From Wall Street cold calling to owning a successful gym in NYC (The Body Blueprint) with a detour into the nightclub scene along the way, Vincent Miceli’s career trajectory is all over the map and he has got some stories. I caught up with him at Solace to compare notes on gyms as businesses, how to create great programming, and what we would do differently if we could start all over.

Vincent talks about his own weight-loss journey (he lost almost 100 pounds in a year) and how he got into CrossFit (spoiler: it involved flipping a coin). We get real about what we look for in coaches, wonder where the insanely energetic people coaching SoulCycle classes come from, and break down what running a gym really looks like when you get down to the expenses. It’s a little bit of storytelling, a little bit of insight offering, a little bit of knowledge dropping, and a hell of a lot of fun. With Vincent’s “there is no ceiling” mentality, anything is possible—and this episode is proof of that.

Buckle up!

– Ryan

HIGHLIGHTS:
1:00 My gym is bigger than your gym
2:30 Vincent was a 24-year-old millionaire
6:30 Let’s go build some nightclubs
7:15 Crazy cocaine stories
13:30 Murder makes you reevaluate
15:00 You try consuming 30 to 40 drinks every night and see what happens
18:30 90 days to turn a life around
22:30 Coin flips and CrossFit
23:30 Vincent is going to the Games
24:15 Vincent is opening a gym and he’s never coached a class
26:00 Is a gym a business or an investment? Two different approaches
27:10 How to make shit happen: be the person with the most passion and the best perspective
28:30 Give the people what they want: different classes for different interests
29:30 The good and the bad about Marcus Filly’s program, and why HIIBB works
31:00 Tendinosis and Active Life
34:00 Programming overlap: how TBB solves the problem—power to the people
35:30 The opex model
36:30 CrossFitters are brats, and the interest is fading
40:00 How do you find high-energy coaches?
42:15 Don’t do the stupid shit—what causes injury
43:00 How hard is making money with a gym, and what makes a coach worth paying?
47:15 Incentivization and why it’s slippery
52:00 Three things that could change, and three things that were great ideas
57:00 “The only major difference is I owned more things”—more money doesn’t necessarily mean more happiness