How CrossFit Became a Billion-Dollar Fitness Empire with Calum Marsh

Welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. Now, today's guest is Callum Marsh. Before he became a journalist, Callum was in B2B sales, cold calling businesses, and his old boss taught him one rule, always chasing up. And Callum used that rule to land the story of a lifetime. He emailed CrossFit founder Greg Glassman for years. Then one day Greg called him at the gym and said, hey, I don't quite trust you, but you intrigue me, so I'll talk to you. And that turned into his new book, The Glass Box, which is out October 27.

We get into how a personal trainer with no investors gave his workouts away for free, charged 500 bucks to open a gym, and built a business doing 80 to 90 million dollars a year. We also talk about what happens when a founder surrounds himself with yes men, whether you have to be an asshole to change an industry, and why you need to know why the rules exist before you break them. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Hey, real quick, before we get started, I wanted to tell you about a new project I'm working on with my daughter called the Future Founder Project. If you've been following me for a while, you know that when she was six years old, she and I wrote a book called I Want to Be in Sales When I Grow Up.

We wanted to get more kids and more women into sales, and all the profits went to charity. We've donated over $25,000 to the World Wildlife Fund, and the book is still raising money to this day. She's now 16, and we've got a bunch of those boxes still left over, so we're putting them to work. Here's how it works. Every time we raise $500, we sponsor a future founder between the ages of 5 and 15 years old. The kid gets a box of 24 books, a $100 check to seed their first business, and a playbook to help them figure out what they want to build and how to get started. They give back by donating some of those books to kids who don't have access to them. And when they're done, they write a story about what they built and what they learned to go back to the sponsor.

You don't have to cover the full $500 yourself. You can give as little as $10 or as much as $500. Every dollar gets the next kid closer to their box. If you want to chip in or you know a kid that has an entrepreneurial spark who wants to sign up, go to futurefounderproject.com. I truly believe that entrepreneurship is the future of work. This is my way of putting that in kids' hands while teaching my own daughter how to build and run a business. Now let's get into today's episode. Callum Marsh, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How are you doing today? I'm doing very well. Thank you for having me. Yeah, you said before we started recording here, you said you just got done with a marathon this weekend.

That's right. So first of all, congratulations. It's your first marathon. Second of all, how are you feeling? Very sore. Very sore. Very tired. Don't want to walk again, let alone run again at this point. Did you hit a wall? Because I always hear the second win, third win, fourth win. Was there a certain point in it where you just were like, I don't know if I can get through this and then you ended up pushing through? It's hilarious because no matter how many times I was warned that there would be a wall, I thought I was sufficiently trained and I was like, well, it's not going to happen to me. And then sure enough, at some point I was like, oh, that's the wall. And it was a real struggle. Yeah.

The end of the marathon was a lot slower than the beginning. And it's a miracle. I made it across the finish line, to be honest with you. Well, that's odd. What do you think was harder? The mental or the physical component? Honestly, I want to say the physical because it was really hurtful and painful and I was struggling physically. But my brain was going places as a result of the pain. And I was just like, why did I sign up for this? And yeah, the last three kilometers, I actually phoned my wife who was waiting for me at the finish line. She was like, are you okay? Where are you? And I was like, I just need you to talk me through the end of this because I cannot make it by myself. It's like, it's so far away.

She was like, where are you? And she looked on the map and she's like, you're like a kilometer and a half away. You're so close. I'm like, no, it's not close at all. It's so far. You don't understand. It's so far away. That's bad. Because I live here in Boston. So we obviously have the Boston Marathon and they talk Heartbreak Hill. And it's not just Heartbreak Hill because it's a hill. It's because it's right towards the end. I think it's like mile 21 or two or something like that. And it's like, right at that point is when you're now like, holy shit. Now, not only does it feel like I'm a hundred miles away, but now I got to go up these hills and come back. So I just, I sit on the sidelines and I clap.

So I will sit on the sideline and clap for you, my friend. Good job. Fortunately, they don't let anyone as slow as me run Boston. So I don't have to face that hurdle particularly. Awesome, man. Well, we're going to get into this CrossFit story, which is bananas here. But before we do that, I always like to obviously get, you know, origin story here for you as far as where you're coming from, grew up, you know, where were your influences? And then how'd you get into, you know, writing quite frankly? And let's take it from there. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so I was born in the UK, my family's British originally, and I moved to Canada when I was really young. My parents moved me there when I was four years old.

So I grew up in Southern Ontario, near Toronto, and I went to school there as well and got into writing around the sort of the rise of the blog era. I was in school like in the late 2000s, and that was when blogging was really taking off. I was super into music. So I was doing the music blogging thing, spending all my free time writing. And I had sort of like early ambitions of maybe I could be a writer, but it just seemed like one of those things where, you know, someone says they're going to be an NBA basketball player. And it's like, well, that'd be great, but is that likely to happen? And I kind of kept at it tenaciously. And I had a job on the side when I graduated that was just like, you know, to pay the bills.

And it was over that period of time that nights and weekends just wrote as much as I could from little to no money, usually no money. And then slowly but surely built myself up to where I had enough of a, you know, career resume behind me where I could say, here's my writing, here's what it looks like when I work. And finally, I was able to do it professionally. Love it, man. So I'm curious. This isn't the track I wanted to take, but I'm curious just your take on AI and writing, right? Because it's making it so easy for anybody to produce, you know, AI slop at the end of the day. Um, that, that sounds good to uneducated people, but usually like, if you know, you know, scenario, right with AI, what's your take on it?

How do you use it? Cause I, cause I've struggled a little bit, you know, my entire career I've built on authenticity and real. And, and, and so like AI, partly when I write my blogs, my newsletter and every, you know, my social posts, I've avoided using it, but now I find it to be super helpful. And I, I kind of have this 30, 60, 10 approach to it where I'll like light up a microphone. I'll dump my idea into it as far as how I want this, what I want to get across and everything else. And then I'll have it structure it and put it into like a logical format for me. And then I'll spend the last 10%, you know, tweaking it and updating it. And that's, I've, I've started to feel pretty good about that because my writing has gotten better.

You know, it helps me ideate better. Um, where are you as, as an actual writer? Um, where are you on your take with how you should use AI or use AI? I don't use AI. I, I don't use it at all. And I, I, and I'm not opposed like on principle and would never try it. I did try it actually. When, when I first, I guess when chat TPT not first came out, but when it first like got good enough that people were starting to say, okay, you can use this to write. So I think that would have been beginning of like 2025, end of 2024, like chat TPT four, I think it was. And everyone started to be like, Oh, this is the future. You can use this for writing. And my wife who was working in a marketing job at the time would use it for emails and things like that.

And she was like, it's really useful. So not wanting to be a curmudgeon, I was like, I'll give it a try and I'll try and do things with it. So I tried it for like all the basic tasks that not for like writing for me, cause I didn't think it would be very good at that. And I, you know, immediately can sniff out prose that was written with AI, but people were like, Oh, it's really helpful for, for ideating or for structuring your work or for transcribing or like research. So I tried kind of each of those things and I literally just found it not useful in any of the ways that I thought it would be useful. And anytime, like, I'll give you an example. When I was starting this book, I had to do hundreds of interviews and I was going to have to transcribe all of those interviews.

That's very laborious, boring part of the job. And so I was initially, um, you know, Apple came out with this update last year where it now has auto transcription on voice notes. So when you record a voice memo, it transcribes it. And the, and the transcription is actually really good. It's very accurate. I was like, great, that's going to save me so much time. So I did some interviews, I took the transcription and then I put them into chat GPT and I was like, you know, it gives you kind of like a big block of very unwieldy looking text. And I just said, can you structure this? Don't add anything, don't take anything away, but just like separate it as best you can. And just, you know, question and answer format.

It works to the extent that like the copy that you get out of it is like pretty passable. But then I found when I was going to actually do the writing, I didn't remember or retain the interview material like anywhere near as well as I used to. And I just found after like trying it three or four times, I was like, this is just not working for me. And so I, it's much to my, like much to my pain as well, because it was way more arduous. I ended up just doing everything by hand again and like ditching it. So I've yet to find it. I won't say like I'll never use it ever because like, who knows? But at this point, I just don't find it useful. Hey, quick break here before we get back to it. Look, it's a weird market right now, and I would love your help growing this show and my business.

So here are three ways you can help. First, the free one. Leave a quick review wherever you're listening to this podcast or share this episode with somebody who needs to hear it. More listeners bring in the sponsors who make it possible for me to keep giving this content away for free. Second, if you want to go deeper, sign up for my on-demand platform at learn.jbarrows.com. It has all of my content in one place, so you can learn it directly instead of piecing it together from the free stuff. Third, sales kickoff season's coming up. If you know a sales leader planning a kickoff, I'd really appreciate the referral. Send them to jbarrows.com or have them reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. Your support means more than you know.

Now let's get back to the show. Yeah, it's funny. There's all sorts of studies now about like what happens to the brain when you use it and everything else. And I found the same thing. It's like, you know, I do this simple after I have a conversation with a client, I'll, you know, I used to, and I go back to it now, I used to take handwritten notes, you know what I mean? Like the highlights, whatever. And then I would summarize that, put it into an email and send it to the client for confirmation. Like, is this what I heard? And then AI came out and I was like, oh, this makes it so much easier. I can just be present in the conversation and it'll record it for me. And then it'll pop out this summary email that looks perfect, right?

And it did two things. One, it, to your point exactly, it, it, it, I stopped remembering like the, the insights weren't there. Like the physical, the part of physically going and writing, you know, things down made it stick in my head better. And then it also kind of commoditized that component where it was like, I was sending people these summary emails that, you know, used to be valuable in the sense that I took the time. It showed, I listened, you know, and really heard what they had to say and confirmed, but now it turned it into a commodity. So it stopped being a valuable asset. And so I've kind of just gone back to old school notes and that type of thing as well. I still use it to write long form stuff.

Cause I'm not very good. I'm not a great writer per se. Um, so I, I'm much better at just like word vomiting in here's what my thought is and then help me put this into a structured format. But yeah, I'm curious from an actual, like I said, from an actual author. So appreciate that. So let's talk about CrossFit. Um, you're actually an avid CrossFit yourself, right? Yeah, I do a lot of CrossFit. Let's, before we get into the story around Greg, like what, when did you get into CrossFit? Why did you get into CrossFit and what was so appealing to about it to you? I mean, nothing was appealing to me from the outside. That's the funny thing. I started going to see a personal trainer when I was coming out of a relationship.

Like almost 10 years ago now. And you know, you go, you get out of a relationship. You're like, I'm going to go to the gym and get in shape. So I go to the gym. I sign up for personal training. They're teaching me how to like squat and how to do all this stuff that I'd never, ever done any of this stuff in my life. And it wasn't until like eight months into seeing this trainer, like every couple of days and getting into shape. I posted a video on my Instagram of me doing something like a box jump or something. Someone messaged me and said, Oh, you're doing CrossFit now. I said, no, I'm not doing CrossFit. And they're like, yeah, I think you are. So I go back to my trainer. I'm like, am I doing CrossFit?

She's like, yeah, yeah. I'm a CrossFit trainer. I didn't even know that. I was like, no, I had no idea. But my, my impression of CrossFit up until that point was like, I'd read a few magazine articles about it. I'd read like a very scathing kind of like in sort of a mocking article about a CrossFit competition that made everyone that did it sound like a, like a loser. And that was, so that was my point of view. I was like, oh, these people, I don't know about that. I would never do that myself, you know? And then once I got really into it, I was like, oh, this is actually amazing. I love it. And I was way too into it at that point to quit because of perception. So I think, I think if I had like been told in advance, I would have said no.

And by the time it was, I was into it, it was too late. That's how I got into it. Is that, cause I mean, I, I kind of had the same experience. Like it's, it's always funny that the joke, like, how do you know somebody's in CrossFit? Right. Cause I tell you when they're in CrossFit, like everybody just said like, hey, I'm across it's like Peloton, you know, same thing, like cultish type of group. Like, oh, like everybody I knew who got into Peloton early days wouldn't shut up about Peloton. You know what I mean? I'm like, dude, okay. Like I get it. You're in shape. Congratulations. Good for you. Same thing with CrossFit. It's like, oh, I do this. I'm like, congratulations. Good for you. But it did pique my interest as far as the fandom and the obsession that this, that this, you know, that Greg created here.

So, so let's get into Greg, right? The Greg Glassman is the guy, right? First and foremost, like this is, I mean, we'll, we'll get into his psyche and his approach and everything else. But I mean, this guy's got pretty much every excuse in the world not to trust journalists and people and you were able to get some pretty detailed information from him and everybody else associated. So how did you, how did you build that trust with him to get him to open up in the first place? Like what was your approach to him and interviews to get him to open up? Because in a lot of ways, sales obviously is getting people to trust you to open up a little bit about their situation. And I always say sales reps, you know, when a sales rep meets with a client, you got to assume that they don't believe 50% of the shit that comes out of your mouth, period.

Just because you're a sales rep that like, so trust is everything. And you got to find a way early to develop trust so that they can open up to you. So how did you do that with Greg? Well, it's funny you mentioned that because actually before I became a professional writer, I was in sales. So I did B2B sales, I used to do, I used to drive around the suburbs and go to businesses and, you know, cold call, get the manager's name and number, go home, call them up. Hey, I spoke to the secretary here today. And so I've done that initial outreach trust building aspect. And I know how to kind of try to evade the initial like resistance of, you know, not just you personally, but like the type of person you represent, I don't want to speak to.

I don't want to speak to a journalist. I don't want to speak to a salesperson. So trying to get over that hump and be like, just give me enough time to show you that maybe I'm not the person you think I am is the most important piece, as you know. So I kind of approach it like I was doing a sales thing. Like I, in the same way that I used to have a boss who was an incredible salesman and he really understood the philosophy of sales. You know, he was super into like Peter Drucker and like Dale Carnegie and not just the, you know, now what we think of as the cheesier stuff, but some of the real literature, like this is the, this is the psychology of sales. And one lesson he taught me that, that like, it to me is the most important lesson like in life is always chase a no.

So if someone does not tell you no, you just need to keep asking until you either get the no or they say yes. And in sales, that was invaluable because there were so many times when I was like, they don't seem interested. And he would like, well, did they say no? And so many of those turned into sales that eventually it like, it drove through my skull of like, okay, actually maybe what you, you kind of telling yourself, oh, they don't, cause you're afraid or you, you know, you think they're judging me. I don't want to push it. I don't want to seem pushy. So similarly, I was reaching out to Glassman. I didn't think he'd be very interested in speaking to a journalist. I didn't think he'd be very interested in someone from the New York Times since the New York Times was the publication that kind of got him disavowed in the first place.

And I knew that approaching him to say, I'm writing a book is going to be just like, it's a tough sell. So I kept emailing him and I kept emailing him. And instead of just saying, Hey, just following up, I'd write these long messages where I would sort of say, well, I was talking to this person. They told me about this story. I learned about this, about CrossFit. I heard about this thing that you did. And I would get, get really granular. You know, I heard about this legal case that you were involved in, and I heard this, this and this, and I would kind of ask him some questions in there, like pepper in some questions and make some assumptions. Some of which I knew were maybe not a hundred percent accurate, but just hoping that maybe he'd want to correct me or kind of, you know, would be intrigued to speak about it.

And every time I sent one of these emails, I'd put my phone number at the bottom and I'd say, Hey, you can call me anytime. And it literally took years before one day out of the blue, I'd sent an email a few days later. I was at the gym. He called me up and he said, Hey, it's Greg Glassman. And he, the first thing he said to me is I don't quite trust you, but I, you intrigued me and I, I don't have anything to fear. So I'll talk to you. Love it. What about the CrossFit story was so intriguing for you to spend two years? Cause I could, you know, from a sales standpoint, I could see, look, all that, that, that customer, man, if I could get Salesforce or Apple or whoever is a client for me, I'm going for it.

So, you know, dedicating two years of your life revenue wise, you know, could pay off. But what was it about this story specifically that, that intrigued you enough to, to continue for years to reach out to this guy? Yeah. And I mean, I did also treat it that way of like, this would be the Apple sale. Like this, you know, and that means I'm still doing my regular job. I'm still doing articles and, and not like just focusing everything on this, but I just knew that this was going to be this, a story of the size that you rarely encounter, like a story that had all the right aspects. I knew enough about it to know that it was a great dramatic rise and fall, that there was a lot more to the business than maybe met the eye, that the characters were going to be so larger than life and interesting and compelling.

And most importantly, or maybe not most importantly, but, but crucially that it hadn't been written about. No one else had covered the story. And I didn't, I don't think maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think there's a ton of journalists who were also super into CrossFit. So I felt like I trusted that maybe this wasn't well known among journalists. And if it were well known, then it would be already probably written about. So I was like, I need to get this, like that land this before someone else comes in here. I, I, my biggest fear the whole time was not that Greg wouldn't talk to me. It's that he talked to someone else, that someone else would get this story before me. So walk me through how he started this, right?

Cause I, cause I, cause he did some pretty unique things at the time, like giving away online free, you know what I mean? When everybody else was trying to gate it, you know, and he, and he found a way to create like super fans. But like, where did, what's his origin story? Cause I, I don't know his origin stories. Like how did this, how did this come out? And, and then let's talk about some of the things he did to, to exponentially grow it. Yeah. So his origins are inauspicious. I'll say he started out as a personal trainer. He was a college dropout many times over personal trainer in California in the eighties and nineties. You know, he was doing, he was doing training with guys, at least chain gyms.

This was like just after, um, pumping iron with Arnold Schwarzenegger come out. And this is in the same area, like Venice beach, California. We need to pump you up. Exactly. And he's in his gyms and he's pumping these guys up. But, you know, if you've ever seen that sort of Schwarzenegger, like curl in the irons, Greg's point of view is totally different. He was like, instead of curling, he's getting guys to like do old school gymnastics. He's putting up rings. They're going on the rings, you know, and they're doing stuff that like no one else at the gym is doing. So it was kind of like, he had an intriguing specific way of working people out. And it was easy to sell locally because people would see him training other people and they would be like, wow, I've never seen anything like that before.

And the results speak for themselves. He'd be taking people in and they'd be getting really fit. He had, he, uh, you know, he was at these gyms where Hakeem Elijah one would like drop in to go to the gym there, but he's not getting these celebs because he was sort of a new, he was the newer guy. So instead he was training a lot of firefighters, cops, first responders that, you know, guys who needed to be in good shape, but who were not like a list clientele. And that became kind of like his niche for lack of a better word. So as he continues to train people on the word of mouth starts to spread, it starts to build locally. And eventually he gets forced to a position where he has to open a gym of his own, mainly because his methods of training people was so wild and weird that all the other gyms he tried to train at were like, we don't want you doing this here.

So people love doing it, but you know, the guys who are owning the gym are like, you've got guys strung up on rings. You've got guys throwing weights over their heads and you know, all this flipping tires in the yard and, uh, risk and, and, and noise and whatever else. So eventually he opens his own gym. So that's sort of where the business begins. Okay. And then, you know, a couple of things here. So let's go, let's go to the kind of giving it away for free. Right. Cause this is, this was kind of, this is something that I knew early days. Like, I don't know whether I just thought IP was, you know, for me on my sales career, for instance, like I created a lot of IP when I was VP of sales. And then I started a sale, you know, I joined a sales training company.

And at that time, everybody was like holding onto their content. Like it was God, you know, and like, if you asked a sales trainer, can you share your deck with me? You might as well have said, can you have, can I have your first born child? Like they would like, even a company, I was like, absolutely not. We share nothing. Like they have to pay for it. And I just was like, well, I like, and I just started giving shit away, like all my tips and I didn't give away the full program, obviously, but, but I would give away like tips and nuggets and stuff like that. So if you were smart enough, you could collect it all and create your own thing. But that helped me blow my brand up and get out there as somebody who was giving away content and get followers.

And then those followers turned into something. How did he know, or why did he make that decision to give away free stuff? You know, his, his full thing outside of the onsite piece. That was that a conscious decision. Was that a, like a strategic decision for him? How did he, how did he look at that? Yeah, it was two things. I mean, if you think about fitness back in those days in the nineties, especially everything was either the magic pill or the magic bullet. Like, you know, the thing you buy, you buy the thigh master. It's all you need. If you buy the bow flex, it's all you need. Or it was like the secret recipe. If you subscribe to our program, we're going to tell you the secret to getting into shape, but you have to pay first and then we'll tell you what it is.

So that was kind of like this. That was the typical sales pitch for all these companies. And they were all a dime a dozen. There were so many trends back then that were like that. Billy Blanks, you know, Tony Robbins, whatever. And Greg's whole thing was, he's first of all, a diehard libertarian. So politically, philosophically, his whole thing was like libertarianism all the way. We don't want to tell people what to do. We just want people to have freedom. So it was a bit of this whole free market, freedom of choice. You know, we're going to put it out there. It's the best product. And his philosophy was like, who goes to see a concert? People who've never heard the band before or people who are huge fans of the band.

Obviously it's the huge fans. So his idea was, if we put out the methodology for free and we get fans, they will come to us. They'll come to my gym. They'll sign up for my program. They'll, you know, they'll work out with me. And I say this like, as though he's some kind of genius and it did turn out to be genius, but he also was doing it partly because it's just how he's wired. It's not, he doesn't want to make a quick buck. So although it was ultimately the thing that made this company so successful, it wasn't like he did it because he thought, if I do this, I'll make a billion dollars. He did it because he didn't know any other way of making money. You know, this was like his, this was just the way he was hardwired.

So he put it out for free on the web. This is like 2001, early 2001, very, very early internet days for this kind of stuff, for e-commerce especially. And it was crossfit.com. And every day they would upload the workout of the day for free. They'd tell you how to do it. There was a comment section underneath. You could post your time, post your score, talk to the community, talk to each other. And it wasn't for a couple more years that Greg launched the first CrossFit seminars where he would actually teach people, not just how to do CrossFit, but how to teach CrossFit. So you go to his gym, they do a weekend course where he would teach you everything he knows about science and fitness and health and workouts.

At the end of the weekend, you'd get certified and then you can go and coach CrossFit. And that was where the money started pouring in. He was, he was charging a thousand bucks. This is in again, 25 years ago, a thousand bucks for a weekend. And they were sold out every weekend, 50, 60 people for the whole year. And very quickly they had to start, you know, spreading them out. So there'd be doing four or five a weekend, 10 a weekend, every weekend. So the money was just from nothing to absolutely pouring in. So I want to talk about community, but I want to talk on that point specifically, as far as the franchise model, if you will. Right. There's like, you know, I mean, in sales training, right.

The Sandler, uh, Sandler sales training, right. And the thing that a lot of people do when they get into sales training is they go towards that type of a model because it's a franchise model. They use that. Right. But Sandler is like super strict with their, um, their IP with how it's done. Like you have to use these exact slides. So like quality control is a huge thing when it comes to, you know, franchising, you know, McDonald's, everything is done exactly the same way, a pizza shop, everything is done. So you can franchise it. It didn't strike me that there was too much, uh, structure or regulating of what a CrossFit trainer could do, what they, you know, how they could run it, whatever it is.

So was there any thought of quality control with this? Or it was just like, people love this. Like, let's show them how to do it and get it out there and make, make it happen. Because there's also like massive risk involved going back to weights and things. And, you know, if I'm at a gym and I'm doing some CrossFit and some guy tells me to take a 45 pound of head in my head and drops on my head, like that person's now liable for my, so what was his philosophy on quality control here? So again, hardcore libertarian, he didn't want to tell anyone what to do. And he did not want to make a franchise at all. When the first people who came to him after a seminar and said, we live in Seattle, you know, way up North from California, we'd like to open a CrossFit gym and call it CrossFit North.

Can we do that? And he was like, I guess, sure. Go ahead. As long as I don't have to have anything to do with it. And they said, okay, how much do you want as a franchise fee? And he was like, how much do you want to pay? They said, uh, what about 500 bucks? He said, great. So from that point on, it was 500 bucks to open a CrossFit gym. And what that 500 bucks got you was literally just the right to put the name CrossFit on the door. And obviously that means that there are big, big issues with quality control. Initially, they kind of policed themselves because the only people who were so into CrossFit initially were the ones that are really drunk at Kool-Aid, who really loved Greg's kind of teachings and were really passionate.

So you didn't have a lot of like fly by night people coming in and trying to get rich and just opening a bad CrossFit gym. You certainly obviously had underqualified people, but initially it wasn't, it was actually not so bad. The, the issue started happening that as people began to do more and more CrossFit and more and more gyms open, statistically, you know, injuries are going to start to happen. And he didn't want to become liable for some guy in Nantucket who was going to get injured because someone told him to do something stupid. There was a situation where some kid was doing, you know, something on the gymnastics rings and he fell and there was like a bucket underneath him and he injured himself.

And it was an issue where they said, okay, well, we don't want a situation like that to cause a big lawsuit where, you know, any of the CrossFit gyms are liable. So Greg kind of worked out the legal situation, got some insurance so that any gym that became a CrossFit gym was insured. And they basically couldn't be sued for like, you know, someone injuring themselves in the gym. That said, the quality control issues became probably the biggest single issue with CrossFit, not issue in, when I say issue, I don't mean this is what was bad about CrossFit. I mean, this is what was perceived to be the biggest problem with CrossFit. This was the biggest reason why people were down on CrossFit sometimes or avoided CrossFit sometimes.

If you spoke to anyone from like 2005 to 2020 and said, what's the biggest problem with CrossFit? They would tell you it's because there's not enough quality control. Anyone can open a gym. You know, some people are idiots. Sometimes idiots open gyms. And, you know, the other issue being that because there was no control over this at all, if you open a gym on such and such street in your town, and I open a gym directly across the street from you, there's nothing stopping that. If you did that with a McDonald's, you wouldn't be allowed to open another one. And that's what the franchise model typically protects against. But again, not a franchise. So there was this, it's a bit of a Wild West situation.

Okay. So what did he, what did he understand about community that I, that, that nobody else did at that time? Cause he created like super fans, like absolute diehard, you know, out there spreading the gospel no matter what about this. And, and it was a time where, you know, especially when it came to gyms and those types of things. I mean, yeah, there was your, you know, your gimmicks of the thigh master and stuff like that, but you know, I don't think there was any super fans of thigh master. So how, what did he understand about community that you, that, that after interviewing him and, and others that you think other people missed and what did he get right about it? Yeah, that's the thing, right?

Like you see the product like thigh master, it was, it's, it's a superficial love. You might like it, but you don't become obsessed with it. It doesn't become your life. No one's getting a thigh master tattoo. People do have CrossFit tattoos. And the other, it's not just that there's a product or a person. It's like the, the, these, the image of it becomes the whole thing. It's marketing basically. When someone thinks about Richard Simmons or Jane Fonda's workout, or, you know, any of these fitness fad trend type things from the eighties and the nineties, the seventies, eighties, nineties, it's usually that you can remember, you know, what Richard Simmons looks like or what he sounds like or how he acted, but what was his workout philosophy?

What was his actual methodology? You know, what was his conception of how exercise and fitness works? Like, and maybe you can tell me, I certainly couldn't tell you off the top of my head. And I think Greg's whole thing was, don't let me be the focus. It doesn't matter what I look like. It doesn't matter what I'm doing. I have the best way of getting fit. The plan I've come up with is the best way of changing your life, becoming healthy and, you know, staying fit forever. And I think that people became truly obsessed with it because they saw the wisdom of what he was selling. The thing that he actually created spoke for itself in a way that other products didn't. So people would start to do CrossFit and they, and it would really change their lives.

And it's not a thing where they do it for six months and be like, I'm bored of it now. They would do it. And then six months later, they'd be like, I can't believe I never did this sooner. I'm going to tell every person I know that they should also be doing this. And this is where you get this cult reputation from because people really throw themselves into it, like beyond belief. So it was, it was not, yes, the results, right? Because you could argue that, you know, Thighmaster, if I used it every day, like I'd see results too, right? But it was the underlying kind of almost science behind it too, where people like believed, because I also like look at cults and those types of things in general.

And there's like some underlying philosophy that they all just buy into 1000%. Like that, that's the core of it. You know, you can pick any religion, you can pick anything in it. There's just something about the core fundamental philosophy of it. And, and was that stated or was it truly just the results that spoke for that underlying thing? And how much did he evangelize the underlying structure around it? Yeah, that's the thing. He evangelized the cult, the concept, the philosophy by writing these long, long essays. He published the free CrossFit journal, which was like an online magazine. And he would write these quasi scientific, I say quasi scientific, because again, he was a college dropout.

He's not a scientist, but he would write these very intelligent sounding essays about fitness and health and, you know, how to, what his philosophy is basically. And those essays would become like the sermon from the mount and people would take it as like the word of gospel, but he would not evangelize the brand or he would not market. He wouldn't do commercials. He wouldn't do flyers. He would never try and bring people into CrossFit. His philosophy was, we have the best thing. And when they hear about it, they'll want to join us. We don't need to ask anyone to join us. And that's a very cult-like thing too, because, you know, although, of course, if you're whatever, I'm not, I don't want to slag on Scientologists or something, but if you're a Scientologist, you probably have some desire to go out to the community and tell people, you know, this is the good word.

You should join us. But Greg's thing was like, it's even deeper than that. Once you see what this is, you will never be wanting to get out of it. So I don't need to tell you how great it is. I just need to tell you what it is and you'll see how great it is. It's almost the anti-marketing approach, right? It's like, no, we're not going to market because we're going to create, because we know we have something good. Because, you know, there's a lot of products out there in the tech and the SaaS world that kind of have a similar, you know, not as cultish, but, you know, the PLG motion, right? Product-led growth where it's, you know, Slack or, you know, Dropbox back in the day and Box back in the day is like, just everybody used it and like just swore by it and it was incredible.

And then, you know, it goes viral and then all of a sudden it becomes an enterprise solution because everybody started buying it. So similar approach. It's interesting to watch people though, how they, you know, try to do that, but still try to market for the business, you know, like it's an underlying, like it sounds like he was genuine to the core libertarian, all that fun stuff to say, no, no, no, no, this shit's good because that's a little anti to sales in general, right? Because I've always said, you don't have to have the best product, like, because even if you do have the best product, if you don't tell anybody about it, nobody's going to buy it, but getting people to tell about it is the, is the customers, right?

It's finding those super fans and, and, and leaning all in on them instead, and instead of just this broad marketing campaign. So interesting. Yeah. And the, and a really interesting twist to this thing too, is that when you look at the money, even the products that sell themselves typically have some kind of startup capital or investors or angel investors, Greg had no money. He didn't get money from anyone. Like I remember talking, when I first started writing this book, I talked to a business reporter that I know, and she asked me, well, where did CrossFit's money come from to get them from like him being a personal trainer to being, you know, thousands of gyms. And I said, well, they didn't take any money from anyone.

And she said, well, I've been a business supporter for 20 years. I've never once heard of a company that didn't have investors that got to that size. It's not possible. And I said, well, it's what happened. Like Greg was literally one day a personal trainer and he was making, you know, personal trainer salary, which is whatever you can make training people per hour. And then he started doing these seminars. So he's getting thousands of dollars every weekend. And then the seminars started growing at scale where he was doing hundreds and hundreds, thousands of seminars. People started opening their own CrossFit gyms and sending him 500 bucks. And within a couple of years, they had thousands of CrossFit gyms.

So you do the math, they went from having basically no money to having millions and millions of dollars in income. Their height, they were making, you know, 80 million, 90 million dollars a year. And that's without any, there's no point in which he was like, I mean, obviously at many junctures, people offered him money. Even, even really early on, like before the website was really a thing, the dot-com boom was in the middle of happening when Greg was like first opening his gym and they were in Silicon Valley. They were in the, they were in the Bay area. So a bunch of, a bunch of people were like, oh, start CrossFit.com. We'll give you a million dollars and we'll, we'll, you know, we'll get in on this.

And he reluctantly didn't go through with it. He, I think toyed with the idea, but he didn't go through with it. Dot-com bubble happened that, you know, the opportunities went away and thank God for him because if he had, if he had done it, it would have been a flash in the pan. But yeah, so that all, at every juncture, there were people saying, hey, we could give you some money and maybe we could help you grow this thing. And he would be like, no, I'm going to do it my own way. Interesting. All right. So sounds like a pretty driven guy going hardcore. At a certain point that laser focus growth, you know, go, sounds like he surrounded himself with people after a while who stopped kind of pushing back on him a little bit and started to get, you know, yes, men, women around him.

When did his kind of strength of, of being able to get this thing off the ground with no funding and gorilla and go, when did that, where was the tipping point? I guess. When did that start to become a liability where he wasn't listening to the outside world? He was starting to, you know, isolate himself and, and, and kind of just continuously push his agenda versus listening to everybody else. Like when, when did that happen in this cycle and how did that happen? There was a really key point, actually early on, he was married and his wife was more of the level head and he was more of the philosopher, you know? So she was the one that was kind of making sure that his budgets were, you know, working or that she was the one who would like hire the cleaners to come clean the gym.

She had these kind of what he thought were more like menial tasks, but when they got divorced in 2007, 2008, without her there, it was like he was without checks and balances. So suddenly if he wants to spend $300,000 on, you know, a sports car and custom Louis Vuitton luggage or something, there's no one to say, Hey, maybe we shouldn't do that because we don't have the money for it. So his spending starts to get really out of control at that point. And I think more abstractly, and it's harder to say, but my instinct is that she was not there to keep him as focused on the growth of the business as he had been previously, because she wasn't there saying, you should spend your time and energy on this rather than this.

So early on, like she told me, I interviewed her extensively for the book as well. And she would tell me that even early on when he was first opening the gym, he could easily spend the entire afternoon just shooting the breeze with one of the clients talking about philosophy. And she'd have to be like, no, you should go home and work on your essays or work on the journal that you want to write because that's more important. And I think as time went on and she was out of the picture, he just had more time to spend on stuff that wasn't helpful and less time to spend on the stuff that would have actually kept the company growing. So, so do you think he just started surrounding himself like after she left?

Do you think he just started surrounding stuff with himself with people that just told him what he wanted to hear? And, and what do you think drives that? Is that the hiring component to this? Is that fear? Is that loyalty? Like, where does the breakdown of pushing back and having good dialogue with leadership and what we need to do to yes, boss, like your, whatever you want to say, we're like, what was that? Was it fear? Was it loyalty? What happened? I feel like you hear this story a lot about maybe it was Steve Jobs or just maybe it's an apocryphal story about any CEO that they always keep like someone there whose only job is to call bullshit on them. Like to say, Hey, you know, I need you to be like my gut check guy.

Greg did not have a need for a gut check guy. He just wanted people to tell him that he was doing a great job. And I think earlier on in the company's growth, there were a lot of situations where people that did disagree with him or people that did think he was doing something wrong would tell him so. And it would just become a huge issue. They'd have some kind of fight or conflict, they'd blow up and they would end up leaving him or leaving the company. And eventually you get rid of enough people like that. And the only people left are the people who are your yes men who will tell you that every single thing you do is great. And I think the richer you get and the more you surround yourself with these like high, you know, high spending, high rolling, you're taking everyone to the four seasons, you're taking everyone out to dinner, becomes harder for people to say no, and becomes harder for people to stand up and say, Hey, I think maybe what you're doing now is a bad idea.

So eventually it was, there was no one left to say that. I think one of the things you said that CrossFit changed the gym forever, right? Changed fitness forever. And I look at a lot of the people who have done that changed whatever forever, like Elon Musk changed electric vehicles forever. You know what I mean? Raging asshole, zero, you know, zero empathy. Like, you know, fuck all y'all. Like I'm going, you know what I mean? Like my way or the highway, I'm breaking things and we'll fix it later. Like, do you think like in order to fundamentally change an industry to fundamentally change, you know, the way that people think or whatever, do you think you, you almost have to have that like no empathy, just a fuck it.

I'm going to do whatever I want to do, break all the rules because I can. Or do you have examples that you've seen of people who have fundamentally changed industries that haven't been raging assholes or, you know, you know what I mean? Because like, that's one of the things I really struggle with right now. It's like, I look at leadership right now and for the kids out there, you know, at least when I was growing up, you know, I hit 50 when I was growing up, like leadership, there was some morals and ethics and, and at least perceived whether it was true or not was different. But, but now every like major leader who's super successful seems to have been a fucking raging asshole to get to that point and does not care necessarily about people's feelings about any of that stuff.

I mean, uh, what's his name from a 16s, uh, from, um, Andrews and horror. I think it was, uh, Andrews and Horowitz. He said it was self-reflection. Like he literally, there's an interview with these like self-reflection. What? He's like, that's a waste of literally, he said, that's a waste of time. What? So, you know, and, and now we see, you know, not, not getting political, but like now we see what's happening to the world when people don't care and, and, and, and empathy isn't there. So do you have any examples of, of leadership that have fundamentally changed industries that haven't been like this guy, Greg? God, I mean, it's like that Kanye line, you know, name one genius. It ain't crazy.

It's a, I think there is an element of that. Definitely. Like the, in order to do something not great, but disruptive and really change the game, it seems to require a level of maybe not being an asshole is like a prerequisite, but maybe the, the, the willingness to do anything, despite what the consequences may be is like closely correlated with some need to be displeasing to other people. Having said that, like, you know, I think if you look at Bill Gates, for example, although not maybe the, the, the, the, the angel from heaven, like is not as well known to be like narcissistic asshole as like Elon Musk or whatever. And even, even Zuckerberg, despite the terrible way he comes off in, in Sarah Wynne Williams's book, like doesn't come off as a raging narcissist to say, you know, in the same way.

So, and, and like Mark Zuckerberg also completely changed social media and completely changed pop, I mean, maybe completely changed the internet in a way as well. So I don't know that those are the greatest examples of like, see, you could be like Mark Zuckerberg. But, um, I do think that there are plenty of examples of people whose, whose personalities are not as overtly narcissistic or overtly egotistical as someone like Greg. I do think Greg is much closer to an Elon Musk or, you know, I, I, I deliberately didn't use the word in my book, but he is a Trump-ish figure in a lot of ways. He has a kind of, you know, says whatever comes to his mind, very much values, like, uh, the kind of honesty that is maybe too honest sometimes.

And yeah. And that can sometimes skew into like just being an asshole. It's hard. Sometimes you're like, well, are you being honest or are you just being a jerk? Yeah. Well, that's exactly right. Like that's, that's what I want. So I, I mean, you know, Richard Branson, I think is, certainly I can look, I don't know enough about, I haven't looked into his details enough to know it. You know, I'm sure that there's plenty of people that will say he's an asshole at some point, but he seems to be at least a good guy that, that, you know, like changed the airline industry. And the reason he did it was because his flight got canceled and he started a charter flight and, you know, raised a, took a few bucks and brought everybody to the island that he wanted to go to.

And all of a sudden Virgin, like, you know what I mean? So he was doing it because there was a need there. It was a, it was specific to him and he was like, I can do this. And, you know, and then started, I mean, talk about somebody diversification, right? Everybody says, no, say, focus on what you're good at. This guy did, started 750 companies or whatever it is. And so, you know, there are some examples, but it just seems like over and over and over again, we just keep getting these examples of, okay, thanks. And like, could you have been a little bit less of a dick to get, to get there? So. Yeah, exactly. All right, let's finish up on this. Like if based on this and your other research for founders coming out today, because I actually think that entrepreneurship is the future of business, of everything, because I just don't feel all that confident that there's going to be hierarchical structures that, you know, people can work for multiple years at and retire with a pen, you know, all that stuff.

I think everybody's going to have their little entrepreneurial thing. So for the entrepreneurs and the founders out there, if you could, if you could change or give a suggestion of one thing to change about how people build companies or, or be conscious of as they're building them, what, what would you kind of give that advice to, to some of the future founders out there? Honestly, learning that learning that I got from this book and it's such a cliche on the surface, but the idea that you don't need to play by the rules, I think is so underappreciated as an actual truth. Like the, there are so many things that people say, like, if you're going to be a founder, you need to do this. If you're going to start a company, you got to do this.

And I think that people are still afraid despite the, you know, that I think people know intuitively, like I should break the rules. I should do what I want, but they're still afraid to do something that isn't conventional. And I think CrossFit is just such an obvious example of something where literally not one choice that he made is what any business person would have told him to do. And because he was following what he thought was the true way to do it, not following a trend, not following examples, not following advice, just doing how he felt his convictions told him to do it. It was successful and it was successful beyond anyone's wildest imagination. Like that company became more valuable than any other fitness brand on earth at that time.

And it was, and this, and every other fitness brand followed the typical playbook of like, this is how you try and become successful in this industry. And I think that's just widely applicable in any field. Like, it doesn't mean you can't do things conventionally, but don't shy away from, if you really feel it should be this way, that's the way you got to pursue it. So where's your, what's your theory or philosophy on knowing the rules before you break them, right? Because there's part of this is walking into something completely ignorant of any of it and saying, fuck it, I'm just going to do what's right. But then you better, your gut better be right. You know what I mean? Like you better have that, that internal, like this, there's something about this itch that I have to scratch and I don't care what anybody else says.

And I'm doing it just because I, I'm that passionate about it. Right. But then there's the other of like being in the system, understanding how the system works, understanding that the system doesn't necessarily work all that great or could be a lot different and knowing that system. So you can then fracture it and, and go be blue ocean, do your thing. So where, where do you sit on that kind of continuum of, of not knowing versus knowing and, and, and then breaking? It honestly is something I think about all the time, because if you take something like public transportation, let's say, and you learn about it and you realize incredibly complex concept. And in order to do anything in public transportation requires an immense amount of knowledge and every decision you make is hard.

If you don't know anything about it and you're just stuck in the subway and you go, why don't they just, you know, do this or this? And like you, there's probably a good reason why they don't do that. You know, and your idea is probably not so good, but on the other hand, the, when you become really immersed in a topic, you get so stuck in the way that you know it and the way that it is that sometimes you can't see a much more elegant solution or a much more disruptive solution. And it requires someone who is ignorant, ignorant enough to not know any better to say, why don't we try this? And that's the thing that just breaks the whole mold, you know? So I'm always on the lookout and try to like, you know, this is like a Zen philosophy thing of like beginner mind, right?

Like try the, the X, the expert mind has a few possibilities. The beginner mind has many, like you, you always need to be open to the possibility that the right choice is the thing that is so obvious that no one who would do it, no one who knows anything about it would ever think to do it because it seems too stupid, but you can't just blindly go in and be like, Hey, I know better. You, you, there probably is some reason why it doesn't work. Well, I think there's a, in your example, I think there's a good distinction there of like industries that are regulated versus ones that aren't so regulated. Yeah. Like tech and SaaS is not very right. AI is zero regulation. Yeah. Zero regulation. Right.

So that, that is like, it's better to walk in blind and just say, let's, let's see what I can do here. But I, you know, I look at, I used to work for, um, Jack Welsh, uh, GE Jack Welsh for about three months getting his online MBA program off the ground. And it was super interesting because he thought he could take his business mind and approach to higher education. And at least early days, he couldn't have been more wrong because there were so many, right. Like he, like, this is one of the reasons I stopped working for him because he gave me an offer of a base salary plus commission. You know, it was, it was, it was a weird scenario. Like he didn't position as a startup like equity or anything like that.

He just kind of was looking for a VP of sales. And so he gave a decent base salary with commission. And I'm like, okay, I'm like, I don't, I don't know if you could sell education, like it, but what, whatever. And then when I met with the provost of the college that he was associated with, and I was talking to him, he's like, wait a minute, you have a, you have a commission plan. You can't have a commission plan in this industry. Like, cause if you think about it just logically, right. Like if I was some slick ass sales guy and telling you, Hey, Callum, man, you sign up for the Jack Welsh thing, man, you're going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars because that name is going to put you in the next level.

And I could, I could literally convince you to then join the Jack, and it could be garbage. Right. So, so he was like taking this, oh, I'm a businessman and yeah, higher education is, is a mess. So I'm going to take my business philosophy implemented here and we're going to crush it. And he like smashed into wall after wall, after wall, and eventually he got it going. But I think there is a distinction there of like public transportation. Like there's a reason that public transportation is kind of the way it is. Yes. There's better ways of doing it. Yes, there's other things, but there's all these regulations, there's security, there's safety, there's, there's things that you are so ignorant of without getting into it.

So I, I almost look at it as if you have an itch that something can be better public education, you know, whatever that you, you, you dive deep into understanding why it is the way it is. And if there's not really any good reasons for why there, then go ahead and double down. And that's such a key thing though, because sometimes people just take the, you can't do that for granted. And it's like, well, if you, yeah, even the example you use, it's like, you can't do sales in higher education. It's like, okay, well, why? Well, actually, why though? You know, and sometimes it's like people just think, well, I've been in this career for a long time and it's just, you just can't, you know, you just can't.

That's why it's like, well, that's not good enough. Sometimes you need to know why. Love it. Awesome, Calum. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation where, um, where can people find out about the book, about you, about all the stuff that you're working on? So the glass box, my book on CrossFit comes out October 27th. It'll be available. Any book sale retailer, Amazon, any local bookstore should be able to sell it. And it's also available as an audio book on Audible and Spotify and every other audio book platform. Did you, did you do the audio or did you have something else? I did not. We have a real, actual, authentic narrator who is professional. So if you don't like my voice, no problem.

This is a real guy doing it. No, that's a, I always get curious. Cause like there's the, it's a, you know, labor of love writing a book, obviously, right? The writing of it. And then some people enjoy the writing, but hate the audio. So, or, or vice versa. Like I, I really liked this part, but it's a whole nother, you know, ball of wax of getting that audio book ready to, cause it's hours and hours and hours of you reading the same thing that you spent months and months and years, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Awesome. Kyle. Well, thanks so much for coming on, man. It's been a fun conversation. Thank you so much. Have a good one. And everybody hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.

And like I said, all the end, all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause no matter how bad your day's going or how bad you think it went, if you make somebody smile, you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side. Hey, thanks again for listening to the show and for all your support throughout the years. This is one last reminder to check out my training programs at jbarrows.com or leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform or G2 if you've already gone through my training or sign up for my newsletter. Any of those will help ensure I can continue to bring you free content and great conversations like the ones you just heard without having to annoy you with sponsors.

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