The other nine goals took a little more time, but he achieved all of them within 12 years -- before his 33rd birthday. He drew two lessons from the experience. First, you can accomplish just about anything if you put your mind to it, are willing to work hard, and refuse to give up no matter what adversity you encounter. Second, books can change your life. There is no limit to what you can learn or how much better you can become, as long as you keep reading, listening, and searching for wisdom.
By then, moreover, he was well on his way to building a company molded around those beliefs and filled with people who shared them.
If owning a business was, in fact, Cirulli's destiny, it had kept itself well hidden prior to his arrival in Gainesville. As a child, he seemed destined only for a rough time. Linda Cirulli-Burton remembers her younger brother getting beaten up by the older boys at school. That spurred Joe to start lifting weights -- first in his cellar, then at the local YMCA. Soon, he was so strong that no one dared pick on him.
The Cirulli family lived on the hard-knocks side of Elmira. Joe was the third of seven children and the oldest boy. His father, Armand, was a 22-year Navy man who became a postman after his discharge. His mother, Frances, was a nurse. Making ends meet was a struggle. Cirulli remembers his parents bringing him a fancy chicken sandwich from Moretti's restaurant once when he was in the hospital after breaking his leg. "Enjoy it," his mother said, "because you'll never have one again."
In 1971, Cirulli graduated from high school and entered Corning Community College. After two years there, he still wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life. He decided to take a year off from school and travel around the country with a friend. When the friend backed out, he changed his itinerary and went to Gainesville, where his girlfriend was attending a community college. "I arrived at 3 a.m. on October 27, 1973," he recalls. Later that morning, he worked out at a local health club. Before leaving, he asked the manager if he could work as an instructor without pay for the next month in exchange for use of the facilities. The manager agreed. Cirulli extended his stay for another 30 days and began earning $1.90 an hour.
By the time Cirulli finally headed home for Christmas, Gainesville was in his blood. After the holiday, he intended to work with masons he knew in Elmira and save money for college, but the frozen ground gave him a good reason to revise his plans. He returned to Gainesville, thinking he would stay for three months and then go back to his job with the masons in the spring. He didn't make it. His success selling health club memberships obviated any need to earn money through masonry. Maybe that was when destiny took over. In any case, he had his own fitness center within four years.
Cirulli immediately went to work expanding it. He began with 2,500 square feet in a wing of the mall that had 11,000 square feet of space altogether. The rest was occupied by retailers of one sort or another. One by one, they moved out, and Gainesville Health & Fitness moved in, eventually taking over the whole wing. At the same time, he was proving that a health club could actually be profitable if you behaved as if you really cared about your members, as opposed to treating them like a necessary inconvenience. He invited members of the failed clubs he had worked for to join Gainesville Health & Fitness and agreed to honor whatever terms were in their original contracts. Beyond that, he promised that he wouldn't raise fees as long as they remained members. Still, Cirulli faced an uphill battle persuading the citizens of Gainesville to join, given the industry's reputation in town. So he turned his attention to the students of the University of Florida, which at the time did not have a fitness center. The majority of them, he realized, could not afford the initial payments that new members were traditionally required to make when they signed up. But Cirulli figured that most students were honest and would pay monthly even if there was no up-front fee. He set up a fee structure for students and began marketing to them. Within a few years, students made up 98 percent of GHFC's membership.
By then, Cirulli was beginning to develop a reputation in the industry. "Joe was already a legend in Florida when I started my business in 1982," says Geoffrey Dyer, founder of Lifestyle Family Fitness, a 57-club chain based in St. Petersburg, Florida. "I didn't sleep for two nights when I heard he might be coming to Lakeland, where I was located. I called him up, and he said, 'Don't worry. We're not coming. We're just talking."
Cirulli was indeed staying in Gainesville, but he had by no means stopped expanding. He opened a club for women in 1984. Two years later, after learning that a Wisconsin health club chain was coming to town and taking aim at his membership, he moved the original center to a new location and doubled its size. A couple of years later, after the University of Florida announced plans to build its own fitness center, he got into physical therapy and began marketing aggressively to the Gainesville public. In 1996, after the university built a second, even larger fitness center, he opened his giant flagship center. This time, he bought the building, because he realized he could control the market only if he owned, rather than leased, his facility.
As the business grew, so did Cirulli's renown. Articles about Gainesville Health & Fitness started appearing in industry publications, and people from other clubs began making the trek to Gainesville to see what Cirulli was up to. He welcomed them all. "He was willing to let anyone come down," recalls Frank Napolitano, formerly an executive with industry giant Town Sports International and now the CEO of GlobalFit, a provider of health club benefits to employees of large corporations. "He'd give you his training manual, share his best practices." Even if he wasn't there, visitors couldn't help being impressed by how cheery and helpful the staff was and by the cleanliness of the club.
