We’ll Catch You All on the Flip Side
Well, this isn’t a blog post that I ever thought I would be writing, but here we are. It’s with a heavy heart that we inform you all that we’ll be closing our doors this April. It’s been a tough few years, and an even tougher few months, but I think I’ve exhausted all possible avenues to continue to make this dream work. Here are some parting words for you all, as I feel like everyone deserves an explanation. Our last day of operations will be on April 22nd, 2025.
Everyone Extracts Their Pound of Flesh, Every Month
It’s no secret that inflation has been wild these past few years, but here in Florida, it’s been compounded by the mass migration that we’ve seen since the tail end of the Covid pandemic. It was incredibly expensive to get going in the beginning, but as the years have progressed so have the costs of running a brick-and-mortar business. Originally, our overhead every month was right around $7500 total every month, and in the past three and a half years, that number has surged to between $9,000 and $10,000 each month. That’s a 30%+ increase in the cost of doing business over three years. It’s roughly $110,000-120,000 a year for us to open the doors and turn the lights on each year. In the past three and a half years we’ve managed to pull in just shy of around $400k, and we’re not even really at a yearly break-even point yet which is wild to think about.
Commercial real estate here in Wesley Chapel has EXPLODED over the past five years, especially when it comes to retail, and businesses are taking a hit because of it. What’s ultimately great for the consumer and community, isn’t necessarily great for the small business owner. You can’t find commercial space for less than $30-35 per square foot, and much of what is available runs as high as $45 per square foot. Then, you’re also going to be paying CAM/NNN fees totaling a few thousand each month. That means for a 2000 square foot space, you’re going to be shelling out on average about $8500-9000 per month to the landlord alone. Then throw in electricity, internet, insurance, equipment maintenance, scheduling software, payment processing, website, and then everything else. As a solopreneur, the monthly nut is a lot more than you’d think, and there’s rarely anything left when it’s all paid down.
We’ve looked everywhere for a suitable spot to help bring our overhead down, that place just doesn’t exist in Wesley Chapel right now. So if you’re someone who is looking to invest in commercial real estate, we desperately need flex and warehouse space lol. Go get on it!
For me at The Lyons Den, I have to coach on the floor for roughly 80-100 hours a month before I’m able to pay myself a dime. Due to this, I haven’t had a paycheck since April 2020, which has been difficult. This leads me to my next point.
I’m Exhausted
Since August 2021, we’ve been open for roughly 1340 days (as of the day in March that I’m writing this) and I’ve had a combined total of about 150 days off, and never two in a row outside of last year when Christmas was on a Monday. Now, this isn’t something that I didn’t expect; I was fully prepared to work 365 days a year in my first couple of years. I’ve done it for other people, I have no problem doing it for myself. I just figured a year or so into it, I would be able to possibly hire someone to fill the gaps throughout the week, and we just never hit a level of business year-round that would allow for that. More on that later.
On average, I’m at the gym for between 70 and 80 hours each week, not necessarily coaching the whole time, but in the building doing business-related things. This puts me at the gym around 6 am most days, and walking out the door as late as 9 pm many days. I haven’t seen the sun rise or set in almost four years and haven’t eaten dinner sitting down more than a handful of times. We’ve been out to dinner once as a family in Charlotte’s two years of life, and Des and I have not been on a date since September of 2021. There’s no time (on money lol).
I’ve missed almost every dinner, bath time, and bedtime with my daughter and that’s time I can’t ever get back. My iPhone is courteous enough to make me photo and video collages of my daughter periodically, and I find myself in tears watching the things that I’ve missed. The time that I am with my family, I’m typically answering emails, text messages, and phone calls, or stressing about how I’m going to generate enough cash to continue going at the gym. My daughter hasn’t really met the version of me who is present, smiling, and not stressed out, and that’s heartbreaking to me. Des is an absolute rockstar and has been in my corner this whole time, but she’s tired as well. Starting and growing a business puts a lot of stress on the people you love, and I’ve (and the people around me) definitely felt it over the years.
I haven’t slept soundly in almost four years. I’m often up til 21-2 am stressing about bills, or when I finally do manage to get to sleep at a decent time, I’ll wake up in a panic stressing about some part of the business. My health has taken an enormous hit these past few years because of all of it, and that’s something I’m going to have to grind at to get back.
I love what I do, and for a long time I defined who I was based on what I did. Since meeting Desiree and having Charlotte though, I’ve found out that life is significantly more than work and that’s been a tough realization to deal with when my whole life has become about work. Having my new family has really opened my eyes in the best possible way. And I want to be able to be present with them, and support them financially. Neither of which are possible in our current position.
The Math Changed
Very early on in this process, I figured if things got tough, I’d just give up my apartment and sleep in the office at the gym. I’ve definitely done this in the past (sleeping at facilities I worked at) because leaving at 10 pm and getting home at 11 pm to come back at 4:30 am didn’t make much sense. I’m a worker, and I’ll do whatever I have to to make things work. I’m not a stranger to putting in ungodly hours to make something work.
In April of 2023, the math changed when we welcomed Charlotte Michelle Lyons into the world and the idea of sleeping in the office flew out the window. The idea of not eating if the money wasn’t there because I was growing the business was no longer an option. Our daughter changed everything.
I went from trying to figure out how to generate enough money to run a business, to figuring out how to pay for a mortgage, a business, buying healthy food for the baby, diapers, baby stuff, etc. I wasn’t doing it alone, but it’s still a lot when you’re not collecting a paycheck. It couldn’t all be about the business anymore, everything shifted to her because she, and her future, are the most important thing in the world now.
If it was just me, I’d figure out a way to deal and make it work, but the math changed and I don’t have the option to be that level of selfish any longer. There are too many people in the meat grinder with me right now who didn’t ask to be and I’ve got to make sure they get out of it.
Trying To Do Things The Right Way Isn’t Always Profitable
When I set out to do this, my goal was to be able to cast as wide a net as humanly possible. I see far too many kids left out when it comes to sports due to cost, and I did not want to be part of this problem, I wanted to be part of some kind of solution. I think every kid deserves to see what they’re capable of, and price shouldn’t keep kids from excelling and having opportunities.
To do this, we’ve kept our costs in line (or lower) than much of our competition when in reality the training here is better (it is in 100 different ways, and I will die on this hill if you want examples I can provide them), and our overhead is higher than pretty much all of our competition. My thought process was we could pay our bills with the group sessions, and then the private training would be what I live off of until we grew to the point of needing help or expanding and growing. Well, we never really got there and much of it is due to the seasonal nature of this business. During the summers, this works, during most of the school year, it absolutely does not.
I always expect the fall months to take a hit, it’s just part of the deal. Kids go back to school and start seasons, schedules change, some kids head off to college or go to their pro/major junior teams, and a percentage of our clientele will take off and we won’t see them again until the next summer. But at this facility, more so than any other facility that I’ve worked at in the past, we would get crushed in the fall. I’m not talking about losing just a good portion of our clientele or a bunch of kids dropping from 3-4 days per week to 1-2 days per week, I’m talking about going from having 75-90 kids training here from June through August to having less than 15 training here byt the end of September, and even more of them dropping off by October. We lost over 75% of our business from July to September this year, you can’t project or even really budget for that.
This isn’t a boo hoo poor me sob story and I’m not looking for sympathy of any kind, it’s just the reality of the situation at this point. We took a hit in the fall that we just couldn’t get out from underneath this year. It was devastating, to say the least. It was really the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I’ve also been brutally honest with people about their needs. There are times when I definitely could have sold someone on an extra day of training every week, or a higher ticket item, but it didn’t make sense for their situation. People trust me to give them the right advice, I don’t want to betray that. They didn’t need it, and it could have ended up hurting them rather than helping them, in addition to spending money they don’t need to spend. I know TONS of coaches who will push x, y, or z based on their own financial needs and not in the best interests of the clientele in their care. I’m just not built to be able to do that.
I’m not someone who sees training as a sales game, I see it as a way to help the people who are in my care. Telling someone they’re better off training twice per week instead of three days per week would cost me about $4200 a year each time I did it. But I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night (I already don’t but this would have made it significantly worse) if I was bamboozling my clientele, it’s just not who I am. But, this is a sales and volume game so this thought process has hurt the business. There’s not a lot of money in being honest when it comes to youth sports. You’ve gotta sell the dream and push the pain points if you want the sale.
Another thing was people trying to nickel and dime me as a business owner, which was wild. I don’t have some corporate office to deflect “policy” type stuff towards, I was always where the buck stopped/decision was made and people knew it. And some would take advantage of that. I’d have clients ask for money back because they weren’t able to train as often as they wanted throughout the month, clients ask to cancel 3 hours before their auto payment was going through (while I was asleep and unable to stop it), people cancel their monthly payments on a Friday when their auto payments were due on a Saturday to push the payment off until Tuesday because they wouldn’t be able to make it on Monday, or want to pause their monthly payment for two or three days because they wouldn’t be able to come in, etc. When we’ve brought the cost down as low as we have (as low as $14 per session in our groups), we can’t really deal with people wanting to do these things and it puts us in a really bad financial position to do so. I’ve lost clients over these disputes.
Here’s another thing that people would do: they would get their monthly declined, and then ignore emails/texts/phone calls and still send their kid in to train, but dropped them off as to avoid me. As an owner, I should absolutely not allow people who haven’t paid to be on the floor, but as a human being, I’m not going to ostracize a kid in a large group because of something their parents did. It’s insane that anyone would have to be put in a situation like this, but it was a quarterly thing for me. This wasn’t anywhere near the majority of my clientele, most of my clients are amazing, pay on time, show up, and do the work. But a few bad apples can really spoil a bunch and when you’re not in a position to turn people away due to high overhead, it can really drag you down.
There are a ton of coaches doing incredibly well financially, and a lot of those coaches are doing it the right way. But not all the coaches your kids work with are living the good life, even with the costs as high as they are, because everyone’s extracting their pound of flesh all the way up the ladder. From the federal government to the state government, the landlord, organizations, etc. it all adds up.
Year Round Sports Are Destroying Development, And Sports Performance Facilities
This is a fairly indirect reason, but it’s tough to make this place work with three good months a year. Kids need year-round development both on and off of the field of play. There’s a reason universities and professional teams hire full tiem strength and conditioning coaches, it’s because this is a year-round endeavor if you want to be successful.
As a strength and conditioning coach, I’m privy to knowledge that others aren’t, and I forget that sometimes. I understand development, and what it takes to get to the next level both as a coach and as an athlete. I played high school and travel hockey, then junior hockey, and then finally, NCAA hockey as a player from Florida before players from Florida really did that. As a strength coach, I’ve coached 8U athletes all the way up to professionals and Olympians. And finally, as a sports coach, I’ve worked with travel, high school, and even a college team. I’ve been down the path of development thousands of times between myself and my clients/players that I’ve coached. I understand it better than most.
My education has also given me another perspective on the development of skill (neurological adaptation, strength, movement, etc.) and how it works as well. The way 99% of my clientele are doing it doesn’t work outside of the fringe freak 0.1% of genetically gifted athletes, and as much as I love my clients, statistically most aren’t in that group.
Our youth sports have inverted the development model in the worst possible ways. There is so much time spent on skill, that there’s often no time (or money) left over to develop physically or even take any time off or learn other skills/sports. It’s happening across the board with all my colleagues as well. And the results are devastating.
Roughly 70% of kids quit sports by 13 years old, and half the ones left will quit in high school. They’re burnt out.
The average age for Tommy John surgery is now 15 and a half years old. Ten years ago it was between 22 and 24 years old. Ten years before that, it was the very late 20s and early 30s. We’ve made something that was very niche to end of their career pitchers, to now being for kids in the earliest years of their “careers.” Dr. Andrews (the pioneer of this surgery) performs roughly 300 of these surgeries every year, and there are tons of these surgeons throughout the country, so if you did the math I’m sure you’d see that there are 3,000+ of these surgeries on youth athletes (under 18) every year.
The average number of ACL tears for high school students is somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 each year. Estimates put non-contact ACL tears at ~65%, and overuse at ~25%, leaving only 10% left as the result of the athlete getting hit (these are unavoidable for the most part). From 2007 to 2022, we saw a 26% jump in overuse knee injuries in high school-aged athletes. That’s a big jump when, during that same time, we’ve seen such a boom in “development” based programs. All that extra practice and skill work won’t matter if you’re sitting on the bench in a knee brace for 9 months rehabbing and reconditioning from an ACL reconstruction during the most important development years.
On average, we see anywhere from 70,000 to 100,000 of what would be considered overuse-type injuries (tendonitis, stress fractures, etc.) that require a doctor visit in high school athletes every year. There are far more that go unreported as these don’t tend to need medical attention and many schools now have athletic trainers. These are caused by too much volume (games and practices) and not enough strength development off of the field of play (and time off completely). These injuries are completely avoidable and self-inflicted. You have to be physically strong enough to deal with the demands of the sport, and sadly today most kids aren’t because they’re on the field/ice/court far too often.
I mention this because, in part, this impacts my business and businesses like mine. The reason we exist is to help get these athletes ready for the field, so I’m under no delusions that kids should be here more often than on the field of play. They’re only here to get better for the field/ice/court. HOWEVER, probably 85% of my clientele only walk through my doors for two to three months (or less) out of the year and then have zero strength stimulus for the other 9 months while they’re playing. This is what leads to overuse, and eventually, the possibility of catastrophic non-contact/overuse injuries that will eventually force you to take time off. Training is a year-round endeavor, you can’t make strides 2-3 months at a time. It’s taking two steps forward, and 1.9 steps back every year.
Think about it this way, if you train only in the offseason (which is getting shorter and shorter now due to year-round play), you’re only going to squat, deadlift, or bench press 10-12 times total per year. In what world could you do something 10-12 times and have it make any real impact on your development? Strength and resiliency are a skill, they have to be honed. Furthermore, they’re skills that have to build on each other. It’s not really something that you can go home and work on by yourself like a sport skill is.
I get middle and elementary school-aged athletes that come in here with the hip and shoulder mobility of geriatric populations. Same with many of the high schoolers although the percentage isn’t quite as high. This has been increasingly the case over the last 10 or so years, and it is getting significantly worse as time marches on. This is going to be a huge issue moving forward, and if these trends are the norm, the overuse problems that we’re seeing in kids right now are nothing compared to what’s coming down the pipeline in the coming decade. This comes from playing one sport, and playing it year round, while neglecting your physical development.
I say this often but it’s 100% true: your sport coach’s “training” is doing more harm than good. There’s a reason they’ve created an entire educational apparatus at universities when it comes to physical development and preparation. There’s a specific way to do it, and I’m sorry to say but your football coach who “played in college” doesn’t know what that way is, unless he/she’s been through said educational apparatus. He may have played the sport, but he isn’t an expert in the physical prep for the sport. He’ll revert to “this is what we did and it worked” which is the most dangerous way to do this. Or worse, he’ll see things on social media and apply it to his situation when it’s fully and wholly inappropriate for your training.
So when you think your kid is still training because they’re with their sport coach in the gym, I can promise you from being in these weight rooms throughout my career, that 99 times out of 100 your kid is worse off for doing it. Best case scenario, the training they’re doing is useless and just drains the tank, worst case it’s actively causing them to get hurt. I get why coaches want to do it, but it’s really harming their players.
I don’t say any of this to make anyone feel bad, but the answer is staring us right in the face and we refuse to even look at it. Your kid needs time away from their sport, and needs time in the gym with a qualified coach. Any other way is going to end in heartbreak and/or injury. The kids that I’ve worked with over the years who have made it to the NCAA DI, Olympic, and professional ranks all have one thing in common: they train in the gym year-round. Very few are able to do it without this and will never reach their full potential.
I Appreciate All of You
This has been a really trying and long season for my family and I. It’s tested me in ways that I definitely wasn’t prepared for and I didn’t always make it through to the other side on my own. One thing I was able to do, was maintain my sobriety from alcohol. And for that, I’m thankful.
If you’ve come through our doors at any point over the last almost four years now, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for trusting me with the development and safety of your child. As a new parent, I understand how hard that can be and what an honor it is to allow someone to watch over and help develop your child. Thank you for having faith and trust in me.
It’s been a tough five years since this idea was born, but I was able to do a lot of good in the community and gain a ton of experience in front of a ton of clients in a new setting. I’ve added well over 10,000 hours on the floor coaching in a relatively short time.
While it’s not a fun thing to be forced into a position to give up on something you worked so hard for, everything is a lesson and this was no exception. I’ve learned a lot and met some awesome people.
I’ve got a couple of opportunities looming so we’ll see where I end up. Many are out of state, which would be a huge change that I’m not necessarily looking forward to, but I’m thankful to have opportunities possibly sitting in front of me to continue making a difference. Florida is home, and it’s been home for most of my life, so we’re doing everything we can to not leave our home.
I’m going to take some time to lick my wounds, heal my bruised ego, be with my family, and finally be present with them in a way I haven’t been able to for the past four and a half years. While there is sadness in this, there is some relief, and optimism as well.
Thank you all, and don’t be a stranger in real life or on social media. We’re going to keep this website running for a while as I build out StrengthCoachUniversity.com, but we’ll probably be shifting most of our socials over to Strength Coach University (we’ve already done this with YouTube and TikTok) which is a nice little hobby/side project for myself, in the not-so-far-off future. Keep up with us over at:
Twitter: @based_coach1
TikTok: @based_coach1
YouTube: @based_coach1
Instagram: @lyonsdensportsperformance
Facebook: Facebook.com/theLDSP
Go check out the podcasts Strength Coach Rants and The Great Strength Debate. We’re going to be having some really solid coaches on in the near future, and you’ll be able to learn a ton!
I’ll be offering some online coaching to those who are interested, and I may keep a handful of clients who are ok training out of my garage if I don’t end up taking any of the positions I’ve made the shortlist for. Reach out if you’re interested. I won’t have the space to run any groups, but if you’re interested in private training it could be a good option for you.
We’re going to be selling off most of the equipment so if you want to build a home gym we might have some things that you’d want or need. We thought we would be able to unload all of it with a business coming in behind us here, but that fell through and we’re left holding onto all of it for now.
If you haven’t yet, go check out the books I’ve written in the past year. There’s a ton of great information in them! I’ll also be working on Exercises in Futility, and another book called The Conjugate Code so keep an eye out for those.
We’ve had a lot of people check out the Ultimate Jump Training page here on our site. I had planned to get that out earlier this year but I just didn’t end up having the time. The eBook has been written, and all the content has been shot, It just needs to be edited and put together for release so keep an eye out for that as well if it’s something you’re interested in.
Thank you all for your patronage over the past three and a half years. I’m grateful that I got the opportunity to meet and work with each and every one of you. While there is sadness and frustration at the beginning of this next season of life, there’s also appreciation.
We’ll catch you all on the flip side.
