We were lucky to catch up with Brian Goldstein recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Brian, thanks for joining us today. One of the toughest parts of scaling a business is maintaining quality as you grow. How have you managed to maintain quality? Any stories or advice?

It’s unquestionable that the world has been through a lot over the past 2 years. However, what it takes to develop and grow a business really hasn’t changed. It all comes down to people and processes. What the the recent pandemic may have amplified is how important it is to be flexible, while maintaining structure.

Everyone has different wants, needs and perceptions that control how they feel about the work they do. In the service sector, it is common for people to work multiple jobs for various reasons. Identifying ways for team members to want to allocate more of their time to your business ultimately improves their engagement, personal satisfaction and quality of service. Learning what makes each team member want to be more connected requires being humble, listening and being open to change.

For us, change occurred in various ways. Starting with the underpinning need to sustain a great team and culture, we heard some team members sought health care benefits to take care of themselves and family members. As such we partnered with a primary health care service provider and fully cover the cost for any team member scheduled to work 30+ hours a week. Not only did this afford multiple team members the ability to proactively address their health care needs at no additional cost, but it helped team members more strongly commit to our business and client needs.

Many team members expressed interest in greater flexibility and earning potential in their role. This was accomplished by adjusting our compensation structure as well as our booking and confirmation process. We effectively established public and private schedule that allows for regular availability to to published on our website and via the StretchLab app while internally our Flexologists (service providers) can note additional times they are available, 6A-8P, to work with clients.

Given the high demand for service, it’s imperative to maintain a high quality schedule. This meant that we had to establish and enforce 2 specific policies: 1) all services must be prepaid, and 2) all cancellations must be >12 hours prior. Since life is unexpected, we had to establish a clear set of exceptions to these new rules. This allows us to uphold high client service standards while ensuring team members are appropriately compensated.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

While always into health and fitness, I wouldn’t say I took a traditional path to operating 2 of the fastest growing health and fitness brands today.

20 years ago, following engineering school at Purdue University, I had the privilege to learn from the best at The Dow Chemical Company in the areas of sales, marketing and business management. While with this amazing company from 1999 – 2013, I grow as a business professional through the support of leaders who believed in me. I was empowered to take calculated risks which resulted in double-digit annualized growth in business profitability, but more importantly discover my full potential.

I was recruited in 2013 to lead the commercialization of a novel oil and gas technology and later assumed responsibility over the marketing and technology commercialization group. Prior to exiting this venture in 2018, I had the opportunity to participate in their IPO and later their integration with an industry peer as part of a merger. During this 5 year tour, I learned the value of building company culture while being humble whether in the boardroom as well as the breakroom.

In 2018, along with my wife Robyn, we evaluated various businesses from technology acquisition and development to franchising. Interestingly, we agreed to go down a different path from what we knew – brick and mortar Health & Fitness services. Starting something new and learning new systems has never been a challenge for me, however I had never worked in a consumer facing business. As a natural introvert, this was going to be the greatest hurdle to overcome, second to our crazy idea of acquiring the rights to be the largest franchisee of two relatively new brands – StretchLab and Row House. Mind you, there was not a single open franchise location in the country at the time.

Fast forward to the near simultaneous opening of each brand in Houston, when I learned I was in for a whole new type of education – that of individualized service and compassion. Ironically, what I didn’t know is how much I’d LOVE this level of personal psychological and emotional interaction. While I have always taken pride in helping family and friends, I had never personally communicated with thousands of potential clients to deeply learn about their needs, interests and unique life-stories that got them to where they are today.

Simply put, we are in the business of taking care of people. Helping people overcome injury, relieve everyday aches and pain, improve self-confidence as well as cardio health and strength. I empower my team to care for and help people. Yes, we have a business to operate, but at the core, we always try to treat people the way we’d want to be treated. I accept team members for who they are. I don’t care if they look a certain way or have different points of view as long as they have humility, compassion toward others and able to learn from mistakes.

From my early professional development, I learned that every job plays a role in your career. As people have different wants and needs at various stages of life, I try to understand this for each team member to tailor their role, responsibilities and development accordingly. As a result of me practicing what I desire from other, I feel we have built a team of stellar people who are excited to not only help each client, but also their team members in the time of need.

It is through this level of engagement and commitment that we are able to the best at what we do.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

Once an engineer, always an engineer. Ask any of my team members and they’ll tell you overthink everything. I do this to identify potential conflicts while making sure new processes are clear and technologies are easy to use. Over the past 3 years, we have seen a lot of change and challenges. Ultimately we have to find ways to do more with less. While we don’t want to remove the human element of a client’s experience, there are a lot of repetitive customer service task and administrative actions that can be streamlined to allow our team to focus on the most important task at hand, being present to connect with clients and address their needs. By creating quasi-personalized communications that are automatically sent to clients upon meeting certain conditions, we can maximize the number of client touch-points without sacrificing team member burnout. In addition to condition based email and text messages we make it easy for clients to reach us if we are available to accept a phone call. We use Zapier to connect our VOIP phone system and texting platform, so any missed call is automatically text to engage in a more convenient mode of communication for all parties. Creating frictionless communication makes it easier for clients to connect with us on their terms as well as track conversation flow for quality control.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.stretchlab.com ; www.therowhouse.com
• Instagram: @stretchlabbellaire; @stretchlabheights; @stretchlabpearland; @rowhousebellaire
• Facebook: @stretchlabbellaire; @stretchlabheights; @stretchlabpearland; @rowhousebellaire
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/stretchlab-bellaire/; www.linkedin.com/company/stretchlab-heights/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE7ASlSWBKwwMteai5hsc_Q/featured (stretchlab); https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsuP7E-MMGuNBdkxwLSWjSQ (row house)

Image Credits
Meredith Flaherty Photography, https://www.meredithflaherty.com/