Pete Doan tried the working man’s life after leaving the Marine Corps in 2010.
Fair to say, it didn’t work out.
“I had four or five different jobs, but none of them were checking all the boxes for me,” said Doan, who took factory work and shoveled 12 hours a day for a drilling company. “I really didn’t see the long term in that.”
Now he’s on a new path, with less physical labor but still with its own set of challenges. As owner of 9:24 CrossFit gym in Berlin, Ohio, he’s peddling wellness and exercise in the heart of Ohio’s Amish country. It’s an unusual mix, but one that is working for him.
Natural transition
Doan, 27, served four years, winding up a sergeant and infantry assaultman. He said a fitness career turned out to be “the most natural transition for me. I was used to working in groups, working in a structured environment and, of course, we did so much stuff that had to do with physical fitness.”
That doesn’t necessarily add up to a business win. Berlin is a small town, after all — only about 3,800 people — and the surrounding population is made up largely of insular religious communities. Still, Doan has found a way to break open that market.
First, he brings his own spiritual sensibility to the table. The gym name — 9:24 — refers to a Bible passage in Corinthians: “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.”
“I am a really firm believer that your spiritual and your physical health coincide a lot more than people realize,” Doan said. In the wake of back-to-back deployments, “I started to let my physical health go, and it helped me realize you can’t have one without the other. They are directly related.”
At the same time, he has found a ready market among locals.
“A substantial portion of our members may have left the Amish or their parents have left the Amish,” he said.
“There are a lot of Amish and Mennonite last names in my book: Troyer, Yoder, Miller, Weaver. We don’t have anybody parking their horse and buggy out back, but the ties are still there for a lot of these people.”
Building the business
As Doan has built up his cadre of 125 loyal members, he has drawn from his military training to establish routines that develop fitness along structured lines.
“My last two years in the Marine Corps were spent training young Marines, getting them ready for deployment to Afghanistan. So that’s 15 or 20 people listening to what comes out of your mouth, and then you see how it plays out, what their performance is,” he said. “That’s pretty much the same thing I do here. Being a small-unit leader in the Marine Corps translates directly to this, leading small groups all day long.”
The discipline behind that experience has helped Doan stake a place in a competitive business landscape.
He borrowed $40,000 from a bank to get started and signed onto the CrossFit name to gain some legitimacy. The national brand does not franchise, but lends legal and other forms of support to its members. Doan remains the sole employee but has brought on five part-time coaches.
While surrounding towns all have their own gyms, Doan has generated interest by drawing on personal ties.
“This is my wife’s hometown, and we have mostly marketed by capitalizing on relationships, talking to the people we know. If those relationships are strong, that is going to come back to us,” he said.
He’s also made the gym visible, for example, by sponsoring a local high school basketball team. “That has helped us get people through the door and get our name out there,” he said.
Still, Doan has faced challenges in building his new life. There are only so many ways to package fitness, after all.
“I’m always trying to find ways to make the product better. I never want it to get stagnant, to just be ‘OK.’ I want people to be excited to be here every day, whether that means I’m buying new equipment or printing T-shirts or finding new ways to work out,” he said.
Next step: A new facility that will double the 2,500 square feet of his “box,” as they say in CrossFit.
He hopes that will nearly double the customer base. “Two hundred members would be our ideal goal,” Doan said. “That would be great. I just love seeing people come in here and seeing them accomplish their goals.”
