How to Book Your DREAM Podcast Guests with Devan Gonzalez

Are you sending out invites and trying to get bigger name guests on your podcast, but just hearing silence joining us on the show today is Devin Gonzalez, and he sees his podcast as playing an integral role when it comes to growing his gym franchise, strive 11 fitness, and share some secrets on exactly how he successfully connects with the right people.

Once you hear what he’s doing, you will instantly be able to start working to improve your ability. To network and bring on your dream podcast guests. Devin has over 15 years in the fitness industry host, the mindset cafe podcast, and has written a book for gym owners called money muscle mindset. And while he does a lot online, like networking and marketing, his gym franchise is exactly that a physical gym business.

So we’re learning in this episode how he successfully merges the online aspect of podcasting with this business and how Devon takes a collaborative approach rather than competitive when it comes to other fitness businesses. And finally, an important lesson learned that caused them to really have a tough time getting guests on the show.

Initially, I’m Joel Oliver, and this is profits through podcasting. Devin, welcome in.

Thank you So much for having me.

we’re going to dig into your business, of course, but I’d like to start with just getting a bit of background about you and getting to know you a bit better. So give us a little bit of a rundown of your entrepreneurship journey leading up to where you are right now with Strive 11 Fitness.

I know you started at a quite a young age, right?

Yeah, I started out at 13 and I mean, at that 13 year old mark, I wasn’t really an entrepreneur per se. I mean, I had, I think my first t shirt company kind of out in, it wasn’t really a company, you know, it was like I was sold it to friends and family and other kids out of my backpack kind of thing.

But that was like my real taste of kind of entrepreneurship and loving to see like the brand around school, around town and, and just seeing that, that. It really lit me up to, to see other people wearing the stuff. Um, but I was a martial arts instructor. You know, once I got my black belt, I got the opportunity to essentially work under the table and, you know, get my first job and that kind of propelled me down the fitness and health journey because once I went to college, The martial arts hours didn’t really work out with my schedule.

And so it was that, well, what, what do I do now? You know, I do want to get a job and I tried retail and that lasted less than a year, you know, and I was like the same for me for sure. And so it was like, well, I like working out and there was an opening up at an LA fitness near me. And so I was like, I’m just going to apply for.

I’m good at working out, how hard can that be? And so that was like my real foot in the door. You know, I started off as a personal training, like sales counselor, then I pivoted over to the personal training side and, I thought this is an amazing opportunity. And what I told myself at the time was this is an amazing college job, right?

I get to make my own hours around my college schedule can pretty much take time off whenever, , but what I didn’t know about that was when I started finding my calling and finding my true passion, right? And, I even switched my, my major from business management over to kinesiology, because I was like, you can get a degree in this. Like this is way, way more fun than learning accounting. And then at the end of college, it was like, my parents started telling me, okay, now you need to start thinking about a career. You know, the personal training was cool, but now you need to start really thinking, what are you going to do with your life?

And I was like, I thought I was just going to kind of. presented to me. I don’t know. And so I started going down the, you know, firefighter route. My dad was LAPD, you know, and he said, please, anything but this. And I was like, okay, well then I’ll go firefighter. And at that time I had already built up a clientele.

I was already being successful in personal training and I was like, wait, so I’m going to have to work as an EMT to build my resume, make minimum wage, which I think they should be making more, but make minimum wage just to build a resume to one day, hopefully become a firefighter.

I don’t even know if I really want to do that. Like I really liked the personal training aspect. I almost get a natural high from when I see a client, see results and see their face light up. So I was like, you know what? I’m just going to bet on myself and I’m going to, I’m going to figure a way out with this, this path.

And then it led me to transitioning from working for a corporate gym to helping build the whole personal training side of a private gym for the owner and, during that process, you know, we had a disagreement and I ended up leaving and, started my own personal training company and made six figures and did really well.

The one thing when people assume that, you know, since I made six figures, it was like online coaching and stuff like that and no knocks to that. But my, my personal training six figure business was actually all in person.

And then it was like, okay, I want to get back to my, my goal of opening up a gym. And that’s what led to the creation of strive 11 fitness. And now, launching the franchise last year and opening up in Florida and soon will be opening up in Texas and

Washington as

well.

I’m really excited to dive into this more. Cause this is a bit of a unique situation. You mentioned a lot of people would think that that next step from say a trainer is something online and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. We’ve heard a lot of stories like that, where people are just happy to have that freedom to go online and then perhaps scale, but you were able to graduate above that level of just Being a trainer forever, but you did it in a different way.

And that’s a very viable method for, you know, a lot of people out there. So everyone’s always interested in hearing how this happened, how you did this, who was trying to break free from that, that situation. So we will get into the whole business side of things more. I’m curious now too, you have the podcast, the mindset cafe, which you’re headed towards 200 episodes with, which is a lot.

I mean, that’s a lot of commitment to be doing that. I think since 2022, right.

 Yeah, we’re actually, we’re actually already, scheduled out, recorded and scheduled out, to, I think episode like 215 or 220 or something like that. So there’s a lot in the, in the pipeline, but I mean, that was all started as a little side project. We wanted to give more to our members in terms of information and through mindset and all that kind of stuff.

So originally the podcast was actually called the strive tribe because of the whole strive 11 fitness, but it was hard to get people on that were in the fitness industry when it was so branded towards our company and cause they didn’t want to promote our company on their platforms and so forth.

And so, The other aspect of that was like my business partner didn’t really want to do the podcasting. He’s a little more, there was a little more camera shy at the time and not saying that I wasn’t, but I knew one of us had to, make it work. And so he stepped away from it and he was like, look, you just take it, run it, do what you want.

I don’t want to be really a part of this right now. And so, okay. So rebranded as the mindset cafe. That way we could, talk about mindset, which is a huge part of fitness, but also go into the entrepreneurship side of, mindset and everything as well and help people on both sides of the spectrum, overcome their obstacles through other people’s journeys and, and so forth.

But it’s really just my give back. Cause at the day, I can’t remember the last time I sat there and actually read through a bunch of blogs, you know, but I’ll listen to a podcast when I’m working out or running or driving the car.

So it’s like, I knew that would give more value to the customer and to our clients.

So that’s the reason why

we, we established that.

. That’s an interesting thing you brought up there, how you were struggling with guests because it was so heavily associated with the brand. So now that you did make that shift, is it still benefiting your business and your, your franchises? Like, is it used as marketing or is it just kind of a, a passion thing that you do to put value out there? 

There’s two sides to it. So everything, the color scheme, everything is the same, right? And so there’s the hidden. Links between the two, but also if you search up mindset cafe, you’re going to end up seeing strive 11. I mean, it’s even in majority of the videos, right? And so there’s that aspect to it, but now not only do other people hear through when I just do solo episodes or me and my business partner talk about it here about, 11 in those episodes, but also, The side of networking in terms of when people come on and talk about, their struggles and stuff, we connect.

And I’ve met a handful of people. We actually have a collaboration coming out for the franchise that was all through the mindset cafe. It was a CEO of another company. That’s this AI, device essentially, that we’re building it out with him to actually make a whole

nother side of strive 11 fitness.

Okay, nice. Yeah, it’s great for that, for connecting with people. So you are operating a franchise model. Just to get some further clarity here, would you say that your marketing as a whole, uh, focuses on both potential franchisees and customers for the gyms, or would it just be one or the other for you?

Uh, we have to do both, right? So there are two completely separate trains of thought, two completely different marketing campaigns, two different client avatars and so forth. So like the gym we market for clients in our ads are tailored to our client avatar for that. But we’re not just gonna blanket market, you know, out there, because then if you’re just marketing to everyone, you’re really marketing to no one.

So for the franchise, we have a client avatar for that, which is not too far off from our clientele, different interests, different, psychodemographics and even demographics, potentially. And that’s what we got to make sure that we’re speaking the language of someone that’s looking to come onto his franchise.

But someone that sees a

franchise ad doesn’t mean they’re going to come by a membership.

Right. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. and You wrote a book for gym owners as well. So you do have a, like, you have a focus there and obviously very knowledgeable around that considering what you do.

Yeah. So that the book money and muscle mindset was actually a book that I wrote. It’s a playbook essentially that I wish I would have had when I was opening a gym. Now the book itself, you could use it and not even just gym, but any kind of sports gym. business, you could utilize this and essentially, open a business, but it was really tailored to the stories and everything throughout our, our journey from strive 11 fitness.

And at the end of each chapter, essentially, there’s a QR code that you can go and it’s not a lead magnet in the sense that you need to fill out anything to get the chapter bonuses, but you scan it and it goes right to a video of me talking about the chapter more in depth. And then there’s actually a downloadable.

Thing for each chapter, whether it’s templates, whether it’s examples or scripts, though, since the first chapter in the last chapter are about mindset, the first chapter is QR code actually does go to the mindset cafe but then the rest of the chapters are all about essentially opening a gym, different aspects from, you know, how do you create a client avatar? How do you find a location? How do you negotiate a location? All those things, building out pricing structures and pricing models, creating referral systems.

And the final chapter is another one about mindset, because I believe everything begins and ends with your mind. So I wanted that analogy to in symbolism to be in the, in the book. But then at the end of the book, there is a lead magnet to strive, love, and fitness. So it’s one of those things where if you’re like, look, this is a lot to do.

You can always, reach out and we can explore the opportunity of

franchising with strive, love, and fitness.

Okay. Interesting. So the book is technically part of a funnel to, to find people that could become franchisees.

And I guess with, I don’t know if this has happened before yet, but the podcast could certainly like you could have a guest on that could be a future franchisee just through those connections that you’re making is that, is that part of the intention or hope behind it?

It’s not, not the intention, not saying that it won’t happen. And I’ve met some, some amazing connections through, franchising specifically with franchise brokers and other people in the franchise space, whether they’re franchisors or, you know, in different industries. And so creating a network of, those kinds of people always leads to, someone that is thinking about opening a gym.

Right. You know, we’ve met some people that, Hey, I have a friend that wanted to open a gym, you know, I’m going to connect you. I’m

like, awesome. Right.

Yeah, making connections of any sort. It’s hard to go wrong when you’re doing something like this. Cause you need people at the end of the day. So for the franchisee side, that’s, you mentioned a couple of things there, like in terms of how you meet these people, aside from the podcast, like where would you typically come into the, these in your network?

So the franchise, that franchise candidates or franchise leads, essentially we do Facebook campaigns, you know, LinkedIn campaigns and so forth, and even YouTube campaigns, but we also pay for franchise portals, right? So you almost like a, an online yellow pages, right. And believe me, that’s one of the things we wanted.

Right. Slowly get away from because it is kind of costly. And there’s some shady things that go along with that, that I’ve noticed that they do, in terms of reselling, you know, leads or recycling old leads to just, cause it’s basically paper lead, whether it’s a quality lead or not, as long as a valid phone number and email, you know, even if the person they don’t respond or whatever, like

it’s 50 bucks

so if someone say for, for those types of people, if they just happen to respond to one of your ads, or they see an ad that you’re running, what would be the next step for them in that case? Cause obviously if you’re cold outreaching, I’m assuming you can chat to them, but if they just come through an ad that you’re running, is there like a lead magnet or something that you use?

Yeah, so we have a, I mean, we have a CRM that we built out. Um, so we have our own internal CRM that we built for the franchise and there’s two sides of that, you know, for the gym and then we have the franchisor side. So when some comes out they go into essentially a pipeline of automations, you know, text, Drops and emails and so forth.

But then also our team is reaching out to them to try to, you know, get them on the phone to see if this is even the best fit for them, explore their reasonings behind, you know, reaching out and wanting to open up a franchise, let alone a fitness franchise. And then. Essentially, we move them down the pipeline into like the first presentation, the second presentation, and then scheduling them to come out and actually see the location in person.

And that’s pretty much the last step, because my biggest thing is that’s a non negotiable, right? Like there’s a different feeling and different vibe and energy you get from meeting someone face to face. Versus online or over the phone and we want to make sure that they don’t just see the gym and from a business standpoint, but they also see it live, you know, get to feel it and everything like that.

But then also we meet face to face because we’re about to make a partnership essentially, if you come on board and at the end of the day for us, one of our, as weird as it sounds, as one of our critical things is if I wouldn’t have you at a barbecue at my house,

you’re not coming on board.

Right. It’s not just accepting anybody.

That’s a, that’s a

big thing for us though.

I’m curious too, in the podcast, do you have some kind of call to action relevant to this or something else? Like, is there something promoting this in the show?

For the franchise directly, we don’t have anything like a call to action in the show. Right. But what we do have is, you know, a Facebook community and an Instagram community, for the mindset cafe. And through that, again, there’s, um, Indirect leads to strive 11 and so forth.

And strive 11 is actually one of the managing accounts on both of those things. So strive 11 is, you know, posting in there and so forth. It’s not just me or not just my, my team. But making it where it’s not so transparent that someone else in the fitness industry wouldn’t want to come on board. But indirect that, you know, they would still be able to promote it.

So be able to do all that kind of

stuff without directly promoting strive 11 fitness,

So that was kind of an attention behind doing it that way and keeping a bit of a distance there. That makes sense.

right? So it’s like, there’s a distance there off of like a, an initial response, but if you join in, you’re a part of it, you see that you get that, that link between it, you know, at, at some point fairly

Okay. That’s yeah, smart. It sounds like you had to arrive at that conclusion after some experimentation. Like you mentioned what happened with the podcast and the challenges there. And then you arrived at this conclusion that it works well.

the fitness industry is challenging because you know, where I see collaboration, a lot of people see competition, I was a guest on a franchise, a franchisees podcast, and she owns three orange theories. I went on, didn’t talk about strive we talked about the fitness business and so forth.

I completely respected her business and so forth. There’s perfect collaborations. Other people at the lower level see competition. And it’s like, it’s me versus you. And you got to understand that the people at the top and people that are growing can see the collaborations and can help each other out and grow together.

The industry is huge and the ocean is big enough for both of us. I promise you.

Yeah. Okay. It’s good to hear that you.

can have those amicable, collaborations as you call. I’m glad you brought that up. Cause I was going to ask, and I was going to use the word competitive because it’s still applicable in some way. Like it is a very competitive space in some ways. Now you don’t have to have a mindset like that about it.

But what I was curious about with you is, yeah, I mean, if I was just going to look and say, you know what, I’m going to start a gym, Like a gym brand. I just think it’s impossible. There’s so many out there. It just can’t be possible to even do, but you did it. Not only did you try to do it, you succeeded, you know, you’re succeeding at it.

What would you say about that? Like, what gave you the confidence that you knew you could do it? And how come you’re able to succeed?

I would say the confidence, confidence, you know, within yourself in any aspect of life is built through your past, right? You wanted to achieve something big or small. You did it. Boom. That’s proof that you can overcome the obstacles required to hit your goal. And so the first step to, you know, launching the gym came from the proof of me launching my personal training business.

Transcribed Not knowing how to be a solopreneur and all the ins and outs of it, but I learned over time, after hitting obstacles and hitting, plateaus and so forth, how to build a referral system, how to, create a price structure, all that kind of stuff. And so that was proof that I may not know everything right this second.

but I will basically find every single answer I need to, whether it’s finding the resource, the person, or just looking it up on YouTube university. Right. And so that was the first thing. But for the model itself, it was, I didn’t want to be another gym. That was just a copy and paste of every other model out there.

And so for us, our model actually came from my background in personal training and having my clients go to these bootcamps in between our personal training sessions. Cause some people don’t want to follow up, program, you know, when you’re not there. So it’s like, okay, if you’re not gonna follow a program, go to one of these group classes in between to, to maintain.

And so over time they came back with a similar problems. You know, the class schedule doesn’t line up with me. I didn’t show up and I got charged an extra fee. I had an emergency. The other one is, asking him, did you go to the workout?

No, I was going to be late. So I didn’t go. And it’s like, Why wouldn’t you still go? Well, every time someone gets it, walks in late, the trainer, you know, kind of puts them on blast and embarrasses them a little bit and Fitness is a very personable thing and a very personal journey for a lot of people.

And it’s already intimidating. So with strive 11, we created, I was like, it’s weird that no, no model has really solved these core issues. And so that our biggest thing is where you are a bootcamp quote unquote style model. Cause once you’re in the gym, it feels like a bootcamp, but we have no class times.

I love hearing that stuff because like I started with my question there, I would have just kind of given up and said, well, this is already, there’s too much competition. It can’t be done. And then despite all of that, you have this totally fresh way of doing things that perhaps hasn’t been thought of before, and it’s totally different than say these other ones.

So yeah, it’s like, it’s just cool to hear that, how other minds work and remind ourselves that there are different ways of doing things. And, you know, that’s. Where you can find success. When you were podcasting, did you do anything specific to grow that you mentioned a referral system was great for your business. Did you have to do anything for the podcast or did you just put it out there and let people discover it?

In the beginning it was, not knowing a lot about it and only getting a few, a few listens and so forth, like we would tell it to our members and we would send out email blasts and text message blasts from our CRM to the gym. But to really start growing that it was, the networks that were a part of the masterminds that were a part of and stuff like getting the guests on from there and essentially asking, have to ask the guests in.

Even to get some bigger name guests, like you have to kind of follow along their journey and engage with them. We’ve had guests on that have had, not fake a couple hundred thousand followers, but real a hundred thousand plus followers. And they weren’t easy. Just, you know, send them a DM and they hop on.

It was, follow along, engage, engage, engage, engage, ask once, engage, engage, ask again, engage. And then all of a sudden they come on and they, that starts to help growth. But. I’ll give you a quick little story on one of the guests. I could have easily asked for a referral from one of my friends who knew him directly and had him on his podcast, but I didn’t want to go that route.

So what I did was. I waited and I kept watching his content and he put out this piece of content that it said the rule of 33, right? And his rule of 33 essentially was you should spend 33 percent of your time with people above your current level, 33 percent of your time with people at your level. And then 33 percent of your time with people below your level, right.

To really see success. So I’m, I DM’d him off of like off of his video and I was like, Hey, I was coming on the mindset cafe with, Definitely serve your 33 percent of hanging out with someone lower than your level. And then it was literally, I got a direct message within the hour. You got it.

Send me the link. And I was like, awesome. You know? And so networking was a huge part of that one and still currently is, but just asking, you know, Hey, do you know anyone else that would fit the model? 

So I was going to ask a bit more about your system for finding guests and you kind of just got into it because it can be frustrating now more than ever, people are just getting bombarded with pitches, especially higher level people like you’re talking about. And I even have this concern that for example, on Instagram, if you’re spending that time.

Interacting with them. I don’t always even know that it’s that person is seeing anything. I think it’s like their assistant or someone is, so I’m doing all this interaction and no one’s even seeing it, but you’re saying that you are getting results that way. It just takes time, persistence, not being annoying, but don’t just try once and give up and you can actually get the attention of these people.

I mean, it comes down to your quality of engagement is what I really think the biggest part is, right? If you’re just liking their photo, you’re one of what, a thousand? Like, and you know, so it’s like no one remembers that. I don’t remember everyone that liked my photo and I don’t even have anywhere near that, but it’s, it’s one of those things where the easiest way is subscribe to their, put the little push, the little notification bell.

So every time they post something and notifies you, and then you can go message them first. Right. And if you’re one of the first ones that messages them every single time, or not messaging, I don’t know. comments on their thing, right? They’re going to start to notice that, so you like it and you don’t just send a fire emoji as a comment, like comment on what they’re talking about or what they just posted, whether you agree, whether you disagree, you know, expand on it, like your thoughts on it.

And over time you’ll start to notice that those people do notice they’ll reach out, they’ll comment back, and then that’s when you send

that first, you know, request out.

Mm hmm. Yeah. I think that’s, it’s important to highlight that because it could, We can get caught up in this. Just how come I commented once and nothing worked. Or even if you try a couple of times, like it just takes time. There’s no real shortcut to this type of quality relationship building. You’ve just got to do it consistently over time.

And so that’s how you’ve gotten your podcast to the size that it is. And had, it sounds like quite a number of higher level guests on, and it just snowballs from there, right? Have you found that?

Yeah. I mean, it, it does. And once you can get a higher level guests on, usually you can get a referral to another high level guests. Right, and that’s the easiest way is asking them, the easiest way is if you know who the next guest is that you want that is connected to that person. You can ask them for a direct connection to that person versus, Hey, do you know anyone else?

Obviously they know other people. Right. But it’s like, Hey, I noticed that you’re friends with so and so I’ve seen them a lot in your content. Is there any way that you would be able to, send a connection so I could get them on the podcast as well? I think your message and their message are so powerful and I would love to, get both of

you guys out there on, on the platform to the audience.

That’s such great advice. And I think more and more important as we move forward and try to decipher what is real and fake and probably have our guards up against AI and everything. So yeah, asking for introductions, really good. So my final question I always like to ask, because we can have people like you on here who it seems like everything’s great.

You’ve been podcasting for a long time. You’re getting these big guests, your business is going great. But as we know, as entrepreneurs, there’s always something that’s a challenge or a priority at the very least. So

what is a current, uh, either a challenge or a priority of yours in your business?

So the priority first and foremost is the franchise for me, right? Other people are, um, Investing some like our franchise in Tampa, like they, they rolled their 401k into it. Right. And so like someone’s betting that much on themselves and on us, like, that’s my number one priority. to make sure that I’m doing everything I can to serve them and give them the tools that they need.

And the challenge is, as an entrepreneur, 10 different ways and trying to focus on and Kind of limit down what is the priority, what’s second, what’s third and do the tasks associated with each in that order, right? You know the podcasting for me is a huge networking thing in it I wouldn’t say it’s super low on the list it is actually one of the top ones on the list because I know that it’s the Long term play for a lot of the connections that I need for the franchise growth itself, which

again is my top priority

Mm hmm. Okay. So that’s interesting to hear that the, you feel that the podcast is absolutely a big, uh, kind of play a big role in that.

It definitely is in, I mean, you being a podcast host, like you definitely see a different side. And I saw this different side once I was a podcast host, but before you started hosting, you hear, you listen to podcasts and you’re like, man, that’s so cool. They have a podcast. It’s, it’s almost like someone being on a TV, you know, being interviewed on TV.

Right. And it’s this big, luxurious thing that you’re like, wow, that’s so cool. Look at them. And all of a sudden, when you start hosting, you’re like, wow, this is, it’s a lot. Lot more acquirable than a lot of people, you know, would think, but those introductions to people that don’t host and don’t have their own podcast, it’s the easiest way to get in that contact with that person because they want to talk about themselves.

I mean, that’s the most beautiful sound to someone is their name and to be able to hear themselves talk. Right? And so if you allow them to talk, now you’re allowing them to connect with you and essentially stick to you and create a part to your network a little bit.

And the easiest way is to let them just tell their story.

Absolutely. Yeah. And if you’re just starting out and you don’t have much of a network, just keep in mind that it will grow it. That’s just the whole point of it. Like you, you explained here how you’re able to get these bigger name guests. Now you’ve just got to start and it does actually happen. So I love hearing that you’re actually, you’re doing it, you know, like you, you believe that moving forward, it’s going to be an even bigger, uh, play an even bigger role in your business.

But even up until now, it’s been great. So thanks so much, Devin, that was really insightful. You gave us a couple of really good tips there. So, uh, we’ll, we’ll have your link for strive 11 fitness in the show notes. And of course to the mindset cafe as well, but I appreciate your time.

Thank you so much for having me. It was an honor.