Greenville’s Heather Hudson has always had a passion for fitness. She grew up on a healthy diet of Jane Fonda’s VHS step aerobics workouts in her living room.
Today, she and her husband Shannon, a professional kickboxer, have converted that passion into 9Round, the world’s largest kickboxing-based gym franchise. The Simpsonville-based company now has nearly 700 locations around the world, all teaching a trainer-guided, 30-minute full-body circuit workout painstakingly developed by the Hudsons.
It’s interesting now, with all that success, to look at where the company started back in 2008.
Heather and Shannon Hudson met when Heather started taking martial arts classes at a studio around the corner from her apartment.
“I ended up getting to know one of the instructors and owners there,” she says, “and we ended up falling in love and getting married. One year after we were married, he thought of this prototype for 9Round and we decided to open it up together.”
Neither Heather nor Shannon knew how to start a business from the ground up, so they learned as they went along.
“It was a lot of leaning in really hard and making sure what skills I needed, I learned on my own,” she says, “either by watching, observing, reading, studying, and of course making lots of mistakes. We opened one unit in Greenville with the intention of making something duplicatable that was franchisable that other people could own as well. Our passion made up for our lack of funds and lack of knowledge and everything.”
To say they were operating on a shoestring budget would be an understatement.
“Everything was a challenge,” she says. “Money was so tight. I remember having a credit card with $2,500 on it, borrowing some cash from a friend and paying that back monthly and just building this bare bones version of what today is a completely different buildout. We didn’t have enough money for a sign out over the door; we had a vinyl banner. I was making the advertising material on our home printer. It was so homemade, the budget was so tight.”
Luckily, the business took off almost immediately, because, as Heather says, “there was no ‘plan B.’”
“It had to work,” she says. “I remember specifically having ‘x’ amount of money until we had to have ‘x’ amount of members to make up for what we were not going to have. It was that close. And we did it. As the money went away, we were signing up the right amount of people to make up for it. And when that two-and-a-half months of money was gone, we had hit our goal. We signed up like, 78 people in month one, just from standing out in front of the door, saying ‘Hey, come in, look at this.’ We franchised one the year after, which is pretty fast.”
Today, instead of making homemade flyers, Heather is the COO of a company with locations in 41 states and countries around the world.
“I’m really focused on operations and process and making sure we’re really connected to the franchisees,” she says. “We have two customers now: We have our members and our franchise partners. And they both have to be happy, and we have to make sure that everything we do makes sense for both of them, and everything we do has to be duplicatable in any city, anywhere.”
Hudson says that after 13 years in the kickboxing fitness business, she’s happiest helping others achieve their goals, whether that means in business or in life.
“It’s so rewarding to see the fruits of your labor,” she says. “We get to give the gift of business ownership to others. The franchising part of it is very rewarding because other people get to experience entrepreneurship and business ownership, that might not have. And we are giving the gift of health. Every person who works out at a 9Round leaves feeling better; they either lost some weight or they lost some stress, or maybe they just feel better about themselves because they’re healthier. Those are noble causes, all of them, and that is just all encompassing and very rewarding.”
Along the way, like many female business owners, Heather Hudson had to deal with sexism, something she does not tolerate in her own company.
“I have had a man tell me that he didn’t need my signature on collateral for a loan because I wasn‘t the kickboxer in the business,” she says. “There’s been not so subtle and more subtle ways that being a female makes a difference in business. But I’m a half owner of this business, so what’s great is that I can control what goes on in my business. And what I can really be proud of is that we’ve always been 50/50 men and women in our headquarters, and it’s about the same for our franchise owners. And I can ensure that in my business, there is no such thing as not equal pay for women. My employees don’t have to worry about that because I can control it.”
