This is an episode about a gym that took thirteen years of plumbing to open, and about a Marine who deliberately chose not to import the drill-instructor model onto his coaching floor. Kyle Hannah’s story starts in high school, where he was on the smaller side, played football, wrestled, and started lifting to put on size. When he joined the Marine Corps in 2006, his martial arts and wrestling background pointed him toward becoming a Marine Corps martial arts instructor, a role that shifted quickly into something else. Marines were failing height and weight standards and their physical fitness tests, and Kyle was told to fix them. He fell in love with the work almost immediately. Taking someone who couldn’t do a thing and turning them, through training, into someone who could, and watching that translate into their real life, was the moment the rest of his career was decided.

Getting out of the Marine Corps didn’t put him straight into fitness. His first child was on the way and he needed to work immediately, so he went into plumbing and stayed there for thirteen years, saving. During that stretch he climbed to operations manager at a multi-million-dollar company, which taught him two things: how to run a business, and how not to run one. He watched things done in ways that made him feel gross at the end of the day, and promised himself that when he built his own company he wouldn’t run it that way. He earned his personal training certification during those years and started training clients in the gym above the plumbing company, then in a garage he’d converted into a gym, then, in 2023, into the building Semper occupies now.

The coaching philosophy Kyle brought with him is a deliberate rejection of the drill-instructor archetype. His line to new clients is that if they wanted a drill instructor, he’d have stayed in the Marine Corps and become one, because when you’re training Marines for war, you need instant, unquestioning obedience so you can tell someone to get their head down and know they will. Clients trying to lose weight or get healthy don’t need that. What they need, in Kyle’s view, is a program they will actually do consistently and actually enjoy doing. If burpees are what a client technically needs but burpees are what they dread all day at work, then burpees are the wrong tool, there is another way to attack the same problem that won’t make the client want to skip the session. That approach is why his retention sits at 84 percent.

Underneath the coaching sits a core-values structure Kyle recites in order: faith, strength, honor, courage. Faith comes first, and he means it, the ability to look at himself in the mirror at the end of the day and know he did right by his people. That value shows up most concretely in how he hires. He won’t bring on a trainer he doesn’t fully trust with clients, and once someone is on the team he gives them ownership rather than a corporate script. His view, borrowed from the Marine Corps, is that people handed real responsibility will run through walls for you, and that a trainer with a different style from his isn’t wrong. They’re right for a different client, and the job is to route the right clients to the right coach. That’s how the bodybuilding trainer, Brandy the powerlifter, and Kyle himself divide the floor.

The business itself has grown year over year since opening. Kyle has hired trainers, added group classes, and is now in the awkward middle stretch that a lot of small operators know, busy enough that he is working 80 to 90 hours a week, not quite busy enough to justify the next hire. His current push is marketing, so that he can step back to work on the business rather than in it. He is candid that marketing was not his native ground, he handled it himself for a long time before hiring a marketing team, and the moment he did was the moment growth accelerated. His advice for anyone else opening a gym is shaped by that experience: don’t stress about members in the early days; do the right thing by the client and word of mouth spreads; and once you can, put a percentage of net income into marketing and let professionals handle their piece the way you handle yours.

His arrival at Wellyx followed the same shape as most software decisions in this industry. He started with Google Calendar, tried one paid platform whose feature set didn’t fit and passed on it, signed with a second whose software simply didn’t work well, and was actively unhappy when Wellyx reached out to him, he was direct that Wellyx found him, not the other way around. What kept him there was that the software actually worked, the price felt fair against what it delivered, and the onboarding team was patient with a self-described non-technical operator. His one open request, which he has already raised with onboarding, is that recurring client bookings currently cap at roughly 28 visits, and he’d like the same indefinite recurrence he had on Google Calendar, 50-plus clients on weekly slots is more schedule than any operator wants to spend an hour a week policing.

Ask Kyle what he is proudest of, and the Marines don’t come first. Being a father and being a husband do. He has three kids, a nearly-15-year-old with a fresh driver’s permit, a seven-year-old, and a four-year-old, and his advice for other trainers is a version of the same principle he applies to programming: don’t spread yourself too thin, focus on what you’re actually good at, and hire professionals for the parts you aren’t. The name he gave the business is not decoration. It is the standard he holds himself to. Always faithful, in the order he lists them: faith, strength, honor, courage.