Can you forgive me if my blog is a little sappy this week?
I know I wrote about us moving last week already, but like, it’s kind of a big deal, so I’m going to write about it some more. A little over three years ago, I met with Katie, the previous owner of PPG, for lunch, and she asked me if I wanted to buy her gym. I was flabbergasted.
I really hadn’t ever had a goal to own a gym. I was working in fitness, but I always kind of envisioned myself coaching somewhere, not running a business, and certainly not one with the range and scope that Power Plant Gym had. But Katie apparently saw something in me that I didn’t quite see in myself yet.
I decided to take the leap, and over the next couple months, Katie and I worked together to make it happen.
Truth be told, I was in way over my head at first. I might still be in over my head, but don’t tell anyone else that. I think to own a small business, you have to be a little delusional.
The first year or so was rough, and I had a LOT to learn. I told people it felt like I was flying a plane, but I still needed to finish building the plane, and also I didn’t know how to fly or build planes. It’s hard to learn while the thing is already up in the friggin air. I’m grateful to the people who stuck around while I figured out how to fly this gosh darn plane.
When I first bought the gym, my goal was basically just to keep it open. I hoped to do a lot of the stuff Katie did, the strongman shows, competition prep, all that stuff. Katie was one of the OGs of strongman in this region, and I was taking over a gym with a pretty established identity. Since then, we’ve evolved a bit.
We still run some strongman shows, but we’ve added unsanctioned powerlifting, more small events, kids events, and we’ve grown our personal training by a lot.
We’ve wanted to expand our small group offerings for a while, but we couldn’t figure out how to offer anything additional without impacting our LIFT members. I’m really excited that this bigger space gives us room to offer more without messing with what’s already working.
It also gives us the space to run events in our own gym. In the past, we’ve done most of our events offsite. Packing up an entire freaking strongman gym, dragging it across town to some other gym, doing the whole thing, and then doing it all in reverse is a TON of work. I’m excited to run events in our own spot, and I’m looking forward to trying out some new stuff, too.
When I first bought PPG, I was trying to figure out how to keep someone else’s gym going. I was trying to learn how to run a business, how to lead a team, how to coach better, how to make decisions when I had no idea what the right decision was, and how to build something that could actually keep growing.
Three years later, I’m standing in a much bigger space, looking at all the things we’re going to be able to do here that we simply couldn’t do before. Somewhere along the way, PPG became ours.
Not just mine.
It’s the coaches who have helped shape what we do, the members who have stuck around through all the changes, the people who trusted us with their training, and the people who have let us try new things, screw things up, and try again.
(Except when you goobers tell me to sell all the Eleiko bars. Then it’s my gym.)
Katie believed in me when she trusted me with the gym. She saw something in me that I didn’t know was there yet.
As a coach, I get to experience a little bit of that from the other side now. Sometimes I look at a new lifter and see something in them that they don’t know is there yet. I get to help them figure out how to get there.
I guess that’s one of the things I’m most grateful for about these last three years. I didn’t set out to own a gym. I definitely didn’t have some five-year plan that ended with me standing in a 4,500-square-foot space, figuring out how to fit a 9 foot tall rig in a space that apparently had 8ft and 11 ⅝ inches clearance.
But here we are. And I’m really proud of us!
