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As far back as Joe Cirulli can remember, his mother always told him, “As long as you have your health, you have everything.” His mother was a nurse, so she knew a thing or two about the importance of health. Joe took the advice to heart, and it wasn’t long before he found a hero in fitness star Jack LaLanne. An eight-year-old Joe stationed himself in front of the television as often as he could, exercising alongside the bodybuilder.
“By the time Christmas rolled around, all I wanted was my own set of weights,” says Joe. “I still remember walking into the living room on Christmas morning and seeing Mighty Mouse with a set of 110-pound weights. I started training right away.”
As Joe grew up, fitness became one of the focal points of his life. Not only was he passionate about building his own strength, but he started teaching his friends how to train and become healthier, too. By the time he reached college, he was training and lifting weights every single day. So when he decided to take a year off from college and spend a month living in Gainesville, Florida, he knew he had to find somewhere to work out. But there was one problem: Joe had almost no money. He tagged along with a friend to the local gym and asked the manager to make a deal with him.
“My first day in Gainesville, I knew I needed to find somewhere to work out,” says Joe. “So I told the manager I’d work for him two days a week in exchange for a free membership for the month. One month turned into two and I really started to love what I was doing there.”
At first, Joe was tasked with giving tours to prospective members. He knew right away that he’d be great at closing the sale, but management told him time and again that he wasn’t qualified for a sales position. After all, he was barely 20 years old and he had zero sales experience. He kept asking, and they finally agreed to give him the training. On his first day, he sold eight memberships — a feat that took most salespeople several months. For Joe, it was easy.
“I remember my manager asking how I did it,” says Joe. “ True sales comes from the heart, not the head. When I talk to people about exercising, I’m doing it because I’ve always known it’s the most important thing.”
Despite his success, his finances were still in bad shape. As he climbed the sales ranks and pursued opportunities at other clubs around Florida, he came up against all kinds of problems. Health clubs are a tough business, and in his first five years in the industry, six of the clubs he worked for went bankrupt. Checks bounced, clubs closed their doors overnight, and pretty soon Joe was sleeping in his car.
“For awhile, I would live in the lobbies of the clubs where I worked,” says Joe. “Sometimes I’d sleep in the lobby of a closed-down building. Eventually, I was sleeping in my car. I hit rock bottom when I went into McDonald’s for a 16-cent Diet Coke and realized I only had 12 cents. It was my last 12 cents.”
Why didn’t Joe just walk away from clubs and get a traditional sales job? Despite the turbulence, Joe was learning the industry and loving every minute of it. For every six-month stint in a club that shut down, he learned new things about how to run a gym and sell memberships. But there was something else happening — Joe had discovered the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. The ideas in the book introduced him to a new way of thinking that fueled his desire to stick with it. It opened his mind to an entirely new way of thinking about work, your passions, and what’s possible in life.
“Growing up in a middle-class family, I had middle-class thoughts,” says Joe. “I had a picture of what life was supposed to be until I read this book. I realized I could actually make money doing what I love. I was so inspired that I immediately sat down and made a list of everything I wanted to accomplish.”
One of the goals on his list? To make $100,000 by the age of 25. Although he had just landed a job as the manager of a new fitness club, he was only making about $10,000. His most recent place of residence was his car. Still, he read his list every morning and every night, and within three months, he was making moves to open up his own fitness center.
“The very first thing on my list was to open my own club in Gainesville,” says Joe. “I knew I wanted to live in Gainesville, and I was tired of having other people tell me where to live. I wanted to make a health club that was respected by the community because clubs have a terrible reputation here.”
In 1978, Joe found a location and signed a lease that put him on the hook for $168,000. He hired a team to build out the space: plumbers, masons, and builders — with just $1,700 in his bank account. He started advertising the club before it was even open, and he managed to sell enough memberships every few weeks to pay his team. He was scared, but he believed in what he was building.
“Early on, my father taught me how to deal with fear: you just deal with it,” says Joe. “I didn’t tell anyone I only had $1,700 — especially not the people I hired to build the club. But I had members coming in before we were even finished, and they kept coming after we opened.”
From the very beginning, Joe knew how he wanted to differentiate Gainesville Health & Fitness from the pack. Instead of focusing on selling memberships, they focused on helping people. He believed that if they could help enough people, their good reputation would make it easy to sell memberships. 40 years and 28,000 members later, it seems Joe was right.
After years of struggling to find his footing, his luck turned around when he took the business into his own hands. Though he missed his goal of making $100,000 by the age of 25, he met that goal exactly one year later.
“On the day I turned 26, I had exactly $100,000 in my savings account. I looked at that number, and I thought it’s not $99,000, it’s not $101,000 — its $100,000. It’s the exact number I wrote down,” says Joe. “At that age and time in my life, I thought, ‘Everything they said is true, I can do anything I set my mind to.’ And you know, I did knock everything off of that list I made.”
Today, Gainesville Health & Fitness is celebrating 40 years in business. The brand has 130,000 square feet of facilities, 3 fitness centers, 2 rehabilitation centers, a handful of boutique centers, and more than 500 employees. They continue to make the choice to be a premium provider in a commodity business, and it’s sustained them over time. The club rakes in awards and recognition, including being named one of Forbes’ Small Giants 2016: Best Small Companies in America.
Though the business has scaled and grown through the years, the driving purpose remains the same — improving the health of its members and the Gainesville community at large. In fact, Joe and his team set a goal in the early 2000s to have Gainesville recognized as the healthiest city in America. By the spring of 2003, Gainesville became the first and only city to receive the gold Well City award from the Wellness Council of America. At its core, the business is built on the idea of building relationships and helping people.
“It’s not about us, it’s about people,” says Joe. “People like Jerry, a member who has come to our club every day since his wife died. We’re one of the biggest parts of his life; being inside this club and his connection with our staff and our members. If you help people get what they want out of life, you’ll get what you want from life. ”
To hear more of Joe’s story and interviews with other purpose-driven leaders, tune into my Growing with Purpose podcast.
