Ep 12 – Andrew Obrecht – Building YYC Cycle

The Ambition Project – Calgary Entrepreneurial Podcast

The Ambition Project is a video series in which we interview successful and ambitious Calgary entrepreneurs and talk to them about their struggles, what they’ve had to overcome on their journey and valuable insights they have to share with up and coming business owners. The series will premiere on September 18th, 2018. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay updated or stream an episode on Spotify or iTunes.

Jonathan Hafichuk: Welcome Andrew, thank you so much for being a part of this series. 

Andrew Obrecht: Thanks for having me. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So Andrew is the owner of YYC Cycle, and YEG Cycle, there’s 5 spin studios so far and plans to grow in the future. 

Andrew Obrecht: Yeah actually it was just announced for our 6th studio in the university district in Calgary for 2020 so yeah always growing. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Exciting so tell us a little bit about what YYC Cycle is and what you guys offer. 

Andrew Obrecht: Yeah, both at YYC Cycle and YEG Cycle we’re very proud to provide a platform for connection and community and impact essentially. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So how do you go about creating that impact? 

Andrew Obrecht on The Ambition Project

Andrew Obrecht: Yeah you know we have a mantra on our wall that says we’re not in the business of spin class, certainly what we have is spin studios you know, indoor fitness. We are very proud to provide a community that is inviting to all different ages and athletic levels and so on they come in, connect, it’s that third space that a lot of people are craving to connect with other people and then also providing that platform for them to make an impact not only on each other when they come to the studio but also when they leave those doors and all the communities that surround our studios.

Jonathan Hafichuk: So for the really small percentile of people who don’t know what spin is, what is spin? 

Andrew Obrecht: Yeah I mean spin has been around and indoor cycling has been around for a long time since the ’80s and as things have evolved, where we are at today to describe it to people it’s almost as if you’re in a Vegas nightclub with spin bikes in the room. So it’s a darker room it’s not brightly lit that everybody is just staring at each other, an experience that some people may have had before with spin you know darker room, we have nightclub lighting system, nightclub sound system and really it’s an environment that people can fully immerse themselves into that experience. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: How long is a typical spin class? 

Andrew Obrecht: So our spin classes are between 44 and 46 minutes of working time and then about 4 to 6 minutes stretch, so in total it’s a 50-minute class that we offer. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Ok cool, how many classes a week do you guys run?

Andrew Obrecht talking about YYC Cycle and YEG Cycle

Andrew Obrecht: Between the 5 studios that we have, we run about 220 spin classes a week. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Awesome, so you started out you said you had entrepreneurial parents, what did your parents do and did that inspire part of your entrepreneurial journey? 

Andrew Obrecht: For sure, my parents are my superheroes right, I think that I’m a dichotomy of both my mom and my dad, I hope amazing combination of the two of them. My dad is a master chef from Vienna, Austria, and he had a challenging upbringing in Vienna and Austria and he really wanted the opportunity to leave and go find other opportunities elsewhere, one of which was to learn a trade so he learned how to cook. At the age of 18, he became a master chef and he’s cooked for everybody from the Queen to my next door neighbor to Brad Pitt and so on and kind of everybody in between and he got to Canada essentially with 70$ and a knife set to Montreal and that’s where he met my mom, my dad owned restaurants, hes cooked in some of the biggest hotels, some of the biggest sporting arenas as far as Spruce Meadows and so on and also has been an entrepreneur owning his own catering company, Deluxe Catering in Calgary and my mom on the other side I always say from my dads side I get my time management when I grew up, my dad was out of the house by 2 or 3 in the morning to go and prep in the kitchen and sometimes back at 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 at night and he did it for the family and you know he did it for the love of us and the family and my mom on the other side is in natural medicine and energy healing, so she’s a reflexologist, she’s an herbalist, she’s a Reiki master, she now just finished up her yoga teacher training. So I kind of get my time management side for my dad, you can’t put everything in the oven at the same time and expect it to taste good when it comes out, you have to put this in here and 3 minutes later it’s that and my mom I get that energy side of things. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So you started out playing football, but it sounds like it was kind of out of being compelled to do so out of what you kinda thought people wanted you to do. How did you go from playing football and realizing that wasn’t what you loved and going into first a garment business and then the spin business? 

Andrew Obrecht: Yeah you know growing up I had asthma as a kid so it’s not the first thing that I tell people but a lot of people will know now that we’re doing this, when I grew up I had asthma, I was allergic to everything that had fur which is why I still have a pet snake that I’ve had since I was 8 years old, so they live a long time and at that point in time my parents put me in competitive swimming and then it was martial arts and then it was rugby and then it was football and a lot of activities that could build up my body and lungs and so on to kind of get passed having asthma and so in football, I started in grade 10 with football as just something to do and I remember trying out and I had one of my best friends Justeg from junior high school and we tried out for the football team and the after the first week he had said hey its isn’t for me and being the great best friend, I said ok give me one more week, I’ll try it a little bit longer and if I don’t like it I’ll quit too, I’ll stop too. And ultimately at that point in time, I said this was challenging, I felt like there was a lot of opportunities that could come from it and that trend has actually followed into the decision of teaching spin. So that got me into football and I didnt stop and I had an opportunity to go and play for the University of Calgary and played there for 6 years retruity, had the opportunity to go to the Montreal Alouettes in 2009, for training camp there and really it was I never grew up wearing a football helmet and dreaming about playing pro football, and at that time I did my international business degree at the U of C but I was conflicted I didn’t really want to go and work a 9 to 5 job, I wanted to find something I was passionate about that I can really own and at that point in time It was also going to some yoga studios in Calgary and the owners of those yoga studios were opening up some spin concepts in Calgary kind of like the first boutique spin concepts in Calgary and they asked me if I wanted to be a spin instructor, at that point in time It was kind of something on the side I was very curious about I haven’t done a lot of spin classes, I didn’t necessarily love cardio, when I played football I was 260Lbs, that 10-year challenge is a very interesting one for me because I look very different 10 years ago, let alone 6 years ago. So I thought I love motivating people, connection is everything to me, energy is everything to me, and at the end of the day just like football when my best friend at that point in time said I’m going to quit, I thought you know what there’s really nothing negative to come from this so I’m only doing myself a disservice from jumping into this opportunity so, at that point in time, I was getting into this spin thing but also training for what I thought training for pro football but people thought it was awesome and it was cool and it was exciting that I was training for pro football but it didn’t really fill me up. I almost did it because I liked people saying Oh that’s awesome, pro football that would be great and it was actually a relationship at that point in time that the person I was with at the time told me, what do you want to do? Football is one opportunity but it doesn’t seem like that’s really what’s rooted in your heart and in your soul and what you’re curious about and passionate about and it’s also an opportunity that I’d be traveling a lot in that point in time, so I made the decision to step away from that dream that actually wasn’t my dream, it was other people’s dream, and really pursue and get more involved with spin and so I jumped into that.

Andrew Obrecht of YYC Cycle and YEG Cycle 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So was spin before that time, was it a big thing? Was it a growing trend? I feel like it’s only been in more recent years that it’s been a more mainstream thing or is that just you making that happen? 

Andrew Obrecht: Well I appreciate that and there’s many great studios in Calgary that are making it happen too so you know, it’s been really exciting to see what’s happened, not only in the spin industry in Calgary but also the fitness industry in Calgary as well. Spin has been around like I said since the ’80s, it’s just evolved itself prior to the studios I’ve stepped into and then YYC when we kind of took that vision and made it ours and evolved it even more on the cultural standpoint and the experience in the room and what people are really feeling when they step in and interact with our brand, you know prior to that, there was brands in the US that really started growing and that was where those spin studios, the first ones that I taught at, that’s where they kind of wanted to mimic, hey success leaves clues right? So look at other successful brands and models and so on and that was what was being brought to Calgary, and since then in the last 5 years, I mean March 17th will be 5 years for us it’s been insane to see what’s happening in the fitness industry. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So when we chatted before, you mentioned that you had a black belt in Hapkido, do you find that the time you spent in martial arts and the effort you put into learning and the discipline, did you learn skills that helped with your success in your business? 

Andrew Obrecht: Yeah I think, specifically martial arts for me there was a component of discipline, a component of integrity, a component of if you say you’re going to be somewhere, be there. There was a lot of aspects of martial arts that not only at the time growing up that kept me out of trouble probably gave me an outlet to express myself physically and let out emotions and so on through that process, but it was definitely a great stepping stone to the discipline that it takes to help navigate a company of our size now. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Your first business it sounds like it was a garment business, tell us a little more about that. 

Andrew Obrecht on The Ambition Project podcast

Andrew Obrecht: Yeah and it’s one that I haven’t really spoken a lot out about but it’s really been a great foundation to understanding expectations, a great understanding on what partnerships look like and so on, so when I was finishing up university and training for pro football and getting into spin, I had an idea that I explained to my trainer at the time about creating a garment that would put your body into proper posture. And so I had this idea and I had my international business degree and I wanted to use it for something, and so one thing led to another and I ended up partnering with a company from Winnipeg and we started building this business to create products, textiles, and garments that would put your body into proper posture some of which also had medical benefits to it as well. I traveled between Calgary and Taiwan and China and I learned a little bit of Chinese and that was such a great experience, doing business in Asia is so much about relationship first and foremost to business and I had the privilege, I don’t know if they had the privilege but I had the privilege of singing on stage for 500 Taiwanese people in Taiwan for my business, my business partner over there, his wedding so like I said I don’t know if they had the privilege of hearing that but I had the privilege of doing that and it was a great experience and I learned a lot of great tools and foundational lessons to what it means to grown business and also grow an effective partnership too. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Now you had some difficulties along the way, some ups and downs with that business.

Andrew Obrecht: Yeah, I also learned some people know me as the man of many sayings, and I also learned a lot of sayings back then through that process one of which “ Expectations is the root of all heartache” comes from Shakespear, but it really is that in a partnership and really that was the experience with partnerships, then I’ll talk about the product side, but partnerships, its very important in a business partnership just as a personal partnership or relationship to make sure that expectations are clearly explained and clearly understood from both sides so you’re not led to heartache right, so in that situation certainly there were promises that were made and expectations that were blown up on what that company was going to do and how much we could sell when the products arrived which ended up being 1/5th of what actually sold which on a cash flow side really hindered our business that I had to ask my dad for an allowance sometimes. You knew at 24, 25 years old and certainly that hurts pride but I’ve learned a lot of lessons on measuring expectations and clearly communicating expectations with those that you’re doing business with, those you are leading and so on, on the product side, one of the products that we 

made was a hot and cold compression wrap, you can put it in the fridge, you can put it in the microwave, you know it’s really interesting doing business with Asia you really need to describe to the minutia of what that product’s going to look like and how it’s going to function, essentially what they ended up doing, the product was a neoprene outer lining with a gel pack inside and you would think they would make a pouch, and then insert it and then nicely stitch it, well no they made a sandwich out of everything and then they just sewed right through it. So I got on such a high, I got an order of 3000 of these wraps, about 25000$ worth of product of which I got investments for, so it arrived, I had a great relationship with the manufacturer, this was going to be a big business deal, I already talked to distributors that would move those products, we were really going to do it and it was going to be awesome, then I didn’t even test them out, I sent them to my distributor and so on, and he calls me back and he says they’re leaking, I said what? Ya, they’re leaking, so what happened is they sewed right through the gel pack, the gel was leaking right out of these packs so in that point in time I had to be agile and really find a way to convince someone whos on the other side of the world, that runs a manufacturing plant for multiple countries around the world for ten times as many units as I ordered at that point in time and convince them to pay for the products to be shipped back to China to be remade and then shipped back to Calgary. I was successful with that, but it did come with a lot of tears at that time, I remember one morning I just called, 25 years old and calling my dad and crying to him on the phone like this is never going to work, so I learned a few lessons along the way. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: What are some things you did at that point to help restore your self-confidence and your confidence in the potential of the business? 

Andrew Obrecht: I think at that point in time, I’ve had amazing role models as parents, where essentially they’ve owned restaurants and they’ve had successes in business and they’ve had failures in business and so on, so I’ve seen this process and we just don’t give up, the philosophy of “it’s never the problem that’s the problem, it’s your reaction to the problem” has been something that’s been ingrained in me so certainly it comes with the emotions that come with failure and self-doubt and so on but at the end of the day at that point in time it was the role models of mom and dad who said hey listen, this is what it is right now and it’s ok to feel what you’re feeling but what are we going to do about it? Let’s find the best path that we think we can move forward and just go, don’t look back, just go and do it, easier said than done in certain circumstances but I think that was a huge thing to have that support from them. 

Andrew Obrecht speaking on Entrepreneurship in Alberta Business

Jonathan Hafichuk: So how did YYC Cycle get started? 

Andrew Obrecht: As we talked about this question do you want to be a spin instructor, ultimately I thought there was nothing negative to come from it, jumped into it and it was really, I hope people can trackback on my Instagram to see old picture of me but I was definitely not the figure of spin instruction at that point in time, 262 pounds, shaved head, on the bike, had to check the weight capacity of the bike, I was a big dude on the bike right, I used to tell people I was a unit on the bike but at that point in time, a little bit of training back then nobody really knew what that boutique spin was so we kind of did as best as we could in that training and it was up to us to build from there. I started teaching classes and started really loving what was happening in that space, so much so that it became more than just the bike, in fact I was talking with one of our first motivators we had, Alex Troniac and we were sitting down at coffee and I was talking to her about this vision of YYC Cycle and I was telling her that the bike just became an accessory to what happened in that room , it was a platform for connection and positivity and passion and the community that it brought together, and she said you gotta write that down, that’s your mantra, you look retrospectively on things that happen and that was a good idea,and so now in all of our studios you’ll see that mantra on the wall,and those words on the wall that “we’re not in the business of spin classes, were in the business of passion and positivity and community and authenticity and ultimately happiness and with that backtracking there,I started teaching classes more and more,loving this experience of connecting people with the room,and then I saw people really go through a transformation not only them but myself and at that point in time I really wanted people to feel welcomed in my classes whether or not it was their first time on a bike or if they were a high level athlete,its very easy sometimes especially with social media and marketing out there to compare your first chapter to someone’s 5th chapter to compare when you’re starting something,to compare that with someone whos been doing it for 10 years and so at that point in time I really wanted to create a community so I started calling people that came to my classes the “Biker Gang” and that just kind of grew from there.Whether or not people knew each other in the room or whether or not you were old or young or fit , unfit to society’s standards because it looks very different all over to different ages,different colours,different sexual preferences,I just wanted everybody to feel welcomed in that space because it was so much more ,so that Biker Gang really grew from there and we were on to something and so I had some conversations with the owners of that studios and asked if there were opportunities for me to be a part of that vision and and they had expressed that I could be a manager of work behind the front desk and so on and that wasn’t the vision that I maybe had so at that point in time I understood what their expectations were, so I said I’m going to do the best job that I can do so that there may be another opportunity for me one day, whether or not I stay here and I just keep growing or I leave and there might be opportunities elsewhere,so at one point in time we parted way and I was looking over my resume to be handed out to oil and gas companies and meanwhile I was teaching for an oil and gas company downtown and it was at that point in time I certainly didn’t have the money to start up a spin class studio alone,and I found out about 2 guys that were in oil and gas and they were around my age and saw spin becoming more popular and wanted to have a business together and wanted to have a spin studio but the thing with that was they had never taught it, so they didnt know the background of the classes,enter me and we came together and for the next 3 and a half years , the three of us built that and then from there we just finished a year and a half buyout from one of our partners who approached us, his vision for his life was going a different way and he wanted us to buy him out so we wanted to navigate that process in the best way possible and wish him nothing but the best of luck and success in his life and now Grady and I are looking forward to the future. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: What’s been your biggest struggle so far with building that business? 

Andrew Obrecht: People? I think, and I say that as a question because I think it’s also the most exciting part. You need to be so diligent on the connection that you provide for your people and the guidance that you provide with your people, there’s a saying of having 99% alignment and 1% vision, a lot of times in organizations, you know our company now is 270 people large who works with us and for us and then the Biker Gang is thousands and thousands of people and so to have that many people internally and make sure that they are aligned, you really need to make sure you’re leading your leaders and that you’re leading by example and then continuing to execute that growth on leadership strategies, meeting pulses, creating systems to make sure that when Grady and I aren’t there as the owners, people are still experiencing the same vibe that they had with Studio 1 in Kensington. 

Andrew Obrecht and Jonathan Hafichuk

Jonathan Hafichuk: Very cool, do you and your business partners have skills or talents that benefit each other or accent each other like holes that you fill? 

Andrew Obrecht: Oh for sure, I mean I’d be nothing without Grady and I would take a bullet for him in a second, him and I balance each other out really really well and in fact, it was interesting when we went through this transition of splitting partnership and having 3 partners become 2, I think it’s really important to own the roles that you have in business and also be able to trust your partners, hold them accountable to what they say they’re going to do but really trust that they can get it done. Grady and I through the transition did personality tests and so on and we just saw that sometimes maybe I’m a little bit more eager and he’s a little more reserved and maybe I speak a little bit quicker than he does and so sometimes I need to know when to shut my mouth and try to practice being the last one to speak, still practicing it. But I know for instance, for Grady he’s an incredibly intelligent individual so he may not respond with his opinion or his thoughts right away but I know when he comes back to me with an idea it’s worth listening to, it’s well thought out. We’ve done disk analysis of ourselves and we’re very opposite on the scale so I think it’s important to find someone that has the same vision and the same drive for success and that ultimate goal, that whole 99% alignment, 1% vision. For him and I have to be 99% aligned behind that 1% vision but at the same time, it’s really great to have someone that balances me out for sure. If there were 2 of me I’m sure we would destroy each other for sure. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So from when you started teaching spin to now, it sounds like you’ve built a quite a bit of following, a quite loyal following a bit of a personal brand, do you attribute that entirely just to your natural personality or were there things you did along the way to help build that following and build that awareness for your personal brand that you were conscious of? 

Andrew Obrecht: Thank you, first of all and it’s been a fun journey with that and I think when you talk about timing, timings a big thing ,I truly believe i’m really passionate about what happens in that room and so I think building my own personal brand just came from my excitement being in that room and being around people and taking selfies with people, if people go down my Instagram, it looks very juvenile in the beginning it’s all selfies posted with other people that came to my classes and that was the way I grew that community, that’s how I grew my personal brand a little bit and through that I had the opportunity to be an ambassador for Lululemon and after that had an opportunity to be an ambassador for Sporting Life, had the opportunity to do more public speaking and so on ,certainly I think I have the personality that worked with that,be a leader in that sense but it’s also our amazing team, honestly I would not be here without the incredible leadership that we that have underneath us and the leadership they have underneath them that goes all the way down to our crew and all the way down to our motivators, The brand has helped built me personally as a brand but i’m always very conscious that my purpose is to continue building other people up within the brad too so it seems like it’s a little bit of a forced circle on that standpoint. 

Andrew Obrecht being interviewed by Jonathan Hafichuk

Jonathan Hafichuk: When hiring management and the leaders in your organization what things do you look at and do you practice the hire fast, fire fast mentality? 

Andrew Obrecht: Yeah, I mean up to now in our company, we’ve looked for incredible powerful women so that’s a great thing. We’ve had really really great men that have been apart of our organization but it’s when Grady and I talk about this, I’m 32 years old, our biggest demographic is 25 to 34, so I’m 2 years away from not being the demographic as far as age, and our demographic is 70% female and 30% male and the men are growing which is great because they are starting to see that this is a really great outlet to have fitness in their life and cardio in their life and meet new people and have that connection and give back and make an impact on the company. For us it’s important that we have people that are leading this organization and this company that really resonate with our riders, certainly, I will always have a market and Grady will always have a market but with our leadership, we look for personality first, skill can always be trained, we look for people that have alot of our leadership have been with us for a long time and have grown within the company whether or not they started as a crew and then now they are motivators and now they’re senior leadership or whatever it is, we look for them that they’ve been apart of our company for awhile they understand why we do what we do not the what as far as spin and the “hire slow and fire fast”, I think more and more were protective of the culture that we have internally so we do take a little bit longer to find those people that come and join our internal community and certainly we have an incredible amount of A players that if someone comes in and they don’t resonate with our culture we make decisions pretty quickly with that. We always have conversations around it so hopefully, those people aren’t shocked by what a decision is made to part ways with someone, nobody ever likes getting fired but we try to do our best when that happens to make it a positive experience. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: I imagine with that many people it has to be fairly regular that you’ll have to let people go or they’ll have to quit so you must have some degree of turnover with that larger number of staff. 

Andrew Obrecht: We’re actually very lucky, we have a pretty low turnover. There’s certainly been parts of the business and times in the business where you go through a little bit of growing pains. When we open up new studios sometimes, for instance, we need 17 new motivators and 35 new staff, and so sometimes people come in there, and it just might not be the right fit for them to be in but we’ve been very successful with our leadership program and our mentorship program that we have within the company to make sure that we really onboard people properly that they can make the decision for themselves if this is the right family for them to be in, and it’s very apparent if it’s not and typically someone won’t get past an interview or our multiple interviews if they are not a great fit. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So you guys really pride yourselves on community involvement, what kind of things do you like to do to support the community around you and to give back? 

Andrew Obrecht: I think that’s one of the most exciting things about what we do when we first started the studios we wanted to start off making an impact on the community and attracting the right type of people into our doors as far as riders that felt that was important as well. What we did is we started our Giver Campaigns, and what the Giver Campaigns are is that whenever we open up our first studio or any studio, the first full week that we’re open, we host 10$ classes and all that money we donate to charities, further to that every Friday night we have what we call our Giver Class and that’s a 10$ class and at the end of the year we donate for every person that attends their 10$ per person to the charity. We take it one step further and really give ownership to the Biker Gang on where that money goes towards so every quarter were we put it out on social media and actually get nominations first for registered charities and then we do a vote for who that quarterly Giver Charity is going to be and that’s for every studio, Calgary and Edmonton and between that Giver Charities and our charity classes that we do and our fundraising events over the last 4 and a half almost 5 years, we’ve raised and donated over half a million dollars to those organizations. When you look at the barriers that break down creating this Biker Gang and who they support, sometimes its babies, sometimes it’s minorities, sometimes its animals, sometimes it’s people who experience domestic violence, so that really is what means so much to everybody that’s involved in this community and it really is a thread that’s woven within every single interaction in our studio, every single class that we have and certainly every single Giver charity that we raise money for. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: What kind of time and work did you have to put in when you were getting your studios off the ground?

Andrew Obrecht: All the time, all the time and all the work. When we started, the three business partners, when we started this is how it worked. One of us would wake up at 5, 4:45 in the morning, and get to the studio at 5 am. That person would work until 1:30 in the afternoon, that person then would come back with another one of the partners and open up the studio for the evening and the person that opened that morning would go home early and then we would rotate through that process every single day. It was about 10 months before we hired our first person to come and help us out there and I think that that’s so important to know from the ground up, how do can you put expectations when I talk about expectations being the root of all heartache, how can I put expectations on people within our business when I haven’t experienced it, washing bathrooms and folding towels and greeting riders that come in and understanding the flow of the studios and so on, it was a lot of time commitment and very well worth it. 

Andrew Obrecht with Jonathan Hafichuk of Symbol Syndication

Jonathan Hafichuk: Where do you see YYC Cycle and yourself in the next 10 years? 

Andrew Obrecht: Yeah, I mean 10 years, that’s a great question, you know Grady and I have a big vision for the studios and our goal is to have 15 studios across Canada within 10 years. I always have a disclaimer with that though because culture is so important to us, one of my good mentors told me that they’d rather grow a great company than a big company and I think we will never grow bigger than our people will allow us to, we’d be happy staying with 5, soon to be 6 studios if that meant that our culture remained intact, and we could have a touchpoint on that impact not only on our internal community but the external community. But certainly, we have a big vision for it, I think the fact that we’re not in the business of spin classes and we do provide that space for people to connect and create relationships and create impact and create emotional and physical change within themselves, there’s a global opportunity with that when you talk about how important mental health is, and finding outlets to provide growth with mental health in areas in Canada where we’ll focus on first, that people can really benefit from this third space, Starbucks talks a lot about it but this third space where people can connect and unwind and destress or let out anxiety or feel better about themselves or be empowered by that person teaching the class. We have a big vision for this so within the next 10 years we’re going to keep growing this and keep growing our leaders underneath ourselves. For myself I want to have opportunities to speak about what we’ve done and what we’ve built culturally and expand that to different audiences, I love public speaking and I want to be involved with more public speaking,whether or not that’s to students , to young entrepreneurs that are getting going or business owners that want to look at how they can shift their business and get out of the what they do and the why they do it, how they can take one class per week and turn that into half a million dollars donated to charities,you give not to receive but you receive so much more when you give, so I want to be able to have that platform in the future to speak to different groups and organizations about infusing that culture within those organizations,I want to mentor entrepreneurs to see them succeed in business, certainly I want to invest in other businesses one day that I believe in , and see that process happen again, I get so hungry listening to new entrepreneurs about how they can look at their businesses differently to find success and also purpose with it, I want to keep teaching spin and I’m going to be, you’re going to see me when i’m 75 years old in a park somewhere teaching the pigeons i’m sure and you’ll be like thats that Andrew guy he might be not all up there but he is still motivating someone in this world, in that room , in that environment, that’s my flow, that’s my mediation,thats my release, that’s my connection, sometimes it the only hour in the day that I dont have my devices so i’ll be teaching spin until I can’t anymore. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Very cool, you’ve had a fascinating story. I’m super excited to see you open 10 more studios. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. 

Andrew Obrecht: Yeah thanks for having me, this was great. 

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