The Believer

The impact has been huge. The Well City campaign alone brought together people from throughout the community, including people from hospitals, businesses, government organizations, The Gainesville Sun, the University of Florida, and the local community college. Obviously, many factors are driving the burgeoning trend toward workplace wellness, not least the explosion of health care costs and the demonstrable effectiveness of wellness programs in holding them down. And yet what has happened in Gainesville is also part of another story -- a story about how one man's obsession with self-improvement can imbue a company and then spread from that company to an entire community, and from that community to other communities far and wide.

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.

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