February 2017 | Business View Magazine

100 101 IRON TRIBE FITNESS benefits of the economies of scale. I wanted to scale it in Birmingham, four to six times, before I started to franchise the model. So that’s what we did. Between February 2010, when the first one opened, and April 2012, we opened up four of our own locations and launched the franchise model. Today, there are eight corporate locations; six of those are in Birmingham, Alabama, where we’re headquartered, and two are in Atlanta.We are now starting to develop the Atlanta market as our next corporate city.” Walden explains where Iron Tribe fits within an industry, that, today, offers many more choices than it did only a decade or two ago. “Our niche would be referred to as the boutique fitness gym I wanted to create a communi- ty-based, workout programwith group fitness workouts for cus- tomers who increasingly live in a fragmented world and don’t have a gathering place, anymore. We wanted to be that place between home and work, and thought there was no better tool than fitness to be able to accomplish that. Forrest Walden founder – some people call it a micro-gym,” he says. “We’re not competing against the 24-hour fit- ness models–the Gold’s Gyms or the Powerhous- es; they’re not our competition, at all.Our com- petition is more in that boutique or micro-gym market.That could be anything from a SoulCycle to an Orangetheory Fitness, to a CrossFit gym, to anybody who’s offering group, personal training classes as their primary offering.” With so many different models competing for the consumer’s dollar, it’s become a necessity for each brand to define itself as succinctly as possible. Iron Tribe’s tagline is “Fun, Fast, and Fit.”“We want our customers to know that when they come in the door, every workout is going to be fun,”Walden says. “We’ve taken the guess- work out of the process. They just show up– the workout’s created for them. It’s always a mix of different workout elements; always variable. It keeps their body guessing and ultimately keeps it fun. It’s fast – it’s only 45 minutes; we always start and end our classes on time. There are always two full-time coaches per class, so the trainer-to-client ratio is never more than one- to-ten, which is really important in our indus- try. Scheduling is easy through an IPhone app. They can choose from any class we offer in any city. They have access to our clubs, nationwide. And then, fit –we’re going to get them into the healthiest version of themselves. Everybody has