Today we’d like to introduce you to Ian Cummings.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Born in Raised in Miami, FL (Richmond Heights), I grew up playing every sport there was to play outside and in every after-school sports program, they offered at a nearby private Catholic School (St. John Neumann Catholic School). This included Cross Country, Soccer, Baseball, Basketball, Volleyball, Track & Field. My favorite subject was hands down P.E. though I did ok in other subjects. At home and being the youngest of 5 naturally I followed older brothers and played in every pickup football game, basketball game, and the classic outdoor games, red light green light, tag, and simply a good old foot race was always to be had with the local neighborhood friends.
Funny enough as an African American child (before the Venus and Serena William era) my dad & mom both came from Guyana (South America) and after working in a few corporate jobs back in Guyana and not liking that feel he came to this country in Miami and started his own Kitchen Cabinet company and did this until he retired. He was always his own boss throughout my childhood. He learned to play tennis a childhood dream of his when he was little and formed his own band and made their own instruments I’m told, so naturally, he was an entrepreneur at heart.
My mother too rarely if ever worked for any company, maybe Victoria Secret during a Holiday season but was a housekeeper when initially arriving, but was very thrifty and though she pinched pennies, she had a Neiman Marcus account and till this day has some of the most expensive pieces of furniture, clothing, and garden pieces that you wouldn’t believe how someone without a 9-5 could afford and is one of their largest clients and is treated as such to this day. This will show later why it was natural over time to pursue the path I am currently on today (just 1 month shy of my 40th birthday January 28th, 2018)
So naturally, my older brother (4 years older) and I would go with him after work like clockwork. As you are starting to get a sense, anything to get out of the house or out of the indoor environment. As 2 Black kids my brother and I were actually pretty good at tennis. My older brother being a bit stronger and older at the time was better and was able to play against my dad’s friends, while I was stuck with one of my dad’s friends daughters to play with at the time. And she wasn’t as good so my determination began to wander and I followed my brother to the nearby basketball court as there were typically only 2 tennis courts to play on and with 8 men waiting their turn and my brother typically up next, the opportunities for me to play were very slim.
Funny story as I wandered to the court each night that girl stayed on the court hitting against the chain linked fence until one day years later we played as we did so many times in the past and low and behold the game was competitive and we got to a long tiebreaking match and of course like any good movie she ended up beating me for the first time. On this day probably around 12-13 is when I began to fully pursue my brother and the game of basketball. (Side note, that girl went on later to get a full tennis scholarship to St. Thomas University and was the #2 player so I’m told by my dad). My older brother had many high school coaches hoping he’d attend their high schools La Salle if I recall but he ended up following our other brother’s and sister’s footsteps to their alma mater Killian High School the neighborhood designated high school. He played some Varsity Basketball.
Of course, after Venus and Serena’s rise to fame many years later we both still wonder if we made the right decision as very few African American’s played tennis in those days and College Sports Scholarships for minorities were at an all-time high especially in tennis, but you live and you learn.
Yes, we had video games like Atari, Coleco, eventually Nintendo and while yes we played it from time to time there was nothing like being outside as I typically got in trouble for coming home after the street lights came on. As a pre-teen, fishing was also a great passion of mine as when friends weren’t around we lived very close to a canal where I would go solo, with my older brothers, or with a friend and we could be gone from 4 pm until sundown (6 pm or 8 pm dependent on Day Light Savings time). I think I still hold the claim to fame for almost catching the biggest Bass (just right past dusk). We called Channel 7 News but they never came.
Funny story, I wanted to mount that bass but the following day after school I came home to find it cut in several large steaks by my mom and I think I cried that day, I can’t quite remember but my mom said it would have spoiled as no one had any idea how to mount a fish or even the money to do so if we did find a way. I also remember having my own cash prize fishing tournament around 12 years old in my channel similar to the ones the Bass Channel would have on Saturday mornings and I remember making my own black and white flyers, cutting the paper in 4’s and handed them out door to door, in barber shops, and phoning my friends. I fronted my own money and all.
Unfortunately, I won my own tournament so not many wanted to return to future ones, lol. Other entrepreneurial minded things we always did as kids were to go door to door to wash the neighbors cars for $5-$10 (with wax), cut yards, sell fallen avocados or mangos, lemonade or fruit cup stands (frozen cool aid), which is again why most of my personal entrepreneurial endeavors later in life came natural to me.
High School came around for me and I too wanted to follow in my other siblings footsteps following private school 1st – 8th grade and attend Killian High but my father had had enough, and decided it was better that we tried something new and I headed to where many of my grade school peers attended to Christopher Columbus High School. At first it was disappointed and actually wore my brother’s green & gold Killian Letterman jacket one day to school as a freshman and obviously that wasn’t the brightest idea I had, but I quickly came to have many more friends, teammates from both the JV and Varsity Football team and did well with my studies.
I played JV football and was encouraged by numerous coaches to play varsity football for the high chance of a Division 1 football scholarship but somehow like my brother we liked basketball and I decided to give it my best going into my Junior and Senior years as the year I played football in 10th grade my skills did not advance the following year as much as I would have liked. Playing Varsity my 10th, 11, & 12 grade year (1996), was exciting and our team went from 15-15 the first year to 16-14 my Junior Year, and 19-3 our Senior year we were doing well. When College acceptance letters started to come in, I was pleased that I got into all 7 colleges that I applied to with a near 3.0 GPA average, but only 1 was for a College Basketball Division III full scholarship and actually with pay as it was to one of our countries top Service Academies, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.
So not knowing much about the school, except for one visit from their Basketball Head Coach to Columbus and 1 visit to the Academy in our Senior year, I accepted the offer and off to the military I went. I really went with the mindset to play basketball and didn’t consider much else, but boy was my world turned upside down as the yelling, screaming, short showers, shorter sleeping times, 20+ credit courses (6 classes a day) plus initially Division 1 level playing came at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport R.I. where they initially sent the potential candidates that did not have the 4.0 GPA’s or the 1400+ SAT scores to ensure we could keep up with the expectations i.e. military/academics/athletics. So Bootcamp #1 for 10 months was complete and off to our perspective academies I went.
Btw, when competing against Division 1 players and me being just a Division III player I ended up starting the entire season and after scoring nearly 25+ points in a JV game versus the Naval Academy JV players, the Navy head coach asked me in the locker room following the game as to why I didn’t attend the Naval Academy instead of the Coast Guard Academy. I looked him in the face and said, “well you all never came to visit me at my high school like the head coach of the Coast Guard did.” He was silent.
Following the Coast Guard, I exited following 1 year at the Academy “honorably discharged” and began at FIU 1998. My father told me computers were the future and I recalled playing a few “Kings Quest games in my youth and Sim City * Sim Farm along with AOL being a big hit and I figured, sure how hard could Computer Science be. Once again my world was turned upside down but the fact that I wasn’t a quitter a powered through and eventually graduated with my BS in Computer Science from FIU in 2003.
While coding wasn’t for me I landed a job at a not-for-profit organization “The Center for Independent Living of South FL” where I became a PT Computer Instructor teaching adults with disabilities basic computer skills, i.e. typing, Microsoft Office, chat rooms, lol, etc. Within a week I was asked to take on an additional roll teaching lower-functioning adults with disabilities Independent Living Skills and actually met my soon to be wife who was already working there for many years. Funny enough we had a recess of sorts twice a week and I took them across the street and once again I taught each of them all of the sports I used to play as a kid in private school, in my street, or in the colleges I attended (such as kickball, soccer, basketball, exercises, ultimate frisbee, and more). As you can see the sports kid in me never left.
After 5 years at the non-for profit I continued to realize that I was in an industry typically dominated by older women as I would attend meeting after meeting and as a young men now with a military discipline and continued to stay in shape, I said I had to change both because I was now financially driven, but at the same time I knew I had more to accomplish. Btw, I should mention during this time as a teacher I started my own Event Planning Company as in college I truly enjoyed the nightlife scene, and because my dad & mom were entrepreneurs I always look at ways that I can both help people out and if I can make a buck for myself in the process and had a burning desire then nothing could stop me.
I along with one of my old Academy buddies as my associate director and my soon to be wife as my marketing director set out to have a ton of fun bringing people from all over the country including locally to throw large events for a fraction of the cost for our members than it would normally cost. As you will see later my goal was never to price gauge my loyal members but instead provide a service that everyone would be happy about. I did this for about 3 years and stopped when I purchased my first home and now had a wife and 4 year old daughter (now 14) through my now wife, so it seemed like partying all night or work and MBA studies didn’t mix so I closed the doors on the event planning company but it taught me a lesson as after 3 years of growing that business the phone was ringing with larger clients and more members. The lesson I learned there was that the earlier part of the business was the hardest but through consistency and hard work is when it begins to pay off.
So as I left the teaching world I entered the world of sales and at first it was at a career college which allowed me to go back to school to get my MBA degree for free while I worked there and 2 years later was asked to be the Associate Dean of the campus but I moved on to another sales role for a marketing company which promised high financial expectations only to be throttled in a downward spiral when a 3rd of the work force was laid off due to financial hardships and of course under the last in first out policy I was let go. Not 2 months before this I had purchased a Range Rover and my now wife and child had moved into a 7 bedroom 4 bathroom, with pool, music studio, pool, pool bar, pool room, dance studio monstrosity of a house and now we were floored to my wife’s teaching salary and I was on FL unemployment making a mere $550 every 2 weeks.
I remained unemployed for 3 months applying to over 500+ jobs in that time through any means necessary and financial duress kicked in. In that time I only received maybe 5 phone interviews and maybe 2 in-person interviews, until one day I headed to a career fair and was hired on the next day. During this time I told myself that I never again wanted to have my life and my families life put into turmoil because a firm I was working for wasn’t doing well or for any other reason to cause me financial duress.
So I guess you could say in those 3 months and knowing that Event Planning wasn’t going to happen again due to my new life circumstances of family and now being in my mid 30’s, I said to myself what can I do on my own, that I had a passion for, and can help others. This is when all of my childhood & high school sports mind, military college/training, event planning skill set, and others all came together as I was always at the gym after work, and well I said what about my own fitness boot camp. So while I began my new Sales job in Downtown Miami, a balanced my new startup on the side and did so successfully for 5 years before leaving and last year going full time with Operation Triple T, LLC.
However, to back up a bit, when starting out 5 years ago in 2013, my initial idea was to start on January 1, 2013 and get all of the Small Business paperwork in order, get the insurances needed, buy some equipment, apply for the local park permits, hire trainers, do the marketing and sales in which I was a natural at, and sit back and let the money roll in. Lol Little did I know the person holding the permit also needed to be certified so a few months later I passed the exam, and several months after that awaited the final approval for the local park permit and opened the door to my first Fitness Bootcamp class and did some 1 day demos for free on August 15th, 2013, and on September 1, 2013, had my first month of paying members most of which were my family members, personal friends & gym members I used to see frequently at the gym, and a few members from the demos the week before that happened to be walking around the park.
Of course, all was not smooth sailing as most small business startups can attest. One of the funniest yet not funny stories I can tell was ordering 5000 flyers, and I went with my first hired part-time employee (my nephew in high school at the time) and dropped him off at the local community college to hand out flyers or put them on cars. Within 20 minutes of me dropping him off, he called me 20 minutes later to tell me he was asked to leave by local security. After dropping him off I went to a nearby park and ride busway and put flyers on nearly 100 + cars. I got on the bus as I always did and something began to happen later that day on my way home.
My business voicemail box that was attached to cell began to fill with tons of messages and I got excited and thought wow, will it really be this easy. Unfortunately, as listed to the first message it was an irate caller screaming about how upset they were that one of my red & white flyers had stuck onto their car doors and windshield and peeled the paint off. Then I listen to another voicemail only to hear another highly irate person passionately displeased about the damage this flyer did. This went on for about an hour as one by one that night I had to call each person back to apologize and informed them that I would return the following morning to undo the damage. So the next morning my nephew and I arrived to that park and ride with a few buckets of water, soap, and credit card edges and washed off nearly 100 plus cars.
Of course as to be expected and not having running water and not much to fully rinse the cars off there were some remnants left behind so we got a few more calls that evening and one saying, please just stop touching my car. Luckily no paint was ever scratched but it only appeared that way at first as after I put the flyers on the cars, it rained causing the flyers to keel over onto the side of the door, and then the hot South Florida sun came out and baked them into the door making it almost impossible to peel off without soap and water and those that initially tried were the most traumatized especially those with newer model cars.
Ok, so that was our toughest day, but each day after got better, and with each month membership grew, and with that we were able to purchase more durable equipment as initially with little to no capital we did the exercises you would typically see in the military and most other boot camps and at home dvd’s body weight specific. With each membership, we purchased portable equipment that had multiple uses and this continued to bring new interested onlookers and then I knew I had something that people wanted. Something more than just push ups and sit ups that most other (though few) at the time were offering in Miami.
We were also outdoors and while the $10 youfit craze wasn’t there yet my members were those who didn’t like the box gym feel, they didn’t like waiting for machines, or that eery gaze that some men give women in gyms. They wanted to run free and not a treadmill or elliptical run, They wanted a place they could exercise and their kid be in the playground within eye view or running around right near them and under the mother like watch of all of the other boot camp members (an extended family so to speak). They wanted new exercises and routines, not just the standard 3 sets of 10 that even I grew bored with. They wanted a challenge, they wanted to sweat, they wanted to look and feel good and Zumba wasn’t quite it.
So Operation Triple T, LLC was born. Btw you may ask what is Operation Triple T. When I was in the military and after the tough 3 months or more boot camp period in the Academy you get a solid 3 course meals and without proper exercise, many cadets found that they needed to increase their waist size. So some of us said as there is an Operation name for any military exercise, some most know like “Operation Desert Storm or Operation Iraqi Freedom” to some less known like “Operation Golden Flow” a time when the last # of your social security number was called in the morning and you had to report to the “head” or bathroom to take a drug test or urine sample. Well, when we felt we were getting out of shape a few friends of mine came up with “Operation Triple T” or otherwise known as Operation Tank Top Time so that we could get back in shape for those summer months. So it stuck and though I’m sure there are a few new members that may not know what it means, my long-term members have fun with it just as my military buddies and I did many years ago and everyone now wants to be in OperationTTT shape.
After 5 years at my last job and a 6 figure income once again I was now in search of something more only this time it was not money, well maybe a little money but this time with at the time a new baby girl on the way, I said no longer did I want to do 2 jobs and I was in search of a better quality of life. A life where I can take our little one for walks, play with her, and for me to be able to play tennis on a Monday afternoon, go swimming on a Tuesday, basketball on a Wednesday, private salsa dancing lessons with my wife in the afternoon, and of course fishing on a Friday (in my old neighborhood canal or salt water), and happy hour with my friends. Never have to ask a boss if I can attend one of my daughters sports game at her elementary school, yes St. John Neumann (how annoying that was) as she would be entering high school and I remember how nice it was for me when I saw my dad and mom in the stands so I vowed to do the same thing. I wrote these goals down and looked at them on the side of my bed each night I went to bed and each morning I woke up.
I am happy to report that for 1 year now I have been doing all of those things mentioned, and I mean all and then some. I now work about 2 hours a day, some weekdays are off and enjoying life so much more. In my 2nd year doing boot camp part time, my goals are to expand but as I initially intended to have trained staff service each location to avoid me losing my much appreciated new time to do as I please.
Btw:
Operation Triple T, LLC went from 1 location and 2 night sessions only 3 times a week (24 sessions per month total for the first 3 years) to now 4 years later holding over 132 sessions per month, with 3 locations to choose from (Deerwood Bonita Lakes Park, Tropical Park Stadium, and Saint John Neumann Catholic School (yes the same school my brother & I attended many years ago). We had morning, afternoon, and early evening sessions, and even have a complimentary session for our member’s guests and anyone that is interested. The first session is always complimentary and our claim to fame is that if you can give us a minimum of 3 sessions per week you can be expected to see a significant change in your overall physique and muscle and cardiovascular endurance levels and after 3 months you’ll be reaching goals you never thought you would.
We work hard but it is always a go at your own pace type of boot camp where we encourage members new and long-standing to take as many breaks as needed and with each session, you will get better each time. Our other claim to fame is that we never have any 2 sessions alike and it has been that way for over 4 years now which is why we still have several members that have been with us since our inception. We have very affordable monthly rates to choose from which rival any in the market to date in fact I’m always being told by my peers in the industry that our prices are too low but again like my Event Planning days, our goals are to serve the local communities and it’s residents and not try to overcharge but instead provide a high-quality program each and every time. We offer very low stretch sessions and free tried and trusted nutritional guidance by licensed and certified doctors, nutritionists, and dietitians.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
My parents, wife, friends, and current members for supporting me.
Pricing:
- Month to Month $80 per month
- 3 Month Package $70 per month
- 6 Month Package $65 per month
- 12 Month Package $60 per month
- Receive a 10% discount if paying the 3, 6, or 12 month packages all up front.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.operationttt.com
- Phone: 7864135235
- Email: Ian@Operationttt.com
- Instagram: Instagram.com/Operationttt
- Facebook: Facebook.com/Operationttt
- Twitter: Twitter.com/Operationttt
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