What’s up friends?

Hope you’ve all been well. To be honest, I feel like I’ve been drowning lately and it felt pretty therapeutic to get to the keyboard today. If you’ve been a long time reader, you know this is the part the email where I only tell you the good stuff.

Where I lead with a big update, hype you up for the big email.

This isn’t that one.

Every quarter, our leadership team does a 48-hour offsite. No phones. No outside noise. Just a conference room (more like a Miami jail cell if I’m being honest), 12 hours a day, and the full weight of the business on the table. We say the uncomfortable things. We stare at ugly numbers. We make decisions that don’t have clean answers. Most of all we just get really honest and say all the things we’ve been holding back. There’s eight of us in a room and tension gets high.

This past one was the most significant we’ve ever done. And I want to share all of it with you because its honestly helped transform the business and helped The Founders Club become the fastest growing business I’ve ever been apart of.

Let’s start with the numbers I’m proud of: We grew 297% year-over-year in Q1. Massive growth and we’re almost at 1500 incredible members throughout North America. People are applying in waves to our website (over 100+ applications a day) and we’re turning down 95% of them.

That’s real, it’s verified, and it’s the biggest growth rate in the history of this company. Three years ago I would have said you are insane if you told me this was possible.

But growth without context is just decoration, so here’s the fuller picture.

What went well: Membership momentum is stronger than it’s ever been. The quality of founders coming into TFC continues to go up. Word of mouth is driving more of our pipeline than ever before. And the depth of conversation happening inside the community, in our mastermind groups, at our events, is the best I’ve seen it. In the next 48 hours alone we will host over 600 people for 14 different events in 7 different cities.

It’s madness. It’s only at thefoundersclubofficial.com

Where we fell short: We were behind on annual revenue targets. Not catastrophically, but intentionally. This week we decided to walk away from $2,000,000 in projected annual revenue and are shutting down our sponsorship business.

That’s not a typo. And it wasn’t easy to decide as the club was built on sponsorships. All those dinners Aaron & I used to fly to would have never happened without the sponsorship money that all the SAAS companies, banks and agencies used to pay.

Here’s why we’re now turning it down.

Every time we took sponsor money, we introduced a second stakeholder into the room. And every time that happened, there was a quiet tension between what the sponsor needed and what the member deserved. It was never dramatic. Usually small. But small compromises compound.

TFC exists for one reason: to give founders access to something genuinely rare. A peer community of serious people who will push them, challenge them, and show up at the highest level. The moment we design the experience around anyone else’s interests, we’ve broken the contract. Even if its Delta Airlines. We love you Delta but I don’t want to have to force anybody to fly your airline over another. I will always pick you over Spirit tho <3

Members come first. Always.

We believe a membership community that’s 100% member-funded and 100% member-focused is more valuable, more defensible, and ultimately more profitable than one that serves two masters. We’re betting the whole business on that belief and its hard decisions like this that make us believe this community can survive decades, not just years.

Sadly people lost their job this week. Friends, people who have put the club first for a long time and have done everything to lock in the best partners. And the worst part was it was not even their fault. We just realized we needed to pivot as a business to survive the next 20 years. If you’re in the market for an amazing sponsorship/partnership lead I am happy to make the intro, she is best in class and would crush it for your company.

I did an interview with Forbes yesterday and the reporter asked me a question I wasn’t fully prepared for. I went to bed pretty proud of the answer and now with tens of thousands of people reading this, I figured the answer might be more relevant than ever here.

“Why do most businesses not end up working?”

I paused. And then something clicked that I’ve been trying to articulate for years.

The businesses I’m building right now are actually working. And for the first time in my life, I think I know exactly why.

I’ve finally been around long enough to listen to the math.

Before I go down the rabbit hole of years of my life on something, I need to know if it financially makes sense first. Not in theory. Not in a pitch deck. In reality.

TFC is a membership. We provide services to support it. If we don’t overspend and overhire, there’s plenty of money left over. The math is obvious.

BODY Hot Pilates is rent, instructors, and staff. If we get bodies in the room, there’s plenty of money left over. The math is obvious.

But so many founders are out here trying to build and scale businesses that are operating on 5 to 15% gross margins. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s nearly impossible to survive like that, let alone break through. And it gets even harder when you have multiple co-founders all fighting for a slice of that same thin margin. This is exactly what happened with CROSSNET. We had a $100 product, it cost $30, shipping was $30, marketing was another $30 and there was no money left.

The standard I chase now is 70 to 80% gross margins. Otherwise its simply just not worth my time.

Keep the company lean. Build an audience that actually wants what you’re selling before you need them to buy it. And do everything in your power to not be dependent on paid marketing to stay alive.

My goal for the rest of this year is to build a business that does not rely on Zuckerberg.

I left our offsite this week challenging the marketing team with this question:

“If the internet didn’t exist, how would we market?”

I want the Rolex feeling. This is the one club you probably can’t get into. It needs to be aspirational. The second we start taking short cuts we lose years of momentum. Brand moats take years to build and can be unwound in hours with stupid mistakes.

Aspirational. Global. Unmistakable. That’s the brand we’re building. And I think we’re closer than most people realize.

If you haven’t had your Q2 offsite, take this framework. I promise it works.

Day One:

Full financial transparency. Every line of the business. Revenue, margins, overspending, burn, runway. Everyone in the room sees the same unfiltered picture. The shared understanding is what makes every conversation after it honest.

Then comes what we call the “Ugly Deck, Sexy Business.”

Each department builds one slide to present. Its filled with challenges, the 90 day plan, hiring goals, budgets, solutions to problems, etc. The one rule is no new ideas. No pivots. No moonshots. We stick to the plan unless everyone agrees that the plan is broken.

Every team member gets roughly an hour to present, followed by an hour of Q&A. It’s intense. It’s also the most valuable meeting we run all year.

But before any of that, we do something that might surprise you.

We sit in a room and run a mastermind with each other. The same format we run for our members. And we go to the hard places.

That last question opened up the most important conversation of the entire offsite and what we tackle on Day Two.

Day Two: It only comes down to two things.

I’d feel like I was leaving something out if I didn’t mention this and leave you with a win.

My wife Lyndsey and I just signed two new leases for BODY Hot Pilates, the country’s fastest growing hot pilates studio in Chelsea, NYC & Sarasota, Florida.

We’re on a full sprint to open 10 locations this year across Florida and the Northeast with the goal to build the next CorePower, solidcore, or famous national fitness company. And when we hit 7 locations (just two away), we’ll actually have more corporately owned hot pilates studios than anyone else in the United States.

Let that one sink in for a second.

In under 16 months we will be the largest in the entire country. Private equity has already come knocking. Multiple times. And to be honest, there’s something deeply satisfying about telling them not now. The plan is to hold off as long as we possibly can, fund this thing through the business’s own profits and our life savings, and keep full control of something we believe in. We’re not in a rush to hand this to anyone.

If you have the opportunity in life to help and see your significant other’s dreams come to life. DO IT. There is no greater feeling than seeing them unlock their true potential and to scratch that itch. Watching Lyndsey chase this dream, for real, at full speed, is one of the most attractive things I’ve ever seen. I know that when we have kids someday, they’ll be able to look at their mom and know she actually did it. She didn’t wonder. She didn’t settle. She went and built something and that should give them all the courage in the world that they can actually do anything they put their mind to.

Regret is an ugly thing. We’re not interested in it.

With that I’m signing off for two incredible days in NYC. If you’re in town say whats up. I’m heading to The Othership in Flatiron tonight at 9PM with 25 members. Hopefully I’ll see you there!

Onward and upward,

Chris

Reply directly to this email if you have questions or thoughts. I read every one.