The employee handbook of Gainesville Health & Fitness is a 53-page document, prosaically entitled Customer Service Manual, that spells out in minute detail things such as the rules for interacting with customers and a description of what Cirulli and his team want to see happen in the next 10 years. A particularly revealing passage can be found on page seven, under Core Values, one of which is Creating Our Own Future. It reads, in part, "Our greatest power is the freedom to choose; we decide what we do, what we think, and where we go....We can do what we want to do; we can be who we want to be. We develop our own future by applying persistence to the possibilities. Our future is all around us. If we seek, we will find it. If the door is closed, we must knock and keep knocking until it opens. We never give up...."
Anyone familiar with the company's origins can understand where such convictions come from. By all rights, Gainesville Health & Fitness should not exist today. In January 1978, when Cirulli assumed the debts of the Gainesville Executive Health Spa and changed its name, neither he nor anyone else had any reason to believe the club would survive. He was barely 24 years old, and the five fitness businesses he had previously worked for had all gone bankrupt, leaving their creditors -- including their paid-up members -- in the lurch. Bankers had been burned so often that the mere mention of the words health club filled them with fear and loathing. Real estate owners felt pretty much the same way. Cirulli thus had the worst of both worlds, since his club occupied 1,500 square feet above his landlord's business, which just happened to be a bank. On top of that, he had no money, no friends or family with money, and no experience running his own business.
Yet Cirulli believed he could pull it off. If you ask him why, he might tell you about an experience he had had four years earlier, at the age of 20, when he was working as an instructor at his second health club in Gainesville and was given an opportunity to try his hand at sales. He signed up eight members on his first day. "Normally it takes months to do that," the vice president of the fitness company told him over dinner that evening. "You don't seem too excited."
"It wasn't that hard," Cirulli replied.
Or he might tell you about reading a book shortly thereafter and finding it a "life-changing experience." It was one of the classics of the self-help canon, The Power of Positive Thinking, by Norman Vincent Peale. The book persuaded him to set a goal: to become the top salesperson of the fitness company's 10 clubs. He achieved it in three months.
Then again, he might tell you about coming back to Gainesville from his hometown of Elmira, New York, after Christmas to discover that the fitness company had folded, his last paycheck had bounced, and he could make the payment due on his new maroon MGB only by getting back the $95 deposit on his apartment, which left him homeless and broke. He spent the next few months sleeping in health clubs and his MGB. At one point, he went to buy a Diet Coke at McDonald's and discovered he had just 12 cents to his name. Finally, he landed a job at a new Gainesville health club -- and read another book, Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill.
From Hill, Cirulli learned that the secret of success lies in knowing what you want. He proceeded to take out a legal pad and write down 10 goals, which he was supposed to read aloud every night before going to bed and every morning when he awoke. He did so for the next few years. The goals were: 1. Own a health club in Gainesville; 2. Make it respected in the community; 3. Earn $100,000 by the age of 25; 4. Own a Mercedes-Benz like the one driven by the Six Million Dollar Man; 5. Own a home in the mountains and one by the ocean and build another for his parents; 6. Become a black belt; 7. Become a pilot and own a plane; 8. Travel all over the United States; 9. Travel all over the world; and 10. Save $1 million.
So he believed it was destiny, not calamity, that beckoned when the owner of the Executive Health Spa confessed that he was an alcoholic, in the middle of a divorce, and about to declare bankruptcy. The following day, the bank announced that the club would be evicted in 30 days. To achieve his first goal, Cirulli would have to raise money, find a new place, persuade the landlord to lease it to him, get the necessary permits, build the space out, move the equipment, and somehow keep the club running -- and the members happy -- the entire time. How he did it reads like The Perils of Pauline.
First, he persuades the banker to give him 60 days rather than 30. It's not enough. He finds a location, but banks won't lend to a health club. He finally wangles a personal loan, only to learn that the location has fallen through. The banker who is the landlord of the old club demands he return the keys. Cirulli begs. The banker relents but demands a signed lease and a rent check by 9 a.m. Monday. Cirulli miraculously finds space in a brand-new mall. He has $1,700 and three weeks to get the place ready -- plumbing, electricity, new walls, showers, lockers, the whole bit. The club is still under construction when he moves in the equipment in June, whereupon a building inspector threatens to shut Cirulli down if he sees anyone using it. The club opens anyway. The building inspector never returns. Gainesville Health & Fitness gets its certificate of occupancy six months later, and Joe Cirulli achieves goal No. 1.
