We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brandon Thomas a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Brandon , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
After 4 years of professional basketball and 5 years of training at big box gyms, I decided that I wanted to merge the 2. A gym that caters to adult fitness but also caters to youth athletes. Many gyms do one of the 2 but there are not many in Austin that cater to both. Playing basketball my entire life it was inevitable that I would have a career around basketball at that moment I had no idea to what capacity that would be. I hadn’t gotten that far. Did I want to coach? Did I want to do skill and development? How would strength training become a part of it? So my wife and I found a small warehouse and started coaching adults in small group strength classes. After a few months, I started a youth strength and conditioning program and began to reach out to local high schools to offer my service. Once we started building relationships with schools in our area with our youth strength and conditioning, I began to start coaching summer ball for Westwood High School. My old college coach became the coach there and reached out to me to coach his girl’s team during the summer. From there I began to train kids and coach. The next thing you know it all started to fall into place. We have our studio where we run our adult fitness classes and our youth strength program, and I now run Sweat Hoops my basketball program where we train and coach kids in the area. Did I know all of this would come together? Honestly even with a little reservation in the begining, I knew once I started to build relationships it would happen I just didn’t know at what rate it would grow and how it would look but I knew it would happen at some point. I guess you can say to a degree we were solving a problem becuase youth spourts/training is not really combined in our are but the services are provided. Seeing parents and kids alike succeed and our training being a part of that is what gets us excited.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Brandon Thomas, I’m from Austin. I graduated from Pflugerville High School. I attended Navarro College where I played a single season of basketball and from there transferred to Texas State University and finished playing college basketball there. After graduation, I went to play professional basketball abroad in Switzerland, Japan, Finland, and India. Once my career ended I started personal training at a few big box gyms, 24-hour fitness, and lifetime fitness. I left the big box gym sector to go into the small boutique gym sector. There I was able to learn more about the gym business on a more personal level and learn a lot about the day-to-day process of running a gym. This inspired my wife and I to open our boutique gym, Sweat Athletics.
Sweat Athletics has been open for 7 years now. We are located in north Austin, On 620, and Lake and Lake Creek, in the Lake Creek shopping center. We offer adult small group classes, youth strength classes, and private training as well. I’m proud of how we’ve grown with the community in which we serve. When we opened our doors our number goal was to be a part of the fabric that makes up the community around us. We don’t want to be just another gym. We love our community and we are active in our community and that’s what separates us.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Covid-19 made our entire industry pivot. We immediately went to online classes and training. I was not a fan of it. I love coaching in person. I love talking to our members, joking with them and just catching up on life, and more importantly, it’s much easier to coach form and technique in person. So online coaching made up most of our 2020.
How did you build your audience on social media?
This is something we have started to focus on this year. We are starting to build a stronger presence on social by being authentic in our posts. I view it as a mobile business card. Show potential new members what we do in class or training. We try to interact as much as possible. A few pointers that have helped us as we have navigated social media are consistency posting, a schedule to help with what type of content you want to post, and lastly interacting with users/potential clients when they comment or send you a direct message.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.sweatathleticsatx.com
- Instagram: SweatAtx
- Facebook: Sweat Athletics