Abbey Griffith, Clarity Fitness

[00:00:55] Sanjay Parekh: Hey, and welcome to the Hiscox Side Hustle to Small Business Podcast. My guest today is Abbey Griffith. I'm excited to have you on today, Abbey. Tell us a little bit about you and what got you to where you are today. 

[00:01:07] Abbey Griffith: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here and I'm the owner of Clarity Fitness, which is Georgia's first body positive fitness center. So, we work a ton in the mental health space and really want to make fitness more inclusive and accessible for everyone. And that came from my absolute love of fitness and my struggles with disordered eating and eating disorders. Really realizing that there's a big opportunity in the fitness space to shift how we're addressing movement and shift how we're addressing our bodies.

[00:01:35] Sanjay Parekh: Fascinating. So, you're here in Atlanta. Are you originally from Atlanta or you're from somewhere else? 

[00:01:39] Abbey Griffith: Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. Shout out to the Browns. We won last night. Also went to school in Miami, Florida, so landed in the middle, felt like it would be a great opportunity in terms of a community and a real estate space for us to start our first location.

[00:01:54] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Any chance you know Dana Carvey? 

[00:01:56] Abbey Griffith: I don't.

[00:01:56] Sanjay Parekh: Dana Carvey? That's the guy, the Price is Right guy, right? No, Dana Carvey's the other guy. Why am I not remembering his name? I'm blanking. He's the guy that had the TV show. I don't know. 

[00:02:08] Abbey Griffith: I don't know. I'm sorry. 

[00:02:09] Sanjay Parekh: Anyways. I just assume Cleveland's a small town. You might know everybody there. Drew Carey, That's who I'm thinking of. 

[00:02:16] Abbey Griffith: Yep. I do know that name. 

[00:02:17] Sanjay Parekh: Not Dana Carvey, Drew Carey. Yeah. That's different. You don't know him, right? 

[00:02:20] Abbey Griffith: Haven't met him, but one day hope to. 

[00:02:23] Sanjay Parekh: Maybe we should get him down here to Clarity and work it out. Okay. So, interesting about what you're doing here. Did you look for other gyms before trying to decide, Hey, I'm just going to start my own because there's not a place for me?

[00:02:35] Abbey Griffith: No, this was the goal. This was the vision. So, we knew that just the fitness concepts out there right now, there's tons of different ideas, but none of them are approaching the mental health, specifically eating disorder informed and fat positive sides that we're all about. We knew that we needed to make a shift and we wanted a high-end experience. So, there are some studios out there that are doing more niche concepts like Pilates or a specific type of class, but we wanted to run the whole gamut of a fitness studio and have that messaging behind it. 

[00:03:05] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Walking into this space, it's absolutely fantastic. It's really beautiful. We even have very nice artwork behind us here for the folks that are watching on video that are not just listening to the podcast. You've been very, it looks like you've been very intentional about how to build this out. Has this been something that you knew and figured out? Did you get help from outside? Like, how did you figure out how to set this up in a way that makes sense?

[00:03:30] Abbey Griffith: Yeah. Lots of different things. Definitely was not all me. I had a ton of help, a ton of support. I'm the sole owner legally, but I have definitely had an incredible team of just advisors and team members behind me. I actually started this in my industrial engineering degree at the University of Miami in Florida. So, I went, we had a senior project where we had to look at a business and figure out how we could improve it, make it more efficient, save time and money. All the good IE things. 

[00:03:58] Sanjay Parekh: Very standard, operational enhancements, all that stuff.

[00:04:03] Abbey Griffith: Yeah. So, I was a personal trainer at our fitness studio on campus, so, the rec center, and I wanted to do a project there. So, me and two of my best girlfriends looked at that business model and they actually helped us do a dual project where we took things that were working for them and put that into the business plan for Clarity and then took our enhancements, gave them back to University of Miami first, and then also put them into my business plan, which was really helpful for the backbone of where the business plan started.

[00:04:32] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. So, I've got to ask, did the University of Miami actually take those suggestions and actually do the things? 

[00:04:38] Abbey Griffith: They did not but they heard us out. So, we were taking credit for them hearing us out and then we were like, we'll start Clarity anyway. So, we've got lots of good feedback from them.

[00:04:47] Sanjay Parekh: So, a great pick of a class when you were an undergrad to launch you into this thing. Is that really where the thought of entrepreneurship came, or did you do anything entrepreneurial when you were younger?

[00:04:58] Abbey Griffith: I started entrepreneuring, I would argue, very young. I was always one of the lemonade stand kids and always doing little things at recess. I got in trouble. I started a tattoo company with magic markers in elementary school. The teachers didn't like it. So, that was my first business failure, but it got a good name out there. Always trying something. 

[00:05:20] Sanjay Parekh: Okay, I've got to say that is a first for me. I've never heard of a magic marker tattoo company. What I used to do was the candy bar arbitrage where you buy candy bars and sell them to your classmates and stuff for more. 

[00:05:30] Abbey Griffith: That's also awesome. A great strategy. 

[00:05:32] Sanjay Parekh: You didn't do that.

[00:05:33] Abbey Griffith: I did a little, it just wasn't as fun. I liked the tattoos. 

[00:05:36] Sanjay Parekh: It wasn't as fun. It would keep you out of trouble, but I guess you went the trouble route.

[00:05:42] Abbey Griffith: I like the trouble route. 

[00:05:43] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, that's the good trouble. Okay. Launching this, how did you start thinking about where to have a location? You were in Cleveland, you were in Miami, but you ended up here. Like, how did you think about this and how did you find the exact spot that you wanted to open up? 

[00:05:56] Abbey Griffith: For sure. So, there was a lot of different research that I was looking at. I really wanted a space that was fitness oriented, that was mental health oriented, that was open to a different perspective and really paradigm shattering, which is what I like to think about going through my journey of recovering from an eating disorder and changing how I thought about fitness. And I really felt like Atlanta was a great place. There's so much art, there's so much culture, there's so much history and people are really connected to the social justice work that's going on in the world here and I felt that would be a great place to start some transformative conversations. And then we saw the city of Decatur and saw their programs around small business support and the space that we're in is right on the downtown Decatur Square, and it has windows on every single side. So, we're basically just like an advertisement fishbowl. That's always helpful for a first location when no one knows what you're doing. Took a stab at it here. 

[00:06:54] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, I've got to say all the windows are fantastic walking into the space. So much natural light coming in. So, it's really nice. Okay. So, you figured out the spot. How did you fund this thing? It's a lot to do. Equipment is not cheap. 

[00:07:07] Abbey Griffith: For sure. So, big shout out to the family. I'm so incredibly grateful. Both my mom and my grandma are entrepreneurs and they've really poured into my dream and could not have done it. 

[00:07:36] Sanjay Parekh: What kind of entrepreneurs are they? 

[00:07:37] Abbey Griffith: They're both in the law space. We have a tiny family, and we have 13 immediate legal connections in our super tiny family of 17. So, I did not want to go that route, but it was definitely...

[00:07:40] Sanjay Parekh: But, all your legal documents here for the gym are taken care of. 

[00:07:43] Abbey Griffith: Free legal support all the time. Jokes aside, I love them so much and I'm so grateful. I truly would not be here without them, and they really took a big chance on me and I'm excited to one day pay them back for that. 

[00:07:50] Sanjay Parekh: So, that's interesting way of going about it. A lot of entrepreneurs when they're doing something big like this are having to take in investors and that changes the way that they have to think about the business and have to run the business. How has this in your view helped you think about this differently?

[00:08:04] Abbey Griffith: Yeah, I, first of all, I think objectively there's a little bit of shame there. I feel like I haven't taken the hard route, air quotes, of finding the investors. And you could say I bootstrapped it, but also, I recognize that I was given a lot of benefit from family funding and family support. So, there's definitely that component, but on the positive side, it has given me a ton more runway to figure out what the heck I'm doing. This is my first official business. The tattoo company didn't go very far. It's been a really great stab at figuring things out, giving me time to make mistakes, which we're all going to do anyway, and figuring out how I can get this off the ground and make the impact that I want to make.

[00:08:48] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Fascinating. So, what is that kind of long-term runway? So, you've got this one location here. Where are you at in terms of clients and people that know this space? 

[00:08:58] Abbey Griffith: Yeah. So, we've served about 900 people so far in about three years. We currently have about 200 members and we're working on just developing our retention. We're developing a new sales model that we're rolling out in a few weeks. So, really figuring out how we can make that a continuous funnel and a continuous engine. And we're looking to grow to 100 locations in the future, in my life. 

[00:09:23] Sanjay Parekh: A hundred locations. 

[00:09:25] Abbey Griffith: Is the big goal, BHAG. 

[00:09:26] Sanjay Parekh: The BHAG there, big, hairy, audacious goal. So, when do you think you're going to do that? So, you've got one location, when's location number two? 

[00:09:34] Abbey Griffith: Location number two, I think objectively will be within the next five years. And we have gotten a lot of mentors that are really seeing potential in franchising Clarity. Especially with some shifts that we're about to make in terms of how we want to run things. We're really excited about just being able to replicate what we're doing. We have a lot of training and a lot of great mentors that can help people understand the messaging and the vision that we're wanting to bring into all of our instructors and trainers. So, I do think that it is something that could really build wings and grow and soar into different areas of the United States, if not the world. 

[00:10:12] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Okay. In terms of the, you touched on it a little bit there getting people in, how have you been doing that? How has the marketing been going? What works? What doesn't work for y'all?

[00:10:21] Abbey Griffith: Yeah. So, we've used a ton of different mentors. And one of my favorite things has been as many lines in the water as possible. So, we have, I have my car wrapped. We've done Google ads. We've done TikTok ads. We've done social media. We've done mailers. We've done every event you can possibly imagine. We've done open houses. We're tapping into the mental health world in terms of different therapists, dietitians, treatment center hospitals. So, we really have a lot of different lanes that we're wanting to build out and that we have built out. I would say the TikTok ads have actually done incredibly well, so we're really excited about that. Google ads have been great for us and mailers did not work. And I would say that the treatment hospitals have really started to build up too. That's been awesome. 

[00:11:11] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, I'm not surprised about the mailers because I think what all of us do is they just go straight into the recycling, right? But interesting that TikTok and some of those other channels are working for y'all. And is this something that you guys have been doing on your own? Are you using somebody outside to help? 

[00:11:26] Abbey Griffith: Lots of different companies. We've gone through different companies that have a consulting and advertising component and have done their programs. We've moved into different connections of mine through networking groups that we've found. And right now, we're actually using someone that I found that niches into the fitness space. And I actually met her through a previous company, previous engagement and she's taken me on as a freelance client, which has been awesome because we've really been able to niche into my specific approach. It's not a cookie cutter, paste this photo, B roll, whatever, from some random other gym and we can make it work for Clarity. It really is a specific thing that we're trying to do here. So, it requires a little extra TLC. 

[00:12:11] Adam Walker: Support for this podcast comes from Hiscox, committed to helping small businesses protect their dreams since 1901. Quotes and information on customized insurance for specific risks are available at Hiscox.com. Hiscox, the business insurance experts.

[00:12:32] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. So, let's switch gears a little bit. Although it's not really switching gears because of what you do. Let's talk about health and wellness. Like you're surrounded by it all day. Like how do you deal with it for yourself? Because it feels like, man, for a lot of us that work in something like you don't want to talk about that something after. But it's important to worry about your own health and wellness. So how do you think about that for you? And how do you deal with that in terms of the place that you work? 

[00:12:57] Abbey Griffith: For sure. Great question. So, I'm a personal trainer by trade as well as industrial engineer, but that's where I feel like I max out is the programming of the workouts. So, I absolutely love relying on other trainers to support me in my fitness journey. I love going to classes. I love working out with my partner and he figures out the workouts and if I disagree with something he's doing, I'll just plug something else in. So that works out great. 

I see my therapist every two weeks, which has been hugely helpful in recovery and balancing work and balancing life. And then I also have a non-diet dietitian, which is something that's really specific to the eating disorder recovery space, but something that I truly feel everyone could benefit from. And she has really helped with different things that have come up. Stress levels have risen, some blood level numbers. And so, I've definitely needed to depend on her for how to make some shifts without it becoming triggering and setting me back in my eating disorder recovery. 

[00:13:55] Sanjay Parekh: So, I need you to explain one thing that you said, because I don't know that I understand what it meant. Non-diet dietitian. What does it mean?

[00:14:01] Abbey Griffith: The best thing in the world. I love them. They are, when you go to a typical dietitian, you're going to get, eat this, don't eat that. Here's some things that you should add to your plate, or here's what you should avoid at all costs. And there's a lot of really dangerous psychological impact that kind of messaging can have on your relationship with food. There's, in the eating disorder recovery space there is a phrase that there is no good or bad food and that doesn't mean that we are wanting to only eat, we call them energy dense instead of bad foods because calories have energy and they fill your body and it's nothing that inherently will make the world stop turning around. To un-demonize that kind of relationship with food, you can start to think about energy dense and nutrient dense foods and they'll talk to you about that. They'll talk about your relationship with food. What happens if you're skipping a meal? Is that because you're restricting? Or is that because you just forgot? And what does that really mean? Really challenging more than just here's what you should eat and here's why. 

[00:15:06] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Because you could just read that in a book. 

[00:15:09] Abbey Griffith: It's true. And it also can be really dangerous depending on who the messaging is going to. 

[00:15:13] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, exactly. So, help me a little bit more than that. That's good. Yeah, that's useful. Okay. You've got family involved in the business. We just had Thanksgiving. I don't know if you saw family or not, but you see probably family ongoing. Do you talk about the business? Don't talk about the business? Like how do you manage? Because otherwise, like every time you spend with family is just only talking about the business and then people be like, man, that Abbey only talks about the business and fitness. So how do you navigate that? 

[00:15:41] Abbey Griffith: We definitely talk about it. People are really excited about what we're doing and really receptive to any kind of insight or new fun things that we're adding, but I also do a lot of things outside of work. I got my private pilot's license this year. So that's been great. We talk about that. 

We talk about travel. Everyone I know, including both of my parents are getting married in the next 365 days. So that's fun to talk about. So, lots of other things too. And I definitely, I have my weekends as my safe space where I really try to check out of work and, not that work is not also a safe space, but I really want that to be a healthy boundary to just turn off the phone and step away for a bit. And that's been helpful too, to just focus on other things. 

[00:16:23] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. For work, you only focus on it Monday to Friday? And then Friday at…

[00:16:29] Abbey Griffith: That's the intention. 

[00:16:31] Sanjay Parekh: So that's the plan. How does it actually work for you? 

[00:16:34] Abbey Griffith: Last night I was lying in bed, and I had all these work ideas and last night was a Sunday. And so, I was up very late trying to brainstorm things into my phone. Sometimes the ideas don't come at the boundary times. 

[00:16:47] Sanjay Parekh: And this is one of the challenges of being an entrepreneur is once you really get into it, ideas just come all the time. Where do you find most of your ideas come? Is it during that nighttime just before you're going to bed? Or is there some other time during the day that it just comes to you?

[00:17:01] Abbey Griffith: Usually mornings. I'm a morning person, so I'll wake up and I have a new app that I found that's a frequency app, which has been really interesting. So, there's, I don't know how much you know about frequencies, but there's different audio waves that elicit different things and tell yourselves to relax or create abundance or whatever it might be, and it sounds very woo-woo, but there's a lot of science behind it. So, I've been something that's very, it sounds very woo-woo, but there's been actual psychological studies and it's been really interesting to tap into that. So that's usually my morning routine. And then I listen to a podcast or two and then I get some ideas flowing and do some brainstorming and hit the sales. 

[00:17:43] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. So, is that most of your day, sales? Trying to get people in the door? 

[00:17:47] Abbey Griffith: For sure. Sales. We're doing a lot with the treatment center hospitals, so reaching out to different people in the eating disorder recovery space to see if we can provide fitness support to people that are in recovery in that way, or after they're discharged from treatment. And then also just making sure that the team has what they need and making sure the members have what they need. I'm in charge of the personal training and group X side. So, a lot of hiring and a lot of audits in terms of verbiage, which is one of our biggest focuses in terms of, that's really where we differentiate ourselves. So that's probably the typical day spiel. And networking. 

[00:18:24] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Let's dive into hiring because that's always a challenge for entrepreneurs. How have you thought about that, and how have you tried to find the right people, and have you had issues along the way, and how have you dealt with them? 

[00:18:35] Abbey Griffith: For sure! I would say that we definitely have had our issues, for sure, so that's easy. But our biggest impact from networking and from the sales and from getting out into the community is that we've had a relatively easy time finding instructors and fitness professionals that agree with what we're about. 

I've said this before to other people in my networking, but a lot of people either totally get what we're about or totally don't. And the people that totally get what we're about, those are our cult followers, and they really understand the impact of having a different headspace when you're coming into a health atmosphere, whether that's a gym or a doctor's office or a dietician. 

It seems like such a little shift, but especially if you're in recovery or if you have anxiety or if you're susceptible to that all-or-nothing thinking about wellness, it can be really dangerous to have other types of messaging. So, the people that get us have found us and that's been really awesome to bring them on and be able to join forces on a mission that they were out to make happen.

[00:19:40] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. So how is it that you're making sure that kind of values and messaging is out there? Because, a lot of companies, what they'll do is in their job postings, they'll list that out, but then you don't see it anywhere else. I feel like this is more of a cohesive kind of messaging for you. So how have you thought about that part? 

[00:19:55] Abbey Griffith: Absolutely. One of our big interview questions, and I'm probably showing behind the curtain a little. So, if anyone's trying to get hired, here you go. But we ask if a client comes up to you and wants to lose weight, what would you say? And how they navigate that question is, I can read them like a book from that perspective in terms of their approach to how they would navigate that in the fitness setting. So, if someone starts going into all the ways that they would try to tell the client to lose weight, what to eat, what not to do in the gym, what to do in the gym, and really focuses on drilling into getting them to a different body shape and size, that's actually a red flag for me because what I want them to do is check in on why. Did a doctor say something? Are you having bad body image struggles? Are you feeling like your cousin, Sally, is X pounds, and so you want to be that too. Really diving into the why, not saying that their goal is wrong or saying that they've done anything bad, but just checking in on the why is really important. And then we can navigate from there.

[00:20:56] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. And how important that is actually for so many things in life is to actually understand the why behind it, instead of being just like, yeah, let's just solve the symptom and not the underlying cause. So that's really interesting that you're going about that approach. Is that something that you, how did you get to that of thinking about, hey, this is like the right interview question to understand their motivation?

[00:21:19] Abbey Griffith: A lot of research, a lot of learning. I totally recognize that I am a white able-bodied woman and that has a lot of privilege and I've done a lot of learning and growing in this space of fat positivity, which is a social justice issue that we really want to be allies in and help make change for. And that has taught me a ton about how I can check into what people are thinking in the fitness space, the triggers for people that are in the eating disorder recovery space that want a safe space but don't want to talk about weight, or specifically tell the trainer that they're not interested in weight loss or food support and then the trainer lectures them about both of those every time they come out anyway. So, it's been really interesting to tap into that and learn and figure out what question, as well as lots of training, as well as lots of events that we do with different non-diet dietitians and therapists and people in that social justice space to pull it all together. 

[00:22:15] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Awesome. Okay. Let's take, you've been doing this now for a few years. Let's take a look back. If you could go back in time and do something differently, what is it and why? 

[00:22:27] Abbey Griffith: Smaller space. Smaller space. It is key. I think the ‘starting small and building into what you create’ message was lost on me when we opened. 

[00:22:37] Sanjay Parekh: So how many square feet are you right from the get-go?

[00:22:40] Abbey Griffith: We're at 7, 000. I spent a ton of money on the build out. We spent a ton of money on advertising. We had a fully built out team from day one instead of building into what we needed as it came. Just typical new business owner mistakes, I would say. But we're learning and growing still but yeah; I would say starting smaller would be a lot less financial strain and we're getting to a better place now, but it was a tough five years and January 2020 was not a fun time to open our facility which was a plot twist.

[00:23:14] Sanjay Parekh: So how did you deal with that? The kind of the pandemic, because after March, you had nobody here for a while. 

[00:23:19] Abbey Griffith: For sure. Yeah. We were fully shut down through May. And then in Decatur, they actually didn't lift the mask mandate for a full two years. So, we were masked policing every individual in the studio to put their mask back on, whether they were doing cardio or fitness classes. And there was, I'm team mask, but there was a ton of pushback for that by clients and other gyms that weren't requiring that, but we really wanted to uphold the Decatur standards and uphold what we knew to be healthy at that point in time. So, that was a huge pivot. 

And then we also were as virtual as we possibly could be. And we started something called Clarity Online, which is still out there. It's a little library of at-home workout classes and we're hoping to build that into live features and lots more as we grow. But yeah, it was scary and switched as fast as we could. Fortunately, I think we had about 60 members at the time. So, we were able to really pivot quickly. And a lot of people were just trying to figure out things for themselves, too. So, people were really supportive and kind about it and knew that we were two months old. 

[00:24:26] Sanjay Parekh: And now dealing with the pandemic. And I can imagine it's hard to work out in a mask, so man, that's, it's got to be tough. Okay. Last question for you. You're a small business owner, hopefully becoming a large business owner when we get to the hundred locations. What piece of advice do you have for other small business owners or people trying to start a small business like you? 

[00:24:51] Abbey Griffith: Awesome. I would say our slogan here at Clarity is You Are Enough. And as corny as that sounds, that was a big piece of my eating disorder recovery too. Just figuring out that you're doing enough, waking up early enough. You're trying enough things. I think, this is a generalization, but if you're opening a business, you probably have a big vision for the future. You have plans, you have drive, you have dedication just inherently by starting something that is so scary and so new and so awesome. So, the self-doubt, the guilt and the shame that comes in comparing yourself to someone else, isn't helping push towards your goal and whether or not there are things you could incorporate that’s separate from the enoughness, I just really want to spread the message that they're doing enough and that they can continue to grow without hating themselves. Which I feel can sometimes be the messaging in the fitness space and in the business development space. It's negative until you reach quote unquote success. And I think that misses the point and misses the journey of all the awesome stuff that you're making happen. 

[00:25:59] Sanjay Parekh: Journey is incredible. I enjoy it a lot. Abbey, this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast today. 

[00:26:05] Abbey Griffith: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. This was super fun. www.clarityfitness.com

[00:26:08] Sanjay Parekh: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Side Hustle to Small Business Podcast, powered by Hiscox. To learn more about how Hiscox can help protect your small business through intelligent insurance solutions, visit hiscox.com. And if you have a story you want to hear on this podcast, please visit www.hiscox.com/shareyourstory. I'm your host Sanjay Parekh. You can find out more about me at my website, www.sanjayparekh.com.