Zaccario joined Stretch Zone back when it had just four locations. Today, the assisted stretching franchise counts over 400 locations and counting.
For Tony Zaccario, it pays to go with your gut.
Zaccario joined Stretch Zone just a couple of years out of college back in 2016, sensing an opportunity to turn the assisted stretching brand, which had just four locations at the time, into something much bigger.
In 2019, Zaccario became Stretch Zone’s president and CEO, ushering the brand into a period of impressive growth through franchising.
Today, Stretch Zone has over 400 locations across the U.S., all without a single store failure. Last year, the assisted stretching franchise expanded into Canada, potentially setting the stage for more international expansion in the years to come.
The brand is also known for its affiliation with NFL legend Drew Brees, who joined as an ambassador after attending Stretch Zone studios during his playing days to extend his career.
Zaccario sat down with Athletech News to discuss why he took the leap of faith in joining a small assisted stretching brand, how he went about scaling Stretch Zone into a 400-location behemoth, and what’s coming next for the franchise.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Athletech News: You joined Stretch Zone very early in the company’s growth trajectory, eventually becoming CEO. Can you tell us about your early career background and how you first got involved with Stretch Zone?
Tony Zaccario: I was born and raised in Tampa, Florida, and went to the University of Florida. Go Gators. I’ve always had the entrepreneurial spirit. My first gig out of college was at a startup timber company in Alabama. The pitch I got was, “You’re going to get severely underpaid and severely overworked for what you’re responsible for, but you’re going to learn a lot.” I said, yes, and they weren’t lying about one bit of it. When I was living in Alabama, my now-wife was down here in South Florida. So my first exposure to Stretch Zone was when I was coming to visit her. Having that entrepreneurial spirit drove me to realize this was an incredibly unique and effective concept.
Being as young as I was, I took that jump and decided to go chase that entrepreneurial dream. We had four locations at the time — in my mind, I thought, “If I’m wrong about this, then great, I’m going to learn a lot, and I’ll go find something different.” It turns out I was right about it, and here we are at over 400 locations.
ATN: What drew you to Stretch Zone and the idea of building a business around assisted stretching?
TZ: Stretching has always been a part of fitness, with personal trainers or in yoga, for example. The difference is, our founder, Jorden Gold, created a sound, protocol-based stretching method that can be applied with a degree of variance. There are countless unique protocols we can apply to help you accomplish your goal when coming into a Stretch Zone.
When I first heard about Stretch Zone, I thought it made a lot of sense for weekend warriors and athletes. But if you spend a few hours inside one of our locations, you’d be shocked to realize that for as many of those weekend warriors and active individuals who are coming in, there’s twice as many who are inactive or part of the aging population. They arguably get even more benefit from the Stretch Zone method, because now they’re actually able to do things in their daily life they once couldn’t. I remember in the early days, I saw how impactful the service is when an elderly gentleman was sitting there, and for the first time in months, he could put his shoes on by himself, without his wife helping him, or he could sleep through the night.
ATN: How did you go about scaling the brand from four to over 400 locations?
TZ: In the early days, it was a startup culture. We joke all the time, calling it dysfunctional is probably being kind to what it was. Jorden created the stretching methodology back in 1999. He’s an absolute genius for that. I started in 2016, and franchising wasn’t even a thought. We had tile floors and hand-me-down furniture. We didn’t even have a website at the time,
So our priority then was systematizing the business inside the four walls. We had an incredible service with the Stretch Zone methodology. But how do we sell it? How do we market it? How do we price it? How do we track things, and what are the daily SOPs? So I was really tasked with creating the business around the stretch. We were trying to create a replicable model.
ATN: When did you decide to start expanding through franchising?
TZ: We originally thought we were going to penetrate the nation via corporate locations. In early 2017, we learned what franchising was, and we felt it was an incredible vehicle to spread the power of stretch, so to speak, since there’s so much intellectual property behind our service. No one can do what we do. And since there’s a low barrier to entry from a capital perspective, it attracted a lot of prospective franchisees, both those who were first and new to business ownership and those who were sophisticated business owners.
So we started franchising in 2017. Now, we have over 400 locations open, still without a single store failure. I think a lot of that is because of the simplicity of our model.
ATN: Now that Stretch Zone has over 400 locations, how has your growth strategy evolved?
TZ: In leadership, you start to realize that what got you from point A to point B won’t necessarily get you from point B to point C.
So two years ago, we went out and started our hunt to bring in a COO, who we now have in Jordan Levine, who cut his teeth at health and wellness brands like Massage Envy and Sola Salons. We also brought in a head of franchise development who spent time at Neighborly, as well as a director of real estate from Orangetheory and a new VP of Operations. So we’re trying to top-grade the entire team, because we understand that if we want to remain one of the premier brands in franchising, we have to bring in the best from franchising. So it’s an exciting phase.
ATN: Stretch Zone has a well-known partnership with Drew Brees, who’s become a face of the company. How did the partnership with Drew come about?
TZ: It’s funny, originally, we weren’t looking for an ambassador. If you ask me, philosophically, I’d say there’s a lot of risk with ambassadorship in business.
The way it happened with Drew is very organic and serendipitous. I didn’t know it, but prior to coming to us, Drew had a wealth of experience in franchising that goes back to Jimmy John’s and other ventures. Drew’s roommates from his time at Purdue, Jason and Ben, were interested in stretching. So Drew sat in on their “Meet the Team” day because he was trying to advise them on franchising. After that Meet the Team day, Drew said to us, “I love the service and the strategic vision you guys have. I want to be a part of this.”
I can’t say enough about him as a guy — everything you think he might be, as far as having a good character and core values that you see through his interviews and playing days in football, I can attest he is in real life. That mattered a lot to Jorden and me, to de-risk any kind of ambassadorship.
ATN: What are your expansion goals for Stretch Zone moving forward, both in the U.S. and internationally?
TZ: I still have the same excitement and am as wide-eyed at 400 locations as I was at four. I think this is just the beginning of Stretch Zone.
There’s so much white space within the U.S., especially when you go down the path of workers comp mitigation and national accounts, which we’re pursuing.
International is a whole other ballgame — we just opened our first store in Canada. On the international front, the most exciting thing about Stretch Zone is that the human anatomy doesn’t change whether you’re in Europe, Asia or Australia.
