Announcer (00:03):
From Austin Stone Worship, this is Stories From the Austin Stone. In the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, believers around the world are striving to be faithful to Jesus and love their neighbors. Alone Together is a series of stories about how the people of the Austin Stone are living faithfully in uncertain times. Today, across Austin and around the world, doctors and nurses, restaurant owners and delivery drivers, singles and students, moms and dads, artists and accountants and more are loving God, their church, their city, and the nations in the midst of this season. We might be spending our days apart, but in Jesus, the church will always be united. These are stories of God's people, alone together.

Shawn Martinez (00:56):
My name is Shawn Martinez, and I am the founder and CEO of Gym Studios. I graduated UT here in Austin in 2007 and then left there to go to Lifetime Fitness. I graduated with a kinesiology degree, so I had an interest in fitness. I learned the ropes, the business ropes and personal training at my time at Lifetime, but I was training a couple of clients on the side through that period, and those clients lived in a spot in Austin, Texas called The Domain.

Shawn Martinez (01:26):
At the time, The Domain was just this little bubble, and now fast forward, it's kind of this revolutionary real estate venture, a mixed-used: restaurants, apartments, lots of family, and I, as a trainer, being kind of in that box gym and then moving out to the park, doing some stuff at Zilker, and then finding this really high-end luxury space as a trainer was just such a prestigious spot to be in. That's kind of when God I think planted the seed of this entrepreneurial itch of niching myself in the apartment world.

Shawn Martinez (02:05):
Then the very next moment, I saw a new apartment pop up in The Domain, I took the little money I had, put a brand together, some business cards from Vistaprint and just went in there and said, "Hey, I'm a trainer. I would like to use your space and care for it and train. Would you let me train my own clients here?"

Shawn Martinez (02:26):
It was kind of an interesting ask, but they liked it, and that's how my company started. It started out as a bartered relationship where I use the apartment space and I care for it full time, but I'm able to bring my own clients in and use it like as it was my own gym. That's kind of how it started. As the group fitness elements started to come into the picture, I would say like 2014-ish, we started to evolve our model and to offer group fitness.

Shawn Martinez (02:58):
Today, prior to COVID I'll speak to is we have 20 locations. We're in Austin. We're in Dallas. We're in San Antonio. We're in Arizona. We have close to 70 contractors that we work with. We have a leadership of five or six managers that they're salaried, and I'm still the CEO of the company, but I've also ventured into a very successful consulting business where I work with the apartment developers and actually design gyms now, and I do equipping outfitting of pretty much in a shell of any space that wants to be a gym.

Shawn Martinez (03:35):
We've been growing. I've had zero debt, zero investors. We've grown organically ever since 2012 when I incorporated. We were producing maybe a couple of hundred dollars a year at the time. 2019, we hit 750K, so just shy of a million dollars, and we positioned ourselves this January of 2020 in a very, very exciting... just start to actually break a million dollars in revenue for the very first time in 2020. To this day, man, I can't take credit. I feel like God has just guided my hand every step of the way. I don't know what I'm doing half the time. I just wake up and do stuff.

Shawn Martinez (04:19):
I remember hearing about it way back in February, and then not really taking it seriously or just raising an eyebrow of why everyone's kind of freaking out, but I remember that date that it hit me. I mean, March 13th was the day that my family and I were driving to Florida, as we had a six-month planned vacation that we do, an annual beach trip every year, and my phone started blowing up. Media stories started hitting, really rise into the service of like a whole other level of like, "Hey, lockdown. This is coming. We're about to get hit," kind of thing.

Shawn Martinez (05:03):
Then because of our business model heavily relies on gym access, we started getting emails from our properties of saying, "Hey, the gym's going to be closed." Given that was the first day of my vacation, it was really disturbing. I remember that night that we... because we drove to Florida, which is a long drive, so we stopped probably halfway, got a hotel, and I just didn't sleep that night. I was just so worried and confused. I think when we got to Florida, the first night there I think was when I was able to let my mind wrap around what was happening. I remember there was a specific morning where I woke up, I had the opportunity to go out to the patio with some coffee and my devotional. I read some scripture, prayed, and just started weeping and know that was the day that I had needed to communicate to my team.

Shawn Martinez (06:09):
Then it just got worse, man. My emails started getting worse. By the end of the week, I was in Florida, but by the end of the week, 100% of our locations were shut down. I just felt I had to talk to people because everyone knew I was on vacation, and the last thing I wanted them to think is like I'm just turning my back on everything right now.

Shawn Martinez (06:35):
I remember recording myself doing a video, but also writing out an email letting everyone know that I'm on it, I'm doing what we can, encouraging the trainers that, "We're going to stop taking any revenue share from you right now. We're just going to freeze all that, so don't worry," and then encouraging my management team to hang tight, that I'm coming up with a game plan. That followed by some private emails to some managers saying, "Hey, I just want you to know the layoffs are probably going to happen soon."

Shawn Martinez (07:08):
That was the morning where I broke down. That was the most memorable morning, I would say, when the pandemic first hit us. It was just the weirdest week. We drove back early, and then knowing I would have to face the music the next day, I was just in this weird stoic state where I was just deer in the headlights. I didn't know what to do. I didn't even have emotion. I was just confused and in shock.

Shawn Martinez (07:43):
I had just walked away from a deal in January that I had been under a due diligence with a private equity company for a possible acquisition and investment, which was a huge deal for us. I mean, just a small company that I started from scratch talking about getting some significant investment and scaling nationally, and God just allowed that deal not to happen, and I had spent the last six months aggressively talking about scaling and becoming this multimillion dollar company and wrapping my mind around that and stressing out about scaling, and then all of a sudden, my stresses are now "how do I survive?"

Shawn Martinez (08:29):
All that's out the window. It's not about being a Fortune 500 company more. It's like how do I get through this and be a survivor, one of the few survivors in the fitness industry. The fitness industry is never going to be the same after this, in my opinion. We've had to pivot and take everything we can online, and that dollar amount isn't the same, so now it's battling what are the properties willing to pay us, how can we innovate and negotiate that we're bringing a similar value and try to get them to just pay us as much money as possible in a four-day period. We're like, "How do we become a virtual digital company?"

Shawn Martinez (09:15):
I just said, "We're going to use zoom, and we're going to offer 25 classes a week. It's going to be live. That way, we can continue that valued livestream interaction versus in-person." We didn't want to do a recording. I feel like that would devalue our service. I would say 95% of our properties were actually excited about it. They're like, "This is awesome. We're going to put this out."

Shawn Martinez (09:43):
When I got back to Austin from our Florida trip, I didn't even want to get out of bed, and deer in the headlights. I knew that, mentally, I was just struggling, and God put it in my heart to reach out to all the entrepreneur believers that I knew to do a daily prayer because, selfishly, I needed it, and it's been... For about two and a half, three weeks, I've been facilitating an 8:00 a.m. prayer, and it's about three or four guys jump on. It's random. It's never the same group, but it helped me have eternal perspective of just submitting to God first thing in the morning and just focusing on the day.

Shawn Martinez (10:38):
My hope, even though it was kind of a selfish act, I hoped it to be a blessing for whoever jumped on the call. I like to think that it has been because people keep showing up every morning. Literally at 8:00 a.m. Monday through Friday, that's how I start my day. That's been such a sweet time to remember God's goodness because that would have never happened otherwise. It's increased my prayer life tremendously, and with my family, it's just an incredible opportunity to be around family all the time. We've just had these really sweet moments of, I mean, just...

Shawn Martinez (11:22):
Sunday service, for example, man, something really incredible about worshiping God and listening to sermons in your home. I feel like that's brought our family closer together. During this time, it's been super difficult to think about others during this time because I'm so distracted because I'm pretty much in fight-or-flight mode, and God would kind of wired me to always... like it's easy for me to serve, it's easy for me to care about other people, but haven't been able to do that.

Shawn Martinez (11:57):
We're talking to my wife, like, "How do we love our neighbors during this time," and all this stuff, and we just started... she actually suggested, "You're a fitness professional. Why don't you share workouts?" We have a sandwich board. I put that out in the front of our driveway every day and just encourage our neighbors to stay active.

Shawn Martinez (12:17):
Workout of the day, 10-minute jog, and then go into a 10-minute cycle of 15 squats, 10 pushups, five burpees, and then end it with a 10-minute jog. We kept it on 30-minute workouts because I feel like we're trying to keep it simple, minimal, minimal equipment if no equipment, and everyone can either start here. If they're in decent shape, they can actually use this as a warmup to their other workout or whatever, but just providing some kind of simple no-brainer workouts is the goal.

Shawn Martinez (12:48):
I'm trying to make the kids part of it and help me come up with the workouts. It's been pretty cool. I'll be in my office, and I'll see you... like people actually stop and read it and take a picture or try to memorize it. It's just cool that we're contributing to a healthy neighborhood on some level. You know what I mean?

Shawn Martinez (13:08):
I'm not out of the weeds in any sense. What I originally thought was 50% loss is now 75% loss. Because of that, the next 30 days are so unknown. I don't know what we're going to do. I really don't, man. I had put a lot of hope in the government relief and the PPP and some of the loans, but best-case scenario, we won't get funding for six weeks. By that time, we could very much well be like, "It's too late."

Shawn Martinez (13:45):
I mentioned that probably about six years ago, I ventured into consulting. What that is, is I work with apartment developers or even corporate spaces, and they lean on me to give them a budget, to give them a strategy, and to give them a layout and equipment choice. I basically build them a gym catered to their needs, their goals, their demographic. I've gotten good at it, and I'm really passionate about it. Again, some more irony or God's provision, towards the end of last year, I've ventured into home gym design. I outfitted my home garage.

Shawn Martinez (14:24):
It's funny because even with the private equity partner that I was exploring with, he was almost like, "Well, the home is cool, but that's not really scalable," but now, I mean, it's completely changed. The context that I'm building for you is, that's the pivot. We lost our trainers, but now I'm hitting the home user, the home gym user hard. With all the connections that I've had with the different manufacturers... I mean, you could go on Amazon and try to find anything right now with fitness [inaudible 00:14:55], you just can't. Stuff's back ordered and like... I had this really fortunate position to be able to get things that most people can't, so I positioned myself and completely just overnight created a home gym, fitness equipment delivery service.

Shawn Martinez (15:16):
I think I have already sold like $10,000 a worth of equipment. The margins are different, so for us to actually get out of a hole right now, I'd have to sell like 40, $50,000 of equipment, but that's what I've pivoted to, and that's what I'm like... my team, I'm like, "Guys, I need you to just like hold down operations, free me up to just sell equipment." That's what I... The more minutes that I can be doing that, the better chance that we are like surviving this thing.

Shawn Martinez (15:48):
Virtual fitness and home gym sales. That's who we are now. We've redefined what Gym Studios is, and that's what I'm doing. That's kind of the pivot that we've made. There's just such a hill to climb that I'm not even halfway there to get us out of the hole. The other thing I'm dealing with too is it's not the demand. I feel like we're actually feeding hungry people, but it's the supply. All equipment originates in a handful of places, like from all over the world. A lot of stuffs come from China, all that stuffs even comes from the US, but these manufacturers, suppliers, I mean, they can't keep up with the demand right now, so I'm part of that too.

Shawn Martinez (16:30):
I've always struggled with confidence and more of intellectual confidence. I can execute. I'm a doer. I work hard. I think that the hope that has been instilled in me is that I have this company, Gym Studios, and I've been working diligently, mostly faithfully, almost like a 10-year period of building this up, but that's not who I am. My identity is not in that, and I very, very much probably believed that my identity is in that without realizing it, but then there's Shawn Martinez.

Shawn Martinez (17:14):
There's the Jesus-loving husband/father, Hispanic guy that likes hot sauce and cooking brisket. There's that guy, and I feel like God has helped me separate the two through this season of knowing, "Hey, I might lose Gym Studios, but I believe in myself as a provider. I'm not going to let my family go hungry. I work too hard to even remotely worry about that. I'll take care of them. If I have to go mow lawns or whatever I have to do, I'm not worried about it. I like to work. I like to provide. I like to serve."

Shawn Martinez (17:52):
I think that's such a gift of confidence because even though it makes me cry and makes me super scared to lose that, lose my company, we'll be okay. That's the hope. My prayer has just been whether I lose my company tomorrow or this is a weird season where we're just going to blow up after this is over, my hope and prayer has just been that anybody that's following me, whether it's on social media or internally, knows that I love Jesus, or they see something different about me that sparks curiosity to understand my faith, daily faithfulness, not weekly faithfulness or monthly, but daily, hour-by-hour faithfulness is a way that I feel like God's really shown that.

Shawn Martinez (18:51):
I think the other obvious one is family and just the sobering truth that the fact that I get to wake up to what I wake up to is clearly taken for granted. I think God prunes branches don't produce fruit, and in a lot of ways, losing all this stuff made me aware of areas in the business that I wasn't being a good steward of and areas that I may have maybe taken credit for things that God should be taking the credit for. There's a lot of things like that have been coming up. I know it's kind of all over the place and random, but the thing that I do know is that God's intertangled every cell of this thing, like it's so clear.

Announcer (19:53):
Thank you for listening to this episode of Stories From the Austin Stone. Please help us spread the word about the podcast by rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you found this episode and by sharing this episode with your family and friends. If you have a story to share with us during this time, please visit austinstone.org/share. That's austinstone.org/ S-H-A-R-E. Finally, for up-to-date information on how the Austin Stone is responding to the new coronavirus, please visit austinstone.org/coronavirus.