ORIGIN STORY
The Beginning
St. Peter, MN. A town of 10,000 people in the middle of Southwest Minnesota. Not your typical location for the starting point for a software company, but Coach Catalyst isn’t your typical software. Why St. Peter? It's the location of Gustavus Adolphus College - a small Swedish liberal arts college that boasts one of the best D-III basketball programs in the region. That is what brought Trevor and Kane together for the first time.
They hit it off right away. On the court. Back at the dorms. Hanging out on weekends. Their skills on the court complimented each other nicely.
Trevor was the slasher who could get to the hoop and played above the rim. Kane was the sharpshooter who helped stretch defenses. Both understood the game and played at a high level, leading Gustavus to a conference championship and earning All-Conference honors. They had more in common than just basketball. They both loved the weight room and becoming better athletes. Between nutrition, athletic performance, and recovery, they always had something to talk about. But after four years, graduation came and it was time to move on.
The Next Step
Kane moved to Chicago to earn his MBA from Loyola University Chicago. Trevor pursued his lifelong dream and got picked up to play pro ball in Germany.
Even though they were thousands of miles apart, they still often communicated about health and fitness topics.
The Gyms
Kane finished up his MBA within a year and a half and decided to move back to his hometown of Madison, WI. He still had the itch to run a fitness facility and got his chance shortly. He took over CORE Health and Fitness and used his business degree to help turn around a struggling gym. After four years of pro ball in Germany, Trevor moved back to his hometown of Redwood Falls, MN and started his own gym - Functional Fitness. These were very similar businesses. Both were coaching gyms focused on getting clients results and improving their experience. Both were scaling... quickly! And both were starting to have similar issues.
The Issues
Like a lot of fitness pros, when they had 10-20 clients, it was easy to manage. Keeping track of everyone was simple and communication was streamlined. But they found more and more holes in their business as they grew. Number one, it was difficult to keep clients accountable! Sure they did great in the gym the three hours a week we saw them but what about the other 165 hours in a week?? That is what really mattered. And helping clients change their behavior was difficult.
They tried having clients track things on pen and paper - that didn't work. They tried using habit tracking apps - but there wasn't a way for a coach to view all their clients' progress. They even tried other "coaching software" on the market. None of it did what they needed. But it wasn't just client accountability that was lacking as they grew... With more and more clients, communication was becoming almost impossible to manage. It was coming in all over the place - email.
Text messages. Facebook messages. It was nearly impossible to stay on top of it all. This meant messages started slipping through the cracks - not the customer experience you want. And speaking of customer experience, each new client was being treated differently. As they hired more coaches to help with their growing clientele, Coach Jeff might give different information than Coach Trevor. They didn’t have a set system. There was no way their gyms could continue to grow. They needed a better way or it would all start to crumble. They both hit a breaking point. Something had to change.
The Software
So two guys who can't write a line of code decided to start a tech company. It wasn't smooth. It took 9 months just to get a first version done enough for them to view - and it was completely unusable.
That was 9 months and thousands of dollars down the drain. They moved on to plan B with a new company. What was supposed to take 3-6 months took 12+ months but they finally had a functioning product. It wasn't pretty - but it worked! Even though it wasn't great, other coaches wanted it. That told Kane and Trevor they were on to something.
So after a long five years of constant improvements, Coach Catalyst has grown from a basic habit tracking software to a full-fledge coaching system. Today, Coach Catalyst helps overwhelmed coaches scale to 200-300 clients all while working less hours AND keeping a personal touch with clients. We have a global team working with thousands of coaches and have helped make a positive impact in over 1/2 million lives. At the end of the day, we know The more successful our coaches are, the healthier our world can be.
