Blog Posts

Tim Klitch was a D1 tennis player who, by his own account, looked down his nose at pickleball as "for people who aren't athletic enough to play tennis." Four years later he had converted a downtown Austin parking garage rooftop into an eight-court p…

Nico Varano still signs the leases and personal guarantees on his five SweatHouz studios in Boston, even though he's now the company's CEO. On this episode of HALO Talks, Pete Moore sits down with Varano, who went from SweatHouz member to its first …

SoulFire Collective started with the two founders biking dirty towels to and from a beach studio basket because they could not yet afford a laundry service. Ten years and three studios later, Kat and Brooke Wyman are in the process of raising a coup…

There is no dedicated community thermal wellness space within 700 square miles of Kansas City. That is the gap Carrie Bacon, a classically trained acupuncturist turned bathhouse operator, is building into with 180 Degree Bathhouse, a micro-format co…

United Theranostics has a stated goal of opening 50 clinics in every state within the next seven years, and it plans to get there almost entirely through recruiting, not acquisition. On this episode of HALO Talks, Dr. Munir Ghesani, Chief Medical Di…

A yoga student got injured in a class Cory Sterling was attending in Vancouver. There was no waiver on file, and the studio didn't understand why that mattered. That gap is what pulled Sterling out of a downtown corporate law job and into a niche al…

Tony Scrimale started in the gym business the way a lot of the best operators do: broke, 18 years old, and spending three to four hours a day at a Florida health club he wasn't even employed by yet. Almost thirty years later, he's CEO of CR Fitness …

A padel court can run $30,000 to $70,000 to build once you factor in engineering sign-off and municipal permits. There is no governing body setting the rules, no proven facility model, and barely any homegrown coaching talent. That combination sound…

What's In It for You Most operators talk about growth in terms of units opened per year. Rich Drengberg, CEO of EoS Fitness, talks about it in terms of discipline: which deals to pass on, which real estate relationships to spend years building befo…

If you're a multi-unit operator, franchisor executive, or investor trying to figure out what disciplined, PE-backed growth actually looks like inside a franchise system, this conversation is a playbook. Pete Moore sits down with Joe Pepe Jr., CEO of…

Most strength programs assume both sides of the body should carry the same load. Dr. Joel Seedman and Sal LoDuca have spent years proving that assumption leaves performance and injury prevention on the table. On this episode of HALO Talks, Pete Moor…

From Elite Running to Longevity Investing: Ola Capital's Richey Hansen on HALO Talks What does coaching Olympic Trials runners have to do with picking early-stage health-tech winners? More than you would think. In this episode of HALO Talks, host P…

UFC Gym's Asset-Light Franchise Playbook: CEO Adam Sedlack on HALO Talks Most fitness brands that hit a cash crunch tend to go straight to Chapter 11. UFC GYM did the opposite. In this return visit to HALO Talks, CEO and co-founder Adam Sedlack wal…

Inside GreatLIFE's Fitness ESOP: Nick Ovenden on Employee Ownership and the Golf-and-Fitness Model How do you solve succession at a thriving, founder-led fitness business without selling to private equity and possibly losing the culture? GreatLIFE …

For most of the last decade, the fitness conversation has been dominated by the big-box value model and the boutique studio. Women's-only clubs, a format many operators wrote off as a relic of the 1990s, barely came up. In British Columbia, two bra…