Intro
Mark Fisher is the co-owner of Mark Fisher Fitness, a boutique gym in midtown Manhattan. MFF particularly loves working with folks that hate working out and/or sat alone at lunch in middle school. Our philosophy of training and nutrition is based on the Albert Einstein dictum, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not any simpler.” In his spare time, Mark likes dropping F bombs and playing with puppies.

Matt: When someone on the West Coast eventually attempts to model their business after Mark Fisher Fitness will you embrace them or will it turn into another Biggie-Tupac style standoff?

Mark: Wow. What a great question. The thing is that we’re so far into this that I honestly think it would be hard for someone to replicate our package. I’ll tell you that for the people who are influenced by us and embrace providing ridiculously animated value, if they choose to be inspired by what we do and make fitness fun and irreverent it would be absolutely amazing. We would be so supportive of that. In the unlikely event that someone just really tries to rip our shit off, like use Samurais and Pegasus, even then they would still have a really hard time matching our insanity. We’ve got dildos on the wall, drag queens, dudes running around with dicks between their legs, and much more. We just go to such a far place that it’s going to hard for most organizations to get away with even trying this stuff out.

Matt: I want to talk to you about your branding and marketing. At first glance it seems like it’s a package thats put together to just deliver as much shock value as possible, but it’s reality it’s hyper-focused on attracting a specific audience to come to MFF and give their fitness goals a shot. Can you talk about your team decided to go after this type of clientele?

Mark: You’re exactly right. My background was as a theater actor for a long time and that is a world of very irreverent people who are over the top and outrageous. Several years ago when MFF kinda became what it is now it just made sense to speak to them in a way where they could find joy and humour. This way they would really listen to my message. I’d been a trainer for many, many years and until we really gave MFF a go as a business I followed a much more conventional approach to marketing my services. With MFF we were targeting a demographic I knew very well and these people weren’t feeling any connection with the way the fitness industry usually represented information. The thing that is not lost on me is that a lot of people who excel at the business element of fitness sometimes do not have the most progressive fitness strategies. Not to judge them per say, but for me I was so passionate about the progressive side of exercise science and all the geekiness that goes along with that. So my hope is to provide all that progressive information with something that’s accessible to people that don’t feel comfortable in traditional gyms.

Matt: I believe you were spot on in your article on the PTDC when you talk about how this is the dawn of artisanal fitness. There will be room for so many different flavors of fitness as the market continues to grow, especially with online training. Are there any other fitness professionals out there that you’re excited about helping expand this new approach to fitness?

Mark: That’s a good question. I think that the people right now who are really coming at it strong are the female voices in the industry. That’s been really cool to see over the past few years with people like Neghar Fonooni and my friend Ann Wendel who’s a physical therapist. We’ve really seen the rise of a lot of strong female voices and that’s great because the general fitness population is historically a little more skewed towards females as opposed to the male-dominant strength and conditioning segment. A few things I think the fitness industry will target and see more of different age groups, more ethnicities, and something that’s near and dear to me, gay voices in the industry. It’s kind of a random thing, but I’m sort of seen as a gay-friendly trainer now even though I have a girlfriend (laughing). Going back to your last question, part of why I started working on in such a gay-friendly way with MFF was because so many of my friends were gay. These were people I knew that weren’t being spoken to as a market. Hopefully we’re going to keep seeing more and more of this inclusive approach.As far as who’s really running with it right now, I’m really loving those female voices coming through.

Matt: That’s awesome. The industry could definitely use more of this.

Going back to your recent PTDC article, when I read it I knew I was reading the work of someone who had taken their time to study business and psychology. I saw glimpses of the same business philosophies that inspire many of the innovators of Silicon Valley and our team at StrengthPortal. Can you tell me what led you along this educational path, especially after studying Musical Theater in college?

Mark: Honestly I feel as if it was a weird accident. I’ve always been a voracious reader and had these periods in my life where I would get obsessed with something and read everything I could about it. About four years ago I had heard enough trainers talk about reading E-myth so I picked it up. It was the first business book I had ever read. At that point I wasn’t really thinking about doing a business at all, but I started reading this book. From there I just continued my way through different business books that other trainers recommended. Because of the amount that I read within a year I had moved on to a lot of the harder, denser business material that I don’t think a lot of people in the fitness industry ever get to. It’s really weird to think that three years ago I was just a personal trainer who did group classes. The business growth has been sort of nuts. We have I think 20 full-time people, 850 clients…the business side of MFF has just exploded. One thing that I think is always a bit underappreciated is that my business partner (who did the Ted talk with me) did have more of a business background and came in with a lot of the skillsets that I didn’t have.

The book that really changed my approach and focus on improving the business side was Delivering Happiness. Once I read that book and started to look at business in a different way, an opportunity to deliver happiness, it changed everything for me. Previously I had enjoyed business as a sort of game, but now it was this vessel for improving the human condition. I’m so passionate about organizational culture and creating an environment where people are stoked to come to work every single day. It’s something that a lot of people are missing from their life. I just believe so strongly that positive business environments which are driven by missions greater than any of the individual players and committed to the well-being of all shareholders that they touch….that is what fuels the powerful businesses that continually deliver happiness and improves the quality of life around the world. I know that’s super idealistic, but as you can can tell I’m so into it.

Matt: Building off of that, what are some examples of what you’ve done to continue to grow and improve the team at MFF?

Mark: There’s a lot of things we do. We certainly have a culture built around getting better. We have ongoing personal development stuff. Weekly team meetings where we focus on life coaching, interpersonal communication skills, as well as the ongoing development on the actual skills of coaching and training. Additionally, we provide a yearly stipend for people to go to seminars and purchase books. We do a lot of personal work with the trainers to help lead them to the information they are most interested in to continually develop them for long careers in the industry, which will hopefully be at Mark Fisher Fitness. It helps that the first few team members really stepped up and walked the walk to show how important the continual personal development was. Reading books, going to conferences, just staying really hungry to get better. All of these things combined created a culture that is obsessed with improvement. We can always get better.

Matt: The business is obviously expanded like crazy.  Where do you see the MFF team going in the next few years?

Mark: That’s a great questions. Right now I think we’re at an interesting crossroads. We just finished our expansion eight weeks ago, but it wasn’t a huge expansion. We’re probably officially finding it close to the point where we’ve reached capacity at our current location in Manhattan. I think there’s a good chance that we’ll be opening up new locations soon….that’s probably the one thing I’m most certain will happen in the next few years. We’ve had some talk about actually starting a non-profit foundation because we do a lot of charity work and we want to be an even bigger part of what we do. There’s discussion of doing more stuff in the online space…even looking at corporate wellness. Obviously we would have to be working with a very specific type of organization who get what we do as a brand (laughing). There’s a lot of opportunities right now.

There’s  two things we are dead set on. The first is making sure we don’t grow so quickly that we choke. That’s something that when you read the business literature you become very aware of. My concern is always the downside. I will say that some of the scariest moments we’ve had were situations like the one month where we grew 45% from one month to the next. These days I’m more concerned about I’m more concerned about making sure that we have all these checks so we can’t grow too quickly. The second thing I’m most interested as we go forward in is maintaining the values and the culture. We want to stay in areas where we can be the domain expert. I’m well-aware that if you take a cursory  at the MFF site it can come across as light on fitness, and that’s alright because it’s for the clients and not other fitness people. It’s very important for us to be the very best we can be at providing the best fitness solution for people. To do this we need to follow Richard Branson’s advice and find the most brilliant, amazing people to add to our team. Once we’ve found them we need to give them to tools they needs and then get out of their way. We’re always looking for talent. Always for people who have a gift and have something to share with the world. We thrive off their energy and want to have those people around us as we continue the Grand Unicorn experiment which is the affectionate name we’ve given this weird thing we’re trying to do together.

To read more from Mark and his team of unicorns check out the links below:

• Mark Fisher Fitness Website
• Facebook and Twitter
• Youtube Channel  <-highly recommended
• PTDC article