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Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, everyone, and welcome to How I Built This Resilience Edition. On these episodes, we're talking with entrepreneurs and other business leaders about how they're thinking creatively during such a disruptive time. And today, we're going to hear from Alberto Perlman, co-founder of Zumba.
Zumba is a fitness program that combines Latin dance and aerobics. It's popular all over the world, but now, of course, many gyms and fitness studios are closed, leading Zumba instructors without a place to teach. So to keep people moving, Alberto's team got into action and built a virtual platform in just a few weeks. For people who don't know much about it, just how do you describe Zumba?
Well, Zumba is a, I think it's the largest branded fitness community in the world. We have, pre-pandemic, over 15 million people who take Zumba classes every week. And we're in 186 countries. And pre-pandemic, we were in 200,000 locations.
We don't own the locations. We have instructors teaching those locations. Some instructors own their own locations, and some instructors work for somebody else. But we are a fitness community, a cultural community, a musical community, a community of people that just come together.
And have fun and get healthy and happy. And basically, you train instructors, and then you license the brand and program to instructors around the world. And those instructors are like entrepreneurs. I mean, they run their own Zumba business.
Yeah, we enable them to go out and create their business or work for someone and generate income doing what they love. That is the most important thing. If people love dancing, people love interacting with other people, people love leading, then they get trained in this. They can actually make money doing something that they really, really love.
Alberto, we had John Foley at Peloton on a couple weeks ago and Sadie Lincoln of R3. Obviously, the industry as a whole has just been absolutely decimated, right? I mean, 24-hour fitness file for bankruptcy, gyms across the country are struggling. Many of them may not survive.
But at the same time, working out from home is really, you know, anybody who's tried to get dumbbells online knows it's impossible to find them right now, right? I heard there's a black market for dumbbells. Yeah. How has the economic crisis affected Zumba?
So we sat out and said, let's base our response to the pandemic. And we started seeing this in January and February because we have instructors in China. And our instructors in China were telling us, hey, this is really bad. You guys have to prepare for this because if this gets out, this is not good.
So we said we have to do three things. One, the most important thing, how do we continue to help our instructors generate income? Two, how do we deliver education virtually for people? New people want to become instructors or our existing instructors who need further education, especially if they're transitioning to virtual?
And three, how do we keep our promise to make the world happy and healthy? The first thing we did was we allowed our instructors to start teaching online. And they started teaching on Zoom. But parallel to that, we started developing our own platform.
And it's called Zinn Studio. Zinn stands for Zoom Instructor Network. So Zinn Studio. And Zinn Studio allows instructors to livestream their classes.
It allows them to upload pre-recorded classes with licensed music. It allows them to charge for their classes. It allows them to list their classes on a platform on zoom.com. We really focused on this Zinn Studio concept to help our instructors generate income during the lockdown.
And at the same time, we said our instructors are not necessarily trained in using all this technology. So we better provide all the education that they need. So we created all these courses that were done through Zoom. And some are e-learning courses that instructors could take to become what we call virtual fitness pros.
And to our surprise, within a month and a half, we had about a million people a week taking Zumba classes virtually, which is amazing for a new virtual product. And it was really our instructors telling their students, hey, now I'm teaching online. And come take my class virtually. And every week, we launch improvements to the platform.
So we added chat to the platform so students can chat while they're taking the class. We added emojis. We added things to the paywall so that instructors could take payment. Every week, we're launching new tech at a pace that our technology team had never done so before.
And I'm so proud of them because they really took it to the next level. Yeah. I mean, you basically stood up a virtual platform within weeks. I mean, I'm imagining that if you had a plan, like let's say a year ago, you said, hey, we want to do a virtual platform.
It would have taken you like a year to put together, right? And you did this in like six weeks? Yeah. Unville people working, nights, weekends.
It felt like we were starting Zumba again. It felt like, you know how Jeff Bezos says they won? It really felt like they won. We felt unstoppable.
We were going at it. We were talking to instructors to get feedback on how to make a platform perfect for them. And at the same time, we said we need to also help our instructors and the world at large during the pandemic in other ways. So we created a community fund where we gave funds out to instructors who were directly affected by COVID themselves, who were hospitalized, who had family members that passed away, or instructors that were, because our instructors sometimes are, Zumba is their side job.
So we had a lot of instructors who are nurses, a lot, huge population of nurses who are also Zumba instructors. So we helped them, the frontline workers. We helped them with child care services. So we created this community fund.
And we also did something that we call the one class, one meal program for every person who took a virtual class, which we make no revenue on. All the revenue goes to the instructors. For every person who takes a virtual class, we donated a meal during the month of June, and we donated 1.1 million meals to food banks around the world. Wow.
So Alberto, so when somebody signs up for a virtual class on the Zumba platform, all that revenue pays for it, it goes to the instructor? Yeah, everything goes to the instructor. Wow. So, I mean, how are you guys, I mean, you're still in business, you still have employees.
How are you kind of managing the business? And, I mean, have you had to have layoffs or furloughs, for example? Yeah, so we didn't do any layoffs. We didn't do any furloughs.
Surprisingly, our clothing business is doing very well. People are buying fitness clothing to work out at home. And we were able to manage it. Obviously, it's not going to be a very profitable year, because we made a lot of investments to make all these things happen.
But that's not our objective this year. Our objective this year is about the people. It's about the instructors. It's about their students.
It's about our employees. It's always been that. And this year, it's even more about just helping out others. And we'll be fine.
So, basically, if you are a Zumba instructor, obviously, you pay a monthly license fee. But if you want to have virtual classes, you can use this platform, and all that money goes to you. Zumba doesn't take a cut. Yeah, I know instructors.
This is amazing. I know instructors who are making $25 a class teaching at the YMCA or $30 a class teaching at the YMCA. Suddenly, when they switch to virtual, they're making $150 a class. So, some of them are making more money than before the pandemic.
Wow. When you were originally on the show a couple years ago, you talked about the 2008 financial crisis. And all of a sudden, you started to see an uptick in people training to become Zumba instructors because people were losing their jobs. Here we are, once again, in an even worse financial economic crisis.
Are you seeing an uptick in brand-new people joining and trying to learn how to become Zumba instructors? So, we are seeing people coming in. It's not as big as 2008. And it's not as big as what we predicted was going to happen at the beginning of the year.
But we are seeing every day a large group of people registering to become Zumba instructors. It's not the same as 2008. 2008 was crazy. And I think it's partly because there were so many people that were hanging out at the gym.
In 2008, 2009, they were laid off. They were hanging out at the gym. And the fitness industry needed more instructors. Yeah, of course.
You know, I remember the other sort of shift for your business was when you made a huge pick. Because originally, you guys made videos, like Zoom home videos that were sold through infomercials. And that's how you could learn how to become a Zumba instructor. And you realized that that wasn't actually a sustainable model.
You made a huge pivot to support training and to create a network instead of just selling videos. This seems to me what you're doing now with virtual courses and training, that seems to be the biggest pivot since your whole business model was established. Is that fair? I think our pivot now, yes.
I think it's more than just the virtual piece. It's how do we pivot into a place where our instructors are going to have to be even more entrepreneurial than before. We don't know what's going to happen to the four walls. Our great friends at 24 Hour, at Gold's, even a lot of the boutique gyms, it's tough.
And we've been trying to help them. And one of the ways we've helped is we really push our instructors and motivate our instructors to teach outdoors. And tell our gym partners, hey, our instructors can teach in parking lots, in the parking lot at your gym. And you can partner with them and host these classes there.
And so that could generate some income for you. Or some instructors would say, I'm going to go to the park and I'm going to talk to the park ranger. And I'm going to rent the park for an hour. And I'm going to charge $10 a person.
And I'm going to get 20 of my students to show up. And I'll generate $200 in revenue for my classes at the park. And we're seeing every day, we're seeing more and more people teach outdoors. I saw a huge class happening in New York with, I think I had like 300 people outdoors in Central Park.
And some instructors have even doubled up and said, well, I'm going to teach outside. Or I'm going to teach socially distant inside. But I'm also going to stream at the same time. And so I can generate revenue twice.
I can generate revenue from my people who are live in person with me. And I can do it at the same time with people all over the world. So I can have some people from Korea and from Argentina and from Brazil taking my class. And at the same time, I'm in my hometown of New York teaching an outdoor class and generating revenue on both sides and making people happy.
When we come back in just a moment, Alberto tells us about a new exercise program that helps you forget you just did 20 furbies and encourages you to do a few more. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz. And you're listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR.
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Resilience Edition. And I'm talking with Alberto Pearlman, co-founder of Zumba. And for Alberto and really for the whole fitness industry, one of the big questions right now is how do you replicate the experience of an in-person class online? You know, one of the things that I remember you talking about in the episode was this concept that you called FEJ, freeing, electrifying joy, right?
This idea that like 20 minutes into a Zumba class, you just like hit a zone. You're just like liberated from the world outside, you know? And anyone who's taken a Zumba class probably knows what I'm talking about. Can you get that feeling when you're doing this virtually?
So we did a survey of people who've taken Zumba virtually. And we interviewed over 100,000 people. And 50% of them said that they started doing Zumba virtually because they needed to stay in shape. But the main reason that they're doing it now is because of stress relief.
It's like forced meditation a little bit. It's like you have to follow those dance moves, you're concentrated, you're listening to this amazing music, all of your other thoughts go away. It's just you, the music, the instructor, and the movement. And that's what's beautiful about Zumba is that moment that we call FEJ, which is like our Zen.
What Zen is to yoga, FEJ is to Zumba, freeing, electrifying joy. I'm going to go to some questions from our viewers. This is from Claire Murashima. Hello, Claire.
Claire asks, like when you get tired of doing Zumba, what do you do? Because, you know, you probably don't do Zumba every day. I know you exercise. So what other things do you do?
So Strong Nation is our new program, which is a high-intensity interval training program. It's non-dance, where you're doing a push-up, a squat, a burpee, 10 jacks, and then you go into punching and kicking. And we synchronized music to it. So we went to our favorite DJs, DJs like Steve Aoki or producers like Timbaland, and we said, can you score music to this workout?
Instead of the music being in the background, let's score music. Just like you would score music to a movie, like a training scene in a movie or like a battle scene in the movie 300. And they created this very cool, epic music that matches the workout completely. So if you take a Strong Nation class, you can take virtual Strong Nation classes, or you can take them outdoors, or you can take them in gyms that are open.
And you feel like one with the music. You feel like you are completely immersed. Zumba is about FEDGE. Strong Nation is about hacking motivation.
So it's like, remember Pavlov's dogs? Where the bell would ring and the dog would tally? So we created a similar thing with music conditioning. So we're not counting how many burpees you're doing.
It's every time that sound hits, you're doing a burpee, and suddenly you thought you could only do 20, and you just did 26. And it's because you were just hearing that sound, and you were getting conditioned. So I'm really excited about Strong Nation. We're getting a lot of people hiring Strong Nation instructors to come teach in their backyards.
As almost like personal coaches, personal trainers, come teach me Strong Nation in my backyard, because that's the workout I want to do while I'm at home. Yeah. Walk me through a little bit how you guys are successfully doing virtual training and virtual instruction, because not only are you onboarding new people, but you're also updating and offering continued instruction. But then, like, teaching people how to use the virtual platforms.
I imagine that it was kind of a rocky period at the beginning, right, when you were trying to do this? Oh, it was crazy. So we started out with helping our instructors get on Zoom, right? And Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, they were teaching on these platforms.
And a lot of audio issues or video issues, actually, we're learning, right? There's a lot of different settings that you can use on these platforms. So there was a whole learning process and a lot of issues at the first few classes. Then we launched our own platform.
And in our own platform, we had to work out all the technical bugs. And now the platform is incredible. Our platform has better video than I've ever seen in any other platform. That's what we wanted to focus on is video.
And now you're being crystal clear, HD, come through, amazing. And then we had to train our instructors, right? That was a big piece of it. So we created Zumba virtual Facebook groups that people could join and learn how to teach virtually.
We created courses, e-learning courses. And we created Zumba virtual pro, which would help them really, not only on their technical skills, but when you're speaking to a camera, when you're dancing to a camera, your movements have to be a little different. How do you engage when you're not seeing the feedback? When you're not seeing what the other person's expression is?
How do you engage? It's almost like acting classes, right? And so we had a lot of fun doing it. And we learned a lot from our instructors, from their experiences.
And how do you take that to the next level? You know, are you guys strongly discouraging our instructors from doing indoor classes? We're not. We want nothing more than for people to be back at the gyms and for people to be teaching classes together because community is such a big deal.
People are a lot more accountable to other people than they are to themselves, unfortunately. And so if you know your buddy's going to show up at your Zumba class or at your Strong Nation class, you're more likely to go because there's someone waiting for you there. So we want the gyms to reopen. We want people to teach indoors again.
We want to experiment with this hybrid model of teaching indoors and teaching virtually. We want people to be teaching outdoors. The more we can get people together, the happier we are. I want to ask you this important question.
Because a lot of people, as you know, Alberto, who listen to our program are starting businesses and are also in marketing. How do you kind of market what you do and successfully reach people who may not know about Zumba? How do you get the word out? What are some of your strategies?
Yeah, so the world has changed, right? Obviously, the world of marketing has gone through an innovation period that has created lots of opportunities, but it's also very different these days. Currently, we obviously use social media. We have over 10 million people that follow us on social media.
we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars advertising find a class you know we don't make any money from find a class right because that money all goes to the instructor we advertise it all the time it's one of our biggest line items in our cost thruster is advertising find a class so we create thousands of ads for people to come and find zumba classes and obviously the number one thing that drives people to zumba is bring a friend is when somebody tells you hey i'm taking this amazing class i found this amazing instructor do you want to come with me it's one of the best marketing tools we have so we help our instructors and our gym partners encourage that as well yeah aberto um before we let you go what is something that you have learned about yourself as a leader or something that this crisis has forced you to be or become that you want to take with you into the future as you continue to leave this company wow and i think that focus has been so sharpened for me where because we're all working from home and because we are all trying to figure out what the next move is having clear crystal focus for the organization and aligning everybody together has become so much more important and i think i've learned how to communicate better because now you're communicating in this virtual world you really need to have people understand what it is that you want to get done and what it is where it is that you want to go right aberto perlman co-founder thank you so much thank you guy it's great seeing you again that's an excerpt from a conversation with alberto perlman co-founder of zumba by the way you should check out our episode on zumba we aired it back in january of 2017 it is hilarious and really interesting to see my full interview with alberto you can go to facebook.com slash how i built this and if you want to see all of our past live interviews you can find them there or at youtube.com slash npr if you want to find out more about the how i built this resilience series or other virtual npr events you can go to npr presents.org this episode was produced by candace limb with help from will mitchell tyra lockhart matt adams giana capadona john isabella julia carney eva grant and jeff rogers thanks for listening stay safe and i'll see you in a few days i'm guy roz and you've been listening to how i built this