Speaker 0 00:00:04 We all want a business like Netflix or Amazon prime businesses, where once a customer engages with them, it becomes automatic and a part of their lifestyle from then on. But how do you build that forever transaction? I'm Robbie Kellman Baxter, and I have been studying subscription and membership models for nearly 20 years in this podcast, my guests and I share the secrets and strategies of the membership economy. Join us for subscription stories, true tales from the trenches CrossFit CEO. Eric Rosa has an interesting background, which brings together two separate threads, an entrepreneurial streak, and a love for health, a successful tech executive who sold his company data logics to Oracle in 2014, for $1.2 billion and continued at Oracle for another five years. Eric has also been a life long fitness nut. His enthusiasm for the CrossFit lifestyle eventually led him to open a CrossFit gym CrossFit Sanitas in Boulder, Colorado, where he lives even as he continued his day job at data logics and then Oracle in mid 2020 about a year after retiring from Oracle, Eric bought CrossFit Inc from CrossFit, founder and former CEO, Greg Glassman.
Speaker 0 00:01:26 The sale was first announced on June 24th, 2020, just a few weeks after Glassman had resigned as CEO amidst a swirl of controversy. Eric took over as CEO at a critical time for a membership organization known for its cult-like following and devoted members. He brings tremendous experience and passion to CrossFit. I invited Eric to the show because I've been fascinated by CrossFit since my sister. And brother-in-law discovered it in 2010, I wrote about how CrossFit developed super users members, so committed and passionate that they spend their own money and time for the good of the brand. In my first book, the membership economy, when I heard that my business school, classmate and friend was taking over CrossFit after such a successful career in technology and during such a tumultuous time, I had a million questions today, Eric and I are going to talk about how to write a membership culture after a crisis, walking that fine line of rebuilding the organization while not losing what had made it great and bringing together a broad group of stakeholders around a new forever promise. Welcome to the
Speaker 1 00:02:40 Thanks for having me Robbie. So can you describe your journey to CrossFit? I know you first discovered CrossFit in 2008, but how did you come to be the owner of CrossFit writ large? I started doing CrossFit as it's called CrossFit in 2008. But if, if I look back, I probably was doing something that looked like CrossFit, and I could even tell you what the workout was. And so on, in about 1978 with buddies. And so I always, once I found cross and like, Oh my God, where has this been? My whole life. And it had so many elements of things that I've always been drawn towards, whether it was the high intensity, the variety, the community, and then, you know, not long after discovering it. I got this crazy idea into my head. In fact, before we opened CrossFits Anitas that if I could do anything with my life, for the rest of my life after Datalogics, it would be leading CrossFit someday.
Speaker 2 00:03:33 Wow. That's awesome. So my sister and brother-in-law are devoted members of their CrossFit Palo Alto box.
Speaker 1 00:03:41 I've been there long time ago. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:03:44 Yeah. It's such a huge part of their life. You know, they have really great friends there. It's a big part of their social life. And of course the CrossFit workouts have been core to everything they do, including when we go on vacation, what do you think it is about CrossFit that makes members so committed? Passionate?
Speaker 1 00:04:03 Well, I will answer that, but I'm going to ask you a question first. Robbie, have they ever tempted you to go in there with them?
Speaker 2 00:04:09 It felt very intense. The zeal with which they joined was intimidating to me. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:04:14 Yeah, yeah. That's good stuff. Yeah. It's important for me. And I appreciate you sharing that to learn about both what attracted people to CrossFit and what actually made them, kept them sort of trying it. We're launching. I'm really excited about it. We're launching at the end of this month, actually a at the end of January, our first kind of attempt to bridge that gap and reach people like you, who maybe were intrigued and saw some great results and passion with family members, but didn't feel it was like a safe place for you yet, or you weren't ready yet. And so this is we're launching as a great new product called the CrossFit on ramp that brings cross it into people's living room with no equipment needed to learn how to do it. We think going to the gym is the way to that's where you really get the power, but this lets you kind of get your legs under you and learn some skills and build the confidence and see whether this is something you might like to try.
Speaker 1 00:05:06 Anyway. We'll, we'll see if something like that, you know, brings you into the fold. I always found by the way, for every 10 people that I would try to get involved in cross set amongst my friends, maybe one of them would do it. I always found that right. It's you know, at our age and all that, right. It's too intense. It's too extreme. It's too. This it's too that, so my thought was, wow, if we can reach out outside of the box, outside the gym and get to one more of those 10 people, that's going to be another million plus people a year trying cross fit. And I think more than half of them will find, wow, this is pretty freaking cool. Now that I, so anyway, we'll see.
Speaker 2 00:05:43 It's really interesting because one of the things that I wrote about CrossFit and that fascinated me about CrossFit is that it didn't feel particularly welcoming to everybody. And in my work on membership, I think that for a lot of organizations, that's the sauce is to really know who you serve well and not make it easy for the wrong people to come in. So to say, you know, this is what we do. This is how we do it. If this seems like a good fit for you and a promise that makes sense and is valuable to you, come in and we know we can, you know, knock the ball out of the park. And if you're somebody different, if this isn't for you, that's okay too, but we don't want to mislead you. And I think that's been a real part of, of CrossFit success up to this point.
Speaker 2 00:06:23 And I think it's really interesting that you're looking at, how do you just loosen that a little bit? How do you expand the audience? Cause it isn't necessarily for everyone it's very challenging and they require a big commitment. So I wonder as you think about rolling out this new offering, kind of finding that perfect balance between opening things up a little bit, to bring in more people and to make people like me less intimidated. And at the same time, making sure that people know what they're getting into, that this is going to be life changing. It's going to make them incredibly fit. They're going to find a real community, but you have to be ready to work.
Speaker 1 00:07:00 You nailed it. Right? So there's, we actually were just going through some of our marketing materials and packaging, um, right before this podcast actually. And the two things we talked about is we are not going to sugar coat it. This is going to feel like high intensity for where you are not high intensity by the standards of world-class athlete, but when CrossFit meets you where you are and it's going to play that edge in a way that maybe you haven't played and that's where the magic happens. And secondly, you're going to learn a lot of new skills and it's going to be uncomfortable. Some of the movements, right? Those two things can't be sugarcoated in our messaging. So I think you're right on there. The interesting thing to on your first point, and it's what makes CrossFit so fascinating intellectually is that when we say it's not for everyone, that's absolutely true, right?
Speaker 1 00:07:48 The highest end estimate I would have is 10 million people around the world doing something that is very recognizable as CrossFit. I'll be not necessarily in one of our gyms and that's 10 million out of 7.5 billion people. So it's a small group of people now relative to the world's population. What's interesting is when you break that apart, they're in, we have gyms and 155 countries. So I would bet there might be in 200 countries that there are people doing CrossFit. There are credentialed CrossFit trainers in a hundred countries, right? I wrote actually 150 countries because there has to be one everywhere. We have a gym, you know, we've done a feature on a 96 year old who discovered CrossFit at 94, right? There are, five-year-olds doing cross, or you can find plenty of talk and Instagram videos of that. There are people who are 300 pounds overweight doing press, or there are people without limbs doing CrossFit.
Speaker 1 00:08:37 So the interesting thing is it's hard to stereotype. Yes, this is a relatively small subset of the world, but it's hard to stereotype exactly what that subset is. And I think what we're trying to broaden the understanding of is you don't have to be fit to do this. You don't have to feel like you're fit to do this. You don't have to get ready to do CrossFit CrossFit at its best, which we're not always at meets you exactly where you are. And it really doesn't matter what your level of conditioning is, what your orthopedic issues are, what your state of metabolic health is, et cetera. When we get it right, we can meet you anywhere. But it does take a certain person to be ready to say, I'm going to push the edge of my intensity and I'm going to have the humility to not try to keep up with the person next to me, if that's not the right thing to do.
Speaker 1 00:09:30 And our part of this is both a messaging to invite you in and make sure that, but also then to be at our best more often, so that the actual environment that you're in is representing what I said. And one of the challenges, you know, with the, the model that we have right now, which is well over 10,000 gyms around the world who have largely forged their own path is that the experience of members can be different in different gyms. And so what we're trying to do is walk the line because we really value the autonomy and the independence and the funky, crazy creativity of each individual, gym and operator. But we also believe that cross it as a core stands for being inclusive, that it stands for being a place where everyone's welcome.
Speaker 2 00:10:14 It's really interesting. Sometimes I think about, you know, on the journey to membership for different organizations, it's important to kind of look for where are your challenges and opportunities and where are your strengths? And I sometimes like in a membership to being like a party, right? And so if there's a party going on at someone's house, like you walk by it all the time, this house, and you don't even know there's a party going on inside or, you know, at some restaurant or bar. So if you don't even know that there's a party going on in there, that's a communications problem. Right. Who knew there was a party in my neighborhood. And then the next thing is, do you think that it's a party for you? Well, like I, I looked in the windows and those didn't look like my people, so I just kept going and that could be true and it could not be true.
Speaker 2 00:10:53 Right. It could be that I just got the wrong idea by looking in the window. And then there are kind of the deeper challenges that, that a membership has, which is I came in and I didn't feel welcome. And I realized that I decided it wasn't for me. And that could be true or it could just be a bad onboarding experience. And then once I'm in the party, do I want to stay? Is it fun? Is it what, what was promised? And it sounds like what you're talking about is sort of at that, looking in the window here,
Speaker 1 00:11:18 And I would go further Robbie, which is, if you leave the party for whatever reason, do we have an appropriate way of inviting you back at the right time? Right? Because in some cases you left the party for good and other cases, it could have had something, nothing to do with us. We've had in the eight years, our gym has been open. And this happened with a friend of mine who joined early on. She was really loving it and then was playing softball. And I think screwed up her knee or something twist their knee and effectively never came back. And so that was like, someone loses their job or moves away or is going through marital trauma or whatever. How do you invite people back again? So it's this full, full life cycle and journey and let them know that it's okay. If you're taking a pause, there's no judgment there. And if you have to come back and step back a little bit, I do, I deal with that myself. You know, it was a way for three out of four weeks recently. And I felt going back into the gym, like, Oh my gosh, I'm going to be so down on myself for my performance in there. And then you get to play with your own ego and go, is that really what this is all about?
Speaker 2 00:12:21 No, it's really interesting. And that question of wind backs, that's very popular right now. And a lot of memberships as this concept of a pause button and a no judgment pause button, right? You don't lose your status. You don't lose your place. Some cases you don't lose your pricing or whatever, you know, deal you had. But this idea being that we as an organization recognize that there are a lot of legitimate reasons that might cause you to take a break. Can you describe what CrossFit is and what a typical workout is like?
Speaker 1 00:12:50 So the way I would describe the CrossFit workout, Robbie is you come into the gym and there's a coach there and you have a class, it's a group of people. It might be two or three people in some places it's you alone. Sometimes it might be 20 or 30 when we're outside of COVID. So, and I guess there could even be classes bigger than 30. That's about as big as I've ever seen. And the coach is going to go around and make kind of sometimes make sure everybody knows each other. And then it's going to explain there's a whiteboard. And the coach is going to explain what the workout is. And what's really interesting about this is every day the is different. And what you can count on is there's a little phrase we talk about with, which is constantly varied movements that are executed at high intensity and are functional.
Speaker 1 00:13:38 So what does that mean? So constantly varied. They're always different and you could have two or three of them thrown together. You want to be at a fairly high intensity. I wouldn't say we always work at, at high intensity, but we often do. And it tends to be much shorter than a workout that you're used to, if you're going for an hour long run or something. And then we say functional, it's usually involving the whole body. So you won't see in cross it, Oh, today's a biceps day, right? Or today's a calf raise day. We're really trying to do movements that will help you in everyday life, getting off of the floor, reaching up overhead, things like that, that will apply more broadly. And then the other thing is that CrossFit is the term we use is infinitely scalable, meaning that whether you're the most fit person on the planet, or this is your first time off the couch in three years, our coaches are trained to be able to meet you exactly where you are.
Speaker 1 00:14:32 And in partnership with you play that edge. So that the definition of intensity is very much subjective to what you're feeling, not what somebody else's opinion is or not what the person next to you is doing. And I love that about CrossFit. When I started doing it was just the range and people that were in there. And, you know, a few years, my mom died a few years ago, but she started doing CrossFit at the age of 75, four years ago. And it was the best thing in her life, along with their grandkids in her last two years on the planet. And it was, and she texted me about three months after joining and said, I just dead lifted a hundred pounds. And you know, there's not a lot, you know, let's face it traditionally. I didn't know what a dead lift was, where I started CrossFitting but like, there should probably, aren't a lot of 75 year old women out there, right? Who are grandmas of four, who are being introduced to something at the age of 75 and then so excited about it, that they're kind of bragging to their son and Dakota celebrated, you know, it brought tears to my eyes and it almost does now to think about that. And so it's really awesome. When you say, what are you doing, CrossFit? The answer is some pretty crazy stuff.
Speaker 2 00:15:41 I love that. I love that image of your, your mom, may her memory be of blessing of her dead lifting a hundred pounds and then calling you and bragging
Speaker 1 00:15:52 One. You know, one time I walked into the gym and my mom was working out with my daughter who was nine at the time. And that was another one like, Oh my God, this is legit. This is crazy. Like nothing else.
Speaker 2 00:16:05 So I want to take a different, a different tack for a minute. You owned the gym, you've been an active CrossFitter yourself. You brought a lot of family members along with you and friends, but then, you know, in this past year you bought CrossFit, Inc. That's a hard thing buying from a founder in a difficult time. Can you tell me the story of how you got Greg Glassman, the founder, and prior CEO to sell the business to you and to trust you with his baby? I think it's a great story and I'd love for you to tell it.
Speaker 1 00:16:37 Absolutely. Yeah. So we're back in June and I had moved on from Oracle, which was a company that acquired Datalogics. I'd spent five years there working there and with general catalyst and doing boards and so on. And so I'm at home, I'm working about probably about 50% of my time and traveling and, you know, again, mostly doing investing in boards and so on and pondering everyday. This question of, do I want to be an operator again? Or am I done? And there was part of me that said, I don't need to be an operator anymore. And there was part of me that said I'm made to be an operator, but all these companies that I'm hearing about from head hunters and so on, don't feel like what I want to be doing. And I was increasingly investing in enjoining boards of companies that were focused on my twin themes of health and happiness.
Speaker 1 00:17:28 And I just, I wrote this, a personal manifesto when I left Oracle and said the more time that I spend with people immersed in trying to make other people healthier and happier, the healthier and happier I get myself. It was just such an obvious equation to me and that I was wired for it. And so what happened, I'm sitting there, I'd say highly receptive to something bigger. Moving me in a certain direction. Way down there buried was, I guess, was this idea that, wow, if I could do anything from 10 years earlier, it would be to lead CrossFit. And then the Floyd 19 tweet comes out from Greg Glassman, Greg glass, and the founder of CrossFit sent out a tweet that kind of launched all this possibility for, to re-invent CrossFit. Um, that traumatized the community. And I think inadvertently that said Floyd dash 19.
Speaker 1 00:18:20 And so it was kind of a conflation of everything that was going around George Floyd. We were right in this period in June and George Floyd's, um, you know, deaths and all of the circumstances around it and the upheaval in society and how a lot of us were feeling about that. And also the COVID-19 quarantine and so on. And I don't, I still to this day don't know what Floyd 19 meant, but Greg tweeted that out and immediately people were very offended by that notion. And a lot of people said we don't want to be part of CrossFit anymore. So within a few days you had half of the top professional athletes in CrossFit, boycotting the games and you had, which is our annual or global competition to crown the fittest man and woman on earth. And then you had hundreds of gyms saying we're not going to be affiliated gyms anymore.
Speaker 1 00:19:12 And so what happened then was I started to hear from some friends who knew that this was a lifelong dream of mine and associated me with CrossFit. I think three or four of them pinged me on text or LinkedIn and said, Hey, I keep thinking, I'm going to open up my newsfeed and see that you bought crossed it. Or, Hey, now's the time ha in the first year I kind of said, ha ha. And then I think by the time the third one hit me, I was like, well, what are you waiting for? Duh, you're sitting, you're looking for more meaning in your life. You think you want to operate, but it doesn't look like an enterprise software company. Your focus is health and happiness go for it. And so this is the moment of what would you do if you're not afraid? And I was like, the answer is try to buy CrossFit and try to lead it into the future. And so that
Speaker 3 00:20:01 Was that's the backstory and how it happened. And I was
Speaker 1 00:20:04 Very fortunate to get introduced to Greg and get a chance to meet with him. Wasn't an easy thing to do. And he and I spent about 12 hours together in about a 24 hour period. And by the time we left, I was like, we didn't have a handshake yet, but I was like, wow, this is possible. And by the time I got home that night, I had kind of written up a, um, basically a proposal that I'd already pitched him on verbally. And the next morning we had a verbal handshake to, uh, to get it, to get it all done. And this was within about a week of the Floyd 19 tweet and the people around the company. So it happened very quickly after a ten-year lag. The universe just was listening and dropped
Speaker 2 00:20:48 It in your lap. And what, uh, what kismet,
Speaker 1 00:20:50 I was so fortunate. I've talked about it with the community as if I were ever someone who didn't believe in kind of metaphysical things and magic or fate or destiny. It's hard to argue that I found some real magic inside myself that allowed me to make the pitch of a lifetime to Greg. That couldn't have been more heartfelt about why I was the right guy to entrust this to even though I knew there were reservations. And I knew that he probably wouldn't be happy with a lot of the ways that I led the business. And I told him that, but knowing that my ends were pure, you know, that my intent here was pure. It was really important. And then the external magic of just all these things conspiring to support this, it was unbelievable. And it was hard not to, you know, it's hard not to make you feel a little more metaphysical about the way the world works and all that,
Speaker 2 00:21:40 That kind of being open to it, telling the universe kind of what you want to do and what you think you can do and what your highest and best purposes, and then being brave enough to grab it when it comes by. I give you a lot of credit. I'm so impressed.
Speaker 1 00:21:53 Well, again, as I said, I think I call it magic, not with false humility. It was pretty bad.
Speaker 2 00:21:59 So take me back to that moment. So you and Greg had this meeting of the minds, there was a lot of trust there, and then you came forward and said, okay, Hey, community, that has been, that is so passionate and so connected and has been doing things a certain way for a long time. Now I'm, I'm here at the helm. How did you think about that? I think it's very hard to take over a membership organization or a very strong community, especially, you know, in kind of the circumstances that you did. What was your thinking and how did you think about taking over and protecting the integrity of the community even as you were moving in a new direction?
Speaker 1 00:22:38 First thing that was so clear was that we needed to listen and learn to a tremendous number of constituencies. It's unlike you said, there's so much passion around CrossFit, and we know that passion can swing wildly from one side to the other. And I think there was so much disappointment and fear and uncertainty fear was the predominant emotion I think about because this is an interesting statistic, but over a hundred thousand people around the world make their living with CrossFit. Don't just love it as the best part of their day when they go into the gym, because then you're in the millions, but a hundred thousand people make their living, but almost none of them work for us, right? They have they're part of, one of, I mean, there are thousands of different businesses in the CrossFit ecosystem, independent of the gyms that are over 10,000, I mean, software companies and apparel companies and supplement companies and medical practices.
Speaker 1 00:23:34 And it goes to the list goes on, you know, food companies, equipment companies, the list goes on and on all over the world. And so all these people were really fearful about what was going to happen next. And they all had very different points of view. And so I needed to listen to as many of them as possible and appreciate the complexity and the nature of this ecosystem. So I went full on crazy talking to people. I mean, I can't tell you how many one-on-one conversations. We immediately set up an email box,
[email protected] and had to hire three people to help manage it. And we set this up before the deal closed two months before the deal closed and said, like, tell us what you think we want to hear from you. And every one of those emails, it was red, it was overwhelming. And then of course there's all the social media posts.
Speaker 1 00:24:20 And so it was really listening and learning and piecing together the somewhat of the mosaic. And then the other thing was I tried to be somewhat visible. So we did kind of the first community town hall where I would get on a video conference and have it open to the press to everything. And just talk about what was going on and talk with different stakeholders and so on and convened a summit. Then it was just really hard during COVID to do this in a safe way. But we did about, we had 25 people come in in July and to Boulder, you know, in this ballroom that held 500 people and went very deep on issues around diversity, equity and inclusion and the future of the gym business and the age of COVID and how would the training business evolve and all these different areas. And so we just really tried to have people know we were listening and then follow up with actions and summaries and so on.
Speaker 1 00:25:15 But I think you're right. There was tremendous risk of, you know, I think the best term that gets used faces organ rejection, right? If somebody's coming into a founder led business, that people are so passionate about and feel so much ownership, we were very fortunate to be able to get people on board. It was really a, to me, it was a Testament of the resilience of the community of saying, you know, we're going to give this guy, we don't know a shot. And I will say part of what was super helpful here was the fact that I had owned a gym for eight years and actually opened up four different gyms, including my companies in that way with an insider. I wasn't part of the company. I didn't know anything about all that work, but I had my own little microcosm and it was so clear. I think to people when they met me, that my passion was bringing more health and happiness to people that I came into contact with there wasn't, I didn't have to fake that or say, wait, what am I talking points today? It's like, no, no I've been living this. Like, this is all I want to do.
Speaker 2 00:26:09 You've talked about growing globally and also investing in diversity, equity and inclusion. How are you managing keeping the kind of the historical secret sauce, the way that the things that brought people to CrossFit that it's familiar to them with kind of you have this new, a newish vision. How are you balancing those two? Because I think in a membership organization, it's even a little different than other founder led transitions because all of these people have been brought along, not just the employees. When you talk about a founder, led business changing, but also all of the members, how are you balancing kind of the old school way things have always been with, you know, kind of this new age, new approach that you bring with your joining.
Speaker 1 00:26:51 You have to understand, you have to peel back and say, what do we believe at our core? And again, this is where I had a, I was fortunate to have that perspective of a time owner of a gym, as well as having gyms at work, you know, that we had, I understood, I think to my core, it's what drew me in the first place, what CrossFit was at its best. And that was something that, you know, so you have your, you kind of have your North star that I had no interest in changing what CrossFit is at its best. We've got that figured out. I want to be there more often. That's a very different model. When you think about transformation of a culture or company, it's one thing to say, look, guys, we're just, this just isn't good enough. We've got to change XYZ or this market's not big enough or the world's changed, but there's none of that. I know exactly what CrossFit is at its best and all of us do. That's why we love it so much. It's just, how do we get there more often? How do we deliver that brand promise more often?
Speaker 2 00:27:50 It's funny. Cause you talk about being an operator and the way you described the challenge you face is very much of an operational challenge. It's about execution, not about vision, not about brand. It's about
Speaker 1 00:28:00 The core vision and the core methodology are very sound. Yeah. We just need to get them to more people and again, be at our best more often.
Speaker 2 00:28:09 Really interesting. I wonder peeling back on this question about operations, you're a great operator, right? You've won all these awards for running data logics and for running your CrossFit gym, what do you think you bring to CrossFit? You know, I mean, we met at Stanford business school where, you know, business people, what do you think you bring from the business side that is useful in your CrossFit role? And what do you think is different? If anything,
Speaker 1 00:28:36 I think a lot about stakeholders who's invested in this and how can we make them successful? That's probably one thing is a certain amount of rigor. I don't want to get into kind of business speak around this. And stakeholder already sounds like business speak. And you know, I'm already throwing up around saying that, but I do think while I do rely a lot on intuition as well, I try to be pretty rigorous in my thinking about who are the stakeholders we care the most about what matters the most to them. And so I, this is a model that I kind of use for myself. And I taught in classes when I taught at university of Colorado. And so on the model of stakeholder success and really understanding that by talking to people and then holding yourself accountable and being invested in the success of your stakeholders. And then magic happens because like you said, when people are really part of this membership economy, they're going to line up behind you with their time and resources and money to help because they're so invested in it, but you reciprocate. So I think if I had to pick one thing, that's the big one.
Speaker 2 00:29:35 So what advice would you have for others who are taking over founder led businesses, especially those that are coming in at a challenging time or at a moment of great intensity?
Speaker 1 00:29:45 Well, one of the things that I try to do again, I'm so kind of people forward in my thinking and about kind of these one-to-one connections is I've met in small groups now, obviously via zoom given the time with all of CrossFits employees, as well as I mentioned, hundreds and hundreds of folks who don't work for us and work in other parts of the ecosystem. And I think there's no substitute for getting the individual stories,
Speaker 2 00:30:10 Advice to really focus on the stakeholders, the people that have a stake in the success of your book.
Speaker 1 00:30:16 And I think in Robbie, the important thing I don't want to lose that is this one-to-one thing. I'm all about market research and all about like cohorts and NPS scores and all the rest of it, I believe and all that stuff. But the one-on-one anecdotes, you know, the focus group, et cetera, has been discredited over time, but I will tell you that there's no substitute for that one-on-one connection from the top leader to everyone in the organization. If you really want to send a message and you have to feel as authentically that you actually care, it makes just no substitute. You can have a surrogate. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:30:48 It's what you talked about earlier with CrossFit in general, seems like it's also true for you that, you know, the key things, both coaching the connections, the community, and then that, that hard work. I mean, there's no substitute of like going out. One-on-one, that's a lot of, a lot of hard work
Speaker 1 00:31:03 To what you just said there, Robbie is right on, which is I try to align this way just to be really authentic and really transparent. So I will give you just one quick example. Here is we put forward CrossFits mission is to be the world's leading platform for health, happiness, and performance. And so I then told the team that works for us, that works for CrossFit. We need to also be that within our company. And we're not that right now, right? We need to be focused on our own health, happiness, the performance of the business, our individual performance. And then my assistant reminded me, Eric, how are you doing on your own health, happiness, and performance? I said, to be honest, I've been a little stressed and overworked since this job. And so she's doing this amazing thing with me now, which she initiated a cruise. It's just awesome to every day, I have to focus on my own health, happiness, and performance. And I have an accountability to her every day to tell her at the end of the day, how it went and how my energy was and you know, how much sleep I got. So I think if you can kind of live that and model that authentically up and down the line, then you're just totally in alignment with what you're trying to do. You know,
Speaker 2 00:32:15 Marisa, we all need a Perissa to keep us honest. Okay. So I want to close out with a speed round. So I'm gonna just ask you questions and don't think about it too much. Just whatever pops to mind. What's the best thing about working with you? What would people say
Speaker 1 00:32:30 Passion and caring? What's the worst thing about working with you? Intensity drive, getting excited about a lot of new things, best piece of advice you've received in the last week. Best piece of advice that I've received in the past week is actually from a professor on stoicism named bill Irvine. And he talks about the fact that you shouldn't want to make somebody else feel bad for you, and you shouldn't want to make somebody else worry about you and anyone who would do that. You're just increasing misery in the world. So this notion that you can help people without feeling their pain, and you shouldn't want that from other people that they should be sad or upset because of how you feel really powerful stuff. It just keeps getting to be, as I think more about that model. I love that. And the power of stoicism as a model. Okay. First subscription. You ever had a rolling stone magazine and your favorite subscription now besides CrossFit? My new medical service. Awesome wild health. Awesome.
Speaker 0 00:33:28 Thank you so much, Eric, for taking the time to, to share your wisdom and your experiences of the past year and also all of the accomplishments and the great work that you've done over the last many years. Thank you so much for being a guest. Eric pleasure. Rowdy. Thanks for having me. That was Eric Rosa CEO of CrossFit. You can find out more about
[email protected] and for more about subscription stories, as well as a transcript of my conversation with Eric, go to Robbie Kellman, baxter.com/podcast. Also, if you like what you heard, please take a moment to write a review and give us a star rating reviews matters so much in helping others find us. Thanks for your support. And thanks for listening to subscription stories.
