- December 12, 2024
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Jeff Moore, after a long and danger-laden stint in the U.S. military — he was a Navy SEAL in the 1990s and worked in protective services for high-target potential kidnap victims after that — went back home to rural western Kentucky. It was 2006. His mom had just died, and he wanted to help his dad.
A local gym owner told Moore about how the place had hired someone to run a boot camp, and that person left town with the deposits for the class in tow. The owner, noting Moore’s military experience, asked him: could you teach boot camp classes?
Moore said sure, he’d give it a shot. He was successful, and he loved the work, he says, especially helping people reach fitness goals. That led to a new career in the fitness industry, with the latest stop in the Sarasota-Bradenton region: Moore — a fit 60 who wears a three-piece suit, alligator boots and a cowboy hat while at work and not working out — recently signed a development agreement with Chicago-based Fitness Premier to open multiple locations of the boutique concept in the Southeast.
Moore’s first four Fitness Premier spots are scheduled to open in January, including one in east Manatee County in a former Anytime Fitness on State Road 64 and one in Sarasota County in the former Gym SRQ on Clark Road. The pair will be the debut Fitness Premier locations in Florida.Other locations in his network are in South Carolina and Miromar, outside Miami. In total, Moore says it’s a $1 million-plus investment in renovations, equipment and more. (Fitness Premier, which has some 20 locations, in and around Chicago, has an initial franchise fee of $49,500; $275,000-$664,000 in startup costs and 6% in royalties, according to its website.)
Moore most recently worked for gym chain EoS Fitness, as a district manager and in other corporate roles in Florida. He’s been living in the Sarasota area for about a decade, first moving to help another family member, his sister. He was earning into the six figures at EoS. But he outgrew it. “I gave up a good salary to spend a bunch of money,” he says, “but I’m having fun again. I had lost the fun. Premier, at the end of the day, is about helping people. The money will come if you help people.”
The fitness industry has been in need of some help. According to a November report from data firm IBISWorld, revenue in the industry fell at an annual compounded growth rate of 1.9% to $41.8 billion this year. The report pegs the decline on higher interest rates, limited discretionary spending and depressing demand for gym memberships. Another industry challenge: even amid a declining gym membership environment, fitness options, from class-specific franchises (F45, Orangetheory) to high-tech in-home equipment (Lulelemon Studio, Peloton) are plentiful.
That’s all top of mind as Moore seeks to grab boutique fitness center market share in the Sarasota-Manatee region. The Fitness Premier model, the company says, is to “establish gyms in smaller, often underserved communities and offer a range of equipment and resources to address the needs of the masses.” That resonates with Moore.
In addition, he says Fitness Premier executives are on board with one of his core strategies: to build a strong team through having managers and leaders with entrepreneurial buy-in and a hiring philosophy that prioritizes a candidate's traits — not necessarily his or her skills.
On the later part, Moore says that was a big takeaway from the Navy SEALs— noted for building high-performing teams. “We hire on traits and train on behavior,” he says, adding one way to do that is to ask more probing questions in the interviews. “You need to look down deep at the person sitting in front of you, not (just) what’s on the surface.”
Overseeing this while Moore oversees the operation are a group of highly-selected general managers. Moore says he has learned from the military that the best leaders are built by being challenged to meet big goals, and then rewarded with autonomy, not just money. He incentivises all his general managers that if they meet all their goals, he will help them — financially — run their own gyms in his network. “I tell them you go find it, I’ll fund it for you and then you can buy me out.”
Moore started his working life as a firefighter/paramedic, when he was 19 in Kentucky. He thought he was going to go to med school before finding his place in the military.
The opportunity in the fitness industry stems from the experience helping the gym back in Kentucky jilted by its bootcamp instructor. Turns out the 18,000-square-foot place had other operations issues — “you had members in there fixing the equipment on their own,” Moore says. He eventually took over the business.
He had a knack for it. He added classes, hired personal trainers and opened the place 24 hours, catering to a factory town with plants running on three shifts. He soon grew the membership base from under 250 to over 1,500, in a town, he says, with 3,400 people. He eventually opened more gyms, in Kentucky and Ohio. He sold them when he relocated to Florida in 2015.
After eight years of working for corporate gyms, Moore’s large book of contacts in the fitness industry led him to the upstart Fitness Premier brand. He liked their model, and the approach of problem-solving for clients, not hard-pitch sales tactics. That and knowing he can build a team from scratch. “The legacy I want to leave is not in setting sales records or winning awards,” he says, “but it’s how I am able to grow and develop (people’s) careers.”
And those three piece suits? It’s not because the affable Moore is unusually formal. It’s because he wore sweatpants and polos, he says, for years in corporate fitness. Now he wants to make a different kind of sartorial statement, with a Navy SEALs lesson at the front: mindset drives everything — in life, and business.
“I don’t have an off switch,” he says. “I’m all go, no stop. All gas, no brakes. I don’t complain about anything. I just fix the problem.”
