Barry’s CEO Joey Gonzalez Shares His Secret to Success
BARRY’S CO-CEO Joey Gonzalez's road to fortune has not always been steady. Taking big financial risks have left him with some good, and some bad, investing. Through it all, the entrepreneur has experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Gonzalez has put his heart and soul both inside and outside the infamous Red Room. He started off as a client of the popular fitness studio, attending many of their cardio and strength class. He worked his way up to become a trainer, where he put in the brunt work teaching classes, scrubbing toilets, and cleaning equipment. Then, he took a leap of faith– he approached the owners if he could invest in opening more studios around the US.
The leap paid off – and he was granted the opportunity to take his "biggest financial risk"—opening Barry's NYC.
Gonzalez knows risk all too well. He already had one failed investment – a restaurant he invested in with Jessica Biel, called Au Fudge. The concept was a fine dining experience where adults could eat while their kids were in a special off section of the restaurant with hired Au Pairs (not just for the rich and famous). From it, he learned “how important it is to know the team, who are the boots on the ground running the business—I think was really my miss there," he says.
For the Barry's NYC location, the team committed to a mortgage of half a million dollars to ensure a "premium-ised" experience where clients could have luxurious amenities within the locker rooms and showers in addition to its beloved smoothie bars – making Barry's NYC more then just a place you go to sweat.
It worked, and the studio became a raging success. Gonzalez then made another risky decision to reinvest 90% of the company's earnings to building the business, helping boost it to the 88 locations we have today.
The key to all this success? Knowing the business from the inside out, Gonzalez says.
'Understanding every little detail in my business, starting from teaching classes in the red room, to working at the front desk, to managing people to cleaning toilets, to running marketing and unfortunately running finance,' he said. Knowing all the different components of the business and the jobs within it leads him to making the best decisions possible.
'Just be smart about your investing and really get to know the product and the people and who you exactly are investing in,' he says.
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