Thanks for joining us. I guess Randy, I should say welcome back. It's been a little while but great to be reconnecting.

Awesome to be with you, Joe. Thanks, Joe.

Good to be here.

Yeah, likewise. For the sake of this conversation, I think there's a lot of things to get into and people seeing the episode pop up in their feed and seeing the brand TRX is one that is, in many ways, synonymous with the fitness industry. I think they'll be familiar with that. Picking up where we left off the last conversation, well, links to your previous appearance, Randy and the show notes here, they covered the origin story and so much of how TRX came to be and how it became a dominant brand in the fitness industry. I think for the sake of today's conversation and looping Jack in, it's like this TRX since reclaiming the reins and restarting and continuing so much of the work that you've done but also charting a new path forward. Maybe with that in mind, what's the best state of TRX at this moment and how things stand and then we'll get into the details? I

can jump in at the beginning just mostly to make sure that anybody who doesn't know Jack kind of knows because they certainly will if you're fans of TRX. As we went into, I think, last time the business went through a period of crisis that I was watching from outside trying to figure out what we could do and we had the opportunity, fortunately for us, unfortunately for the incumbents at the time, we had the opportunity to take a swing at buying back the business and Jack and I had a relationship from outside of the fitness industry. Jack's the treasurer of the Navy Seal Foundation and had been around the the seal community for many, many years. Grew up with a mutual friend, a very, very close friend of Jack's childhood friend who was a sealed officer that I knew and then through the community, I had kept hearing about this cat that lived out in San Francisco, which is a bit of a misnomer. He didn't really, he sort of like bounces all over the place but was in San Francisco and San Francisco is not exactly the hotbed of veteran resettlement or necessarily, you know, military patriotic zeal. So he stood out as a guy that friends of mine kept telling me that I had to get to know and that spoke a lot to me because these are these are cats that I'd worked with for, you know, a very long time, had enormous respect for and the fact that they had such great respect for him kind of opened the door and I think that worked reciprocally on the other side. So we end up finding all these common friends in the seal community and Jack and I became became friends and fortunately his circumstance at the time was, you know, he was kind of quasi-retired. I mean, I guess I'll say that because Jack certainly doesn't retire from much of anything but after a long career at Goldman Sachs and TPG buying and selling businesses, he was kind of cool in his heels and figuring out what was going to happen next and I was able to interlope into that plan, get on his screen, you know, fortunately his wife, Metca, did not veto the thing outright, which, you know, she may regret that at this point given the hours that we put in but we ended up connecting and Jack was really masterful, frankly, at helping shepherd us through, you know, I didn't have the capital because a lot of my capital was on white paper that had been wiped out to do it on my own. Jack had both the capital and the expertise and the interest because his sort of, you know, I'm speaking for you, I'm going to hand the mic over to Jack in a second, but he kind of reached this point in his life where all he wanted to do was you'll hear him saying over and over, health and happiness and focusing on fitness, healthy lifestyles, longevity, and this kind of fit the bill as it turned out. And so just over a year ago, we won back control of the business and I was able to bully Jack into taking, well, with the help of one of our, one of our board members, Mark Fields, into taking the CEO role because I was already involved in another startup, right, which I had started when I stepped away as CEO and it's worked. I mean, beyond my wildest dreams of success, you know, Jack is nothing if not a quick study and has taken to the CEO role like a fish to water. You know, and I've been fortunate to be able to kind of be his wingman in this as we brought it back and you'll hear Joe as we go along, we're pretty complimentary. It just turns out that our skill sets, our interests, our temperament, we're all, we're pretty complimentary. And so here we are a year later and the business, has responded amazingly. We're back to profitability, which is no small task coming from the whole that we started in. And you know, and I'm excited for Jack to get to hop in and tell you some of the ways that we've accomplished that. Yeah,

so maybe, Joe, I'll add a little bit. Thanks, Randy. That's my mom appreciates that intro. But hey, Joe, by the way, let me say thank you to you because I am coming from outside the industry. And you've done a terrific job really educating people inside the industry at depth. But also as a newcomer coming in, I've been able to get up to speed very quickly in the industry because of resources like you and the interviews you do. It's terrific. It really is. So thank you. You know, appreciate that. You know, as Randy said, I came from outside the industry, I was a control investor taking over large companies and adding value. And I was on my path of health, wellness and happiness, right? I retired after 25 years on Wall Street, taking over multi-billion dollar companies. And through my friendship with Randy, provided an opportunity to marry, you know, when you're on a journey focusing on health, wellness and happiness, Joe, you and many others discovered the fitness industry early in your careers. I get, I discovered that I've been in fitness. I've worked out all the time, but I wasn't in the industry. And so, when you find a way to get into a passion in a professional way, in such a remarkable way with TRX, I mean, great platform for, frankly, a blessing for me to be able to live a lifestyle that I aspire to live, which is very on brand for the company. And that bring my years of experience and transforming and creating some of the largest companies in the world to the industry. It's just exciting and doing it with a buddy like Randy Hetrick, right? We just got to know each other in such a great way with such a great community of warriors and, you know, have it turn into now what this journey that we've been on for now, 15 months, having acquired the business and transforming it is really exciting. So happy to talk about where we're going with it and what we're doing with it. But it's been fun so far.

Yeah, I think Randy, to your point, like very complimentary. And it is, there's so many ways in which the energy, this energy is the complimentary, but still down that path of like, at the end of the day, you're both doing the things that are incredibly passionate about and getting to come to this industry and, you know, kind of shepherd the brand into its next evolution. It's like, yeah, that is absolutely something I could see, you know, Jack getting fired up every day to go and do. And I think that's one of the things that, and, you know, either of you feel free to jump in as we kind of go through the questions here, but, you know, Randy, in some ways, having that win, right, of selling the company, so to speak, and you mentioned like some of this on paper, but then kind of sitting back and maybe things not playing out the way that you had hoped, and then getting the chance to come back in, when you are having these conversations about, hey, can we get back in there? What would this look like? How do we do it? Getting the capital? Were there things? I'm sure there were, which things kind of stood out to you as like, hey, these we've identified as the problems, the pitfalls, the things that created this situation that we don't want to do, that we want to change. And these are the things that if we did that, we would be able to kind of transform things and get it right back on track. Was it kind of like massive, whole uncertainty, or was it like very obvious to you in terms of like, these are the things that went wrong and maybe this is how we would change it?

I think it was more of the latter. We ran TRX for a long time, right? And it was kind of steady as rock. In fact, you would argue that if there was a challenge with TRX, it was that our business model, meaning selling primarily durable goods, right, in a B2B, largely B2B universe, that was a hard thing to get to great scale. You know, we got up to 50, 60 million, 10% kind of even demargence, but getting above that was a challenge because what are your options to do it? Well, you have to come up with some recurring revenue engines. Well, those are expensive and hard to create. Or you have to add consumer, which that's expensive, right? And so that was kind of one of the challenges that we had. But apart from that, the business was pretty darn steady, pretty darn, you know, well-beloved. I mean, we have one of the few truly global fitness brands. Honestly, there's only a few of them, but we're one of them, which I think speaks to our shadow has always been bigger than our physical form. What we're trying to do, you know, as we go forward is make those things more equivalent, right? Make the physical form of the business become as big as the brand shadow. But I felt at the time that, okay, it wasn't a magical formula that made us successful. It was a lot of hard work and a lot of operational, just kind of diligence and consistency. And I felt like that had gone missing. I've been very, very focused throughout my career in the SEAL teams. I mean, that's where I learned it, right? It's like with a great team, you can accomplish anything, right? Without a great team, it's hard to accomplish anything. And so, so the focus on the team, I knew we could do. I was the guy who built Humpty Dumpty, right? I knew how the pieces fit back together. And I really had the relationships with folks from the past who had been great members of TRX and with a guy like Jack who could bring kind of the future. And I did have the awareness show that like, I don't care what great company you talk about out there, and you know this, right? From the business that you do, every one of them either has a crash and burn Phoenix story, or they came this close to it, right? Like every one of them has a near-death experience where, I mean, all of them from Apple and Nike on down, where they were almost out, right? And yet, they figured out how to get back to what was working early on in the business, to bring those disciplines back, to bring in some new talent, maybe some new things better, and they created an amazing, powerful company that went on to become one of the great, greats in the world. That was always kind of my belief that if I could find the right partner, which I believed Jack was. And then the last piece is I think that I knew that Jack would be coming with his own capital. And that was important to me because I'd been through the experience of having misaligned capital partners who are managing other people's money. And it means that their horizons are so short that just about the time that you're fully deploying the capital, they're ready to leave because of their time cycles. And I didn't want to be in that again, right? I really wanted to try to avoid that. And so the partnership with Jack hit a bunch of those wickets. Yeah,

from your perspective, Jack, you know, Randy is very convincing. And I'm sure in starting to get this pitch, you saw a lot of the things that he's saying, right? Like this opportunity is there. It does make sense to get things aligned and back on track. As you started maybe looking under the hood, kicking the tires, really getting into your diligence, were those things, was it as clear to you in terms of what it would take? And did you, and how did you get aligned on that kind of knowing that getting the financing, making things work, and then kind of taking it to that next level was the ultimate goal?

Yeah, well, look, I give credit to all the hard work that Randy and the team did prior to me getting here, right? Because I saw lots of value when I came in, right? And those things are easy to spot. They're obviously issues, right? That this is the opportunity to buy the company. But a ubiquitous brand, not just in the US or not just in North America around the world, we have 350,000 certified trainers worldwide who are certified in TRX. Two thirds of them are outside the US. Everywhere I go, Mark Fields, who Randy mentioned, you know, ran Ford Motor Company and serves on lots of boards, Qualcomm and Hertz, ran Hertz. Like he keeps texting me from all different parts of the world. And he walks in and sees suspension trainers up in different hotel gyms. And I get the same thing. You got to Iceland, you got to Europe, you got to Asia, like it's all over the place. So that brand and not only the brand, it's that little smile you get when you tell somebody you're involved in TRX, because then they tell you a story of their friend, themselves, parent, child, who's used it. There's a psychic energy and goodness that comes from the brand that's just invaluable. And so that's what's been built now we're coming up on 20 years of being of the company being in resistance. That's incredibly valuable. That ecosystem is irreplaceable. What happens if people start a company and they think they can build a consumer brand and they try to spend and everybody spends hundreds of millions of dollars, they name stadiums, they get Super Bowl ads and they go out of business the next year, right? Because they spend to try to create something that Randy did by starting by selling suspension trainers, the personal trainers, out of his back of his car, right? And he just did it the old fast way, provided world class products. And so I came in, the brand was ubiquitous, the ecosystem of enthusiastic response, knowing it's a premium quality product and premium brand. And then we have products that are world class, Randy created the functional training space as far as I'm concerned. And the suspension trainer is the world's greatest fitness tool. And so we have intellectual properties surrounding all of that that's also valuable. So those are the ingredients that we came in. And what we have to do is we have to fix the fun, you know, we had to fix the foundation of the business, right? And that's that's stuff that's behind the wall. I call it the electrical plumbing and the foundation in a house, supply chain, marketing, you know, sales, sales ops, finance, and administration. So what we had to do in the financing was that this was the easy part because it's just my wife and I, it's our capital. We're not relying on anybody else. It's not private equity. It's it's daily family money, right? So it's that's gonna I deciding this is where we want to invest not only on time, but our treasure and taking this company and taking it to the next level. But there's a lot of value coming in. So we're not gonna like, it's very successful now and it's gonna become even more successful. We're not gonna get full credit for that because we came into a situation with real value. I look at that way.

Yeah, absolutely.