Leading with Impact: The Victress Story

Speaker 1: [Music] rarely does the plan ever unfold the way that you expected to so having Grace and understanding that pivoting is okay taking it day by day and understanding that there's going to be a lot of emotion involved and your plan may not go as you expected it to but if you're willing to think on your feet and adapt the adaptability is huge then you're going to end up exceeding your West dream I'm Melanie bar welcome back to the shilp podcast as your go-to place to empower you to live the life and business that you crave I'm here to talk about everything from Having the courage to make life and career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech Innovation I'm here to celebrate your wins and navigate through your challenges I live in the city now but I grew up in a town of a thousand people I've navigated major life leaps a senior level corporate career worked in profession Prof Sports and now as a successful entrepreneur who loves business technology family and making meaningful connections with you and the she built it Community I also love a good workout and dose of selfcare magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so turn up the audio open your favorite Notes app grab your favorite drink and here we go welcome back to the Shila podcast thank you for joining us dosy what inspired you to take take the role as CEO of victus and how does your company's Mission align with your personal vision victus is a women's strength training facility we are brick and mortar we're scaling across the United States but we specialize in Fitness for all stages of life we have programs anywhere from Young athlete to prenatal postpartum and pre and postmenopausal so we are very cyclical beings as women and we understand and write programs specifically for each stage of life and the adaptations that are needed in terms of our physiology I have always had an entrepreneurial spirit I consulted for several years started my own Consulting business and fell upon the victorus opportunity when training during my second pregnancy the G that I was training with and I joined forces and started Victor's movement together I am a founder and with my business experience and that entrepreneur spirit I landed in CEO role of movement in terms of my values we've built the business around our personal values as a mother I have three boys I'm pregnant with my fourth child a little girl the entire business model has been built around motherhood and flexibility and honing in on what it means to be a mom but also have those career aspirations and being able to have those two live in parallel I love that and I love that you work with young athletes and everyone throughout out their stage of life because you get to a point as a young athlete and you're ready for more Fitness and more training but where do you go during that time right I was an athlete growing up three sport athlete in high school and played softball in college and the training that we had was all written specifically for boys and unbeknownst to me that's like there are certain things that we should have been doing our Center of mass is different the way we hold a bar should be different and it wasn't until after I had children that I even realized if I would have had this growing up I probably would have been able to perform at a completely different level and I think I would have had a little bit more grace on myself right as we go through those changes within the month and then also throughout our lives as an athlete you're just very hard on yourself when maybe you don't perform at the level that you're expecting but as women that's not unusual yeah it's interesting cuz I have twins boy girl and they just turned 11 and they're both extremely athletic and they get to a point where they want more strength or they want more training in certain areas and it's hard to know what to do at that point because they can't really go into any gym at that age but it's great to have a place where they could train and learn like you said how to hold the bar and how to make themselves Stronger Just strength training for women in general hasn't ever really been researched up until as of late and the majority of the research that has been out there has been written specific to men and when they do study women they're studying women when they are most like men so during our follicular phase when our hormones are at a low and we're not having those swings but yeah I think that kids at the same exact age they're going to develop at different times they're going to have different challenges based on where they're at in that process of puberty and how it's going to affect their ability to perform it's so interesting it's also interesting to Think Through the stages of life too because I worked out and trained with a twin pregnancy as long as I could until my doctor said no more and then afterwards I wanted to go back to doing everything I did before running marathons and for me I couldn't realistically do it cuz I was constantly getting a cold and then I'd be frustrated with myself and my workouts became shorter and I had to be okay with the fact that they're shorter but they can still be just as impactful but I had to go through that thought process and it was hard cuz I thought oh my workout has to be an hour and I finally had to tell myself it doesn't have to be an hour to get as much impact as it did before as an entrepreneur and when you're really busy same with being a mom too like you add all those things together it's compounding and your pockets of time are so short maybe my body could handle an hour long workout but I only got 30 minutes so what can I get in 30 minutes how can I make it the most impactful and meaningful and then I always say a short word workouts better than no workout at all and that's the hardest part is like getting in there and doing it there's a lot of different Fitness franchises and businesses out there you can't get into a class if the time has passed there's 9: a.m. class they shut the doors and you can't get in if you show up late we really try to meet women where they're at and so if they do show up 10 minutes after class started we do allow them to come in and work out because as a mom our schedules are Ever Changing maybe my kid wouldn't get out of the car at drop off because he have meltdown you have no idea what's going to happen in your day and so we just Tred to meet the woman in front of us and just give her the opportunity and maybe her body doesn't feel great that day and she doesn't want to lift as heavy as she normally would and that's okay I think understanding that a lot of us go to work out or get a workout in for the mental health aspect of it it's not always just the physical and that helps so much with stress too sometimes we're stressed just to try to get to a class and the whole point is to d-stress absolutely what you need challenges and opportunities do women face in the franchise industry you mentioned franchising across the country and how does victus help address them yeah when we decided to scale we had two locations that we had opened on our own we opened in 2019 here in Lincoln Nebraska and then we opened a location in elorn Nebraska which is a suburb of Omaha a year ago in October we had been getting a lot of inquiries on opening locations in different areas and we talked to an attorney and he basic basically was like what you're trying to do is essentially franchising and we're like I don't know if that's really the route we want to go my background is in multiunit management so I have managed multiple locations in in a broader geographical area in terms of my career and so we were unsure of what direction we wanted to go the reason why I really leaned on that idea is empowering women to have that sense of ownership in something victoris gave me not only victoris but my Consulting business too business ownership gave me the flexibility to be able to be a great mom and still be able to have that identity in my career and have success which I didn't have working in Corporate America so giving other women the opportunity to step into small business ownership and providing all of the tools in order to be successful in that role was a very empowering idea for us as we have navigated through this year our growth pattern has changed actually opening more of our own locations we've had so much interest in people wanting to be involved in our mission and what we do but it takes a very special person to own a business that business Acumen and understanding the intricacies of what it takes to run the back end of a business isn't necessarily the easiest to find so what we've decided to do is focus on opening our own locations and getting this proof of concept and honing in on all of the tools systems pretty much all of the backend of our business so that we can continue to franchise in a responsible way and we're capitalized and have the means to be able to support our franchisees in the way that we want to setting up the backend and the right way and the way that you want to takes so much time but you can always franchise in the future we're very culture-based and people-based that is hard to replicate from Community to community yeah there's going to be differences and we do have a few franchises and what we found is they are able to take our product and inject it into their Community but it's really helping them build their team and in franchising unfortunately you can't treat their employees as your employees so teaching the culture and teaching them how to train the culture is very difficult so honing in on that and honing in on the Persona of who the best franchisee is and who the best head coach is and who the best manager is those are all intergal parts of being successful and like you said over time we will continue to franchise and we are a franchisor we did all the legal paperwork so on paper it's there and I wouldn't turn down the perfect person if they came to me today we're going to be super picky about it mentorship is a key part of your mission what advice do you give women striving to become leaders in their field having a plan is really important if you're going into leadership but rarely does the plan ever unfold the way that you expect it to so having Grace and understanding that pivoting is okay I just explained a pretty significant pivot in our business right taking it day by day and understanding that there's going to be a lot of emotion involved and your plan may not go as you expected it to but if you're willing to think on your feet and adapt the adaptability is huge then you're going to end up exceeding your well distrain as long as you're willing to work at it and make those changes if you're not changing you're choosing I love that quote if we see a consistent problem happening over and over and over again maybe it's an employee if you're not doing something about it and you're not making a change you're only doing yourself and your team in is service so that would be my advice so true I love that quote yeah what does it mean to you to be a change agent and how do you inspire others to embrace change in their own Journeys a lot of people are by Nature change adverse they feel like change is going to create more difficulty or challenge in their life but it's usually the opposite I like to focus on empowering whether it's an employee a member whoever the person is in front of me that I'm giving them the direction and empowerment that yes this change might be very scary because there is so much unknown but having faith in the higher power and understanding that you are meant to make this decision you have all of the training you have all of the capabilities and understanding that your strengths will carry you through in those types of situations and then also thought leadership I'm a huge advocate for just being outspoken and speaking truth into people and so giving them as much concise feedback as I possibly can to help guide them in those decisions I really do believe leading by example is really important mentoring and always having an open door and allowing people to come to you for questions is really important when it comes to change that's so true and developing key team members too in that way it empowers them so much when you say I'm here to support you oh absolutely we use the word Empower and Advocate all the time in terms of building our culture and one question I always ask my team members when we have our follow-up evaluations and one-on ones is are you finding a joy in what you're doing is there anything in your day that you don't enjoy doing because we can always shift and pass off responsibility it might fit their skill set but they may just absolutely hate doing that specific task or maybe it's not really in their set of values and that's okay they may not even be a good fit and I think having those open conversations consistently really helps people it helps them understand like I do provide a lot of value but I also really need to enjoy what I'm doing and having a leader or having a team that understands that is so important to the success and happiness in any career path speaking of joy and this was a perfect transition because I asked this question at the end of every she built it podcast episode magic happens when we focus on the part of our business and ourself that brings us joy what is one thing that you do for you to make sure that you're finding and living your joy I love to lift weights it's the thing that I do for my mental health the thing that I do just for myself that nobody else can take away from me I'm very clear-headed when I'm able to get strong and it is such an empowering feeling putting a bunch of weight on a bar and being able to do incredible things with my body in all stages of life I was able to lift the most weight I've ever lifted was when I was pregnant with my last child is such a special experience something nobody could take away from me yeah it's so true and as a mom I've fallen in love with 5 minute meditation and 20 minute weight segments because you can get so much in in 20 minutes oh absolutely it's the afterburn is real when it comes to weight training thank you so much for joining us today can you share with us how and where we can find you and victus yeah so the best way to find victress is at victus mvmt.com that's our website or on Instagram at victus mvmt my name is Stacey grenfell on Instagram at Stacey grenfell thank you for joining us to today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our shiled website or at Sheed on social thank you to my editor Rich draino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave [Music]