We were lucky to catch up with Sami Sweeney recently and have shared our conversation below.
Sami, appreciate you 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?
My husband and I launched RowdyBox – a Seattle-based fitness brand and concept – following 11 years of owning and operating multiple franchised fitness studios. We launched RowdyBox in efforts to share our combined decades of experience in the fitness industry with our love for boxing, results-based strength training and building community. Our Rowdy mission is to inspire every person who comes through our doors to make measurable changes to their level of fitness and overall well-being.
We’re firm believers that physical movement is necessary for overall health. If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that we must take personal responsibility to care for our mental, physical and emotional health. RowdyBox provides a platform to drive positive change in our clients, supporting and inspiring our members on their journey to better health. We believe in the power of daily rituals that cultivate self-confidence and encourage personal growth. We lead by example. We hire and develop those who also lead by example. Our team walks the walk, demonstrating how consistent physical movement, self-discipline, celebrating wins (no matter how tiny), and pushing beyond your comfort zone can lead to a healthier, happier life.
Our fitness brand strives to offer more than just a workout; we offer an experience that empowers our members to unleash their inner strength, both physically and mentally. Our state-of-the-art facility is designed to foster an energetic and uplifting atmosphere, where every punch thrown is a step towards personal growth and empowerment. We’re inclusive, accessible to athletes of all levels and committed to innovating and adapting to keep our community thriving.
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?
In my younger years, I trained as a competitive gymnast. I’ve always had a passion for coaching others in exercise and movement, likely because I experienced firsthand the benefits of being coached and training rigorously from a young age. Additionally, I have always loved helping others achieve their personal goals, especially those involving fitness and healthy physical movement. I majored in finance and economics and instantly knew, if the economics ever made sense, my dream business would revolve around coaching, fitness and team development.
In 2010, I opened a fitness studio in Seattle in partnership with a company that was in the early stages of franchising nationwide. Over the next 5 years, I proceeded to open an additional 5 franchised fitness studios. My husband, Brandon, quit his career as a lawyer in 2013 to join me as a multi-unit fitness franchisee. With his legal skills, strategic thoughtfulness and quantitatively driven business acumen, we grew some of the franchise’s most profitable studio locations while managing a staff of over 100 employees. We also played various key roles in the franchise’s corporate-level systems, including marketing, innovation and teacher development and training.
Although franchising was a rewarding experience, Brandon and I eventually outgrew the parameters of the franchise. In efforts of broadening our market research, Brandon and I traveled world-wide, studying the various fitness markets in different geographic locations and cultivating the inspiration to create our own fitness concept. In 2018, we had our RowdyBox prototype. The inception of our budding RowdyBox vision was rooted in our passion for both fitness and now the business of fitness.
RowdyBox was designed to be a fitness experience unlike any other. We planned our launch, built entirely new and updated business systems, hired and developed the best talent we could imagine and built our innovative, edgy, high-end gym in the heart of Seattle…in 2020. In hindsight, our poorly timed (mid-pandemic) grand opening taught us many lessons in our own resilience, adaptability and grit – all pinnacles of our current brand.
Before we ever opened our doors, we aimed to build a business that we could strategically scale. Every internal business system – from marketing, to our coach/team onboarding, to class formats and exercise programming to our sales strategies and more – were built with scalability and growth in mind. Just one year after opening our facility, we partnered with an international group to launch RowdyBox in Jakarta, Indonesia. This major step towards broader, global expansion is one we couldn’t be more proud of. Our unimaginable growth into a non-english speaking country – one in which culturally, women rarely engage in strength training, let alone male-dominated fight-inspired sports – forced us to change our limited mindset around growth that followed the pandemic. Our pre-pandemic goals to transcend the social/cultural boundaries and standards around exercise were illuminated on again.
Although Americans are attending gyms at a lower rate than they were pre-pandemic, we’ve found that people will attend a gym that offers a unique, inspiring group experience that can’t be replicated at home. The night club vibes of our group fitness room – the Rowdy Room – coupled with the high-end equipment and top-of-the-line coaching offered clients a refuge from their at-home fitness habits, or lack thereof. Today, the retention rate of our average client surpasses the nationwide industry average by an impressive amount. Our online reviews, average class size and the lifetime duration of our members suggests that we’re offering an unparalleled, exciting experience. We remain committed to understanding our consumers and adapting our services and class offerings to create the biggest, most positive impact possible.
Our RowdyBox community, our people, continue to inspires us and lead us in ways we never expected. We don’t take lightly that nearly every individual who has walked in our doors initially took a big, scary risk. Every client we’ve earned the trust of had the courage to step out of their comfort zone and walk into an edgy boxing club for likely the first time ever. They wrapped their hands, put on boxing gloves and learned a new skill in a room full of others, forced to embrace the beginner’s mindset. In a time where our country was socially-disconnected and often less active than ever, our clients took personal responsibility to reconnect to community while improving their health and wellness. We continue to adapt and evolve our fitness brand and offerings to meet the needs of our changing community members.
We’re also deeply inspired by the brave and talented individuals who joined our team and became employed by a service-based start-up in the wake of the pandemic. A start-up that appeared to stand no chance to succeed in the damaged climate of our industry. Despite the odds being stacked against them, our team helped build a connected, upbeat, inclusive culture. From our coaches, to our studio coordinators to our leadership-level employees, we work with some of the most passionate, adaptable, loyal and driven humans we know. Our team is the primary reason we have managed to grow and prosper over the past 3.5 years.
Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.
My post-college side hustle is exactly the reason I am where I am today. Following University, with a double major in finance and economics, I left college certain that my 20’s would be spent employed by a financial service company, consistent with my previous work/internship history and academic experience. However, I still wanted to be involved in fitness in some capacity following my college-level cheerleading and intramural sports experience, so I sought out the side gig of coaching fitness. My husband, Brandon and I had recently moved to Nashville, TN where Brandon attended law school. In Nashville, I launched my professional career in business management with an entry level 9-5 and I also started teaching a pilates/barre based workout concept in my free time. I was less excited about my full-time job, but was very excited about my fitness coaching side hustle. Little did I know, this part-time fitness instructor position would fast-track my entrepreneurial career in the fitness industry.
Moving to Nashville from Boise, Idaho, and then starting a side-gig in fitness, proved to be the most pivotal experience in my early career. Shortly into my part-time employment role at this fitness studio, Pure Barre, I was hired in a larger capacity to run the studio’s operations and eventually work for the founder to develop a franchisable teaching system and teacher training program. I spent an exciting 12 months working for the founder of Pure Barre before I decided to raise the requisite capital to open a location of this newly designated franchise. My location of choice for this franchise was Seattle, WA. At 24 years old, I had built a team of 10 employees and a growing fitness studio.
I recognize that most side-gigs don’t typically provide the opportunity to build a full-time, revenue-generating business. I also know that my timing of discovering a budding fitness chain at its inception was nothing short of serendipitous. I have tremendous gratitude for deciding to coach fitness as a side-gig at a young age, a side gig that brought me so much joy and opportunity. In short, I capitalized on the first opportunity to make my side gig a bigger player in my trajectory towards building my personal career success. The best career-based decision I made in my 20’s.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
In my experience, resilience is learned in the trenches, in the muck of the trenches. Resilience is the inner strength that one develops from remaining optimistic in the face of adversity and challenges. To become a resilient leader, one must first be introduced to uncomfortable (and sometimes seemingly impossible) challenges, an experience that often derails people from achieving their goals. For me, to have true gratitude for the resilience I’ve cultivated over my entrepreneurial journey, I must also have gratitude for the countless challenges I’ve had to face head-on. Undoubtedly, I wouldn’t be where I am today without having experienced the psychological and emotional stress of the challenges that I was forced to overcome in order to succeed. My path to resilience was hard-earned. A two-fold path that 1) on multiple occasions, almost cost me my life savings, my life’s work, my relationships, and my self-belief and 2) has also provided me the opportunity to do the work I love, with people that I love in an autonomous, exciting and profitable role for businesses that I built alongside my husband.
As a young, multi-unit franchisee, I encountered endless challenges. The financial challenges and constraints of scaling were endless. In my initial year of franchising, I was forced to relocate a studio due to sound issues and neighboring tenant complaints. I struggled finding talented and loyal, brand-compliant staff. I struggled with building scalable internal systems. I encountered major setbacks around training, marketing, client management and brand consistency. As a franchisee, I also struggled mightily with limited franchisor support as the brand was sold 4x over to various venture capital firms in the time I owned my studios. But alas, as I encountered major setbacks over my franchising career, I always found ways to persevere. I sold all 6 of my franchises profitably in my early 30’s, an experience that taught me volumes about the rewards of staying true to my vision, strategically navigating setbacks and building true, personal resilience.
The biggest test of my resilience to date can be showcased in the launch of RowdyBox. Originally, we were slated to open RowdyBox in April of 2020. This passion-driven business was one Brandon and I had been crafting for years, in every nuanced detail. The launch of RowdyBox quickly became a living nightmare. In 2020, RowdyBox opened 7 months over-schedule and incredibly over-budget. Additionally, we opened in a market that was devastated by the pandemic, in a city that was proving to be anything but economically resilient to the effects of Covid-19. The pandemic-related lockdown nearly put our business out of business before we ever had a chance to open for business! Every single aspect of our RowdyBox plan was shattered. Our efforts to put our collective decades of fitness business experience towards our greatest work appeared to be allfornot. Imagine, it’s as though we were in the bottom of the 9th inning with the bases loaded, no outs and our heaviest hitter up to bat. We just needed 1 point and we’d be living out our dream! My husband and I were confidently racing towards the win. Then, the entire industry was unrecognizably damaged in just a matter of days.
Our industry was in shambles, and in many ways, still remains in shambles. The financial setbacks we endured from being forced to open 7 months after our scheduled opening nearly bankrupted RowdyBox, before we ever had the chance to generate revenue. To make matters worse, our target market shrunk to a fraction of it’s original size. And the hits just kept on coming! Our business was forced to close down completely on 3 separate occasions due to increased covid-19 transmission rates. And in our first year of business, the pandemic-related government mandates around gym operations were so strict that many gyms were forced to close their doors for good. We were operating with more uncertainty and bandwidth than we’d ever experienced.
For better or worse, Brandon and I believed so deeply in our vision, and the services we planned to offer, that we continued fighting for what we believed in. We fought for our RowdyBox mission, our talented team, our faith in our service(s) and plans for execution. And most importantly, we fought for the community of people we knew would benefit from the work we were eager to provide.
I share the following knowing very well that 2020 was a nightmare of a year for so many. It is not my intention to diminish the tragic effects the pandemic had on others, business owners and non-business owners alike. The following is simply the best illustration of personal resilience I’ve experienced in my work as an entrepreneur…
In the summer of 2020, in addition to having a newborn baby and having to pay rent on a high-end commercial space that legally couldn’t generate revenue, I also landed myself on the small business advisory board that worked directly with the WA state political task force who was in charge of creating covid-related mandates for small businesses across all industries. Although the pandemic was an unfortunate setback for most small businesses, many service-based businesses, including fitness, were disproportionately affected by the pandemic. I worked tirelessly to provide the task force with real-time data and research in efforts to salvage the small biz industry as a whole. I personally wrote countless petitions, charged hard for (tens of) thousands of community-generated signatures, and I spent grueling hours testing new PPE, various sanitizing procedures and ultimately championing for better science-based research around fitness and gym-related activities. I was on a newfound mission to help illuminate the real costs/benefits of allowing small fitness businesses to operate with various safety measures. Fortunately, my time and energy-intensive effort resulted in more wins than losses once all the dust settled.
Once we became relatively out of the weeds of everchanging mandates and increasingly threatening transmission rates, we started to gain our footing as a small start-up. My husband and I fiercely focused on what we knew we could realistically control and influence. Within less than 12 months of our official opening, we navigated a path towards real growth and profitability. Although we started small, and far deeper in the red than any small business should start, we were tenacious in our efforts to make RowdyBox a success.
Brandon and I have remained focused and steadfast on our original – pre-pandemic- RowdyBox vision for the past 3 years. We’ve built a beautiful business and community of like-minded individuals determined to become healthier and happier. and connected to community. We continue to grow in size, revenue and memberships month-over-month. 3 years following our less-than-grand opening, many small businesses are continuing to close their doors around us in downtown Seattle. For us, we are just getting started. We remain optimistic in our pursuit to offer the best workout experience and fitness community in the state of WA, and beyond. A deep-seeded optimism that only exists in those who understand the enormity and value of their hard-earned resilience.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.rowdybox.com
- Instagram: @samisween
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sami.d.sweeney/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sami-sweeney-20274622/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@rowdybox7445
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/rowdybox-seattle