Learning What It Takes to Build the Dream
June 26, 2026
Today, we met with a commercial realtor who will help us find a facility capable of housing our vision and serving our community. The process is exciting, but also daunting, because location will play such an important role in whether Barbell Battalion succeeds. We must balance what we are learning through our community survey with the realities of rent, operating expenses, and the funding available to us. We identified several possible options and will begin reaching out to gather more information and determine which opportunities make the most sense.
We have also discovered just how many assignments come with opening a gym, especially when developing the business plan needed to secure funding. We routinely joke that we could not have chosen a more capital-intensive business to pursue. We are two people working regular jobs and managing the same financial pressures as many other families, so opening a facility of this size will require careful planning and outside support. Our goal is not to build a gym that makes us rich; we hope to maintain a comfortable income and reinvest anything beyond that into the facility and its community. Before we can think about growth, however, we first have to find a way to open the doors.
Advertising has presented another unexpected learning curve. Neither of us has marketing experience, and although we grew up surrounded by online advertisements and promotions, creating them ourselves is entirely different. There are endless videos, articles, and resources explaining what to do, but applying that advice and earning people’s attention and trust takes time. As a new business without a physical location, we understand why some people may question whether our survey is legitimate or worry that it could be spam. Our immediate goal is not simply name recognition—it is reaching enough people through the survey to understand what our community needs and design the facility as responsibly as possible.
Our commitment to this project comes from our own experiences with powerlifting. We met and bonded through the sport, trained together, and supported one another at competitions. To us, powerlifting is not only about competing against other lifters; it is also about becoming stronger than the person you were before through training, patience, and discipline. Like life, obstacles will arise, and progress depends on the ability to adapt, overcome, and persevere. We know others share these values, and we want to create a place where people in our community have the equipment, space, and support needed to pursue their own progress.
We ended the day with something much smaller but still meaningful: an order of stickers featuring the Barbell Battalion logo. They may only be stickers, but they are the first physical items we can hold that represent what has mostly existed as plans, spreadsheets, conversations, and ideas. They remind us that building a business will not always be paperwork and financial projections; it will also require creativity and thoughtful decisions about the identity we want the brand to represent. Holding them made the dream feel a little more real. There is still a long road ahead, but today gave us something tangible that represents our hope of building a facility that genuinely benefits our community.
