We recently connected with Calah Young and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Calah , thanks for joining us today. Do you have any advice regarding quality control and maintaining quality as your brand grows?

As a young child, I remember sitting down in a restaurant with my dad and the manager of the restaurant spoke to us as he was sweeping the floor. My dad made it a point to tell me that the manager would be a good one to work under, because even as a superior, he wasn’t above doing the most menial of tasks himself. Of course, at that time, I had no idea I would ever grow up to own a business or hold a management position, but this observation really stuck with me.

When my husband, Mike and I started Athletic Lab in 2009, it was just the two of us. As Athletic Lab has grown and continues to grow, something that has become a necessity is delegating tasks. Mike and I simply cannot physically do all of the work ourselves as we did during the startup of Athletic Lab. As busy as Athletic Lab is within the walls of its facility- for which we’re likely best known- we’re just as busy off-site. We have staff helping to oversee online services and coaching education, as well as scattered out throughout the area while providing training at other locations. We’ve divided Athletic Lab into different sectors and we’ve hired several directors to oversee those divisions within Athletic Lab. These positions are only assigned to the most trusted employees who have proven themselves as a good fit for the position and although we allow quite a bit of autonomy to each director to complete their specific job, we have measures in place to ensure duties and tasks are appropriately being completed. I can assure everyone that Mike and I have at one point completed those exact tasks ourselves before they’ve been handed off to someone else.

We’ve tried really hard to maintain those small business touches that are often lost as a business grows. I’ve had long-standing members come to me with their concerns that Athletic Lab won’t continue to feel like “the same Athletic Lab” the more and more we continue growing. Despite how large our community has become, you’ll still find us sending out handwritten notes. It would be much easier to send out automated messages to everyone, but a handwritten note is a personal touch that we still work hard to provide. It could have been very easy by this point for Mike and myself to have gradually become distant administrative figureheads of the business who you never see or interact with. In my current role with the company, I could easily fulfill my responsibilities off-site. However, I am a firm believer that the owner of any business should physically spend time on-site in the business. Sometimes, I think taking a step backwards to complete the most menial of tasks puts you in the best position as a business owner or a manager to oversee quality control. On a daily basis, you’ll not only see Mike around the training hall, but I also insist on setting aside time during the busiest on-site hours to work at the front desk. The front desk is a position that could certainly be handed to another employee as an entry-level position and it can make my job otherwise difficult with the distractions that come along with being at the center of the entrance and exit. However, being at the front desk allows me to know exactly what’s going on in our business. I view the front desk as a major on-site vein into the heart of Athletic Lab through which nearly everything and everyone pumps into the building. Being at the front desk provides an opportunity to learn everyone’s name and it allows me to personally meet and greet everyone as they come and go. I learn about their lives and their goals, the celebrations or defeats they have going on, the projects they have coming up at work, or the plans they have for the weekend. It allows me to be an approachable face to the company and a familiar face to those who have been with us for several years. I know immediately if sessions are running ahead or behind on schedule, which provides me with feedback on class programming. I know if staff are on time or running late for work. Being present also provides a chance to ask for feedback when everyone is exiting the facility. Although there are oftentimes logistics that members might not be aware of, this does open the door to real-time suggestions on how to improve our services if anything is lacking.

I recognize that it’s unusual for the owner of a business the size of Athletic Lab to be sitting at the front desk, so people aren’t really expecting it. Mike is well-known around the world in our field and he is easily recognizable to most people who come to Athletic Lab. Many are drawn to Athletic Lab because of Mike; however, not a whole lot of people know of me or know what I look like. Very few people who walk in for the first time know that I am an owner of the business. In fact, members will sometimes be around for several months before figuring it out. I really prefer it like that. It tells me quite a bit about that person to see how they interact with me when they think I’m a front desk attendant and not the owner of the business. It’s a good indicator of how they might treat the rest of our staff. It almost never comes from our own member base, but people can be unkind at times and although I try to just let it roll off my back, I do have a tendency to carry that home with me and let it ruin my day. It can be difficult at times, especially when people approach the front desk and ask to speak to my manager, so I have quite a bit of empathy for not only anyone who would work at our front desk, but for those who hold customer service positions in general. Our facility is very large, so sometimes if something is broken or out of place, it could be difficult to spot. I’ve found that cleaning the facility provides me with an opportunity to not only ensure the facility is cleaned to my standards, but I also see every square inch of the building and our equipment. If there’s damage and something is missing or out of place, I’ll see it up close for myself. I hope our staff is able to recognize that I’m not above doing the dirtiest and most menial jobs of Athletic Lab myself. I believe that if an owner of a business ever finds themselves distant or out of touch with their growing business, it’s likely because they’ve delegated away much of their own role or they’re not spending enough time within the walls of their company. Although it takes a lot of extra effort, they should perhaps backtrack by picking up a broom or by sitting down at the front desk.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

After my husband, Mike, and I graduated from Louisiana State University, we found ourselves coaching at the West Point Military Academy in New York. When our daughter was born, we knew we wanted to make a change. With a lot of thoughtful planning, we left New York, moved to North Carolina, and we started Athletic Lab. Before moving to Cary, North Carolina, we had never even visited the area; however, it checked every single criteria we were searching for in a city to start a new business, while still remaining relatively close to our family. Even when we were searching for locations for our business startup, I honestly don’t think we could have fully predicted just how much this area would become such a hotbed for the growth that its seen in the past decade.

Located in the heart of the Research Triangle, Athletic Lab is North Carolina’s premier sports performance, fitness, & athletic research center. Awarded Morrisville’s 2020 Small Business of the Year, Athletic Lab boasts a brand new 25,000 square foot showcase facility. Athletic Lab, known as the largest and most well-equipped facility of its kind in North Carolina, is the training home to the NC Courage FC, North Carolina FC, NCFC Youth, the Junior Hurricanes, junior and high school individual athletes and teams, professional athletes, and everyday fitness enthusiasts.

Our motto is “Game Changing. Life Changing.” The Athletic Lab community is very diverse as are the goals of our clientele. You might attend group classes with the goal of losing a few pounds and the person training across the gym from you could very well be an Olympian or a World Cup champion. Athletic Lab provides an all-inclusive environment where we are results-driven, so it doesn’t matter to us how you arrive at Athletic Lab, but it does really matter to us that you leave better than how you came in.

Athletic Lab operates an onsite coaching mentorship program that draws applicants from all over the world. The mentorship allows us to spend an ample amount of time with each mentee, which then provides us with an opportunity to hand-select the best of the best for the hiring of our staff. We are partnered with a Brazilian-based company, Elite Training, that has launched our coaching education curriculum in Portuguese while offering clinics throughout Brazil and Portugal. We recognize that it’s not always feasible for those who are interested in our coaching education to travel to North Carolina and to commit to our on-site mentorship program. As such, the Athletic Lab Coaching Academy has been one of the most recent additions to our services. This is an online coaching certification offered in both English and Portuguese that allows coaches to earn their coaching certifications from Athletic Lab by following along with our coaching education online.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

We are frequently asked this question and the unique backstory of Athletic Lab’s startup funding actually boils down to timing and Mike’s wise financial decisions early in our marriage that came before we even had plans to start a business.

When Mike and I were students at LSU, we owned a house with a fellow student in Mike’s doctoral program. We rented out parts of the house to other students and this helped to cover the mortgage. As we were finishing our studies in 2005 and getting ready to leave Louisiana, we placed our house on the market. The following week, Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana while pushing a large population of residents from New Orleans to Baton Rouge who were seeking housing. It was a bit surreal. There were people lined up in their cars on our street waiting to look at the house. People would knock on the door at all hours asking to come inside to take a look. A cash offer came through that we accepted and we were extremely cognizant that we did not want to take advantage of anyone given the circumstances of the hurricane, so we actually accepted less than what had been offered on the purchase of the house. Being in our early twenties, we suddenly had a pile of cash.

It would have been easy to spend that cash as we were graduating from school and starting out, but instead, we moved to New York and started working. Mike wisely took the cash from the sale of our house and invested it into Apple Inc. (AAPL). I think Apple Inc. might have offered the early edition iPod® and some computers at that time, but fast forward to 2009 when we were starting Athletic Lab, and those stocks had grown substantially. We sold them as we needed funding available to start Athletic Lab and that is how we funded the business startup.

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

In 2019, we had a beautiful new facility built from the ground up. We had been working for a decade to gradually work up to the point at which we would have a new state of the art building. After eagerly watching the blueprints morph into the construction of the building, we finally opened up for business in the new facility in November of 2019. By March 2020, just four months after settling into the new facility, COVID-19 hit and North Carolina placed a mandatory closure on all gyms. It was a closure that would last for six months. Our brand new 25,000 square foot facility, for which we were paying, sat empty and we were legally unable to use it. As one can imagine, the overhead on a space of this magnitude, which could not be used at all for generating revenue, was not easy to swallow. Ahead of the pandemic, we had been holding meetings about moving some of our services to an online platform, but we could not have predicted that the closure would last as long as it did.

Each morning, we would wake up and get to work while in quarantine. Mike had our home office and I had a makeshift desk at our kitchen island. We kept in touch with staff through virtual meetings. In those early days of quarantine, I’d have to take a deep breath before opening my laptop and counting through the number of emails in my inbox that held requests to either cancel or hold memberships. The pressure that we were under to keep Athletic Lab afloat and to keep as many of our staff paid as possible, all while our facility had been kicked out from under us, was something I hope to never experience again. We had the livelihood of our staff riding on our shoulders. It never came to it, but Mike and I decided we would take out personal loans to pay our staff if we needed to. During those virtual meetings with our staff, Mike and I were probably much like swimming ducks: appearing calm above the surface so as not to induce fear in our staff, but underneath the water, we were kicking around as hard as we possibly could to to stay afloat by finding streams of revenue.

There were many members who stuck around to support us even though it was clear that without a facility, we couldn’t fully offer them what they were paying for. To this day, I still don’t know how we could ever appropriately thank everyone. We moved as much of our training online as possible. We changed our class schedules and held virtual sessions with members while they were quarantined at home. Even though the quarantine eventually ended, gyms were still under a mandatory closure for quite some time. We couldn’t train anyone inside our facility, but we were allowed to hold classes outside. When we moved into the new facility, we had a lot of extra rubber flooring and equipment that had been left over from our old building in a storage unit. This storage unit had been sitting in the parking lot. We got to work laying out the old rubber flooring in the parking lot and we took equipment from inside the building and put it into the storage unit. Several times a day, we would take tons of equipment out of the storage unit and carry it into the parking lot for classes. Between and after classes, all equipment was disinfected and wiped down before being carried back into the storage unit. The outdoor classes were really hot during the summer months and even though we had to dodge thunder storms and mosquitos, our members still showed up for us. Although the circumstances were terrible and it was backbreaking work to disinfect and move the equipment several times a day, I do have some fond memories of those outdoor classes, mostly because it was great to see everyone again after the quarantine. We did what was necessary to survive by adapting to our circumstances. On the backend of things, Mike worked to salvage our contracts with teams and organizations.

Now, in 2022, Athletic Lab is bigger, better, and far busier than ever while surpassing our pre-COVID metrics in every regard. I know this story could have had a much different ending and the juxtaposition is seen in the number of gyms in the area and across the world that have been boarded up since COVID-19 hit. We don’t take that lightly. Athletic Lab is resilient. We are alive and thriving now due to this resiliency, as well as creativity, adaptation, amazing members, and the refusal of giving up.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.athleticlab.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/athleticlab
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/athleticlab
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/athleticlab
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/athleticlab
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/athletic-lab-cary-crossfit-morrisville
• Other: https://www.athleticlabacademy.com

Image Credits
@sunnysaucefotos @createdbybrian @landlimited