The Believer

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.

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.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6  NEXT