“Just because you affiliate doesn’t mean you’re going to succeed.” – Joe Tepe

Talk to boutique fitness gym owner Joe Tepe, and you’ll always come away with something you didn’t know before. It’s the energy he brings to it, the sense that he’s thought hard about every piece and is happy to walk you through all of it. We sat down to talk about The Engine Room, his new HYROX gym in Las Vegas.

Joe’s resume includes:

Successful nightclub operator in Las Vegas
Made the switch to fitness in 2017 by opening The Strip CrossFit
When he launched his first gym, he did it all on his own, starting with 15 members
Today, he has 4 gym brands and 5 locations in Las Vegas

Through the interview, he shared a wealth of information for others planning to open a HYROX gym, including:

What it costs to build a premium HYROX Training Club from scratch, and why you don’t need to spend that much if you don’t want to
How a month of free classes brought in 450 leads, and the rules to remove time wasters
How to launch a founding member offer that drives early membership
Why this HYROX gym focuses on indoor running instead of sending members outside
What does the HYROX affiliation get you, and why it won’t fix a gym that isn’t working

You can learn more about The Engine Room on Instagram and on their website.

Joe Tepe has the battle scars that led to this point

Joe Tepe opened his first gym nine years ago with 15 members and no staff. Today he runs four concepts all next door to each other on a single Las Vegas plaza: The Strip CrossFit, Tread Vegas, The Strip Barbell, and, as of September 1, The Engine Room – a HYROX Training Club.

When Joe got started, he wasn’t a full-time coach who made the leap into the gym-owner world, but he was a smart operator passionate about CrossFit and working out, with transferable skills from the Vegas nightclub industry. He spent 10 years in hospitality before he ever programmed a workout, and it shows in how he talks about member experience, lead generation, and why a free class can generate high-quality leads.

Joe got his battle scars opening a CrossFit gym, “The Strip CrossFit,” and doing it all on his own, starting with 15 members. We caught up with him in the midst of launching his latest concept, a premium HYROX Training Club. He is currently in week 1 of a one-month free-class period, before a single member pays full price. A strategy that generated 450 leads.

What follows is an unvarnished look at the decisions behind opening a new HYROX gym, including the ones Joe is still making.

Every gym after that came out of a limitation in the one before it. Walk us through how you’ve launched your gyms and arrived at The Engine Room.

About four years later, we decided to open a boutique bootcamp because not everybody was looking for CrossFit. One of my members was also coaching at a gym in the suburbs that was running some of my workouts, but with dumbbells and a treadmill instead. We decided to launch our own variation of that, and that became Tread Vegas.

Shortly after that, we had an open office in the front room of Tread, so I turned it into a 300-square-foot lifting facility. You could buy day passes or rent it by the hour. That was The Strip Barbell. But the first version of The Strip Barbell had a lot of limitations. We didn’t have cardio equipment, just a bike erg. No treadmills. No dumbbells other than 35s and 50s. We had an Olympic lifting platform, a squat rack, and you could bench. That was about it. So we grew that into a 3,500-square-foot lifting facility. A lot of people inquired, a lot of people loved it, but people signed up for membership and quickly churned because of limited equipment options.

So we expanded to the side. We added two saunas, showers, locker rooms, and about 30 pieces of Atlantis equipment. At that point, we went from five in-house personal trainers to 15. But we knew we wanted to coach more members and grow the business, and I wanted to diversify our offering even more while complementing everything we do. So we took over the space next door to Engine Room, and it became our first dedicated HYROX gym.

What was the investment to set up your HYROX gym, “The Engine Room?

So first of all, it’s not a complete rectangle, which would be ideal, but it’s pretty close. We have nine wall ball targets, five lanes of turf, ten air runners for indoor running, and ten ergs, five ski and five row. I decided to go all in on the build-out, and the investment was a little over $300,000. That included gutting the entire space and correcting the flooring so we could install turf on a completely flat, smooth surface with no bumps. Then a ground-up build-out with brand-new equipment. We invested in Centr equipment because we wanted to match a HYROX race as seamlessly as possible; we wanted the exact kettlebells, the exact plates, sleds, runners, and rowers.

You’re offering free HYROX classes for the entire month of September; so far you have 450 signups. Explain the math.

We did four Instagram posts about free classes through September and had over 450 signups through Wodify.

All leads had to DM us on Instagram and were guided through a DM reply, which we automated to go to our online sales page. They paid $1 as a setup fee, then they downloaded the Wodify app, where they could book one class up to seven days in advance. Each week in September, they can take one class.

We’re being smart with what we give away for free in September by only offering five classes per week; this lets us get leads in as trial members, lets them experience the class, get hands-on with the beautiful equipment, and want to come back for more. Because we’re only doing 5 classes a week in September, we’re limited to 160 unique participants each week. If someone no-shows or late-cancels one of their free promo classes, they are booted out of the September free classes offer. This approach creates commitment and helps us make sure our classes are full i.e. 30 out of 30. We’ve had seven classes now, and we’re seeing 29 or 28 show up. We set all this up in Wodify, it was super easy.

Do you think free trial classes are the best way to launch a new gym?

I’ve now done all the different ways. I’ve done the grassroots CrossFit marketing, building it organically one person at a time. When I opened Tread Vegas, we did $7,800 in Facebook ads over a month and a half and front-sold founding memberships that way. With this one, and the interest in HYROX, instead of spending a bunch of money on Facebook, we said we’ll give away free classes and basically eat it for a month in terms of dollars, because we’ll have demand and we can focus on converting these leads into new members.

At the end of the day, I think they all [the different marketing approaches to launching a gym] can work. As long as you have a direction and a plan and you move in that direction, then your marketing can work. Our idea for The Engine Room was that if we can create a whole list of people who are interested in HYROX, I can sell them now by getting them through the gym doors. Then I can revisit them in a month, or when there’s a HYROX race around the corner, or in six months, and so forth.

So, no Facebook ads. Are you doing anything else to get leads and build awareness for your new HYROX gym?

We have over 260 people signed up for our grand opening, which you had to sign up for through an online portal using Wodify. The grand opening is a specially programmed HYROX class where we’re going to get 260 people through a class in 1-hour. It’s going to be interesting, but we’ve designed a program that will work by using outdoor space, bodyweight movements, and everyone gets to be hands-on with some of our equipment e.g. treadmills, sleds, etc.

Everyone who comes to the grand opening gets an Engine Room T-shirt so we will instantly create brand awareness in the Vegas fitness community.

My thought was: would you be happy with $10 to $12 Facebook leads? The answer, of course, if you can pull that off, is “yes”. So if you know that, why not put out free content on Instagram and Facebook and give away the T-shirt? Then, instead of paying Instagram and Facebook for the lead, you collect it through a T-shirt and organic marketing approach and amplify your brand with a free T-shirt.

After the free trial period, what happens? What’s your pricing for a premium HYROX gym going to look like?

We’re offering a founding membership if you sign up before October 1. It’s twelve classes for $169 and unlimited classes for $199. If you’re not a founding member, it will be $229 and $259, respectively. Our contracts are month-to-month. You can cancel at any time. You’re trusting us and we’ll deliver on that with incredible service.

Our pricing is definitely more of a premium, but you also get access to everything. The membership is not just for HYROX classes. You can use it for HYROX, CrossFit, Tread Vegas, our boutique HIIT, and our bootcamp experience. Plus, you get 24-hour access to work out and do extra conditioning.

To create momentum around Founding Members, we’ve also let people sign up for October. If you commit now, you get unlimited access to classes for September instead of that one per week. We’ve already had 30 conversions on that, and we’re only a week and a day into our September promo. We’ll have other calls to action for the limited-time founding member pricing through the October 1 cutoff. My goal is 50 to 75 dedicated, founding members along with a bunch of punch cards. That’s the sweet spot.

You wrote a “creed” for the new gym. What does that mean?

We want people to know what we will give them coming into our classes. It’s about three paragraphs, and we call it “What We Build Here at The Engine Room.” We get into what our 60 minutes provides. We want them to know whether we’re hitting on that or not.

We also don’t want them to think they’re going to come to our HYROX gym to get all their running dialed in. That’s not the case. There’s a huge running component to HYROX, and you’re going to have to do that on your own with the additional programming we give you. Whether you do that in our space, at home, in a globo gym, or outside on the street, you’ll need to run and do more monostructural work outside that 60-minute class. HYROX classes would be boring if everybody did monostructural running and cardio for 60 minutes in a group setting. But if you’re serious about conditioning and HYROX, you need the extra running.

The Engine Room exists to sharpen three things: technique, strength, and the ability to push harder. Those are the pillars we’re standing on. We give you the other pieces to work on outside the gym by posting additional programming in the Wodify app that our members can access, but you have to take them on and complete them yourself. If a member wants to get better outside of class, our creed shows them how we’ll help and what they should do.

Speaking of running, HYROX requires a lot. You’ve embraced indoor running at The Engine Room. Why?

That’s our differentiator versus the CrossFit gym down the street that offers HYROX, then opens the garage doors and sends everybody out on an uncoached run. We want the members in front of us, so we can actively coach them on the treadmills. We want to keep the energy, keep the vibe, and make it so that no matter your running pace, everybody runs for five minutes and finishes exactly at the five-minute mark.

Say the workout is four rounds of a 400-meter run and everybody goes outside to run. They’re not holding run pace; some take off way too hot, and you have to try and manage each person differently to make sure they all get back at the same time. Or people just don’t like it…if you’re the person who’s brand new to HYROX and you watch 30 other people take off way faster than you, you immediately think this gym is not for me.

When you’re all on an air runner next to each other, people still kind of know who’s going faster. But it’s not “I’m behind everybody else, I’m not ready for this.” It’s “we’re all training together, and we’re all exiting the treadmills at the five-minute mark,” and each person has individual time and meter goals based on their own level.

Another reality is Vegas. I’ve been to a HYROX gym in Orange County with a great setup, and they send everybody outside on a run. But it’s sunny Orange County, California. It’s not 107 degrees at four in the afternoon. It’s also not 24 degrees at five in the morning in December, January, February, and March. But ultimately, I made the decision based on the bigger reason of what happens to a brand-new person and the coached running experience I want for my HYROX gym.

Plus, we keep the environment high. We want our runners vibing to The Engine Room’s music. We have 22 speakers and a nightclub subwoofer. It’s a high-energy environment. We’re not just going to coach you; we’re going to coach you on your running, keep you accountable, and make sure you love the vibe.

Overall, my goal is to run the perfect 30-person class. Through the build-out and the free classes we’re offering, I have learned the following:

I would love a 10th wall ball target. We have nine because of sizing limitations. With a 10th, I could have all 10 clients in one station doing wall balls [Note: with 10, Joe could move his members in groups of 10 between stations].

The bigger one is runners. I’m working on securing five additional assault runners to give us 15 total. That would mean in a 30-person class we can have 50 percent of the class on the runners and 50 percent on the floor. Right now we’re doing 30-person classes, but it’s one third running, one third erg or floor work, and one third turf or floor work. There isn’t as much running in class as I would like to see. If I could do it all from scratch on day one again, I’d add five more assault runners. There’s a huge cost to that, but it’s our defining difference.

I’d also love more space for more turf. Structural posts in the building limited us to five lanes. With six lanes, I would have gone 12 treadmills, six ergs on each side, and run 12, 12, and 12. Five was the lane maximum we could get with turf. Six would have let us do three pull stations at the same time as three pushes very easily. Now we pick days. It’s a push day or a pull day, or we flip it halfway through the workout, and you do both.

Is coaching HYROX different from coaching CrossFit?

Not really, but I say that knowing we have Adam Schindler as our head coach. He’s a pro HYROX athlete and race winner. He also has great empathy for people, meeting them where they are and helping them keep growing. And of course, he has HYROX Level 1 and Level 2 coaching certifications.

The class is different, though. In CrossFit, you’re doing strength sets, you’re building weight, you’re doing more technical movement. In a HYROX class, you’re trying to get 35 to 40 minutes of conditioning in different ways. We move through a 10-minute warm-up, but it’s not as movement-specific, because you’re going to do 10 different movements in that class. That’s compared to “we’re doing a deadlift today,” which then translates into a dumbbell snatch because we’re still doing a hinge. So the HYROX warm-up can be much more general.

Class size is also different. Our HYROX classes are almost double the number of people. Our average CrossFit class is 15-18. We’re hitting 30 in every HYROX class, and 40 in our Sunday class.

The final difference right now is the members. For the most part, as a brand-new gym, the 30 people coming to our classes have never met us before. Maybe five have taken classes in our other gyms, and the other 25 are brand new to the space and brand new to us. So it’s a lot of observation, quick corrections, and meeting people where they’re at is important.

What are you doing for HYROX programming? And who is the Hybrid Engine?

The Hybrid Engine is the online programming by Lauren Weeks and her husband Anthony Peressini. We partner with them and use their program in our gym for classes, plus the additional monostructural e.g. running and conditioning work we give our members.

All the programming they develop shows up in Wodify so our members can preview the class, and then it’s on the giant screens we’ve installed in the gym when members show up for class.

Plus, when you’re a member of The Engine Room, all the extra work outside of class that you might hire an extra coach for is in the Wodify app as a secondary program for you to follow in your own time. It’s free for all members as part of the gym. If you weren’t a member of our HYROX gym, you’d need to pay for this kind of programming.

Our partnership with Hybrid Engine is also a differentiator for The Engine Room; once a month we’ll host big HYROX events. For example, 50- to 100-person throwdowns at the gym. Anthony will be coaching those. Lauren will attend and participate, along with members and guests from Las Vegas

What does HYROX affiliation cost? And what do you get?

The affiliation is inexpensive. It’s $130 per month to say that you’re a HYROX gym. I don’t think I’d get the same response if I said I’m doing bootcamp classes.

The $130 is well worth the investment, even if they don’t give me much. I hate to say it, but it’s what putting CrossFit on your front door 12 to 15 years ago is in today’s terms. That’s the closest working comparison. People seek it out for name recognition alone, regardless of the actual workout that happens behind the door. Saying you do HYROX workouts immediately has brand pull and eyeballs.

What’s your approach to running HYROX sims?

The biggest thing we want to do is define what a class is and what a sim is.

The problem is that most people who run HYROX classes are really running sims. They don’t actually run classes. They run all eight movements, or six of the movements, with runs in between, and they call it a HYROX class. They’re not actually building anything. They’re just putting people through a conditioning workout with no real intent other than completing the work.

So we didn’t do sims right out of the gate, because we want to be able to dictate what that term means at The Engine Room. Once we know what we want it to be, we want to make it repeatable, and we want to figure out how many people we can do that with properly in the space. We’ll probably do them as a test once per month on a Saturday or Sunday. Two or three sessions back-to-back, 75 to 90 minutes, typically with an hour working component. It’ll be almost like writing out a named CrossFit workout. We want them as repeatable tests you can track over time. Still indoors, still in our format, meaning we’re not sending people outside to run through sections. Each one will have individual time components you can track.

That said, that could change tomorrow. I might get pushed into sims, because that’s what people are looking for. And as much as I want to explain to people that that’s not how you get better, people like to do what they want to do. If people are buying, I’m willing to adapt, and I’m willing to learn.

Last one. What’s your advice for a gym owner thinking about affiliating with HYROX?

It’s not going to fix your gym. If your gym is struggling and you’re not retaining members or generating new leads, changing your brand, changing your affiliation, and going in a different direction isn’t going to fix that.

Affiliating with HYROX is a good way to get new leads and inquiries through the door. But you still have to define what your class and your gym provide, and how you stand differently from everybody else in the space.

It’ll be a very short time before there’s a boom on the HYROX affiliate map. In Vegas, I remember that during the CrossFit boom, there were something like 38 CrossFit gyms. Now there are about 18. Just because you affiliate doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. You still have to define who your avatar [ideal customer] is, what you’re providing, how you’re delivering that service, how you’re tracking it, and everything else that goes with it.

And $300,000 isn’t necessary. You could very easily start with outdoor running. You could start with a larger indoor component. There are different ways to do it. I wouldn’t say pivot. I’d say understand what you’re selling, and then figure out what direction you want to move into.

For us, we were already running HYROX classes on Wednesdays and Sundays in our CrossFit space. They were popular. People were showing up. So there was demand for it. When our neighbor gave the green light to move into their space to build out The Engine Room, it was either now or never, and I went all in.

How to Open a HYROX Gym: What One Owner Learned