FEC Talkshow: Episode 005 — Garrett Clark

July 17, 2020 (San Francisco)

This past Monday, on July 13th, Harmony Plus continued our Future Entrepreneur Challenge (FEC) talkshow. For our fifth episode, we interviewed Garrett Clark, who has had extensive years of marketing experience at companies including Sony and Intuit. Furthermore, when many companies were facing daunting operational obstacles due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Garrett was able to successfully manage and grow his fitness studio.

As the Co-Owner of Athletes Play Hard Fitness Studio, located in downtown Escondido, California, Garrett was able to directly learn, develop, and adapt upon his business knowledge and skills to successfully pivot his company’s services to effectively accommodate customers and their needs. The company’s business model of training athletes outdoors, even prior to the pandemic, presented an opportunity for Garrett to capitalize on this unique situation.

Garrett’s entrepreneurial journey began as a leap of faith, after having come to the realization that a corporate work environment with big companies was not the best fit for him. For Garrett, his passion lay in athletics and coaching, and even during his time with Sony he was coaching athletics. With the positive feedback from his athletes and fellow coaches, Garrett decided to start a fitness studio on his own. However, his early days in running the studio were met with many challenges and difficulties.

“I opened up a small fitness studio and proceeded to do everything wrong, entrepreneurially speaking, that you could do wrong… I didn’t understand, number one, my consumer base… I didn’t really do a full scan of other competing companies or gyms in the area to make sure I was differentiating myself and then the community at large.”

However, these early hardships were valuable learning experiences going forward, as it taught Garrett how to recover from setbacks, evaluate the marketplace, and understand his and his company’s true niche. These learning experiences, along with his passion for coaching, is what has allowed Garrett to not only mentor children in entrepreneurship, but adults as well.

“To be honest, there’s isn’t a whole lot of secret sauce here. It’s just simply being willing and able to be flexible… understanding what the marketplace is throwing at you… allowing yourself to not get stuck in a traditional or comfortable way of thinking, but instead focusing on how you can move things forward or make the situation better. For a lot of people this takes an overhaul of how they think.”

Garrett also provided advice from his own experiences for high school students interested in pursuing entrepreneurship. He stressed the importance of seeking mentorship as a critical tool to successfully pursuing a path of entrepreneurship in that many early avoidable mistakes could have been prevented. He also explained that a lot of entrepreneurs don’t spend a lot of time to think about what their niche is or will be, and that doing so would be extremely important in determining the success of a start-up.

“What will make their business unique that will enable them to succeed in a way that they desire? [For me], what I could do better than most gyms was to train even regular people to be more athletic. That’s what I could bring that was unique, and once I honed in on that, it’s been a whole different ball game.”

If you are interested in learning more about Garrett and his story, you can watch the full video here.