A New kind of Gym: The Story of La Kave

Co-authored by Thomas Cerboneschi, StrongFirst Certified Elite Instructor

In Spring 2021, as quarantine was finally ending in France, my coach Thomas Cerboneschi, StrongFirst Certified Elite Instructor, and I opened a small gym in my office basement and began to teach StrongFirst classes. We did not start with high expectations. It was mostly an experiment to see if people would be interested in training there. But as the gym grew and exceeded our expectations, we began to imagine a new type of gym. One that required few expenses but yielded high value and results for our students. Here is the full story of La Kave, a new type of training center that organically developed in the basement “cave” of my office.

Background

I have been an entrepreneur since I was 18. Over the last 20 years, I have started several businesses in the fields of event planning, real estate, and project development. Growing a business from a simple idea is something I am passionate about. So much so, that I am currently developing a new project based on giving advice and training to entrepreneurs. I also teach this topic at Paris Dauphine University.

I discovered StrongFirst three years ago thanks to my coach Thomas Cerboneschi. He assembled a team to participate in the first Tactical Strength Challenge (TSC) in Paris in 2019. This StrongFirst event, and many others after, taught me about the power of community built on smiles, support, training tips, and a warm welcome. I realized that these universal aspects could be applied to any gathering, competitive or not. As an entrepreneur, I was excited to apply this to a business, especially a gym dedicated to a population outside of experienced strength athletes.

Training in a Basement

When things began shutting down due to Covid restrictions, Thomas and I had an idea. We would turn the basement of my office, a small and rudimentary room, into a place to train. This would allow us to make up for training that we had missed due to Covid and could also be used as an experiment to test whether others would like to join. If all went well, we would eventually turn it into a larger, “real” gym. We started this project mostly with Thomas’s students and athletes, who were already familiar with StrongFirst. But soon people unfamiliar with StrongFirst began to join and we were able to see the effectiveness of our gym in a wider population.

The Blue Ocean Strategy

In Blue Ocean Strategy, a book published in 2004 and studied worldwide, Renee Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim worked on strategies to implement a new business in a competitive market. I do not have time to go into the details of Blue Ocean Strategy, but the short version is that it uses a method of market analysis that makes your competitors irrelevant by presenting your product in a radically different way. You strategically offer an alternative to anything that has been done or is being done right now.

The Blue Ocean Strategy follows these steps:

1. Analyzing the key success factors that exist in a business.
2. Cross examining these key success factors with other markets.
3. Including key factors that meet clients’ expectations.
4. Deciding which factors you should use for your business, throw away, emphasize, or redesign.

When starting a business, it is important to analyze the market you are entering and even look at successful businesses in other markets. Considering which ideas and methodologies have become irrelevant as new products develop can save expenses and set you apart from your competitors. In addition, understanding how to uniquely implement and emphasize existing ideas and methodologies is also beneficial to your business strategy. Analyzing these elements will lead you to create a new value curve. The financial dimension is also key to this analysis. Real success in creating a new value curve occurs when it costs you less money than your competitors. To sum it up, through proper market analysis you can create a more effective plan and radically different business.

Key Success Factors of Our Competitors 

Our competitors in the high-end fitness market usually fight to be the best in the following areas:

1. A beautiful, spacious training space.
2. Multiple machines and the most modern equipment available.
3. Digital resources such as training apps, videos, and tutorials.
4. An orientation on weight loss through monitoring body composition, cryotherapy, and nutritionists.
5. Wellness services such as saunas, hammams, and stretching machines.

The high-end fitness industry has mastered these and trying to compete with them by developing our own version would be a costly battle.

Key Success Factors of La Kave

Talking to your students is essential to identify and develop important factors outside of the ones mentioned above. The challenge is that, at least initially, most students don’t come in with a full understanding of what they want or would be most beneficial for them.  For this reason, we developed factors we thought would be successful and then observed and talked with our students to determine if we were meeting their needs. Through this process we were able to collaboratively create our own gym culture.

Here are the observations we made within the first four months:

1. Our students are interested in our emphasis on a health approach and injury prevention. Many of them have suffered from injuries and want to prevent future ones.
2. As virtual training and digitalization have entered so many aspects of life, people are searching for something radically different. This leads to a desire for real improvement and development of personalized and in-person service.
3. Connected to the previous point, people are seeking a community experience more than ever before due to the COVID crisis.
4. People tend to lose their motivation if their goal feels out of reach. Finding a worthy, yet achievable goal keeps people motivated.
5. Students benefit from an intermediary and alternative goal. For example, rather than focusing on a goal like losing 20kg right away, we help set goals that build strength and good habits. This could include training for the TSC or reaching a certain strength benchmark. In training for these, the goal of losing 20kg will be achieved, but they will also celebrate small victories along the way.

Our students came up with these key success factors that became our vision as we expanded La Kave. Fortunately, we could adapt and improve these factors with very little monetary cost. We also decided that almost all key factors of high-end French gyms would be either minimized or eliminated from our gym. Instead, we created and developed other factors that were more relevant and financially accessible. The factors that we developed are listed below:

1. Personalization in training.
2. Community focus.
3. Short-term goals that serve a long-term plan.
4. Emphasis on health and injury prevention orientation.

The Power of Reduction

We eliminated quite a few things found in high-end French gyms that not only saved us money, but also set us apart. First, the elimination of wellness services such as saunas, hammams, and digitalized training was a huge cut in operating expenses, not to mention we could never have beaten our competitors in these domains. Secondly, we train in a minimalistic space which saves us the most amount of business expenses. Our training takes place in a 60 square meter basement. We do not focus on weight loss and therefore have no need to buy expensive machines that measure body composition. Rather, weight loss is addressed in a health-based approach. Finally, the reduction of the variety of equipment was natural as we offer StrongFirst classes only. We invested in kettlebells, two barbells, two pullup bars, and one bench. This minimalist approach is reflected in our name La Kave, which stands for “the cave” with a k for kettlebells. Having a limited space means a limited number of trainees which also reduces financial cost.

Building Community

Building community is what we focus on. Most gyms do not take this into account, or at least not very well. They have some welcoming conversations, maybe check in on the holidays, but that is about it. We wanted a strong community and not just because it could lead to a successful gym. The truth is, we knew that the number of dedicated students would be limited. We wanted to train with people we appreciated and attract students we could have drinks with. Keeping this in mind, we decided to implement a particular spirit in the gym. We use humor in almost every advertisement, jokes in each class, and a strong identity based on both strength and cocktails. The use of humor in advertisement establishes a feeling of closeness. Many people contacting us for the first time include jokes in their emails and communicate as if they already know us. Similarly, in classes jokes help the newbies feel more comfortable and less intimidated by their first strength class.

Health and Injury Prevention

We have developed a specific onboarding process for health benefits and injury prevention. Each new student starts with an interview documenting their past injuries and medical conditions followed by a functional movement screen (FMS). The results are kept in the student’s file and used as a reference for future FMS screenings that we offer about every four to six months. Corrective mobility exercises are sent to students after each FMS and are available for independent implementation two or three times a week in addition to the training sessions.

Short-Term Goals

Short-term goals are developed collaboratively by the coach and the students once we have a clear vision of their objectives and abilities. These short-term goals include setting a strength goal that is reachable within a period of nine weeks. It could be attending a TSC event, reaching a specific benchmark, completing a swing or snatch test, or pressing/deadlifting a certain weight. The goal is reachable, but not mastered at the beginning of the process. Preparation for a StrongFirst certification would often be worked on over several periods of nine weeks, depending on the student’s level.

Creating New Values

The personalization of training is a core value of La Kave. Thomas works on individualized programming for each client, focusing on their long-term goals, which are served by a short nine-week objective. The programming is adapted to the student’s level of technique, the time dedicated to training, mobility/injury limitation, lifestyle, and stress level. This results in sessions where every participant can have a different program.  As difficult as this might seem, the limit of two to six students in our training space allows us this opportunity. Communication between coaches is central to this vision. Thomas designs a nine-week program and communicates it to other coaches. Every session is followed by a debriefing from the instructor in a group message. This ensures that the next teacher will receive the information needed to adjust each session according to the last one. 

This personalized approach is helpful in assembling groups regardless of ability level. In addition, the number of certified students is increasing, and they are all willing to give advice to beginners during class. This leads to situations where, although only one coach is teaching, there are two other certified instructors in the class with beginners. You can imagine the progress a beginner can make through this process. The students who are certified instructors complete their own training session, as well as use their skills and knowledge to watch and coach others.

This approach gives La Kave a unique value, where students are offered a hybrid service of personal training and programming while enjoying the environment of a group class. They are achieving individual goals and still able to enjoy community in a fun and motivating way. The price for a group class is high, but even in a group our students are benefiting from the individualized approach of a private trainer.

At La Kave, we have kept the best of each approach. We focus on community, fun, and the joy of group training. We offer personal programming, tailor-made sessions, and the real-time adjustments of a private coach. Our vision evolved organically while testing and implementing our strategy, which has led us to create a training center that is cost-effective, successful, and radically different from other models.

Resources

W Chan Kim, & Renée Mauborgne. (2004). Blue Ocean Strategy: How to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant. Harvard Bus Review Press.