Bringing a Disruptive Fitness Technology to Market with Mark Alexander

Transcription

In the last couple of episodes, in case you missed them, we looked at the ten traits of successful entrepreneurs in the online health and fitness space, what they all have in common. We did a two part episode split on those. If you missed those, go back and grab them.

We also had some great conversations with Wes Kennedy, who’s a former special operations/sniper in the Canadian Forces, and my former publicist, Nicole Dunn, who helped get me on the shows like Dr. Oz and the Doctors. If you missed any of that stuff be sure to go back to those episodes because there’s some really great wisdom that was shared.

Today we’re taking things up to the next level because we’ve got a really great guest. He’s actually been invited by NASA on several occasions to advise them on strategic countermeasures for long term space flight.

Now, why would he be invited to do stuff like that? Well, part of the reason, I think, is because he’s got an amazing fitness technology called ARX which is taking the world by storm and has been adopted by a lot of the leading bio hackers in our space and high performers who are looking to get the most efficient use of their time when it comes to exercise.

We’re going to talk about how Mark developed this technology, why he developed it, some of the challenges that have come along with bringing such an innovative technology to market, and also, how they’ve done it so successfully.

So you’re going to want to sit tight because if you have an idea for a product or a service, or if you’re thinking about how to position yourself in this marketplace to stand out—this episode is going to help you big time.

We also talk about some really important questions to ask yourself as it pertains to those desires of; “How do I differentiate? How do I stand out in a very competitive marketplace?”

Some very important questions you want to be asking yourself that Mark is going to share with us towards the end of the interview. So sit tight, grab a green juice, and let me introduce Mark Alexander to you.

He’s a health and wellness entrepreneur based in Austin, Texas. He chooses to invest in health because, without it, we really have nothing, which is something I think we all believe in. He’s been involved with founding and running several health and fitness wellness companies, including Efficient Exercise, Paleo FX—with one of our previous interviewees, Keith Norris—and his current primary focus is on his new fitness technology, ARX, which is adaptive resistance exercise.

If you want to learn more about Mark and ARX, you can go over to arxfit.com. So without any further ado, let’s welcome Mark onto the show.

Mark, how’s it going, my friend? Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast.

Mark:  Hey, thanks for having me on.

Yuri:    Yeah, I’m excited because you’re doing some pretty cool stuff and connected with some other people that we know in the space like Keith Norris from Paleo FX. Right now, in this day and age, what are you most pumped up about when it comes to your business or businesses?

Mark:  Yeah, ARX, our adaptive resistance exercise technology, has got me most excited right now. As an entrepreneur, yeah, I’ve been involved in numerous health and wellness and health and fitness businesses over the years, ARX has definitely got my attention and got me most excited right now.

Yuri:    For the listeners who don’t know what it is, can you just quickly tell us what it is, how it’s unique?

What adaptive resistance technology is all about

Mark:  Yeah, sure. We’ve developed our resistance training technology, and it’s a hardware/software integration. The hardware is comprised of a couple different frames, pulleys and mechanisms that are driven by motors as opposed to any type of gravity-based weight system.

It’s a non-gravity based system. These motors are computer-controlled, so our software program dictates what’s going on for the user and what’s going on in the workout and it actually adapts to the user. There’s no pre-setting of weights or resistance, the system will adapt to your force capabilities at that given time—as a matter of fact, down to the microsecond.

For the user to understand this … Sometimes we say it’s like arm wrestling a super hero. Yeah, the super hero’s going to win but he can let you move his arm, if you will, just so slightly.

What the software does is it reads that force capability. Even though the machine will always win, the motors are always stronger than the human—we can see in real time what’s going on in your performance as well as track over time and quantify the experience so that the next time you’re on the system, you can chase previous performances and have the real time biofeedback to give you motivation. And there’s the long term dashboard quantification, if you will, to make sure that you’re tracking and progressing over time.

Yuri:    That sounds pretty amazing. I think one of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs have in our space is coming up with some new product or technology or service that is very unique from what else is out there. How did you even come up with this idea?

The creation of ARX

Mark:  Yeah, I’ve always been obsessed with efficiency—some might call it calculated laziness—but I’ve always known and grew up with exercise.

My father was a retired physician, so I knew exercise as medicine from a toddler on up. I really have always been into exercise and known what that can do for performance, whether the performance is in business, athletics, or whatever your focus is.

Fast forward to 2001, I started Efficient Exercise which is a fitness training business where we have people come see us in Austin (we have more than one location). As the name says, I was after this pursuit of—what is the most bang for your buck in the exercise world? I leaned toward resistance exercise, or strength training, for the laymen.

With resistance exercise I’ve always looked for tools that could possibly be better and more efficient, more effective. I always like to say, “The barbell can work.”  It has for many, many years, similar to how the horse and buggy worked for many, many years.

But cars came along. Jets came along. Things that got you from point A to point B, got you there faster.

Similar to exercise, we have found methods to get you there faster, if you will. What is the result of exercise that you’re wanting? We have improved upon the tool.

It’s been a pursuit over many years, and I cannot lay claim to being the absolute inventor of this technology. The inventor and I worked together for many years, let’s call it refining the technology, and then being able to bring it to a place where we can market it. And again, be a differentiator, if you will, in the market.

But it really came from this passionate pursuit of being efficient, effective and safe in the exercise realm and there’s a lot of stories along the way that we could dive into—but I would say, at the end of day, it was having an exercise science background and knowing what we want from exercise.

How can we get the most efficient tool to produce that stimulus that everyone’s chasing after in the exercise world? That’s how ARX came about.

How to educate effectively

Yuri:    That’s pretty cool. There must be a good amount of education involved in teaching people what this is, why it’s beneficial to them.

How have you done that? How have you taken this new technology, this new, more efficient way of exercising—and disseminated the information to people so they’re like, “Oh, my God, I need to have this”?

Mark:  Yeah, that’s a good question.

I don’t want to go about it—and I’ve seen this done time and time again—where the means of education is bashing everything else out there.

Yuri:    Yeah.

 Mark:  I’m definitely not taking that approach. Again, there are a lot of ways up the mountain, and in the exercise world, to get to that summit you can do a lot of different things.

I guess first is knowing your audience, so the people that I’m speaking to are usually chasing performance, often in business or in life in general. Not necessarily athletic performance but just high achievers, high performers, and they’re after any time saving that they get. Because they understand that health equals contribution, or health equals performance to a certain degree.

In other words, if your health goes down, likely your contribution will go down as well.

Again, knowing that I’m working and speaking to those people, we talk directly to that audience. If the gym is your lifestyle and you spend six hours a day at the gym, we’re probably not for you, and that’s okay. You might be the biggest guy out of your friend group because you do that but, again, that’s just not our crowd.

Again, knowing who we’re talking to, we’re talking to fellow entrepreneurs, fellow high achievers, people where time is literally money in most cases—and they’d rather spend their time doing other things. Being a husband, being a father, chasing after their latest venture, whatever that is.

The education process, I guess, starts from there. And I do push back when we put out super technical or uber technical language. I won’t name names, but we have some internal names or internal customers, and we always check ourselves and we say, “Does this meet the so-and-so test?”

In our internal lingo that means, essentially, “Would your mom understand this?”

We want to make sure that even though there’s a lot of scientific knowledge and background that has gone into the development of ARX, we’re not trying to speak in technical language that only an engineer would understand, only an exercise scientist would understand.

We want to make sure that we can distill this information in ways that anyone would understand. Namely, let’s just say, a 65-year-old woman that has no exercise background. Would she be able to understand it?

So again, knowing our audience and then also trying to keep things simple. We have a handful of internal rules and one of them is—simple is usually better. If we can explain something simply we try to go with the simple explanation versus diving too much into the details.

Trust me, we all love to talk shop and dive into it, but I think if you can’t explain something very simply and succinctly, you probably need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to explain it.

Yuri:    That’s huge. That is such a big lesson. For everyone listening, write that down. Especially in the space of health, wellness, fitness, where everyone is like this technical wizard.

Man, you have to be speaking at grade three level. It’s such an important, important thing.

I remember a friend of mine who’s a sport chiropractor—really smart guy, works with the Toronto Raptors—and I remember about 15 years ago seeing a postcard flyer of his that was hanging on a bulletin board at Starbucks.

And I’m reading this, and I’m like, “I can’t even understand this with a background in kinesiology and health sciences, how do you expect the average person at Starbucks to understand that this is a clinic for real people?”

I’m just like, “Dude, you got to kind of bring this back to English.” That’s such a great reminder, so thank you for sharing that.

Mark:  Yeah, and I think that your experience will show your prowess, if you will. I run into a lot of people who are technicians first and then they happen to have a business—I think that’s what a lot of health and wellness entrepreneurs actually are.

 Yuri:    Yeah.

 Mark:  If you’re a technician first, that’s great, that means you have a lot of background and experience. But really, a lot of that goes nowhere if you can’t teach it to a layman and can’t teach it to someone that—if we want to be honest here—they probably don’t really care about it like you do.

But they do want the result of whatever that knowledge is.

You have to find a way to distill it into something … Do the 80/20 test on everything that you’re putting out there. I think in threes all the time—“What are the three main points you want to make?”

Just stick with those, don’t try to go outside the lines too much unless people are really asking for it. Sometimes you find the people that are asking for more technical information, but I think 80% of the people do not want that.

Yuri:    Yeah, and you know what’s interesting, Mark, is a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs that I speak to in this space, they say that one of their biggest strengths is simplifying complexity.

Mark:  Yeah, yeah.

Yuri:    I think that’s so valuable because as you mentioned, it’s really important to take a complex technology or concept and be able to slim it down to digestible bite-sized pieces for the average person to understand.

Because if you don’t, you really have to go back to the drawing board and figure that out.

Mark:  Yeah, yeah.

Yuri:    As you’ve built this bad boy, what’s been the biggest challenge that you’ve faced in business?

Biggest challenges

Mark:  I think coming from a service side of business—in other words, “I know something and I’m going to perform a service for somebody and then also I’m going to train many staff members over the years to perform various levels of service.”

And I applaud anyone that’s been successful in the service business—whether it’s a personal trainer or physical therapist or what have you—because that has its challenges. It’s relationships first and technical knowledge second.

So I had to go from that paradigm into bringing a product to market. And again, relationships are still important in the product world, but the challenges of bringing a product to market have put some more gray hairs on my head in the last five years … Just because you know it’s there, you know what you’re after, and it is a physical, tangible thing.

We have hardware and software, and there’s challenges in both of those. I would say there’s probably more hardware challenges of, again, just bringing this product to market.

You read time and time again of all these products that test well—for example, with the model 3 now—it’s like, they’re having challenges. And you’re at the hands of manufacturers, you’re at the hands of other engineers—very competent, skilled, capable people—but I have yet to read a success story where there weren’t challenges along the way of bringing a product to market.

I definitely say that the challenges of bringing a physical product—that happens to also have a technology and software component to it—to market has definitely been dominating over the last about five-ish years in my entrepreneurial journey.

Yuri:    So guys, check out the website. ARXfit.com.  You can get a better sense of what we’re talking about in terms of what the product does and what it looks like.

Mark, so this is bit more involved than a kettlebell, right? A kettlebell is like—Okay, I’m going to go pick it up, it’s $70 bucks, whatever.

What does the business model look like for getting someone to potentially be interested in this? What is the price of one of these machines?

Market strategies; products vs. services

Mark:  Yeah, in North America, our primary go to market strategy is business-to-business leasing.

We recognize we’re not the cheapest thing around, we understand that, and the cash up front we want to try to minimize as much as we can—therefore, we’ve developed a leasing model. There’s credit factors and yadda, yadda, just like if you were leasing a car. Similar things go into it in terms of the risk assessment and the like, but I won’t bore your audience with that.

The cool part about what we’re starting to see and this trend that I think is going to continue, is smaller footprint facilities. So we’re starting to work with people that aren’t in the 20,000 square foot gyms.

They’re recognizing that A) they can’t afford it, and B) that model is terribly inefficient and not personal—so they’re going into these more personal, smaller footprint facilities. And then they’re also asking themselves the 80/20 question of health; “What should go in here?”

I don’t think many people these days would argue that resistance exercise is not part of the health equation. I think most people recognize that now. 20, 30 years ago with Kenneth Cooper and the aerobics craze, people might have questioned you more, but now I don’t think anyone’s questioning that, thank goodness.

They’re starting to say, “Well, we can get people in the door for exercise but I don’t want to allocate 10,000 square feet to a gym. How do I get a couple machines that are each about the size of a couch to basically do a full workout?” Well, that’s where we come in.

So we’re helping practitioners implement space effective efficient exercise in a very small footprint way. But, again, there are models where you can still grow in scale and still help hundreds or thousands of people per location, if you do it right.

I think this venue of health, if you will—I keep trying to come up with a creative name of what this is … It’s not a gym, it’s not a medical clinic, but whatever you want to call this new venue, it’s starting to take shape. And it’s starting to take shape really quickly as things sprout up all over the place—where it’s usually a practitioner, an entrepreneur or two that are looking for ways to bring, not only resistance exercise, but some other health or biohack type of technologies to the market and under one roof.

Again, we’ve seen a lot of aligning and technologies and tools that are going alongside ARX. Again, I not so boldly predict that these types of new facilities are going to start popping up more and more often, which I really love because the big gym model is, to me, really dying a slow death and eventually I think it will go.

Yuri:    Yeah, I know it’s tremendous. I was thinking, just as you were talking there … If I’m a gym owner, or if I own a clinic where I’m going to get people to do some type of exercise … If we look at the number of people you can service in a certain amount of time, maybe that number becomes a lot higher, because you don’t need an hour to work out, now it’s 10 minutes. Or now you have an amazing differentiator, which is—No one else has this technology but us.

Mark:  Yeah. Yeah.

Yuri:    I think for the potential owner of someone who’s going to bring this into their facility, I think it’s a massive value add to the value proposition they can offer their clientele.

 Mark:  Absolutely. Yeah, you’re saving them so much time, and I mentioned that the technicians often don’t realize that the people they’re serving probably don’t care about 80% of the knowledge that they have so they don’t need to hear about it.

I would also say that if you could tell them that they’re saving time, they would rather be doing other things. You’re right, it’s a huge market differentiator in that you are … Yes, you’re able to get them the results that they are after but also save them a lot of time.

Yeah, we talk about the entrepreneurs and I know that’s your audience here, but what about the stay-at-home mom or the stay-at-home dad or the people that are just trying to be family-focused for this season in their life?

We’re all busy. I don’t really like that, I wish we weren’t as busy sometimes. But I’m not sure that that’s going to change really quickly, so let’s try to find ways to make our lives a bit more efficient through technology.

I think that’s where we’ve come in with ARX, is being able to provide that efficiency so that you’re not spending hours and hours at the gym every week.

Yuri:    Yeah, no, that’s pretty awesome. If you were to look at creating a new company or let’s say ARX just got abducted by aliens and never existed, there was no footprint of it on the planet and you had to start a new company tomorrow … In maybe a new market or similar market.

Knowing what you know now, what’s the first thing you would start doing differently, if anything?

Asking yourself the important questions

 Mark:  Yeah, I like your concept of finding a new product—I did some reading prior to our podcast here, and I think it is a very important concept. I think we’re starting to see a saturation—and I’ll just take the online or digital marketing type of community as an example—I see a lot of gurus out there.

It’s like, how many gurus can we really have and what are they really saying that’s any different than the next guru?

I think what I would do … Maybe this sounds counterintuitive, but I would just do nothing and think for awhile. I would go away to the mountains and I would try to figure out, “What is this new thing, this new product, this new idea?”

And then ask myself, “Is it really new? Is it really something that holds its ground on its own?”

And this is my own take, but I sure as hell wouldn’t base it on my own personality or my own ego or my own persona. I see that, and it does work in our world, but I’m not the guy who’s going to take off my shirt, flex my muscles and be like, “Hey, follow me.”

I know it works, I get it. And athletes go through this all the time. They’re like, “You know what? I got my knee injury and now I can’t perform anymore. What do I do?” I think we all should take that time to pause and reflect and figure out—“What is it that I’m passionate about? What is it that I’m skilled at? What is it that I can see myself dedicating some serious, considerable time to?”

If you’re asking me what the new idea is right now, I don’t know. Again, I think it’s … Take some serious time for consideration and planning and then know that execution is much greater than an idea.

So once you do come up with that idea, you have to think about the next years to come. How much time do I want to allocate to executing this idea because I think most people underestimate that side and that’s why most small businesses go under—is they did not understand what it took to execute upon that great idea.

Yuri:    Yep. That’s really, really good advice. Because I find there’s a lot of the entrepreneurial people tend to follow the advice of ready, fire, aim. I’m a huge believer in MVP, minimal viable product, get it out there, get some feedback and adjust.

But I’ve also recognized from my own experience that when you put something out too early, you end up having to spend a lot of time and money going back and fixing errors. I like to think of it as strategize then strike.

You talked about taking time to think, that’s extremely valuable. I don’t think a lot of people do that because they’re so focused on doing the stuff in the business all the time. Yeah, I think that’s great insight.

Mark:  Yeah, yeah. Well, and technology has empowered—maybe not in a good way—empowered people to take ideas to market really quickly these days. Again, probably in most cases it’s not wise to go do that that quickly. Even though you can, it doesn’t always mean you should.

I think that’s probably a rule to follow, as you said, it’s not the ready, fire, aim approach. There have been certain seasons of digital products that you could probably have gotten away with that.

But I think we’re in an age now where the market’s saturated enough, technology is what it is, people can quickly sniff out when bad stuff comes out and then you’re going to fail.

Yuri:    Yeah, totally. I want to go back to what you said about we have enough gurus, which is true. Again, I started off my health and fitness business as the expert, the face of the business, and I decided to go very general, which is not a very good strategy.

So it’s always been more work than it may have been had I thought about this stuff 12 years ago. I want to put this out there to our listeners—if you are the personality for the face of your brand, even if you have a product and you’re not, I think it’s important to consider this discussion.

Just playing off what you talked about, really asking yourself, “Why do I exist? Why is it important that this business, my product, or me exists?” And taking the time to really reflect on that. Because if you can’t explain or express your differentiator and how that matters to the marketplace, they’re not going to see the difference. They’re going to be like, “Oh, here’s another person talking about the same stuff.”

I think we’ve hit on a couple of things—whether it’s creating messaging that can relate to a 65-year-old woman or just really clarifying the message so that you are unique in the marketplace. Because, as you just said, it’s so saturated that you have to think about this stuff before you just put out another weight loss product or another course that everyone else is doing.

Mark:  Yeah, yeah. I think the question of, “What would this business be like without me in place?” Whether you’re looking at that from a legacy/exit strategy, or you’re looking at it from, “Does it stand on its own without me?”

I think those are great questions to ask. It doesn’t mean that if there is a good-looking guy or girl out there with tons of Instagram followers and they end up being able to work a business out of those followers and sell them product—that that’s inherently bad.

I know you speak to what I would call true entrepreneurs a lot, where again, I think there is something born into certain people that’s not in others. Not that it can’t be groomed and trained, but nonetheless, I think if you’re talking to that crowd which is 80/20 style on the actual entrepreneur crowd to those people that really are, as Gary Vee would say, the hustlers … I think those questions are super important because maybe they’re not already thinking about the next thing.

I think every entrepreneur has his or her timetable in their head and they figure out, “I’m a five year guy, I’m a two year guy, I’m a seven year guy.”  You figure out where you’re strong and then where you need to move on. To those people, I think you do have to ask yourself about exit, about legacy, about, “Is this viable without me?”

Start asking yourself those things fairly early on. And I’m speaking about all this like I’ve been perfect at it. No, I’ve had to learn the absolute hardest ways possible many times trying to figure out how can I make this stand without me—and usually it’s by failing several times and then figuring it out and knowing, “Oh, okay, these are the strategies and these are the people that I have to put in place.”

Yeah, you’re going to fail when you’re doing that but that’s totally okay.

Yuri:    Yeah, that’s great.  That’s such good advice.

If you were sitting down with someone at a coffee shop or a juice bar, and they’re a relatively new entrepreneur looking to build their business, whether it’s a physical product or an information product, what one piece of advice would you give them?

Mark:  It’s just asking yourself the hard question of … Essentially, double-checking yourself and say, “Do I really want to do this?”

I think I went back to the saying, “You should really think about it.” Sorry, I guess I’m coming back to that again. “Is it okay if you tell yourself no to this idea of this business?”

If the answer to that is, “No, I’m called to do it, I’m driven to do this,” whatever it is internally that is driving you, well then, pursue it.

But I have seen too many times where people get really hung up on an idea. They think this idea is going to net them millions of dollars. And again, execution is really where businesses are made or are not. So ask yourself, “Is this something that I’m really going to pursue and put a lot of energy and effort into over the next several years?”

I don’t know if people’s pride will let them say no, but saying no is totally okay. I’d also say that to the investors or the people that are empowering others, investing in others, let yourself say no.

A lot of people know that already, but I think if you come to a “no” after really digging deep then that’s okay. But if you can’t come to a “no” and there’s no way you cannot do whatever this is, then by all means, pursue it.

Rapid five questions

Yuri:    Good advice. Good stuff. Alright, Mark, are you ready for the rapid five?

Mark:  Sure, I don’t know how rapid I’ll be but I’ll try.

Yuri:    Here’s a little hack for all of you listeners. If you actually want to make this a rapid five, go to 2x speed on your phone if you’re listening to this on iTunes.

Okay, anyway—basically whatever comes to mind as I ask these questions or completing the statements, that’s pretty much all we’re asking for. Nothing too incriminating, so it’s all good.

Okay. First off, what is your biggest weakness?

Mark:  Oh, I would say chasing perfectionism.

 Yuri:    And your biggest strength?

 Mark:  I’d say empowering others, trusting them.

 Yuri:    Nice. What’s one skill you’ve becoming dangerously good at in order to grow your business?

 Mark:  Emotional intelligence.

 Yuri:    That’s a good one. What do you do first thing in the morning?

 Mark:  There’s a bit of a routine, it’s not a one answer thing. In a nutshell, it’s doing things physically, spiritually, and emotionally to get myself ready for the day and it’s pretty Type A routine, but it only takes about an hour.

 Yuri:    Nice. Well, especially if you’re using the ARX, right?

 Mark:  Mm-hmm.

 Yuri:    That’s awesome. Complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when …

 Mark:  When the sense of reward and fulfillment is there.

 Yuri:    Awesome. Good stuff. Mark, this has been a pleasure. It’s been great connecting with you and talking to the man behind a really, really cool technology that can help people exercise more efficiently and more effectively.

What is the best place for our listeners to follow your work, learn more about ARX and anything else you have going on?

Mark:  Yeah, you mentioned arxfit.com, as well as our Facebook page on social. I would say those two resources are great. If you want to dive into a lot of the technicalities, go into our YouTube channel and just consume. Yeah, so I’d say that those are definitely great resources to check out.

Yuri:    Perfect, well there you guys go. Mark, once again, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today, it’s been a lot of fun, and I look forward to connecting with you soon.

Mark:  Yes. Thanks, this has been super efficient and fun. Thank you.

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What I loved about talking with Mark was that he’s coming at this business a little bit differently than a lot of people creating information products. This is a full on piece of equipment that is not inexpensive.

And so the questions that he’s asking, like taking time to really think and reflect and ask how do we really standout? How do we position this in a way that is going to be meaningful to this very competitive marketplace? I think those are great questions to ask yourself and that’s why I’m a huge believer in the idea that the best way to build your online business is to spend more time offline.

Taking half a day one day a week to just think, turn off the computer, get out a notebook, and just start thinking. Writing down ideas, writing down questions, and really challenging yourself to come up with great solutions that you wouldn’t otherwise think of when you’re in the grind, day in and day out.

Taking that time for reflection is just valuable.

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https://arxfit.com/

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