We were lucky to catch up with Mike Hansen recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Mike, thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

At Endorphinz, their mission is to help fitness creators and fitness brands connect with consumers using media, resulting in billions of fans of fitness worldwide. But in order to truly understand the story of the company, you have to start with the storyteller, Mike Hansen.

Mike grew up playing sports. He was a little bit overweight as a child, and in his senior year of high school he decided to use fitness to transform his body and his life, which left him with a lasting impact. Fitness helped give Mike the strength and confidence he needed as a person, and led him down a long and winding path with fitness at the forefront.

From a professional perspective, Mike’s been in the fitness industry for over 24 years. Thinking he needed to “get a real job” to make more money, Mike left the industry for a time but ultimately came back. He realized during that process that fitness is his passion, so when he came back to the fitness industry he put on his entrepreneurial hat and set out on a mission to make fitness fun.

Mike wanted to make fitness more accessible so that others could feel the same things that he felt – the benefits of confidence, community and more. Through this process, Mike ended up building one of the largest commercial fitness gaming companies in the world, leading with his mission: making fitness fun. His company took off, and was in the top 100 in Entrepreneur magazine.

Soon, Mike was immersed in the media technology side of the fitness industry. Ever since then, he’s looked at ways to utilize technology and media to transform the fitness industry and reinvent the ways people can experience and share fitness.

About a decade ago, fitness was heavily driven by the brick-and-mortar businesses. There were at-home options, but it wasn’t as popular as it is today. Being the innovator that he is, Mike set out to break down the four walls of fitness. This mission led Mike to the world of media. He wanted to extend fitness services outside of the brick-and-mortar facilities, but it wasn’t until later that his idea started catching on as he learned that timing was critical to his foresight.

Fast forward to 2019, and Mike was working on a project with the largest software company in the fitness industry. He was helping them think about how to support their customers with streaming and online media, and how to streamline their business overall. As a platform company, it made a lot of sense to be able to deliver content and media (on-demand video classes) for their customers. During this process, Mike quickly discovered that there was a problem.

“It’s a four-legged school and there’s a leg missing”, Mike said to the CEO, explaining that yes, there needs to be a platform to deliver content to the customers, but it’s what you do on top of this platform that matters. If your customer doesn’t have good content and they don’t know how to create or deliver that content through digital marketing, production, etc., then their platform will not perform well. Mike saw that currently, there was nobody fulfilling that objective for the fitness industry outside of a bunch of independent contractors or really expensive agencies. There was no single point of contact, no company that could take a brand into the online world.

Just like when retail went to e-commerce, there were companies that stewarded that process because the people, resources and business model were completely different than traditional retail brick-and-mortar models. Mike founded Endorphinz to help with the same problem, with the mission of connecting fitness brands and fitness creators to consumers using media, with the ultimate goal of having billions of fans of fitness.

The vision of Endorphinz, however, is much bigger than the mission. The mission is consistent with everything Endorphinz does, but the vision drives the business forward. Endorphinz continuously finds ways to utilize media to help raise the fitness industry into the mainstream, just like the food industry, the gaming industry, the home industry, etc. “We have this opportunity in the fitness industry,” Mike says, “we are going to take a brand and creators and be that platform that people can sit on top of…we are going to give them a voice to be successful, utilizing media.”

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

Mike got into the fitness industry through his love of sports as a child, which led him to pursue a healthier lifestyle with the goal of making fitness fun.

Endorphinz is the only vertically integrated resource for fitness video production on the market. Because we have a tactical trade in fitness, Endorphinz has all of the elements needed for fitness video production: the programming, the talent, the set, the production and the creativity.

We understand that companies and creators want to create content to extend their brands to gain more fans. And a lot of the time, creators need help figuring out what their brand is and how to portray it through media. Endorphinz provides both the technical skills needed to make high quality, on-brand fitness videos, while also empowering creators in the fitness world to create and promote their authentic brand.

For big brands, Endorphinz understands that they need a partner they can trust and rely on rather than having to hire a bunch of independent contractors. Because of our vertical integration, big brands don’t have to waste time going to different businesses to complete a project. Endorphinz offers the full package, all in one place.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When the pandemic happened, Endorphinz had to move deeper into the production side versus the service side. Initially, when we started the business, the idea was to have production, digital marketing, etc. all in one to take a retail brick and mortar business into Ecommerce. What we did during the pandemic was move heavier into the content creation and production side, and we let go of digital marketing and some of the general advisory. We still did some of those services as a value add-on, but we weren’t really selling them. The market conditions change, and we have to change with them as a business.

Anytime you go through a pivot, you have to figure out how to take the existing resources and apply them in a new direction without 100% disrupting the existing business, which is very complicated, because sometimes people have to change their responsibilities. You have to think about how to maintain your people and resources at the same time, and a lot of the time you have to run two different businesses at once. Will you fade one out? Will you fade the other one in? You can’t just turn one off and turn the other one on. So we worked with that during the pandemic, and ultimately came out on the other side with the largest fitness media production company.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

There was one business transaction where I gave a quote to a customer, and in that quote I put in a service that we weren’t currently doing as an option for them to choose. We never really thought that the person was going to choose it. In this instance, we were moving into a remote broadcasting model and we hadn’t done it at this scale yet, and the customer never hired us to do it, but all of a sudden came back to us one day and was like, “hey, I think we are going to do that remote broadcast thing you talked about.”

So I went back to the team and told them we needed to figure this out. The team was telling me we couldn’t do it, that it wasn’t going to work the way we thought it would. I told them no, it has to work because I sold it! So we got a meeting together, and sat down with different advisors. They told me it was possible, but we couldn’t do it the way I wanted to, it had to be done another way. That weekend I went home and watched a ton of YouTube videos and found some people doing some of the things I’d thought of, but in other industries. I was able to basically say, yes, we can do it, and here’s how.

I went ahead and got a few people that understood what I was talking about, and we were able to pull it together. It wasn’t clear how we were doing to do it, and we had to piece it together in order to get it to work. We had roughly four to six weeks to pull it off, and we had already committed to the customer and still didn’t have a full resolution or solution. But, we ended up pulling it off and basically sold something new for us that soon became a core product of our business.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://endorphinz.net
• Instagram: @endorphinzmedia
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Endorphinzmedia/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/endorphinz
• Twitter: @endorphinzmedia
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/endorphinz
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/endorphinz-tampa

Image Credits
Endorphinz