Business Description
BAREfit takes a holistic, minimalist approach to strength training, mobility, and cardiovascular conditioning. Our style of training is a fusion of bodybuilding framework with elements of parkour, MovNat, strongman lifting, plyometric and isometric movement, and more. We reclaim and repurpose a large variety of heavy materials, and use them as our workout equipment. This approach is more reminiscent of real world physical demands, and it’s more environmentally sustainable than buying commercial machines. We constantly source and craft new materials, while adding and changing around obstacles courses in the gym, leading to innovative, adaptive movement workouts in a complex environment. Our primary goal as a training company is to help our clients become more capable humans.
Anyone with a heartbeat and a desire to succeed is our ideal client, but more specifically we find our niche audience to be those who love (or want to learn more about) outdoor adventure; rock climbers, hikers, cyclists, trail runners, OCR athletes, campers, paddlers, etc. We’ve also found that many of our clients were just bored with traditional gyms, and fed up with little to no results. Our workouts provide the education, motivation, and accessibility to meet any fitness goal.
What is the purpose of this loan?
We began our business in late 2013 with $0 in our account. No loans, no investments. Curtis and I worked for free, and were given permission to use a shared studio space inside of a gym I’d been consulting. We built our client base up through gorilla marketing, word of mouth, and workouts unlike anything our members had experienced.
By mid-2014 we had enough clients to afford our own space. Unfortunately by moving our business 5 miles from our satellite to our own space, we lost almost all of our member base. Our initial $5,000 KIVA loan gave us some cushion to move in, cover payroll, and buy rubber flooring for our new space. Without that loan we could not have kept going.
Since then we’ve grown our member base from just a handful to 91 members (as of June 28th 2016). We’ve spent over a year working on our space, helping our members change their lives, and gaining some amazing friendships along the way.
We have remained profitable throughout, but not enough for sustainable growth. Our challenge today is cash flow. We are now poised for the next phase of growth toward our member goal of 200. But at this point we need to be able to have at least 2 months of working capital on hand for payroll, emergencies, and marketing.
We are fiscally conservative as a business, and not looking to quickly spend this loan, but to use it as a cash reserve over the next 6-8 months. By that point if goals are met, our revenue will surpass our overhead enough each month to be setting aside our own working capital. This 10k loan will allow us to move away from instability and uncertainty into a position of security for continued growth.