Interview with VASA Fitness Director of Fitness Product Gini Grimsley
Matt: Thank you for taking the time to do this interview with me Gini. First question to kick this off, you've had quite a journey with your career from playing college basketball to your current role as the Director of Fitness Products for VASA Fitness. So you started out as an athlete and transitioned over into personal training, which is a common path for many members of our industry (myself included). I'd love to hear about how your past experience as an athlete has shaped your approach to designing fitness programs and systems.
Gini: This is a really good question. I don't think it's ever been posed in that way, but I have this conversation pretty often with one of our HR directors, who's also a former athlete. The thing that continues to pop up in my mind as a common theme is that there are progressive ways to teach sport, if you will. You go through the youth stages, you go through the developmental teams, and then you can go to play at the college level. If you’re lucky you can earn the opportunity to play at the pro level. It’s a very clear progression. Having this framework in my mind has really helped me with building my career and also with how I approach teaching fitness. When you’re working with a trainer or a client, they have to know that you can't jump all the way to the end. You can't jump all the way to the college or pro level, to use that example, without first working your way through the developmental stages. When I’m thinking about training, for our training staff and members, we have to start with the basics. We have to get really good at the basics and THEN we can layer on nuance. If we don't follow this process then your skill set will be pretty limited and you might be able to make progress only to the JV team level versus eventually reaching your maximum potential. And I don't want to make it sound like reaching a JV level isn’t an accomplishment in the grand scheme of things. To me it’s really important to be realistic with what your fitness ceiling is. If your ceiling is only to a certain level of development, maximize it. Don’t let it discourage you and change course to something that’s not going to be as impactful to your personal health and fitness. Maximize what talent you have, what skills you have, and who you are as a person. That's so important, especially when working with a Gen Pop member base. We don’t need more people trying to be fitness influencers with a million followers doling out blanket advice (laughing). At VASA we have the opportunity to help people dramatically improve their health and fitness.
Matt: That makes a lot of sense. When someone joins a VASA Fitness you’re not setting the same long-term target for everyone, like hitting a 500 lb deadlift for example.
As you reflect on your career progression, from starting as a personal trainer working directly with clients to managing trainers and eventually overseeing systems across multiple locations, what were the key lessons you learned as you advanced into higher levels of fitness program management?
Gini: Understanding that I didn't have as much control the higher I went. When you're working with clients, you have complete control. You're doing scheduling, you're doing programming, you're doing check-ins, you're doing all of that. Then you become a PT manager and realize okay I have less control over the clients, but now my influence and control is over a group of trainers. Then I moved to more of the corporate role I have now and I currently have very little influence on the clients and minimal influence on the trainers themselves. The question became how can I directly impact these leaders to get them to buy into what we're trying to do as a company? You have to come to terms with the fact that you can't go in and do the day to day work and get into the weeds like you used to. When I was still a trainer there were ways that I could influence people so that we were all rowing in the same direction.
Matt: So it sounds like as your roles at VASA advanced you had to lean more and more into trusting your teams and the systems you put in place to help guide specific actions.
being put in place.
Gini: Yes, that’s the specifics of how it gets done, but the key aspect that helped provide the direction that we all needed was first starting with what VASA’s vision was. As a company and team, you have to align on what the philosophy and guiding principles are. That was one of the first things that we focused on when I took over personal training at VASA. Asking what did we want to be known for and how that is different from other offerings in the market we're in.What were the things that we want to be known for? And thank goodness we had a document within VASA Fitness that helped set the culture and vision for the entire company to work off of. That gave us the starting point to continue to work off as the vision for the personal training department was defined so we could work towards it. Once that vision was sent that sets the stage for us to go out and hire a specific type of person with a target level of education. The vision was what gave us the motivation at VASA to build one of the most robust sets of resources that I’ve seen at any HVLP (High Value Low Price) fitness business for our trainers at no cost to them. The vision is what motivated us to continue to build opportunities for our training teams to access information that allows them to level up their skill set and career.
Matt: And you basically perfectly answered the next question I had, queued up which is fantastic. So building off of that, it sounds after the vision and systems are set it comes down to trust and holding the teams accountable on their execution to ensure that the target experience is being delivered upon to each and every member at VASA.
Gini: Yeah, it's one of those things I have to trust that we've put the process in place and now our operations team knows what to do and that they’ll raise their hand for help if they need it. We’ve reached the point at VASA where we can clearly tell from a data standpoint which clubs and teams are leveraging the resources they’ve been given and that they will help them reach their target goals. When the goals aren’t met we have the ability to go through the vision, the resources, and the execution together to pinpoint what needs to be focused on to make progress.
Matt: So StrengthPortal and VASA have been working together for about a year now and we love being a partner that can contribute towards VASA's vision. Can you tell me about the review process you had when looking for vendors and what led to you selecting StrengthPortal’s software platform?
Gini: VASA tends to be a little more selective and thorough in vetting vendors. We want to know what the potential vendor's vision is because we want partners and vendors who are aligned with our vision. When we started looking at the different personal training platforms that are out there I probably called every single person between here and the US and Europe. We wanted to talk to each vendor on a call to get a sense of where they were as a company and how their business operated. That was about a three month process of just interviewing vendors before we landed on StrengthPortal. The thing that attracted us to StrengthPortal wasn’t all the bells and whistles. It was that the software was designed in a way that made it easy enough for our training teams to start using immediately, whether they were very green or a super experienced trainer. Additionally, StrengthPortal could quickly support an integration with the platform all of our data was within and our member mobile app. There were platforms out there that had certain features that were really strong and sophisticated, but what we needed was a platform that we could implement quickly into our training teams. We believed that once the harder parts were in place we could work with StrengthPortal overtime to add additional layers of complexity.
Matt: Absolutely. So after building out the integrations required to kick this off we’ve gone through initial pilots at a few locations to rolling out to all locations in the last six months. We’re able to view some initial data, but it’s still too early to show the progress being made on our shared long-term visions. Knowing that, what are you noticing from seeing StrengthPortal being used by the training teams so far?
Gini: We’ve noticed that the platform was picked up really quickly by our really experienced personal trainers. I think that’s because there's a level of maturity to know that as a trainer I don't really need all these crazy bells and whistles from a platform when a month ago I was just writing everything down on paper notebooks (laughing). To me that says we made the right selection.
Matt: So StrengthPortal is meeting the needs of the highest functioning team members right out of the gates.
Gini: Yes.
Matt: Glad to hear! Have you noticed any impacts stemming from our integration into the VASA mobile member app yet?
Gini: The StrengthPortal integration into the VASA mobile app has made the conversations around homework and progress a little bit easier. I think our trainers and members are still figuring out how to best use this tool in their routines since it’s a new workflow with a few steps that didn’t exist before, but that’s to be expected. I’m looking forward to reviewing the return in the next 6-9 months.
I am really looking forward to the chat feature next year. Once it’s released it will help us better protect our personal trainers as an extra layer of privacy compared to sharing your phone number with your training clients. The current industry status quo has the potential to be a scary situation, especially for younger trainers, that we don’t want our trainers to be in. With the law of large numbers for fitness business member bases you’re going to run into a few crazies out there. Back when I was a personal training manager at a different company we just had all of our phone numbers listed on our bios in the gym. Every once in a while you’d get a crank call from someone just screwing with you, but there’s an opportunity for something worse. StrengthPortal will help reduce that risk.
Matt: That makes a lot of sense. So now that we’ve completed the first goal of rolling out to all locations there’s a foundation to work off of to start to build towards VASA’s future goals. How do you see this partnership evolving over time?
Gini: I don't know of anyone else in our space that has effectively implemented a digital tool for their training teams. We know that step one is getting this setup and fully integrated into our training program. As this continues to mature, StrengthPortal will allow for us to have further quality control with trainer-client relationships and to deliver an even better experience for our members. There’s always going to be a percentage of members that will stay as just members and not convert to training clients, but we want this software to have a positive impact on training clients lifetime value and possibly even general members lifetime value.
We have a lot of stuff in the works that I’ll hold off from announcing publicly yet, but there’s a bright future for StrengthPortal and VASA working together.
Matt: The future is bright, the future is bright.
So broadening the scope of this interview a bit, I feel as if the fitness industry as a whole is starting to really build momentum again after 2020 and all of the effects from the Pandemic. We knew it would take some time, but I’m seeing lots of progress being made towards the stated long-term visions again. What are your thoughts on that? Additionally, what is getting you really excited about the next few years in our industry?
Gini: In 2020 and 2021 I think people went all in on the digital space. Before the pandemic the standard view was that in-person was the only way to do things and now we’ve all agreed that a hybrid approach to fitness (a combination of in-person and online) is what makes the most sense going forward. It’s good that people have more equipment and options at home at their disposal. It’s good that they can do yoga at home, for example. There is a broader realization right now that fitness isn’t a luxury activity and that it should be an essential part of all of our lives. This gets me really excited because it means we all have a future in this industry (laughing) and that’s getting solidified even further.
In parallel there are some larger organizations working with the labor department to make being a certified strength coach or being a fitness professional a nationally tracked occupation. That would be huge for shifting the public perception of individuals who work in this space. Trainers are not just salespeople, they are not just meatheads (laughing)! These are people who are here to help
One other thing that I'm really excited about from an industry financial standpoint is the continued progress on being able to use HSA funds and FSA funds for gym services. That was not something until recently that you could even do and without paying for a letter of medical necessity, either from your primary care physician or any of these services that are offering those. The opportunity to be able to use exercise as medicine and treat the chronic lifestyle diseases that are plaguing the country now is huge. There's a lot going on that is really positive for the industry, but also for the consumer.
Matt: I couldn’t agree more. To me it feels like the industry is still super nascent and that there’s a huge upside opportunity available.
Building off of that, we both have a similar goal with the work that we do of trying to help create opportunities for trainers to have full careers in this industry. Do you have any last words or advice for anyone in or potentially considering this career path?
Gini: Personal training might be one of the most emotionally rewarding, and frustrating at the same time, jobs you'll ever have. You can make good money in this space, but I don’t think that should be your main motivation for pursuing a career in fitness. Same as in any other career path. You have to be willing to put yourself out there and it's much more than just writing programs and breaking down macros. All of that is probably secondary to the behavior change piece, especially if you're working with general population clients. Once you start this career there will be a lot of things you’ll have to learn on the job that personal training certifications can’t teach you. I’d recommend that you go shadow someone who's been a trainer for more than five years. It might take you some time to find that person, but the ones who make it to that mark are probably doing pretty well for themselves. So find a role model so you can build an understanding of what the job actually is versus your current assumptions. You’re going to have to start at the ground level and work your way up in order to make enough money to stay in the industry and also to find a niche that people are willing to pay for. I don’t think it’s a good path to just say, “Oh I can train everyone.” Yes, you technically can, but you’ll position yourself much better if you specialize. It is totally ok to start broadly to test and see what works for attracting clients for yourself, but it makes a big difference when you specialize. The last thing I’ll say is that you should really think about whether you want to get into management or not. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a full time trainer. Historically you sort of had to move on to be a manager to earn a certain income level, but hopefully that doesn’t have to be the case in the long-term. There are different challenges and stresses with being a manager and it might not be the best fit for you personally. For some it is, for others it won’t be, and that’s okay Luckily in this space you can always transition back to being a trainer and have a really direct impact on people’s lives. That might just be my “retirement” plan (laughing).
Matt: Well way down the road I look forward to the opportunity to work with you as a trainer (laughing). Thank you so much for the time Gini, this was great!
If you'd like to learn more about Gini and VASA Fitness please check out the links below:
Interviewer's note: This interview was recorded over a phone call, transcribed, and edited. Some sentences may be edited slightly for an easier read.