ATHLEISURE MAG #83 NOV ISSUE | FORGING AHEAD WITH TRX Randy Hetrick + Jack Daly

We've been using TRX in our workouts for a little over a decade. We love how they allow us to do a number of workouts whether indoors or outdoors and you can pop them into your bag so that your fitness goals stay on track! This functional training system is an innovation in this space and we're excited to see where they go next. We caught up with Randy Hetrick, founder and creator of this fitness method as well as Owner/CEO Jack Daly who recently required the brand this summer. We wanted to find out how TRX was created, the background of both of the men as well as what their vision is for the future for the brand, its products and TRX Training Club.

ATHLEISURE MAG: Randy before we delve into the vision of TRX, can you tell us about your background and what led you to cre ating this fitness method?

RANDY HETRICK: Sure, I had a background in body weight training and then I spent a career as a Navy SEAL and I hatched this kookie idea to use my jiujitsu belt and webbing that we used for all kinds of stuff that tended to be the risers on a parachute and created this wacky harness that you could lean back and use your own bodyweight and use it against gravity to train across a whole variety of movements we needed to be strong for on the SEAL teams and today we call that functional in the training room that obliquely or direct ly translates to. By the time that I was out of the field, I thought that I would apply to business school at Stanford, I didn’t think that I would get in but to my ever lasting astonishment, they wanted a SEAL on the recruitment poster for that year. I got in and while I was there, I took the 2nd year of business school while I was there to use it as an incubator and to determine if it was a good decision to do this or not and I decided that I would launch this back in 2004. I started to get this together to what would eventually become TRX.

TRX started around its hero product the Suspension Trainer which is funny again in retrospect because that is a name that I coined to describe it. Suspension Training wasn’t a thing back in the 2000s, it be came a thing on the back on the TRX as we grew and then we broadened our stance over time and we became one of the leaders really of functional training in that movement of functional training. We had the benefit of being both good and hard working. But we also had tim ing. This movement was in its infancy to such a point that when I first heard it, I thought that I should go and get the URL. So I went on and registered it for 10 bucks and that tells you how early we were in the functional training move ment. We became one of the main players in what would help to popularize functional training. I also like to catego rize it in another way – small tools, big movements. This is different than traditional weight lifting, different than ma chines and here we are 18 years later.

AM: And before we talk about the TRX acquisition, Jack can you tell us about your background?

JACK DALY: I got to know TRX through a friendship with Randy. So it’s my friendship with Randy that brought me here. Products that I have spent 25 years on Wall Street as a partner at Goldman Sachs for many years and then I moved over to be a partner at TPG Capital. My expertise is to make control investments in large companies. I bought industrials and service companies and have done so and have take companies in public markets and making them private and pri vate companies and making them public later. I’ve been working with large scale companies over the years which led me obviously to the opportunity to acquire TRX, this was something that I had been doing for a very long time.

Now prior to that, I spent 6 years on faculty with Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland I was a mechanical engineer and I taught classes in product development, design and manufactur ing. The important parts about my back ground are probably less Wall Street and more product development side and I’m also a fitness nut. I’ve been a fitness nut for a very long time. So I think that it is more of my enthusiasm and fitness, my prod uct development experience through my engineering days and my friendship with Randy far outweighs the 25 years that I spent as a partner at Goldman Sachs and TPG buying large companies. But what that did though is that it gave me the abil ity to be able to team up with Randy and then acquire TRX which I have done. We talked about this a little bit before, this is an acquisition that I made with just my wife and I, it’s our family business and it’s a partnership with Randy. So I am not in vesting someone else’s money. I’m invest ing my money into the company through this acquisition and I’m very excited about it.

AM: That’s fantastic and we have been a long time fan of the products and we have used them. What is that process like in terms of bringing new products to the brand and continuing to make sure that they are still portable and you can stow them in your bag when you’re traveling and use them wherever you are?

RH: What’s exciting about this is that I can’t tell you how excited I am to be in business with Jack. Jack’s reputation as a supporter to the SEAL community, I have known for a long time and fortunately, I have been able to get to know him much more closely prior to us having this opportunity. Everybody knows the story that this thing got driven into the ground by some guys that didn’t know what they were doing and what’s exciting about it is that by having Jack, and being at the point in his career and thank goodness – he decided to step back from being the deals man and to start focusing on other kinds of quality of life types of pursuits - when this opportunity came up it happened at the right time.

I can tell you about how we brought on products previously, but how cool is it to have someone now that is on that same path of wanting to create and to be able to provide solutions to problems and especially in the fitness realm. To be able to do that in a way that helps people so that they can have healthier and better lives as well as to perform better in sports. It’s also about keeping my for mer colleagues fit on the battlefield as well.

The idea that we start with at TRX is that we want to innovate and we want to look for problems that people have and then to see if there is an elegant solution. And by elegant, I mean some thing that is not too complex and not too expensive. Some of the hallmarks of our brand has been about our ability and our aspiration. We want to be able to make the same kind of products and benefits that the pros, the best on Earth whether in athletic or tactical fields can use as well as regular folks that they can afford to use the same ones as the pros. This way, they can take them home and benefit from them in their own life. We engaged with them in the gyms that we built in the first 12 years of the company in partnership with gyms, trainers and coaches. So, we like to take input from the field and a lot of our ideas come from our coaches that are training a variety of different people from physical therapists out to strength and conditioning coaches. They have ideas. We hear a lot of ideas from what our gym partners need and what regular folks need!

I don’t know if you have been able to use our Bandit.

AM: Yes we love them and use them!

RH: People love them and this is an ex ample of something that we have that is not very complex. It’s the antithesis of complex. Just a handle that pops over any resistance band! But by creating that, it encourages people who didn’t like bands to use it because they didn’t like the experience of using it on their hands. I just have a knack for sitting down and thinking about things that I am super excited about. So now, to sit down with Jack who can bring that knowledge as a product designer in his early years and he was very successful, and then being successful as a board member at best practices companies is a benefit as well. But I think that as we go forward, that’s how I would look at new product development. Always looking at innovation and always addressing a need. Try to address a real need as opposed to coming up with something just because you can. Then you want to make sure that you are making things that you can sell through to the consumer that gyms and training facilities would also want as well. That’s my take on it.

JD: What’s great about this is that you can only imagine how excited I am to be able to team up with an iconic man! I’m going to embarrass Randy just a little bit. He’s an iconic and legendary inventor of fitness products having pioneered and being one of the largest pioneers of functional training in this industry through his creativity and genius to be able to make these things happen. So through the power of Randy being able to come through with these beautiful products – on the creative side, you just can’t teach this. I knew that in teaching undergraduate and graduate engineering courses on product develop ment.

There is an innate ability to be able to see things that other people can’t see and to be able to bring them to life. Randy has that more than anybody else out there. So, you have this creative genius and he’s able to build a company based on that.

Now I can come out at it from a disciplined company builder perspective plus understanding the product development process and what goes on in doing that. From an organizational capability we have that nuclear power engine of the creative genius of Randy being able to really spark in th at ecosystem and to come up with all those ideas, but someone has to see all of those ideas and then take them in, nurture them and develop them. Then we can come at it with a process overlay with an investment perspective on what makes sense, how to do it, how to get all the people around the table, how to action those ideas, how to bring them to prototype, how to test those proto types and then how to introduce them into market. There is so much that goes on in all of that, but I think that that is where we are very complimentary with skills. As I think about the new products going forward, we’re very well posi tioned to doing that.

AM: How does TRX Training Club fit into the TRX universe?

JD: From my perspective, I have to tell you that I am very very excited about the TRX Training Club. As we came in and looked at the business, there are many things that are great about the compa ny. One of them is the potential of the TRX Training Club. I think that they have made a very good start and we have a very good product of over 30,000 subscribers. What we can do with the right amount of focus, time and attention is that we can take that product and really improve it and then grow it pretty rap idly in many different ways. When you think about how you do that, we can take what we are doing now and we can bring in what Randy has built infor this company, the authentic TRX experience. It’s really about expertise in this kind of training. So the foundation that we are building for this TRX Training Club is that authentic expertise and TRX style training in functional training.

You start off with back to basics, back to core, what are we really good at and then there is the fitness and entertainment side of it. It has to be entertaining to be effective because you want to be able to motivate people over and over again. But the foundation has to be that authentic real experience and then we will make it entertaining because you do want people coming back over and over again. Now, we marry that with the organizational capability of Quincy Carroll for example who is our CTO. He has been involved in building some of the largest subscriber-based businesses in the world. He happened to go to Stanford Business School with Randy 20 years ago so they’re friends and he wanted to come in and join our mission to do this. So we’re thrilled to be able to attract a technology leader like a Quincy to come in to bring the tech to match up with Randy and Fraser in the company as well as other senior leaders in the company. To have that depth of expertise and to have taught people for 20 years in functional training – match that with our ecosystem of 100s of thousands of trainers worldwide. To be able to get feedback and to be able to bring that to the TRX Training Club and that’s a great service to be able to provide to that customer. If we can marry the expertise that we have with the technology platform that we are building and layer that into our ecosystem and get that excitement from our ecosystem around it – this will go out to the consumers – that’s a huge opportunity for us. We’re spending a lot of time, energy, effort and investing. Now, with a product like that, you’ll see that we won’t be making a lot of changes right away, but you will see changes over the coming quarters where that would improve and I would guess that you would see our subscription numbers grow pretty quickly as we do that.

RH: The only thing that I would add is that the company was built on this premise of what we call the Triple Threat for a long time. It was innovative and ported by 2 pil lars – 1 is wrapping it in great content for the end user and that allows us to entertain and to deliver great results that are relevant to the end user. The other pillar is by partnering with trainers, physical therapists and coaches. By giving them a level of comfort and depth of knowledge, with our tools, it makes them go deliver results to their patients, clients and athletes. So that idea has been there since the very beginning of the company. What has not always been there was the tech right? We were up online over a decade live, but digital has risen and you know you have to be a little more deliberate and modest about your expectations because people have begun to convert over to digital. So what I’m super excited about is that once we have this app and it almost feels like underperforming by calling it that because it’s such a broader platform than that. But at the end of the day, it’s an app and we’ll be able to reach around the world for that consumer and to deliver all of this incredible content, education, support for entertainment to our customers of all levels. We’ll be able to do it in a way that is efficient and affordable. I never had that ability before. This is something that is being called the TRX 2.0, I’m just Jacked about it, no pun intended, because we can take this thing and make it so much bigger than what it ever was before.

AM: What are your roles and responsibilities that you guys have?

RH: While I was away from TRX, as you may or may not know, I have a company called OutFit that I’m the CEO of. As we started talking about this from the be ginning, we knew that I couldn’t be the CEO.

I’m an entrepreneur and I love building things. Even towards the end when I was selling control, TRX was getting to be of a size that I am really passionate about creating. So I think that what was ideal was that I was able to say Jack, we’re going to have to be able to find a CEO for this. Initially, his response was we’ll go hire the best CEO we can find and will bring it in. Then as I worked with Jack a little bit, I got to understand him and the way in which he works and frankly the talent that he can bring into something, I started pestering him and I said that I didn't think that we should hire an outside CEO, I think you should do it. His initial response was that he wasn’t doing that. I told him that if he wanted to be a really great control owner, to do that, you have to at least take a couple of years and run it. This way, you’re not some smart-ass running things from the cheap seats and asking why the spreadsheet doesn’t match to the reality of how things are. He said that that wasn’t what he does but eventually myself and Jack reached out to one of our board members who he can tell you about. Jack told him that I was pushing this crazy idea and he wanted to know what he thought. Turns out, he joined me in ganging up on Jack to become the CEO for however long he chooses to do so and I have to tell you that as a guy that would tell you that that is not what he does, but I’m learning things every day about best practices about running businesses that I didn’t know. I’m really pleased! I don’t know whether I’m Executive Chairman, but I’m way more than a guy that’s sitting out there and coming to a boardroom. But I am someone who goes to Jack and that is my perspective and that is the true story.

JD: That is the true story, Randy put me in the position. I certainly agree and sup port those statements. When I decided to acquire the company, I wasn’t thinking of running the company. That’s clear, but Randy and I are very much so part ners in running this business. Now, he is right. As we were getting closer to think ing about who would be the best per son in the world to run the company, he came to me and said that I should do it. He told me that I have an intensity issue and that I would probably kill anyone else in that seat and I probably do have that. Then a board member, Mark Fields who was the CEO for Ford for many years and has also been the CEO of Hertz and runs major companies around the world, has been a very close friend Mark also came in and I let Randy know that I would talk to Mark about it. Mark, Randy and I all agreed that I would come in as the CEO and that any one of the 3 of us can fire me at any moment if I'm not performing or if we find someone better out there. That was the deal that we had going in. Having now been in this seat going in on the 3rd month, I’m having a blast! It really is the perfect position for me coming from my perspective. I was in the warehouse run ning a forklift on Sat. I was doing an in ventory count with the team and I spent time in the UK with our sales team for our

European arms. I’m getting to know everybody in the company much deeper than I would have otherwise and I’m having a blast. I’ve been on the phone with our certified trainers worldwide and I’m really getting to know the ecosystem. We have a summit coming up in MA in early Dec that Randy and I will be part of. From my perspective, it has turned out to be a perfect position and I’m really excited about that. There’s an activation energy that comes even at this stage in my career from taking on a role like this.

So Randy is vision, direction, spiritu al leader of the industry and the com pany and actively involved in all of the major decisions that we’re making as a company and I’m building the team and making the trains run on time. We work together a lot. I talk with Randy multi ple times a day, we just do. Now we’re buddies so that makes it easy. Jill on the other hand probably wants me to talk to him a little bit less, but we’re having a great time doing this. We’re building this team and we’re all on this mission of what we want to do here about this company and I have to tell you that it’s fun and it’s exciting.

RH: The one other thing that I will add is that it’s such an asset. By structuring it this way, we’re able to move fast. Normally, if you think about how it would work, a CEO would be separate and you have these board members and there’s this whole series of delays and a lot in inefficiencies that goes on in that to have the CEO constantly putting everything together and taking as much time as possible. For us, we’re able to pull our team together quickly as we have a killer team with a couple of board members and we can very quickly make decisions which is kind of a position where we are coming into a business that was struggling and we’re turning it around very rapidly and you watch what you’re going to be able to see over the next 12-18 months that just couldn’t happen in a different structure at this kind of pace. So I have been really happy with something that I didn’t really anticipate, but it has worked out really great.

JD: The point that Randy is making is that with the team that has come together as it’s worth noting, if you think about it we have a combination of OGs and NGs in the company. We have OGs like Randy, Rick Cusick came in as our CRO. He exited the business in 2019/2020 and he has come back in with great perspective. Our senior management team is really extraordinary. I mentioned that Mark Fields is on our board, Frank McGuigan is on our board one of the most recognized senior leaders in the supply chain side worldwide right now. If you look at the management team, our CFO is Doug Greeff he was the CFO of Revlon for 8 years, he ran Global Leverage Finance for Citigroup an extraordinary finance executive who is just a friend who is on this mission with us. He said he was coming in and he would be our CFO. Quincy Carroll who I mentioned is the CTO, a friend of Randy’s who has known this business for a long time and is very close with Randy. Our VP and General Counsel, Alain Villeneuve was litigation attorney for TRX for 12 years. When we came together to acquire the company, he came to us and said that he wanted to be on the team. He wanted to be in house and to be on the mission. We’re about to announce the new head of Supply Chain. An 11 year Senior Executive at Nike who ran as a senior executive at Nike and was at Nautilus 6 years before that. He has great start up experience prior to that. World class talent is here and he will be one of the NGs.

I did not acquire this business to flip it, I want to build this over the next couple of decades to take something that is very special and to make it even better. We just have this great team around us that is making us able to do that. Those are just some of the names.

AM: That’s fantastic! Looking into next year, what is the vision of TRX as a brand, its projects and new products that may be coming out next year.

RH: I think that we have a bunch of cool innovative new products that are in the pipeline that I was part of before the dark days came and I went away. For tunately, that group couldn’t figure out how to get those things to market and it’s some really interesting new products that are new takes on training modalities like elastic resistance which is something that I am really really interested in! I think that it is something that has been under leveraged and there is a real opportunity of leverage there. Our prod ucts are pretty damn smart, but we’re interested in making them smarter and then I think that there is a way to do things the way that we have been doing them better, faster, more efficiently and more profitably. TRX will never do some crappy commodity product because we could, we want to speak to premium, quality and to have items that speak to deliberate and smart approaches. If we can’t do that and wrap it in amazing content, then we shouldn’t do it.

JD: We’re completely on the same page. From our perspective, now that we are 2 months into the acquisition and hav ing retooled senior management team, we’re really focused on getting back to basics as a first step which won’t be as exciting to you, but it’s really important to us right? Getting back to basics and understanding what we do now, what we do well, how we do everything well in a first class way and improving the foun dation. Obviously, the business has been up and running for a long time now. So focusing on those basics, making supply chain a competitive advantage rather then focusing on just getting product out the door – but it’s not optimized.

Those are the things that we’re doing. On the new product side, Randy has a bag of magic tricks and the ecosystem does as well. So as we get through this period of focusing on what we do to day to make it a competitive advantage, we’re going to look at the products that we have now and the improvement of products that we have now. Things like expanding the functional training product line is a natural thing to do, working on the services from the TRX Training Club side to work with the products is critical ly important and then it’s about looping back to a connected system. Everyone is looking for more feedback and more in formation that’s customers and profes sional partners. They want to have that connected experience and bio feedback. We have lots of places that we can grow through new services and new products where we get that complete system where you’re not only working out, it’s being tracked, you’re getting feedback in real time, you’re comparing yourself day over day and month over month and year over year. So it’s like anything else, when you’re getting ready to compete in a sport, get your body in excellent shape, get your cardio up, your strength up, your agility and then you go into the ring ready to do battle. What we’re doing now is we’re getting our cardio up, our strength up and our agility up and then we’re going to pick our spots to see what rings we’re going into and where we’re going to do battle and we’re going to do that in a very deliberate way. We have the expectation that it’s coming and be a little patient while we work on our core health and then watch us as we start coming up with these new tools, equipment and capabilities to our customers and then while we also at the same time activate our ecosystem. There are people all around the world that are excited about the brand!

If you have not tried out TRX Training Club, Jack and Randy are giving our readers 90 days free to try it out for yourself!

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You will have Unlimited access to 500+ On Demand workouts, New On Demand workouts added weekly, Unlimited access to daily LIVE classes and Unlimited access to daily REPLAY classes.

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