Weight for It: Gym entrepreneurs muscle up for growth

Geoff Dyer and Vince Julien are gung-ho to grow their portfolio of membership-based clubs, capitalizing on the industry’s pandemic-based upheaval.

By Mark Gordon
| 12:00 p.m. December 9, 2021
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Mark Wemple. Longtime gym executives and entrepreneurs Vince Julien and Geoff Dyer have been working together opening Crunch fitness franchise locations since 2014.

Strategies

CR Fitness CEO Tony Scrimale’s high-energy, can-do spirit doesn’t only work in the gym, in achieving fitness goals. It’s also a fit on the corporate side, in climbing the corporate ladder. This is a gym rat, after all, who started his career with a broom, cleaning floors and locker rooms in gyms in Sarasota. Two decades later helps oversee a multimillion-dollar operator of multiple Crunch fitness locations, on both Florida coasts and the Orlando and Atlanta areas.

Payroll protection

One of the keys to surviving the pandemic at CR Fitness, which operates 34 franchised Crunch locations in Florida and Georgia, especially in the early days, was to preserve its workforce.

“That was a huge win, to keep everyone on the payroll,” CR Fitness CEO Tony Scrimale says, starting when gyms statewide and nationally were shuttered in April 2020, mostly by state order. “LA fitness, Youfit, all of them, they didn’t have any employees when things opened up again. They had all left.”

CR Fitness officials decline to disclose how much it cost to keep the payroll intact. Some of the funds came from federal Payment Protection Program loans. The company, under LLCs with the name TVJ and then the gym’s location in Florida, obtained 11 loans in April 2020 worth $1.84 million that preserved 524 jobs, according to federal SBA loan data. Those loans were forgiven in June. (TVJ, according to Florida Department of State records, is for Vince Julien, who began opening Crunch locations through CR Fitness in 2011.)

Another set of LLCs under the TVJ name obtained multiple PPP loans this past March and April. Those loans, SBA documents show, were for $2.14 million that preserved 414 jobs.