We recently connected with Jay Sutaria and have shared our conversation below.
Jay, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.
In August of 2015, I had been out of college for 2 years and in the process of slowly but surely building my independent personal training business. At the time, I had only a handful of clients, and my schedule wasn’t very busy. One of the professional athletes that I had always looked up was playing for my hometown Houston Rockets at the time – Dwight Howard – had posted on Instagram that he would be doing a meet and greet for fans at a local Sprinkles Cupcakes. I checked the time of the event, looked through my (very light) schedule, and realized that I had the afternoon free to go and meet him. Up to that point in my short career, I had gained a ton of experience working with folks with knee injuries, and I knew Dwight was coming off of a knee injury suffered in the prior season’s playoff series. I arrived at Sprinkles Cupcakes to a line wrapped around the building. With just my phone and a company t-shirt to gift to Dwight on my shoulder, I waited for over 2 hours to get inside the building. Once I got in, I looked at Dwight and asked him how his knee was doing, to which he replied “it’s alright” but made a face while he said it. I looked at him straight on and told him I could help him with the pain, and proceeded to gift him my company shirt. He took out a sharpie thinking I wanted the shirt signed, and was taken aback when I told him the shirt was for him. Here I was, the only person in the line looking to give him something, while everybody else was there to take a cupcake and picture with him instead. Long story short, I ended up getting a phone call from Dwight’s manager a few weeks later. On the phone, he said “Big fella wants to take you to Miami and Vegas, and if he likes what you’re doing, then Dubai and China.” That summer was a whirlwind for me, as I spent 27 days outside of Houston as Dwight Howard’s personal rehab and strength coach. His openness to me using him as a marketing billboard meant everything to me, and allowed me to take huge leaps in my career very quickly.
Jay, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My passion for being in the gym started at an early age. From the time I made my middle school basketball team until I finished out my high school career, I was always one of the shorter players on the team. The only way I would make my mark on a ‘defense first’ team was to become a great rebounder, and the only way to become a great rebounder was to be strong enough to box out bigger and taller players. Unfortunately, my passion led me in the wrong direction, as I spent too much time in the weight room and relied on my basketball coaches (who had no weight training education) to coach me on form. During my JV year, I ended up being diagnosed with a bulging disc in the lower portion of my lumbar spine. The pain was bad enough that I ended up receiving multiple steroid injections and had to sit out my JV and Senior years. As disappointed as I was, little did I know at the time that my own injury would set the foundation for my future business. My injury wasn’t the reason I got into personal training, but it was the reason that I applied myself to the science of anatomy to a level that few other trainers are willing to match. These days, we have a number of boys, girls, men, women, and professional athletes walk into our facility to not only train, but train in a way that minimizes their risk of future injury. Our 3 phase system is geared towards ultimately getting everybody to reach peak athletic performance, but not at the expense of movement compensations and injury risk. Phase 1 is a phase in which we target these compensations and teach clients how to properly use their bodies to create movement, and it is the phase which sets the foundation. We team with other providers in a similar space, such as physical therapists, orthopedic surgeons, and chiropractors to ensure that our entire ‘village’ is on the same page when it comes to our clients. The one thing that we refrain from in our facility is group sessions. I truly do believe that the best and most detailed work is done in a one-on-one setting. There are less distractions for each party, clients are more tuned in to their movements, and the knowledge gained over each session is second to none. That’s what we call the “STF Way”.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
From the time I became an independent personal trainer in 2011 until 2019, I had spent time training at various privately owned gyms. The way it worked was I paid a monthly rent to use the facility, my clients bought a monthly gym membership, I could charge my personal rate, and that cycle would go on until I had enough clients to open my own facility. That moment came on March 2, 2020, when I opened the doors to my very own private training gym. Now if you’re thinking that month and year looks eerily familiar, you’re on to something. The covid pandemic hit less than 2 weeks later – and we were in trouble if I didn’t act quickly. The city of Houston was quick to put out the “essential business” order, which meant if you were a gym, retail store, etc. you had to lock your doors until told otherwise. I would say we got extremely lucky that the City of Houston business inspector hadn’t classified our facility as a gym. I remember him asking if we offered gym memberships, to which I replied “no, we only do private one-on-one training sessions.” He took this to heart, and classified our facility as an ‘office’ stating that we were more like a physical therapy clinic. So while all of the 24 Hour Fitnesses, Lifetimes, and Equinoxes had to shut their doors, STF Houston remained open, and it was the first time in my career that I had asked clients to active lyrecruit their friends & family for us. With gyms were closed and people craving for a gym to workout in, our clientele picked up and – as much as I dislike saying this out of respect for those that suffered terribly – the pandemic actually did a lot of positive things for our business, and we grew because of it.
Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?
Word of mouth hands-down is the way we’ve managed to grow our clientele. We don’t take shortcuts revolving around social media following or mass mail flyers. Humans as a species are far more likely to speak publicly about a negative experience than a positive one. This is one reason that businesses struggle to grow early on – they don’t prioritize customer service and the negative reputation starts to set in. My target is to eliminate negative reviews and combine that with giving every customer and client a platinum experience in the facility. While we know we can’t get everybody to openly talk about how great an experience it is training in our facility, some most definitely will, and those people’s friends & family will start to come in also. I’ve never focused on the ‘next’ client, but rather my attention is solely on the client in that moment. In the back of my mind, I know that if I do a great job with this client, then there’s a chance that they will refer us to a friend – a potential “plus 1”. If I don’t do my job, and the session is bad, then that sets us up for a potential “minus 1”. Instead of trying to grow the business large and fast, our aim is to grow it steadily through exceptional work and top-tier customer service. ‘
Contact Info:
- Website: www.stfhouston.com
- Instagram: stfhouston
- Linkedin: jay sutaria
Image Credits
Blake Hobson Chris Nguyen