How to be a Parent and Run a Successful Gym with Pete Dupuis

[00:00:00] Hey friends, Ben here with business unicorns. And today Pete and I are diving into a topic that’s. It’s not often talked about in the fitness business space. It’s about how does your identity change over time as a business owner? Pete’s been in business for 18 years now. How do you balance the changes that come with starting a gym and living in it and then still running a successful gym while being an amazing parent?

What does it look like to have hobbies outside of the gym and what type of guardrails or lessons that you need to put in place in order to make sure that your gym stays profitable, but also incredibly fulfilling for the long run. Enjoy.

Welcome to the business for unicorns podcast, where we help gym owners unleash the full potential of their business. I’m your host, Michael Keeler. Join me each week for actionable advice. Expert insights and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym. Get ready to [00:01:00] unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.

Let’s begin.

Hey friends. Welcome to another episode of the BFU podcast. Today, Pete and I are talking, going to talk about the things that we don’t often talk about. It’s the work life balance. It’s the, how do you run a business and still prioritize a family and get a little bit more personal on today’s podcast? But before we dive in, I do want to remind you that if you haven’t already to register for BFU’s gym lead blueprint, it’s Monday, September 9th from 10 till noon.

This is a virtual class masterclass with the one and only Mark Fisher. That’s all about ways to generate more leads this month with less than three hours per work per week of additional work. And Mark’s going to be going into all sorts of things, such as how to get. Better local leads without paid ads.

The biggest mistake gym owners make with offers. And of course, a blueprint for the perfect week of effective marketing. That’s efficient and effective. You get all of this for only 47 bucks. [00:02:00] All right, Pete, let’s get to it. I guess the question that’s been on my mind and might’ve been on some of our other listeners minds is you’ve always done a remarkable job, or it appears to me, you’ve always done a remarkable job balancing the challenges of entrepreneurship A dedication to being a wonderful father.

Can you tell us a little bit more about like your thought processes and everything goes into that? Cause we know that running a gym can sometimes be a 4 a. m. till 10 p. m. seven days a week thing. And you’ve seen broken the mold. Yeah, I’m flattered by that kind of perception. And I guess it probably makes sense for me to start by saying I have two little boys, my son, Colin is 10 years old and my son, Owen just turned eight this A handful of days before we recorded this episode.

So I’ve got your stereotypical kind of rough housing, super high energy, rambunctious boys in my house. And being a [00:03:00] former athlete myself and a gym owner who takes care of that performance training community. I’ve got a couple of boys who are terribly interested in sports. And so it’s really easy for me both to blend work and family.

For example, we didn’t have a whole lot of summer camp coverage here at the back end of the summer before kids got back into school. So that meant a couple of days at the gym with dad. Sandwiching a family vacation, which we can certainly talk about if you want. The question is big and it’s really big.

What’s my master plan or philosophy on maintaining family and work balance. Before I go any further, I also noticed that I am happily married and my wife, Katie and I are coming up on now, 12 years of marriage this fall. Things are going well. And I think that I wasn’t always very good at the balance piece.

And I probably owe Katie credit for course correcting me on a few occasions and helping me appreciate the fact that there should be a line drawn [00:04:00] between work and home as it relates to things like dinner conversation and things like that. Which has ebbed and flowed over the years, but I haven’t done it without a lot of help both from her and from my colleagues.

Does that check out with how you see it from the outside looking in? Yeah. Don’t get me wrong. What I said, I genuinely meant that you, seems like you’ve done a really good job balancing that. And I imagine like most of us, like how you operate today, wasn’t how you operated on day one. And thanks to the input of our loved ones and our environment, we learn how to show up differently and adapt to the needs of the world.

Like our families that are ever changing to your point. Yeah. You put it better than I did. Thanks. So I guess the curiosity is maybe we can start with, give us kind of the fast forward of like, how was it on day one? Did you do the, lived at the gym and basically slept in at peace and then fast forward today.

Maybe it’s like, what are your biggest takeaways? Yeah, that’s a good one. So I lived at the [00:05:00] gym. But I wouldn’t misconstrue that for that being like a burdensome thing. I was here because I loved it here. I still love it here, but at the time, the six and sometimes seven day work weeks weren’t because I was a slave to my operation.

They were because I genuinely enjoyed it. And so the lessons that I took away from this transition from. Non parent business owner to parenting business owners that I was brutally unproductive during the hours that I allocated toward being at the gym for a long time. I would spend a couple hours in the morning training with my buddies, and then I might take an hour winding down from that, socializing in the office.

And I might take a half hour to prep some food and hang out and talk about what we just did in the weight room. And I might open the email. I might listen to some voicemail, but what would consistently happen was I’d get to this point in the day, sometimes 5 PM, but [00:06:00] I’m not talking like early afternoon, the day has just about got away from me and I’m thinking to myself, Oh, if I want to get home to Katie and have dinner at a reasonable hour.

I got to have a couple of really productive hours here, and I would habitually just close the door, close the shades, and just work my ass off for two, three hours, empty the account, do all the things. And the work got done every day, but it didn’t get done in a way that complemented a family schedule. I could roll in late because my wife had a demanding corporate job as well.

And so it didn’t hurt anyone when I was inefficient. But the minute I had my son, I realized that lack of efficiency was super selfish and there was no way at all that I was going to be able to be a presence consistently the way I had. Kind of aspired to be without really getting considerably more productive during the time I had available in a professional setting.

So I [00:07:00] learned a lot about myself as far as when I do my best work, how much time I need to allot toward it between breaks and what the, what kind of the optimized version of Pete’s output is. And turns out I probably could have got my work day done in about 40 to 50 percent of the time that I was giving to what we were calling a work day.

But it was like a clubhouse day with work at the end. And that was, that’s just part of being an immature person in their mid twenties who started a gym and we were, you could argue that we were prioritizing our own training as much or even more than that, which we were delivering to clients. Cause if there was one thing that was like non negotiable in our world, it was staff training time.

And there are pros and cons that come with that. But. Things like that needed to change pretty significantly when it came time to start and build and take care of a family. And so that, that might be the first place I compromised my super [00:08:00] casual, slow moving mornings stopped almost entirely. You bring up an interesting, a really good point because often.

We get into fitness as a business because we love fitness as a hobby or passion or possibly obsession for many of us. And like, we know that our clients don’t have two hours to train, then another an hour and a half to debrief and chat about training and have lunch. There’s a reason we deliver sessions and usually roughly an hour.

It’s to serve the people who have other things going on. And it sounds like you were in tune with, as the needs of the business and family evolved, there were some compromises that need to happen. Cause. Yeah, we all know if you wanna have a successful gym mirroring the behaviors of a lot of my client population as well.

I was watching a as, um, a service, a baseball community. And these guys, if you look at the way a baseball player’s life moves, not like an elementary school or high schooler who’s got days full of classes and then they gotta catch a bus and go to games. I’m talking about a [00:09:00] college or a professional athlete.

These guys have sometimes nothing on the agenda until, say, two o’clock when they gotta show up at the field. And so everything that happens before then is just very casual and doesn’t happen with a lot of urgency. And I’ve said to you before that we aspire to mimic the clubhouse environment that these guys are exposed to all season.

And as much as they come to us and they’re like, Oh, I’m so done with baseball. I need to be done with this. I don’t want to touch baseball. I don’t want to think about baseball. Let’s just get into the weight room and just change things up. They unknowingly desperately crave. The clubhouse culture and vibe, and it’s hard to create it and deliver it without embracing it yourself, or at least not with any degree of authenticity.

So I don’t regret these years of slow moving productivity because they were foundational in us establishing the brand and a reputation for being able to talk and engage with the [00:10:00] athletes on a way that they felt was super authentic. So. That years of inefficiency were time invested in something that became much bigger that I could think about optimizing in 2014 when I started to identify as dad more than gym owner.

But that’s probably worth noting today. I’m not Pete, the gym owner. I’m Pete, Colin and Owen’s dad, Katie’s husband, who also owns a gym. That’s how I identify with it. And it doesn’t mean I don’t want to show up and do a good job when I’m here, but I’m not interested in my professional identity being my singular identity.

Hey there. Business Fiend Acorns podcast listeners. I’m just making absolutely sure you have already gotten your free, instantly downloadable copy of my new book, The little book of gym marketing secrets. You can find a link to download it in the show notes, or you can go to gym marketing secrets book.

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com. And now back to the podcast. That’s a really good point. That, that identity change over time is something that lots of Unicorn Society members, myself included, have sometimes faced like fighting tooth and nail to avoid, and then sometimes fully embracing and being okay with that switch. And that’s not a easy thing to articulate.

Well, and a lesson in listening to the market because the market tells you who you are and where you bring value. I was concerned when I started having kids that I wasn’t going to be able to put out any more meaningful content and I wasn’t going to be able to really speak to the audience in a way that would resonate with them.

And it was because I thought I got to put that time toward being dad. But then I end up on in conversations like this and publishing pieces about how to be a dad and [00:12:00] gym owner at the same time. And people typically will tell me that’s what resonates with them. And I definitely didn’t expect it when I thought people were going to want me to make a habit of, I don’t know, explaining profit first or something like that.

When in reality, they just want to know how do I carve out the time a couple of years from now. To coach youth soccer, if I want to. During a time when the gym can conceivably be fairly busy. And that is something that I’ve been able to do over time, but Ben, we’re 18 plus years in here. So I’m not going to pretend that I figured out some sort of a hack and I fast tracked myself to this.

It was a slow burn. And we were already at the seven year mark when Colin arrived. So it’s some personal freedoms well earned over a fairly extended period. Absolutely. Yeah. I’m glad you clarified that too. There’s less gym owners in their forties and they’re typically, or less fitness professionals in their forties plus than they’re typically be is in their [00:13:00] like twenties and thirties.

And yeah, you can put everything into that basket when that is all you do and you live and breathe the gym and that’s why you started it. And then. You hit that age where you’re like, I think I want more than this, but I’m not sure I want to give up the gym thing too, whether it’s a identity thing or simply like you need to make ends meet and pay the mortgage.

Yep. I’m seeing people jump out of the industry on a maybe weekly basis these days. I know I’ve discussed it with you. I think it’s probably worth pointing out that we’ve built this whole business for unicorns concept around this idea of. You, you get to the front by standing on the shoulders of giants and basically not making the mistakes we made over the years and we can help you track by bypassing a lot of potentially poor decisions.

That doesn’t mean everything can have a shortcut. And so the years in the game piece. There’s no way to manufacture a decade in the industry in five years. You gotta take your lumps and you [00:14:00] gotta become a really good technician and you gotta put the time in if you want the privilege. And so, I’m just, I’m cognizant of the fact that everybody seems to want a shortcut these days.

And some of the privileges we’re talking about don’t have anything to do. With SOPs or with KPI or whatever different acronym we want to slap toward it. Sometimes it’s just reps. Yeah, a hundred percent. Keeping the theme of what have you learned, maybe fast forwarding a little bit from the early days to maybe now or partway along, any other major takeaways that would allow listeners to stand on their shoulders and giants?

Oh, there’s so many resources out there. Things like this podcast, good bloggers, good social media accounts that if you consume enough, there’s all the information’s out there. I would suggest that in the vein of this discussion of balance, I would strongly suggest the [00:15:00] gym owners look for ways to make friends outside of the gym.

Maybe the biggest issue I see with gym owners is. When they don’t make any non work affiliated friends. And it certainly can work. But you end up having singularly focused conversations. You live your job. Every minute of the day. And having kids forced me to stop that habit. Just because once the kids come, there’s daycares, there’s elementary schools, there are youth sports teams.

You get infused, whether you like it or not, into a variety of different social scenes. But now some of my closest friends in the world Our parents who were randomly assigned to the same daycare room almost a decade ago. And that’s the way life comes and goes. But if you’re a gym owner who doesn’t have kids and doesn’t have this kind of forced social interaction outside of the space, it can get pretty dangerous when you can’t really draw the line between friend and [00:16:00] colleague, friend and client, friend and business partner.

You just, you need more than just your gym. And you need interesting hobbies that aren’t directly aligned with them. I understand that there are people who are an exception to the rule and just eat, sleep and breed their business. But for every one of those people, I could probably find 99 other gym owners who resented a little bit, but don’t really know how to break that habit.

And so if I could give one piece of advice. It’s take at least a day of the week where you fundamentally step away from your business. And I’m not saying that from the perspective of don’t be a slave to your email account or don’t let your clients think you are so responsive that they can get ahold of you at any time of day.

Sure. Embrace that mentality if you want. I don’t care if you’re 24 hours a day accessible during the other six days of the week. If you can just shut it off mentally for your own well being and do something that has nothing to do with the gym for a pretty significant chunk of your week, I think you’re going to be [00:17:00] much better for your colleagues and clients because of it.

And it’s not something we talk about a ton in Unicorn Society, because it’s hard to build SOPs around. Don’t be a gym robot, because we’re actually trying to build gym robots. But that might be my best piece of advice, Ben. Oh, that’s really insightful, Pete. Thank you. This isn’t about me, but even speaking from my experience, like, I lived the gym for a long time.

And when I started my gym, I was there all the time for Yeah, everything you said is true, like, from a cultural perspective, but we’re Gen Pops a little bit different. But if nothing else, like we didn’t have systems and I didn’t know any better. I needed to get my reps in. And I was fortunate to have a very supportive wife who like basically managed the family.

So I didn’t have to think about those things. But by doing more things outside of the gym, especially the last few years, like I’m part of a men’s group that like no one else is into fitness there. Or you join a rec volleyball or sports league or whatever. That’s actually relatable to my clientele. I realized there’d be exceptions to that if you train.

22 year old CrossFitters, like [00:18:00] they might just be into the gym like you are. But when you’ve got clients who like have kids in daycare or have other things they want to do, or have hobbies they want to pursue, and you also have things that don’t just revolve around the business that you do, it’s way easier to build relationships, fitness.

People are intimidating. How many times have you been at a party and you’re drinking a beer and someone’s like, Whoa, you’re in fitness. You’re allowed to do that. The public’s perception of what it looks like to be a gym owner is. Exceptionally like one sided, but in reality, we’re mostly regular people who want to help other people live better and perform better.

Yeah. I have to admit, I’ve had a little bit of an inferiority complex as it relates to you for years. Cause I remember you did some sort of home renovation or you like built a deck or something. And it was on Facebook. And I just remember thinking about how far I am from being able to do something like that.

And it was refreshing to see Ben, the homeowner, when all I knew was the gym owner and to see you and your flannel dragging your hammer around [00:19:00] and actually documenting how you use the time when you’re not in the gym, when you and I, at that point, we’re working together in a professional setting. Talking about how to scale your gym.

And I only had one version of Ben in my mind. And when I realized you were a little bit more of a Renaissance man, it was refreshing, but intimidating at the same time. Appreciate it. Yeah. And just so I, yeah, prior to BF using. I think existence, at least Unicorn Society existence, I had independently hired Pete when I moved into a new location to help me get some of the.

Headaches that come with doubling or tripling your square footage sorted out. So it’s funny hearing that from your perspective, because I see you as the kind of already doing that, that it’s definitely Pete, the gym business guy, but there’s also the Pete family and soccer goalie and where you’re just in vacation in Colorado recently.

There’s so many other aspects to your life that it. That makes it easier to relate versus if all you know is fitness, all you want to talk is fitness. It’s really hard to build relationships with people who aren’t that into it. Yeah. And it’s funny. There’s [00:20:00] a challenge in deciding how to manage my web presence.

When I walk this tightrope of Pete, the gym owner who puts out content against that kind of dynamic. And then Peach is living his life because sometimes I just want to put up a picture of the boys. For example, at the rodeo we went to in Colorado in their stupid little cowboy hats. It’s funny. Basically, watching these people get absolutely thrashed around on animals in the mud and see them loving it.

But I know that, sadly enough, there is like a direct correlation with people unfollowing me on social media when I put up the stuff that humanizes me. It’s crazy. Some people are like, no, I’m just here for the tweets. I didn’t need to see your cute kids. And I put that up. It’s crickets and unfollows, which is absolutely wild, but I’m okay with that.

If it, for the people who do stick around, get to feel like they know me a little bit better, cause it might make the stuff I put out against business a little bit more. Meaningful. Cause I’m [00:21:00] also not a gym robot in their mind when they’re reading these robotic tweets, it’s funny. Like when I first started out in the industry, as I’m sure many listening it was the first few years, as many listeners probably are, all I wanted to learn was business and fitness.

And now that I’ve worked just over a decade now, and 15 years for me in the industry as a professional, what I view as success has fundamentally changed the people I’ve used successful in my life, like they often do have. Killer jobs or successful businesses or whatever, but we don’t really talk about that.

Hey, how’s business going? Yeah, it’s stressful. I got some travel. Things are good. But let me tell you about what we did at the cottage on the weekend. Yep. And I guess it’s been, if nothing else, by sheer volume and frequency that it’s coming my way. I’ve, I think it’s helped me redefine my version of success because living in the gym is awesome for a period of time.

But it’s very likely what you look forward to is going to change over time. Oh man, Ben, my buddy Sahil Bloom has a book coming out on this exactly. I believe it’s called the Wealth Fly, and it’s basically saying that there are five [00:22:00] foundational types of wealth and what’s in your bank account is only one of them, but it’s your relationships, it’s your health and fitness, it’s a number of different things, so that’s my pitch for a book that hasn’t come out yet.

Q1 of 2025, that one will hit shelves and it really hammers that point home. And I’ve talked to him about these concepts at length over our kind of friendly training sessions since every time he comes back to town. We lift and all we do is talk about that stuff. Our kids, our hobbies, our interests outside of what we’re doing when we’re answering emails for our work.

Yeah, that’s for personal, for selfish reasons. Let me know when that comes out and I’ll definitely buy a coffee. But that I think that would resonate with a lot of other people as well. Absolutely. And our last like minute here, do you have any tips for maybe the folks who are in the phase of living in the gym and yes, not in the spirit of shortcutting it.

I’m with you. That’s not possible, but if they want to progress in kind of that next phase of identity, what’s the next step? [00:23:00] If you’ve been living in a, what feels like Groundhog day, In a certain stage in your gym, then the next step is going to be to change your learning habits, I think, because if we don’t change what we consume, we don’t change the way our day to day goes.

But if you feel like you’re in the stage that you’ve just mentioned, but you haven’t been living there for a while, I’d say don’t rush it, honestly. I know that’s not super tactical, but I’m in love with some of those early years in the business when I could have jammed my foot on the accelerator and raced through some pretty meaningful stages.

But letting the business grow at an exciting but manageable pace and seeing who you become as a gym owner during it is a beautiful thing. And as long as you’re not in it to make an absolute fortune, which none of our listeners should be because I’ve yet to meet more than maybe one or two gym owners who can say they’re doing that, and you’re there because you can make a meaningful wage and you can live within your means and you can build something special, [00:24:00] then I don’t rush any of the stages.

I loved the, the stage where it was me, Eric and Tony for a couple of years. I’m in hindsight, love making my first handful of hires. One of which is still in the building every single day. Now working as a manual therapist, I enjoyed the stage where we built an internship program. I enjoyed, I even enjoyed the stage in hindsight when I had employees leave and compete with us for a couple of years.

And totally changed the way I think about my business and act within it and compensate my team and all of the things. But when I look back on all of these, the business couldn’t be today what it is now if I had skipped those steps and let them play themselves out. So I hate to say it, but my answer is be patient.

Don’t hate to say that at all. That’s, there’s something to be said for stopping and smelling the roses along the path you’re on, journey not destination. There’s all those [00:25:00] things that we know to be true, but in the moment often forget they also apply to us. Well, I think it’s a wonderful place to leave it.

Thank you so much for your time. I’m sure if listeners, if you want more of this type of stuff, please comment below, give us feedback. We build this for you. And if, again, friendly reminder, if you haven’t already signed up for the gym lead blueprint, it’s only 47 bucks. You get a lot out of it. Thanks for your time, Pete.

Thank you, sir. Good conversation. Talk soon.