The story of CrossFit’s collapse in the final weeks of former owner and CEO Greg Glassman’s tenure doesn’t need to be retold. We told you. You don’t have to hear the story like new owner and CEO Eric Roza and CrossFit Inc. Because we’ve already told you that too.
When we from the MH SQUAD team spoke to Eric during his European tour, we instead wanted to find out what action he and his team had actually taken; how exactly it would not only fix the damage, but also increase the impact of health and fitness in every nook and cranny.
As you can see in this interview, which is exclusive to MH Squad members, Eric Roza does not rely on stock replies and glosses over even the jagged problems.
Men’s health: You took over CrossFit at a very turbulent time, with racial insensitivity and allegations of sexism during the previous owner’s tenure. What were the first things on your to-do list?
Eric Roza: We had to grapple with the question of whether CrossFit is really racist. Is CrossFit Really Sexist? And we have to make sure that we felt really good answering those questions and showing people that we weren’t.
Then it came down to figuring out how we can make CrossFit grow – it’s going to be way bigger than it is now and have even more impact on the world when it comes to changing lives.
Because we measure our success by it and will always measure it by how many lives we change. More than any other metric. This is more important to us than the company’s sales or the company’s profitability or anything else.
After all, after COVID, the question really arose of how we can become strong and continue to expand the business. I am currently speaking to you from Spain and we have significantly more gyms here than before COVID. It’s at an all-time high and we’re already seeing that in some markets. We are still recovering in other markets.
When it comes to the inflammatory topic of diversity, to what extent was that an opportunity to develop a more inclusive company?
It was 100%. We knew CrossFit at its best was one of the most complete environments I have ever seen. All barriers break down when you sweat with people. So we had to figure out how to reflect that in our actions as a CrossFit business as CrossFit Inc. How could we look the same?
We really tried to do business that way and one example is that we set up a Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Council; One of our executives spends 100% of their time with diversity, equity and inclusion. Not only at company level, but also in the community. We have an email box where we learn about diversity issues from gym owners and members and help resolve them.
Another example are the people we bring in: people with different skin colors, different genders and gender preferences. We recently hired three new senior executives. A president, a chief financial officer, and a chief marketing officer, and two of those three are women. So we’re really trying to show that we’re committed to this in every aspect of the organization.
How much focus has been put on helping, investing in and empowering CrossFit partners rather than just taking their money to use the brand name?
We asked the partners what tools they need to be successful. They all said very clearly that they don’t need any more rules from us, we need tools from us. So everything we tried to offer was entirely up to the affiliates to take in and take advantage of. When all is going well for a gym, don’t confuse success. If your business is a hobby, you may not want to spend any more time on it, and that’s fine, too.
But if you are working and trying to make your partner your main source of income, here are a number of tools that will make you more successful and also do more good in the world. So we’ve already invested millions of dollars and hired a lot more people for the affiliate group, and we will continue to do so.
Many people feel that there is a financial barrier to getting started with CrossFit and that makes it impossible for less privileged communities to get involved. Is that something you want to fix?
Absolutely. We have nearly 1500 gyms that we charge for so that they can provide services to their members. These gyms can be located in schools, churches, hospitals, military stations, and so on. Wherever I am in Spain there is a hospital around the corner that offers cancer patients CrossFit before their surgery. It is actually prescribed by the senior oncologist.
In the US we have now teamed up with an organization called The Phoenix that helps people recover from addictions. They established two CrossFit community centers, one in Boston and one in Denver. These have become magnets, not just for people with substance use disorders, but a number of other CrossFit nonprofits that can use these gyms for free and provide their services to their communities for free.
One last example. In the state of Colorado, we have four prisons that offer CrossFit to inmates, and we are very leaning towards that partnership. In the next few months or so – and people really think it’s amazing when I say that – we’re going to train 60 inmates to become Level 1 CrossFit Trainers so we can spread this more widely.
We have now agreed with the Colorado prison system that all 19 prisons will eventually have CrossFit gyms. Will still have the tough problem of getting them equipment at a reasonable price as they don’t have a huge budget.
But we give hope to people who don’t get a lot out of it every day. You have a different identity than a convict, which is so important. And we see much less violence and gang violence in the prisons from a public health perspective when they install CrossFit gyms. It is fully documented why the prison system is ready to spread it so widely. We are seeing fewer people returning to the prison system as they now have an identity and an opportunity to earn an income. And above all, they feel a certain empowerment.
These are just some examples. We’re talking about our long-term goal: “100 million lives will be changed by CrossFit”. I would like to see half of this happening in underserved communities that traditionally have not been able to join a gym.
I read recently that you imagine that Europe will soon have more affiliates than the US.
If you look back a few years ago, Europe had half as many members as the US. Now it’s 75-80%. I don’t know if it will be three or five years, but while there is growth in the US, Europe is growing much faster. The population in Europe is twice the size of the US, so I think we’ll end up seeing more gyms.
In what other regions of the world do you see the next CrossFit boom?
Australia and New Zealand are very good markets for us. I would really call this a maturing market. If you look at Latin America, Brazil has always been one of our biggest markets, but the rest of Latin America is honestly still early days. So we have a lot of opportunities to grow outside of Brazil. There were devastating problems with COVID there. And markets like Argentina had their own economic challenges regardless of the pandemic, which made it a very difficult time for them.
Asia and the Middle East are areas of enormous opportunity. We are still quite small in Asia. We have first footsteps in most of the Asian countries, but I can tell you that even in the big markets like China, India, Japan and South Korea we are still at the very beginning. We’re probably where we were in Europe ten years ago to give you an idea.
Every market has its own challenges. What works in the UK doesn’t work in Japan. So we have a lot to do there and consider it a ten year project. But if Europe becomes our largest market in, say, five years from now, Asia will be our largest market due to population growth and the growth of the middle class.
How we get there, I just have no idea!
Since you took over, has reinvesting in the CrossFit games been part of reaching out to more people around the world?
It is, yes. We know that five to ten times as many people watch the games as CrossFit right now. So we can reach a larger audience. But it’s not enough, because then we have to make CrossFit accessible to that audience. The game is a vehicle for intriguing people, but then we have to come into play with these transformative stories that common people depict, often with greater challenges than the viewer.
The athletes of the Games ensure ambition. We hope the stories we tell about the members of our community bring inspiration.
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source https://www.bisayanews.com/2021/10/03/crossfit-ceo-eric-roza-on-global-diversity-in-the-sport-of-fitness/
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