franchisee sp tlight
Trey Owen
United PF Partners
Partners: JLM Financial Partners, Eagle Merchant Partners
Total number of PF clubs: 78
States your clubs operate in: 10
How did you become a PF ® franchisee?
I was introduced to Planet Fitness® in 2009 as a landlord repre-
sentative working on a project where we put Greg Attwood and
Mike Turner’s (Excel Fitness) second club in Austin. I asked those
guys about Planet Fitness and liked what they told me. I called
PFHQ to ask about becoming a franchisee. I could only qualify for
one location at the time, so I chose Amarillo, Texas. It took off like
a rocket ship in late 2010, and we were off to the races.
Tell us about the decision that led to United PF Partners.
22
After growing my own franchisee group to 10 or so loca-
tions over a four-plus-year period, I decided to partner with a
good friend of mine, Larry Meyer, and we formed JLM Financial
Partners. We quickly developed 12-plus clubs over a short period
and purchased the Oklahoma City market in late 2015. We had
25 clubs at that point. We reached out to PFHQ to find out what
other franchisees might be interested in partnering and growing
with us. Those initial conversations led to a chain of events that
culminated in four additional franchisee groups – Lomasney,
Landry/Lyons, Robinson and Henson – combining with JLM
Financial Partners and Eagle Merchant Partners to form United PF
Partners in November 2016. There are many, but here are a couple
of themes that jump out as to why:
1. All of our partners have faith and family as high priorities,
so we have a collective culture fit. We are truly what we internally
refer to as our “PFamily” and thoroughly enjoy being in each
other’s company.
2. Together we could become something and accomplish
something that none of us as individual franchisee groups could
do alone, including best practices development, organizational
structure and resources, and strong capital partners, in addition to
our sheer size. The resulting symphony was extremely attractive to
all of us.
How did you meet your business partners?
Larry Meyer and I have been family friends for nearly 20
years. Larry and I, as JLM Financial Partners, met Eagle Merchant
Partners out of Atlanta during our journey in forming United PF
Partners. Ironically, we had our introductory visit with Eagle during
the first PFIFA conference at Chateau Elan in early 2016. The more
we cultivated our relationship with the four principals at Eagle, we
realized the addition of their collective skill sets (multi-unit franchise
operations, expansive debt markets network and technical financial
execution among many other skills) would produce an incredible
franchisee team. Of course, all the franchisee partners (Henson,
Landry/Lyons, Lomasney, Owen and Robinson) have known each
other within the Planet Fitness franchisee family for some time. It
was always fun to be around franchisee friends at various conferences,
conventions and huddles. Now it’s triple the fun and extremely
gratifying to be in business with your franchisee friends!