The Owner Seat

Most boutique studios are opened by people who love the method and learn the math later. A reformer Pilates room makes that expensive. The room has a hard ceiling: a fixed number of reformers, a 50-minute class, and only so many peak hours in a week. That makes utilization, pricing, and class-pack discounting the entire game, and most owners set all three by feel. Today's guest did it in the oppos...

Most owners in fitness and wellness think they have a lead problem. A lot of them have a follow-up problem, and that one costs more than any marketing budget ever will. Leads come in after hours, the front desk is teaching or checking people in, and the follow-up happens when someone gets to it, if it happens at all. Most owners cannot tell you their cost per lead, their lead-to-appointment rate,...

Ask any studio owner what revenue was last month and you get an answer in two seconds. Ask how many of the members who joined twelve months ago are still paying today and you get a blank stare. That is not a discipline problem. Nobody ever asked owners to track it, so nobody built the habit of looking. In franchise fitness the gap gets wider. Two locations of the same brand, three states apart, ru...

As of August 1, every UIL school in Texas is required to monitor Wet Bulb Globe Temperature before every outdoor practice, contest, workout, and marching band rehearsal. Rapid cooling zones. Full-body ice immersion equipment on site. Every athletic director in the state is spending compliance dollars right now, and most of the operators listening to this show serve exactly the population affected....

Every recovery and longevity franchise system has the same two numbers, and they almost never match: units open and territories awarded. The gap between them is where franchisors get paid, where franchisees get stuck, and where most of the honest conversations in this industry never happen. Founders who built a system from zero rarely talk about that gap while they're still inside it. The ones who...

Millions of people are going to come off GLP-1 drugs. Some for cost, some for side effects, some because they were never meant to be on them forever. When they come off, the weight tends to come back, and they are going to walk into your studio asking your front desk questions nobody trained your staff to answer. Meanwhile the shelf behind that desk is filling up with products making bigger and bi...

Most operators can describe the business they want to build. Very few can describe the first ninety days that make it real. Jim Donnelly has done it across five industries, sold companies out of three of them, and is doing the hardest version of it right now in longevity. This episode is about the execution, not the vision. Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Jim Donn...

Most operators in fitness and wellness can tell you what a lead costs. Almost none can tell you what a member costs to acquire. Those are different numbers, and the gap between them is where the money goes. This episode gives owners the questions to ask their marketing person, their agency, or themselves, and the targets to hold them to. Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down...

Get your tickets for the Healthspan Summit October 1st - 3rd in Los Angeles, CA PROMO LINK is live - https://www.accelevents.com/e/the-2026-healthspan-summit?discount=Stratego Code " Stratego " 10% off Your vendor says clinically proven. Ask what the phrase actually means and most of the time the answer falls apart in under two minutes. This episode gives fitness, wellness, and longevity operators...

Most wellness businesses are built by one person wearing every hat: clinician, operator, and finance brain, all in one exhausted founder. This episode is what it looks like when those hats get split on purpose. Three leaders, one business, and an honest look at how the recovery floor actually performs. Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with the leadership team behind The...

Most studio owners think their software is a scheduling tool. It is actually a margin decision. This episode breaks down what your platform should be telling you about retention, utilization, and pricing, and why most owners never see any of it. Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Laura Munkholm, President and Co-Founder of Walla and a boutique fitness operator with n...

Most wellness founders believe great work gets found on its own. It doesn't. This episode breaks down how reputation actually becomes a business asset: one that lowers acquisition cost, lifts pricing power, and opens doors that outlast any single media hit. Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Natalie Trice, a chartered PR professional with 30 years across global media...

Most operators dream about expansion. Landon French sold his own business to go execute one. This episode is the operator's playbook for turning a single reformer studio into a regional brand: the real estate underwriting, the unit economics, the presale strategy, and the green light that tells you it's time to sign the next lease. Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with...

Operators will spend six figures on a build-out and then neglect the one asset that actually runs the business: their people. And the most neglected person of all is usually the founder. This episode is a live coaching session on the leadership problems that quietly decide whether a fitness, wellness, or longevity company makes it. Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with...

The wellness category is moving fast, and most operators are being told to chase the next modality without anyone showing them how to make the math work. Ben Crosbie sees this business the way the people who listen to this show do: as a P&L, not a press release. This episode is for fitness, wellness, and longevity operators who want the honest unit economics behind IV therapy and the longevity...

Every operator in fitness and wellness is being told the same thing right now: add recovery, add longevity, add the next modality. Almost nobody tells them how to make the math work. Elena Kormilina lives at exactly that intersection, where a brand-new technology has to turn into a real business an operator can actually run. This episode is for fitness, wellness, and longevity operators weighing a...

Most founders fall in love with their product. The best ones fall in love with the experience their customer actually has, then build the business around it. Jonathan Singer spent 25 years doing exactly that for some of the biggest brands in the world, and now he's doing it for himself with The Red Light Wellness Company. This episode is for fitness, wellness, and longevity operators who have to m...

Most people who buy a business end up buying themselves a job. The studio works when they are in the room and stalls the minute they step out. Scott Capelin spent 20 years learning why that happens and how to build the opposite. This episode is for fitness, wellness, and longevity owners who want a studio that holds its margin and keeps running without them standing in the doorway. Today on The Ow...

Most operators think they're building a business. The best ones are building an asset. This episode is the difference between the two, told by someone who scaled to 40 locations and sold to private equity twice before she had fully separated which one she'd built. If you run a fitness, wellness, or longevity brand and you've never stopped to ask whether your company could survive without you, this...

This is a sneak peek into NEOPlex, what I believe is going to change the entire fitness, wellness and boutique studio business model. They are coming to the U.S., and I'll be helping them raise the capital. More to come Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life...

The same habits that build a fitness or wellness brand are usually the ones that cap it. The founder becomes the system, every decision routes through one person, and growth stalls right when it should compound. This episode is about how to scale a multi-location brand without becoming the bottleneck, with an advisor who has spent eight-plus years in closed-door rooms watching exactly where it bre...

Welcome back to The Owner Seat Podcast, where we explore what's coming next in the fitness and wellness industry. Today, we're joined by Nate Scott, CFO of Solidcore, to discuss growth, margins, and survival. He shares his insights from a robust career in corporate finance and cfo career development, offering valuable perspectives for any business.

Welcome back to The Owner Seat Podcast! This episode offers essential business tips for fitness and wellness operators. We discuss how to scale business effectively, emphasizing that true business growth and longevity come from smart recovery, not just constant pushing. Learn to grow your business with clarity, not chaos.

Welcome back to The Owner Seat Podcast, the show for operators, franchisors, franchisees, and founders in the fitness industry. We cover where fitness is actually going and how to build a sustainable business strategy. This episode is for anyone with an idea and the courage to build it, focusing on entrepreneurship from patents to partnerships and how to achieve business growth through a recurring...

In this episode of The Owner Seat, Albert Ramos sits down with Joe Meglio — Founder & CEO of GameChanger Fitness, Inc. 5000 honoree (2025), and former strength coach at Underground Strength Gym. Joe started GameChanger in 2013 in a 600 square foot baseball facility in New Jersey. Today the brand operates 16 locations across New Jersey and Maryland, with Wayne NJ in presale and two new studios...