Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lex Ronin. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Lex, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry
I think, as a whole, people are moving away from the “functional fitness” madness that has dominated gym culture for almost 20 years. For a while, the general population would do anything besides the things that actually worked, all in the name of “function,” without ever knowing what that function was. “Training for life” sounds deep, but in the end, it just turned out to be circuit training on a road to nowhere. Many personal trainers and corporate gyms are to blame for it.
Fitness is the easiest thing to achieve, yet the industry has made it almost incomprehensible on purpose. The general population seems to be waking up and rediscovering the classical methods of training that have always worked, and we are here to serve them. Not only in achieving their goals but also in ultimately knowing how to train themselves in the future and be 100% autonomous. No one needs a personal trainer for a lifetime. We should be a stop on the road at best.
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 back background and context?
Before I became a full time Business Owner , I think I was like a lot of people, in the sense that I saw my “real world” job and my “real self” as two distinct lives. I can remember spending very long days watching the clock, waiting for that 24-hour paramedic shift to end just so I could go train in martial arts for an hour or hit the gym. Before bodybuilding and martial arts, it was music. I played in bands from ages 13 to 33. It’s all I cared about. I was a terrible employee in literally every job I ever had, including the Army. I was the guy who was always late and screwed up basic rookie things. However, when I would get to what I perceived to be my “real” life, I would suddenly become this energized, focused guy who cared about details and loved even the mundane parts. It was a weird evolution from playing in bands to martial arts to weightlifting to going into business, but it all feels like the same project.
The big moment of my life was meeting martial arts instructors and personal trainers who did it full-time as a “real” job. All of a sudden, that power I had in my “off” hours was something that could sustain me in my “real” life. I did attempt to do personal training as a “side hustle” for a while and keep my paramedic career, but after getting fired for the fourth time in 2012, I decided to jump in full-time and make it happen. I had negative 100 bucks in the bank that day. I burned all my State of Texas medical documents and effectively made myself unemployable. It was June 15th. I celebrate that day every year. All six companies I worked for here in Texas have since shut down. So much for normalcy….
In terms of what we provide here, the sign on the front says it all: “Old School Fitness.” What exactly is “Old School Fitness”? It is the things that have always worked, that are time-tested (Western bodybuilding is almost 200 years old!) and can last a lifetime. The era that I draw the most inspiration from is the “Silver Era” of bodybuilding, which roughly spans from the early 1900s to about 1960. Just about from the birth of Bernard McFadden’s “Physical Culture” magazine to the earliest Muscle Beach culture that ended in the late ’50s/early ’60s when steroids started becoming prevalent in bodybuilding culture. During this “Silver Age,” most “physical culturists” were regular men and women with jobs and families and did not fit the modern mold of the 24/7 “gym rat.” A regular weightlifting routine was a 3-4 day a week rotation and was usually full-body and not much more than an hour. Just add clean classical American-style foods from that time, and you suddenly have some of the best bodies to ever exist. Examples? For boys, look up Steve Reeves, John Grimek, and Reg Park. For girls, look up the QUEEN: Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton.
Fitness is incredibly simple. Literally, everything you need to know to stay lean and athletic could fit into one issue of one magazine. I’m pretty liberal with the term “bodybuilding,” as most things that we want to get out of our fitness actually fall under the domain of bodybuilding. No one goes into a CrossFit gym to NOT see their body look good, regardless of whatever silly “functional” angle they are selling. The good news is that it’s a spectrum. The type of routine that I would prescribe to someone just wanting to shape up for vacation is the same type of program that I would start an aspiring competitive bodybuilder on. It’s largely a matter of varying intensity.
Aside from the actual “product,” i.e., the training, I can tell you with 100% certainty that what has made Ronin Fitness of Richardson successful is my private one-on-one approach. When you are here, it’s just you, me, and my dog Kit! There is NEVER another trainer or other people. People feel comfortable here, and they can just focus on making the training happen rather than worry about being surrounded by a toxic globo gym environment. Changing your body is very personal and needs to be done somewhere that doesn’t feel like you are in HR or a mall.
Finally, I think authenticity plays a role. You don’t keep clients for months and years at a time by trying to sell them supplements and upgrade packages. You get essentially the training and diet protocol that changed my life and that I train with myself today, and that’s it! Straight to the point and straight from the heart. Maybe the environment is fun too. My studio is only about 500 square feet, and about half my equipment is from the 1970s, with posters of the greats like Bruce Lee everywhere. I play ONLY high-energy 80s rock when we are training. It’s definitely its own thing.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I think 2020 was a story that pretty much the entire country can relate to. As a personal trainer and self-defense instructor, my entire operating model is face-to-face in the most organic environment you can think of, so a nationwide shutdown was literally the “worst-case scenario” a lot of business owners worry about. Thankfully, my teacher and coach Justin Everman from the A.C.W.A. has always encouraged me to think of things in a “where’s the win” manner rather than the “survival” mode that I tend to default to. If nearly 13 years in business has taught me anything, it’s that abundance and scarcity co-exist at the same point.
First, I offered some really extreme deals to all my existing clients for a few months, not only to give them some relief but, let’s be honest, to buy some loyalty and the business a few months of revenue while the world lost its collective mind.
Second, I raised my prices for new clients. I knew a lot of personal trainers are part-time or fly-by-night operations, so essentially the “competition” was cut in half, and the big box gyms were out of the game for a little while. The people who wanted personal training were willing to pay for it. It turns out the auto industry had the same idea and profited greatly from it.
Third, I doubled down on the marketing and improving the gym. My across-the-board MO is to advance during the “down” times in order to avoid the “digging in” mentality and focus on cultivation and process when the market is “good” to avoid the sugar-high of feeling like the good times are permanent. So far, my weird little philosophy has paid off!
Fourth, I had to learn to overcome my Luddite-like distrust of technology. I’m an analog guy through and through, but things the younger people use, like Zoom, really saved us. I was able to retool quickly and offer specialized seminars to groups and, of course, one-on-one instruction to people at home and, for the first time, people outside Texas. Learning to be a little more open-minded with the new digital products was a big deal.
From a personal perspective, I had time to really take advantage of the slower pace and work on some personal, niche things that really made a difference on the other side. I was in therapy for some trauma that I had been dealing with for literal decades and my “aha” moment came dead-center of all that chaos. I really see my life in two separate chapters now, and I don’t think it would have been so clean cut if it wasn’t for the lockdown. Also, I had time to really focus on some more niche aspects of my martial arts training that took my overall skill set to another place entirely.
The happy ending here is that we didn’t just “survive.” After five years of working to hit a certain earnings benchmark, we achieved it on June 15, 2020! Not only that, but we also had our best overall yearly profit ever! Ronin Fitness of Richardson has not been the same since then, and I really feel that the COVID disaster is what took us to the next level.
How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?
The beauty of my business model is that I don’t have to try to foster anything like a feeling of “connection” or “belonging” or (my least favorite buzzword) “community”—it naturally occurs here. Ronin Fitness of Richardson isn’t a gym; it’s barely a studio. It’s a small space where it’s just you, me, and the dog. I don’t have a cookie-cutter training method; my training style is about 80% intuitive. Spend several hours a week with someone in an environment like that, and you get to know them pretty well.
A lot of people stay for months, or sometimes even years. Some train for a few months and come back on and off to tighten up. I have old clients who just drop by to say hello. I get to know their lives, their families, their day-to-day. When you have an environment like this, keeping in touch and anything you might call “brand loyalty” handles itself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.roninfitnessofrichardson.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/challenge/?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2Froninfitnessofrichardson%2F%3F__coig_challenged%3D1
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/roninfitnessofrichardson/?locale=nl_NL
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roninfitnessofrichardson/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/roninoffitness
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/roninfitnessdfwdallas
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/ronin-fitness-dfw-richardson
Image Credits
Lex Ronin / Jacqueline Ferrari / Robert Goulet