Luke Carlson never thought he’d be running a fitness company.
His education was in kinesiology and exercise science and, at 23, he was an assistant trainer for the Minnesota Vikings.
But when a friend recommended it, he embraced the idea of starting a strength training boutique club that adhered not to the whims of the public but to the science of exercise.
“We’re not going to do anything that is fad driven,” he says. “I was so turned on by the fact that could we create an exercise experience that was truly what was best for the client according to the scientific research.”
Living both passions — great fitness, great business…
So, he flew to Florida for a tutorial with another fitness industry executive and set out to learn the world of business with the same intensity of the players he used to help coach.
Eleven years later, he has total control of Bloomington-based Discover Strength, after recently buying out his business partner. And he has a laser focus on the niche the company is trying to fill and an ambitious growth plan that would see the company go from three to 10 locations in the next few years.
Carlson discussed the path his company has taken and the direction it’s headed in the years to come. Here is an edited version of our conversation.
Upsize: Tell me about your company?
Carlson: We do nothing but one-on-one and small-group strength training. The only thing we do is strength training. The large part, if not the largest part or contribution to our success is narrowly defining our strategic niche.
Over the last 10 years, and accelerating the last five, the same thing that happened in retail many years ago has happened in the fitness world.
In the Twin Cities, 30 or 40 years ago, you shopped for everything at Dayton’s. With segmentation, divergence and specialization, smaller niche retailers emerged and they became large focusing on just one thing. The same is happening in health clubs.
We were doing it before it became incredibly popular.
Upsize: The Twin Cities is headquarters to several fitness companies. Was this niche your way of standing out?
Carlson: I wish I could say I was smart enough to answer that yes. Really, when we opened, I knew we were passionate about one thing, and we wanted to really try to be the best in the world at it.
Two things happened.
One, I learned about the importance of narrowly defining a strategic niche and the idea that the strength of a brand grows as it becomes more focused in scope and the strength of the brand weakens as the scope increases.
Then, it just so happened, this was all timed when segmentation or specialization in the overall health club business started happening.
The business example we teach to all our staff is we want to be the Victoria’s Secret of the fitness world. Victoria’s Secret owns the space of women’s intimate apparel — bras and underwear – that’s all they do. People walk away from the Macy’s and Nordstrom and J.C. Penney and Sears and all the department stores and go to Victoria’s Secret. So, we want the same thing – those large health clubs can still exist, but when you think of strength training, in our market, you only think about Discover Strength.
Upsize: I didn’t expect a Victoria’s Secret reference here.
Carlson: We love that comparison. People always ask us ‘you’re just focused on strength training. Don’t people need more? Don’t they need some cardio or nutrition discussion? Shouldn’t you put in a small spin studio? Shouldn’t you do some stretching?’ We say ‘all those things are great.’ That doesn’t mean we have to provide them.
I can walk into Victoria’s Secret and say ‘hey, winter is coming, can I buy a parka here for a man’ and they say ‘heck no.’ They know that a man needs a parka at some point in the winter but they don’t feel the responsibility to sell it. That’s kind of where we are too.
It is just getting harder and harder to differentiate in that full-service space. It was just good fortune for us that I was never interested in having a full-fitness perspective. For us we knew the right decision was to be as niched as possible.
Upsize: What’s your background? How did you get involved in the strength training aspect of the business?
Carlson: I was an undergraduate in kinesiology and did my Master’s in exercise physiology at the University of Minnesota. From the time I was 20 years old I was an assistant strength coach for the Vikings, so it was really all I had ever done. I thought I was either going to be a NFL strength coach for life or become a tenure track faculty member or professor at a university. At 23, a great colleague of mine said ‘hey you should think about opening some kind of business.’ That’s where the focus has been ever since.
Upsize: You didn’t have a business background. How did you overcome that?
Carlson: I had heard there was a guy in Florida who runs the most profitable health club in the world. I just love to learn, so I said ‘well, I’ll take every penny I have and book a flight to Florida and learn from this guy.’ His name is Joe Cirulli. Inc. Magazine in 2008 detailed his rags to riches story. He was just in Fortune maybe six months ago with a top 25 small businesses in America.
So, I went down there and he spent a few hours with me. His message was ‘it doesn’t matter how much you know about fitness. You’re going to need to learn about business.’ He gave me “Good to Great,” and then “Built to Last,” by Jim Collins. I found myself in this never-ending passion for reading business and management books. To this day my absolute favorite thing to do is to sit down, read them and try to figure out how to integrate them into our business.
