IAM1494 – Fitness Enthusiast Helps Clients Improve Their Health Inspired By His Own Weight Loss Transformation

As someone with an interest in fitness, helping as many people as possible improve their health, and seeing the benefits of his own weight loss transformation, Matthew Bible started his fitness company, CASS Fitness in September of 2013. The company started out with Matthew and his two partners Stephen Sengstacke and Ramon Thomas. Matthew is an in-home personal trainer, traveling to homes, apartment gyms, parks, offices, and more in Montgomery County, MD, Arlington, VA, and Washington, DC. Over the next few years, Matthew helped to recruit several talented personal trainers in the DC area as independent contractors. In 2017, CASS Fitness began teaching outdoor classes for the Parks at Walter Reed in DC and also gained their first trainer in Pittsburgh, PA.

• CEO Story: Matthew had so much interest in fitness since taking his degree. His weight loss was a motivation and helped many people improve their health by giving advice. He was tired of unstable work. Pursued taking fitness-accredited certification and went on to follow his dream. Built his business along with his two partners.
• Business Service: In-home personal trainer for small groups, homes, gyms, parks, etc. Working mostly with weight loss clients.
• Secret Sauce: Making client’s experience personal, nothing is a customer-fits-all program.
• CEO Hack: Trainerize
• CEO Nugget: Screen clients during the onboarding process
• CEO Defined: Position of being in control

Website: www.cassfitness.net

Facebook: cassfitnessdotnet
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cassfitness
Instagram: http://instagram.com/cassfitnessmatt

Episode Link: https://iamceo.co/2018/11/26/iam115-fitness-enthusiast-helps-clients-improve-their-health-inspired-by-his-own-weight-loss-transformation/

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Transcription

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00:25 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:51 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have the Matthew Bible of CASfitness.net. As someone with an interest in fitness, helping as many people as possible improve their health, and seeing the benefits of his own weight loss transformation. Matthew Bible started his fitness company, Cas Fitness, in September 2013. The company started out with Matthew and his 2 partners, Stephen Stingstack and Ramon Thomas. Matthew is an in-home personal trainer, traveling to homes, apartments, gyms, parks, offices, and more in Montgomery County, Maryland, Arlington, Virginia, and

01:28 – Gresham Harkless

Washington, D.C. Over the next few years, Matthew helped to recruit several talented personal trainers in the DC area, as well as independent contractors. In 2017, Cast Fitness began teaching outdoor classes for the parks at Walter Reed in Washington DC, and he also gained their first trainer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Matthew, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:50 – Matthew Bible

I am ready, yes.

01:51 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, let's do it. So the first question I had was just to hear a little bit more about your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

01:56 – Matthew Bible

All right, so I've had an interest in the world of health and fitness, even when I was working on my degree at Penn State. And then of course, as you mentioned, I did experience my own 50-pound weight loss and that was compiled about all the weight. Weight gain was resolved by bad decisions in college, but then the weight loss was just some motivation, just, you know, just really just ready to get back into shape. But then I was also helping people with advice on their nutrition. They're like, well, how'd you do it?

02:23 – Matthew Bible

And I was like, okay, let's do this, this, and that. For you, a little bit different, this, this, and that, helping them with certain exercises. Unfortunately, at the time, I put my desire to get my personal training certification on the back burner. I was like, okay, let me finish my degree. I got into the corporate world for a couple of years. Then I got laid off. Then I fell back on hospitality, and hotels, which actually worked most to college. At the time, I had some aspirations of actually owning a resort. So I was getting promotions at the hotel I worked with. So I was content but I wasn't too happy with it. So then I saw the stress that general managers and sales managers went through on a daily basis and I kept thinking to myself, I don't know.

So I saw the corporate company, I ran the hotel firing people left and right and actually took elimination of my position by corporate and then demotion back to the front desk to really kickstart my dreams. So I left work, pretty angry that day, understandably. So I went to the gym for my second workout, I usually worked out before work. Then I heard a commercial for the NASM, National Academy of Sports Medicine, 1 of the certifications. So that night I looked at NASM and a couple of other accredited certifications. I liked that they had a science-based program and I liked that they had an actual payment plan too.

So I pulled the trigger that night and signed right up. I knew right then and there I wanted to start a fitness business. I knew which direction I wanted to go to. You know, my parents, were initially against my decision to not start at a gym, but I was trying to give them my reasons. I was like, well, seeing the high turnover of trainers at my gym, the fear of losing my job no matter how well I performed, just drove me away from working at a gym. So then I got together with my 2 eventual partners, Ramon and Steven, who actually were a huge help in providing the marketing, the graphic design, web design, and second opinions of my decisions. They knew the potential in a fitness business and provided their services to help us get a good start.

So, you know, I really wanted to start controlling my own destiny and play by my own rules. Too many times I went through manager changes at old jobs and then went to system work. Things always changed, mostly, at least in my opinion, I think for the worst. I also started a company because I wanted to build a foundation where I never have to stress out about bills and I'm doing something that makes me happy.

04:32 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I want to draw it out a little bit deeper and hear a little bit more about what you're doing at cast fitness. How are you helping out and serving these clients that you work with?

04:40 – Matthew Bible

Okay. So we primarily provide in-home personal training for one-on-one clients, some small groups. As mentioned, we do travel to apartment gyms, condo gyms, and houses. And some people have equipment and some people don't have anything. So we all travel with anything from mats, bands, small weights, exercise balls, like battle ropes, pretty much anything that's not barbell or like a sandbag we have, and we'll bring it to them or parks, office gyms. Personally, I mostly work with weight loss clients. And weight loss, it's more than just, every person's life different, It's a different situation, different pieces to the puzzle.

A lot of it is a workout, but it goes beyond the workout. It's helping with nutrition. Nutrition is actually, although it sounds so simple, it's actually very tough because 1, There are so many contradictory articles out there like Do this diet, this diet, that plan, that plan, and all the other, these are incredible people as well. Then there's always so much confusion and then all the marketing out there even like TV ads like always go by if you see something advertised on TV, as far as food, 99% of the time it's not actually healthy, even if they say so. So there's, you know, and it just temptations from work stresses.

So That part of it, it's very personal to each person. And then I do help a little bit with corrective exercise as well. That was actually my second certification in NASM's CES, Corrective Exercise Science. I found that as somebody who went through a pre-debilitating back injury for about a year, I just found corrective exercise to be so useful, and actually, about half of our clientele needs some form of it. Well, I think everybody needs to help prevent injuries, but it's just to help someone recover once they're cleared by a doctor or physical therapist, just to help them out with preventing that kind of injury from happening again.

It's so much of it's just occupation. The occupational majority of folks now are sitting at desks most of the day, maybe not in the most ergonomic, most ideal ergonomic situation, or there's a lot of repetitive motion. So, it's like our technologies actually, our technology is hurting us physically. So, it's like we got to combat that. That's the 2, that's made 2 categories. And I do help what in the fitness world they call newbies, I guess, in the strength world. I was also that really skinny kid at 1 point too. I really just helped help like beginner to intermediate lifters kind of get to the next level with their strength training as well.

07:16 – Gresham Harkless

Now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. And this is something that you feel makes either you or your organization or both of them unique.

07:23 – Matthew Bible

What makes us unique? I feel we truly make our client's experience personal. Every person we treat just like, you treat them totally differently. I mean, everybody with respect, of course, but just every situation is different. Every program is different. There's no cookie-cutter program to 30-day like this, this, and that. Nobody's a one-size-fits-all situation. I think every trainer that's with us, not only has personal training experience, but almost everybody has customer service experience from other jobs. And I've had a lot of it, especially drawing from working at hotels for several years, just knowing, even especially when I got into like higher-end hotels, like just providing a certain level of service each time. I think I drew a lot of that from the customer service world.

And I think a lot of us have gone through personal journeys, whether it's been weight loss, injury recovery, or we had a trainer for a while you know still very close where she moved to North Carolina but she actually has a really inspirational story like she was she actually turned 51 got the bodybuilding 4 years ago just totally transformed her life actually was on bodybuilding.com and you know she was just all played that role model role for like a lot of women and especially in their 30s and 40s and 50s. I think with us being human, you know, just got to think you see too much on social media. You see, you know, and I did this kind of significantly early on. I'd post all kinds of crazy stuff I would do, but it's like, that's not what most people want.

There's a very specialized group of people that do, but it can be intimidating to some folks. I kind of drove away from that and just really focused on, all right, what do they need? And then we also, you know, in addition to personal training, we do like to work with different budgets because we realize, you know, not everybody in Ivory can afford personal training, but We want to help out as many people as possible.

We want to help out that college student. We want to help out that teacher who just got his or her first job out of college. So we derive from a couple of my clients moving out of the area and still wanting to work with me to a client who lost their job, who still wants to work with me. So I was like, all right, let's do online training. A couple of people who moved, I do Skype sessions. But then, so that was born. And then the program is kind of my budget option that I work with. So I usually will give them a questionnaire, and they'll give stats about where they work out or what they have access to.

And then from there, you know, any injury history, goals, you know, occupation. From that through our app, we customize the workout just for them. So we program from them every month what you know, they want to work out 3 to 345 times a week We'll put that in there and then we'll give them email support just once a week So that's something that I really I'm really also running with and I can go multiple areas with that I mean, I'm more so focused in the DC area pretty much with that, but expanding out and just trying to help as many people as possible.

For example, you can read out of a magazine, you can watch, you can get YouTube videos, you can get programs anywhere, but yeah, somebody with a knee issue, you know, squats are great exercise, they're the best, but yeah, you got knee issues, squats, probably not the best choice. So you know, it takes, it takes injuries into account as well. And then, you know, we, we give them instructions, full instructions on everything, videos, some that we've done and if they haven't been ones we've done, we've handpicked every single 1 of them.

That kind of aligns with our values because it helps somebody when they go to the gym because you go to a gym and probably half people are doing the exercises wrong. You know, you go to a gym, you see like lat pulldowns, bicep curls, all kinds of stuff just butchered. Sometimes big strong guys, and I hurt myself early on in my lifting career. I'm like, okay, I'm just going to watch what they're doing and, you know, hit the price.

11:16 – Gresham Harkless

They're not doing the right thing either. So it kind of just manifests itself and keeps going. It's like a snowball, so to speak.

11:21 – Matthew Bible

Oh yeah, definitely. I've had a rotator cuff, not a terrible rotator cuff, Andrew, but I've had some rotator cuff issues in the beginning from watching stuff.

11:32 – Gresham Harkless

Right. Well, cool. Well, it's great that you have that kind of individuality for every person so that you're able to kind of fit their needs. And what I wanted to do was switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

11:47 – Matthew Bible

Definitely, I'm gonna expand upon actually the app that I just mentioned. So it's called Trainerize. It's 1 of the more popular fitness apps out there. You can use it as an app, but there's of course the full capability on the website. So without a doubt, it's been crucial in business development and retention. We use it for everybody. We use it for our one-on-one programs because it helps clients keep track of their progress. They can see what their workout's gonna be. And then, of course, I can easily substitute an exercise. And then of course we do use that for online clients.

And then with Trainerize is cool, they can also, they can check in, they can chart their weight, their measurements. They can actually link like MyFitnessPal and other apps and their Fitbits as well. So we can kind of see their daily calorie intake, their macronutrient split. And it just, makes, again, as I mentioned it makes it easier for trainers as well. And then now that I, and then now that I have, I have several contracted trainers that also, so that's a good way to kind of check our stats as well for everybody.

12:49 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, it sounds like keeping everybody on the same page as well too, which is always important. So now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget and this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice or if you can kind of hop in a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

13:02 – Matthew Bible

But I wanted to grow so fast, you know when I first started, we ended up getting our first contract, the trainer. I was like, oh my gosh, you know, this is awesome. I want to get all sorts of people. I thought I had too much shame. I did have 1, you know, I love my contractors. I have, they're great. I did have 1 guy though. I didn't do enough of a stringent interview process. So I remember this, he was having a habit of being late a lot or not showing up. He was not showing up to clients. And now they're starting to get, it was the first time I had to really handle customer complaints, which I dealt with all the time working in hotels. So I was prepared to do so.

And I do training on Sunday. It was like the first Sunday I took off for a long time. My niece was just born right before that. She was about 3 weeks old at the time. So I drove up to Hershey, Pennsylvania, and hung out for the weekend. And this trainer had clients lined up. It was all Sunday morning. And I knew 2 out of 3 of them. And I actually gave them 1 of mine to get them started. And all 3 of these were friends with each other. And then, so 1 texted me, he was like, he never showed up. He said he was gonna be 5 minutes late. And I was like, oh no. And then I'm just sitting by the phone. I'm like, and then the second 1 calls me.

And then the third 1 calls me. Oh my goodness. I mean, thankfully I knew them and I was 1 of those, 1 of my, 1 of my former clients, I didn't become a client again. So I rectified it and I did have to get away some, did have to go give away some free sessions. I did have to do some volunteer work for a bit. But.

14:36 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes sense. But that's huge in making sure, you know, and I can definitely understand that you know, trying to grow and trying to grow fast, especially sometimes you can sometimes skip over, you know, some of the people you're bringing on, but it's great to hear you've kind of definitely rectified that with your company and being able to provide quality services to people now. But that's usually sometimes the hardest way to learn, but sometimes it's the best way to learn. Yes. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So what does being a CEO mean to you?

15:08 – Matthew Bible

CEO, I mean, it really, it's a position where, you know, you're in control. It's a position where you really truly get to change lives. You get to play by your own rules. You get to do what you love every single day.

15:23 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Matthew, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out of your schedule. What I wanted to do was pass you the mic, so to speak, to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know and then also how best they can get a hold of you.

15:33 – Matthew Bible

That's what to get a hold of us. You can go to our website www.casfitness.net. Our official site. The phone line's always open as well. Even through email, through our website. We have a contact form on there as well. It's kind of me and we actually have a nice blog on there as well. We actually, have a lot of guest writers that come in and sign up for the emailing list as well and deliver the blogs to you, that exclusive tips that you may not find on the website exactly. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing from somebody as well.

16:05 – Gresham Harkless

Definitely. Well, I appreciate you again. And what we'll do is we'll have those links in the show notes just so that anybody can follow up. But again, I appreciate your time and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:14 – Matthew Bible

Thanks. You too, brother.

16:15 –  Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.