I am super excited to announce that we now have a formal partnership with the prospect wizard. And when I say wizard, I mean wizard. Obviously, you have a website. This allows you to convert your website traffic visitors directly into leads. It's not just another chatbot, and it's not AI, but it allows a visitor to call, text, or leave a voice mail. Immediately goes to you, your sales team, or anyone else in the
club instantly. MIT shows a study that if you contact the lead within ten minutes, chance of them converting goes up nine times that of the average. We got the Atlanta clubs on it, Vida Fitness, Gold's Gym, Mountainside, City Fitness Philly, College Park, become one of the next halo companies to deploy the wizard. It's easy to use. Go to the prospectwizard.com. Get a free thirty day trial. Talk to my boy, Dave Gallon. He will get you all set up, and let the leads flow based on the
wizard. Go get them. This is Pete Moore on Halo Talks NYC. I have a fellow New Yorker joining us today, Bridge Athletic founder and CEO Fadi, by way of beyond active in our backgammon match to set off the, the event. And, we are gonna talk about some interesting things going on in the training market and how this technology could be brought to localized health club studios and trainers abroad. So, Fadi, welcome to your first Halo talks. Pete,
thanks for having me. And I'm definitely looking for a rematch. Yeah. Okay. A lot of people are asking for rematches, but, bro, you gotta wait in line, man. This is a sudden death tournament, you know, annually as we have on our time to win again. That's the season, bro. So you gotta wait till next year. Love it. On a on a more on a more positive note about your performance, you did, you did bring your a game, which I know you
always do. Given a Stanford grad and wearing a shirt that says tactical on it, I think kinda says that, you know, you live a tactical lifestyle. And, why don't you start off and give us a little bit of background on why you got into the industry, why you thought this was an area that had opportunity, and how you've kinda busted the myth of actually getting these types of, you know, experts to actually utilize technology, which they never did really before.
Love it. Yep. My background is, on the technology side. My training is from academic standpoint. I pursued a PhD in the space and software and algorithms, and I met our founding group, when we were all in grad school. We're a group of athletes and coaches. A couple of my cofounders were college athletes. They spent a lot of time in the weight room and, still dealing with a
lot of pen and paper in those weight rooms. Everything from training to education to surveying was done either in person or on pen and paper, and that was the opportunity that we went after. We are today powering, some of the highest performance, communities from sports to tactical as well as fitness. We're all about that athlete development journey. Think of train, learn, and adapt. Bridge Athletic is digitizing weight room for professional sports teams, college
athletics, tactical communities, as well as fitness. And we'll dig into it a lot more. The the clear need there is moving from purely in person to having a digital strategy. We're very proud to power performance at professional teams, college, athletic departments, tactical community, where we are the ultimate ally of the practitioner, of coaches, of fitness professionals, of athletic trainers who are looking to develop athletes, from training as well as a learning standpoint.
So so when you take a look at you know, let's start with d one athletes. The investment that is being made in a college athlete today, you know, is on the professional level, you know. And then it kinda, like, trickles down from there, you know, whether it's, you know, high school, whether it's, like, high performance, you know, centers that are trying to get kids into college, whether it's college athletes that are doing combines or
trying to get into professional sports. So talk about how your technology is kind of like the mission critical, like, user interface. As an example, you know, what do I see every day? I don't know. I check Gmail. Right? It's my private label email. So Gmail basically, like, owns my user interface, and that is my operating system. So talk about how Bridge is the operating system for communication with your strength coach or your conditioning coach or your, you know, you know, lineman coach
or or your running back. Like, talk about who the key people are in, like, the utilization of the software from all the different, you know, tentacles, if you will. Mhmm. From a, focus standpoint, the first community that we went after to really empower is the strength and conditioning coach
within those departments. Strength coaches are in the business of taking athletes from point a to point b. They're doing that by building relationships, number one, and also building training plans, periodized programming to take athletes from point a to point b. And, coaches are looking for a flexible tool that allows them to personalize the experience to really get specific and custom with how they wanna move their athletes. Each athlete is different based on
their setup, based on their strength and weaknesses. So that's assessing athletes, and they're moving them in a very methodical way from point a to point b. And, unfortunately, 90% of coaches to date still are stuck in Excel and pen and paper. There are no tools out there for them to do their job and do it efficiently and effectively. So they're spending a lot of time in Excel designing those training plans. They're sending YouTube links. They're
following up in text messages. It's all pretty much done in nineteen nineties tech. That was the opportunity that we went
after initially. So focusing a lot on these performance driven, data driven coaches within the strength and conditioning community, allowing them to easily build training plans, periodized programs to take athletes from point point a to point b. We we allow them to save more time and spend more time doing what they do best, which is building the relationship, getting compliance from their athletes. And gradually, we started growing over the last ten years into athletic trainers, and empowering
more of the functional trainers. And then ultimately, where we're seeing a lot of growth in the past couple years is in the fitness industry as well, where many of these professionals, practitioners are today working with pro like prosumers, people who are training like athletes within fitness. Gotcha. And from a standpoint of, you know, how how you price this, because we're a lot of entrepreneurs are on the phone here
and thinking about, like, I've got a software. It's mission critical, and I can prove that it's mission critical, therefore, it's worth x. You know, how do you think about that as, like, a a value proposition? I mean, you're going from, like, notebooks and Excel, which have no, you know, function after you actually write it down. There's no ability to optimize it. You can't change it on the fly. I
can't do any kind of data analytics on it. So so how have you guys come to a point from my investor hat on or from, like, my scalability hat on to say, it's a no brainer for you to use this when you're ready to use the technology, but let me let here's all the other ancillary benefits, and this is how much it costs and why. Excellent question. And that's a very difficult, exercise to do when you think about software, especially when you're placing Excel, which
is free. So you really need to focus on the benefits, on the value. What is the value? How do we quantify value that we bring to our community? On the efficiency side so there's efficiency and effectiveness. On efficiency, we know that trainers today save forty minutes each day when they use Bridge Athletic compared to Excel. That is quantifiable. This is time that your staff is spending in excel, and they're not spending with your athlete on the performance side.
When you look at effectiveness, it's all about engaging athletes. We're not trying to, in a sense, help coaches build better programs. We're just freeing them up so they can build those more effective programs and also communicate in the same language as Gen Zers today. They're native first. They're used to to having their training on their mobile app when they're traveling and also on tablets within the wait room. They love the the element of being data driven,
and what we help coaches do is get higher compliance. So when you look at implementing bridge pre and post, you see an uptick in compliance with the training of of of coaches. We're doing our job. We're bringing more value. We're ultimately bringing more effectiveness and performance. It's difficult to jump forward and then claim certain numbers on injury prevention. This is the role of the coaches themselves. We're barely and we are helping them just
be more efficient and more effective in terms of engagement. And, ultimately, when you go back to your question in terms of price point, that's how we think of price point. What is the value that we bring in terms of our tools and, and as well as our expertise, helping our, our community implement those strategies? Today, Bridge is a SaaS, so we're software as subscription, and we price a bit
differently for the pro teams that we work with. That's more of an enterprise, annual license, subscription annually subscription, versus the independent trainers that work with us who can start working with Bridge as for as little as $39 a month to train up to 15 clients.
This is Pete Moore. I wanna let you in on a little secret. There's this company called Promotion Vault, and what they do is they give out rewards from retailers that allow you to incentivize your members without having to do zero down and one month free or giving away shakes or giving away t shirts. What you wanna do is build a rewards program that lasts, that people value, and that doesn't discount your own products and services. So here's the deal. There's something called rewards vault.
The rewards vault is going to allow a member to set up their own profile. They are going to answer questions. You are gonna get those answers. You're gonna be able to target those members, and you're gonna reward them inside your club, inside your spa, and outside of the club, and outside of the spa to get them to become loyal, to get them to pay their monthly dues, and to be rewarded properly for the actions. A lot of companies are cutting back
on rewards. You shouldn't be. Promotion Vault's your answer. Trust me. This is real. And once somebody gets on the system and you're gravitating from either a notebook or Excel and you're going into bridge, and you get all your athletes on there and you have full buy in,
how many times, if any, have people say, like, hey. We're we're not gonna be using your software on because we found something better, or we kinda wanna go back into the, you know, caveman times and we, like, would rather do this even though, you know, we're losing time, effort, energy, and results. Excellent question. And we, we love to look at the metric we call stickiness. I'm I'm concerned with this within our team in terms of stickiness, in terms of engagement, and how often folks use
us once they get going. So sickness is a portion of your daily actives as a ratio of monthly actives. So how many of your daily actives are using you on a daily basis? And what we're seeing is very high retention for folks after they get buy in. It's very difficult to get people to leave that Excel master
spreadsheet that they've spent years building. Once they see the benefits of digitizing, their their workflows and offering and supplementing the in person with the digital experience, we see tremendous retention and compliance as well from both the coach and the as well as the athlete standpoint. And, Pete, we try to make it very easy for coaches to get onboarded. We have partnerships with a number of industry leaders such as Exos, FMS, Hyperice. We bring
all of these exercise videos within Bridge Athletics. So as when you start off, you're starting off with 3,500 exercise videos that are already prebuilt and available within the library and a bunch of templates. But then we also allow you to bulk upload your own. So bring your own movement library if if you've already shot one. You
can also import and reintegrate from YouTube. So we want coaches to have as much flexibility as they have in Excel, yet be more efficient in the way they get organized ultimately, with us. Well, one of the interesting things as I was preparing for this podcast was, what if you took all of your college athletic programs and say, over the last three years, this is what their win loss ratio has been, And here's like everybody else in in in
in college athletics. I don't know if you know if you could do it, but if you can say, hey. If I've got the best strength and conditioned athletes versus the field, and I say that I am part of being that mission critical, you know, like, in football, it'd be like if you're playing Seattle. It's like the twelfth man. It's kinda like the, you know, the fans and and the way the stadium's set up from the
noise level. Or you'd say, like, you know, my my my sixth man in in basketball, you know, the first guy off the bench is, like, the one that's, like, kinda, like he or she's, like, the one that does, like, is the game changer or the you know? And you could say, like, hey, Bridge Athletic, like, this is the game changer. Like, the average group that we work with goes, you know, twelve and four, and and the and their industry is, like, six and eight or,
you know, or eight or eight or something. I don't know. I'm just thinking that maybe there's, like, some metric, like, the the the ultimate goal is winning. Right? I'm gonna help you win as bridge, and that's because I'm helping you be more effective, efficient, and you got the best athletes. I don't know if there's a question there, bro. If you wanna answer it, that's fine. I'll make one up. And I and I think we we we power
two types of organizations. We power high performance organizations. And so and then we also power fitness industries where the ultimate KPI is growing business. Right. And within the fitness industry, it's a lot more quantifiable where we go out and work with independent trainers or larger, organizations, studios. They're looking to grow business.
It's a lot more quantifiable within that community to, connect value of using Bridge or having a ecommerce front to be able to monetize your training programs and deliver an awesome experience. We also help our partners run NPS surveys with both athletes, clients, and then also coaches and staff. And what where we see a lot of excitement is Bridge is designed for coaches by coaches. We're ultimately powering the ally of the athlete. And on both ends of the experience, the
satisfaction of staff goes up. Staff loves you know, whether you're an engineer, a developer, a designer, you want the best tools to do your job. And we see an uptick in both on the private side and staff retention. And on the performance side, coaches, again, they're in the business of building relationships. We're just helping them do that better, and we give all the credit back to coaches. So we've stayed away from measuring win
rates. We're very proud to work with, with with some of the best organizations even in terms of winning in the last five years because, ultimately, on the performance side, we where we see, a lot of success is with performance organizations that are forward thinking. They're looking to adopt technology to get an edge. They're not looking to save $510. They're looking to actually win. And that's where we see a lot of, alignment, and those cultures tend to
be really phenomenal. And we're we're a part of that equation. We're an important part of that equation, but ultimately, it's down to the to the staff and to coaches. Gotcha. You know, when you take a look at, yeah, I ran a software company back in February to 02/2003. As I told you, we're doing online fitness nutrition programs, unfortunately, through an AOL dial up. Not very good, you know, to get data in
and out of the pipes at the time. But the one thing I realized when running that company a a software company in this new era of version updates, you know, constantly online, and not having, like, a CD ROM or DVD or whatever you wanna call it back in the day to upgrade it, you'll like, the painting is is never done. It's like it's always wet. You
know? It always has more things that you could put onto it. So as you think about as an entrepreneur switching gears, you know, how do you look at prioritizing, like, the hundred, you know, bells and whistles or little widgets or, hey. I we like to one client would like to API with this or somebody would like to be able to do this with the dashboard or how do you kind of you know, as given your background educationally, given your background on, hey. I started this company.
We release certain things, you know, real time. We release certain things, like, you know, on a quarterly or monthly basis, however it is. How do you as an entrepreneur and as a CEO kinda drive, this is what the data is telling me. This is how intuitively I know what's important. And here's stuff that, like, I'm not doing it. Like, it's not necessary. So can you can you give us
a little window into how your brain works? In terms of software, one of the biggest benefits of software, you can always push updates. To your point, Pete, you don't need a CD ROM. You can just push updates. We push constant updates. We have two or three weekly updates that go out. We bucket those into three buckets. Bugs and issues, we iterate on those on around the clock basis. As soon as we find an issue, we're able to patch it and then push updates to it, which
is great. The second basket of projects are small improvements to the to the core experience, which add up. For instance, we just added a search bar in a certain area within our builder that say is a click saver. Those type of small improvements, which are a week to two week type projects, are measured within our app, and we also gather feedback through our customers through constant surveys, which we run on a monthly basis. This is a
second basket of the project, and then you have the big projects. Pushing big project to the community is trickier. As we mature, we have tens of thousands of coaches who are using Bridge Athletic. And what we learned I'm a I'm a techy at heart. I would love to push updates very quickly. It's incredibly important to not only have the capability, but also have success around the capability.
So we've developed a flow to beta test those capabilities, put them out to a smaller subset of the community, gather feedback, iterate on them, and then work with our product marketing team to inspire how features can become workflows and can power certain processes and workflows for our community. And those run on a more of a quarterly basis. Gotcha. And and then as you look at, you know, Mindbody to take it back in the day,
they used to have these educational seminars around the country. And that's how they basically got, you know, 50,000 studios to actually do the work and actually understand how the software worked instead of, like, going studio to studio. They said, like, okay. We're doing a two or three day, like, mind body, you know, training seminar in New York, and that
basically brought in, you know, everyone from, like, a 90 mile radius. And this is basically, like, you know, City Hop to try and get people onto the platform. Obviously, now there's, you know, remote learning and there's, like, webinars you could do and there's, like, you know, YouTube videos or what have you that, you know, have this is how you use it, instructional. What have you found is the best way to get people educated and and to be using it? And and, you know, how
effective has that been? Be given that the the user, the the primary user is a tech savvy, tech savvy kid. Like, we don't have to worry about those people. It's really like who's producing it that we have to educate, I I I would suspect. It's a combination of doing and running programs in person education is always important as well as the digital element. And from a digital element, you mentioned the long form education such as webinar. We have plenty of resources out there and support
articles. However, it's very important to embed within the product itself education. If you're in that area of the survey and form capabilities and you're authoring your next survey, we want to educate you right there and then on certain tips. And you see plenty of example out there within software products on how to do that. So it's like when when we look at the digital side, it's it's a bit of that. And then when we're talking about in person, we still love to attend events where we meet
our community and spend time with the community. We have excellent relationships with a number of organizations, that are focused on educating coaches and fitness professionals, and helping them get certified. We have partnership with, and then we we we do set up partnership with them to try and help those education the institution also bring that education within Bridge. And then finally, I'd like to highlight one initiative that we're currently running with academia. I I was trained and
educated as an engineer myself. Some of the tools I use today were, tools that were offered to me for free when I was getting my undergraduate and graduate degree. So what Bridge Athletic is doing is we're going to the classroom. We're bringing Bridge Athletic to professors of kinesiology, of program design, who are looking to educate their students on the the topics of program design and exercise science.
And we're giving Bridge Athletic for free within those setups so they can also, get the practical experience as in addition to the PRF. This is Pete Moore. Here's the last tip for you of the podcast. We are partnered up with a company called Higher Dose, higher dose dot com. They are the leader in workout recovery products, infrared technology, LED light masks, neck enhancers, and other products such as PEMF mats and sauna blankets. If you have not gotten on the workout recovery train
yet, your time and your stop is now. You gotta get these products in there before these workout recovery and spas end up saturating your market, having your members walk out of the club and going into one of their locations for $200 per month where they paid 39 to you. Let's become an expert in workout recovery if we are already an authority in
workouts. Higher dose, check it out. There's a wholesale code, and we look forward to helping you augment your products and services to meet the demands of your members. And, hey, let's get people happy, healthy, and sweaty, and the recovery should be just as good as the workout. And then, my last question here in closing is over the years that you've been doing this, you made some acquisitions. You know, that's
how I got got connected with you, and I'm excited about the road forward. What has been, you know, one or two of, like, your moments where you've been like, wow, dude. Like, I didn't even know that what I built could actually, like, make this happen. Or, like, here's a story of somebody that was, like, injured and, like, they got on the bridge program and, like, you
know, they rehab quicker than they've ever had. And, like, now they're playing in, you know, x league or and any kinda anecdotal stories that, you know, as you slug through being a software entrepreneur in an ever changing market, they're like, you know what, dude? I've helped, like, couple of people that, like, I never thought that would even be possible.
Yeah. This this is what keeps us going as entrepreneurs and especially as people who are passionate about the halo sector is the impact that we create within our community. I remember nine or ten years ago, we're just getting started with Bridge, and it was a year and a half into it. We're working with a couple of youth organizations, helping the aquatics athletes, with dry land training. And our staff was delivering some of the education and some of the training to these youth athletes.
And a year and a half into, our relationship, with with that community, we received one of the nicest testimonial from a mother whose daughter was injured in a in an accident, a couple years ago prior. And her doctor told her that she would she's not never gonna be able to compete, perhaps run again. And she she sent us, out of the blue, a lovely testimonial on how Bridge was part of her recovery journey. Again, credit to all of the professionals who helped, her Yeah. Of course. Recover.
But she, it was tremendous. And then she literally sent us an X-ray of pre and post a year and a half of training from surgery, which was absolutely awesome. And we've had a number of those, type of testimonial, but this one stands unique to me because it made it very clear that what we're doing is special.
The industry in which we operate is phenomenal, and there's so much else out there that we can do in terms of spreading the word of strength training to the broader community and to our society to make it a much more productive physically as well as mentally.
Awesome. Well, quick shout out to Max Wessel for, connecting Fadi and I. And, for all the health club operators and studios and franchisors, franchisees that know me, you will soon know Fadi because we would like to roll this out aggressively, in your clubs and into your communities and trainers. And, Fadi, the the term halo kind of flows off your tongue very nicely, so I'd like you to keep doing that, you know, on a daily basis and I'll send you nice reviews as well. Thank you, Pete. Awesome.