CrossFit Little Creek | Corey Coleman

Eric 0:32
Now welcome to this fifth episode of the ocean view Business Association podcast called Discover OV. Today in this episode, you’re going to be listening to a conversation that I got to have with the owner of CrossFit little creek. His name is Corey and let me just tell you something. I was fascinated. I learned some really cool things about CrossFit. I had no idea. I’m not a gym going person. And so I didn’t I didn’t know. But I found out they you know if you know things for families, things for locals, you know classes and and even for those that are you know, visiting the area.

Eric 1:18
It’s just absolutely all kinds of really cool things happening over it at CrossFit Little Creek. They have an outdoor area, they got their indoor gym, they’ve got a separate second business there. That’s one of those cycling places. And anyway, just all kinds of great stuff. I’ll let Cory explain it. But thanks for listening. And for links to any things that we talked about in today’s episode or to see some cool pictures of the gym. Make sure you head over to the show notes Ocean View.biz/005 as in Episode Five, and now my interview with Corey.

Eric 2:01
All right, everybody will again like I said in the intro there I am sitting here with Corey Corey, welcome to the podcast.

Corey 2:08
Thanks for having me.

Eric 2:09
Yeah, absolutely. So why don’t you This is one of my ways I start out almost every podcast. Why don’t you take a moment and explain to folks listening where you and I are at right now.

Corey 2:17
Awesome. So my name is Corey Coleman and we are in Ocean View, which is a portion of Norfolk but we’re inside my gym. So I own CrossFit Little Creek and Spinister Cycle studio with my wife Starr. We’ve been open for almost six years now. And we’re sitting in the back enjoying ourselves.

Eric 2:37
Yeah, we are having a great conversation now. Um, you said six years?

Corey 2:41
Yep. Six years we’ve been here.

Eric 2:43
It’s always in this looks in the spot.

Corey 2:45
Yeah. So we started out actually just with the end unit here. It’s about 2000 square feet. And then we recently about a year and a half ago now maybe a year ago, we expanded over open the spin studio, and then took the room behind that to grow to about 4000 square feet total now so

Eric 3:01
Okay, yeah, I was when I came walking in. This was the first time I was in here. And man it does. It comes right back around here. Very clean. Very clean, modern.

Corey 3:09
We certainly work for that.

Eric 3:10
Yeah. And I saw some big tires and stuff outside. Yep.

Corey 3:13
Yeah, those aren’t as clean. But there are a lot of a lot of fun.

Eric 3:16
Right. That’s fair. That’s fair. But keep the keep the big dirty tires outside. Yeah, yeah. All right. Very cool vehicle. Well, for, you know, so it’s CrossFit gym.

Corey 3:27
Yep.

Eric 3:27
You know, excited. Tell us just real quickly. Okay. Well, before we get into talking about your business, how did you end up here? How did you how did you land here in Ocean View?

Corey 3:36
So it’s been took a long time for that to happen. But the story is really short. So I’m from North Carolina, or Kansas, originally moved to North Carolina, join the Navy after high school. I still in the Navy done that for 15 years now. And 13 of those have been living here in the same house. So a super rare story for most people in the service. But we ended up here and then, you know, extrapolating from that, that, you know, my wife and I both really desire to serve other people in our local community. We kind of happened into CrossFit and realize that it’s absolutely the most effective way to train as far as fitness goes. And we wanted to share that with all the people of ocean view. So here we are.

Eric 4:14
Okay, in six years that’s great. And this is what’s the shopping center we’re in again?

Corey 4:18
So this is East beach shops so

Eric 4:19
East beach shops

Corey 4:20
Right at the corner where Shore Drive turns into Ocean View boulevard.

Eric 4:25
Yeah, right to enter the next intersection is is that pretty Lake?

Corey 4:29
So pretty, like it’s right here. And then and then little creek is usually the one we give people to find us because it’s a mile down the road. So

Eric 4:35
Yeah, yeah, very cool. And it makes sense. CrossFit little creek. Yep. Nice.

Corey 4:39
We’re not on the base that we get that a lot, actually. But we’re just just outside.

Eric 4:43
And you said you’re still active duty.

Corey 4:45
I am. Yep. Yeah, I’m a naval officer. Now. I started out my career enlisted back in 2004. And I’ve just been chugging along ever since. So well.

Eric 4:51
Thank you for your service. So, a little my first question for you about the gym here is so Why CrossFit versus going to a $10 a month, you know, gym that has big, purple and yellow commercials.

Corey 5:09
Yeah, that’s a good one. That’s and that’s, that’s something that we, you know, we really struggle with. And there’s nothing wrong with going to the big purple and yellow gym, that’s $10 a month. But for us, the business model is predicated on people not coming, you know, they have 10,000 members at some of those big box gyms. And if every single person showed up, they would literally go out of business because their stuff would be ill maintained and broken. So we are a very different business model. And like I said, Before, we really wanted our Cornerstone to be helping people. So this methodology allows us to have a very well functioning business with 100 to 200. Members, and we see about half of them every single day.

Eric 5:47
Wow.

Corey 5:47
And so that allows us to really get to know each person as an individual. And then the classes are kind of set up so that it’s small group training, but it’s very much almost like group personal training. So the coaches are here, making sure that you’re moving safe and efficiently the entire time, we’re designing the workouts, we’re designing everything based off of your goals. And then we’re able to optimize if you’re, you know, you’re worried about getting too bulky or getting hurt, we can scale the weights down and increase the amount of cardio that we’re adding in. But really, the program spans so diverse modalities, that anybody can participate in it. And we’ve had people in wheelchairs, we’ve had people that, you know, are missing limbs, and we’ve been able to adapt it and still provide them really good stimulus for change in in life improvement.

Eric 6:33
Well, I had no idea that it was you got that level of attention?

Corey 6:38
Yeah, with Sure.

Eric 6:39
All right, very cool. Well,

Corey 6:40
That’s actually an affordable option, when you look at like a $70 an hour personal trainer, right? You know, for two hours of personal training, you can come to an unlimited amount of CrossFit. So, okay, we’re so well,

Eric 6:50
Okay, now, does the CrossFit, does that include the cycle,

Corey 6:53
It doesn’t. So that’s too well, it can. So I shouldn’t say it, doesn’t it, we have a hybrid membership, where you have unlimited access to both. But for the most part, those run as separate business entities, and it actually works out really well. Because what we’ve seen is the demographic that enjoys an hour of really intensive cardio, and very high energy spin classes isn’t always necessarily the same as the people who want to come in and work on technique or strength work that we get in in the CrossFit side. So we do have some bleed over and people that enjoy doing both, or they will use kind of a lighter spin session as their active recovery. But for the most part, we see that people enjoy one or the other.

Eric 7:29
All right, okay, what, what age to the start.

Corey 7:32
So we actually train we have an awesome kids group that comes over from a preschool but we train all the way down to two years old, believe it or not,

Eric 7:41
Wow,

Corey 7:41
yeah, so we don’t have anybody in the gym. That set age right now we actually are lowest is about four years old. But our insurance allows us to to train people down to two. And obviously, the class is very different. A lot of that’s incorporating fitness. Kind of like you hide the pill inside the cheese for your dog. We do the same thing with kids and fitness. We don’t tell them like, hey, you’re doing pushups, and they’re not supposed to be fun. We say hey, you’re you’re playing a game of leapfrog. And we’re incorporating all those tenants that make the program effective for adults, but not necessarily telling them the secret sauce.

Eric 8:11
So very cool. I like it. Now, this is one of those questions I have no idea the answer to and I don’t know if I should ever ask these kinds of questions. So do you ever have like family classes?

Corey 8:22
Yeah, 100%, we get people in. And we actually have a family of four that comes in quite a bit once they’ve really gotten into it huge. And one of the, the mom, the wife actually coaches for us now. So we have them come in all the time. We also do private sessions for families quite often. And yeah, we really, really enjoy that. You know, we’ve got five kids between my wife and I. So we don’t have an option but to be a very family friendly. But yeah, we’ve got a kid’s room, Xbox, everything if they don’t want to get involved, but most the time we encourage the kids to stay somewhere near the gym for so we can keep eyes on them.

Eric 8:55
Sure.

Corey 8:55
And then also so that they can see their parents and really have a good example set for them.

Eric 8:59
Yeah. Well, it’s, you know, more is caught than taught.

Corey 9:02
Yep.

Eric 9:02
You know, and so it’s like, thanks. You can use it. It’s not trademarked or anything perfect. Yeah. All right. Cool. So you’ve got that going on. You guys are plugged into ocean view. I mean, like your OV people.

Corey 9:16
Yeah, I can’t we can’t say we’re originals, because because Sure. I think technically we’re not but we’ve been here a very long time. And we love it, man. It is awesome. We love actually down on Baby Boulevard. So we’ve got the business on this and and then our house kind of right in the middle there. And, man, it’s an exciting time for ocean view.

Eric 9:32
It really is. So it well. Now you’ve got some construction. So this is fall of 2019. As we’re recording this, you got some construction kind of coming out ramp behind you here. Right.

Corey 9:44
Yeah. Yeah,

Eric 9:46
That’s the term

Corey 9:47
That turns out well, yeah, that that panel, they made some ridiculous progress on that. I’m super happy about the way that that’s coming along. I think it’s a $50 million project somebody said.

Eric 9:57
So pretty impressed. very significant. So that’ll but that’ll bring in a good bit of potential foot traffic.

Corey 10:04
Sure, yeah.

Eric 10:04
Now, so for locals, you’ve got memberships. You got classes yet, stuff like that. And we will link to your website and social media in the show notes. But what about somebody that’s listening right now that’s planning a vacation to this area? Or I know what happened to me when we moved here. Suddenly family wants to spend a lot more time with us. I don’t know why.

Corey 10:26
It’s a weird thing. Yeah, next to the water.

Eric 10:27
Exactly. Never happened in Ohio, but down here. So for people to listen, locals listening that have out of town guests coming in that, you know, might be interested in something like this, or the tourists coming into the area, how does that work if you’re if you don’t live here and don’t have a monthly membership.

Corey 10:46
Sure, so we have a couple options on actually on both sides of the house. But on the CrossFit side of the house, what we do is a drop in and that’s a very traditional thing for CrossFit gyms to do typically $20. And then you can buy a T shirt, every gym is a little bit different, but most of them are very hospitable and encourage people from outside of the area to drop in and check out how they operate. We have that we also do a $59 unlimited week. So you can come to as many classes as you can stomach for the week while you’re in town. And then on the spin side, we do $18 single sessions. And then we have a $75 5 pack, which if you were going to come every day that would work out to about a week. And that’s a pretty good deal, actually. So

Eric 11:23
Yeah, so if you’re coming into the area and want to, you know, make sure that you’re keeping up, you know, with exercising, you know, you can do that. Now, did I also see on your website that you also help with nutrition?

Corey 11:34
We do. Yeah, so our major three tenants are that we provide small group training, we do Personal Training, which is kind of like program design, but also just one on one time with with individuals. And their nutrition coaching is a big component of what we do. And a lot of that is included in the regular memberships anyways. But we also do more advanced packages where we’re tracking things like carbohydrates, fats, and proteins and macronutrients. So

Eric 11:56
Wow, okay, now, being CrossFit, are you connected and associated with every other CrossFit gym out there? Or is this does CrossFit, this more than a description of the style of gym you are.

Corey 12:10
So it’s an odd thing, you know, and we struggle with this, there’s a lot of good that comes from it. There’s also some stuff where, you know, some some businesses have made questionable decisions, and it’s reflected badly on the community as a whole. But CrossFit gyms are affiliates. And what that means is that we pay to use the name CrossFit, after we’ve met a certain standard of training, but past that, you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want, you produce your own marketing materials, you produce your own classes, you do everything on your own, other than using the CrossFit name. So with that said, there are some gyms that are very endurance based, they do a lot of cardio, you’ll find some that are very much powerlifting oriented. And they do that. So we kind of fall right in the middle, we really pride ourselves on being accessible to everyone. So being very inclusive, which is cool, because being an ocean view, I think that’s one of the tenants of the community here is that we’re very open and welcoming to a very diverse group, for sure. So that’s kind of where we sit with it. And for the most part, I think it’s been working out pretty well.

Eric 13:12
Okay. Okay. Now, what about like, our is this accessible for people that, you know, you know, obviously, you’re not open just during nine to five business hours, you know, what hours look like?

Corey 13:21
Yeah, so we are early morning classes, 5:30am, all the classes run right out about an hour. If I’m coaching, they run a little bit long, because they’re told I like to talk, but we have a 5:30am, a 7am, and then an 11:30am. And then we do a 430, or 545, and a 7pm. That’s a mouthful every time I say.

Eric 13:42
That’s okay.

Corey 13:43
And that schedule changes based on you know, the quarter the season when kids are in school when they’re not, but for the most part, we have six to seven classes a day. And then anytime those classes are in session, our members are allowed to come in and use it as open gym time as well. So if they want to come in, during the class before the one where they’re actually going to participate, they can get a little bit of extra side work in or the coaches can give them some prescriptive stuff to maybe help mobilize them or work on some issues that they may have been having.

Eric 14:07
Okay, so somebody like me, you know, that you know, that people can’t tell it’s an audio podcast, but I’m not, you know, I don’t belong to a gym, you know, and if people saw me, they wouldn’t be surprised. So I’m just I’m not in shape. I need to get in shape, not in shape. Can I jump into any of those classes as a beginner?

Corey 14:29
Yep. 100%. So again, that’s one of the things that CrossFit gyms go back and forth on some believe that you need a robust beginners program, and there’s reasons why you would and why you wouldn’t necessarily want that. We typically like people to come in and start with two personal training sessions. It helps us get to know them. It puts some of their fears at ease, and it lets them get a little bit of exposure without kind of the rapid fire Enos that can happen in the classes. With that said, Our coaches are very competent at optimizing and scaling each individual workout for each individual athlete. So we call you an athlete because you’re an athlete in the sport. Word of life will say, but like, yeah, you’d be ready to jump in just like you are now your workout wouldn’t look like everybody else’s. But it would be your workout, it would be 100% perfect for where you’re at your fitness journey so that you can get started and get rolling, you don’t have to risk injury and you don’t have to be intimidated.

Corey 15:17
So as the owner, if that’s your belief, I would imagine that that is kind of worked its way through the culture of your members. And so it’s probably more encouraging and non judgmental, you know, stuff like that.

Corey 15:32
So you can come through our door and not get a high five and the first 30 seconds, I would cover your membership for your first month.

Eric 15:39
Wow. All right,

Corey 15:40
I’m that that sure that our culture and the community, I mean, ocean view as a whole is awesome, right. But like, the people we have here are the cream of the crop, they really are welcoming, and they know that helping you succeed is going to help them succeed.

Eric 15:52
Okay, this is great stuff. I’m excited. There’s a lot of cool stuff in here. So what I’m gonna hope to do is I’m gonna grab some pictures to put in the show notes. As well as I think the best thing is probably people just to go to your website. Yeah. Alright. Alright, what did what age we’ll still link to it in the show notes. But what is your website?

Corey 16:10
So our CrossFit website is CrossFit little creek.com. And then for the spin studio, it’s Spinister, that’s like spinster, but with an extra is supposed to be spinister, but we get spinster all the time. So Spinister, northfolk.com. And then you can find us on all the social media outlets with the same same hashtags,

Eric 16:29
Okay, and I’m gonna link to all of those in the show notes and stuff like that. And so, in the intro, and outro because I when I as I record these, I never know exactly where it’s gonna fall on the order of shows. But once I go back and get it ready, I’ll let people know in the intro and outro. So great anything else you want to share before as we get ready to wrap things up here?

Corey 16:52
No, I’m just super excited. Thank you for coming into to do this with me.

Eric 16:55
Yeah,

Corey 16:56
I’m super excited for what Oceanview has in store for it. All this construction. And all these businesses springing up are really starting to add some value for the local populace. And it’s an exciting time.

Eric 17:04
Yeah. And I’ve got, we’ve got some new restaurants that pop up in the area breweries and I’m excited to be interviewing those folks.

Corey 17:14
And we’ve got the de brewery coming open on the corner. And the batemans are great. We really love them. And I’m we’re excited about both the coffee and the beer that they’re going to have there. But it’s right in the middle of our 400 meter run that we run almost on the daily. So I anticipate we might be losing some people mid run. But we have to deal with that when it happens.

Eric 17:30
That’s why Yeah, and I’m just I just enter in fact, their episode is probably the episode right before this one. Nice. Yeah. So they It was a there were a lot of fun. For sure. So Alright, man. Well, thank you very much.

Corey 17:43
Yeah. Likewise

Eric 17:46
Well, I hope you enjoy today’s podcast and let me just let you know. After the conversation there, I had a little bit more talk after we stopped recording, I had a little more time to talk with Cory and got some more information about the family things and so I tell you what, I’m excited I came home and told my wife about it. And I think we’re gonna go check it out and look into maybe trying a few sessions out and see what we think of doing that as a family to have some activity time together so well with that you have successfully made it to the end of another podcast here called Discover OV where we explore all there is to do in Ocean View. If you have a recommendation for a business that we should reach out to make sure you head on over to the website, let us know ocean view dot biz. And again for information in this episode, Ocean View dot biz forward slash 005. Have a great rest of your day.