The Founder Success Formula by Ross Franklin - HTML preview

Chapter 1: What They Don’t Teach You in

Business School But Should

I’ll admit it, I’m a business school dropout. As it turns out, my decision to drop out of business school may have been one of the best decisions I’ve made. Dropping out set me on a path toward paving my own road and learning from first-hand experience in the business world as well as from a variety of leaders and mentors. I’ve learned more about business and leadership by being in the trenches, making mistakes and testing what works, than I would have ever learned in a textbook.

It just so happens there is a long list of successful founders who dropped out of college: Steve Jobs (Founder of Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook), Jack Dorsey (Founder of Square, Co-Founder of Twitter), John Mackey (Co-Founder of Whole Foods) and the list goes on. Just why is it that so many successful founders dropped out of academia and went on to start or operate companies? I believe the common theme here is that they all decided to follow their passions instead of a predesigned academic curriculum that serves little purpose in the business world.

Before founding my company, Pure Green, I was fortunate throughout my career to be mentored and guided by great entrepreneurs. I probably even learned more of what not to do from poor leaders and entrepreneurs that I encountered along the way. The road of an entrepreneur is full of ups and downs, and some of the best lessons are learned from failures. I failed many times and learned the importance of persistence and how to pivot. I’ll explain why I dropped out of business school and how I adopted and created many of the systems and processes that have become the foundation for Pure Green. These systems and processes are derived from many failures and successes.

Let me start by walking you through my journey of how I went from graduating from a small liberal arts college to founding one of the fastest-growing juice bar companies and juice bar franchises in the United States.

I received my undergraduate degree from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts where I majored in biology and dual-minored in psychology and art history. I spent my junior year on exchange as the sole male student at Wellesley College. Yes, you read that right, I was the only male student on a campus of 3,000 women, but I’ll save that story for another book. Well… I don’t want to make you wait, so if you’re really curious, you can read about in Rolling Stone Magazine:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-highly-charged-erotic-life-of-the-wellesley-girl-57245/

I digress. After graduating from Wheaton College in 2002, I went to work in New York City as the Fitness Manager at The Sports Center at Chelsea Piers, one of the largest and most renowned health clubs in the world, at the time. Over summers during college, I had worked there as a personal trainer, and I also held a leadership internship there over winter breaks. Building relationships there put me in a prime position to be offered the Fitness Manager position, running the personal training department after graduation.

The internship that I previously held at The Sports Center at Chelsea Piers was invaluable to my development as a leader. I received mentorship from Bill Abramson, the General Manager at the time, and he took me under his wing and let me shadow him at every meeting. This one-on-one time with Bill allowed me to see how he structured his daily agenda, orchestrated his weekly meetings with department heads and how he operated as a leader. I saw firsthand how he reviewed and reported the key metrics of the business with everyone who reported to him. I also had the privilege of attending monthly ownership meetings with Bill and the owners of Chelsea Piers. This gave me another vantage point. More than just seeing how Bill mobilized his team and handled himself with the owners, this internship experience stimulated my passion for operational leadership. It created a hunger and desire in me to move up the ranks within the fitness industry.

After I graduated from college and was working as the Fitness Manager at The Sports Center at Chelsea Piers, I oversaw 50 personal trainers, many of whom were among the top personal trainers in the country. Not a bad gig for being fresh out of college! Some of the trainers were celebrity trainers with impressive backgrounds, and they all seemed to take a liking to me and would teach me various training and stretching techniques. The Sports Center at Chelsea Piers invested heavily in continuing education and had renowned fitness industry experts teach classes every week. As Fitness Manager, I attended every single continuing education class. I learned about functional fitness, proper nutrition and even learned more about anatomy and biomechanics from these continuing education classes than I did my entire four years as an undergraduate.

I’m a big believer in full immersion, and being at The Sports Center at Chelsea Piers gave me access to some of the top nutritionists, exercise physiologists and personal trainers in the country. I took full advantage of this access by talking with them every day and soaking up as much information as I could. I also helped with membership sales and learned how to sell memberships from the Sales Manager at Chelsea Piers. At the time, The Sports Center at Chelsea Piers had the most elite clientele of any gym in the country. Jay Z came by every week to box. Kanye West, Daymond Dash and even Beyonce frequented the gym. Jennifer Connelly used to leave her pocketbook in my office when she trained. I even had the pleasure of personal training Queen Latifah when she came to visit.

The access and exposure I had was great, but my base salary as Fitness Manager at The Sports Center was a mere $35,000 a year—not a lot of money for living in New York City. As part of my contract as Fitness Manager, I could train clients for extra money. I quickly built a solid base of personal training clients. This allowed me to put into action everything I was learning. I also trained clients outside of the gym at clients’ home and building gyms until I saved up enough money for a down payment on an apartment in New York City.

While I enjoyed being the Fitness Manager and personal training clients, I did not see a future continuing this path. I realized that my growth potential in this role was capped. I had the hunger to advance in my career, and I saw the General Manager role as the next step in my development. Unfortunately, the General Manager position was not open at Chelsea Piers, and it became clear that I needed to look at a larger company to rise into that role. I interviewed with New York Sports Clubs, owned by Town Sports International, for the General Manager role, and I was offered the position. The offer included considerably higher compensation than my salary at The Sports Center at Chelsea Piers, and I saw the move as a steppingstone to the next chapter of my career.

I was placed as General Manager for the New York Sports Club in Union Square on 14th Street. With over 100 locations at the time, New York Sports Club was a much larger company by unit count than The Sports Center at Chelsea Piers (only one unit at that time); however, it was much more corporately regulated. I found that my innovative ideas for growing revenue streams were quickly shut down by corporate, as the company was more concerned with uniformity than it was innovation.

While working as General Manager at New York Sports Club, the main revenue centers I focused on were new membership sales and personal training revenue. While looking at maximizing revenue for the club, I identified an untapped revenue center which was the “Spa” revenue center. The reason that spa is in quotes is that the spas at New York Sports Clubs are simple massage rooms, not quite the full-service spa experience that one would expect. When I took over the location on 14th Street, the “Spa” hadn’t generated a single dollar in revenue in years. They had no massage therapists! To grow this revenue channel, I placed ads and interviewed dozens of massage therapists. I ended up hiring the two therapists that impressed me.

In a gym like New York Sports Clubs, no one knew that the club even offered massage. The first step I took was creating an SOP (standard operating procedure) for selling massages. The therapists were not thrilled about selling in general, as they just wanted to perform their craft. I was able to convince the massage therapists to execute the SOP that I created, and I taught them the protocol for how to turn a 5-minute demonstration chair massage into a repeat client. I showed the therapists how to sit down with the client after the chair massage and explain where they carried most of their tension and how they would benefit from regular massage. I created a simple chart for them to show clients where the muscular adhesions were in their bodies. I helped the therapists understand the art of converting their knowledge of massage into booking sessions.

The SOP I executed worked exceptionally well, and both therapists were fully booked in a matter of weeks. The “Spa” at 14th became the highest revenue generating “Spa” in the entire New York Sports Club portfolio. At that time, a friend offered to paint the massage room to enhance the “Spa” vibe as the room was literally just four white walls. I took him up on his offer, and after it was painted with venetian plaster, the massage room had never looked better—it almost looked like a real spa… but not quite ;)

Shortly after, corporate sent some suits to investigate how this single room “Spa” was generating the highest revenue in the company. They reported back to the higher-level suits that the reason the “Spa” was performing so well must be because the room was painted differently than the other “Spa” rooms at other locations. The next day, corporate sent a painter in to repaint the “Spa” back to all white walls without even telling me. This didn’t make any sense. If the venetian plaster was the reason the “Spa” was producing the highest revenue in the company, why wouldn’t they paint all the “Spas” the same way? It became clear to me that New York Sports Club had a severe disconnect and didn’t respect its General Managers. This was a classic example of corporate snapshot management based on false correlations. They saw a deviation from the norm, took a surface view of what was different and made a false correlation. The real reason for the high revenue at the “Spa” was my innovation in creating a new SOP and hiring great therapists. I started to feel that something was missing and questioned if working at New York Sports Club was the right fit for me.

I started missing the higher-end environment that The Sports Center at Chelsea Piers offered. I felt I needed to work for a company that embraced innovation. That’s when Equinox started recruiting me. I took a meeting with the head of Equinox’s Human Resources and then had a series of other interviews. I received an offer and became a General Manager in Training at the Equinox in Union Square and later the General Manager for the Equinox on the Upper East Side.

It was at Equinox that I met Mark Wood. I remember the first time I saw Mark. I walked out of my office and smelled patchouli oil. I looked up and saw this tall guy with a brimmed hat and pointy shoes showing a group of suits around the Equinox at 19th Street. I wondered who the heck this guy was. As it turned out, this was Mark Wood, a legend in the hospitality industry, a man that would have great impact on my development as a leader, and someone who would help me finetune my execution of systems and processes.

Mark had previously owned several restaurants including Commune, a New York City hotspot, and China Grill, with restauranteur Jeffrey Chadorow as his partner. Mark worked at Disney reporting directly to Michael Eisner, and he developed hotels with Ian Schrager. As the story goes, Mark had sold his restaurant group, retired in the Bahamas for years before coming back to New York City, where on a whim he decided to work at Equinox to gain a basic understanding of the fitness industry.

Up to that point, I had never encountered an entrepreneur with a background quite like Mark’s. From his decades in the hospitality industry, Mark was a master of creating systems and processes. But at the time, he didn’t know anything about the fitness industry. Mark was the Regional Director for Equinox, where I reported to him. I was well versed in the fitness industry but lacked the level of leadership systems that Mark was well versed in. Our skill sets complemented each other, and when we worked together, we were able to achieve massive results. Mark and I put together a series of SOPs and protocols that were implemented across all Equinox locations nationally.

Working at Equinox, I implemented all the systems and processes that I learned from Mark and combined this with aggressive outreach to generate new membership sales. I built the Equinox locations I managed to become some of the highest revenue and most profitable locations of all the Equinox locations in the entire company.

While working full time as a General Manager for Equinox Fitness, I received a Presidential Scholarship from Touro University Business School in New York City. I started off with one class in marketing, attending classes a few times per week while maintaining my full-time role at Equinox.

My first business school course in marketing was stimulating, but I can’t say I learned anything game changing. The marketing course covered textbook case studies and marketing business plan structure, and I ended up receiving a 4.0 grade in the class. For my last assignment, I wrote a business plan for a specialty boutique fitness brand that I created. On the last day of class, my professor pulled me aside and told me that even though the business plan was for a school project, she was very impressed and encouraged me to move forward and start the business. She was also interested in investing! At that point in my career, I wanted to stay with Equinox and wasn’t ready to branch out on my own. I felt like something was still missing.

At the business school, there was a set curriculum, and the next class I was required to take was calculus. I was paying for tuition out of my own pocket, and even with a scholarship, I decided that taking the required course (that I had no interest in) was not worth my hard-earned money. I could not figure out how I would use calculus in the business world. So, I dropped out of business school and never looked back.

In his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, Apple Founder Steve Jobs spoke about a similar experience when he dropped out of Reed college. He was required to take classes that didn’t interest him. Instead, he decided to drop in on classes that he found interesting. After officially dropping out of college, Jobs followed his curiosity and intuition and took a calligraphy class, which he credits for the Mac computer having multiple type faces and beautifully proportioned fonts. Jobs referenced during his speech with a smirk, since Windows copied the Mac, our modern-day personal computers may never have had the beautiful fonts had he not dropped in on that calligraphy class at Reed College.

If you’ve never seen Steve Jobs’ commencement speech, I strongly encourage you to watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc&t=631s

In that same commencement address, Jobs talks about connecting the dots. I believe that Steve Jobs’ decision to drop out of Reed College had to do with following his passion. If you reach a point in your life where you feel like you are just going through the motions and not living life on your own terms, you are likely not following your passion.

Why are we forced in academia to take classes that don’t interest us? Why are we not taught practical skills like how to start a business, and why don’t we receive encouragement to follow our passion? Why are we not taught more about leadership, entrepreneurship and core principles and skills needed to run global companies? I believe these oversights are the reasons that our current academic environment creates more 9-5 workers than it does entrepreneurs. This is the reason I wrote this book. To provide some of the skill sets, leadership qualities and habits that shape successful entrepreneurs.

After I dropped out of business school, I continued to work at Equinox and later other high-end health clubs. I eventually started my own consulting business growing health clubs and developing specialty boutique fitness companies and later Pilates’s studios, Yoga studios and finally juice bars.

Although I’ve always been interested in health and wellness and worked in the fitness industry, the point when I truly found my passion was when I realized that about 80% of optimal health is rooted in nutrition while only 20% is attributed to fitness. I questioned why I was spending so much of my time in fitness when I should really be spending more of my time on nutrition, where I could make a larger impact on people’s health. This realization was the pivotal moment when I found my true passion.

I knew that nutrition was the key to making a difference in people’s lives by enhancing their health. I started attending anti-aging conferences, reading books on nutrition and consulting for juice bar chains. I discovered superfoods and the benefits of cold pressed juice, and I saw the potential that a scalable juice bar model can have on the world. This is how Pure Green was born. It all started with my passion and desire to make a positive impact on people’s health.