Welcome to the six Figure Business Mastery Podcast, where every week

Kirsten and Jeanie dive into the essential topics to fuel your business

growth, from copywriting to course creation mindset, to video marketing.

They've got you covered.

Tune in for expert guest interviews on all things marketing and

business, and learn how to work on your business, not just in it.

So get ready to unlock your business potential and take it to the next level.

So welcome everyone to today's episode.

We're thrilled to have you here, and I'm thrilled to have Pete Moore from

Integrity Square and he's gonna tell us a little bit about what he does

and how he can help entrepreneurs.

So welcome to the show, Pete.

It's lovely to have you.

Thanks for having me on, and I appreciate the opportunity to, uh, talk to your

thriving community of startup founders and executives and entrepreneurs that

are making a difference in the world.

And, you know, that all starts with their own community in their

first location or their first product or their first service.

Uh, just as quick background, I am a native New Yorker.

I grew up playing soccer goalie back in the early days because I didn't

like to run around and I used to eat a lot of sugar from the ice cream man.

That's why I became the goalie and kind of always put myself as a. Advisor or

the member of the team that always was playing defense or was always the person

kind of behind the groups that were, you know, engaged to score and win.

I was making sure we didn't lose.

And it's kind of been part of my DNA throughout to, to help

advise other people to win.

And on this podcast with you, I wanna focus on through that experience, I

actually, people that start companies and really need to understand

what they're getting into and the dedication that they are making to

this business and making to their life.

And the sacrifices that it takes to be an entrepreneur.

I think some people don't understand entrepreneurship and think that it's

just another job that you signed up for.

And what you really signed up for is a life of stress, a life of rollercoaster

rides without a seatbelt and a life that could be highly exhilarating

at the same time you think you are on, you know, the verge of failure.

At the same time, and I think every entrepreneur kind of feels that on a

daily, weekly, and monthly basis, and at the same time that you think that

you're about to fail is the same time when you have to be the strongest leader

and the advocate for your business.

So it's an interesting dichotomy of how you have.

Operate in order to be a successful entrepreneur.

And as you go through the interviews that come out on LinkedIn and you hear about,

you know, the CEO of Nvidia who used to work at Denny's, and then the CEO of

Whoop who said, you know, he was sitting on his parents' couch and he was on the

verge of bankruptcy, and then he saw a LeBron James advertisement and he only had

a hundred whoop products in the market.

And LeBron James, one of the best players.

Ever in the basketball community and worldwide was wearing one

of his, and that gave him the motivation to just keep going.

You know, my background is I started working at a company that owned Gold's Gym

International back in the late nineties.

I was a private equity executive, so I'm a financial guy, but I had

this itch to start an internet company and for your audience

that's say over 45, they'll probably remember a OL dial up and messenger.

And I started up a company and I had a vision to basically

manage all the websites.

And all the sales management and software for the health club industry, which

at the time was 30,000 health clubs.

Now there's over a hundred thousand.

And what I unfortunately did not realize is that nobody wanted to put in an

internet DSL line or broadband connection.

They didn't wanna buy a gateway or a Dell computer, and my

business had 1500 health clubs.

That were on servers that cost 11,000 a month.

And I basically risked all my money that I had at the time, a $66,000 of credit

card debt because the business, which was called Fitness Insight, was also Pete

Moore and Pete Moore was behind that.

And Pete Moore never failed before.

And I went to Harvard Business School and I was the president of my fraternity.

And they don't teach a class at business school of when?

Do you know when to say when?

And I went back to banking after running this company for three years.

And that was kind of a education in real business versus Harvard

Business School business about what it takes to grow a business.

And what I realized is that every business that I start, or that

I invested in going forward, was literally a chemistry experiment.

And what I needed to understand and what I want to get through as part of like one

of the three takeaways of this podcast with you is that you have to be solving a.

Frustration that your clients and customers want to solve.

Now, you can't be a visionary and an evangelist and get in too early into

a market and then try and educate the market for years because you're

gonna run outta money to educate them.

So right now, to close out my background, I help people buy and

sell health and fitness companies.

I hate the word wellness because it came up from a Mayo Clinic scientist

back in the day named Halbert Dunn, who was just trying to come

up with the antonym of illness.

So he came up with wellness.

So wellness is basically the not sick industry.

So I came up with an acronym with my team called, uh, halo.

Which stands for Health Active Lifestyle Outdoors, and I'm trying to create the

halo effect, the Halo sector, and that includes any company that's providing

a product or service to someone that wants to live a healthy lifestyle.

And that is how I kind of coined what we're doing.

And I wrote a book called Time to Win Again, which is how to run

your business like a sports team.

And we've been.

Involved with probably a third of all the mergers and acquisitions and

investments that have gone in to build all the Pilates and the boot camps and the

orange theories and the planet Fitnesses, and the the Gold's Gyms and the Crunch

Fitnesses that you see around the country.

You know, we've had our finger on about a.

Third of all those boxes that have been built because we've been able to convince

people to put money into this sector.

I'll pause there.

I know that was a little bit long-winded, but I'm, I'm from New

York and I try to speak slower than I used to, and that is my story so far.

Well, Pete, that's awesome.

I'm dying to know where are you?

You look like you're in a mountain cabin somewhere.

I, I have the luxury of beating my friend Adam and Stephanie Mastery's,

Woodstock getaway house right now.

So I came up here for 48 hours of r and r and Kirsten and Jean podcast,

so that this is my day job today is, is hanging out with you guys.

Oh, I love it.

I love it.

Yeah.

I, I'm in Sarasota, Florida, so I'm looking at like you jacket,

so you in upstate New York?

Yeah, I'm upstate at Woodstock.

I was about two and a half hours north of the city.

I used to go to summer camp here, which was a very defining, uh, part of

my life when you realized friends and networks and relationships and winning

and teams and sports is like your most important things that you're doing.

I really relish it.

And when I came out, I took a walk this morning and when you breathe

in and you've been in a place for like 10 years as a kid, it's like

you breathe in like your childhood.

Yeah.

And, and it was really exhilarating for me to, to be able to do that this morning.

So, um, oh, that's a little bit of an old school soul.

That's awesome.

All those old school memories.

And well, tell us what inspired you to write your book.

Like, I know, uh, you wanna help other people win, but tell us a little bit

more about that and, and some of the lessons people will get from that book.

Because I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna put, I just put it on my read.

Yeah.

We'll send, we'll, we'll send it over to you.

So what happened was, you know, I've been doing this since 1999 and myself,

like I'm sure most of the entrepreneurs and audience here went through COVID.

And if you think about one of the most difficult jobs to have would be

trying to raise capital for health and fitness, bricks and mortar companies

that were all closed during COVID.

And it was almost like if you guys are Star Wars fans, or sort

of the first Star Wars where Luke Skywalker is in the trash compactor.

And he is trying to keep all the different walls from crushing on his cohort there.

The landlords after 60 days want to get paid their lease because it

doesn't have a COVID clause that you can't stop paying your rent.

Your members are all going on freeze because they don't wanna really

pay you to just work out on Zoom, so they cancel their memberships.

Your debt provider who says, oh, I'm flexible capital, you

know, flexible capital is.

Flexible for about 90 days when they don't get paid interest and

then they're not flexible anymore.

I was the advisor, or I like to say I was a certified, I'll say self-certified

entrepreneurial therapist, probably like you were during COVID to your

clients and, and your audience.

You know, I was trying to help people get to the other side and

as I was trying to get to the other side, I always thought of it as.

Hey, we're kind of down in soccer or in in roller hockey, or you know, in

softball, like, we're down five, nothing.

And we're only in like the middle of the game.

So what do we need to do to make sure that we kind of tighten up and we gotta

fight every day, you know, and negotiate against each one of these counterparties.

So it's almost like you're playing like.

A three or four if you're playing volleyball and you are in the middle

as like the setter, but you actually playing four games at the same time and

you just have to keep rotating around.

So we helped keep a lot of people alive.

We were able to negotiate and basically go in and parachute and help

restructure Some companies, take some companies through voluntary bankruptcy

so they could get out of some of their leases and at the same time.

Uh, Netflix I watched, or was HBO Netflix.

I watched the Last Dance, which was the Michael Jordan documentary about

how to build a dynasty and how to have a team, and how to have the commitment

to winning and the discipline to do it.

And I started thinking about all these things that, wow, if my company actually

treated their employees like professional athletes, how would that change?

What if instead of giving everyone in my health club or my client's

health clubs, instead of giving them a shirt that said Trainer on the back,

what if I put Wilson on the back?

What if I put Gene?

What if I put your last name and your favorite number?

Would that change the way you behave inside the club?

Because now you're playing on my field.

You know, you might play back in high school, you might be a college athlete,

you might've been a professional athlete, and now you're a personal trainer,

or now you're the general manager.

I always felt like you probably didn't, Kirsten, did you play any sports back

in the day or nothing on your side?

Well, gene, like, you know, you put a, you put a jersey on it, like.

It's like, okay, it's game time.

And I feel like in business, people don't necessarily feel like every

day is game time, but it really is.

In the health club industry and the boutique studio industry are basically

an extension of playing team sports because you get to go into a place

where there's loud music, there's turf, there's weights, there's group

exercise classes, there's team cycling.

So I, I said, okay, look, you give everyone a uniform.

The other thing I said was.

If somebody leaves your club and your employment, or they get fired, take

their jersey back and take the embroider name off the back and put someone else's

name so everybody knows that you are on my team or you're not on my team.

And that's how a lot of clubs think about employees.

Also, you know, when we grew up, it used to be that you made a team.

If somebody got injured, then you know, we didn't hire, we didn't

add another kid to the team, right?

We just played with the team that we had.

If you had 12 people on the volleyball team and somebody

twisted their ankle or somebody.

You know, broke their arm.

Okay.

We're down to 10 people.

A lot of companies hire people constantly, and managers and and

executives are constantly adding people.

So I say, why don't we just do it twice a year?

Okay, we're gonna hire you in January and you're gonna play for us in this season.

I'm not giving you lifetime employment and I wanna find out day to day do

I win or lose with you on my team.

If you watch hockey, there's something called a plus minus ratio, which basically

means how many times were you on the ice when we scored and how many times were

you on the ice when someone scored on us?

It's a plus minus number and it's a key performance indicator.

So I tell my clients as part of it, like what constitutes a win?

And a lot of people in business don't really think about, did I

win today or did I lose today?

Right?

So if you're a baseball player, you better get used to losing.

Because you're gonna lose at least like 62 games a year.

Maybe you'll win a hundred, that's like the best that you're gonna do, but you're

probably gonna win 90, you know, lose, you know, like 72 if you're in the playoffs.

So what I tell my clients, and I tell people that I talk to on time

to win again, is like, you have to tell me every day if you want a loss.

So I keep a calendar with a win loss.

Every day, whether, and, and part of it's qualitative and

part of it's just how I feel.

Did I get a workout in?

Did I sleep well?

Did I eat well?

Did I limit my sugar?

Did I talk to my friends?

Did I laugh today?

Did we do $2,000 a day in sales if I'm a health club or a boutique studio operator?

So I feel like people need to make a, a scorecard and you should treat yourself.

Like, did the team win?

And I did.

It was great.

Jean and Carson, I did a seminar.

One year for a Gold's Gym chain.

And then I went back the next year to the same group and I went around and I

said, you know, it was, it was October.

So I said, you have the nine months.

What's your record so far per month?

And um, and this group had instituted their own win-loss calendar on their

own based on what were our sales today, uh, how many employees did we keep?

How, what was our, our traffic, what was our personal

training conversion per month?

And they had a scorecard.

And I went around to like the nine managers.

They came in all wearing Gold's Gym, football jerseys, and I

almost like cried because I'm like, they're playing like a team.

And they like took what I said and they're like, Hey man, we got football

jerseys, we got baseball jerseys, and we got hockey jerseys and like

all like every day we switch 'em up.

I'm like, that's awesome.

And everyone's got their name on the back so they feel like

they're an athlete again.

So I go around the room and I'm like, what's your reckon?

They go, first guy looks at his book and he is like.

We're seven in two this this year, right?

So every month they're like gauging, like did they win this month?

I got taken aback because I had implemented this for myself, but no

one's really implemented like a, have you seen a company that does like

their own win loss daily or monthly?

No.

So I was like, this is awesome.

So I want to get that out there.

Like it's time to win again.

And the reason why the book's called Time to Win again is because I wrote

it during COVID and all my clients were basically like in hibernation.

Mode and trying to make sure like, Hey, can I stay in business

until like the vaccine comes out?

So once you get to the other side, right now it's like,

okay, it's time to win again.

Let's like, we don't have to feel like, you know, don't look back, look forward.

I always tell people like, lose your rear view mirror because no one cares.

About what happened in the past and a lot of executives and my

mom, my Jewish mother says, should have coulda, would've done this.

Like, doesn't matter what you should have coulda would've done, it's what we're

gonna do today and tomorrow that matters.

So there's 52 takeaways in the book.

It's written as a caricature book, so it's kind of like good to great meets.

Where's Waldo?

And I do a podcast called Halo Talks with executives.

So I, I bobble heads of everybody on there.

So that's my long-winded answer of why I wrote the book was

to make people realize like.

If you could be better and you can win more days than than lose, then you

are going to be a profitable business.

And then you could come back to me and say, Hey, I ran this

business for 10, 15, 20 years.

I wanna sell it.

And as a guy that I used to work for, used to say to me, his name's Peter Brockway.

He was a private equity investor, very savvy guy, really nice guy.

One of my investors are good friends.

He says, if you create value when you want to sell it.

Someone is gonna pay you for the value that you created.

If you run a business and you put the right pieces in place and you understand

your special sauce, and in our industry, if you understand your unit four

wall economics and can explain it to another investor of how the flywheel

works, how do we make money here?

A lot of people that you talk to don't.

They'll say like, I'm running this kind of store.

Well, what does it really do?

How do you make money?

How do you get leads?

How does the engine work?

If I'm buying a business, I wanna buy an engine.

I'm not buying like a plane that glides.

I wanna buy a company that has an engine.

That's how I think about it.

I think it's so awesome because it's a very inspiring title, how to

Win Again After COVID, because I do feel like so many business owners.

Well, one, we saw a massive amount of people starting business during COVID.

Yeah.

Especially in the online space.

That was kind of impressive.

But yeah, I can imagine if you had that type of business where, you know,

once you get knocked down that hard, sometimes it is hard to get back up and

then it's hard to think, can I win again?

Yeah.

So that's inspiring.

So there's 52 lessons.

Can you tell us, just give us one or two more lessons because it

sounds like you've been there.

Yeah.

So I love.

All team sports, and I'm a big football and hockey fan.

And another thing that happens in football as an example, is you get

three timeouts in each and every team takes all their timeouts.

You know, they wanna stop the clock because they're planning for a play.

They want to stop the clock because something's about to go wrong, or they

want to stop the clock because they fix something that just happened that was

wrong, that we don't want to happen again.

Now how many people have you met that said.

Hey, I took a time out in my business.

Okay.

I changed the software, or I took a time out.

I closed the company for the day.

Okay?

I just put up sign that says closed, and I did sales team

training, or I got low morale.

I took a time out.

I took everybody on a trip.

Nobody takes time outs in business.

To fix things and it kind of drives me crazy because if you belong to a health

club, okay, and they sell you personal training, the way that they used to

sell personal training is you've been to like a health club where you buy

like a 10 pack of personal training sessions and then they wait for someone

to like use the 10 pack and then they.

Try and sell 'em again.

Well, a lot of clubs over the last 15 years have taken those 10 packs

and said, okay, Kirsten, for 10 sessions a month, we're gonna charge

you another $300 per month and every month you use it or lose it, okay?

Mm-hmm.

And I'll put you on there and, and I want you to use it because

I want you to get results.

But what I also want to do is I don't want have to sell you every month and

try and find you and track you down and annoy you to say, okay, let's

like gimme your credit card again.

Right?

So a lot of clubs have put their personal training on what's called EFT.

Or electronic funds transfer.

So I'll pay $39 a month for the membership and then I'll pay 2 99

for eight or 10 30 minute sessions, small group training session.

And it's generated a significant amount of revenue and a significant

amount of results for members.

And also what it's done is it's kept the personal trainers who are

really good not looking for another job because they could get paid now.

So it kind of covers all the different.

Frustrations that you could have in your business and you are keeping it on your

credit card because you're using it.

Or if I stop that, you're basically giving up hope and the vision

of what you want to be, right?

So there's a lot of reasons why this works.

So I'll go to a health club operator.

I'm like, you guys have personal training on recurring.

You know what?

I think I'm gonna, what month is, oh, it's August.

I think we're gonna put that in in like January or February.

Put it in like next week, right?

Take a time out, get the software set up, do a meeting with your personal trainers.

Do a blitz.

To all of your members on September 1st and stop leaving money on

the table or telling me you don't have time to fix your business.

Like imagine you went to a game and like the team was not playing well,

and at the end of the game they're like, Hey guys, you had six timeouts.

How did you not take any of those to just calm people down, fix the

play, and then get back on the field.

So that's another thing.

The other lesson that is important, that's the last one,

is to always take the points.

So as a football analogy, you know, if you have the ball at the 10 yard line

and you could go and you could try for a touchdown and get six points, or

you could kick a field goal for three, you know, that's an important lesson.

I have got a lot of entrepreneurs that say, Hey, I wanna sell my business.

Somebody offered me $5 million for my, you know, pet supply business,

but I want 5.5 or I want six.

And I'm like, what are you gonna buy with that extra million dollars that

you think you're gonna get after tax and after fees and expenses, you're

gonna have another like 400,000.

What can't you buy with the 5 million that you're gonna get?

So to get the last dollar in every deal is like, you gotta take the points.

So I, I've had clients and every single one of 'em, resents not taking the deal,

every single one because when you get a buyer to spend their time and they wanna

buy your business, you have to strike.

And if that's off by 10% or 15, maybe even 20% of what you

quote unquote want or need.

Just remember if you sell your health club chain or restaurant chain.

For $20 million and somebody was like, oh, that was worth 25.

Okay.

Let's just say as an example, that $20 million pre-tax versus that extra $5

million, you can manage your lifestyle, that you're not leaving anything on

the table, you know, in your experience or in your, you know, to high five and

to protect your family for generations ahead if you manage that properly.

So you have to take the points is one of the other takeaways, and

that's why teams manage the clock.

They manage the business.

Those are probably like three of the big takeaways.

Treat your team like professional athletes, give 'em uniforms, take

time out and take the points when you have the ability to do it.

I love that.

That is awesome.

So your book is called, again, time to Win Again, and we are

excited that we are helping our clients as well get ready to win.

Yeah.

So if people wanna reach out to you, Pete, they're listening.

They're saying, I love the sports analogy.

I love everything that he has to say and I need to talk to him.

What's the best way for them to reach out to you?

Yeah.

So, um.

I've got a Halo Talks podcast that we release, release weekly.

I've got two minute financial drills that we do every Wednesday.

Comes out on our network, which is through, uh, my firm Integrity Square and

at Halo Talks and at the Halo Advisors.

So we'll have all that for you guys on the show notes.

I'll also give you my email address, pete@integritysq.com.

And my cell phone if you want to text me, is 9 1 7 5 4 3.

Nine four.

Five.

Five.

And the reason why I give you that number is a quick story.

There's a lot of health clubs and a lot of operators and a lot of

business owners that you can't find their number on on a website.

You can't find their number.

Like in the contact us and I went into a restroom.

In Orlando for one of my clients who has five health clubs, and there was

a sign above one of the urinals that says, if you have a problem, anything

in this club text me, pleasant Lewis.

And he gave his cell phone number.

And I'm like, this is a guy who wants to find out what the problems are and

I want to fix him and I want to connect myself to the member and be accessible.

So why can't I give you my cell phone?

Why do I have to like try and track it down?

If you wanna reach me, that's how you reach me.

Send me a text.

I'd love that.

Yeah.

Do it right?

That's right.

That's great.

Well, I love what you guys are doing.

And look, every, every entrepreneur who succeeds is helping in some way

impacting the next person or creating like the inertia for someone to

be like, Hey, you got a good idea.

Just go after it.

I think the only thing people need to realize is that what you're doing,

you're doing an experiment, okay?

And sometimes in chemistry.

Experiments don't work for whatever reason.

So the worst thing you could do is be like a failing

entrepreneur for 15 years, right?

The best thing you could do is like have five different companies that

you start and each one's like a three year experiment, and you're

gonna find the one that actually is the frustration that you solve.

I always start when people come in.

And say, what's a frustration that you're solving and is

someone willing to pay for that?

That's where the business comes from.

I love that.

Well, Pete, we'll make sure that we have all your contact information,

including your phone number in the show notes below, and uh, we can't

thank you enough for joining us today.

Yeah, well, I'll be a subscriber and I appreciate what you guys are doing

and keep, keep charging forward and have a great rest of the summer.

Thanks.

Thanks for listening to the six Figure Business Mastery Podcast.

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