Edit: He Left a Six-Figure Salary to Build a Gym. Everyone Thought He Was Losing His Mind.

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James Park keeps a sticky note on his monitor at Apex Athletics' Austin headquarters. It reads: "You already survived the worst day." He put it there in October 2021, two weeks after his bank account hit $4,100 — the lowest it had been since college, the lowest it would ever be again.

"I remember staring at that number," he says, swiveling in a beat-up office chair between two whiteboards dense with membership projections. "And thinking: this is fine. I've already decided. There is no other version of this story."

Apex Athletics has nine locations across Texas. It crossed $3.1 million in revenue last year. It has a waitlist for its flagship Austin studio. James Park is 36 years old.

## The Career He Built and Then Left

Park grew up in Plano, Texas, the son of Korean immigrants who ran a dry-cleaning business. He swam competitively through high school and earned a partial scholarship to UT Austin, where he studied computer science and spent four years in the pool and four more wondering whether software engineering was something he actually wanted or something he'd simply been good at.

He graduated in 2011, took a job at a mid-size Austin tech firm, and was promoted three times in five years. By 2018, he was making $148,000 as a senior engineer. He was also training at a boutique fitness studio near his apartment and spending a lot of time thinking about why he liked it so much.

"It wasn't just the workout," he says. "It was the design of the experience. The way the room was set up, the music timing, the way the coaches actually knew your name. Someone had thought about all of it. And it was working on people in a real way."

He started researching the boutique fitness market. He wrote a business plan over three weekends. He showed it to his wife, Christine, a pediatric nurse, expecting pushback. She read it twice and said: "When are you starting?"

He quit his job in March 2019.

## A Room Full of Equipment and No Members

Apex Athletics Studio One opened in East Austin in September 2019. Forty-two functional fitness stations, a sound system Park spec'd himself, a head coach he recruited from a competing studio, and 11 founding members who'd pre-paid for three months at a discount.

"Eleven people," he says. "I needed sixty-five to break even."

He spent the first three months doing everything that doesn't scale: standing outside coffee shops on Saturday mornings, handing out one-week trial cards. Cold-calling personal trainers. Running a free class every Sunday and cooking breakfast for whoever showed up. By December, he had 38 members. Rent was $8,400 a month. He covered the gap from savings.

Then, February 2020: 61 members. He was finally approaching break-even.

Then, March 2020.

> I had been grinding for a year and a half to get to break-even. Then the world stopped. I had two choices: fold or figure it out.

## The Pivot That Saved Everything

When COVID forced Apex to close, Park didn't pause the business. He moved it online in eight days.

He shot and edited workout videos in his living room using a borrowed camera and a ring light. He launched a $49-a-month streaming membership. He ran live classes by video every morning at 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. — same schedule, different medium.

Sixty-two of his 61 in-studio members signed up. Then something unexpected happened: people outside Austin started subscribing. People in Chicago. In Denver. In Toronto. By August 2020, Apex Online had 340 paying members and $16,660 in monthly recurring revenue — more than the physical studio had ever generated.

"I realized I had accidentally built something bigger than a gym," he says.

When Austin reopened in the fall of 2020, Park came back with something the pre-pandemic Apex didn't have: proof that the brand carried beyond a single zip code. He signed a lease on a second location in South Austin and opened it in January 2021.

## The $4,100 Moment

The second location nearly ended him.

Construction ran six weeks over schedule. Opening costs came in $47,000 higher than projected. Park had poured the online revenue into the buildout and was operating on fumes by October 2021. Christine's nursing income covered groceries.

"I called every investor I'd ever spoken to," he says. "I called people I'd met at conferences. I sent a deck to people I barely knew."

A local real estate developer named Robert Okafor had toured the first studio on a whim three months earlier. He called Park back. They met at a coffee shop. Okafor wrote a check for $200,000 in exchange for 12 percent of the company. He had one condition: Park had to open a third location within 18 months.

Park did it in 14.

## Where He Is Now

Nine studios. Thirty-seven full-time employees. A franchise model launching in the third quarter of this year that will take Apex to Phoenix, Denver, and Dallas. The online platform still runs — 1,100 subscribers, $53,900 in monthly recurring revenue, a business inside the business.

Park and Christine have two kids now. He swims laps on Sunday mornings at a local outdoor pool, which he did the week before he quit his tech job and has done almost every week since.

"People always want to know about the risk," he says. "But the question I kept asking myself was the opposite: what's the cost of not doing it? What does it cost to stay in something that is slowly emptying you out?"

He glances at the sticky note.

"That math never scared me as much as the other math."

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