Fifty years in fitness, one life-changing layoff and a spare bedroom in Florida: that's all it took to spark one of the most recognizable brands in boutique fitness. On this episode of “The Sidekick Life,” Ellen Latham, co-founder of Orangetheory Fitness, joins Ryan and Tyler alongside Brett Ganther, Director of Franchise Development at Purpose Brands, to unpack why partnership chemistry matters more than any business plan, and what it really takes to build something that lasts.
Ellen had already spent five decades in the fitness industry by the time most people would be thinking about retirement, but it was a layoff in her 40s that set the real story in motion. A single parent with an eight-year-old son and no steady paycheck, she leaned on a lesson handed down from her father, a high school football coach who lived by what he called the momentum shift theory.
"You focus on what you have, not what you don't have," Ellen said, recalling how that mindset carried her through the hardest stretch of her career.
With nothing but a Pilates certification, she turned a spare bedroom into her first studio.
"That's where I began my entrepreneurial experience, out of a spare room in my house," Ellen said.
Word spread fast enough that she moved into an 1,100-square-foot studio, but it was her members who pushed her toward what would become Orangetheory. They loved the Pilates instruction but wanted more metabolic and fat-burning work, and Ellen, armed with a background in exercise physiology, built a workout designed to deliver exactly that.
What started in that small space has since grown into more than 1,500 studios worldwide, built on a workout philosophy Ellen hasn't changed since day one.
"Unless the human body changes, the science is the same," she said.
Every big brand has an origin story about partnership, and Ellen credits much of Orangetheory's duplicable success to co-founders Dave Long and Jerome Kern. The trio divided roles almost perfectly, something Ellen says she only fully understood after a conversation with Tony Robbins.
"He said the best partnerships have three individuals in it. They have an artist, they have a manager, and they have an entrepreneur," Ellen said.
She explained that she was the artist who created the workout, Dave was the cerebral manager, and Jerome was the relentless entrepreneur pushing for more locations.
That division of labor showed up early, when Dave and Jerome insisted Ellen stay out of the pilot studio entirely. If a franchise concept depends on one person's personal energy in the room, it isn't a franchise, it's a cult of personality. Instead, they needed processes, systems and the right people so the workout could be duplicated without what Ellen jokingly calls her "Ellen energy."
Long before "growth hacking" was a buzzword, Orangetheory was doing it with spray paint and old bicycles. In the brand's earliest days, the team painted beat-up bikes orange and scattered them around town to spark curiosity about a brand nobody could quite place.
"People, this name, where does it have to do with fitness?" Ellen said, recalling how locals guessed everything from orange juice to orange therapy before ever setting foot in a studio.
Just as unconventional was the requirement that franchisees presell 250 memberships before opening their doors. It created instant urgency and guaranteed recurring revenue from day one, and according to Brett, it still works today.
"To date, we still have not had anybody not open a studio because of two hundred and fifty," Brett said.
What sounded like a tough ask to new franchisees quickly became proof of how much hustle matters before the ribbon ever gets cut.
By 2017 and 2018, Orangetheory was in the middle of one of the biggest growth runs boutique fitness had ever seen, eventually crossing a billion dollars in system-wide sales and expanding past 1,500 locations. That kind of momentum eventually led Ellen and her partners to bring in Purpose Brands, co-founded by Anytime Fitness leaders Chuck Runyon and Dave Mortensen, giving Orangetheory a partner who understood scale without losing what made the brand special.
Today Brett oversees franchise development across four brands under the Purpose Brands umbrella, including Orangetheory, Anytime Fitness, Waxing the City and The Bar Method.
"The same people that helped boom Orange Theory into what it is ... are the same people now that also help find all the real estate, all the operational help, everything," Brett said. "We're not gonna all of a sudden start selling spaghetti out of our Orange Theory studios.”
But scale brings its own challenges. Ellen has seen multi-unit owners run identical systems under identical branding, yet get wildly different results between locations. Her diagnosis almost always comes back to leadership on the ground.
"If you're not gonna be on the ground in those studios... you have to build a very strong team of individuals," Ellen said.
A reminder that culture has to be built location by location, not assumed because of a shared logo.
Ask Brett about the future and the conversation turns quickly to technology, specifically artificial intelligence. Having spent two decades watching Best Buy scale from a handful of stores into a national retailer, he's no stranger to disruption, and he sees AI as the next wave fitness brands can't afford to ignore.
"It's not here to take our jobs. It's here to help us," Brett said, pointing to how data from wearables and heart rate monitors could soon tell members more about their sleep, nutrition and recovery than ever before.
Still, both Brett and Ellen were quick to draw a line between smarter tools and a smarter business. The moment a brand loses its human coaching connection, it loses what built its following in the first place. Technology might sharpen the experience, but it's never going to replace the person standing next to a member during their hardest thirty seconds on the treadmill.
For anyone sitting on the fence about leaving a steady paycheck for franchise ownership, Ellen's advice doesn't start with financing or market research, it starts with purpose.
"Love what you're going to buy into ... align your purpose," she said, pushing back on the idea that franchising is a passive investment. "Get ready to grind, get ready to work hard, not mediocre, but at an exceptional level.”
It's that mix of heart and hustle, more than any single system or tactic, that turned a spare-bedroom Pilates studio into a global brand and a seat at the table with some of franchising's biggest names. If Ellen’s story has you rethinking what's possible in your own career, Franchise Sidekick would love to help you find your own version of it.
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