The Owner Seat

The Owner Seat (formerly The Valisights Podcast) is where fitness & wellness owners step out of the whirlwind and into the numbers. Host Albert Ramos, Fractional CFO for fitness & wellness brands, sits down with studio owners, franchisors, and finance leaders to break down cash flow, unit economics, and the messy middle of growth. Book a call with Albert Ramos: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/30min

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  Episode #92

  Gym Member Retention: The Number Most Studio Owners Don't Track | Zac Crain

  Sep 21, 202646 minS2

  Ask any studio owner what revenue was last month and you get an answer in two seconds. Ask how many of the members who joined twelve months ago are still paying today and you get a blank stare. That is not a discipline problem. Nobody ever asked owners to track it, so nobody built the habit of looking. In franchise fitness the gap gets wider. Two locations of the same brand, three states apart, run the identical workout and post completely different retention numbers, because the brand guarantees the workout and leaves year two up to whoever bought the territory. This episode is about the number that decides whether a studio is still open in three years, and what an operator can do about it on Monday morning. Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Zachary Crain, CEO and Co-Founder of RetentionRx, and goes behind the build: - Retention defined properly: what to count, why a blended average membership length hides the one location or join-month cohort dragging the whole network, and why a freeze request is a cancellation with better manners. - The LTV math every owner should run: a member at $150 per month who stays 12 months is worth $1,800. Getting to $2,250 takes either a 25 percent price increase or three more months of stay. Same math, completely different risk. - The culture blind spot: the twenty loud members who convince an owner the culture is great, the three hundred nobody is talking to, and where software stops and a human conversation has to start. Zachary Crain is the CEO and Co-Founder of RetentionRx, a Las Vegas-based software platform built exclusively for boutique fitness franchisees and franchisors. RetentionRx gives owners a real-time read on who is engaging, who is fading, and who needs attention right now, so they can act before the cancellation instead of after it. Zac has spent about a decade in boutique fitness. He set national and international sales and growth records across multiple brands, then worked as a franchisee business consultant in the trenches with BFT, Pure Barre, YogaSix, StretchLab, Row House, CycleBar, and more, where he found the same retention gap in studio after studio. He built software instead of staying a consultant because a habit that depends on one consultant showing up does not scale past that consultant. If you're a franchisor, this is the case for making retention part of the brand standard: required, measured, and reported by location. If you're a franchisee or independent studio owner, this is the definition, the formula, and the Monday-morning actions that add months to a membership. If you're an operator or investor evaluating a multi-unit fitness or wellness business, this is the number to ask for before you trust the revenue line. Connect with Zac on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachary-crain-581123184/ Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible. Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328 Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/ More from The Owner Seat New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST. Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@theownerseatpodcast STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

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  Episode #91

  Why Your Kid's Coach Might Be Wrong About Heat | Melissa Fortenberry | The Owner Seat

  Sep 14, 202638 minS2

  As of August 1, every UIL school in Texas is required to monitor Wet Bulb Globe Temperature before every outdoor practice, contest, workout, and marching band rehearsal. Rapid cooling zones. Full-body ice immersion equipment on site. Every athletic director in the state is spending compliance dollars right now, and most of the operators listening to this show serve exactly the population affected. Here is the problem the mandate does not solve: WBGT measures the field, not the kid. Two athletes in the same practice, under the same reading, can be in completely different trouble depending on hydration, acclimation, and fitness that day. By the time a coach can see a symptom, the window has already started closing. This episode is about the founder who left a Chief Product Officer seat to measure the athlete instead of the weather, and whether the economics work when a school district is the buyer. Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Melissa Fortenberry, Founder and CEO of HeatSense, and goes behind the build: -What core body temperature tells you that air temperature and visible symptoms cannot, how a chest or bicep sensor estimates it against the invasive gold standard, and where the error range and validation actually stand -Why a school district can be fully compliant with one WBGT device on a pole and still never buy a per-athlete wearable, who the real buyer is (athletic director, booster club, parent, or private club program), and how hardware cost, membership pricing, and gross margin hold up across an off-season -Whether per-athlete monitoring makes a program more protected or more exposed when an athlete still goes down, and how minors' biometric data gets handled under Texas biometric law, student-record obligations, and parent consent Melissa Fortenberry is the Founder and CEO of HeatSense, based in Austin, Texas. Melissa comes out of twenty years as a consumer internet and product executive, and that is why this conversation goes well beyond a typical founder interview. She spent nearly seven years at RVshare, the first and largest peer-to-peer RV rental marketplace serving more than 60,000 RV owners, joining as Vice President of Product and rising to Chief Product Officer. Before that, nine years at HomeAway, rising from product manager on VacationRentals.com to Vice President of Global Product Marketing across HomeAway, VRBO, and 25 global vacation rental sites, through the Expedia acquisition in December 2015. Earlier roles include Philips, where she managed an $8 million budget across the Norelco and Sonicare brands, Millward Brown Vermeer, and StarMedia. She holds a degree in finance and Spanish from Tulane and an MBA in marketing from UT Austin's McCombs School of Business. In June 2025 she left software to build hardware. HeatSense pairs a lightweight, non-invasive sensor worn on the chest or bicep with an athlete app and a live coach dashboard, tracking core body temperature and heart rate continuously so a coach or athletic trainer knows who needs a break before performance drops. The premise underneath it: regulations look at visible symptoms and guidelines look at the weather, but the measurement that actually matters is core body temperature, and in the pros it is still taken with a rectal thermometer. [OPTIONAL, pending Melissa's OK: In 2026, Alabama football became HeatSense's first team customer, as reported by the Tuscaloosa News.] If you're weighing a raise or a procurement-driven sale: you hear how a pre-revenue hardware founder answers the validation, liability, and buyer questions an investor asks before writing a check. If you're a franchisor, franchisee, or operator with athletes training in the heat: you get the honest version of what the mandate changes, what it does not, and what to do differently on Monday. Connect with Melissa: https://heatsense.com Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible. Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328 Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/ More from The Owner Seat New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST. Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@theownerseatpodcast STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

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  Episode #90

  iCRYO Co-Founder Kyle Jones: What Franchisors and Franchisees Get Wrong | Kyle Jones

  Sep 8, 202654 minS2

  Every recovery and longevity franchise system has the same two numbers, and they almost never match: units open and territories awarded. The gap between them is where franchisors get paid, where franchisees get stuck, and where most of the honest conversations in this industry never happen. Founders who built a system from zero rarely talk about that gap while they're still inside it. The ones who leave usually go quiet. This episode is the exception, built with a co-founder who agreed to be asked hard questions about the company he spent eleven years building and walked away from in June. Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Kyle Jones, Co-Founder and former CEO of iCRYO, and goes behind the build:What franchisors get wrong, what Kyle got wrong, and what a franchisor does right that a franchisee never sees or gives them credit for The franchisee profile that actually succeeds in a recovery or longevity franchise versus the one that looks great on paper and fails, specific to capital, temperament, and time What it costs to stop being the person whose name is on the brand, and what Kyle decided in the weeks after he left Kyle Jones is the Co-Founder and former Chief Executive Officer of iCRYO. Kyle is a Houston native who came up through a full-ride football scholarship and a B.S. in Exercise Sports Science from Texas State. In January 2013 he managed the startup of whole body cryotherapy inside Valeo Physical Therapy, building the scheduling, marketing, and management protocols from scratch when almost nobody in the country had heard of the modality. In July 2015 he co-founded iCRYO and spent the next eleven years in the operator seat, moving from Co-Founder and COO to Chief Innovation and Branding Officer, Co-CEO in April 2024, and CEO from September 2024. Under his leadership iCRYO grew into one of the largest recovery and longevity franchise systems in the world, with 52 locations open across the United States and Canada and roughly 250 more awarded. In May 2025 he was named a finalist for Franchise Executive of the Year in the Athletech News Power Players Awards. In June 2026 he left the company, and in the weeks that followed he was baptized for the first time in his life. His stated core values are faith, family, and fitness, and his headline is four words: significance over success.If you're a franchisor or emerging brand: you hear the honest tension between selling development and opening units, and whether a recovery franchise model that has tightened is a model problem, an execution problem, or a market problem. If you're a franchisee or a candidate: you get the question Kyle wishes every prospect had asked him and almost none did, and the mistakes franchisees make before they ever open a door. Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible. Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328 Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.comConnect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/ More from The Owner Seat New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST. Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOwnerSeatPodcastSTRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

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  Episode #89

  Millions Are About to Come Off GLP-1s: Is Your Studio Ready for What Walks Back In? | Lekha Vyas | The Owner Seat

  Aug 21, 202644 minS2

  Millions of people are going to come off GLP-1 drugs. Some for cost, some for side effects, some because they were never meant to be on them forever. When they come off, the weight tends to come back, and they are going to walk into your studio asking your front desk questions nobody trained your staff to answer. Meanwhile the shelf behind that desk is filling up with products making bigger and bigger promises, and most owners have no framework for evaluating any of it. This episode is that framework, built with a founder who agreed to be asked hard questions about her own product. Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Lekha Vyas, Founder and CEO of SYNQ Wellness and Founder and CEO of ELVY Lab, and goes behind the build: What role a wellness product can and cannot play alongside physician-directed care when a member is transitioning off GLP-1 therapy, and what your front desk should actually say How to separate published literature from a company's own observational data, and how to tell where the evidence stops Who owns the substantiation problem when a studio owner repeats a product claim to a member Lekha Vyas is the Founder and CEO of SYNQ Wellness and the Founder and CEO of ELVY Lab, a second-time founder based in New York. She spent more than five years at Procter & Gamble leading supply chain planning and operations, then moved into leadership roles across some of the largest beauty companies in the world. At L'Oréal she played a key role in the Urban Decay acquisition and integration, running supply chain planning, retail planning, and global business planning. She joined Chanel as Director of Inside Sales, then Estée Lauder as Executive Director of Global Business Planning, where she led global planning initiatives, portfolio strategy, and M&A integration. At Guthy-Renker Ventures she served as Head of Strategic Planning and Operations, helping evaluate, incubate, and scale emerging consumer brands. She was also part of the founding team behind JLo Beauty. Most founders in the supplement industry come out of marketing or product development. Lekha comes out of enterprise strategy, supply chain, operations, and commercialization, and that is why this conversation goes well beyond a typical founder interview. SYNQ Wellness is developing a patent-pending oral dissolving film platform focused on metabolic health. Its first product combines dihydroberberine, or DHB, with six additional plant-derived bioactives in a fast-dissolving oral strip. Rather than creating another supplement, the company's thesis is that formulation and delivery can be just as important as ingredient selection, while building toward what Lekha believes can become a broader oral delivery platform across multiple wellness categories. The company has built an early access waitlist of more than 4,800 people and has publicly documented much of its product development as it prepares for launch. This episode is for fitness, wellness, and longevity owners, franchisees, and multi-unit operators who are tired of: Watching members cycle on and off medications with no plan for what happens next Sending staff to the front desk with no script for questions that are really medical questions Stocking retail products they cannot evaluate and could not defend if asked Tying up working capital in inventory before they know whether it moves Top topics we cover The GLP-1 off-ramp and the duty of care. What a wellness product can responsibly sit alongside, what your front desk should say when a member asks what comes next, plus screening, labeling, and contraindications including insulin and pregnancy. From enterprise operations to a one-product startup. What actually transfers from global supply chain and commercial planning, and what has to be unlearned completely. Formulation and delivery versus ingredient selection. Lekha makes the full case, then names exactly where the thesis hits a ceiling. Three buckets of evidence. Published literature on the ingredients, a company's own observational data, and future validation studies, and how an operator should weigh each one differently. Claims and who carries them. Where a structure and function claim ends, where regulatory exposure begins, and what happens when a studio owner repeats a claim to a member. The business underneath it. Landed cost, gross margin, blended acquisition cost, month three retention, wholesale terms, and the working capital trapped in inventory. How this episode helps you win If you're a single-studio owner: you get a repeatable set of questions to ask any vendor before their product touches your shelf, and language your staff can use when a member asks about coming off a prescription. If you're a multi-unit operator: you get the staff training gap made visible across locations, and a clear line on what your front desk should and should not say. If you're weighing acquisitions or outside capital: you hear how someone who ran M&A integration at global scale allocates capital when proof is expensive and the company is pre-revenue. If you're a franchisor or emerging brand: you get the honest version of what claims cost you, and the planning mistake Lekha watches wellness founders make over and over. Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible. Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328 Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/ More from The Owner Seat New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST. Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOwnerSeatPodcast STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

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  Episode #88

  From Restore Hyper Wellness to Humanaut Health | Jim Donnelly | The Owner Seat

  Aug 17, 202659 minS2

  Most operators can describe the business they want to build. Very few can describe the first ninety days that make it real. Jim Donnelly has done it across five industries, sold companies out of three of them, and is doing the hardest version of it right now in longevity. This episode is about the execution, not the vision. Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Jim Donnelly, Co-Founder and CEO of Humanaut Health and Co-Founder of Restore Hyper Wellness, and goes behind the build: What was structurally fragile in the Restore Hyper Wellness franchise model, and how much of it was set on his watch The real unit economics of a 4,000 square foot longevity clinic: members to break even, blended acquisition cost, and payback on the buildout Whether franchising actually works for medical and quasi-medical services, or only works until the market softens Jim Donnelly is the Co-Founder and CEO of Humanaut Health in Austin, Texas, a premium longevity and health optimization clinic. Before Humanaut Health, he co-founded Restore Hyper Wellness and ran it as CEO from 2015 to February 2023, building it past 220 locations and $32 million in revenue by 2020, number one on Inc's list of the hottest franchise businesses in America, number one in its category on the Entrepreneur Franchise 500, and a Fortune top workplace in health care. He served as a US Army officer from 1991 to 1994, then held brand and marketing roles at Kraft Foods on Jell-O Pudding and Cool Whip, BellSouth, Coca-Cola as a global brand manager, and Citigroup as Vice President and Director of Marketing, where he built the brand for Citi f/i, Citibank's internet-only bank. In 2000 he co-founded IgoUgo, a user-generated travel content platform, and sold it to Sabre Holdings in February 2005. Through Pursuit Group in Charlotte he developed luxury mixed-use real estate, placed two buildings on the National Historic Registry, co-founded a men's grooming lounge, and founded the Charlotte Athletic Club. He then built Kin Valley, a family social platform, from 2010 to 2015. Humanaut Health's first location is 4,000 square feet in The Grove in Austin, with body imaging, fitness testing, an IV lounge, and a regenerative medicine procedure room. Memberships start around $355 per month, and every member receives a full-body baseline across more than 100 health markers. Jim raised $8.7 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by The Kabech Fund with Midnight Venture Partners, and built a leadership bench including Chief Medical Officer Dr. Amy Killen, regenerative medicine lead Dr. Harry Adelson, Chief Technology Officer Tony Cheng, and Chief Product Officer Elliot Karathanasis. This episode is for fitness, wellness, and longevity owners, franchisees, and multi-unit operators who are tired of: Signing franchise agreements without knowing what breaks when the category softens Adding clinical or medical services with no model for how the P&L absorbs the labor Watching membership revenue look strong on paper while month twelve retention quietly falls apart Building a service line on a regulatory assumption that can change without warning Top topics we cover The pattern across five industries. Strip away the category and there is one repeatable thing Jim does every time. He names it. Reading an early market. Arriving early is usually how founders go broke. The specific signal Jim looks for to separate a real market from a mirage. The first ninety days of a new venture. What he does personally, in what order, and the short list he refuses to delegate. Running a medical company as a non-clinician. Where he defers completely to his physicians, and where he has overruled them. Franchising medical services. Rent, equipment, clinical labor, and a royalty stacked on one P&L, and what he deliberately changed the second time around. Longevity membership economics. Members to break even, acquisition cost, buildout payback, and the retention mechanism for the member who feels fine in month seven. How this episode helps you win If you're a single-studio owner: you get a working method for testing whether a new service line is a real market or a trend you are about to fund. If you're a multi-unit operator: you get the labor and capex math behind clinical services before you sign a lease you cannot unwind. If you're weighing acquisitions or outside capital: you hear how an $8.7 million seed round got structured and what the investors underwrote. If you're a franchisor or emerging brand: you get an honest look at what was fragile in a top-ranked franchise model, from the person who built it. Work with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and Wellness I'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible. Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcast Subscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328 Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.com Connect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/ More from The Owner Seat New episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST. Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOwnerSeatPodcast STRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com

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