Marine Corps veteran Jim Rowley kicked off his post-military transition into fitness-related entrepreneurship with a rotary phone in hand.
“I applied for a job and didn’t get selected, so I asked my brother to put in a good word for me at the gym where he worked,” said Rowley, now 56. “I had to cold-call leads on a rotary phone — there wasn’t a position there that had a lesser responsibility.”
That persistence from Rowley, who served as a platoon sergeant during the Gulf War, paid off. Today, Rowley is the CEO of Crunch Fitness, a U.S.-based brand of approximately 460 gyms around the U.S. and a half-dozen other countries.
How did he get there? Rowley, an identical twin born to a teen mother, will gladly divulge the answer: plenty of hard work — and lessons learned from the military.
“The Marines taught me how to be courageous in the face of adversity, how to provide a leadership example and what it means to lead from the front,” he said. “There are just so many things I could point to that my time as a Marine taught me.”
Jim & gyms
Rowley has always been athletic, first getting hooked on working out as a high school football player. That love of strength and endurance only grew once he joined the Marines in 1986, prompted by family tradition.
“There was a lot of military influence in my family,” he said. “My dad was a Marine, my grandfathers were career Navy, but my paternal grandfather was attached to a Marine Corps unit.”
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Rowley served until 1994, including OCONUS assignments with the State Department and Marine Corps Embassy Security Group. There was also a combat tour.
When he got out, the stress of becoming a civilian slammed into him. Exercise got him through.
“Through working out, I gained confidence and succeeded,” Rowley wrote in an Instagram post. “Fitness changed my life.”
Franchise friendly
From that bottom-of-the-totem-pole position at his twin’s gym, Rowley gradually worked his way up through the fitness ranks. Today, as the face of Crunch, he is in charge of day-to-day operations, development, marketing and franchising.
The latter is how former Navy Lt. Rafael Cuellar first came to learn about Rowley.
A business owner since leaving the service in 1996, Cuellar was attempting to rent out one-half of a commercial building he owned in Clifton, New Jersey. But when that attempt failed, he began researching the top franchises to work with.
“Crunch surfaced to the top as one of the best ones,” said Cuellar, a former surface warfare officer on the USS Detroit. “It has not disappointed.”
For starters, Crunch offers military veterans a 20% discount off its franchise fees and royalties with the purchase of three or more club rights. Cuellar said that the support for franchisers is top-notch, and as a result, the gym has been consistently growing since its opening in 2019.
“It’s been a great experience, and we have about 6,200 members now,” said Cuellar, who works out at his fitness club at 3 a.m., before it opens. “We’re looking at hopefully opening another Crunch gym this year.”
Rowley, a VFW member, feels the same, only on an even larger scale. Crunch opened about one gym per week in 2023 and hopes to expand it to 1.5 this year. It’s an exciting path of entrepreneurship, he said, that he wishes more veterans would embark upon.
“It’s important that I give back and create belief about the art of what’s possible outside of the military,” he said. “It’s amazing how we veterans often sell ourselves short after military service, but the skillset acquisition is tremendously valued in the private sector.”
His advice? Use your military experience as a launchpad.
“If you applied what the military taught you, those practices translate perfectly into entrepreneurship and general business,” he said. “If you did four to eight years in the military, you’re far ahead of people just emerging from college.”
