We were lucky to catch up with Michele Gomez recently and have shared our conversation below.

Michele, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

I had a smaller version of my current business prior to opening up my own facility and I had to come up with all the logistics of that business in a very short amount of time so the name I decided on was something simple. I was originally called SA MVC (San Antonio Most Valuable Cheer) which was a cute play off MVP. While growing SA MVC, I knew eventually I would need to change my name to make it more “business savvy”. It had to be something catchy and I wanted it to be something no one else had. I had to take into consideration what it would sound like when the MCs at competitions announced it as well as how it sounded being chanted by all the fans. It also needed to be industry related and strong!
So after about a year and a half of playing with names and word combinations, I finally decided on FullOut Xtreme Cheer. For those that don’t know, a full out is when you practice your routine all the way through with all stunts, tumbling and to the music–giving it everything you got! But that is not where it ended…
While in the works of getting my own facility open, my son in law asked one day what the name was going to be and when I told him, he had a thought and came back with “Oh, so FOXC” (pronounced foxy). This was the beginning of what has now become our staple. FOXC cheer is now becoming recognized and is the strong name representation that I had been searching for!

Michele, 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?

I coach all star cheer teams, teach tumbling and do choreography for cheerleading. We currently have several competing teams. I also currently work with several high school cheer teams around town where we teach tumbling and stunting skills as well as full choreography and choreography clean up. My gym offers classes for kids ages 4-18 and teach the basics of tumbling all the way up to working the highest skills. We believe in small class settings to allow more one on one with the coaches. Active coaching allows the kids to learn better and faster when trying to acquire new skills. I personally did cheerleading when I was younger and I can honestly say it was the best time of my life! When I eventually had kids, my husband and I were going to sign up my son for football when he was 5 and when they saw I had daughters they encouraged us to sign them up for cheerleading. Of course we did and then the now infamous words in my life were said, “We can always use volunteers!” and yes I am that type of mom that I agreed to volunteer coach for my daughters. At this point I had never coached before and was very nervous about what to do but I brushed off the memories of my cheer days and used my knowledge from then to teach now. I have been coaching cheer ever since that time.
I have been able to used my real life experiences with cheer and my personal mindset to grow my teams every year from the days of sideline cheer to now with the all star competitive teams.
I haven’t always won the top prize but I can proudly say that I have always improved my athletes and more importantly myself so that I can continue to do what I do with great success.
People come and go from everyone’s life and whatever time frame I have with an athlete I pride myself on improving them. Making sure that they are more advanced when they leave than when they first came to me. Some have stayed for a very long time and others move on to other things but I can very confidently say that I had an impact on every athlete no matter how big or small the impact was.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

On the competition side of the business, the number of retuning athletes in an all star cheer program plays a very large factor in the success of a season. A few years after tripling our original number after first opening our doors, we had a mass exodus. As a program, we are always learning and trying to grow and unfortunately, the group of athletes/families that left were those that had been with our program for several years and learned all their current skills from FOXC. Most came in with little to no experience however, after several years of our training, they had grown to become the top athletes in our gym.
The unfortunate part is that these athletes and families felt they had outgrown us and our visions for the future had separated. FOXC was working on building a group of top athletes that would be the creme of the crop in this gym and would be the team that all incoming athletes would strive and work to be on, however, this type of dream team does not happen over night. It takes years of training and although we were absolutely headed in this direction, impatience and doubt began to creep in and unfortunately this is what drove these families to move on. They no longer wanted to learn with us and be the foundation of something we were building.
This was a very dark time in my life personally and as a business owner. I am a very loyalty driven person and the confidence in myself and in friendships/relationships had taken a major hit. I asked every question from “What did I do wrong?” to “Why am I not good enough?” before finally allowing myself to redirect my focus.
I hadn’t sacrificed all these years just to allow a bump in the road to stop me in my tracks.
We continued on with our open registrations and all the pre-season preparation and completed our rosters
with returning athletes and many new ones being just 14 athletes shy of our number from last season!
We have started our season and although the talent is raw, it’s there along with the coaching abilities of my very competent staff. We are almost two months into the new season and we are so excited with the desire of these athletes to be better. Everyone is working so hard and all the families are so supportive of our program and of their athletes.
Although I know that there is a revolving door in this world, I believe loyalty, trust and belief will take everyone to beautiful places and that is what I intend on proving this season!

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

My strategy for growing clientele is simply this…do what you do best. To have a successful business, you must have a passion and talent for something. Mine was cheerleading and coaching. After actively participating in the sport, and then volunteer coaching the sport, I found that I was pretty good at it. Not only teaching the sport and making kids successful at it but I was pretty good at reading the athletes. Seeing their potential, realizing their struggles and teaching them all differently yet the same. You can’t take one cheerleader at a time and teach them everything they need to know. This has to be done as a team but not all athletes learn the same or react the same to correction/discipline. I realized I had the ability to take 8-15 different personalities, learning abilities and attitudes and teach them to come together as a team and to win. When I first started coaching, every year was a different set of personalities, learning abilities and attitudes and I was able to coach each group to a 1st or 2nd place win for my first 10 years of coaching.
As the newer generation started joining, all of these factors began changing and the kids then were not the same kids of 10 years before and I had to rethink how I coached to be effective for the success of these kids.
Although I don’t have a clean sweep record, I know that I have evolved and grown my teams and myself and by doing just that, I have been able to grow my clientele.
Many of the families in my gym come by word of mouth and reviews online. If my athletes/families are happy, then I am doing something right and this, to me, is the best way to grow your business.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.foxc.org
• Instagram: fulloutxtremecheer
• Facebook: fulloutxtremecheer