Message from the CEO: Update on our Gyms
Hello FinGym Family,
As I sit down to write this note to you, I’m reflecting on all of the messages I’ve sent before — especially over the last two years. I’m thinking about how many challenging stories I’ve shared with you, how much our business and team have evolved, and up until three months ago, I never thought I would have to write this message. Unfortunately, the pandemic has forced another change, the loss of our physical Gym locations.
When I set out on the mission to build The Financial Gym nine years ago, I always imagined that the Gyms would be physical locations. I always said, “It’s going to be like H&R Block, but fun and cool.” I always imagined people being able to walk into the space, greeted with kindness and a cocktail, and feeling comfortable with an uncomfortable subject matter. If you ever went into one of our Gyms, you know that they had a “Money Bar,” and the concept for the Money Bar was to be like the Genius Bar at Apple stores; but instead of a person who could fix your tech product behind the bar, you would find someone who could fix your money problem.
Nine years ago, I imagined physical spaces, but I never knew exactly what they were going to look like. And then five years ago, we were introduced to an amazing woman, Jennifer Magee, the founder of a company called Retail by Design. Magee, as we came to call her, spent so much time with us imagining what a Financial Gym would look like and even created the wallpaper we used in all of our spaces. She took the seedling of an idea and made it into a work of art...our Gyms were works of art.
I will never forget the feeling I had when I walked into our first Magee-designed location on 134 West 25th Street, the Gym that would become known as HQ. It was a mixture of excitement, pride, and fear. Would people come to the Gym? Would they love the Gym? Would we be able to pay our rent?
The answer to all of those questions for the next two years was a resounding “Yes!” People came and enjoyed it so much that we needed to expand to another floor in our building, and we started scouting the expansion outside of New York. Our goal was always to have Gyms across the country and in the first two months of 2020, we signed three new leases (Brooklyn, DC, and LA).
When the pandemic took the international stage in March of 2020, we assumed, like so many people, that the quarantine would be temporary and in two weeks we would all be back in the Gyms. The reality of the last two years is that only 18 clients have asked to utilize any of our four Gym locations, our employees have moved across the world, our clients have moved across the world; and when the Omicron variant hit late last year, we knew we couldn’t hold onto the locations any longer.
In the first three months of this year, we began the process of negotiating with our landlords, arranged buyout terms, and secured funding to execute the buyouts. I have been on this journey for nine years now, and I have experienced tremendous highs and lows, but nothing has felt lower than what we’ve had to go through during this time.
On February 10, 2022, armed with my boyfriend and a U-Haul truck, we were forced to quickly clear out HQ and officially end the journey that started almost exactly four years earlier. After the chaos of cleaning the space, securing what we needed to, and loading the van, I sat alone in one of my favorite spots of the Gym and cried. I cried many tears through so many emotions.
I cried while I remembered all of the beautiful moments shared with the hundreds of people who entered that space. I remembered all of the Wine & Learns that we hosted there, the way the team used to eat lunch around the brown table, the holiday party we had where we got in trouble for singing karaoke at 2 in the afternoon, the time the Today Show filmed there, the hugs, the laughter and the countless bottles of wine shared with so many beautiful souls.
I cried while I remembered the hardships we faced while in the space. The challenges we had building out the location, the time we knew we had a rodent situation (the extra team member we nicknamed “Mickey”), the tough employee conversations, the time we had unwanted guests attend our Wine & Learn, and the countless boxes of Kleenex that were passed around.
As I’m writing this to you, I’m still shedding tears and mourning a chapter of the Gym that is coming to an end. This is not the future I imagined for the company, but like so many of us have experienced, the pandemic has dictated a different path for us to take.
So, I am writing this to you to tell you about the end of our physical Gyms, but it’s not the end of our time together. We have and continue to work with clients virtually. When the time is right, we have plans to organize Meetups and Wine & Learns in locations around the country. We will have events and share wine and Kleenex together again; it will just be at different addresses.
To anyone who enjoyed our Gyms, thank you for coming into our homes and giving us beautiful memories to take with us. Thank you for your support of the Gyms, and as we close this chapter, we’re looking forward to where this next chapter is going to take us.
Cheers!
Shannon McLay
Founder & CEO
