May 16, 2017

Meet Charlie Cates and Julie Errington of Muscle Activation Schaumburg

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Charlie Cates and Julie Errington.

Charlie and Julie, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
The idea of owning my own exercise facility started during my freshman year of college. I was really into sports performance but knew I wanted to explore the business side of things, as well. By the end of my freshman year, I had made the decision that I would one day go into business for myself running my own exercise facility.

Right out of college I was supposed to have a job in Connecticut. Two weeks before I was going to move there, I got a call from the person who hired me saying the place was declaring for bankruptcy. At the time, I was living at home with my parents in Wisconsin. One of my teammates from college was attending law school at Northwestern University in the city and said I should come down to Chicago because there were a lot of gyms to work at there. I interviewed at four different places and ended up accepting an offer from FFC in the Gold Coast. It was there that I was introduced to Muscle Activation Techniques™ (MAT™).

MAT™ was the missing link that I had been looking for when it came to exercise and personal training, so I dove head first into the classes that were being held in Chicago starting in January of 2011. Up to that point, I had difficulty growing my business at FFC. I was not sure if I would be able to continue to work as a trainer. A lot of days I thought it would be easier to just look for a salaried position somewhere to pick up a side job at a grocery store or something. I even went as far as to get the application forms for a Trader Joe’s near where I was living. I put the application in my desk drawer and I told myself that if things didn’t get better by the end of the month, I would fill out the application and turn it in.

Some months things would get better. Some months they would not. But I was determined to make a career for myself in fitness and to open up my own facility, so I never ended up turning in the applications.

On February 29, 2012, I left FFC and started working for myself as a contractor at a few different locations in the city. I was continuing to progress through the MAT™ classes and had started another series of courses called RTS. It was during one of the RTS courses that I met my now fiancée, Julie. Julie was living in Naples, FL at the time and I was living downtown. We continued to connect after the course, then started dating for 9 months.

During that time, I was building my business in the city but was growing increasingly unhappy living in the urban environment. I had grown up in a small town and gone to undergrad in a small town, so the city always felt foreign to me. Eventually, I made the decision to leave the city and move out to Schaumburg, and Julie relocated out there with me shortly after in June of 2013.

I was still commuting to the West Loop five days a week to see clients, though. By September of 2013, I was seeing clients out of my apartment’s fitness center in Schaumburg. Julie was employed as a personal trainer by Lifetime Fitness in Schaumburg, too. After a few short months, I was told I was no longer allowed to see clients at our apartment. That Christmas, I contacted every place in Schaumburg looking for a location to see my clients. Nobody was interested in the idea.

At that time I knew I had to find a place of my own, and on New Year’s Eve of 2013, I signed the lease for our 118 square-foot, 10 N. Martingale office.

Despite the maze of our office and the inconvenience of accessing the basement fitness center, we were happy and grateful to be running our own show. Julie and I had to schedule around each other each day because the office was only big enough for a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet, and one MAT™ table. On July 1, 2014, we were told we could no longer use the fitness center to train our clients. As an exercise-based business, this was not great news. I knew we had to find a new location fast.

I spent the entirety of the next two days hunting for office spaces in Schaumburg. I called as many as I could find and ended up picking three to visit. After seeing the first space, I was sold. But, I needed to do my due-diligence and check out the other two. The second space required too much build-out on our part. The third space Julie loved from the moment we walked in. She could see something in it that I did not at that time, but I trusted her judgment and decided to sign the lease for the third space. This began our time in Remington Office Court.

We then needed to find equipment to put in our space! We scoured the internet late into the nights looking for equipment that we wanted. We ordered pieces from all over the U.S., most notably our 11-piece Keiser line, which we got from South Carolina. It was “local pickup only”, so Julie and I took a one-way flight down to Greenville, SC and rented a 24-foot truck. We drove 14 hours straight through the night to have the equipment back in Schaumburg by the next morning so we could see clients and attend meetings that day.

We opened our 1355 Remington Suite D office on September 1, 2014, the day I turned 27 years old. We had a wonderful 9-month time there, but when the opportunity to expand was brought to us, we seized it and moved to the front of the business park, into our current 4,000 square-foot space (1375 Remington Rd, Suite K).

The moment I walked into our current office, I had a flashback to a picture I had drawn back in January 2013 during a brainstorming session. I was visualizing what I wanted my future facility to look like and had sketched a floor plan of it. The floor plan that I sketched is nearly identical to the floorplan of our current office.

June 6, 2017, will mark two years in our current office. We have expanded our offering of fitness equipment, now showcasing nearly 20 pieces of exercise machines and cardio pieces. We have also become the Chicago-area hub for the Muscle Activation Techniques™ educational program, hosting and teaching classes here for the introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses. This brings students from all across the globe into Schaumburg and into our space to learn MAT™.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It has absolutely not been a smooth road, although from an outside perspective our trajectory and growth may suggest otherwise. I think the biggest struggle to date is learning the business side of things – how to run a business, creating systems, documenting processes, finding good people to work with who buy into our idea, sales, marketing, keeping books – all of the things that, as personal trainers and MAT™ practitioners, are outside of our area of expertise but still completely necessary for keeping the lights on. These challenges have brought a ton of learning opportunities, as well, so even though some days seem difficult, the difficulties seem far fewer than they once did. Every time we have changed office location, purchased a new line of fitness equipment, or tried to change something at our office, difficulties have arisen. I have learned that major projects are likely going to take more time and cost more money than I initially think, and there will usually be at least one fire to put out that seems threatening to the completion of the project. Everything from driving to and from Wisconsin to pick up new equipment and realizing that it is 1/2 an inch too wide to fit through our door once we get it back here, to random water leaks, toilets flooding, and people not showing up to help move equipment have all happened. But in the end, everything has worked out. What I have realized is that when faced with the situation of “This has to get done no matter what”, the task gets done, regardless of how improbable it seems.

Muscle Activation Schaumburg – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
We specialize in one on one personal training and Muscle Activation Techniques™. Our expertise is in helping individuals exercise to maintain and improve their health instead of trying to exercise for performance. We utilize MAT™ to help our clients continue to do the things they love to do for as long as they want to do them. We also have an educational side to our business where we host and teach a number of courses for the Muscle Activation Techniques™ program as well as for people wanting to get certified as personal trainers.

As a company, we are proud to offer a welcoming exercise environment for people who do not like the traditional gym setting. We create a personalized exercise experience that cannot be found elsewhere in the northwest suburbs. Our attention to detail with each client’s exercise process allows us to create exercise for our clients’ bodies rather than trying to match their body to an exercise. Additionally, shifting our clients’ focus from what is happening outside of their body (such as moving the weight or getting in reps) to what is happening inside of their body (i.e. their muscles squeezing) completely transforms how our clients experience exercise. For most, they have not ever had exercise feel the way it does when they exercise with us.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
A really proud moment for me was when we were nominated as the Schaumburg Business Association’s Rookie of the Year business this past October. Even though we did not win the award, it showed me that the Schaumburg area was taking notice of and truly appreciating the work that Julie and I are doing at MAS. We are extremely grateful for the opportunities that Schaumburg provides us, so our nomination really meant a lot to me.

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