ABOUT PETE PIRANIO
WELCOME! MY NAME IS PETE PIRANIO.
You Can Read My “BIO” And Story Below, But First I Wanted To Write You A Personal Note And Thank You For Coming To My Website.
HELLO FITNESS ENTREPREURS
I’ve always loved the “about me” page on websites because they’re written in the third person, but the owner of the site typically writes them.
After I made several attempts, I quickly abandoned that approach and decided to write this page like it was a letter to a friend, which I hope, will eventually be the case.
If you are a fellow Entrepreneur, then I believe we are kindred spirits and I am glad our paths have crossed today. My goal is to make entrepreneurship easier and more attainable by empowering more people to start, grow and scale their business faster, while achieving lifestyle and financial freedom for their families. Regardless of what stage you are in, EmpirePreneur has the courses, suite of business services, and coaching programs to help you accomplish this.
I LEARNED HOW TO START, RUN AND GROW A BUSINESS THE HARD WAY.
So you don't have to.
I know building a business while achieving lifestyle and financial freedom may sound cliché. A lot of “Guru’s” make that promise, but being a small business owner can either be the greatest vehicle to create this freedom or a ball a chain that you can’t break free of. If you are a struggling business owner you know exactly what I’m talking about. I’ve seen both sides myself, which I share in my story below. This has allowed me a unique perspective that has allowed me to build a program, services, and systems here at EmpirePreneur that puts you a path to success while avoiding the big pitfalls. However, avoiding pitfalls is just not enough. Instead, my aim is to make your Entrepreneurial journey easier and help you grow faster, rather than, being frustrated slugging it out year after year. Sometimes at the cost of relationships, family, and health. Because there is no doubt in my mind, if you don’t have a mentor or coach who’s been there, you are in for a long road. A road that’s not necessary with the right education, services, and coaching.
If you are willing, I can lead you to a place where your passion and business idea can be aligned to produce uncommon clarity, focus, and large-scale growth. This is because STARTING, GROWING and SCALING businesses is truly my specialty.
I have been involved with successfully growing and scaling a business for 15 years. In a business model and industry where most who attempted to grow and scale- failed. This gives me a significant body of experience to pull from. I’ve been involved with numerous businesses in a variety of industries and worked with a variety of leadership positions, whether that’s a unit manager, multi-unit leader, owner, franchisee or franchise executive. This has put me in a unique position to be able to see – and identify – the commonalities of what makes some businesses WORK, and others NOT. These “golden threads” have allowed me to distil these fundamental business success principles into proprietary frameworks, systems, tools, services, and business models that I have been perfecting over the years.
After many hard fought victories and even lessons learned from failures, I KNOW WHAT IT TAKES TO DESIGN A BUSINESS THAT SERVES YOUR LIFE. As opposed to your business running your life. This is what will make you an EMPIREPRENEUR, rather than, a manager who happens to own the place (more on that later).
BUILDING A BUSINESS AND BECOMING AN EMPIREPRENEUR IS A PROCESS.
What I will coach you on can be applied to ANY business, ANYWHERE in the world, but EmpirePreneur for Fitness Professionals is specially designed for personal trainers, fitness gym owners, sports performance coaches, and sports training facilities. Rather than, generic business systems any “guru” will give you, I’ve designed EmpirePreneur to work in two ways:
1. Plug and Play: you can simply implement the proven done-for-you business models, systems, business services, and tools that I perfected in the fitness industry.
2. Customized Universal Systems: I will coach you how to tailor these proven systems to act in a proprietary way. This way you are not competing with others in the EmpirePreneur community. Plus, if you choose to scale your business through licensing or franchising, we’ll be helping you build your proprietary asset from the beginning.
GROWTH IS A SERIES OF PLATEAUS
Have you hit a “plateau” in your business? Are you Feeling burned out? Starting to regret your business?
Or are you a Personal Trainer with a dream of starting your own business, but paralyzed by the fear of the unknown and being overwhelmed?
Of course you are...because GROWTH is a series of plateaus. Much like a ladder, you’ll need to break through these plateaus of business and personal growth to get to the next level.
I HELP YOU BREAK THROUGH THOSE PLATEAUS. EASIER AND FASTER.
How?
By changing your point of view about your business and personal growth. By opening your eyes to leadership and management methods, proprietary frameworks, systems, and business models I’ve developed over the last 15 years. By opening your eyes to the levels of growth you as an Entrepreneur need to take to become what I call an EmpirePreneur.
You see, my coaching, programs, tools and processes produce simple, but profound shifts in your mindset about yourself and your business. It allows the entrepreneur’s purpose, vision, passion, and business reality to align – and once that happens, large-scale growth happens almost automatically.
I can’t tell you how valuable this is. I remember struggling at different levels of growth and spending enormous amounts of time, energy and money looking for the answers. Always looking for the answer to why we were hitting the ceiling. You see, the hardest business to build is your first one because you have to learn as you grow. The good news is my previous war wounds are your golden nuggets and our whole mission is to make this easier.
Don’t worry. This isn’t some self-improvement-personal-development guru fluff. We’ll go to work…and work it will be. We’ll be plugging in real strategies, tactics, and systems. Tackling your obstacles preventing you from taking it to the next level. We will do the real work of building your business.
HOW DID I LEARN ALL OF THIS?
AUTHOR MALCOLM GLADWELL: POPULARIZED THE IDEA OF SPENDING 10,000 HOURS ON YOUR CRAFT TO BECOME AN EXPERT.
It has been a long journey – and a lot of WORK, SUCCESSES, and FAILURES. You see, I built my most valuable asset, my skills, knowledge, and network on this journey. Even during one of my biggest business challenges, I knew this was an asset no one could takeaway.
I can promise you, I have WAY MORE than 10,000 hours worth of in the trenches business experience under my belt and my passion is to share those lessons, wisdom, and insights with you. Not only through my personal experience, but other EmpirePreneurs I’ve been fortunate enough know and learn from.
WITH THAT SAID, HERE’S A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF MY STORY.
My story as an Entrepreneur begins after getting my Bachelors Degree and entering the field of personal training in 1998 at a big box gym. Unfortunately, my early experience in personal training was disappointing. I quickly realized that the personal training was not what I expected. My vision of a personal trainer was a professional in a respected and noble field that helped change people’s lives. What I found were low standards, gym owners who didn’t value their trainers, and frankly even personal trainers that didn’t respect themselves or the profession.
This created the desire and ultimately a vision to create a better way. I decided I needed to build a company that could have an impact not only on its clients but also fitness professionals. I wanted to make a shift in the fitness and personal trainer paradigm by creating a company that respected personal trainers, mentored personal trainers to become respected professionals, create career growth opportunities that were so limited in the industry at that time.
THE PROBLEM
Like many personal trainers I wanted to open my own personal training studio, but I was a bit paralyzed by the big question: how? Looking back, it’s amazing what I didn’t know:
- I didn’t know marketing and sales.
- I didn’t know how to recruit and hire properly.
- I didn’t know how to train employees effectively.
- I didn’t know how to manage employees to avoid all kinds of problems.
- I didn’t know how to intentionally build the right culture.
- I didn’t know how to manage finances.
- I didn’t know how to identify the right markets to open in.
- I didn’t know anything about lease negotiations and build outs.
- I didn’t know how to work with the city, state, or the number of legal issues.
- The list could go on…..
THE AWAKING OF MY INNER ENTREPRENEUR
Like many young entrepreneurs, I decided buying into a franchise might be the best route. After all, I was a top notch personal trainer and a franchise would provide me with the business side- right? Well, looking back, this is now laughable to me. I ended up buying into a start-up franchise who's “system” was in a 4” binder and the primary goal was to sell more franchises, rather than, complete the system they were selling.
Needless to say, I had no time for complaining. I had to go to work and build the systems to fill the holes in the model, all while paying 6% of my revenues for the honor. I had to go to work and invest in my education. I spent at least six figures over 15 years immersing myself in anything I could get my hands on about operating, marketing and growing a successful business.
In reality, having to do the work of an entrepreneur, rather than, having a perfect "McDonalds system" was a blessing in disguise. The knowledge, skills, and experience I gained are irreplaceable.
The result was I built a personal training business with 5 personal training studios in two states and supporting 12 additional franchises in two states. We lead the nation as one of the largest personal training studio operations for several years. Here are some of the results we achieved:
• Average revenues were 2.9 times the franchises national average.
• Averaged $54,000/month in personal training per studio for several years.
• Set a record for training 1154 session in a studio in one month.
• Averaged 4000 or more sessions trained a month in 5 studios.
• Generated $700,000+ annual personal training revenues in 1750 square foot studio.
• Generated over 2.6 million in annual revenues of only personal training.
"THE SKILLS THAT GET YOU FROM $0 DOLLARS TO $5 MILLION ARE VERY DIFFERENT FROM THE SKILLS THAT WILL GET YOU FROM $5 MILLION TO $50 MILLION."
THE NEXT CHALLENGE
My team and I had operations dialed in with two studios. Then came the challenge of scaling a business. You see, many owners can man handle a location, but I saw many businesses implode once they opened a second location. For me, the challenge came when we opened our third location. My time, skills and leadership mindset needed a paradigm shift - quickly.
This is where I hit a wall in finding available information, experts, and systems for scaling a business. There really were none, at least when it came to real tangible frameworks or best practices. The franchise had no clue. The repeated owner failures after opening a second location made this obvious. The fitness business “Guru’s” talked a big game, but none of them had experience running a business of our size either.
Scaling presents it’s own set of new challenges and requires a whole new set of leadership, management, financial management, marketing, and sales skills. At times it made me yearn for the simple times of two studio operations, but that wasn’t the vision of growth and opportunity I promised my team.
A BLESSING IN DISGUISE
So once again, we had to go to work and figure this scaling thing out. Unfortunately, the franchise we were apart of was too busy trying to save the current franchisee locations around the country, now closing at a staggering rate. In fact, the franchise became more of a costly ball and chain, than an asset. Eventually, the ball and chain had to end in what I’ll call a "messy divorce".
While this “divorce” created many big personal and professional challenges, I had been blessed to be in a very UNIQUE SITUATION to be involved with many passionate entrepreneurs, helping to build a franchise from the ground up, learning what makes a good franchise system and what doesn’t, the dynamics of franchisee and franchisor relationships, running multi-unit and multi-state operations, opening new locations, acquiring existing businesses, and selling businesses. I’ve been able to see a franchise system grow rapidly and see one failing miserably. It has given me a unique view into what it takes to make a business successful.
During that time I also started to do high level consulting – showing business owners how to use simple business models to dramatically grow and SCALE their businesses.
Being involved with many different businesses has put me in a rather unique position to be able to see – and identify – the commonalities of what makes some businesses WORK, and others NOT. Then distilling these fundamental business success principles into proprietary frameworks, systems, and business models to help my fellow entrepreneurs succeed. Today I am a trusted advisor, consultant, coach, and board member that dedicates my time to mentoring other entrepreneurs, and helping them START, GROW, SCALE, and SELL highly profitable businesses by sharing my proprietary frameworks with them. I am truly committed to helping entrepreneurs create a life they love.
"AND NOW IT’S MY MISSION IN LIFE, TO HELP FITNESS ENTREPRENEURSHIP BECOME MORE ATTAINABLE, EASIER, AND HELP THESE "PASSIONATE LIFE CHANGERS” GROW FASTER. ULTIMATELY, HELPING THEM STRUGGLE LESS, ENJOY THE PROCESS MORE, AND ACHIEVE THE FREEDOM THEY SEEK."