Hey, my name’s Vince Gabriele, and my story in the fitness industry is a long one (20+ years)…so here’s the short version. It started in 2001 after I realized I was never going to play in the NFL. I was an average offensive lineman at Temple University majoring in business. After an injury-plagued career and with a strong love for the weight room, I turned everything I had into a career in Personal training.
My family thought I was crazy but I knew what I was doing. I got an internship at a gym called Fitness Quest 10 in San Diego. I worked my way up from being an intern to becoming a sought-after trainer in San Diego by NFL Athletes. I founded their football and NFL combine prep programs and while this was cool…I always had the dream of opening my own gym. I moved back to my home state of New Jersey with my wonderful wife, Vanessa, a Cali girl who also was in the fitness industry.
Together we started our first training business in NJ, Gabriele Fitness & Performance, in 2007. Before we opened our first location I trained people in my mom's basement, rented space in a local gym, trained athletes on 5 different local fields, and used various gyms in the local schools to get my business started. After a year of this craziness, we signed a lease for our first facility. We built a gym that was completely different from our competition—no other facility was like ours and that’s what created our success.
Together, Vanessa and I ran GFP and have helped 1000s of people in our community change their lives, lose weight, and live a more active life. I was just doing my thing as a gym owner trying to make a great life for my family. We reached 7 figures in revenue very quickly and I structured the business so that was able to never miss a bedtime for any of my 3 kids. I started getting phone calls from other gym owners asking me how I was having so much success. So I started to help them grow their businesses and my gym became the blueprint for countless gym owners…with many of them respectfully copying everything I was doing. A few months after this…My dad had a stroke—a really bad one—and I had to be out of my gym for over two months to be there for my mom and sisters. While I was gone…my gym continued to grow and have success…even when I wasn’t there.
That was my sign that I needed to move into teaching gym owners how to have a successful business that not only makes money…but still grows while they’re not there. Today my days are filled with helping gym owners build more successful businesses.