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There are five steps to getting hired at GHFC, beginning with a four-page application form consisting mainly of puzzles and games. "We eliminate most of the lazy people with that," Stewart says. Next, references are checked by phone, which further reduces the pool. The third step is a group interview, with at least eight candidates and a hiring team including supervisors and department heads, followed by a one-on-one with the department head. Stewart challenges his people to come up with creative ways to determine whether candidates really share the company's four core values: integrity, willingness to work hard, extraordinary commitment to helping people, and desire to create the future.

One technique, for example, is the chair test, wherein extra chairs are left in the interview room. Stewart used it once with a candidate who had come through the group interview with rave notices. The candidate was sitting in the room when Stewart entered. "They need some chairs next door," Stewart said and began picking up the extra ones and carrying them out of the room. He kept doing this until only two were left. The candidate didn't move, except to take his feet off a chair when Stewart asked him to. "Well," said Stewart, "thanks for coming, but this place is really not for you."

The guy was taken aback. "But you haven't interviewed me yet," he said.

"Yes, I just did," Stewart said and ushered him out of the room.

Finally, candidates are taken through a high-intensity workout on the MedX machines developed by the late Arthur Jones, the founder of Nautilus. The idea is to work a particular muscle or group of muscles to exhaustion. "We want to see how people react to adversity," says Stewart. "That's when the true self comes out. We tell them up front we're not looking to see what kind of shape they're in. We just want to know two things: Are they hard working, and can they listen and follow directions?" Despite all the screening to that point, 25 percent of the candidates fail the test.

The ones who pass become the raw material of the leadership factory. Most recruits seem only too happy to get with the program. That includes being "shadowed" by a veteran employee who serves as an on-the-job trainer and administers weekly quizzes in preparation for quarterly tests, on which they must score at least 90 percent. They are further expected to take advantage of the opportunities for continuing education offered by the company's large library of self-help books and tapes. And they have to follow the rules.

Recruits receive points for things like tardiness, no tie or nametag, improper shoes, complaining, and cursing. Seven points in a quarter results in probation.

It's not for everybody, which is intentional. "The whole selection process is designed to weed out the wrong people," notes Will Phillips, a management consultant who runs roundtables, including one Cirulli belongs to, for fitness-industry CEOs. "Joe takes very seriously the idea that you should hire for attitude and train for skill. When you hire people and try to convert them to your way of doing things, you create a horrible tension that training is supposed to 'fix' employees. That may be more insidious than having a selective, somewhat authoritarian goal-driven business like Joe's."

Of all the goals that Cirulli and his colleagues set for themselves, none seemed more daunting than making Gainesville the healthiest city in America, though the choice of that mission was hardly a surprise in itself. For years, Cirulli had been saying that the ultimate measure of a fitness business should be the health of the community in which it is located.

But it was one thing to have such a mission and quite another to measure your success in achieving it. Debbie Lee was the one who came up with the mechanism. She remembered a project she had overseen when she was a coordinator of undergraduate programs at the University of Florida. One student had interned at Johnson & Johnson in Jacksonville, where she worked on the company's application for certification as a Well Workplace by the Wellness Councils of America. It turned out that WELCOA also had a program for certifying cities, based on the percentage of the work force in Well Workplaces, which the group defines as companies, organizations, and institutions with comprehensive wellness programs. Cities with 20 percent of their work force in such a program won the bronze, 30 percent took silver, and 50 percent earned the gold. One could argue whether a WELCOA certification actually constitutes the best measure of a community's health. But the program did lay out a plan of action that could be used to rally the community, and other cities had already participated, making it possible to compare results. And because no city had ever done better than a bronze, why not go for the gold?

But GHFC could do only so much by itself. If Gainesville was going to become the first Gold Well City, the community's movers and shakers had to get behind the effort. With that in mind, Cirulli and Lee approached Marilyn Tubb, who was then vice president for community affairs at Shands HealthCare, a University of Florida affiliate and operator of several hospitals around the state, and had just become president of the Gainesville Chamber of Commerce. In short order, Tubb and Lee put together a steering committee of 16 people, including representatives of media outlets, health care programs, and local government. The committee immediately went to work building support for the campaign.

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Bo Burlingham

Burlingham joined Inc. in 1983. An editor at large, he is the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. The book was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2006. Burlingham is also the co-author with Norm Brodsky of The Knack; and the co-author with Jack Stack of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome.

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