Fitness Business University Podcast · Vince Gabriele

Business Secrets of a Pittsburgh Gym That Went From 10k to 30k/month in PROFIT…and recently opened their 3rd location with 61 members on day 1!

·48 min·3 clips

The new location opened with 61 pre-sales and an average EFT above $400.

The host opens with his usual habit of yakking into the bottom of his phone while waiting for his kids at jujitsu and jokes that the show has somehow become the number one fitness business podcast. He says interviewing smart people has become just as useful for him as it is for the audience. Jason DeRose comes on as the guest. The conversation is part interview and part testimonial-book project for mastermind members. The team is transcribing those interviews and turning them into a book. From there, the talk moves straight into how the gym is actually run. Jason explains that the GM meeting has a templated structure. That meeting checks the deployment for each location, plus marketing content and email, as part of a scorecard. The GM role was introduced clearly when it was created. That person now serves as operations director for all three gyms and still keeps a hand on the original location while the team plans to fold the GM role more fully into operations. The next move is to promote from within. Jason also lays out the weekly rhythm with the full-time trainers. He meets with those trainers every week. There is also an all-in meeting on Wednesday mornings at 10 AM for everyone, and Anthony runs that meeting for the other partner locations. The host keeps pressing on the strategic choices behind the growth. Jason points to the org chart as one major decision. He also points to the way he leads and manages people as the other major decision. The other big lever is a quarterly marketing calendar that was re-instituted in 2024. That calendar lets the team look back at what worked in Q1 of 2024, 2025, and 2026. It also keeps seasonal ideas like March Madness from getting lost. The episode closes on the same blunt idea that keeps surfacing throughout the conversation: if there is a system for it, the system runs the business, and even the bookshelf gets treated that way with the ultimate guide to small group personal training kept front-facing because it matters.

As heard by us

A structured gym-management conversation about systems, meetings, and accountability.

The episode stays focused on how a gym team adds structure as it grows. Its value is in the operating detail: an org chart that is clear enough to use, templated GM meetings, weekly trainer check-ins, an all-hands rhythm, and a quarterly marketing calendar that helps the basics…

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Why you'd press play

You want the operating system behind a gym team running across three locations.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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