This week's episode is all about the intersection where gym management, communications, and customer experience meet.
My guest is Dan Uyemura, who was a serial tech entrepreneur before opening his first gym in 2010 – and then his gym management software platform, PushPress, which helps gym owners scale their businesses effectively.
PushPress streamlines billing, keeps up with attendance, and helps track and improve other operational tasks, as well. And it’s seeing huge and steady growth, with 70% year over year growth since 2013, and more than 3,000 gyms worldwide among its clients.
Dan and I talk a bit about PushPress and the power of software to help businesses help more people. And we also get into the over-50 market, of course. Dan’s about to join us in the demographic, and he’s seeing how powerful it is to gym and studio owners who are willing to look ahead of the curve to see opportunities that most are ignoring.
Resources and Information
Dan and PushPress
Dan on Instagram and Facebook
My new course to motivate men over 50 to get off the couch and into fitness
Life Priority Supplements -- Affiliate Discount here
Functional Aging Institute -- Use FAIMM50 discount code
Prime Fit Content – Engage the over-50 market
This week's episode is all about the intersection where gym management, communications, and customer experience meet.
My guest is Dan Uyemura, who was a serial tech entrepreneur before opening his first gym in 2010 – and then his gym management software platform, PushPress, which helps gym owners scale their businesses effectively.
PushPress streamlines billing, keeps up with attendance, and helps track and improve other operational tasks, as well. And it’s seeing huge and steady growth, with 70% year over year growth since 2013, and more than 3,000 gyms worldwide among its clients.
Dan and I talk a bit about PushPress and the power of software to help businesses help more people. And we also get into the over-50 market, of course. Dan’s about to join us in the demographic, and he’s seeing how powerful it is to gym and studio owners who are willing to look ahead of the curve to see opportunities that most are ignoring.
Resources and Information
Dan and PushPress
Dan on Instagram and Facebook
My new course to motivate men over 50 to get off the couch and into fitness
Life Priority Supplements -- Affiliate Discount here
Functional Aging Institute -- Use FAIMM50 discount code
Prime Fit Content – Engage the over-50 market
Okay, before we start this week's episode, I want to tell you about a new course I have developed that is available now and it's at a special 50% off rate. I'm doing a soft launch, I guess you could say. The course is designed to help men over 50 who want to start exercising but feel stuck on the couch and in bad habits and misinformation and ridiculous expectations and all these things that can keep us from making positive change, even though we want to. So if that's you, or if it sounds like a man in your life, then check out my course. It's called Optimal Aging a simple start to fitness. I will leave a link in the show notes and I will also post it on my business page, prime Fit Content.
Jay Croft:Welcome to this week's episode of Optimal Aging, the show for gym owners and fitness fans who want to learn more about the business and communications behind fitness over 50. I'm your host, jaycroft, of Prime Fit Content. Today's guest is Danu Yamara, who was a serial tech entrepreneur before opening his first gym in 2010 and then creating his gym management software platform, pushpress, which helps gym owners scale their businesses effectively. Pushpress streamlines all kinds of operational tasks for gyms, from billing to keeping up with attendance. It's had 70% year over year growth since 2003 and more than 3,000 gyms worldwide among its clients. Now Dan and I talk about PushPress and the power of software to help businesses reach more people, and we also get into the over 50 market.
Jay Croft:Of course. Dan is about to join us in the demographic and he's starting to see how powerful it can be for gym and studio owners who are willing to look ahead of the curve a bit and see opportunities that most are ignoring. I love it when I meet a smart, experienced fitness pro with the willingness to see the potential in all of this. Here's my conversation with Dan. Dan hi, nice to see you today. How's everything?
Dan Uyemura:Things have been great. Thank you for having me on the podcast.
Jay Croft:Jay, I'm delighted to have you on and I was great meeting you a week or so ago, and we talked about some things that we'll be discussing today. I love what you're doing and I love your interest in the over 50 market, which is my focus, of course, and this intersection of customer service, the customer experience, high tech, data driven communications tools. It's great stuff.
Dan Uyemura:Yeah, I'll be quite frank. As someone who's approaching 50, this market's becoming more and more obvious and relevant to me now. If you were to ask me this 15 years ago, I would have completely missed it, but I think this is an exciting place to be thinking, and a lot of gyms that I talk to and see are not thinking in this direction, and I think we can be working a little bit better in that way.
Jay Croft:Good? I think so too. That's what I do every day, and what really fires me up is spreading the word, so to speak, so that people understand that this is an unprecedented economic opportunity for their businesses. Before we dive into all of that, I want to talk about your story and the push press story. So tell us a little bit about how you got here and how you came up with push press, and what makes push press special in this growing segment that we're talking about.
Dan Uyemura:Yeah, absolutely so. I guess the backstory for me. I've been a lifelong entrepreneurially minded and when I came out of college or around the turn of the century 2000, the best place to be if you were entrepreneur in mind was building internet stuff. So I learned how to code and I started coding for startups that were building internet, mobile living and applications. Fast forward a good 13 years. I was at my third or fourth company and I got laid off. It was my space. Ironically, I got laid off there and I decided at that point in time hey, you know what? I'm going to go back to my roots.
Dan Uyemura:I was athletic as a kid. I love sports, I love working out and I'm going to take some time off because I was getting burned out being a developer and I decided to open a gym. When I did that, the first thing I wanted to do as a software person was I wanted to get software to run my gym and I saw everything that was available at the time and I felt it was. It missed the mark from what I knew could be built because I built software. And so I decided to build software for my gym and During that phase I got embedded with gym ownership communities. I didn't realize. All the gym owners hang out in the certain corners of the internet and we all talk and we all share things with each other and as I was building the software and building my gym, other gym owners were asking me like what do you use? And it looks different and can you tell me about it? And as the genesis of how PushPress kind of got off the ground, yeah, Okay, and this SoftPress, PushPress, do.
Jay Croft:What is the functionality?
Dan Uyemura:of it. By and large, we're a gym management software. Our aspirations are much bigger, but for now that's what we do. We do the table stakes and the most important aspects of running your boutique fitness studio day to day. So memberships and scheduling and staff rostering and payroll considerations and waivers and documents and contracts and access control and in-store signage and just all of members apps and all the things that you need and your members need to streamline the operations of your gym and help you leverage both your time and your staff's time to operate the gym more efficiently.
Jay Croft:So your customer is the gym owner, right? And then you install your PushPress for them and then they use it to communicate with their members. Is that right?
Dan Uyemura:It also has to do with building your membership packages making sure that they're billed every 30 days or whenever the billing needs to happen, making sure the members know when the billing fails so that they can fix it on their own and you're not chasing them down for money. When the members show up at the gym, they can use their app to reserve a class or to check into the class, and then you get to understand the attendance trends and who's falling off and who's becoming a stronger member. A lot of the nuance of it is in the data that gets derived out of the activity inside the gym.
Jay Croft:When did you launch PushPress?
Dan Uyemura:The first commercial version of it was 2013, but I had been working on it from about 2010 to 2013 and probably threw away 100,000 lines of code a couple times because it just wasn't where I wanted to go. And then, finally, in 2013, with my second gym, I opened a second gym and I launched PushPress with my second gym.
Jay Croft:Okay. And from there you're doing great. Tell us where you are, how big you are now.
Dan Uyemura:It's the typical we're a 13 year old overnight success.
Jay Croft:Yeah.
Dan Uyemura:Like people just haven't heard of us. We've been doing it for a long time but yeah, we're about 3,000 clients now and probably about 90 people are working for the company, so this pretty big support staff. I think you asked me earlier what sets us apart. I think one of the things that sets us apart is go back 20 years. All the software was built by companies, corporations, who are software corporations, who are building software into niche areas of the markets that needed it.
Dan Uyemura:Probably about 10 years ago, when we were building this too, the trend became some owner-operator out of that niche discovered that the software didn't hit the needs and figured out how to build the software for their niche because they understood the niche. So that's one of the big value-adds that we are and we've doubled down on that. So we have about 90 employees and I would weigh a major. 68 of them have owned a gym or have been coaches in gyms. So it's like the people we hire are connected to the client that we serve but also have a professional expertise in something that they do. So it's like we built this whole culture around. We are the customer that we support and we love the customer support because we are the customer we support.
Jay Croft:Now I primarily work with gyms and studios that want to help quote unquote older people, and by that I just mean 50 and above. I'm getting a lot of push from other gym owners and studio owners to help them get the 40 and above market, but for right now I'm just focusing on the 50 and above. Do you do any kind of work specifically with that market, or has that not really entered into your conversations yet, or what's your thought on that?
Dan Uyemura:Yeah. So it honestly has not been a focus of anything that we've done as a company yet. However, myself I'm 48, I'm tipping right into that 50 bucket, and what I've started to realize more and more in the recent years is I don't have the time to do general purpose training or maybe even show up for a class, because my travel is going crazy or I've got kids that need my attention. For certain things I would pay for specific training that suit my bad hips and me sitting for a long time and the ankle that I injured playing basketball, and I have the money to do it. So I'm becoming the avatar of this client, the more I'm starting to realize what gyms are missing is.
Dan Uyemura:There's this huge group of people that fit this perfect trifecta of I have the need, I have the means and I have the time and, frankly, I place the value on it because I'm at the point where my kids are in college. I'm starting to realize, man, what was not long ago. I feel like I was just coming out of college and I'm putting my kids are in college. My time is going real fast and people in my shoes will place way more value in longevity of life and well-being than maybe someone that I was focused on when I was 30. I was focused on 30 year old, so it's just an evolution of how we look in the mirror.
Jay Croft:Yes, I see a lot of resistance from younger people primarily who are in the fitness business, who think I don't want to deal with old people.
Dan Uyemura:I don't think it's on the radar yet, but I also think the people that succeed in business are the ones who can see through the smoke, through the Fogga war, and understand what's coming around a corner. And it's not even revenue for your gym. But let's take it a step back. If we want to get coaches who have the ability to make a good living delivering really good value to the community that they serve, you've got to start to find private training or small group type opportunities for people who value it and can pay for it. That's right, and that's not going to be a 19 year old who's trying to be a competitor.
Jay Croft:There are more than a hundred million people in this country over 50 and they control 70% of the discretionary spending gym memberships. Trainers fall under that category, so we're talking about an incredible amount of money every day. Everybody from a 50 year old Gen X or to a 70 year old baby boomer, and they all have what you said, those three things the time, the money and the motivation to make the best fitness clients, and yet you guys aren't paying attention to them.
Dan Uyemura:Yeah, I would even honestly, now that I'm listening to you say all these things. Going to what you mentioned earlier, I would even say we could expand this to 40-somethings, because the 40-year-olds, like we've gone through arguably with the exception of the 2008 banking crisis and COVID we've gone through, arguably the 20 years of the greatest economic boom that the world has ever seen. Everyone's worried about longevity and there's nothing. There's no lower barrier to entry of longevity than actually just going to a gym. I would argue you could easily extend that to the 40-year-olds. Right now, when you start to see your parents' ages, when you start to realize you're aging people in their 40s, their parents might be 70. And that's like at the point where things start going wrong.
Jay Croft:How do we convince your guys to start focusing on this market and learning how to communicate with them? Because that's what I help, that's where I come in. I help them market to older people.
Dan Uyemura:I think the easiest part of this question is the convinced part. I don't think we have to convince as much as we have to turn the light bulb on. Every single gym owner I speak to and I speak to many a day are maybe overly indexed on the desire to help their community to the point where they're becoming some are becoming martyrs. I don't need to get paid as long as my customers are getting fitter, blah, blah, blah. So let's turn that light bulb on. We can do that right here.
Dan Uyemura:The next step will be how do I do it? And I think this might be where you can come in and you can speak to this. But it's okay, I know there's a demand there. I understand that they have the need and the money and the time, and maybe the 40-year-olds don't have the time as much as the 60-year-olds do. And how do I break that up? How do I talk to them? Where are those people hanging out? How do I build the program? How do I package it up? How do I market it? How do I sell it? Basically, how do I onboard them? What does the program look like? Like you solve those steps for gyms Now that their minds are turned on to it. It's going to be about getting that package together and actually going to market and selling it and bringing people in and having great experience. Once you do that and I'm sure there are a lot of gyms out there that have solved this on their own I think we've got something here.
Jay Croft:Most gyms are completely empty between 9 am and 3 pm. Right, because they're marketing to 20 and 30-year-olds who go to work during those times and if you open up your marketing attempts to reach older people, you're going to fill up your gym and keep your trainers busy during the daytime so that they can go home at night and be with their wives and kids, or husbands and kids or whatever. It's just a more robust way to serve your community.
Dan Uyemura:Yeah, I think again in talking to gym owners, one thing I've realized is not a lot of gym owners in the boutique space have really built out a viable business model, and where the business model always will fall apart is how do you get your coaches paid? So I always like tune to that, because you show me a gym owner who's willing to work 15 hours a day sure, like they can make it work, Right. But if you get to the point where you need to figure out how do you get coaches paid enough to stay in the business, not leave, not go look for another job, and make enough money so that they can afford a decent lifestyle Like they deserve that too, that's where things start to fall apart in a lot of gyms. And again, listening to you say that made me realize like you could easily build a model and I haven't done this. But my mind just went to this is I'm a coach.
Dan Uyemura:I work from five to noon, seven hour day. I probably get a one hour lunch break in between. I do some group coaching in the morning when everyone's in, or maybe, if I built my book of business, I'm doing private trainings the whole way. But group training in the morning, private training. From nine till noon go get lunch, go home.
Jay Croft:I'm done.
Dan Uyemura:I've worked in eight hour a day and with that, with the private training looped in and the right demographic and being able to sell it for the right amount of money and some group class up front, I think you can. You can develop a coach. You can make $8,220,000 a year, absolutely so it's important is the financial aspect. You've got coaches who are making $28,000 a year who have to share rooms with people who are trying to figure out how to make their lives work and then you just watch them fall out of the industry, who are good coaches and go get jobs somewhere where they're not really helping people because they can't make it work financially.
Dan Uyemura:My mom has just recently went into an assisted living home and I went and visited her recently and I'll tell you it was remarkable.
Dan Uyemura:Over half the population was somewhat frail and these are people in their 70s and 80s and 90s even.
Dan Uyemura:But there are actually a lot of them don't look like they belong there, look amazing, and I talked to one of them who happened to be one of my mom's lifelong friends that's why she moved in there and he has moved his whole life.
Dan Uyemura:He spent his whole life moving and he acts, thinks and behaves like a 50-year-old to the tune and he's 80. He's 80. I couldn't keep up with him walking to go get a sandwich when we were up there and what it really illustrated to me was like if you use your body responsibly, you get to keep your body, and so this is where, as fitness professionals, we have to see these things as part of our responsibilities to our communities is like the more people in our 40s and 50s and 60s we can get in and just being active, it is remarkable the difference in lifestyle that these people get to have at 80 and 90. So again, I'm just trying to help people see like you're really helping somebody and it's really meaningful if you can get somebody to undo any of the things that they might have done in the 30s and 40s as soon as possible.
Jay Croft:And this is the kind of thing I write about in my business, which is a little plug for my business. It's called Prime Fit Content. I provide marketing materials for gyms and students who want to reach this demographic, and it's that kind of fact based, it's for real life stories that I share with people, along with the science behind it, in ways that you can understand and really apply to your life. Because I don't think most people my age and older know that weight training is essential to healthy aging. I didn't think that weight training is for boys who want big muscles. I don't think they understand that. It's how they get out of bed in the morning and how they get off the couch and how they get off the toilet, and if they don't practice some form of resistance training, they won't be able to do that.
Jay Croft:We just have this idea in our country. That's what happens when you get old. You can't stand up off the toilet and then you have to go to a home. It's not just what happens. They come to see somebody like you and work out with people like your employees. They're gonna be strong and capable and independent and enjoy their lives. It's not the same thing. So we've really got to educate not only the public but the industry as well.
Dan Uyemura:Yeah, I think that's super well said. I've personally shifted to a little bit more strength training because, again, as I'm starting to reach my get into 50, I'm looking in the mirror and realizing I only have so many years that I can actually build the muscle I need to protect myself as I age. A simple fall, like muscle, protects bones. You can strengthen your attendance. Like it matters so much to be strong and, like you said, it's not to impress people and go on the muscle beach and do crazy feats of weightlifting. It's literally for longevity.
Jay Croft:Yeah, and quality of life, Because longevity just means how long you're alive. But you can be alive in a hospital bed and have a crappy life. We're talking really having a good quality of life. I'm thinking about my mother who recently passed away. She was 87, she had trouble getting off the couch, she had trouble walking from the bed to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and that's I can see being in my 80s, but it's not that far away. When you're 20, it sounds like forever. When you're 60, it's coming right up, and I don't want to be like that. So my motivation used to be I want to be sexy. Now it's I want to take care of myself.
Dan Uyemura:Yeah, I mean, I think you can pretty much look across the spectrum of almost anything, and if anyone could figure out a counterpoint to this, please send it my way so I can update my thinking. But when you change your motivations from external to intrinsic, so you're doing things for your personal reasons everything changes in terms of like you're doing things for the right reason, for what matters. And yeah, going from like I want other people to see me as a hot person too. I want to be able to go to the bathroom for as long as I can without help. That's a big change in like how you approach everything.
Jay Croft:I'm all for looking great in a tight t-shirt, but they're things like playing with their grandchildren, Because if you can't lift that baby up in the air or you can't get up off the floor from playing with the kid, that's going to break your heart. Travel is another one. A lot of people spend 30, 40 years working on a job, dreaming of being able to retire so they can finally go to Paris. Now they're retired, but they're 40 pounds overweight. They come to you they say get me in shape so I can go to Europe. That's really powerful. When you realize that those are much more powerful motivators to get people to go to the gym and have a better life and you can help them, then, like you said, it's really your obligation. It's not just a business opportunity.
Dan Uyemura:Yep, and it's a big one. Just speaking to what you said, one of the things my mom said to me last time I saw her a couple of weeks ago was like I would love to go to Paris again. She literally said this I'd love to go to Paris again, but I don't think my hip can tolerate being on a plane that long.
Dan Uyemura:But that's like the one thing that she wants now. So, yeah, it's about making sure you're out there in your community and these people in their 40s and 50s might not be able to see as far as we can or we are, but just making sure that those pain points are relevant to them and they understand what they're walking into. If they are not taking care of their bodies and how they need to, it doesn't have to be in your gym, but even if you turn that light bulb on for somebody in your community and they go and start walking at the park, you're still doing your job.
Jay Croft:Wow, exactly. This has been great. I hope some of your gym owners hear this and or other gym owners hear this and are motivated to reach out to this demographic and to check out what PushPress can do for them. Where should they go to learn more about it?
Dan Uyemura:To learn more about everything we're doing at PushPress. I've set up a landing page. It's pretty simple. It's pushpresscom slash Dan my name, dan. It has everything that PushPress is doing and ways to connect with me and understand more about me as well. I guess, on the flip side, having this has inspired me and I actually need to get this information so I could bring it to our clients. But if my clients happen to be listening to this, can you please just tell them how they can find out more about how to work with older people?
Dan Uyemura:Yeah, sure it's not that term Did I do a faux pas.
Jay Croft:No, you did not, but I will tell you that's a really good question that you asked To me in conversation like this. I don't have a problem with it. I'm not particularly sensitive, but in marketing it can be really troubling, not because you're offending anyone, but because you're limiting yourself. The only things I really don't like are golden and silver and cute. You ought to be careful to not insult anyone by diminishing Especially if it's like cute old, something cute old.
Dan Uyemura:I guess what you're saying is right. I don't identify as old, so if you said older people, I'd be like that's not me. Yeah, but you need to be pretty tight in how you're describing it. So, anyway, how can I direct some of my clients?
Jay Croft:Yeah, please ask them to check out my website. It's probably the best way. It's primetfitcontentcom, it's primeliketheprimeofyourlifefitcontentcom and my email is jay. My name is Jay, so it's jay at primetfitcontentcom. Send me an email, tell them you heard me talking to Dan and let's talk about it. They can help them reach this market and grow their business.
Dan Uyemura:Yeah, I think it'd be something that could help a lot of the gyms that are on our platform. That would be interesting to understand better. Yeah awesome.
Jay Croft:Okay, dan, thanks so much. This has been terrific, and let's stay in touch and see how this comes along.
Dan Uyemura:All right. Thank you so much, jay Thanks.
Jay Croft:Dan, thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show and I hope you'll subscribe, tell a friend and write a review. All of that helps us grow our audience. I also hope you'll check out the powerful fitness business training and certifications offered by my friends at the Functional Aging Institute. Fai is the leading authority on how to build a business that's focused on helping people over 50 live their best lives through fitness. Their educational services, networking opportunities and coaching are invaluable and the pricing is unbeatable. Just use this special code so they know you're coming to them through me. You can find it on the show notes page and follow the link to learn more.
Jay Croft:Also, fai president and co-founder, dan Ritchie, was our very first guest on Optimal Aging, so reach back to episode one for more about the Functional Aging Institute. I'm now thankful for FAI support as another affiliate sponsor of this show, so you'll be supporting me as well as yourself and this great organization. So thank you. You can learn more about me and my content business at primefitcontentcom. Send me an email at JJAY at primefitcontentcom. I'm also on Facebook, linkedin, instagram and just about anywhere else, so check me out. Love to hear from you. Again, thanks for listening. Join us next time.