The Owner Seat

How much did your gym spend last year replacing the rope attachments on your cable machines? Most owners can't answer that, and Josh Gallia built a company on that line item. This episode is for gym and studio owners who keep paying for the same problem and never stop to ask why they are fixing it again.

Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Josh Gallia, Founder and CEO of Adonai Fitness Engineering, and goes behind the build of the Adonai Rope Cable Attachment:

- How a frayed rope on a commercial gym floor turned into a company, a year before Josh finished college

- Why cheap equipment quietly costs more, and where replacement cycles hide in a gym's budget

- How a two-year warranty, patent protection, and a pilot program help a premium product win against sticker price

Josh Gallia is the Founder and CEO of Adonai Fitness Engineering in Tampa, Florida. He started the company in May 2024, a year before finishing his entrepreneurship degree at the University of Tampa, where Adonai began as an idea he was pitching. He won a 2022 national championship with the University of Tampa men's lacrosse team, studied international business finance at Florence University of the Arts, and worked the gym floor at EOS Fitness as a personal trainer and assistant fitness manager. The Adonai Rope Cable Attachment keeps the classic nylon feel gyms and members like and fixes the part they don't: the fraying. It comes in 12-inch and 20-inch lengths with a two-year commercial warranty, against the 3 to 8 months Adonai says a standard rope lasts. Josh says it is rolling out into dozens of gym chains around the world, with a full line of cable attachments on the way.

This episode is for fitness, wellness, and longevity owners, franchisees, and multi-unit operators who are tired of:

- Buying the same equipment over and over and calling it a normal expense

- Choosing the cheapest option and paying for it in replacements and member complaints

- Losing members little by little to small frustrations nobody on the team notices anymore

- Fixing the same problem again instead of asking why it keeps breaking

Top topics we cover

- Filling the gap in commercial gyms: the problem no one had tried to fix on the cable machine

- Quality vs. profit margins: why the cheapest rope is rarely the cheapest decision

- Neglected cable attachments: the small equipment details that shape the member experience

- Patent protection for a premium product: what a young founder has to protect before scaling

- The 90/10 rule: how Josh builds relationships with gym owners and chains

- From atheist to believer: Josh's faith story, and why he asks whether he'd be proud to put the Adonai name on it

How this episode helps you win

If you're a single-studio owner: how to find the replacement cycles hiding in your equipment budget and what they really cost per year.

If you're a multi-unit operator: how to judge equipment on lifetime cost and member experience across every location, not sticker price.

If you're weighing acquisitions or outside capital: how to spot the recurring maintenance and replacement costs that never make it into the pitch.

If you're a franchisor or emerging brand: how to set an equipment standard your franchisees can hold, and what a supplier pilot should prove before a system-wide order.

Connect with Josh Gallia

Adonai Fitness Engineering: https://www.adonaifitness.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/adonai-fitness-engineering/

Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness

I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible.

Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast

Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328

Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/

More from The Owner Seat

New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST.

Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOwnerSeatPodcast

STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Women over 40 have major purchasing power, and they spend with the brands that make them feel seen. Most wellness and beauty brands still market to a customer who is 35. Lesley Holmes, Founder of Beneath The Gloss and former Chief Marketing Officer of Crème Collective, has spent 23 years building brands across beauty, fashion, health, and wellness. This episode is for the wellness and beauty owners, founders, franchisors, and franchisees who want to know what their customer is actually buying and where she is going next.

Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Lesley Holmes, who was on the founding team at TYRA Beauty, the cosmetics and skincare company founded by Tyra Banks, and goes behind the brand and the customer:

- Why women over 40 are the most overlooked opportunity in wellness and beauty, and what brands keep getting wrong about her

- The thing beneath the thing: how a founder finds what the customer is really buying, and what changes once they know

- Why acquisition can buy customers but cannot manufacture resonance

Lesley Holmes has built brands, products, businesses, and teams from early-stage startups to companies exceeding $250 million. She came up through Dermacia, Dermstore, and JustFab, led brand and marketing on the founding team at TYRA Beauty, and scaled the marketing and creative team at Smashtech, a health and wellness brand incubator, from 3 people to 20 while launching three new brands. At two companies, colleagues nicknamed her The Oracle for spotting patterns others missed. At 40, she stepped away from that career, rebuilt her life around identity and purpose, and returned to the C-suite as CMO of Crème Collective. Today she runs Beneath The Gloss, advising brands, operators, and founders, and coaching people at a turning point through her Internal Rebrand framework. She is a member of WE ARE THE BOARD, an ICF Certified Professional Coach, a Human Design Practitioner, and a certified Lagree instructor.

This episode is for wellness and beauty owners, founders, franchisors, and franchisees who are tired of:

- Marketing to a customer who stopped being 35 a decade ago

- Competing on ClassPass credits and discounts instead of a reason to choose you

- Spending on acquisition and watching customers leave anyway

- Selling the product instead of what the customer is actually buying

Top topics we cover

- Women over 40: the overlooked customer, and the opportunity in muscle, strength, and women's health

- The thing beneath the thing: why a bank isn't selling a loan, and what your brand is really selling

- Dividing demand: what happens when nine reformer studios share one street, and how she chooses

- Seen-with brands: what Stanley, Celsius, and Ulta Beauty understand about identity and the whole woman

- Social wellness: run clubs, gathering in real life, and how a small brand can be part of it

- The values exercise: a tool to run with your team on Monday and at the kitchen table that night

How this episode helps you win

If you're a wellness or beauty founder: how to find the thing beneath the thing and build the brand around it.

If you own a studio, spa, or clinic: how to earn loyalty when every competitor is offering the same thing at a discount.

If you're a franchisee or multi-unit operator: how to make a location feel personal to the woman who walks in, not just consistent.

If you're a franchisor or emerging brand: how to read a real consumer shift early, and tell it apart from a fad.

Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness

I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible.

Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast

Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328

Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/

More from The Owner Seat

New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST.

Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOwnerSeatPodcast

STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Perfectionism, fear of failure, catastrophic thinking, and not knowing when enough is enough. The same wiring that makes a founder great is often the wiring that breaks the business. Dr. Hillary Cauthen, clinical sport psychologist and Co-Founder of Derrick Johnson's Edge Performance Center, has spent her career inside the heads of people who perform under pressure for a living. This episode is for the owner who signs the payroll and carries the weight nobody else sees.

Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Dr. Hillary Cauthen, PsyD, CMPC, who has worked with the San Antonio Spurs, Austin FC, and LOVB Austin, and goes behind the build of The Edge and the mind of the high performer:

- Why perfectionism helps until it doesn't, and how to tell which side you are on

- How fear of failure and fear of evaluation quietly shape pricing, hiring, and growth decisions

- What she and Kansas City Chiefs legend Derrick Johnson are building to change how youth athletes are trained

Dr. Hillary Cauthen is Co-Founder and Chief Performance & Wellness Officer of Derrick Johnson's Edge Performance Center, an integrated model that brings mental performance, strength and conditioning, recovery, nutrition, and sports medicine under one roof for the whole athlete. She founded Texas Optimal Performance & Psychological Services (TOPPS) in Austin in 2015, served as Chief Psychology Officer at Blu Chip Analytics, and is the author of Hello Trauma: Our Invisible Teammate. Her co-founder, Derrick Johnson, is the Kansas City Chiefs' all-time leading tackler, a College Football Hall of Famer, and the 55th inductee into the Chiefs Hall of Fame.

This episode is for fitness, wellness, and longevity owners, franchisees, and multi-unit operators who are tired of:

- Holding a launch, a price increase, or a hire until it is perfect

- Running every decision through the worst-case scenario

- Grinding without a finish line and calling it ambition

- Carrying payroll, personal guarantees, and bad months alone

Top topics we cover

- Perfectionism debunked: when it builds the business and when it stalls it

- Fear of failure and evaluation: why high performers play not to lose

- Catastrophic thinking: how to stop the worst case from making your decisions

- Aspirational realist: setting a finish line you can actually cross, and knowing when enough is enough

- Embracing trauma: Hello Trauma, the invisible teammate, and the pressure owners carry

- Building The Edge: why youth sports training needs a whole-athlete model, and what Derrick Johnson brings to it

How this episode helps you win

If you're a single-studio owner: how to spot the fear behind the price you won't raise and the decision you keep putting off.

If you're a multi-unit operator: how to stop perfectionism and control from making you the bottleneck in every location.

If you're weighing acquisitions or outside capital: how to make a clear call under pressure instead of a catastrophic one.

If you're a franchisor or emerging brand: what an integrated, whole-person model looks like from the founder's seat, and what it takes to build one.

Connect with Dr. Hillary Cauthen

Derrick Johnson's Edge Performance Center: https://theperformance-edge.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hillary-cauthen-psyd-cmpc/

Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness

I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible.

Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast

Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328

Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/

More from The Owner Seat

New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST.

Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOwnerSeatPodcast

STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Before Alex Reed opened the first GolfTRK location, he kept hearing that someone else was about to open a business just like his. He had already signed the lease. Three years later, not one of those conversations became a real business. His did. This episode is for owners staring at a bigger swing they're not sure they've earned.

Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Alex Reed, Co-Founder and CEO of GolfTRK, the membership-based indoor golf franchise out of Kansas City, and goes behind the build:

- Why Alex walked away from a former Macy's site in Prairie Village 90 days after opening location one, and what brought him back two years later

- How GolfTRK built its franchise system before selling one

- How three co-founders make the call when money is on the line

Alex Reed spent fifteen years selling B2B technology to Fortune 1000 companies before leaving corporate in 2023 to build GolfTRK: Trackman-powered bays, PGA-certified pros on the floor, and a tagline that says what they sell, the best place to get better at golf. Since then: two locations, a seed round, a franchise system, an installation business unit, and a 9,300-square-foot headquarters inside a former Macy's in Prairie Village.

This episode is for fitness, wellness, and longevity owners, franchisees, and multi-unit operators who are tired of:

- Hearing "I'm opening one just like yours" and not knowing which threats are real

- Signing a lease on excitement instead of proof

- Wondering whether the next location is earned or just wanted

- A member base that misses a whole segment of the market

Top topics we cover

- Idea chatter vs. action: telling real competition from noise before you enter a territory

- Site discipline: the right zip code over frontage and signage, and what makes a second-generation retail lease pencil

- Where GolfTRK fits: Topgolf's impact on golf, the middle ground GolfTRK fills, and why indoor golf is more than a seasonal solution

- Franchise system first: what is hardest to package and what franchisees underestimate

- Capital: what seed investors underwrote when franchising was still an idea

- The numbers: founding members still paying three years in, and a member base under 10% women in a game where Alex cites nearly half of off-course golfers are female

How this episode helps you win

If you're a single-studio owner: how to judge whether location two is earned or just wanted.

If you're a multi-unit operator: a site lens that puts the right zip code ahead of frontage and signage.

If you're weighing acquisitions or outside capital: what investors underwrite before the proof exists, and what they need to see after.

If you're a franchisor or emerging brand: the systems to build before you sell a franchise.

Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness

I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible.

Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast

Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328

Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/

More from The Owner Seat

New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST.

Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOwnerSeatPodcast

STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Most fitness and wellness owners think they are in the fitness business. They are in the experience business, and that business has a cost structure most of them have never seen laid out. This episode puts a price tag on the dream: what the Savannah Bananas taught their finance chief about bundled pricing, hypergrowth, and loyalty, and what every studio owner, franchisee, and franchisor should read before signing the next lease, loan, or development agreement.

Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Dr. Tim Naddy, CPA, CFE, former VP of Finance of the Savannah Bananas and now VP of Emerging Markets at Jockey International, and goes behind the finance build under the greatest show in sports:

• How the Savannah Bananas underwrote all-you-can-eat food inside the ticket, and what that means for all-inclusive memberships versus a la carte pricing
• Why merchandise ran as its own business, and what a studio should separate on its own books
• What the finance function looked like as the Bananas went from a viral act to the six-team Banana Ball Championship League touring 45 states

Dr. Tim Naddy is a CPA and Certified Fraud Examiner who spent eight years at PwC and Deloitte before becoming VP of Finance and Accounting at Endurance Business Media, the private equity owned franchisor behind Homes & Land, with eight consolidated companies and more than 250 franchisees. He has worked as a fractional CFO, taught fraud examination and forensic interviewing at Shorter University, and served as an Engagement Director at CLA. From 2022 to 2026 he was VP of Finance for the Savannah Bananas. In August 2026 he joined Jockey International, a 150-year-old brand, as VP of Emerging Markets. He teaches cost accounting at the Savannah College of Art and Design, founded the nonprofit Legaci Forge and the advisory firm Hound TALINT, hosts the Business Biceps & BS podcast, and is the author of EDYM (Every Decision You Make): What's the COST of the Dream?

This episode is for fitness, wellness, and longevity owners, franchisees, and multi-unit operators who are tired of:

• Signing bank packages, equipment leases, and franchise development agreements without pricing what they cost
• Blending retail, supplements, and services into one P&L and not knowing which line is carrying which
• Trusting the front desk and the bookkeeper and never checking where the cash goes
• Having a waitlist and still not knowing how to price it

Top topics we cover

• Franchisor finance under pressure: 250+ franchisees, a private equity owner, and the covenant that quietly kills a growing system
• Where the money walks out: fraud in studios and clinics, and the first report to pull
• Bundled pricing the Savannah Bananas way: food inside the ticket, merch as its own business, and a ticket lottery when demand outruns capacity
• Diamond and dugout: building a finance team that understands operations, not only the ledger
• Every Decision You Make: revenue-based financing, future-earnings deals, and the test to run before you sign
• The denominator: Humility, Faith, and Family, and how Tim knew the Bananas chapter was finished

How this episode helps you win

If you're a single-studio owner: how to think through all-inclusive versus a la carte pricing, and where to look first when cash is leaving the building.

If you're a multi-unit operator: the finance build order from one location to ten, and what to separate on your P&L.

If you're weighing acquisitions or outside capital: how to read the covenant page, and how to test any deal that takes a percentage of money you have not earned yet.

If you're a franchisor or emerging brand: how to protect the experience and the margin in units you never walk into.

Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness

I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible.

Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast

Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328

Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/

More from The Owner Seat

New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST.

Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOwnerSeatPodcast

STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Most founders think culture is something you write on a wall once you're big enough to afford a wall. It works the other way. Culture is the set of habits a company is building right now, at four people, whether anyone is paying attention to them or not. How a Monday meeting opens. How a missed number gets handled. How the team talks about a client who is not on the call. Those habits are cheap to fix when a business is small and expensive to fix at forty people, and in a franchise system they get replicated across every location. Most operators optimize the thing in front of them this month. The things that break a brand at scale are the small habits nobody engineered on purpose.

Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Mike Prince, Founder of Revryze, and goes behind the build:

- Habits compound faster than people think: why whatever gets built at three or four people is still there at thirty, the rituals Mike engineered on purpose, and why whatever the founder does on a bad day becomes what the team does on a bad day.

- Data-driven versus having a dashboard: the two or three numbers that actually run a franchise brand, the difference between a metric that predicts a healthy location and a vanity number that makes the deck look good, and where the data stops and judgment starts.

- What transfers to a franchisee and what never will: where franchisor and franchisee numbers pull against each other, how to scale a brand's style without it turning into a costume, and what actually caps a franchise brand's growth: capital, operations, talent, or the founder's own habits.

Mike Prince is the Founder of Revryze and a data-driven franchise leader focused on scaling brands and optimizing the operations underneath them. He treats franchising as a data problem and a habit problem at the same time. His work and his writing center on building the muscles a business will need at five times its current size: the check-ins, the 1:1 questions, how Mondays open and Fridays close, and the numbers on the wall. He is not chasing hacks. His argument is that the small, cheap-to-fix habits a team ignores when it is small are the ones that break it at scale.

If you're a franchisor, this is how to tell what your system actually transfers to a franchisee and which metrics predict a healthy location. If you're a franchisee or multi-unit operator at the four-to-thirty-person inflection point, this is the first number to put on the wall and the first habit to kill. If you're a founder running on instinct with no system underneath you, this is the financial case for building the right habits now instead of fixing the wrong ones later.

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-prince-684914222

Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness

I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible.

Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast

Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328

Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/

More from The Owner Seat

New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST.

Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@theownerseatpodcast

STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Most boutique studios are opened by people who love the method and learn the math later. A reformer Pilates room makes that expensive. The room has a hard ceiling: a fixed number of reformers, a 50-minute class, and only so many peak hours in a week. That makes utilization, pricing, and class-pack discounting the entire game, and most owners set all three by feel. Today's guest did it in the opposite order. She was an accountant and a Financial Controller before she ever taught a class, and she built a studio and a global online membership on top of a full-time job for two years before she let the paycheck go.

Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Nikkii Behrens, Founder and CEO of Nikkii Health and Founder of Rare Street Pilates, and goes behind the build:

- Reformer studio unit economics: what the buildout cost, how many reformers she started with, how many bodies a week the studio needed to cover its own fixed cost, and how full a 50-minute class has to be before it makes money.

- Pricing on purpose: why a single class is CHF 45 and a 20-class pack brings it down to CHF 39 a class, and how to protect average revenue per visit when every client wants the biggest pack at the lowest rate.

- Two businesses, one founder: a global online membership and a physical studio with two different cost structures, which one funds which, what a 150-hour, CHF 4,500 teacher training does for margin, and what she stopped doing because the numbers did not hold.

Nikkii Behrens is the Founder and CEO of Nikkii Health (NH), the fitness and wellness platform at nikkiihealth.com, and the Founder of Rare Street Pilates in Rapperswil, Switzerland, where she also runs The Rare Method teacher trainings. She founded NH in November 2023 and opened Rare Street Pilates a year later, building both while working full time until December 2025. Today the business spans studio classes, an online membership, teacher training, retreats, corporate programs, private lessons, and an 8-week postnatal program. Nikkii started her career in numbers as an accountant in Zurich, then a Financial Controller, then an Operations Manager in Singapore. She spent five years as a Sleep Specialist at a luxury treatment center in Zurich, and she holds certifications across Pilates, yoga, meditation, sound healing, and nutrition. She has written openly about battling mental health challenges and anxiety, and about the gym never feeling like the right fit for her. So she built the thing she needed.

If you're a studio owner, this is the pricing, utilization, and fixed-cost math to run before you add another class to the schedule. If you're an operator thinking about adding an online membership, a teacher training, or retreats, this is how to decide what stays and what gets cut. If you're in the messy middle, still working the job and still building the thing, this is what to look at first.

Connect with Nikkii:

Nikkii Health: https://nikkiihealth.com

Rare Street Pilates: https://rarepilates.com/en

Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness

I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible.

Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast

Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328

Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/

More from The Owner Seat

New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST.

Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@theownerseatpodcast

STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Most owners in fitness and wellness think they have a lead problem. A lot of them have a follow-up problem, and that one costs more than any marketing budget ever will. Leads come in after hours, the front desk is teaching or checking people in, and the follow-up happens when someone gets to it, if it happens at all. Most owners cannot tell you their cost per lead, their lead-to-appointment rate, or their appointment-to-close rate without opening three systems. Now AI sales agents can answer a lead in seconds and follow up every time, which raises two questions nobody in boutique fitness wants to say out loud. What happens to the sales associate on payroll? And what happens to a brand that sold human connection and hands the first conversation to a machine?

Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Joe DeMarco, Co-Founder and CEO of SalesRevv, and goes behind the build:

- The lead math nobody runs: how to tell a lead problem from a conversion problem, the minimum scoreboard an owner needs on the wall every Monday, and the lead volume where a studio's staff physically cannot work the pipeline anymore.

- The part owners don't want to talk about: the honest case for keeping a full-time sales associate at a single-location studio, which payroll line actually changes when AI takes the follow-up, and whether a bot at the top of the funnel breaks the human-connection promise.

- Who should not buy AI sales tools yet: what a studio needs to fix first, what an owner should require in writing before signing, and how long to give it before calling it a failure.

Joe DeMarco is the Co-Founder and CEO of SalesRevv, which builds AI sales agents for appointment and class-based businesses. He co-founded the company in 2023 and launched it in March 2024. SalesRevv raised a $3.24 million seed round led by RTP Global and Floodgate, and it now runs inside studios operating under Pure Barre, Club Pilates, CycleBar, YogaSix, BodyFit Training, and BODY20. Joe built it as an operator first. Sixteen years ago he and his wife Jennifer opened Local Barre, a women's boutique fitness concept in New Jersey, with no franchise playbook and no brand behind them. It is still running today. He also owned CycleBar franchises across seven states, so he has carried the rent, made payroll, and sat in the owner seat on both the independent and the multi-unit franchise side.

If you're a studio owner or franchisee, this is the scoreboard to pull before you spend another dollar on leads. If you're a franchisor, this is what AI at the top of the funnel does to your sales model, your staffing, and your brand promise. If you're an operator or investor evaluating a fitness or wellness business, this is why the advantage is moving from hustle to pricing, utilization, and retention.

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-demarco-a407525/

SalesRevv: https://salesrevv.ai

Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness

I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible.

Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast

Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328

Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/

More from The Owner Seat

New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST.

Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@theownerseatpodcast

STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Ask any studio owner what revenue was last month and you get an answer in two seconds. Ask how many of the members who joined twelve months ago are still paying today and you get a blank stare. That is not a discipline problem. Nobody ever asked owners to track it, so nobody built the habit of looking. In franchise fitness the gap gets wider. Two locations of the same brand, three states apart, run the identical workout and post completely different retention numbers, because the brand guarantees the workout and leaves year two up to whoever bought the territory. This episode is about the number that decides whether a studio is still open in three years, and what an operator can do about it on Monday morning.

Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Zachary Crain, CEO and Co-Founder of RetentionRx, and goes behind the build:

- Retention defined properly: what to count, why a blended average membership length hides the one location or join-month cohort dragging the whole network, and why a freeze request is a cancellation with better manners.

- The LTV math every owner should run: a member at $150 per month who stays 12 months is worth $1,800. Getting to $2,250 takes either a 25 percent price increase or three more months of stay. Same math, completely different risk.

- The culture blind spot: the twenty loud members who convince an owner the culture is great, the three hundred nobody is talking to, and where software stops and a human conversation has to start.

Zachary Crain is the CEO and Co-Founder of RetentionRx, a Las Vegas-based software platform built exclusively for boutique fitness franchisees and franchisors. RetentionRx gives owners a real-time read on who is engaging, who is fading, and who needs attention right now, so they can act before the cancellation instead of after it. Zac has spent about a decade in boutique fitness. He set national and international sales and growth records across multiple brands, then worked as a franchisee business consultant in the trenches with BFT, Pure Barre, YogaSix, StretchLab, Row House, CycleBar, and more, where he found the same retention gap in studio after studio. He built software instead of staying a consultant because a habit that depends on one consultant showing up does not scale past that consultant.

If you're a franchisor, this is the case for making retention part of the brand standard: required, measured, and reported by location. If you're a franchisee or independent studio owner, this is the definition, the formula, and the Monday-morning actions that add months to a membership. If you're an operator or investor evaluating a multi-unit fitness or wellness business, this is the number to ask for before you trust the revenue line.

Connect with Zac on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachary-crain-581123184/

Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness

I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible.

Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast

Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328

Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/

More from The Owner Seat

New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST.

Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@theownerseatpodcast

STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

As of August 1, every UIL school in Texas is required to monitor Wet Bulb Globe Temperature before every outdoor practice, contest, workout, and marching band rehearsal. Rapid cooling zones. Full-body ice immersion equipment on site. Every athletic director in the state is spending compliance dollars right now, and most of the operators listening to this show serve exactly the population affected. Here is the problem the mandate does not solve: WBGT measures the field, not the kid. Two athletes in the same practice, under the same reading, can be in completely different trouble depending on hydration, acclimation, and fitness that day. By the time a coach can see a symptom, the window has already started closing. This episode is about the founder who left a Chief Product Officer seat to measure the athlete instead of the weather, and whether the economics work when a school district is the buyer.

Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Melissa Fortenberry, Founder and CEO of HeatSense, and goes behind the build:

-What core body temperature tells you that air temperature and visible symptoms cannot, how a chest or bicep sensor estimates it against the invasive gold standard, and where the error range and validation actually stand

-Why a school district can be fully compliant with one WBGT device on a pole and still never buy a per-athlete wearable, who the real buyer is (athletic director, booster club, parent, or private club program), and how hardware cost, membership pricing, and gross margin hold up across an off-season

-Whether per-athlete monitoring makes a program more protected or more exposed when an athlete still goes down, and how minors' biometric data gets handled under Texas biometric law, student-record obligations, and parent consent

Melissa Fortenberry is the Founder and CEO of HeatSense, based in Austin, Texas. Melissa comes out of twenty years as a consumer internet and product executive, and that is why this conversation goes well beyond a typical founder interview. She spent nearly seven years at RVshare, the first and largest peer-to-peer RV rental marketplace serving more than 60,000 RV owners, joining as Vice President of Product and rising to Chief Product Officer. Before that, nine years at HomeAway, rising from product manager on VacationRentals.com to Vice President of Global Product Marketing across HomeAway, VRBO, and 25 global vacation rental sites, through the Expedia acquisition in December 2015. Earlier roles include Philips, where she managed an $8 million budget across the Norelco and Sonicare brands, Millward Brown Vermeer, and StarMedia. She holds a degree in finance and Spanish from Tulane and an MBA in marketing from UT Austin's McCombs School of Business. In June 2025 she left software to build hardware. HeatSense pairs a lightweight, non-invasive sensor worn on the chest or bicep with an athlete app and a live coach dashboard, tracking core body temperature and heart rate continuously so a coach or athletic trainer knows who needs a break before performance drops. The premise underneath it: regulations look at visible symptoms and guidelines look at the weather, but the measurement that actually matters is core body temperature, and in the pros it is still taken with a rectal thermometer. [OPTIONAL, pending Melissa's OK: In 2026, Alabama football became HeatSense's first team customer, as reported by the Tuscaloosa News.]

If you're weighing a raise or a procurement-driven sale: you hear how a pre-revenue hardware founder answers the validation, liability, and buyer questions an investor asks before writing a check. If you're a franchisor, franchisee, or operator with athletes training in the heat: you get the honest version of what the mandate changes, what it does not, and what to do differently on Monday.

Connect with Melissa: https://heatsense.com

Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness

I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible.

Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast

Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328

Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/

More from The Owner Seat

New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST.

Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@theownerseatpodcast

STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com