I recently interviewed Equinox co-founder Lavinia Errico on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Adam: Our guests today helped transform the world of fitness, co-founding the largest luxury fitness business in the world. Lavinia Errico is the co-founder of Equinox and is also the founder of Joylift. Lavinia, thank you for joining us.
Lavinia: Yeah. Thank you so much, Adam, for having me.
Adam: You grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey. Jersey girl, through and through, yep. And you worked at the register in your dad’s deli as a kid before moving all the way across the country to attend my alma mater, USC. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?
Lavinia: So I grew up in New Jersey. I grew up in a big Italian family. I always say our house was filled with a lot of energy. My mom used to joke and say that my kids came out of the womb running, and we had hard-working parents, really hard-working parents. I feel like the values were really instilled in us, like hard work. And we watched my dad. My dad would leave for work at literally five o’clock in the morning or quarter to five in the morning, and my dad would go into work early. And when we head off from school, we would go into the delis. I loved being in the deli. I really, really, really enjoyed working. I enjoyed the energy, and I loved New York City. I love the energy of New York City. I love the color and the texture. My dad was in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen. I can’t explain it, I just loved the colors, the texture of people, and the vibrancy, and I loved working. At a young age, I would say to my dad, I want to work the cash register. And he’d be like, You’re too young to work the cash register. But I was really good at it, and I just loved it. So before I knew it, he was letting me work the cash register. I just found I really loved working with the clients and the customers, and so at a young age, I learned to find joy in work and connection in people in customer service. I learned that if I put the pastries or something right by the cash register, people would grab them. It would be an impulse. I remember thinking that, and then by the end of lunch, I’d be like, Oh my God, all the Yankee doodles are gone. I felt excited. Then I remember at the end of the day, when my dad would figure out how much they made, I would be like, How’d we do today, Dad? And he would be like, we did great. And I’d be like, did we do better than yesterday? I don’t even know. I was eight years old, but I got so excited about that. In the weirdest way, I always say, what is your nature and what is your nurture? That’s where the perfect part of learning and growing is when somehow your nature and your nurture come together in a way that create magic. So for whatever reason, I enjoyed business. Who knew that it was business? Then I was just in my dad’s deli working, but I really, in a weird way, Adam, I got butterflies in my stomach before I would go to work with him, but I liked it. I thoroughly, really enjoyed it, and I enjoyed being in New York City. And then I started dancing at a very young age, and I couldn’t wait to start being able to go into New York City and dance in New York City, because I remember some of the ballerinas would walk into the delis, and I thought that’s what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be a dancer in New York.
Adam: I love it. You shared so much there that I would love to dive into. You mentioned the magic that happens when nature and nurture come together, and there might be no better example of that than Equinox. How did the idea for Equinox come together, and how did you and your brothers actualize it?
Lavinia: I feel like, first of all, it was part of our childhood. For me, like I said, I was a dancer, so I was always practicing in our basement. When I got to be about 12 years old, my body started changing from a little skinny girl into like a lot more curvy. And in those days, having a body like that was not ideal as a dancer, because everybody wanted dancers to be a string bean; you had to be super skinny. And that was when I started having some issues around body image. And at the same time, my brothers were starting to get into wanting to work out. They want to get strong. They want to get bigger. And so my dad actually put a universal gym in our basement, and we would all work out down there. I started even going to another gym. I started going to a European health spa because I had friends that worked there, and I was young, and one day, one of the teachers had a flat. They couldn’t make it, and they called in and said, I’m sorry, I have a flat. And then they were making the announcement that the class was going to be canceled, and I walked up to the counter, and I’m like, I’ll teach the class. And they’re like, you’re not even supposed to be in here. You’re too young. What do you mean, teach the class? I said, but I know this class. I memorized it because I was a dancer, so memorization of choreography was very easy because that’s what I’ve been doing since I was five. So they were like, all right, teach the class. I’m like, does anybody have music? I got the music, I taught the class. And I’m like, I love this. I just loved everything about it. So it just became part of the thread of who I was. And my brothers were athletes, so they were playing football and wrestling and working out. So that was like part of our energy in our family. I was watching my way because of dancing. The other one was gaining weight for football and moving and working out, it was part of the culture of our family. And then when I went out to USC, I couldn’t really afford to join a gym, but I started teaching. I got this little atrium area at USC and my little boom box, and I taught classes, and I put flyers out at all the sororities. And the girls came and did that, and had a little box that they would put their money in, and did that for a couple months till I got caught, and they kicked me out because they said I was a liability if anybody got hurt. But then I started working at another gym across the street, and it was just a way to make extra money. That was my side hustle, going to school and had a side hustle. And then I did that for a long time and taught in California. And then it was time to go back to New York. And I thought, You know what, the workout scene in the city at the time wasn’t really great. And then I found this location in New Jersey, and I thought, let me just open up a little studio there. So we were trying to get this studio. My brother was negotiating for me. He was the really good negotiator. And the truth is, people that had real estate, they didn’t want gyms or studios or anything like that. We were the undesirable tenant, where I used to joke at him and say they’d rather have a dry cleaner than us. It was not a desirable tenant by any means. And so we were negotiating, negotiating. It looked like it was going to happen, and then last minute, he got a restaurant in, and we’re out. So I pivoted and went into cosmetics and did that. And actually was such a godsend, because I learned so much. I was in corporate America, and I really learned a lot there, about selling, about PR, about branding, about customer service on the next level. And my brothers were in doing construction, and I still kind of had this little side hustle of fitness, but I kept complaining to them, somebody needs to open a great gym in New York City. It’s horrible. It just wasn’t good. It was either boring. They were playing music that you would hear in a doctor’s office, or it was just neon lights everywhere. It wasn’t cool. We were young and we were hip, and we wanted that, and that’s kind of what we complained, and then one day, one of the guys that owned the tile company said, Hey, you guys are big. You’re like, gym people. Why don’t you take this gym that went defunct up in Westchester, and you guys could probably make it into a business. And we did it, basically. We took that, we got in it. That was our proof of concept before we opened Equinox, we opened up this other gym about 10 miles out of Manhattan. I actually was there full-time. I did both jobs for a while, until we actually had enough money that I could actually take a salary. So I was doing both. I was doing cosmetics and doing the gym, and they were doing their construction and everything. And finally, that was really doing well. And then we was like, let’s go into New York. And right even to the night before we were going to go in and sign, that landlord was out, still talking to people to not put in the gym. He so did not want us as a tenant. Just didn’t want a gym. It wasn’t a desirable tenant at the time, but we finally, we got it, and we opened up, and that’s when everything just changed. Changed, and we opened up the equinox, and people saw that, Wow, it’s beautiful. We put in something that nobody really had ever seen before. It was stylish, and it was cool, and the classes were amazing, and the fitness area was amazing, and the design was amazing, and the locker rooms were clean, and energy and the vibe and the people, and you felt the heart, that’s just sort of how it all began in the beginning.
Adam: You shared a lot of great lessons. Not everyone around you is going to always think that your business is going to be a home run, something you shared, which was so interesting. Equinox, on day one, wasn’t a desirable tenant. Today, as desirable a tenant as there is going to be, but you had a vision to create something that hadn’t yet been created. To do something that no one had done before. You and your brothers knew what that was going to look like, and you executed honestly.
Lavinia: I don’t think we even knew in the beginning, we were just putting in things that we wanted, that we felt right, and I think also our instincts were just really good. We were trusting what we wanted. We were listening to each other. Because I do think that there was the magic in the three of us. I feel like it would have never been what it was if it wasn’t for the three of us. One brother was definitely more the business, and he was the finance and getting it, and I don’t do that. I’m more the heart. I always say I’m more the feminine intelligence, and the feminine intelligence is very much the glue. We are more the creators. We are more the culture. We build the culture, through the people, through the heart. It’s all that. And then my other brother was the esthetics, and he’s still out there doing that in the world so beautifully, building the most amazing spaces that just make you feel so good in them. And of course, there were a lot of things that we crossed over. For sure, we had our lanes, but we also crossed over, and it was really, I believe, the magic of what populated and what grew from all of us, and then, more importantly, the people we brought on, the people that were attracted to what we were doing and that wanted to contribute. It wasn’t just the three of our visions. I remember working with this amazing trainer, and he was just complaining on the floor about so many of the exercises that everybody was doing. He said, dee that exercise that is a very dangerous exercise that that trainer is doing with that client. You see that exercise that isn’t good, she shouldn’t be doing that. And from that, we started these forums where we would bring all the trainers in together to talk about exercises that they were doing on the floor. And then that actually came, and it literally transformed into the Equinox Fitness Training Institute, where we would actually train the trainers that came from Alberto de Galdos, vision of seeing stuff on the training floor that he just thought was not right. That’s the beauty of it, when you create a culture that includes other people. And maybe because we were so young, we were in our 20s, we didn’t walk around like we knew it all. We were open. There was an ebb and a flow. I watch this now, when I mentor a lot of younger people and or even people in their 40s, they’re not as open because they think they have the answers. They think they know it, they think they have the recipe. And the truth of it is there’s always more room. There’s always more room for breath, there’s always more room for more color, for more texture, for more understanding. There’s always more. And I think because we were so young, we were like, so ripe for more, right, for hearing other people what they thought, what they were excited about, we were just so open to that. And I think it behooved us greatly to be in that space.
Adam: I love that, and what I’m hearing from you is that the magic behind Equinox’s success was a culture of listening as a founding team. You and your brothers were siblings, but siblings with very complementary skill sets, who respected the fact that you each brought something different to the table and didn’t step on each other’s toes, and instead listened to and respected what each person brought to the table. You were dedicated to hiring the best people who you could find, and empowering them and listening to them.
Lavinia: Actually, I want to say something. In those days, and when I say that, I feel so friggin old in those days, but at that time, there weren’t really a lot of great trainers. We actually had to develop them, because in 1989 people didn’t walk around and like, I’m a fitness trainer. It wasn’t even really considered a great profession. People were like, if they were lost, if they were an athlete in high school or college, and they didn’t know what they wanted to do, or the other thing was, like, actors. I mean, I remember running some of our ads in some of the acting newspapers. Because I was just like, we need to find people that we can train on how to be trainers. Because, again, we would run these ads and we would get nobody. You could get group fitness. You could get instructors for the classroom, but you weren’t really getting, so we had to be really creative and how we got people that needed jobs. I would say, this is certainly better than being a waiter or being a bartender. It’s healthy. You can make your own schedule. We can be flexible. So we would get these people, and we would have to now get them ready, train them, and that was really the birth of the Equinox Fitness Training Institute to really cultivate them into being great trainers. So there was so many things that we had to do first. And then within five years, because of all the press we got, in five years, it was so much easier to get trainers. They were knocking down your door. But five years before, it was a very short period. It wasn’t a career. It was almost like, oh, you’re a loser. If you’re a trainer, you’re a loser. Today, it’s like, everybody wants to be a trainer. It’s amazing. When I look at it now, it’s like, wow. And I really believe that we were the ones that cultivated, that we were the beginning of that.
Adam: And what you shared is so broadly applicable when you’re trying to build a team, when you’re looking for people, sometimes you get lucky and you find the exact person or the exact people who fit. But as we all know, hiring is really hard, and more often than not, what you have to do is find people who you see potential in and develop them to get to a place where they ultimately become the people who you want them to be and who you know they’re capable of being. In your case, you thought way outside of the box and said, it’s not like there is this workforce of trainers out there. Instead, what is the workforce that is out there, and how can we turn them into this workforce of trainers that we need?
Lavinia: Yeah, and to this day, it’s still the same way. I hire the person. I hire the heart. I hire the energy. I very rarely hire a resume, unless maybe it’s a consultant that I don’t have to really work with, that they’re just going to do work at home, remotely and do it, and even then, because I believe energy seeps in everywhere, I need people that have the right heart, the right energy. And also in this business, you had to be people that wanted to serve. You’re serving people. You’re in the service business, you’re in the care-taking business, you’re in the empowering, you’re moving, you’re inspiring. You can’t give what you don’t own. You can’t touch, move and inspire people if you’re in victim mode, if you’re constantly complaining, if you’re one of these people that have trauma and drama all around you. You’re not going to be somebody that’s going to be able to touch, move, inspire people to be the best version of themselves, mentally, emotionally, physically. So we had to train that. We had to train people on how to do that, how to look at that, how to connect. So there were a lot of layers, so many layers.
Adam: And a lot of what you’re describing really is at the heart of great leadership, how to inspire, how to motivate, how to get people to be at a place where they are their very best selves. What do you believe are the keys to successful leadership? What can anyone do to become a better leader?
Lavinia: Well, first of all, to be a leader, you have to be vulnerable. I think vulnerability and humility are part of being a great leader. It’s not about perfection. It’s about connection. And are we available to really connect to people? Can we connect with them in a way that we can meet them where they are? Because if you can meet people where they are, then you’ve touched them. That has to be an embodiment. You have to embody that there’s embodiment of love. I always say love is my North Star. It’s my currency. Joy and love is my currency because it connects people. So I do think that humility, I think being able to see people being able to do things, I do things all the time where we bring the teams together, and you have to tell us your win, your worry, and your ask, and it doesn’t have to be just at work. So if it’s like my win is that my son slept through the night. That could be a huge win. My worry is that with this merger, I’m not going to have a job. And my ask is, what are the things that I need to do to do a better job here? I want feedback. When you start creating environments like that circles, I always say that great leaders create circles. They don’t create pyramids. Pyramids from up down. That creates separation. When we create circles, we create connection. And I believe connection is where the magic is, when we can literally connect people together and connect their ideas and their wisdom and their vision and their heart and their expertise and their genius. All of a sudden what pops is really magical. Is really magical when you literally are popping in that way and getting people to connect authentically. There’s no mistake. An idea is an idea. Nobody’s putting somebody down. When you’re a leader and you’ve created such a safe container for people to really connect to their genius and have courage. If there’s no courage, there’s no magic. If everybody’s going to just say things to please. I’m going to say that because I know that CEO likes that. I’m going to just do everything he says. Some of the best stuff happened when people would challenge me. The best stuff would happen when somebody would challenge my brother. That’s when things would really go, Wow. This is amazing. So I think great leaders are that, I think when you’re able to really get people to just connect, connect like I say, with all of that, that isn’t always easy for people to do.
Adam: That last point that you shared is particularly interesting in that not only should you show up, eager to challenge and eager to push the status quo, eager to get others to get better, but you should show up eager to be challenged, eager for those around you to challenge you. What am I doing that can be better, because for every single one of us, there’s a lot that we can do every day that can be better, and when we surround ourselves with people who will tell us what that is, we’re going to get better.
Lavinia: I think great leaders know how to use ease. It doesn’t have to be so intense. Entrepreneurship, working building brands, doesn’t have to be so hard. I think that there’s this thing that it has to be, have to grind it, we have to push it, we have to force it. That is not where the magic happens. There has to be an allowing. I was always the Queen, and I still am the queen of piloting. I like to pilot. Let’s put a small budget to it. Let’s pilot it. Let’s see where it goes, and then when we come back, it’s like, Okay, what did we learn? Most leaders want to know, what did we earn? I say, what did we learn? Because learning, very often, is equally, if not more important than earning, because when you’re learning, it will move into earning. It will. They want to force it. Everything is about the bottom line, the bottom line, the bottom line. And there’s got to be a flow, there’s got to be a trust. It takes time. It’s like when you’re making a great wine or you’re making a great bolognese. I’m Italian. I couldn’t make a bolognese in a half an hour. It’s good. But if you give me 24 hours to make a bolognese, I can make an amazing bolognese. We have to have patience to make the bolognese. It takes a little bit of time. Time more than 24 hours, because we’re building a business, you know, we’re building teams, we’re building a customer loyalty, we’re building a culture. It takes something. And I think especially in today’s moment, everybody’s talking about selling in three years. Oh, God, it takes a while. I mean, unless it’s a tech company. I don’t know tech companies, that’s not my lane, but other things, it takes time to build, to create, to innovate, to really break the rules and see what comes out of it. And it’s not fast and furious, that’s a movie. That’s not how you build your brand.
Adam: Success takes time. And as a leader, you need to give grace to those around you, and you need to give grace to yourself.
Lavinia: Oh, yeah, I feel like with me, everybody thinks that everything I’m going to touch, oh, it’s just going to be instantly successful. Hell no. There are days when there’s crickets, there’s just crickets. Nothing’s happening. And at those times, I say, Lavinia, don’t do the old Lavinia. Don’t push because, by the way, when you’re doing that, you’re coming from fear. And fear has an energy to it. It’s got a frequency. Don’t push it. Let’s just find, figure out ease doesn’t mean easy. Ease just means ease. Let’s look at this. Where’s the flow in this? When you push harder, you’re taking the magic away. You’re taking the genius away. And that’s one thing I want people to really be able to embody, is that life can have ease and flow. And then I say, I am supported. And then I say, I choose joy, because when you bring joy or you bring love or you bring bliss into the equation. I don’t care what it is, if it’s in work, if it’s in your personal life, when people say, I’m trying to forgive and I’m like, Just get in love. If you just focus on love, you can forgive because where there’s love, there’s forgiveness, no matter what your business, your personal life, all of that, you can find transformation in certain things. So when people say to me, Well, I don’t think love belongs in business. And I’m like, I believe love is the beginning of it, because love is such a high vibration, it’s such a high frequency, why wouldn’t you want to have love in there? That doesn’t mean it’s love making, it doesn’t mean it’s sexual. It’s love. It’s the energy of love. Love, it’s the first creator of everything. So I know sometimes I’m someplace and somebody’s like, Oh, she’s very California, and I’m thinking, I’m a Jersey girl. I am grounded in that. I just, from my upbringing, realized, because I did live in a house where there was a lot of pushing and a lot of competitive analysis and a lot of harshness. Come on. Just shake it off. You’re an Errico. You’re Italian. Just shake it off. And I see how that stifled me. I see how I didn’t have the courage to live authentically, to express myself, to really be 100% Lavinia, because I was just trying to people-please and fit in. And it closed me down. It didn’t open me up. And then when I finally started learning that, and I started living that, everything in my life changed, including Equinox. So it’s something I’m very enthusiastic about, and I choose that word very clearly, because enthusiasm, the root of it means with spirit, where passion means with suffering. That word passion gets me like I don’t want to suffer. I did enough of that. I want to be filled with the spirit. I want to be filled with enthusiasm for spirit, and bring that energy, because the way you do one thing, Adam, is the way you do everything. That doesn’t mean like, I’m messy. There’s a part of me that can be messy. I’m human. I have my human experience is far from perfect. Perfection, actually, is also a killer of energy. But I have my moments. I get triggered like anybody else. And there’s times I’ve gone down a dicey slope, and you’re like, oh, I don’t like that. I did that. I don’t like that. And then you come back, and you clean it up. That’s how it is in business. That’s how it is in your personal life. That’s how it is with your friends. It’s all connected. It’s so connected.
Adam: You mentioned that you’re not from California. You’re, at this point, an adopted Californian. I am. I am, as you know, I am from California, and I’ve interviewed 1000s of the most successful leaders from all around the world. Most of them are not from California, and something that I’ve taken away, the very best leaders lead with love. Doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from. Love essential to leadership, love of people, love period.
Lavinia: I agree and love is not soft, and when people think that it’s gentle and it’s tender, but it’s not weak. I used to always say, don’t take my sweetness for weakness. I’m sweet, but I’m not weak. There’s an inner strength there. I have a strong mind, and that’s why I love what I do, because you can’t have a strong body and have a weak mind, impossible. So you want to work on your mind. You want to work on your physical body, to be strong. You want to work on your soul and your spirit. You want to be spirit full. I always say to people, don’t you want to be spirit-filled, full of spirit, full of joy, full of love, like, just take my breath away. I want to feel that. I love feeling that. I love connecting to that, and I want to be around people that want that. Yes, we all have seasons in life where we can have illness, or we can have the dark, and we can have unfortunate things happen to us and to people we care about and we love, even in our businesses, and we go through cycles. I was watching Cher talking about something, and one of the people that were interviewing her was like, Cher, you have to keep reinventing yourself. How do you do that? She goes, I don’t reinvent myself. She said, sometimes they like me, and all of a sudden they like me, and then sometimes they don’t like me, and then they don’t like me, but then they like me again. She’s like, I don’t really reinvent myself. I am who I am. That’s why you never know when you’re creating something. The vision could be great, the team could be great, everything could be so great. And it goes nowhere. It’s out of our control. And so often people want to put the blame, the blame. They want to look to see, well, why? They want to control it. They want to understand it. It’s the stars, it’s the lesson. It just is what it is. In the I Am, in the we are, this is just where we are right now, and in the accepting of that. It’s the ease and the understanding, and it’s the flow, and it’s the grace, and it’s the humility, and that’s where the beauty is. Not everything we do is going to be a triple, a grand slam home run out of the stadium, not going to happen. You could put together the best team, the best everything, for whatever reason, it’s just not happening.
Adam: Lavinia, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful, personally and professionally?
Lavinia: The first thing is, do your inner work? Do inner work. It’s very important. Everybody spends a lot of time on the outside work. Young people should be starting young to do that inner work. And there’s so many different ways that they can do it out there. There’s insight, and there’s Hoffman Institute, and there’s just a lot of different ways to do it. But I really would encourage people to go here, to go and do that first. I think having a great mentor is very important. I look at the people that believed in me before I believed in me and the way they helped me, very important. I think being aware of emotional intelligence is very important. I was getting ready to collaborate with somebody brilliant, brilliant woman, and then after about a month, I realized, Whoa, she’s got the emotional intelligence of about a 14-year-old. I can never collaborate with somebody who has the emotional intelligence of a 14-year-old, and it’s just attacking people, and it’s being nasty. So I do think it’s very important. And I see people spending more time and more time, and they’re joining this mastermind, and they’re doing this, and they’re doing everything to figure out the affiliate marketing and the funnels and doing all that. And they were a train wreck inside. Their nervous system is completely going. Every minute, they have their anxieties all over the place, they’re proving their worth. Everything is about how much money they’re going to make, and I just think they’re shooting themselves in the foot. So I do really think that that inner journey is very important.
Adam: Lavinia, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.
Lavinia: So happy, and thank you so much for reaching out and for having me on your podcast.
