Stephen Hines

I've spent the last five years running the sales floor at some of Manhattan's most iconic strength gyms. The ones lifters fly in to train at. The ones that have been open longer than most of their members have been alive.

Before the gym work, I spent seven years in Boston residential real estate. I started at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, co-founded a firm called Lantern Residential, and then ran operations consulting for a handful of Keller Williams teams in Manhattan. Different industry, same skill: helping people buy a version of themselves they want to become, and making sure the business behind it can actually run.

The thing I kept noticing, at every gym I worked at, is that the people running these businesses are some of the sharpest operators I've ever met. They know the floor. They know the community. They know the product cold. What they don't have is a clean line of sight into their own numbers. The CRM lies. The POS doesn't answer the right questions. The reports everyone defaults to are pointed at the wrong things.

I started building my own reporting infrastructure because the tools I was given weren't good enough. Source attribution that actually held up. Close rates by real source, not by whatever the front desk clicked last. Cohort retention. Promo ROI measured on net impact instead of lead volume. The whole picture.

I'm still in the room. I run a sales floor every week. The writing on this site comes from current reps, not from an old résumé.

If any of this resonates, I'd like to hear from you.