-: So my name is Evan Howard.
I am an entrepreneur from Allentown, PA.
Started off as a personal trainer
throughout my years at Penn State
and now I own my own business
a personal training center at my home town.
So my companies name is Forward Thinking Fitness
and we are a personal training center
an up-scale center in Allentown.
We deal with people who want to lose weight
so they want to change their lives for the better
and we offer personal training
in a couple of different scales and offerings.
We offer nutritional counseling for a lot of folks too
to kind of help with those healthy lifestyle habits
that they need to make sure that they are making
the changes that they are looking for.
Yeah so we have 20 different membership options
that we offer at our facility.
So the person would come in and meet with me
I'm the training director, that's my daily duty
is to meet with new clients, meet with old clients
or current clients rather.
Just to make sure that things are going on track
and the new clients I take in
and I take them through a discovery session.
A discovery session is meant to help them to realize
what their goals are, where they are currently,
where they want to be, what's their health history,
what's their fitness history, how am I going to get them
into my facility and make them successful, okay?
Because not everybody is gonna be on the same plan
because not everybody needs the same amount
of attention or help.
I met with my very first Penn State internship coordinator
so I met with him and he helped me out in like 2011
at his physical therapy office in Allentown.
I went up to him and you know, caught up
and I asked him if he wanted to open up a facility with me
and I told him my idea that I wanted functional training,
I wanted physical therapy and I wanted chiropractor care.
I wanted everything to be a one-stop shop.
He went for it and so we hired a realtor
and he found the location for us.
We went back and forth with the landlord a little bit
to get the lease negotiated.
In June of 2015 we signed the lease.
I signed an extension of my lease
and we are building another, well we're building
an extension of our current floor plan.
So right now we have 4,500 square feet
and we're expanding into another 6,000 square feet
on top of that so we'll be somewhere around 11,000.
That's gonna include a full-fledged yoga studio,
a massage studio and we'll just have a lot more room
for our small group personal training services
which happen to be our most sought after services.