Jun
27

#103: From Janitor To Tech Leader: Wodify Founder and CEO Ameet Shah (Sandlot & GORUCK Games 2023 Series)


Tuesday June 27, 2023

The most successful businesses solve a need. The most successful entrepreneurs identify opportunities and display the courage to take action; even if just to prove they just might succeed. Ameet Shah started his professional career as a janitor at Mars Chocolate. Today, he is the Founder and CEO of Wodify; the fitness industry’s leading customer retention platform. 

In this opening conversation from Sandlot Jax & GORUCK Games 2023, Ameet climbed into the 1944 Dodge WC-51 for a conversation with Fran Racioppi on his vision to empower CrossFit athletes to better track their workouts while providing CrossFit box owners the ability to manage and organize their processes and clients. 

Ameet explains the mental hurdles tech visionaries must overcome to develop a product that requires mass adoption and Fran challenges him to explain why bootstrapping the company has been a top priority and a key ingredient to profitability.  Through its multiple services from customer retention to tracking to event planning, Wodify is breaking the mold in fitness software, showing everyone there is no such thing as “gymtimidation” and is now making its mark in Jiu-Jitsu. 

Learn more about Wodify on the web or at the 5000+ gyms that trust Wodify to run their business.  

Read the full episode transcription here and learn more on The Jedburgh Podcast Website. Subscribe to us and follow @jedburghpodcast on all social media. Watch the full video version on YouTube.

Listen to the podcast here


 

From Janitor To Tech Leader: Wodify Founder and CEO Ameet Shah (Sandlot & GORUCK Games 2023 Series)

Ameet, welcome to The Jedburgh Podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

The first interview at Sandlot JAX 2023. Appreciate you coming down from Philadelphia to do so, but amazing venue.TJP - E103 Ameet Shah Founder & CEO of Wodify

I’m impressed. First time here. It’s quite impressive.

I told you, you were the first interview so we had to work out all the kings here in the WC-51 trailer at eighteen hours straight down from Connecticut to here, but they are getting everything settled. It’s awesome that you made the trip down.

Thank you so much for having me. I am humbled to be here. I was tuning in to a number of your shows on my flight here and the impressive folks you are interviewing. You got Olympic athletes, you got my friend Jason Khalipa here. It’s impressive.

He was awesome. He was one of the early ones where we went to go see him because I was talking to him and I said, “Do we do it remotely or in person?” He’s like, “No, let’s do it in person.” If you watch the video version of that and any of our promos, he smoked me after. We did this workout. It was six minutes. I was messed up all day.

He’s an Energizer Bunny. He’s amazing. Full of energy. I love him.

I want to talk about a lot of different things with you, but Wodify you are the CEO and the Founder of it now. It was in Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies a couple of years ago. It’s solving so many different complex challenges in the relationship between gym owners and how they run their business, but then also the clients and the gym goers.

I want to get into all that. It’s also 100% bootstrapped and profitable, as we look at all the different entrepreneurs that we bring on the show. We break down their business models when we talk about what drives them. I’m going to ask you about that. Before we get there, you started as a janitor at Mars. You got to start at the beginning and explain to me how you go from being a janitor at Mars to where you are now.

I grew up in a small little farm town in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.

That’s near the Mars headquarter.

It is. I think their headquarters is in Hackettstown, but there’s a very big facility there. I grew up with two Indian parents from India, first generation. Work ethic and education were pillars that were instilled in me. Not ashamed to admit it, my mother got me my first job at M&M Mars. She said, “I have got this great opportunity for you.” The first thing I asked was, “How much does it pay?” She told me the answer and was three times what I can make elsewhere. I said, “I’m in.”

She goes, “There’s one little catch and you will be working in environmental services.” I’m like, “That sounds cool. I like the environment.” She’s like, “Just so you know, you will be cleaning toilets.” My mom had a way about her of getting convincing me. She was pretty subtle about it. She’s like, “I’m sorry. I thought you might be interested in getting a foot in the door, working in a world-class manufacturer, and learning something about manufacturing.”

TJP - E103 Ameet Shah Founder & CEO of Wodify

“I was, believe it or not, a competitive janitor. I would say ‘my toilets are cleaner than yours….and people noticed.”

“If you don’t want it, that’s fine too.”

She guilted me into it and I did it. I was a janitor through high school and college. It was a great gig. One of the benefits of working at Mars, if you had a son or a daughter that was going to college and had a GPA above 3.2, then they were guaranteed employment during the summer and Christmas breaks. As a poor college student, it was valuable. Everything my mother described happened. I took pride in my work. I was a competitive janitor. I would say that my toys were cleaner than yours, and people noticed. I got opportunities to work with industrial and mechanical engineers on the weekends. I learned so much about process manufacturing at a very young age.

Those opportunities are important. One of the reasons why I wanted you to tell that story is because so many people, when we see it all the time get out of school or they go to school and they are like, “I’m going to be a manager now. I got to be the boss.” In my first job, I worked at a pharmacy. I was a cashier at the pharmacy. I think about the lessons I learned as a cashier in a pharmacy all the time. For my second job, I worked at tables at California Pizza Kitchen all through college.

If you think about jobs like that, being a janitor, and working in the restaurant industry, you learn about people. You learn about hard work and you see that the tangible result is all because of yourself and you have to look at that quality when you walk away. At an early age, it becomes ingrained in you that I care about what I’m doing and I care about this quality. That becomes so instrumental later on.

For the rest of your career, you never lose it. You don’t shake that. I was lucky to have my mother as a coach. She taught me that you can learn something from anyone and anywhere in any situation, and I took that to heart.

[bctt tweet=”You can learn something from anyone anywhere in any situation.” username=”talentwargroup”]

After the janitor, you finished school and then you come into this world of software. We joking about technology before we started, but software and technology have changed the game. We were talking about video editing before we started, and I was telling you about the VHS tapes and having to splice the B-roll. Now it’s all done digitally digital, but it’s advanced so much when we think about fitness.

Fitness in my mind in many ways has advanced tremendously over the last several years with the rise of technology. In some ways, at the end of the day, you think about fitness and what are you doing. You got to move your body in a meaningful way that stresses it but technology has done so much for the industry. Why get into software technology? You spent some time as a consultant for ERPs, and I want you to define an ERP, CRM, and CRP, but why get into that?

That wasn’t my original path. My mother put me to bed every night and said, “Grow up to be a doctor, engineer, or lawyer. Go work for a big company. They are going to pay for your MBA and save money in your 401(k) and your life is complete.” I went down that path. I went and got a Degree in Engineering Science from Penn State. I went to go work for General Motors, and just as she predicted they paid for my MBA. I started my MBA at the University of Rochester. About two years into my career, I just felt and say, “It just didn’t feel like me. It didn’t feel like a good fit.” I didn’t feel like I was growing and learning at the pace I wanted, so I just quit everything. I moved to South Florida with no plan.

Where in South Florida?

Boca Raton I had some friends there and I thought, “At least I will be at the beach and poor and I will enjoy some warm weather.” As luck would happen, a friend of mine worked for a manufacturing company and they were implementing an ERP product. If you are not familiar with ERP, you might be familiar with terms like SAP, Oracle, and JD Edwards. This is pre-Y2K when everyone was afraid of the Y2K bug and they are upgrading their business system. I got into that consulting world and frankly just fell in love with it because I’m a nerd at heart, so I got to play with computers. I happened to have all this manufacturing distribution background at a young early age, and I was able to combine the two.TJP - 103 Wodify CEO Ameet Shah

What probably got me excited was I was always interested in business. Having the opportunity to go to different businesses and see how they worked, learn from them, and learn about different departments of a company. We have talked about learning our debits and credits. You went to NYU, I learned it on the job through consulting. It was a great 10 to 15-year run in consulting. I loved it. The thing that probably got a little bit tiresome was the travel. The clients were always somewhere where I was not.

Building these platforms isn’t an easy task. I wanted to talk about your decision and the opportunity that you saw in Wodify, but it takes a tremendous amount of effort. A tremendous amount of resources and vision and the fact that you have to think about so many different things and how people are going to interact with it. What was the opportunity that you saw in the fitness industry that put Wodify in your mind and said, “This is something that I want to explore?”

I had a consulting business on my own called Conigent and we were quite successful. I didn’t have an opportunity to be creative and innovative. Over the years that I have had ideas and I was come up with an excuse, I’m like, “I’m not smart enough. I’m not pretty enough. It’s not the right time.” I wouldn’t build them and then I’d see someone else build them and I finally got fed up with my excuses.

That’s what they are. I mean, they are excuses. I’m talking about having a bias for action all the time. There’s this concept of limiting beliefs and those are those limiting beliefs that we put in our head, and we wake up every day and we are like, “I’m going to do fourteen things.” At the end of the day, you are like, “I did one. Why didn’t I do the fourteen?” That’s all the reasons that you say.

When we talk about success and elite performance, how do we train ourselves to have the discipline to say, “No, stop. If I take that one step, maybe it doesn’t change the world today or tomorrow, but will it change my life? If it changes my life today and tomorrow and I do it consistently over time, do I then have ten years later a product?”

You nailed it. You answered the question. What I was trying to do is I just wanted to see, “Could I build something that people like?” I got into CrossFit. They said, “If you want to improve your performance, you got to track your performance.” Which I subscribed to in my twenties. I did the 3X10 bench press and lifted and did it like a bodybuilder. I kept a journal and it was just pen and paper.

Just to try. It’s a three-day rotation.

Friday night is always chest and arms. I kept a journal. I’d subscribed to that methodology. What I found in CrossFit is the workouts are verbose, sometimes you never do them again. At the end of a workout, if you are pushing, I can’t even add 2 plus 2, let alone write a whole dissertation and track my performance. I adopted that for about two days. I thought, “I think I can solve this.”

I noticed that gym owners were accustomed to putting the workouts digitally into a WordPress site. I thought, “If I can get them to put it into an application, I will push it to a WordPress site, then I can push it to a kiosk and then I can give a kiosk and a mobile app to athletes so they can track the performance and see a daily leaderboard.”

I literally had no business model in mind. I just wanted to see for personal satisfaction if could I do it. I picked a platform, found an engineer, bought a platform, and we did a week of training, and three weeks later we built our kiosk environment. Two weeks after that we built the mobile environment. I will never forget the satisfaction I had when we launched at CrossFit Aspire in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. This gentleman, a friend of mine walked up to the kiosk and said, “You can enter your back squad here.”

TJP - E103 Ameet Shah Founder & CEO of Wodify

“I literally had no business model in mind, I just wanted to see for personal satisfaction could I do it.”

The owner of the gym had entered manually all the past performances from these pieces of paper. He saw this little gold badge and he is like, “What’s that?” I said, “Hover over it.” He saw that it had a 20-pound PR and his eyes just lit off and I thought, “This was all worth it.” That was a cool experience. We took it a step further obviously and decided, “I think we have something here.” We decided to invest in a brand and build it, productizing it, and then showcasing it for the first time at Boston Regionals in May of 2012.

Can we talk about the different products in the different features that you actually have? You started with, which is now called Perform. Now it’s transitioned as you have built it over the last couple of years into the core. Can you talk to me now about core?

I suppose our customers bullied us into it. We had a performance tracking app and our customers were paying two bills. Oftentimes in those days, they are paying Mindbody or Zen Planner for their member management, their gym management software. They are paying us for performance tracking, and they had to manually enter athletes and classes in both. Our customers were like, “You either need to integrate with these platforms or if you want to do it right, build an all-in-one because that’s what we need. We just want one piece of software.”

We thought about it and honestly, if I knew how hard it was, I probably wouldn’t have done it. Out of ignorance, we did it. We focused on those core features that made up a member management system and class scheduling reservations, wait lists, charging credit cards, and managing memberships. We saw exponential growth because we had built something specific to CrossFit.

What were the biggest challenges? You joked that if you knew how hard it was, you would have stopped. I asked you this question because I worked at a company a couple of years ago where we attempted to build our own internal CRM. It was very similar to what you are talking about at Wodify where you have a traditional ERP, you have a CRM, and you brought up the terms CRP as well. To do these things is incredibly challenging. Not only from an engineering and a software development execution standpoint but also the vision.

Having to think about all the different things that it can do and it can’t do. What are the requirements that are going to come out of the users, and whether that user for you is the gym owner or it’s the client, how do you have the forethought to be able to think about all the different directions that they go down? For those who are out there who wake up in the morning and they think to themselves, “I have software that I think I can build.” Can you talk for a few minutes about the development of that vision and then how that vision keeps you ahead of the industry, but then how do you translate that into execution with an actual engineer who’s got to sit there and code this thing?

Let’s see if you can unpack that. I would tell you that a lot of my lessons around building software came from that consulting phase of my career. One of the things I saw, sadly, with companies spending tens of millions of dollars on ERP products that didn’t get adopted. One of the things I found very quickly was if you want to get adoption, the solution has to be simple. You can iterate on it making it more complex over time. When you are transforming a company to a digital environment from paper or no computers at all, like in a CrossFit gym typically, you got to take baby steps.TJP - E103 Ameet Shah Founder & CEO of Wodify

The other thing I found is that you have to get in the trenches and know the user. When I was consulting, I came from a manufacturing distribution background. I used to work on the production lines. Anytime I went into a new client, I learned what they did. What I found was getting shoulder-to-shoulder and immersing yourself in the industry is important and then making a simple solution. In the early days of Wodify, I was on the road, we had a mobile trailer and a mobile kiosk.

Our early adopters, we showed up on-site for a week, with our tools and we went to Best Buy and bought TVs. We mounted them and we made sure the owners, the coaches, and the athletes knew how to use the system. The other thing we were doing was learning and iterating on how to make the product easier to use, and more consumable. It’s in a laboratory and we are like, “This is what it will do.” Then you go to put it in the field and that’s where I think you learn the most.

I think one of the big keys is immersing yourself. The other challenge I had or we had at Wodify is strategically and purposefully, we were bootstrapped so we didn’t raise any money. You have got limited resources and a limited number of engineers. In those early days, I quite literally worked 7 days a week and slept 3.5 hours. Now we get up at 4:00 in the morning and go straight to coding until I went to the office at 9:00, come back, put the kids to bed, and then go code again until 12:00 to 1:00 in the morning.

Talk about the funding because it is important and we have had a number of conversations on episodes with founders who have had to solve this in different ways and whether that was seeking investment. We had an episode with Liza Huber who started coming called Sage Spoonfuls, which is a make-your-own baby food. She talks about having to go to a factor. Somebody who was going to lend that money on their receivables. There are all these innovative ways and then there are people who just say, “I’m just going to grind it out and cashflow this thing.” Can you define what was bootstrapping and what did that look like as you have grown the business?

In order to start and grow Wodify I had to start another business first and that was my consulting business. That literally started, I remember out of my basement. My first employee, we tried to work out of my basement like this isn’t going to work. We had to go invest in an office. That generating enough cashflow frankly for me to go start Wodify. Now I have had many opportunities to raise dollars and I suppose I don’t for a couple of reasons. One thing I know about myself is I have to be in charge. I have to be in full control. Sometimes I can get a little impatient trying to explain why. Sometimes I know it’s the right thing but I have a hard time articulating it, and so that can be frustrating for an investor.

TJP - E103 Ameet Shah Founder & CEO of Wodify

“I wanted full control on being able to do what I thought was right.”

The other thing is I wanted full control of being able to do what I thought was right and be able to operate with full integrity. There are things that we do in our organization that are unlike others in our space and then we are leaving money on the table but I don’t care because I feel like it’s the right thing to do. I will just give you a quick example. In our space, if you leave from one platform to another, you want to take your credit cards with you. Most companies charge anywhere from $200 to $1,000 to do that. It will take anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks to do that.

If you are a customer of ours and you decide that Wodify is not good for you, we don’t charge you anything and we will honor that request within 24 hours. We feel like potentially we got you into a software app and we didn’t support you the way we should, so some of that onus falls upon us, so we don’t want to penalize you for leaving. If I had an investor, would they agree with me because I’m leaving money on the table? Not having a partner and someone allows me to operate with integrity. It’s important to me.

[bctt tweet=”It’s important to operate with integrity.” username=”talentwargroup”]

You asked me about Jersey Mike’s Founder Peter Cancro, and I asked him the same question when I interviewed him on another episode because he has had numerous opportunities throughout the lifespan of 50 years of building Jersey Mike’s. From a one-location sub shop that he bought at seventeen years old with his high school football coach’s money. Every time he’s turned down investments from everybody. They are a $3 billion company.

All due to exactly what you are saying, his desire to say, “This is my vision, this is my company.” There were two times within their life cycle when they were near bankruptcy. He thought, “Now is the day that I have to lay everybody off.” They weathered those storms and now they are one of the most charitable organizations on the planet. What you are doing is commendable.TJP - E103 Ameet Shah Founder & CEO of Wodify

It’s important when we talk about elite performance, we talk about mindset and leadership. Understanding what you know about yourself as the CEO, as the leader, and what you need internally to wake up every day and feel effective in your organization, I think is a great starting point and something that’s a foundation that I would believe trickles down through your entire organization.

I’m fortunate enough. Honestly, I just want to be surrounded by good humans and everybody in my company is just an amazing human. It’s innately become a requirement to work a lot. You just have to be a good human.

There are some other products like Rise, Arena, or Live where you are enabling your clients to do things like host events, host competitions, and host challenges. Can you talk about those for a second? What was the birth of those products and how have they enhanced the overall suite of the product?

Originally our vision was, “Let’s offer these products to even non-Wodify customers.” We built them as separate endeavors, products, and apps. Lesson learned. What we didn’t realize is it’s providing people with App Fatigue. They are like, “Which one of these five apps do I download?” One of the things we are doing is consolidating that experience into one app. We are already done it with our coach’s instructors having the same app and they put it into coach mode and they have got different sets of functionality and features. We are doing the same with those products.

Arena, you are running events. Live is just another way if you are doing a seminar and you want to charge a ticket price. Now what we are doing, we have got the first implementation of Rise for running those community events and tracking progress in, for example, nutrition challenges, and activity challenges. End of this year 2023, we are going to invest and double down on that product because I think our first iteration was good, not great, and we have got some great ideas to make it awesome.

There’s a saying in software and technology, “Fail fast.” How has the life cycle of the Wodify product over the last couple of years? How have you implemented that and how have you seen that be an effective mindset and strategy for you?

That is part of our strategy is to make a reasonable investment, feel good about it, and get user feedback as quickly and frankly as cheaply as possible. The sooner we can get it out there, the sooner we can get the feedback and find out that it’s a bad idea. The sooner we can stop and pivot. I would guess we got 10 ideas and probably 7 of them are good and 3 are bad ideas, and we know going into it that that’s going to be the case. We try and do research, some estimations around product fit, and then we try and get it out into the user’s hands as quickly as possible so we can learn from that feedback and shut something down or pivot quickly.

TJP - E103 Ameet Shah Founder & CEO of Wodify

“The sooner we can get it out there. The sooner we can get the feedback to find out that its a bad idea, the sooner we can stop and pivot.”

You have been focused over the lifespan of the company on traditional gyms. There’s been a big push into the Jiu-Jitsu gyms. Where did that come about and how come that has been a big push for the company?

Let me step back if you don’t mind and I will talk about where we fit in the market and how we position ourselves now. Traditionally people look at us and say, “You are a CRM.” This year we took some time to think about, “No, we are more than a CRM,” and how do we articulate that? We now describe ourselves as a customer retention platform. That’s made up of two components. Your traditional gym management software, this CRM functionality, which we continue to invest in. The second part of that solution is what we call retention intelligence. Retention intelligence comes in the form of data information analysis and features that connect the coaching instructor to the client.

We are investing in three different ways. We are continuing to invest in those CRM tools and we are building new ones and coming out with V2 of other ones. Something that’s coming out in the near future is workflow automation. We are going to be delivering packaged marketing automation solutions. Imagine being able to tag a client who is injured and automatically creating a task for a coach to follow up with them. Those that will be deployed in August, September 2023 timeframe. The second thing we are doing is investing in retention tools. Hat’s doubling down on the in-gym digital experience.

We have introduced a lot of innovation around video, and new hardware, so we have completely reimagined that in-gym digital experience. The other thing we are doing is giving coaches who I believe are your first line of defense or support in nurturing and maintaining those relationships. We are giving them the tools that allow them to provide a VIP experience and build a stronger relationship with the client.

[bctt tweet=”Wodify gives coaches the tools to provide a VIP experience and build a stronger relationship with the client.” username=”talentwargroup”]

This is to answer your question with Jiu-Jitsu, how are we funding all of that investment into the platform? That’s by going back to our roots and doing what we do best, which is getting laser-focused on a niche and nailing it. I fell in love with Jiu-Jitsu before CrossFit. I have that background and I know what it’s like and just how intimidating, and someone introduced me to a term maybe that’s gymtimidation. Have you heard that phrase?

I haven’t heard it, but I like it. I might have to use it.

It’s working like we are completely transforming the way traditional Jiu-Jitsu gyms run. If you look at Jiu-Jitsu, very intimidating, like you are walking into a bunch of black belts you have never wrestled, you don’t even know if their gis on forward or backward. You go in and you have no idea what the curriculum is, you don’t know what you are walking into. The other thing I have noticed in Jiu-Jitsu is the student-to-instructor ratio can be as high as 30 to 1. The instructor teaches you a movement, you pay attention, you ask questions, and you break up into fifteen pairs. As soon as you hit the mat, your mind goes blank. You forgot everything.

TJP - E103 Ameet Shah Founder & CEO of Wodify

“You can learn something from anyone, anywhere, in any situation.”

The third thing that a Jiu-Jitsu studio will tell you, just like they did in CrossFit is you should keep a journal. Write down what you are doing well and what you are not doing well so the next time you go do a rear naked choke, you know what to improve upon. The way we are solving that is by using performance to drive curriculum and video content.

The other thing we are doing is we have got now Jiu-Jitsu instructors who have been teaching for years with zero technology running classes with an iPad and showing looping videos in class. When you break and the instructor can’t go to all fifteen pairs, the students are looking up at a video to reinforce what they just learned. Finally, we will give the clients the ability to create notes in real-time and also attach videos of their performance. Like as an example, I thought I had a great rear kick and then I saw a video myself and I go, “No, you are not turning your hip over far enough.”

Video components are so important, and it’s awesome that you have identified that. I just had this conversation with my daughter playing lacrosse. I tell her, “You are on the field, but at times tend to be a spectator.” She didn’t laugh. She’s like, “No, I’m not. I’m there. I’m running back and forth. What are you talking about? That’s not true.” I said, “All right, no problem.” I videoed the game, and a couple of minutes put it up on the TV. I said, “Here you go. This is you. The play’s over there. There are the three people running by you, and then you are standing there.”

She doesn’t want to talk about it and she’s looking away because she’s thirteen. All of a sudden, “You are attacking me, you are the enemy.” I’m like, “No, I’m trying to help you.” The video component to increasing effectiveness and increasing your ability to focus on your training where you have concrete feedback that says that’s it. Like you talked about your kick. It’s so important.

This has got to be the most exciting time I have had at Wodify, it feels like the old days of Wodify when we were transforming the way CrossFit gyms work. Now we are doing it with Jiu-Jitsu. What makes us excited is in those days we started with zero customers, a blank piece of paper. Now we are starting with a launchpad, years of real-world experience in the fitness tech industry. It’s super exciting.

What’s next? You look forward, and we talked a little bit about this right here, but as the strategic vision for the company comes from you as the Founder and CEO, you look forward over the course of the next years. What’s that trajectory look like and what’s the focus?

We have got a three-year plan to double the size of our company in terms of revenues. Why that’s exciting for myself, our team, and our customers is again, we are beholden to no one. We are going to take that cash and reinfuse it into the company into the product. Our ultimate vision is to have the best customer retention platform in tech. I think we are well on our way.

TJP - E103 Ameet Shah Founder & CEO of Wodify

“Our ultimate vision is to have the best customer retention platform in well-tech.”

Hands down right there. We talk a lot about habits, talk about foundations. The Jedburghs in World War II, had to do three things every day to be successful. They had to be able to shoot, move, and communicate. If they did these three things with the utmost precision, then they could focus their attention and their effort on more challenging tasks that came their way on any given day. What are the three things that you do every day to be successful in your world?

The first thing I do is I wake up early, usually around 3:00 AM or 4:00 AM and the first thing I do is I’m super selfish with my time and so I invest in myself. Between the hours of 3:00 AM or 4:00 AM and 8:00 AM or 9:00 AM that is my time, and to do whatever I feel like I need, it usually comes in the form of exercise. Sometimes it’s an exercise in a coffee outside by myself watching the sunrise. It’s my time to think and plan for the day. I find that to be critical. The majority of my day is being responsible and accountable to work.

My colleagues, my friends, and my family as examples, and I’m not just saying this, but my mother is 81 years old and I’m an only child. My father passed last summer of 2022. I regret that I didn’t do this earlier, but now I make sure I call my mother every single day when I’m not with her in Philadelphia, and I talk to her. I’m going to be 50 in August 2023, that’s a pretty big milestone.TJP - E103 Ameet Shah Founder & CEO of Wodify

It’s a big milestone and I reflect and I look back. It sounds cliché, but they say it’s not about the destination, it’s the journey and I truly believe that. The third thing I do is I just remind myself just how lucky I am. I feel so blessed to have been taking this journey that started as a janitor and landed where we are having so much fun at Wodify.

Invest in yourself first, you get up at 3:00, usually between 4:00 and 4:30. Sometimes I get up at 5:00 if I can’t get up. You are in it at 3:00, call your mother. I like that one. I will have to tell my mom that. Remind yourself of how lucky you are. Your story’s incredible. I think that the product is amazing and the direction that you are going. How you have used your experience of the past, you have incorporated your time as a janitor, at the GM, and you thought about your time as a consultant to build this product. We talk about effective intelligence, the nine characteristics of elite performance that special operations use to recruit, assess, and develop talent. One of them is effective intelligence.

That’s when we take the experiences that we have had, the aggregate of those experiences. Our perspective is what shapes our mindset. Helps us to frame our decisions for now and for the next days can say that something comes from being on earth longer sometimes or from having these different experiences. That’s something that you are doing and that manifests itself in the success that Wodify has had up to this point and as you shape the vision for the future. I sincerely appreciate you coming down from Philadelphia to do this interview with me. Kick-off Sandlot JAX 2023.

I’m glad we could do this together. This is a fun time.

We are not done, so be careful what you asked for. We are working out. You are going to go change, you are going to come back. By the time you get back, I’m going to put something together because you talked all about getting up and working out and getting after it. It’s going to be a Jedburgh special here and we are going to incorporate those sandbags that I’m looking at on the ground.

Should I be nervous?Ameet Sha and Fran Racioppi workout

No, I should be nervous. Thanks.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

 

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