Ep30 Dan Uyemura—From Rock Bottom with a Felony Charge to a 110-Employee Software Company

Dan Uyemura  0:00  
Anything you do, you want to get to 50.1% success rate, like anything below that, like you shouldn't be doing it, 50.1% success rate, and then you just play as much as you can. So think of blackjack, like if you had a 51% odds in a casino, then the game is just like max out the bank and play as many hands as you can, because in the end you win.

Scott Groves  0:22  
Welcome. welcome to Henderson HQ. This is the podcast where you get all the stories behind the businesses that make our community tick. Don't forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Henderson HQ podcast. I'm Scott Groves with the Henderson HQ website newsletter, all the things. Subscribe at Henderson hq.com and check out the podcast wherever you're listening to podcasts. I am, I am here with my old friend now, Dan, who I've known for a couple years from Jiu Jitsu, owns a company called Push Press, one of the co-founders of a company called Push Press. They kind of solve all of the problems that you might have in the gym space, the technology space, for your gym, marketing, building, all that stuff. I'm really interested to hear his story about how he started the company, the problems it solves, and yeah, let's just get into it, man. So, like, there's there's a million companies out there that do software, but what does what does Push Press do, and like what problems does this solve for gyms?

Dan Uyemura  1:15  
Yeah, I mean, we're based basically solving all the problems around the small gym ownership space, so you know it, like Casey was on the show, single owner operator is doing it for the passion of jiu jitsu, didn't grow up going to MBA school and learning digital marketing and all this other stuff. So it's basically like trying to help these single owner operators who are really passionate about the fitness or the training mechanisms that they provide the community with the tools to be able to run their business easier, faster, more efficiently, without having to hire a whole bunch of help.

Scott Groves  1:48  
So, in my 30s, I grew up in the boxing gym space, and talk about just like a shark tank of like people trying to rip people off for 20 bucks, and everybody thinks they're going to build this huge boxing gym, and become rich, and they've basically just created themselves a job. So, what is the what does the solo gym entrepreneur look like? Have they effectively just created themselves a job, or can they usually scale out of the business, or can they use tools like you to at least create a more common like push press to create a more comfortable lifestyle? Like, like, who are the people that you guys were talking to on a normal basis to bring this product to,

Dan Uyemura  2:22  
yeah, I think for the most part they are people who have built jobs for themselves, and I think that's usually said with disdain, you know, I mean, like don't start a business to create a job, but

Scott Groves  2:32  
I'd rather have a job that I gave myself, yeah, and somebody else gave me,

Dan Uyemura  2:36  
and I think in this case to some degree it's okay, yeah, you know, holds right, like they, whatever it is they do, it's fencing or jiu jitsu or CrossFit, or whatever, it's like those people are super passionate about it, they want to change lives, they want to help people in their community, and starting the gym or the business is the way to do it, some, some people are able to scale, like some people think bigger, and they are able to get three, four, or five locations, or even like, start franchising it out, like we work with some of them, but I think for the most part, like 99% of people are just like, I have one location, I'm cool with it, I have my 100 to 200 people, that's my community, and I'm fine, and I make a living, and I'm good, and I think, like, to some degree, there's some elegance in that, that that's okay,

Scott Groves  3:15  
yeah, if you have, if you have community, and you're paying your bills, it's not, that's not a bad life,

Dan Uyemura  3:20  
yeah, I mean, honestly, like Casey probably lives a pretty blessed life, you know.

Scott Groves  3:23  
Yeah, yeah. So, tell us a little bit, like specifically push press, like what do you guys do? What do you guys, what services do you offer when you come into a business? I want to hear the business stuff, and then trust me, you're gonna want to stick around, because we'll get into the crazy origin story about how this business started. But yeah, tell us a little bit about like the tech stack and the solutions you guys are coming up with.

Dan Uyemura  3:41  
Yes, I mean it's a very big product. If you think about it, we do member management, we do billing, we do scheduling, we do private training, we do waivers and documentation. We build TV screens, member apps, staff apps. What else we do? We have like sales landing pages and funnels, we build websites, we have marketing automation systems for gyms. It's basically like everything you would need in one stack to be able to open a boutique fit in the studio and operate market manager leads, manage your members, collect your money, transfer money to bank, put a calendar up, get coaches on the calendar, let people reserve class for the calendar, all just all of it.

Scott Groves  4:23  
So, in the mortgage industry, and we're probably too soon into the podcast for me to cuss, but oh well, I guess this well will not get monetized in the mortgage industry. We're habitually a decade behind on technology, probably two decades behind, really. And so, oh, it's really bad because there's all these antiquated softwares that with all the banks? Who's banking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and all that banking? So we've nicknamed it the Daisy chain of fuckery, because it's like this system doesn't talk to this system, and then you have to have a virtual assistant or a full-time assistant to plug it back over into this system, and then, and I'm guessing your product kind of soup to nuts solves that problem.

Dan Uyemura  4:58  
That's the goal. I mean, there's always. More to do, and then there's always, there's always more eloquent ways to connect things, but yeah, that's that is the holy grail promised land that every gym owner wants, they want less things to log into, less apps on their phone to manage, like less, right? So less is more in this space, probably in your space too.

Scott Groves  5:15  
Do you think we will get to a point where, like, a gym owner, after they kind of, they build the culture, they build the community. Like, is there a future where somebody could run their business from their phone with one app and kind of just keep an eye on all the things? Is that, is that, is that we're working towards,

Dan Uyemura  5:29  
for the most, for the most part. Yeah, yeah. And it also depends, yeah, if they're okay with not growing or they want to grow. Just, it just kind of depends on their goals. But, yeah, for the most part, I think you can kind of do that now.

Scott Groves  5:37  
Other than the fact that you're a little biased because you'd go to a jiu jitsu gym, what's like your favorite type of gyms to plug into?

Dan Uyemura  5:43  
So, we do best in CrossFit, but that's because my first gyms are CrossFit. We, you know, we kind of embedded in the CrossFit space first. Yeah, Jiu Jitsu, martial arts, we do good in. We're starting to do pretty good in the yoga and Pilates space, so it's kind of pretty wide in terms of like anything that's the way I classify it as anything that's like coach-led community fitness, we can kind of plug into

Scott Groves  6:04  
nice, yeah. And how long has the company been around?

Dan Uyemura  6:07  
14 years.

Scott Groves  6:09  
14 years, yeah. Wait, hell do you?

Dan Uyemura  6:11  
50.

Scott Groves  6:12  
Oh, you look good for 50, man.

Dan Uyemura  6:14  
I look, I feel like I look like I'm 70.

Scott Groves  6:17  
No, that's how you and I feel when we get off the mat in the morning, but yeah. But all joking aside, do you remember when we were young, like really young, like maybe I don't know, not even 10 yet? 50 was like ancient, like, like my grandfather, when he was 50, pot belly, could barely get off the couch, smoked two packs a day, like he was legitimately on death's doorstep. And now I'm looking at guys like you or me or Casey, and I'm like, oh no, 50, like I still want to be just like still working out every day, and still growing, and still learning.

Dan Uyemura  6:45  
I think the I actually have thought about this quite a bit, because I think we grew up, me, you and Casey, in an era where, like, muscle and fitness magazine started coming out, like, people started caring about fitness in a mainstream way, and there was, like, a pop culture thing, but I was thinking about my parents. It's like there was no fitness, there was barely any gyms, there was no one cared about nutrition, you know? Like, there was no education about any of this stuff. So, and the thing about, like, our kids is like, they're growing up in a even more, so you know what I mean? Like, peptides are like, how soon until there's peptides for teens, you know what I mean, right? Like, turning into super jocks, but yeah, like, I think our generation was the first generation that actually benefited from, like, oh, you know, maybe the food pyramids wrong, right? No, or things like that. So

Scott Groves  7:28  
yeah, I remember my grandmother watching to me this was the first influencer was like sweat into the oldies with like Richard Simmons, you know, like, like, okay, old people, you got to start moving your body or you're gonna die. Unfortunately, they all did. They died much younger than they could have. But I remember at a very young age being like, oh, like fitness is a thing, like you could, you could do like a video training or whatever. And then I remember when I got out of the army, I was packing on weight fast because I wasn't dry, I wasn't running like five or six miles every morning, and I found what was the original like Beach Body, it was like

Dan Uyemura  7:59  
ex or P

Scott Groves  8:00  
I D X. Yeah, all that's how I audience it all too, yeah, you got to do it, yeah. So we might as well just get into it, because I know that you're open sharing the story. But tell us about the founding of Push Press, and how and why you're able to throw your whole life into building a software company.

Dan Uyemura  8:14  
Yeah, so I kind of told you about this beforehand, the founding of Push Press, and this story doesn't necessarily intertwine, but it kind of does. Let me tell you, kind of like the origin story of Push Press, and then how this intertwines, because there's a crazy story that intertwines with it. This is all around the same time, right? So, I got it, I got, I was getting divorced, probably when I was like 31 years old, about 20 years ago now, and was this was like during the Obama situation, where they were like trying to fix people's mortgages, and I was like upside down on my mortgage, like got divorced, lost my house, lost my job. Honey, he's melting down. Yeah, there's no jobs. Yeah, like you know, my whole life is just kind of like I wouldn't say crumbling, but I'm also in this midlife crisis. Like, I have kids, but I'm not married, and like my whole nothing was what I thought it would be in my life at this point. And I also, you know, discovered CrossFit around this time, I opened my first gym around this time, and I also discovered meth at this time, and in, you know, I'm coming home from working my ass off, like, you know, brand new gym owner, I'm working 12 hours a day, coming home, I come across meth, and it's like the dumbest thing ever, because it's like I'm a CrossFit gym owner, and then I'm also like starting to do meth at this time, which is nuts, but makes me super productive. I'm able to get up early, keep my house clean, go and be its superstar coach at the gym, come home, cook dinner, be a great dad in this knee in the beginning, and then go to bed, and everything was fine. It was like wonder,

Scott Groves  9:32  
drugs are cool for

Dan Uyemura  9:34  
a moment, wonder drug. Within about 12 months turned me into somehow I thought that there was some mafia entity that was trying to kill me. It was Christmas time, and there was like Christmas lights across the street that I thought were Morse code for like when they were gonna come and get me or not. And I had gotten into guns, of course, because I was super paranoid, so I was like stocked up on guns in my house, and of course I bought like illegal magazines that were like not California approved, and like I did the whole. Whole paranoia run down the cliff thing, and was pretty sure that you know, like, when I drove home from the gym from work, I saw, like, a bunch of motorcycles, and I thought, you know, motorcycle gang was following me, and there's probably a part of the mafia, and I get home, and I'm trying to go to bed, and I see these, these lights flashing, and I'm basically like, okay, they're coming, so I got my, got my, as a Glock on my Glock ran outside, and I'm basically like, I don't know, I think I'm in a movie or something, where I'm just like running behind cars with my gun next door to a couple doors down from as a park. So I run into the park, and then I start shooting warning shots into the air because I saw like a truck drive by, and I'm like, that's it, that's the truck that's going to come get me. And then I run, run home, and I call the cops on the, you know, these people that are coming to get me, and they just promptly came and took me to jail. So that was

Scott Groves  10:45  
up until 31 Was there any up until this divorce, and kind of life effectively gets pretty shitty. Was there any mental health issues, or did you, did you, drugs as a teenager, a 20 year old, or just like,

Dan Uyemura  10:59  
no, I never touched hard drugs at all? I mean, I did like ecstasy or something every here and there, like when a carnival came to, you know, music festival come to town or whatever, but like never really got into drugs. But then it was a slow roll of like when I was married, started doing a little bit of Vicodin, you know, after the divorce, pushed that up a little bit more, found some oxy, this one oxy was like all over, I basically fell victim to like all of the memes of 20 of 2000s right? Oxy, I lost my home, you know, just like all of that stuff.

Scott Groves  11:28  
We could laugh about it now, luckily, but I mean, this is like a couple of years where it's like pretty devastating downward spiral.

Dan Uyemura  11:34  
Yeah, I mean, I basically was, as I was telling you, I was, I was up for 17 to 21 in Folsom for

Scott Groves  11:41  
gun charges, as it turned charging a weapon. Turns

Dan Uyemura  11:43  
out, if you discharge a weapon in a park, it's like quadruple, it's like mega penalty, because kids are normally, it would normally be around, but it was like 2am or something, right? Then they found the magazines, like the 20 something round, I forgot, it was 35 round, you know, AK magazines that I had at home, and this, that, and the other, and it just stacked, and it was like, you know, I don't know if anyone here has been in trouble with a lot, you know, like they just stack things because it's basically a game where they're gonna play, they know they're gonna play it down later, so they just stacked all this stuff on me, and then basically I was looking at it, I'm like, yo, I'm literally like a white, as an upper middle class kid, went to UCLA, like everything about my whole life was very like sterile, and now I'm about to go to like state pen, so that was like a very hard thing for me to wrap my head around, obviously,

Scott Groves  12:30  
obviously, yeah, and the pair I, I've never done meth, so I have some friends that have, I'm guessing the paranoia just comes from lack of sleep, overstimulation, you know, this can only go on for so long. Yeah,

Dan Uyemura  12:43  
I think you just run your brain into the ground, because it's like, yeah, you don't sleep very much once you get going on it. And I remember, like, I was trying to live a normal life, so I was like, you know, doing the meth to get up, doing the meth during the day, and then by the end of the night, I was drinking like a 12 pack of beer to go to sleep, you know. It's like, this was my lifestyle, and which

Scott Groves  13:02  
is crazy, because, like, you're cross your, your cross, while

Dan Uyemura  13:04  
I'm running across the gym,

Scott Groves  13:06  
I mean, this is, if it, if it wasn't so sad, it would be funny, right? Yeah, where it's like you're trying to be this poster boy of the community, build community of train athletes, and then you're like you're supplementing with, you know, some, some not great habits,

Dan Uyemura  13:18  
yeah, and honestly, I think this is a thing within the fitness community. It's like there is a pressure to live the life that you're on stage for. That I think it is a very repressive feeling to feel like I go home and I do these dirty things, like I have McDonald's and nobody can know, you know, type, type thing that I think a lot of fitness coaches and CrossFit coaches probably have to deal with. I don't think I'm alone there, but yeah, I was, I was doing way worse than any McDonald's, maybe, maybe, maybe, I don't know,

Scott Groves  13:42  
so, so what turns around, right? Like you're staring down the barrel of, of a decade in prison or two, yeah. And how does it get turned around?

Dan Uyemura  13:52  
So, I mean, you know, again, upper middle class family, my parents were basically like at the point where they were like, 'Yo, you need to figure out life, because I had, I'm the type of person who will keep writing something as far as I can, so it was like, you know, got got arrested as a high schooler for, like, mouthing off the police, and then got a DUI, you know, it's like I had this progressively worse, you know, doing worse stuff,

Scott Groves  14:13  
so there were some signs before the,

Dan Uyemura  14:15  
I never fit in, and I think, you know, as part of being an entrepreneur, is like, I've never just been cool with abiding, like, whenever there's a law, I'm like, okay, let's think about that. Is that even, you know, like, I don't, I don't, I don't play by rules very well, I guess. Never have. And yeah, my mom was basically like, maybe you should just go and see if you can figure out life in jail. I'm tired of this, you know, which I don't, I don't falter for,

Scott Groves  14:40  
yeah.

Dan Uyemura  14:40  
At the same time I'm like, shit, so when she told me that I consider myself to be a survivor, right, and it's like, whatever situation I get put in, I try to optimize to not only survive but thrive. So I remember I was like in court, it was this bail hearing, so it was like the first hearing, or whatever, I don't remember the name anymore, but it was bail hearing and judge. Just like, okay. Well, here's your bail, 100 grand. I have to post 10 and call my mom, and she's like, "Yeah, maybe she just figured out in jail, right? And I was in line to get on the bus, and in line to get on the bus to go to county while we're waiting, because I get to go county while you're waiting for all the court stuff. I was going, I was running through the playbook, like I was trying to run through the success playbook of being in LA County Jail. I'm like, maybe I have to. I probably have to get a fight to establish some dominance. I might have to stab someone, so I have to figure out, like, I'm mentally figuring out, like, do I have to figure out how to make a knife, you know? Like, try to try and smuggle some materials in there, you know? I'm like, running through this playbook in my head, and probably about three people before the bus, like, I was on the bus, I guess. My mom changed her mind, posted bail, and they pulled me out of line, so it was like this crazy.. like, I went through.. I am I gonna have to kill somebody, you know? Like, what is this gonna be like situation? And then I got pulled out, and the minute I got pulled out, I'm like, I'm never gonna be in this situation again if I'm given this chance. So that was kind of the turning point right there.

Scott Groves  16:00  
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Dan Uyemura  16:52  
probably like 3132

Scott Groves  16:54  
Holy shit, yeah. Okay, so how does he get resolved? You get lucky and you're just on probation. Did you have to serve any time, or

Dan Uyemura  17:00  
did not have to serve any time, and I think, like, I'll probably be the, I'll be the first person to say, like, if I was not upper middle class, if I was not Asian, if I wasn't educated and knew how to speak, if I wasn't able to afford a lawyer, like, I had so many things that, like, if I didn't have that one thing, I would have been toast, you know what I mean? If

Scott Groves  17:17  
you were just some poor kid from the inner city, yeah, or like, even

Dan Uyemura  17:19  
a parent who can come up with 10 grand in an hour, right? Like,

Scott Groves  17:21  
yeah,

Dan Uyemura  17:22  
I would've been toast. So, yeah, so the judge, but

Scott Groves  17:24  
you are a felon, right?

Dan Uyemura  17:25  
I am a felon, yeah, or an expunge, an expunge, but you know, still like on my record to some degree, like I can't get Global Entry because of it. So, yeah, the judge was just basically like, oh no, my lawyer was like, oh, I know this judge, and this is how I learned about the legal system, is kind of screwed, right. It's like the lawyers, like, oh, I play golf with the prosecutor, and he's willing to work with us, and like, I'll just, I'll just talk to him when we play golf, and I'm buddies, my wife is buddies with the judge's wife, so he likes this one recovery center. So, if you enroll in that before our next meeting, you're guaranteed to get out, because he loves them, and they even like supported his campaign, or whatever it is, right? Like, you got, I got all the inside playbooks. I'm like, cool. Went down there. My parents were able to, like, pony up the money for the down payment on the recovery system. So, again, it's just like, right place, like, right circumstance for me. And that, that I have to recognize, like, not everyone gets enrolled in this outpatient process that the judge was like in bed with, or cool with,

Scott Groves  18:18  
whatever. Yeah,

Dan Uyemura  18:19  
yeah. Showed up at the next hearing, just told him, like, hey, you know what, like, I've already enrolled, I've already gone for 10 days, here's, I got a printout from my people, and I had already mentally decided, like, I'm done with this whole life, I came too close to the sun here, and so I bought all the way in, got sober, you know, did all the stuff I had to do, because, because of all those circumstances, the judge is like, no jail time, three years probation, you have to do a whole butt ton of community service, and you know, we'll expunge it at the end of it if you do it all, so I just did it all.

Scott Groves  18:54  
Holy cow, yeah, like talk about second chances,

Dan Uyemura  18:57  
yeah, absolutely, like I guess you know, not not parole with counting, but I could still be in jail today, like right now. That's how long, that's how long of a sentence you're trying to put on me.

Scott Groves  19:09  
And so at this point, job, yeah, like,

Dan Uyemura  19:14  
yeah, so that's that's another thing, like, you don't consider when, when you're, you know, a normal citizen, not doing dumb things. Like, the minute I got the felony, I'm like, oh, because I had, I had left my last apartment that I was renting, and I'm like, oh my gosh, like I'm not gonna be able to rent an apartment, like they do background checks like that, that like immediately hit me. So I went and I rented up, I rented an apartment in Torrance, like immediately, because I like I'm not trying to live in like wherever the hell will take a felon, you know, right? I went and ran an apartment in Torrance, immediately signed like a one or two year lease, like just got on it, and then then I started to deal with the job thing, because I'm like, can't work any real, like I was a computer programmer, and they all do background checks, you know, so I'm like not gonna be able to get any of that, so luckily like one of my friends who had a startup hired me to. Like work at his company, and he's actually a co-founder of Push Press, because in that time I basically just worked at his company, worked on my sobriety, and worked on Push Press, and that was like all that I did for a straight year, like you're straight. Once I kind of got a little bit better, I was able to scale back on all the recovery stuff I had to do, because the outpatient was just like four hours a day, five days a week, like it was quite a bit. I was able to open another gym, and then put my time into the gym, opening Push Press, and so, right, like, sobriety is a little bit less time, but still, to this day, I haven't done single, any kind of drug, basically, since.

Scott Groves  20:32  
That's great to hear, man. Yeah, so, How long ago did you start working on Push Press, and how, like, because I don't know anything about technology, how long does it take to come up with proof of concept, like obviously you're dealing with the sobriety thing and your legal issues, and you know, maybe getting a side eye from certain people or whatever. How long does it take? Like, what was that like? Kind of rebuilding,

Dan Uyemura  20:54  
I mean, building the software took forever. I think it took us about two years to build a workable version to Push Press,

Scott Groves  21:00  
and now you could do it in three months with Claude,

Dan Uyemura  21:02  
yeah. No, you well, yes and no. I've actually tried to rebuild pushpress and clawed just as an experiment to see, like, how much tried to be afraid of this.

Scott Groves  21:11  
Yeah,

Dan Uyemura  21:11  
and I use Claude probably 14 hours a day, like I use a lot, and I don't think it's possible right now in any reasonable.. I mean, I guess if you devoted your, like, if you spent a lot of time really working on it, and you knew the ins and outs of, like, the software, like the gym industry, and you knew a lot of things, you might be able to get it done, like, 90 days, right, three months, like you said, but I know, like, every nook and cranny of push press, and like, where things went wrong, and, like, I know everything, so I think like there's something to it, where it's not as easy as people think, and there's gonna, like, I already know it, like, you're gonna see a whole, you're gonna see a whole bunch of AI software come out, and then it's gonna be, doesn't work well, it'll be, it'll be kind of like surface fine for a year or two, but the minute they have to keep building and like adding on to it and working with it, if they don't know engineering really, really well, it will, it will fall apart, and it will hurt all the gyms that move to the AI software, which is going to suck

Scott Groves  22:07  
at some point, you know, 510, years from now. Who, some, some company, Anthropic, or whatever, will do a postmortem, and they'll be like, yes, 95% of all AI software projects got to 90% complete and never implemented. I mean, there's the conversation I've had with Mike Lady a lot, and I don't even understand any of the jargon you guys were talking about. He's like, yeah, unless you have like enterprise development experience, it's not just easy to, you know, open the cloud code and like figure stuff out, because shit breaks behind the scenes all the time, and it

Dan Uyemura  22:38  
looks so fancy up front that you don't realize it, like, if you don't know code, it looks so good what it makes it, you're like, "Oh, dude, I'm a coder, like I can make this work, but under the hood it's like a tangled mess, and that's where the ticking time bomb lies, and like, that's something that worries me, is like we're gonna see a whole bunch of new gym software come up, it's fine, some gyms, and they're gonna compete on price because they have no other way to compete, and gyms are going to get bought into it, and they'll be like, "Oh, shit, I can get software for like $20 a month, I'm gonna do it. And then, like, 18 months from now, the whole thing's gonna implode, and there's some hackers gonna hack the whole system, or the billing is gonna go haywire, like something's gonna happen, and all of their clients are gonna be like, "I wish I didn't do that just to save $100 a month.

Scott Groves  23:17  
Right? Yeah, yeah, something we're gonna hear something. I just know it's coming right. There's gonna be a big CNN news story about somebody used a, you know, Claude code to connect Stripe at a large company. Somebody was able to backdoor it, and all of a sudden now, you know, 10,000 people's credit cards got ripped off. I mean, it happened with Target, and I'm sure they have a pretty, pretty robust software team. So, if you're, yeah, if you're interested, I'm your own code, you got you got a rough time ahead.

Dan Uyemura  23:43  
I'm super, yes, like I tell some other people jokingly, but I'm like, right now is time to either be an AI engineer or a hacker. Like, there's got to be so much like really bad software to just start hacking into right now.

Scott Groves  23:59  
Oh, it's pretty hilarious. So I have this. This is super interesting to me, right? Because it's like you took two years to build Push Press, and you and Mike and some other people I know are really rare personality type, where it's like you can obviously sit there and nerd out for 14 hours on code and stuff, but then you also know how to like build a business and market this stuff, because I'm sure I'm sure there's millions of great pieces of software out there that nobody's ever heard of, because the person developed it had no idea how to market it. So, like, you spend two years building on it, which is kind of nice, that it coincides with your sobriety journey and getting life back on track. And then what happens when you and your co-founder go, like, okay, we have a product here now to sell?

Dan Uyemura  24:39  
Yeah, there's a saying, like, the first time founder focuses on product and the second time founder focuses on distribution, and so like the we absolutely did that, like I remember thinking, like, dude, we'll just build the best software and we'll win, like you know. Have you ever seen the South Park episodes with the Underpants Gnomes? There's an episode that's. A meme in the business community, but it's basically like they have a three-step process to getting rich.

Scott Groves  25:05  
Okay,

Dan Uyemura  25:05  
and step one is steal underpants, step two is question mark, and step three is get rich, right? And, and that's basically like what most people do when they build a business, they're like, "Dude, I'm gonna build like this thing, and then I'm gonna get rich, but they forget like that whole middle piece of like, right? How do you find your customer? How do you speak to them? How do you get them to trust you? How do you get your first 100 customers, you know? How do you then.. how do you scale? How do you build a team? You know, like, do you need customer support? How do you build that? Like, how do you do 20-four hour support? You know, it's like there's.. you know, do you.. what do you pay for 1k to your team, or how do you pay salary to anyone? You know, like, yeah, so much you have to consider that is when you built, when you're, when you're building your first company, you don't, you just think, like, I'm gonna build this thing, and I'm gonna get rich, like it's the underpants gnome, yeah,

Scott Groves  25:48  
it's very funny, if you read the book, The Million, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, which is written by Gary Keller, the owner of Keller Williams, and I know agents that have been with Keller Williams for 10 years, they've never read the book, and Gary Keller says, when you get into real estate, you are not an interior designer, you're not a high-stakes negotiator. Your first job is to lead generate, and then your second job is to lead generate, and then your third job is to find, you know, clients and lead generate, and then your fourth job is to have a CRM and lead generate, and somewhere way down there is negotiate contracts and sign listing agreements, because, like, if you can't generate a client, your product or your service means effectively zero. Yeah, so you end up with this beautiful product after two years. Were you signing people up in, like, beta test as you go along, or was it like, I'm going to build this perfect product, and then I'll try to get some clients?

Dan Uyemura  26:38  
I mean, the, I think the irony of it is, is I think we signed up our first client like the day that we launched.

Scott Groves  26:44  
Oh,

Dan Uyemura  26:45  
and we're like, oh, this is gonna be so easy, right? It was like such a false flag. I

Scott Groves  26:50  
wouldn't got one gym, we found you on the on the internet, and it's because

Dan Uyemura  26:54  
he mistook us for another push press that was out there. It was just like it was a funny thing, but anyway, yeah, I actually, when I do my talks on stage, I actually show our growth chart, and it's like, and when I talk to jiu jitsu owners, I make this relationship, it's like our growth charts basically like the first seven years you can't see it, and then the last like eight years is almost straight up, right, it's literally like it's like that, right, and but if you zoom in on the seven years, it's probably like 100% growth every year, but it's like 100% of $100 one year, and you know what I mean, it's like, right, it's like from

Scott Groves  27:30  
one to two, two to 448, but then seven years in, you go from like 16 clients to 300 or so, yeah,

Dan Uyemura  27:36  
exactly,

Scott Groves  27:37  
and why did that happen,

Dan Uyemura  27:38  
so I think a couple things happen, the one thing I that we, we did not understand when we launched it is this is a business of relationships and trust, and relationships and trust don't come easy, right. In fact, like the reason I'm doing jujitsu is because two years ago we decided we looked at our client base and we realized we had 400 martial art gyms and like 150 to 200 jiu jitsu gyms and we're like, oh, wow, like, somehow they're finding us, somehow it works, like, they haven't quit, maybe we should go into jujitsu, and I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna go to jiu jitsu then, because we need to have jujitsu people here, if you think you're gonna sell to it, like, you can't just go and do jiu jitsu, you know, I mean, right, so that was kind of the genesis of me starting jiu jitsu, which has honestly been one of the best things, like, thankfully, that's happened to me personally, but this is a relationship game, and in the first iterations, when I'm like, I'm, you know, it's like typical small business owner, I'm writing code, I'm running a gym, I have a side job to actually make some money, I'm trying to sell clients, I'm trying to do customer support, like I'm doing everything, cleaning the toilets, everything, so it's like, yeah, okay, and you might get one demo a week at that point, because you're just so spread so thin, you know. And then I'm also trying to make relationships and friendships, so once you get to a point where, like, you have a brand built on trust, then it's like you can actually kind of scale out, and like other people can sell it, and I can just, you know, like I spend a lot of my time trying to do scalable communications, social media, stuff like that, which is all trust, trust-building exercises, you know.

Scott Groves  29:04  
Yeah, and you know what's crazy is because you started this 17 years ago, 1414,

Dan Uyemura  29:10  
years ago, like social media was there, but it wasn't anywhere near the behemoth it is now, right? So it's like you've probably seen this change from like people find you on the internet to you do email marketing, to you do social media, to now you do AI, or whatever. Like, what does that evolution been like? Like, probably just when you're getting your sea legs for this type of marketing, it's like, oh, well, shit, now there's this new theorem. I think, like anything else, it's basically this progression from unscalable, and like, basically, like, I would go on Facebook, and I would like try to find someone to talk to, or try and, like, there was, there was like gym owner groups, I like try and find a thread I can talk to her, go on Reddit, and try and find something, and then as you get more, more systems in place, more process in place, and you get a little bit more scalable, it turns from like you going out and looking for every single one by one opportunity to like now I just broadcast. Message, and like, we've been able to build enough of a following where, like, we can, we can get a message in front of 50,000 people that potentially are gym owners, and we just have to make sure we're saying the right things, and you know, stuff that they're interested in and provides value.

Scott Groves  30:13  
I notice on your company Instagram, it's a lot of live events. Before we start recording, you and I were just talking about how we're a little burnt out on traveling right now, just because it's nice to be home and be with loved ones and be able to work at our home gym and whatnot. How important has, like, the live event, the convention, the getting in person at the client's gym - how instrumental has that been to the business? Or can somebody jump on Zoom, do a demo, fall in love with you guys, and like just sign up?

Dan Uyemura  30:39  
I mean, the short answer to that back half is yes. If all of the right things have been like, nobody buys software. No, I feel like nobody really in our, in our world, the Jiu Jitsu CrossFit world, buy software because they were wowed by software. They, they're, they've come into a demo, hopefully already hearing somebody that they know and trust talk about it, advocate for it, yeah, right, and that I think that's that's the nuance to this, that people don't understand,

Scott Groves  31:06  
if you're well referred, they're so much more likely to buy your product, right, so if if Casey hears from Eddie that, like, oh man, this product's made my life way easier, all of a sudden the demos kind of just a check the box rubber stamp, right, yeah,

Dan Uyemura  31:18  
yeah, they come in a little bit pre sold and you'd have to screw it up to like either the product just has to miss or you'd have to be a jerk to loser, right. And so that's all mistakes

Scott Groves  31:27  
I've made, by the way.

Dan Uyemura  31:27  
Oh, all of us, but I think that's why the live events matter is in, and I have a, I have a very, I have, I have a mantra, like I think you have to do unscalable things to win business, even it doesn't matter how big you are, you have to do unscalable things.

Scott Groves  31:42  
Explain that, because I know what that means, but a lot of business owners don't know what that means. Yeah,

Dan Uyemura  31:45  
so I think a lot of times people, people, you know, if you watch the internet, you'll probably pick up somewhere along the lines, like people are like, 'Hey, you gotta do scalable things, you can't do things that aren't scalable, and what that means is, like, me coming here and recording a podcast one on with you is unscalable, like it's my time, it's your time, there's nothing that we can do. Well, actually, there's there is leverage to it, and there's scale to it, because it'll be distributed to people. But anything that basically takes your time and doesn't create leverage is unscalable.

Scott Groves  32:10  
Yeah, but you could not have done 20 podcasts today.

Dan Uyemura  32:12  
I've done two, but guy, you can't do 20. Yeah, you can't do 20, like you only have so many hours a day, and that's unscalable. But, like, getting on a plane, flying to a convention, and you know, like, for ours, it might be like 100 to 300 gyms, is a really unscalable move, because it's like three to four days of your time away from home to see 300 people, maybe, in which you might shake 100 hands, you know, like, you don't get all of them, so that's like not really a great scalable effort, but I think that's the most important thing to do, because, like, you make 100 connections, if you think of your time as scalable, but it's like, if you can impress 100 people to the point where those 100 people will talk to three people, and you know, and then you create this ripple wave effect, that's where you have to, you have to be very intentful about why you're doing what you're doing, and so, like, I think the mistake a lot of, like, even my competitors seem to do is like they'll fly in, they'll give a speech, they'll bounce out.

Scott Groves  33:04  
Yeah,

Dan Uyemura  33:04  
and they're not, yeah, they're not taking the time to like connect with people. And whereas our mantra is like we fly in early, we help the organizer set up, we help serve food to people, you know, like we're there of service of everyone, because like it's all a stage, like, and we want everyone to see, like, we are here in service of this industry, even if it means, like, we're serving food.

Scott Groves  33:25  
Yeah,

Dan Uyemura  33:25  
at someone else's convention, you know. Do

Scott Groves  33:27  
you are, you are so speaking my language, because the typical mortgage real estate sales coaching is you go for three days and it's 17 back-to-back keynote speakers that are all trying to sell you something, and they walk up on stage, they do their thing, they walk off stage, and nobody gets time with them. When we designed our coaching program, I was like, if you are going to come to my event as either a vendor or speaker, whatever, you're not going to have a booth, you're not going to have a keynote, you're going to be in the room the whole full three days doing breakout sessions and one on one peer coaching and paired interviews and whatnot, because that's the only way that you can grow business is if you're building trust with the people, and sure enough, the few vendors I do let come, they're like, oh yeah, we sign up a ton of people for like the services we offer, I'm like, yeah, it's because they trust you, and you are like in the trenches with them doing the coaching, versus if you get up on stage, like nobody wants your damn QR code anymore,

Dan Uyemura  34:18  
that's the other way I think I see people make is I get on stage and they low key pitch their product, or maybe not even low key, where, like, whenever I get on stage, it's just 100% give to the to the people, even to the point where, like, I get confused people coming up to me after being like, can you tell me more about push press, like, I don't understand, what do you do, you know, like, you know, and I'm like, I'm not really here for that, like, I'm here to help you, you know, but if you want to talk, we can talk, so

Scott Groves  34:41  
yeah. What, what's the next evolution for the business? Is it more scale, more product development, bigger team, all the above?

Dan Uyemura  34:48  
Like, no, I could never want a bigger team, man. More of the team now, I think, like 110 you got 110 employees, right? Yeah, and it's

Scott Groves  34:57  
a lot,

Dan Uyemura  34:58  
but another learning curve, let. So, like, I think when a lot of people start business, it's like you have all these like fantasies, like things you've been told, and like I think a lot of people are just like, "Oh, you know, make a lot of money or raise money, and then I'm like, you know, scale to 500,000 people, and I'm like, "Ho, what I realized, like, when we went from like 30 to 100 every person you add becomes an exponential problem, and I don't mean like not everyone's a problem, but like, here's an example, like complexity, maybe. Yeah, exactly. So, like, at 100 people, when you add one person on top of 100 you have 101 potential problems and ego conflicts, and you know someone that doesn't want to get along with someone, or a pervy person who does something weird at a, in, you know what I mean, like one person adds 101 problems, one person on top of that adds 102 so it's like every person you add, it's just like you can add 10,000 problems by adding 100 people on top of 100 you know,

Scott Groves  35:48  
yeah,

Dan Uyemura  35:49  
and you don't realize that until you start seeing all of the messes that people make when they start like I don't want to work with him because he's a jerk to me, or they look, they looked at me weird, so like, fuck them, you know, like, so,

Scott Groves  35:59  
well, what's weird, like kind of like the military, you know, you can go all the way up to the pyramid of a 500,000 person military, really the scale of like control is about six to 15 people, right? It's like the generals in charge, the commander in chief is in charge of this, is in charge of 12, all the way down to the unit level, it's like you don't have one person really managing more than six or 12, so like at your scale, even for you, pretty smart guy, you can't be intimately involved with 100 people, and it's like maybe you've got five or six managers and they each have five or six reports and whatnot. It's just, it's, it's.. I think it's sad for businesses when they get to a certain level where it's like you can't know there's just.. there's.. there's not enough time in the day, there's not enough bandwidth for you to know everybody and kind of help them along the journey, and then you ask, then you start trusting people underneath them, and like, do those people have conflicts? It's like the level of complexity the most people I've ever managed is like 45 and it was the worst two years of my life.

Dan Uyemura  36:54  
Yeah, I keep meaning to, I will actually want to study military chain of command, because I feel like they've got it figured out pretty well, but there is, like, I mean, we only have 100 people, and it's just like when I talk to someone four layers, or you know, we used to have four layers, and I'm cutting that down to three, but like, when I would talk to someone four layers behind me, I'm like, their impression of what we're trying to do, why we're trying to do it, what you know, all these things, I'm like, that's not even close to like, like that telephone game just destroys it, so I'm like, I want to study military, because I know, like, you can't have no, you can't have that kind of telephone game there, because people die.

Scott Groves  37:23  
Yeah,

Dan Uyemura  37:23  
you know, so there's something there that I need to take time to learn, but it's, it's a mess. So, yeah, I don't want to grow the people. We're going to, by

Scott Groves  37:30  
the way, remind me to introduce you to my buddy Trier. She was an officer, top-notch helicopter pilot, and then she ran, like, helicopter training, and just because of who she is, and she's brilliant. She was in the right place at all the right time. She got a massive amount of, like, military - I don't want to say, like, war college, but, like, like structural infrastructure leadership training. Like, she's one of the best leadership coaches out there, and she's no longer in the military, so, like, she basically takes military principles, and, like, she'll do a call it over free, is like a bro favor for me, but she's got a lot of insight of, like, how does the military do exactly that. You get the orders from the general to the guy on the flight line to make sure everybody lands in Venezuela at exactly 2:02am to do what they need to do. And yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty amazing how they take dipsticks like me at 18 years old and then can trust me with a million dollar piece of equipment, you know, six months later.

Dan Uyemura  38:22  
Yeah,

Scott Groves  38:22  
it's, it's pretty crazy. So, anyway, I interrupted your question. Oh no, the question, but where are you looking to grow? Is it just software improvement? Is it just kind of getting the word out there to more businesses? I think

Dan Uyemura  38:32  
the current, the current push is through AI, like putting AI in the hands of gym owners. I think is going to be the one most impactful thing that this industry will have seen in a long time,

Scott Groves  38:43  
and what does that, what does that mean? Because I think a lot of people have a misinterpretation of what AI is, you know. Oh, it does do stuff for me, it's gonna be my executive assistant. The thing I use AI the most for, and I'm not on it 14 hours a day, maybe an hour, is like as a thought partner, right? Or it's like helping me think through curriculum and stuff. So, where do you think AI is going to influence the gym owner and the gym member experience?

Dan Uyemura  39:06  
I'll talk mostly to the gym owner. It definitely can impact the member, but we're like, that's gonna be a second phase of what we do. The owner gave me it this way, in the early phases, which is probably where we are now. It is, it can be a thought partner, simply right, and an execution partner, so I call it the vent. It's a vending machine, basically. And I think that's how 98% of the world uses AI right now. It's like, hey, reformat this email for me, like, here you go, here's your email, and like, hey, I want to do a social media thing, here you go. That's the first phase, as easiest, right? So it's like, hey, you know, Scott wants to put his membership on pause, got it, paused, right? So you don't have to like click through and do all this stuff,

Scott Groves  39:41  
you don't have to click 17 buttons for different systems.

Dan Uyemura  39:44  
I think phase phase two will be phase two, which we're 1.5 which we are also right now is like intelligence. So I'll be like, hey, you know what, like I'm not really sure if my 6am class is doing that great. Can you tell me some information? Like, look at the data and tell me what's up, you know, like is it a coach thing, is it a member? Worship thing, do I need to spend more money and get more members there, and it'll like look all the data, and it'll be like, well, it looks like it's not actually a coach thing, but it's like a retention thing, or whatever, you know, like, do this, we kind of have that now. Phase two, I think, will be proactive or push information, so I'll be like, you wake up in the morning, you'll be like, "Hey, what's up, good morning, Dan. Like, over the last week, I just noticed, like, Scott hasn't been in, like, it looks like he might have been on, you know, speaking, so you might want to just check in and get his ass in, because you can't have him not in for a while, right? So, a little bit of like watching your back type thing,

Scott Groves  40:30  
yeah,

Dan Uyemura  40:30  
which AI is really, really, really good at doing. And then Faze Theory will be more what I call like agentic operation, so it'll just be more like, hey, you know what, like, anytime my membership starts to dip below 60. Can you just put up a paid ad for me and create a new landing page, test some offers, and you know, maximize the ones that are doing really well. And then, once we get back up to 100 members, like, turn that off, you know, that that will be in the cards, but not in the, any, like, in the near near future.

Scott Groves  40:58  
That's wild. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy to me that we're in the world of AI, and, and I can't find a reliable software that will take attendance for me on Zoom, and just give me a report of, hey Scott, here's your most engaged coaching clients, here's your coaching clients that are at risk, here's people you need to call on Friday because they weren't on all last week, and there's a, there's a realistic chance for churn, and it's like I've tried everything, I've tried plugins, I'm gonna have to have you or Mike or somebody just build me like a clod agent, because like nobody's quite figured out this simple thing of like I have a standing Zoom meeting, I have, you know, 108 people signed up, just give me attendance and give me a Friday report, green, yellow, or red, so I know who's at risk of like dropping out, and I would, I would love somebody to develop that, so my

Dan Uyemura  41:49  
pretty doable, yeah,

Scott Groves  41:50  
it seems pretty easy, right?

Dan Uyemura  41:53  
Yeah, I mean, I don't know the ins and outs of Zoom, but it seems like you should be able to get transcripts, or I don't know if it can understand voice,

Scott Groves  42:00  
no, but there's an attendance thing. There's, is

Dan Uyemura  42:02  
it there? Are they engaging in the Zoom, or is it? Did they just show up?

Scott Groves  42:05  
They just show up on my daily calls. They just show up, and it's like,

Dan Uyemura  42:09  
this has got to be doable. I mean, it's got it. There's, there's like,

Scott Groves  42:11  
everything's doable. I'm sure there's nobody who's done it yet. What's on the docket like this year? So, what is what is the end of 2026 second half of 2026 look like for Dan and Push Press?

Dan Uyemura  42:20  
So, we're rebuilding our marketing suite. We're kind of refactoring everything around this idea that Push Press will now come with five AI assistants. So the marketing suite, which we use, which we call Grow today, will become like your marketing assistant, and that will be like a unified inbox. It will be, you know, website website integration, it will be ideally. If we can get to it, it'll be like you using like go high level or some of these things, right? Where if you build out this crazy workflow, it's like for gym owners, honestly, they look at it and they're like, oh my god, that's too much. But my vision is like, you should be able to vibe code a workflow, and it should be as simple as like, hey man, when someone enters my lead funnel, like, get them to come to the gym,

Scott Groves  43:02  
right?

Dan Uyemura  43:03  
Like, that's it, like, where are all the steps? Yeah, like, yeah, forget it all, just like it doesn't matter, like, read their, read the room, if they're, if they're being a little weird about it, like, back off, if they're, if they're showing a lot of interest, get them in the gym, you know, like, if they're, if they went cold, re-engage them, like, AI can figure all that out, just like, just lead, get them in the gym, simple as that, you know. And if they show these signs, get them out of the funnel, just clean it up.

Scott Groves  43:27  
Yeah,

Dan Uyemura  43:27  
like that. That's how I see workflows becoming, like I don't want 18 step if this then else, and check, check time zones, and all this other stuff. It's like AI should just know how to handle it. So we're gonna be, we're gonna be building that. We're leaning into, like, we have this thing called Coach Coach Assistant, which is like an AI tool that kind of, like, reads inference that it can get from your members, and when they check into class, it's like, hey, you know, Scott hasn't been in in five days, check in to see how he's doing, or Dan, Dan looks like Dan had a meniscus tear, so like, make sure he's cool, so like every person in your gym feels a little bit more like they're taken care of, right?

Scott Groves  44:01  
Yeah,

Dan Uyemura  44:02  
we're gonna double down on that. The assistant, we're working pretty hard on, and then we're just like they're refactoring out all my old code from 13 years ago now, so it's like one by one they're getting rid of all my, my legacy code. It's all gonna be gone.

Scott Groves  44:14  
Is that like, is it like losing your kid to college is a little hard to see

Dan Uyemura  44:19  
in some ways? Yes, but like the stuff that they're doing is like so massively better, like when I use it, I'm like, oh my god, this is so much better than my stuff. So, thank God for doing it.

Scott Groves  44:27  
Yeah, well, things have moved on a little bit since you read the original code 1315 years ago. Yeah,

Dan Uyemura  44:31  
yeah, it's like literally some of my, my pages, like, you'll click on it, and now I'm used to all the fast stuff that they're doing, and I'll click on something, and I'm like, what's going on, and I'll just like keep clicking, and then I realize, like, oh, it just takes like 13 seconds to load my page, and their one loads in like 800 milliseconds. So

Scott Groves  44:46  
there's a crazy journey from where you were to 100 employees and a massively successful company. Like, give it, give us a couple top Dan lessons, successes, failures in the business,

Dan Uyemura  44:58  
oh. Lessons or successes and failures,

Scott Groves  45:02  
all the above.

Dan Uyemura  45:02  
I'm gonna go with lessons. They seem

Scott Groves  45:04  
to, they seem to all work together.

Dan Uyemura  45:05  
Yeah, I think so. So, here's a couple, like Danisms, I guess. Is, uh, for one, the people who are curious and relentless are rewarded, right? So, and honestly, we know I love about Jiu Jitsu is everything I've learned about business, for the most part, translates directly to the mat. You know, like curious and relentless is somebody who will get good at jiu jitsu, like you want to figure new things out, you're willing to fucking like eat it for a while, you know, you're not going to let a bad day get you down, right? Like that's business, like, and honestly, in business, it's like, I've, you know, in hindsight, our first five years were just survival, it was like white belt land, you know what I mean, like just don't die, right, like that's just show up the next day, like that's all the first five years of our business was, and like there's some period in the beginning of any everyone's entrepreneurship journey, you probably relate to this, is like in the beginning, it's like in the beginning you don't know what you don't know, you don't know anything, and you're just like, I'm just gonna get up today and just keep writing code, I don't know, like, whatever. And then there's the blue belt phase, where it's like, you get a little bit of success, and you're like, I'm fucking hot shit, right? And then you start to realize, like, you're not that hot shit, right? And you know, and then once you kind of graduate past that, you're like, okay, I don't know what I don't know, and I know I'm not that good, so,

Scott Groves  46:20  
but you can keep being relentless and curious,

Dan Uyemura  46:22  
yeah. But that's where black belts are, you know. Every black belt I talk to, you're like, I don't know, I don't know anything, right? Like, and you talk to like some blue belts, they're like, oh, I'm so good, like I just learned this, like this role, whatever. You know, the so it's funny,

Scott Groves  46:34  
I can definitely relate, because we relaunched the price point and the program offering of my sales coaching business three times in the first three years, as I was like, oh, I'm not getting it right, I don't have a good model match. Oh, wait, I'm charging too little, oh, I'm charging too much. It's like you just, just trying to survive. Yes, and if I didn't have a quote unquote real job when I was building the coaching business, the coaching business would not exist.

Dan Uyemura  46:55  
Yeah, yeah, here's another one. So, it's like I actually just did a reel about this. I think a lot of people confuse success with perfection, right. And so there's this concept that I adhere very strictly to, which is like anything you do, you want to get to 50.1% success rate, like anything below that, like you shouldn't be doing it, 50.1% success rate, and then you just play as much as you can, you play the game as much as you can. So, think of blackjack, like if you had a 51% odds in a casino, then the game is just like max out the bank and play as many hands as you can, because in the end you win. I think a lot of people get stuck on like, oh, it's only 51% but I'm like, no, dude, like, you should be betting as many hands as you can as fast as you can at 51% once you get there, but until you're at 50% you're fit, you're betting slow, and you're figuring out the game, and you're trying to figure out, like, how do you get to 51 and once you get a 51 you bet as much as you can, and you're trying to get 52 and then 55 right, and it's all about speed, speed of turns, right, and that's why speed wins in business, once you know what you're doing,

Scott Groves  47:56  
yeah, because I think if you told the average person, like, hey, if you were guaranteed to return $51 on a Facebook ad spend by by investing 50, they'd be like, "Oh, I heard about this guy that did this, and I can want to, like,

Dan Uyemura  48:07  
I want a 5x

Scott Groves  48:08  
yeah, I gotta find, I gotta fine tune my ad, and what if this, and I want a 5x return on my Facebook ads, like, dude, if you know you're making $1 just spend the money, and then iterate along the way, right?

Dan Uyemura  48:17  
Yeah, and then get to get work it up to 70% over time, right, but like, once you're at 51% flood the game and put on your learning hat, right? That's the key, is you have to learn to, to get better. That's a, that's an interesting one, I think, because I think a lot of people, like, they want to, they want to win, they want to pull a slot machine and win 5x right, right, right. But it's like Vegas is here because of 50.5% you know, yeah, that's our whole city is here,

Scott Groves  48:41  
all right. So, last couple questions here. Why Henderson? Why'd you end up out here? You were your California transplant, like me. Yeah, what brought you to Henderson?

Dan Uyemura  48:48  
Henderson specifically was just luck, you know, like I was, you know, like a lot of people move out of California because of politics, move out of California because taxes, all this other stuff. The funny thing is, I personally like, I haven't even really, really told the story, but I just watched this movie that reminded me I moved out of California because of fires. Oh, like, I just got sick of, like, so many fires clogging up the air, like, that was a reason, that was a major reason. It was like there was this era between, like, I don't know, 2016 and 2020 where it's like every cyber, it was like crazy fires, and I just got tired of that, and so we were thinking, like, hey, let's move to Kansas, like, what if we moved to Guatemala? Like, it was just like, hey, if we're gonna move, like, world's scheduled limit, yeah, was world, but then what I didn't realize, like, my wife is Hispanic, and like, Hispanic families are thick, and so she's like, yeah, but like, I might ask my family if we go to Kansas, like, I have to get on a plane, like, and go all the way back. And then, and then I was like, well, if you don't like it, you know, like, we just rent a rent a van and just drive back. And I'm like, but from Kansas, it's kind of a pain. So we're like, let's just go to Vegas, it's like four hours away.

Scott Groves  49:53  
This is exactly my story, by the way. Just keep talking, this absolutely name thing,

Dan Uyemura  49:57  
yeah. So we're just like, let's go to Vegas, like, let's just try. It right, and if it sucks, just break a lease, rent a van, go back home, no big deal. Yeah, you know. Oh, there's another business thing, is I believe in two-way doors, so it's like super two-way door, right? Like, no big deal, like, okay, maybe we break a lease, pay some penalty, just go back home, no big deal. The only

Scott Groves  50:13  
reason I don't live in Dripping Springs, Texas, outside of Austin, is because of my mother-in-law, who I have the world's best mother in law, and my wife was like, huh, four or five hour drive, I can handle, you know, five hours at the airport and flying out there, that's gonna be a non-starter for me. I'm like, well, I guess we're ending up in Vegas, and

Dan Uyemura  50:29  
your wife is Hispanic too, right? Yeah, yeah. So I didn't realize how tight Hispanic, like, they are tight, yes. So I mean, even this is probably too far forgotten for all of them, agree. So it was like, okay, let's go to Vegas, and then it was just like, we came out here, we scouted out some places, I don't know, we looked at some places in the, like, I don't even get all the, like, as an East, no, West, I guess, Summerlin side, I don't know, I just saw a few houses, I was like, I don't know, I'm not cool with that, and then I, my whole perception of that whole side was like, and then, so we looked at some places over here, is like a little newer, like, we ended up, we ended up in Cadence, first rented there for a year, and then rented a little closer to Green Valley, and then we bought a home kind of by the gym. Honestly, I love it.

Scott Groves  51:09  
I love it too. Yeah, like it's so funny. All my LA friends are like, "Oh, you live in Vegas? I'm like, "Well, first of all, I don't live on the strip.

Dan Uyemura  51:15  
Yeah, people can't understand that.

Scott Groves  51:16  
They have no clue. I'm like, "I live in Henderson, it's a great community. And the reality is I moved here when I was 42 so in five years of living in Henderson, I have a better sense of community than I had in 42 years of living in LA. Yeah, kind of reason.

Dan Uyemura  51:32  
Yeah, there's this way more opportunity here, honestly. You know, like if anyone's trying to get ahead or trying to start, like your money goes farther, the opportunity here is just so much better,

Scott Groves  51:43  
and I feel with, like, people like you moving here, we're getting a much better entrepreneurial ecosystem in Vegas, and I know that started with Zappos, and there's a lot of kind of tech adjacent that's moving up here, but just in the five years I've lived here, I've noticed a lot more people coming into the gym, young and old, little bit more entrepreneurial, little bit less like blue collar, with nothing wrong with that. My kids work blue collar jobs. My older kid works blue collar job as well, my probably younger kid, because he loves working his hands. But I do feel like there's like a little bit more of like an entrepreneurial vibe in just in just the last couple years that I've noticed.

Dan Uyemura  52:16  
Here's a little - I don't know if it's fun fact - but the blue collar worker is going to have a renaissance because of AI. Oh, yeah, like they're set. Yeah, so there's nothing wrong with being like a blue collar work at this.

Scott Groves  52:29  
I was telling my son, he's 2223 he's in New York. I'm like, you might want to like take some time getting like your union credentials, because you cannot find a plumber or a tradesman on Long Island that makes less than $250,000 a year. Period. The end. Dan, first of all, I appreciate you being so open and vulnerable about, like, what you went through. Congratulations on Push Press. I didn't know till today that it was 100 person company and so big. So, congratulations on this success, man. And what's the easiest way for people to find you if they're gym owners? They want to get in touch, they want to, they want to do a demo with Dan about Push Press, although I'm sure you have a team for that. Yeah, look in your eyes, of like, I don't do demos anymore, I'm just not with you. But how do people get in touch? Just pushpress.com

Dan Uyemura  53:10  
for gym software. Yeah, I mean, I imagine your audience is less gym owners. Yeah, if this is gym owner, that's great, but like I actually love just connecting with entrepreneurs in general, right? Which I think Henderson HQ is probably pretty connected into, so like, I will like on Instagram, I'm Daniel Sun, like The Karate Kid, Daniel Sun, nice. So, yeah, anyone out there who owns a business who wants to connect, like, I would love to, like, I just love, I love creation, and all of businesses' creation.

Scott Groves  53:33  
I'm gonna get a dinner on the books for a bunch of us, because I know some people that you need to meet. Mike, oh, that'd be cool. So, yeah, we'll make it happen, man. Thanks for coming in. Cool, brother. Appreciate you. And we'll, uh, we'll fight on Monday morning.

Dan Uyemura  53:45  
I'm not looking forward to that. Thanks.

Scott Groves  53:49  
Hey, it's Scott Groves with the Henderson HQ podcast. I hope you got something out of that episode. If you enjoyed it, please don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to the podcast. It really helps the show grow, and by the way, if you are a business owner, or you know a business owner who has an interesting product, service, or just an interesting backstory, please, please get in touch with us, email us at the Henderson hq@gmail.com We would love to interview you, because that's what this show is all about. It's about building community, supporting local, individually owned businesses, and just making Henderson a great place to live. And don't forget, go to Henderson hq.com and make sure you sign up for our newsletter. We send out a once a week newsletter, no spam about the most interesting local businesses, hot spots, restaurants, community events. Thanks for watching the show. Really appreciate you,

Unknown Speaker  54:41  
thank.