The First 3 Things I Would Do TODAY If I Were The CrossFit CEO
The First 3 Things I Would Do TODAY If I Were The CrossFit CEO
Lack of clarity is killing CrossFit from every angle. Here's how I'd fix that in the first 365 days.
“Why are you spending so much time working on things you don’t do great and not doubling down on the things you DO do great?”
This summer, one of the principles at our venture capital partner asked me this, and it’s changed my life and the trajectory of PushPress. I’m here to share this question with CrossFit.
Armchair Quarterbackin’
I hear it all the time from CrossFit Affiliate owners… “what CrossFit should do is…”
The thing is, most people at the affiliate ownership level have no clue what it’s like to try to manage a large scale organization, appease thousands of clients (owners), deal with the noise of millions of critics, while also answering to a board of directors.
In the last few years, I’ve learned a thing of two about all of the above, although admittedly not to the same scale CrossFit stands today.
That being said, I’d like to offer my semi-guided thoughts on what I would do if I were the CrossFit CEO.
Keep in mind, there’s literally no right answer to this. Also, there’s no telling what the board is directing the CEO to execute on (or how hard they’re pushing). I am working only on the premise that the board is trying to maximize the value of CrossFit as an organization.
1. Define The Customer and Product
There’s chaos in CrossFit that’s apparent from 1000 miles outside of the organization, so we should attack the very core questions any business needs to answer; what are we selling and to whom?
To be honest, from afar, I have no idea who the “customer” of CrossFit HQ is. CrossFit currently serves coaches (certifications), gym owners (affiliation), and the general public (gym members).
Who’s the Customer?
The General Public.
While it might feel obvious that the customer is the gym owner, choosing the person who pays for the product is a pattern I likely never will break from.
In CrossFit’s case, the person paying the bills - from the bottom to the top - is the gym member.
HQ putting the gym members center will…
Create clear alignment that prospective gym members can see and feel, making it easier to people join and stay at their CrossFit Affiliate.
Streamline and focus decisions about product and service direction at HQ.
Make it easier for an Affiliate owner to build, grow and maintain a profitable business.
Weaponize the coaches in the Affiliates around their alignment and passion to help the members.
Creating this core alignment around the gym members and prospective gym members is the first critical step we would need to take.
What’s the Product?
Guaranteed Fitness Results - Fast.
What is CrossFit’s product today? Is it seminars? Is it the Games? Is it Affiliate support?
Can anyone explain this unequivocally today?
From the outside looking in, I cannot tell what their product is… but I can see many departments in CrossFit apparently fighting to be “a” product.
Creating a clear product will allow everyone to align around a common understanding of what is is we are selling.
Sweet. We have a customer and a product defined.
Now we can start to cook…
2. Define the Mission
In the current era, CrossFit has gone from one of the most mission driven companies on the planet to seemingly lost it’s way.
Having a clear and rallying mission is paramount to give everyone working towards a common (and hopefully emotionally unionizing) goal.
From the start, CrossFit was a band of outsiders trying to show the world they were being duped. Fitness isn’t found a pill, processed foods, or the couch.
The mission must realign back to the roots, as corporate society will continue to try to sell the “easy” and “scalable” solution of fitness that we know does not work.
What’s the Mission?
Disrupt the world’s bullshit “health and fitness” industries from the inside-out, making the principles of CrossFit mainstream.
Maybe the first mission statement in the world with the word “shit” in it…
I kid… The mission statement would need to be polished for general consumption, but this is the gist of it.
I’m just not going to spend a week polishing a perfect mission statement for a company I’m not the CEO of.
Fitness and nutrition has to be one of the most predatory industries in the world, and we will work to change this, one local small gym at a time. To do this we must support the education, growth, and stability of the affiliate network for the good of the local populations (the CUSTOMER).
In my opinion, it should be the mission of CrossFit to make it’s counterculture approach to health, fitness and nutrition mainstream.
3. Lean Into What We Do Great
Ok we’re lined up. We know who the customer is. We know what our product is. We know why we’re doing this. Now - let’s get to work.
Before I tell you where I think CrossFit should lean - let me tell you where they’re mistakenly focused.
CrossFit Wants To Own The Audience
I can only make this assumption cause of the focus placed on “The Map”.
This is their effort to drive local leads and customers to Affiliates via an Affiliate Finder / Map on their website.
I think in 2005, this would have been a great idea. CrossFit was so unknown there needed to be a unifying presence on the web for it.
Today - it’s a a mistake. Just like no one except my mom (bless her) would go to starbucks.com to search for a “starbucks near me” - no one is going ot think about going to crossfit.com to find an affiliate when they can search for “CrossFit near me”
It’s just not how modern people look for things near them to patronize.
There’s worry in the Affiliate world about CrossFit turning to a franchise model - and things like driving the parent brand and distributing the traffic via a map only puts them closer to franchise fitness models like F45.
I’ll be the first to argue that somewhere in this long tail product mix for CrossFit includes better operator support. However, today there’s a LOT of mentors and coaches out there helping CrossFit gyms.
Conversely there’s only one organization who can massively impact the amount of every day people out there (our customer!) who can discover, understand and ultimately sample CrossFit.
That organization is CrossFit HQ.
The Right Play: Step 1 - Leverage The CrossFit Games
To date, CrossFit has done many things right. But in terms of aligning with the overall missions of fitness disruption, nothing has been more impactful than the CrossFit Games.
See these arrows? That’s CrossFit’s relative search popularity during each year’s CrossFit Games.
The Games are AMAZING - why have we ever considered leaning away from them?
Sport drives eyeballs, attention, and imagination.
Sport allows for stories to be told. Sport allows kids to grow up wanting to “be like Mike” (be like Rich?)
Adaptive and teen divisions were recently peeled away too - another mistake IMO (but hey, I don’t balance the books so it’s easy for me to say). These divisions make the idea of CrossFit even more accessible and aspirational.
The Big Miss of The CrossFit Games
Every year when the Games comes I get excited when I see CrossFit scratch the surface of it’s potential and then just walk away. If I were CEO, I would pull the bandaid right off of this one.
Showcase local Affiliates and the average every day people that are achieving miracles daily.
They recently almost got this with one spot with Scott Panchik and his client Henry. and I was excited to finally see a slew of spots showing more of these! But instead the video centered on Scott as “the coach” instead of Henry as “the client”… MISS.
Drive the eyeballs and the attention to the spectacle of the Games - and turn those eyeballs into curiousity.
Every moment it is possible to squeeze it in, they should introduce one more story from the local Affiliate community showing a normal person achieving uncommon success.
Ads. Commentator mentions. Interviews. On-field showcases. Anything. Bake it into the content and use the platform to drive the message to the world.
As an added benefit if you bake this message into the content, it’ll be available on every replay, every YouTube clip, and re-running in dead hours of ESPN for the year to come.
Turn The CrossFit Games into Local SEO
Screw the “Map” you’ve wasted so much time and effort on. Even if you build it, you’ll have to spend never ending effort driving awarness and eyeballs to crossfit.com just to only send them to Affiliates.
Just send people to Affiliates!
Nail the opportunity of The CrossFit Games presents to connect the dots between the casual viewer and a local Affiliate.
Make it abundantly clear that while these athletes are the 0.01% of the world, the 99.99% of the world is IN A LOCAL CROSSFIT AFFILIATE RIGHT NOW.
Local SEO Is The Huge Opportunity
Not only is Local SEO the huge opportunity for Affiliates to win new members - it’s also the best reason for CrossFit to reduce Affiliate churn.
Non-affiliated gyms face a 50x harder path to winning local SEO vs. CrossFit affiliates. Plus they have less qualified leads coming in on “gym near me” than “crossfit gym near me”.
If they spend their energy maximizing this one single thing, it would connect every piece of their business in success.
Local people would find fitness results faster (and with less bullshit). Local Affiliate owners would benefit from increased business. Coaches would have more people to work with. And CrossFit employees would be driven seeing the scucess of the ecosystem against stated goals.
Enough Fantasy Land
Ok, that’s my 30 minutes on “what would I do if..” You now have my first 365 days in office as CrossFit CEO in the alternate universe where I serve there.
Create internal alignment around a clear definition of who we serve, what we sell, and why we’re doing it.
Leverage this alignment to focus on one thing: driving our customers (the gym members) into the gyms of local affiliates by leaning into the two biggest opportunities we are overlooking. The Games and Local SEO.
To be abundantly clear, I have my own business to run and would never consider leaving as CEO of PushPress - but this Saturday morning was dedicated to thinking about how I would solve different and bigger issues than I face today.
I love CrossFit and everything it’s done for the world and I look forward to seeing what they do there. Every business faces challenges, and I am 100% certain the leadership at CrossFit can figure things out. It’s easy to armchair quarterback from the sidelines, but I’ll happily toss my thoughts out to the world to see if anything sticks.
Without a shred of doubt, I’ll be facing problems this big one day. I just consider this one more rep of practice before I get there.