons that stick with you from that time?

[00:04:49] Matt Gluckman: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that was one of the most influential jobs I had. My very first job, I just worked at a produce stand on the side of the road. And I remember my boss was like, "You get 50 bucks for a day and any tips you can keep." So that already stimulated me to be like, "Oh, tips."

So, if I talk to these people, if I'm like super funny or entertaining, like maybe I'll get more money. And I would walk away with a hundred bucks a day. So, I doubled my money just in tips. But so back to the door-to-door sales, I think being able to talk to people wasn't always my problem, but being able to talk to people on what is interesting to them, that's what I had to learn how to do, right? Really narrowed in and make sense of why.

I was doing TV, phone, and internet. And it was Verizon. So I was pulling at like the heartstrings of, are you struggling with Comcast? Are you mad at Comcast? Show me your bill. Let’s see if we can bring it, that down type of deal. There's so many transferable skills that came from that experience. You talked about them, like being able to deal with rejection, being able to understand things in a little bit more of a framework that helped take, pull out that guilt or that fear or that shame that you're not doing well, and you just look at it more objectively like law of averages.

I'm going to knock on 50 doors today. I'm going to get 10 people to open their door and I'm going to hear eight no’s, you just got to know that's standard. So don't take it personally that you get a door slammed in your face or someone says no to you. It's just all part of the process to help you refine your skills. So, I think it builds a lot of confidence. It also helped me be able to hear rebuttals. It helped me get good with my listening skills and then maybe the other some of the transferable skills that I think you don't see around as much today. I dare anyone just go out to get food at a local restaurant nearby or Chipotle or whatever, that you will not see these skills being used.

And it's called SEA factors. It's smile. It's eye contact. It's enthusiasm. And that was one of the first things they talked to us at day one. And I was like, "I have that in the bag. I'll do that all day." But it's amazing how nowadays you really don't see that you can go and most stores, most retail locations and the associates miss out on giving you their attention, their enthusiasm and their eye contact.

[00:07:16] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. It's a great point, because I think I remember the times when you do get that and I recognize it as man, that person really loves their job. They're really happy to be here. They're really happy to be involved in this interaction because by and large, that is not the case.

Like you say, the ones that really hate their job, you can tell that they don't want to be there, and it just makes it horrible. For everybody, the customer and everybody else around them as well.

[00:07:47] Matt Gluckman: And it's such a key ingredient that you don't realize you're communicating to this other person that you're miserable about doing something.

Well, who is going to want to be around you? Who wants to be around the product you're promoting? So that's where I really, and I advise people to whatever endeavor that they're going on, fail early, fail often, because those are the biggest lessons and the biggest stepping stones to getting past those hurdles, failures because I would fail at certain things like, rebuttals or being able to have the confidence of standing there and looking at somebody in silence.

For the first couple of weeks, I couldn't even do that. If I wasn't talking, I was fiddling, looking down, I was uncomfortable. So having to learn to just get comfortable in that space or that pause or that listening period, I think goes a long way because then you're communicating to the other person how concrete you are and what you're promoting.

[00:08:51] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. I love that. It sounds like this was likely your first entrepreneurial experience, like starting a company. Is that true?

[00:09:00] Matt Gluckman: Actually, after door-to-door sales, funny enough, I knocked on my next boss's door and he hired me to start selling real estate for him on Boston's Newbury street.

And I did that for a year. And one of the other real estate agents at the time who actually rented me an apartment a few years prior. So, it was so funny. But, he was like, "Hey, we could do this on our own if I get my own broker's license and we open up our own location." "All right, let's, do it. Let's launch." So that was probably my first experience with entrepreneurship in terms of having to wear so many hats and get organized with kind of those different endeavors.

[00:09:38] Sanjay Parekh: Alright.

[00:09:38] Matt Gluckman: But yeah, I would say that the personal training one's like my bread and butter, my baby, my star child.

Because again, it comes back to, I love it. Like when you talk about the energy you're portraying when you're talking about something, if you don't love what you're selling, then move on, find something that you love to promote, be the face of.

[00:09:59] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah.

So, in starting the personal training experience company, was there anything that made you nervous, that gave you pause?

And if so, how did you get over that?

[00:10:09] Matt Gluckman: Not really at this time, because I'd overcome that nervousness with the door-to-door sales and the real estate. It was definitely a case of like necessity became the mother of invention. With personal training, you don't, you aren't given a salary.

You aren't given sick days, vacation days, time off, 401k. You don't have any of that. So, you've always got to be thinking of the bigger picture. So, when I built a business near Boston University, Equinox found my resume. I went in for an interview, had to build a business again. So going from like the outskirts of Boston to downtown heart of Boston, I had to start over.

So, I knew I could do that. And I felt okay, I could, I did this in Boston. I can go anywhere and build a business. So that was like a badge of confidence that I held. And then when I got to Utah, it was the same thing. I built a local business right around me, then I got in touch with a gym, down in Holladay and I started working for them and building a business again, and then COVID hit.

And I started building more of an online business. So, I think at every step, it was a point where like necessity became the mother of invention and the pressure of the situation forced me through any fear that would have held me back.

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[00:11:41] Sanjay Parekh: So, you've got an interesting setup, compared to, I think, most of the people that come onto this podcast. You're in Utah and your business partner is not in Utah, not anywhere close to you. How did that happen and how do you make that work?

[00:11:54] Matt Gluckman: So, we talked about the conversations that Eric and I would have in between clients.

And when I first moved to Boston or, excuse me, moved out of Boston, moved to Utah and was training again, that was something I really missed. I missed connecting with other people, other trainers specifically, because they're like, birds of a feather flock together, right? So, it was hard to go down this road all by myself with no one to touch base or reflect on things with, or chew on new topics of training modalities with.

So, we just started picking up our conversations again. And I said, "Hey, Field of  Dreams style — if we record it, they will listen. Why don't we record these conversations and just put them out there? Because I think somebody might find them useful."

That was like seven years ago, actually, when we first did that.

So, for three years, we would just hop on a phone call, once a week, every other week, once a month, and just record a podcast for fun, just talking about our experiences from the week and more like nerding out on the stuff for fitness and training.

[00:13:03] Sanjay Parekh: I love that. So now moving forward, is it regular check ins?

Do you like, how frequently do you talk to your business partner?

[00:13:12] Matt Gluckman: We text probably every week, hop on a call once a month. It is much more like measure twice, cut once, we did a lot of work ahead of time in terms of figuring out the best app we would want to use, the best way we'd want to deliver online training, some of like the key philosophies we want to keep and making sure that we promote a good quality product for people.

And figure out like our daily checklist or ins and outs of the week type of deal. And yeah, like I said, we just are able to manage since then more via text and it's actually really easy because we have clients all over the country anyway, so we just can map it out on our phone.

We can click all our client lists and we can click on each person, and we can have a direct chat with each person. So, it just makes it easy to be organized with our own current client base, on the same platform we're using together.

[00:14:12] Sanjay Parekh: You've got an interesting business for this next question because, most people do the thing that you do for a business to deal with it.

So how do you balance stress with the demands of owning a business and family life and all that? Most people will talk about exercise, but your business is exercise. So, you do something different to think about stress and managing stress.

[00:14:33] Matt Gluckman: Yeah, I think my story did require understanding stress a little bit more.

I have ulcerative colitis and funny enough, I was diagnosed the same year I got into personal training when I was like cleaning everything and just checking people in. So, I've had to really learn different ways to mitigate my stress. I was really good at going a hundred miles an hour and never being able to take the foot off the gas until the wheels fell off.

So, I think my learning process involved the opposite of exercise, like more of the recovery side where I had to adopt more breathing exercises, stretching, sauna, getting a cold plunge every now and then and just really promote the rest and digest side of my life and my psychology essentially.

And that's really how I mitigate stress. I think stress is such an interesting topic because there is a difference between distress and stress. So, there's a good stress and then there's a negative stressor. I think it's about being able to…

Stress is what makes the grape grow. Stress is what makes the oil come out of the olive, so there's levels of stress that actually stimulate us to grow in the direction that we need to, as long as we can do it without maladaptive thought patterns, behaviors, and habits that take us away from our overarching goal.

[00:16:01] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. So let me ask you about this then, boundaries for yourself. How do you set those boundaries for yourself between business?

[00:16:10] Matt Gluckman: Yeah, absolutely. And that's a great question because it's something that I'm still tackling, and I'd say probably only got better at in the last year.

And I think there's a great concept that is, no is the best negotiating tactic and it's the best boundary. Sometimes you do have to say no to people, and you also have to have boundaries around your time. There's a great book that talks, Stephen Covey, Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and he talked about your opportunity time versus your execution time. And that was so powerful to me because it's like, when you're a new trainer, you're just trying to sell anybody for any time slot, whatever you can get through the door, but then you get to a point where you have no time to look for new clients and you're just fully executing on those previous opportunities, but you lose sight of any what I like to call blank canvas time to get new and more opportunities for the future.

So, you've got to have strict boundaries on "This is my time for A, and this is my time to service all those people from those opportunities." And again, being able to say, no, this is my schedule. And this is my boundary. Like I said, when I first started, I was training seven days a week, morning and night, burning the candles at both ends.

And then I eventually got to say no to Sunday. Sunday's going to be my one day. Do laundry, sleep, and then progress it further. I said no to weekends like no, my I'm available from 5am to 7pm Monday through Friday. If we can't make anything work in there, I'm going to refer you to somebody else because, it would just, it would deplete me. And I think so many people miss out on that, whether it's their personal health or their business is, you are a vehicle, so much relies on you. If part of your energy doesn't then recharge the battery of that vehicle. The vehicle dies going down the road and what good is it? It can't carry anybody.

[00:18:05] Sanjay Parekh: So, along those lines, your business is exercise and training. Do you ever actually plan for exercise yourself or do you get enough just because you're dealing with people all the time?

[00:18:17] Matt Gluckman: No, it's definitely more of a loosely structured idea of "Okay, I want to weight train two to three times a week. I want to go for a run two to three times a week. Sauna once a week." But to your point, yeah, like just with the weekly schedule, it can always adapt, whether it's like before all my clients or like in the middle of the day or in the evening. So, it's like a general scaffolding, but I'm not really like strict or rigid on it because, the business kind of takes the priority and other people take the priority.

[00:18:46] Sanjay Parekh: But through those clients, you're getting some of that exercise. I'm imagining you're doing it too, right?

[00:18:51] Matt Gluckman: Like true. I'm not working out side by side. I'm usually like demonstrating and then observing just to make any tweaks I may need. But I'm still picking up weights, moving around.

I do feel like I am still like active enough. If I did just want to blow off all my own personal exercise, I probably would skate on by to my eighties and nineties, if I was just carrying people's weights for them. But no, I wanted to still be able to talk the talk and walk the walk.

[00:19:19] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Your business is different than a lot of us that basically just sit at a desk all day long. You do definitely have that added benefit and I'm envious. I don't know what I could do to carry stuff. Or maybe I need to have some weights in the office here and just move around all day.

[00:19:33] Matt Gluckman: We'll get you a treadmill desk and you can adjust the desk whether you're going to be moving your feet, sitting down, or you want to stand up.

[00:19:41] Sanjay Parekh: Sitting down and moving your feet. Is that, does that even help anything to do that?

[00:19:46] Matt Gluckman: I think it's better than nothing. It's always all relative to what is going on with the individual.

And that's why I love to say, this industry always needs to stay personal. There's so many kind of cookie cutter models out there and over promising, under delivering, but personal training has to be one on one. It has to be personal or it loses, sight of its effectiveness, right? Like me telling you like, "Yo, yeah, just get a sit down treadmill. That'd be great for you." And it does nothing for you because you're actually fairly active. But if you're someone who, is basically dormant in a way where they are sitting all the time, they drive, they sit at work, they sit when they get home. They sit at the dinner table, they sit on the couch, they sleep, they wake up, then repeat that maybe something that just gets any type of movement to get good blood flow could benefit them.

So it's always going to be all relative.

[00:20:36] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Absolutely. Great advice. Okay. A couple of last questions for you, thinking about your journey through all of this. If you could go back in time and do something differently, what is that and why?

[00:20:50] Matt Gluckman: Good question. Well, I don't know if I would change anything because, I think all the pain points that I didn't want to happen, ultimately did lead me somewhere great. That's definitely a maturity lesson that I've had to wrap my head around that, good and bad are just irrelevant, where it takes you is what matters.

[00:21:08] Sanjay Parekh: Was it a lesson or not? But, setting that aside, is there something that you now learned and know that you're like, "Oh, I could have been so much better if I'd known this six months, a year, five years earlier." I definitely have those lessons.

There's a lot of things that it's like, "Oh yeah, that was an experience right there."

[00:21:28] Matt Gluckman: I would say it would have probably been more conducive to start everything together when we were in person. That would have been more helpful. I would also say that in the past two years, three years, I've had to learn so much about marketing websites, APIs, KPIs, CRMs, all this stuff that I had no idea about. So yeah, I wish that maybe I had taken some classes in marketing and in online business management or whatever, business management prior to just diving into this myself. That would have been very helpful.

[00:22:04] Sanjay Parekh: So, you should have done a psychology degree with a minor in marketing. Exactly. Straight out.

[00:22:09] Matt Gluckman: Exactly. I was so focused on let me get good at a craft first before I market it. But then, yeah, if I had been studying, "Okay, this is how you will market it when you get ready." That probably would have saved me some years.

[00:22:21] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. The two areas I think I find and feel most often is marketing is one of them. And financial kind of understanding and accounting understanding is probably the second as entrepreneurs, like two areas that are absolutely critical to understand. Do you feel any different, like on the accounting side? Did you figure it out or did you have some background in there?

[00:22:42] Matt Gluckman: I did actually take an accounting class in college, but I think I just always knew that because of the jobs I've done that, they've always been eat-what-you-kill jobs, door-to-door sales, real estate, personal training.

I was never guaranteed pay in any of those. So that alone made me be good at balancing my budget. But yeah, I think if you put business into four categories of sales, service, operation and marketing, I would say that service and sales came more naturally to me with my history background. And then when I got really good at personal training, and the operations and the marketing side were definitely weaker areas that had to develop and still are.

[00:23:30] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. It's always things that we can be better at, it just never ends really as an entrepreneur, there's always some area that you can get better.

Okay. Last question for you. If you were talking to somebody who's thinking about taking the leap like you did and launching either a side hustle or a full-time business, what advice would you give them?

[00:23:48] Matt Gluckman: I would say you can do it. You absolutely can do it. It won't be easy, and you won't do it alone.

There will be people along the way to support you. You will fail, but probably this, my favorite Winston Churchill quote, which is just, "Failure is not fatal and success is not final."

[00:24:06] Sanjay Parekh: And on that note, this has been a great interview. Matt, where can our listeners find and connect with you?

[00:24:13] Matt Gluckman: You can find us right on our website, thinkfitnesslife.com.

[00:24:16] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. Thanks so much for coming on today.

[00:24:19] Matt Gluckman: Thanks so much, Sanjay.

[00:24:21] Sanjay Parekh: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Side Hustle to Small Business podcast, powered by Hiscox. To learn more about how Hiscox can help protect your small business through intelligent insurance solutions, visit Hiscox.com. And to hear more Side Hustle to Small Business stories, or share your own story, please visit Hiscox.com/side-hustle-to-small-business. I'm your host, Sanjay Parekh. You can find out more about me at my website, SanjayParekh.com.