Forty years in the fitness industry is enough time to watch the entire modern gym business be invented, iterate, stumble, and reinvent itself — multiple times. John Romeo has been present for all of it, accumulating a depth of perspective that few people in the industry can match. His experience spans the birth of 24 Hour Fitness and the growth of the Crunch Fitness franchise, giving him a view of large-scale fitness business that is both historical and operational.

In this conversation with Matthew Januszek, Romeo shares what four decades of experience actually teaches you — and the answer, more than any strategic framework, is about people. Customers and employees both. It is a conversation about the human side of building large fitness businesses, the dynamics of healthy competition, and what the franchising model demands of the people who run it well.

About John Romeo

John Romeo's career encompasses some of the most consequential chapters in American fitness history. His involvement in the early days of 24 Hour Fitness places him at the founding of what became one of the largest gym chains in the world — a vantage point that gives him a clear-eyed understanding of how scale changes an organization and what it demands of leadership.

His insight into the Crunch Fitness franchise model reflects a different but equally instructive dimension of large-scale fitness business: how you build a system that can be replicated across many operators while maintaining quality, culture, and brand integrity. Franchising at scale is a people management challenge as much as it is a business model challenge, and Romeo's experience illuminates both.

The thread that runs through Romeo's perspective, across both 24 Hour Fitness and Crunch, is a conviction that the fitness business is fundamentally a people business — that the relationships between staff and members, and between franchisors and operators, determine outcomes more than any product or pricing decision. Forty years of evidence supports that conviction.

What John Romeo and Matthew Januszek Talked About

• Forty years in the fitness industry reveals that the fundamentals of great gym businesses have not changed: the quality of the relationships between staff, members, and operators determines outcomes more than any market trend or product innovation.
• The birth of 24 Hour Fitness is a case study in how a simple, accessible premise — fitness available around the clock — can scale into a market-defining business when executed with operational discipline and relentless focus on serving the customer.
• Franchising the Crunch Fitness model required building systems robust enough to replicate across many operators while preserving the brand energy and culture that made Crunch worth franchising in the first place — a genuinely difficult balance that Romeo can speak to from direct experience.
• Healthy competition in the fitness industry benefits everyone — operators, consumers, and the category — and Romeo's perspective across four decades illustrates how competitive pressure has consistently driven both innovation and quality improvement.
• The human side of large fitness businesses is where most failures originate: organizations that get the product right but neglect the people dynamics — among staff, within franchises, between leadership and front-line employees — tend not to sustain their early success.
• Employees and customers deserve the same quality of attention — Romeo's career reflects a belief that great fitness businesses invest in their people as deliberately as they invest in their facilities and programming.
• For anyone building or franchising a fitness business today, Romeo's four-decade perspective provides a useful corrective against short-term thinking: the businesses that have lasted are the ones that treated people as the asset, not as a cost.

Why This Conversation Matters

Matthew Januszek has built his career on the conviction that fitness businesses succeed by taking people seriously — as customers, as community members, and as employees. John Romeo's four decades of experience affirm that conviction from the inside of some of the most significant fitness businesses ever built. This conversation gives listeners a rare opportunity to stress-test what they believe about fitness business against someone who has seen it all play out over a genuinely long arc.

That long view matters deeply to the work Matthew is doing with Escape Fitness USA and the LIFTS Podcast. Building something durable in the fitness industry requires understanding not just where the market is going but where it has been — what worked, what failed, and why. John Romeo is as useful a guide for that as anyone in the industry.

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