Alex Earle

My name is Alex Earle. I am the CEO of Black Swan Yoga and Korrect Fitness.

Both companies provide fitness and wellness. We're a service-based company. Black Swan Yoga is a very interesting business model. We're a donation-based company, so we encourage anyone — there's no exclusivity to our business. Whereas yoga kind of traditionally, some people I think feel a little bit intimidated, or maybe it's something that they couldn't afford. Our model is, you can walk right in, you can donate a dollar, and you can come do yoga. So we've been able to build that business up over the last 15 years to 21 studios across Texas, Colorado, and Phoenix, Arizona. And we've done it purely on this law of reciprocity. We provide space, we provide a level of energy in the classes that is very unique, and it's not this kind of traditional yoga — we kind of go on our own path, and our students love it.

And on the gym business side, again, another very community-focused space. There's a lot of this air of positivity and non-exclusivity kind of vibe when you come into the space, and it's a place where people of all shapes and sizes come in. It's intimidating when you see the photos and the videos of what we do, but when you get in there, the level of encouragement and just reinforcement of, "you've got this, we're gonna get through this together," is magnetic. So very proud of the communities we've built with these fitness companies.

Well, I think the biggest thing again is accessibility. Whether it's people being intimidated to come into these spaces, whether it's an economic issue somebody may be having, both of our companies has always led with — there's more of this traditional, predictable path of how you could run a gym or how you could run a wellness studio like a yoga business, and we kind of said, no, we're gonna do things a little differently. And I think that caught the attention of many people that felt maybe otherwise left out, or again, intimidated. So both these spaces, when you come into them, you're kind of like, oh, this is not what I expected. It's refreshing, it's fun. The people that are in there — there's just this real vibrant commitment to just feeling better once they're in there.

Interestingly, AI has not really impacted us yet. But it's funny you ask the question, because as of probably within the last couple of months, more and more it's finding itself internally within our companies. I'm finding my staff is communicating more using AI tools, which is odd at first, because I'm like, that's not you — but then I'm like, actually, what you said was fantastic, and that actually is exactly the right thing that needed to be said.

Externally, we're finding that, okay, from a marketing perspective, from an automation, communications-to-customers perspective, we haven't even scratched the surface of how we can leverage AI. So that's become more of something that's kind of front of mind for me to say, all right, what tools do we need to start to look into that can help create efficiencies when it comes to the marketing side of the company, for sure.

You know, I keep saying this word accessibility — that's really the big one. In the yoga space, we are a volume-based business. We have classes from the beginning of the morning all the way till fairly late into the evening at all of our locations. So we have just mass momentum of just being this space that people can think of and they know and they trust is going to be available to them.

I think a big advantage that we have is again having classes almost every hour on the hour, and then the way in which people can book — they can book very easily through our website, they can book through our point-of-sale software. Part of our tech stack is Mindbody, which has been a necessary evil, let's call it. They've been a company that used to be the main player in the space of point-of-sale in the wellness industry, and they rested on their laurels for a long time. When you looked at the user interface, it was kind of archaic. But they've finally gotten, in my belief, the right leadership team in place, and they've started to revolutionize and modernize the experience. So now the booking, seeing class schedules and that sort of thing, using that tech stack for us, makes it a lot easier for people to book compared to maybe smaller studios that don't have that.

We also have an online platform called BSY TV. It's on-demand, subscription-based. We have thousands of classes on this platform. It's an app — just download BSY TV and you can access it on all of the app stores. That's something that we developed during COVID. When we saw the restrictions of people being able to get together in person, we saw a huge surge in the online demand. And then of course we saw the flip-flop — so after COVID kind of receded, we were one of the first to come back to doing stuff in person. We took a little bit of a leap of faith there and said, all right, we understand the health concerns, the situation that's going on, we're gonna respect and do everything that the law is asking of us, but at the same time, we believe — and certainly still continue to believe — that people need to breathe and people need to be able to move their body. We provided a safe way for them to do that in person. So we quickly rebounded from COVID quicker than most. And thankfully we had this online component that was bridging the gap until we were able to get back to normal.

Absolutely. The actual mechanics of the business and the expenses associated with it — not to give away too much, but the business model is stunning. You have people and facilities, and in many companies, that's really what your big expenses are. But we didn't have to get into developing a technology or an actual product that was a bike or anything to that effect.

So for us, within those four walls that we have, we can follow the trends as we see fit. Currently Pilates, for example, is kind of hot, and it's bizarre because Pilates for a long time was a very exclusive, expensive, more of a suburban environment type of activity. And now it's absolutely all the rage. Part of the reason for that is the cost of Pilates has gone down. So we're looking at it and going, well, maybe there's a demand for Pilates in our studio. That's the beautiful thing — we can pivot when we need to and add other modalities.

I was an athlete — I played sports growing up. Interestingly enough, my brother, my dad, and I started a health and fitness publishing business in Austin back in 2004 called Austin Fit magazine. I was just out of college, I was teaching tennis at a local country club, trying to figure out what I was gonna do. But fitness was always something that had been part of my life. And then we started this magazine.

We had a pretty good run at it. There was a time in Austin when print advertising in magazines was something that everyone was gravitating towards — Austin Chronicle, Tribeza, there were a lot of these different publications. And in that time, I just got very ingrained within the health and wellness community, and through that met the founder of Black Swan Yoga. So we didn't found the company originally — we ended up acquiring the company from the founder to help grow it. And in that time I wore a lot of different hats. I built an event business which I sold part of to Onnit Labs, which is a supplement company. So I worked directly with the founder and CEO of Onnit for a while, and then we sold Onnit to Unilever. In that time, I fully acquired Black Swan Yoga, and fully reacquired — at the time it was called Onnit Gym — which we recently rebranded to Korrect Fitness. So a lot of things have happened in the last 20-some years.

To continue to expand thoughtfully. We went from a pretty small company — from 2020-ish to having three-to-four-X growth since then. And constantly kind of watching the market and the economy, and feeling and understanding the ebbs and flows and trends of how consumers are consuming yoga. We were on track to build two-to-three studios per year, and we've been able to achieve that the last few years. As we look forward, continuing to try to do that is something we'd like to do, but it's not a we-must-do.

So at this point, it's continuing to have sustained, strong revenues, hitting our margins, and then trying to be very thoughtful in where the expansion leads us. There's no doubt that Black Swan has an opportunity to be a national brand. And the way in which we do that is kind of the next step — is discerning, is that something we continue to bootstrap on our own like we have, is that something we look and seek partners for? So that's kind of the stage of where we're at now.

That's an easy one. People that are certainly smarter than me. People that are experts in what their task is, whatever their role is — if they're coming in as a CMO or a COO or a director of marketing or a graphic designer, make sure that they're very astute at what that is, because I'm not. I have a very generalized capability in assembling a good team and making sure that we coalesce well, and setting objectives and putting together our forecasts and our plan and creating our KPIs. But from there, it's for me to get out of the way and let the team really do what they've been hired to do.

Oftentimes, we first seek to try to find people from within. Black Swan Yoga has well over 200 employees. A lot of yoga instructors are people that also have other careers or other skill sets. So before we go and push it externally, we always want to try to see if there's anybody within the family that might have the skill set. And depending on if that's not the case, then we usually seek counsel through referrals, and then start to go more externally.

Authenticity. I want realness. I want somebody that — they don't need to be incredibly buttoned up or have all the experience in the world. I want somebody that I can trust. A lot of that comes down to — obviously they've got to have some level of experience in their resume that gets them to be somebody that comes in front of me, but then it ultimately comes down to the one-to-one human interaction. How do we communicate together? How does it feel sitting in the room with them?

I've hired dozens of people over the years, and even in these instances, I've hired people that on paper look unbelievable, fantastic, and then you get in and you start to work with them and you're like, man, this is a complete mismatch. And on the opposite end, I've hired people that are like, oh, they're really missing some things — I don't know that they're gonna know what they're doing when they get in here, but they're scrappy and they have a positive attitude. So finding that level of realness where I can discern, okay, this is somebody that has what it takes to do their best and excel.

A great example is we have a city manager in our Dallas market for Black Swan Yoga, and she was an individual that lacked tenure, time, experience, management skills — she didn't have these things. But she had all the other things that I could sense and feel. And to this day, I mean, six years fast-forward, she's a rock star. She is the embodiment of what we need out of a city manager. She crushes it.

Since the beginning. I played in it from the very first season — was invited by some mutual friends, and have been in it ever since.

The personal connections that I've made through Founders League have had a very impactful part of my professional career. I've gone into business with people that I've met through Founders and through playing pickleball. Certainly have made an enormous number of connections that are trustworthy friends that have then been people that I've bounced ideas off of, sought advice from, mentorship from, sought referrals.

And we go into the question of hiring — these are people that, after spending a little bit of time with them in this environment at Founders, you quickly realize, oh, this is a very trustworthy individual that I could seek something from, from a professional standpoint. So incredibly helpful, for sure.

Unexpected benefits of Founders League — outside of the professional connections, many of the people that I've met have become really close friends. These are people that when I'm not spending time with my family or working, I'm spending time with them. And regardless of what we all do for a living and for work professionally, spending meaningful time and having close connections with other humans is, in my opinion, one of the most worthy things we could all aspire to do. So Founders League has created this very unique bond. I played sports my entire life — soccer, tennis, I did all these things — I've never had such a diverse yet very close-knit group of people until kind of getting involved with Founders League.

How did I perform in last year's tournament? We won. Yeah — Dan Friedman and I, we've been partners for a few seasons now. We've won it twice. We won last season. It was great, because we didn't do as well the season before that, and I think we were kind of a little bummed about our performance. And then this past season, we amped it up, and it was a thrilling finals. We played against some of our best friends. I actually played against a guy who's somebody I'm in business with — that I met through Founders League. So we played against my business partner in the finals. Full circle.

Going into this year's Founders League, I definitely feel the pressure. Everybody's kind of vying for us. I need to get my game up — everybody's getting better every season, the competition's getting better. And I think people — when you've won it, everybody just wants to take you out. So definitely a lot of pressure.

Yeah, I love Founders League. If somebody asks me about what is Founders League, I say it is a group of highly motivated professionals that are seeking to better themselves in the sport of pickleball, but equally as much in creating worthwhile connections that may help them in their own companies or in their own professional lives — but again, ultimately finding friendship and this purpose that is very unique and different than a lot of the other things that people can go do together. On a weekly basis, when the league is in session, it's my favorite day of the week, because we get to come out here and all spend time together and have fun.