Finding Your Summit

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Randy Hetrick: CEO of TRX talks about 14 years as a Navy Seal and the summits he has had to climb to develop a new wave of working out. May 10, 2019

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Randy Hetrick is the Founder and CEO of successful fitness company, TRX. He is a former U.S. Navy Seal who served for 14 years on both Seal Team 1 and the legendary Seal Team 6. Growing up, Randy was a competitive wrestler and rower, which he says are “grinder sports that no one gives a damn about”. Interestingly, statistics show that athletes with backgrounds in these two sports have the highest chance for completing BUD/S, which has an 85% drop rate. During one of his foreign deployments with the SEALS, Randy came up with a fitness contraption that would later turn into the TRX. Not only was Randy foreign deployed, but during this time he obtained a Masters in National Security Affairs & lobbied for the Special Ops Command in D.C. He then went on to obtain his MBA from Stanford Business School which led him to turn his fledgeling fitness product into a full-blown company that now does over $50M in annual revenue.
Summary:
On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, former Navy SEAL & successful fitness entrepreneur Randy Hetrick talks about his mostly classified military service and subsequent transition into the entrepreneur world. Randy shares the ups and downs of product development manufacturing, enjoying the trek as you reach new summits and pivoting your business when your primary plan doesn’t work out as expected. He takes us on the TRX life journey: inventing the TRX in the field as a SEAL, investing all of his savings to purchase his initial inventory, turning down a huge deal with Costco, raising private equity capital (which he calls the biggest mistake of his life) and now preparing to launch a subscription service for 300,000 trainers. He discusses the rise of “functional training” and the emphasis on “small tools, big movements”. Listen in as Randy discusses encountering and overcoming the “false summits” that we all face in life. Randy’s incredible story reminds all of us that big ideas do, in fact, come in small, unassuming packages and are usually born out of necessity!
What you will learn:
Randy talks about how he came up with the initial idea for the TRX training system while being foreign deployed for months without workout gear but still having the need to train. He was able to perform functional training by pulling himself up against gravity using a jiu-jitsu belt with a knot on the end thrown over a door. He later added an additional handle and began doing curls, rows, presses, flys, etc. TRX was born!
Randy shares about how his product was launched into a business at Stanford. He would hook up his straps to a squat rack and crush workouts at the Athletic Training Center. When the different head coaches began asking him to make TRX straps for each of their teams, he realized there was a broad market for the product. With this realization, he decided to launch the product into a full-blown business after graduating.
Randy gives his top advice for entrepreneurs: come from a rich family & never quit! He believes there is rarely a summit in life; instead, there are usually false summits. What comes after a false summit is a downhill slope. You have to go down into the abyss to get to the next summit.
Randy discusses “the biggest mistake of my life”: raising private equity money in 2012. Based on his experience, raising institutional capital is usually not a great idea. Looking back, He would've trimmed sales and grown at the pace the business could grow at. Once you take institutional capital, no growth is ever enough, and you are trapped with those investors. The only way to get them out is by raising more private equity which continues the cycle.
Links to Additional Resources:
Violets are Blue - Natural Skincare [Sponsor]
Laird Superfood - Code: Markp20 [Sponsor]
https://www.trxtraining.com/

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