Chapter 40
The Summit Room was, miraculously, clean. But the Studio Managers were not. Pretty much all of them appeared to have skipped showering in favor of catching just a few more minutes of sleep, which — by Dee’s estimation — meant they got a maximum of three hours before the mandatory, 6:30 a.m., high-intensity, bodyweight-based interval training class led by Shelly. (Harley Pasternak had been called away by Jessica Simpson for an emergency glutes session during her book tour.)
“They all look like shit,” Dee whispered to Tara as they sipped bulletproof coffee in the back of the room and watched 56 Studio Managers slog through jumping jacks, pushups, jump squats, extended plank holds, and high knees.
Tara laughed quietly.
The untrained eye might call this sadism. But that would be selling Dee short. She didn’t keep her Studio Managers up late so she could watch them suffer this morning. She did it because it primed them. It made them malleable, impressionable.
The initial inspiration for this leadership strategy came from a study, “Mind Control and the Masses: How Cults Come to Be” (Edwin Baker, PhD, et al, 1980), and its findings on sleep deprivation, sensory overload, and constant activity as drivers for submissiveness. Dee fine-tuned the idea during a week with the Green Berets in North Carolina. Tiger Woods had recommended it; he’d said the hand-to-hand combat, live fire maneuvers, and collective mission training in the fictional, tumultuous country known as Pineland were “awesome.” And he was right. Dee thirsted for these kinds of physical challenges but got the most out of the interrogation training, which taught her about confrontation, theme development, denials, objections, gaining and holding a suspect’s attention, and handling a suspect’s passivity.
Substitute the word “suspect” for “client” or “employee” and there’s a lot you can get people to do.
“Bring your hands into prayer at your heart,” Shelly commanded. “Namaste. Now please pick up your mandatory morning smoothie.”
Dee watched as the Studio Managers tried to catch their breath and inspected their glasses of moss-colored sludge with black particulates floating on the surface. She knew the smoothie had amazing powers, but she also knew it smelled like a tire fire you’d tried to cover up with Febreeze.
Axel brought the drink to her lips and then shuddered, whispering, “No, no, no, no, no.” The nervous-looking, freckle-faced Studio Manager named Dana quietly gagged. Camilla, still on a campaign to be teacher’s pet, chugged the drink so fast it started to trickle down her chin, which was kind of ingenious, because it meant she could wipe the muck away instead of swallowing it. Others allowed such small sips that it would take four hours to finish eight ounces.
“This smoothie is one of Shaman Jeff’s most popular and expensive nutrition elixirs,” said Georgina, the brunette branding and merchandising lead at FitFams. “The top two Jessicas — Biel and Alba — drink it every morning.”
Dee watched to see what Willa would do. She held the glass up to the light, shrugged, then drank it all down. She stifled a burp that looked productive, then swallowed and gave a weak thumbs-up.
“You all now have 30 minutes to take showers and return here for Dee’s lecture,” Tara called out. “Don’t be late!”
The Studio Managers looked at each other, held on to their smoothies, and speed-walked to the door like competitors in an egg-and-spoon race.
Jimmy was nearly run over. “What’s going on?” he asked, yawning and stretching.
“They have 30 minutes for a shower break,” Tara said.
“That’s not enough time for all of those people to shower, is it?” he asked.
“Right,” Shelly said. “That’s the idea.”
Jimmy looked thoroughly perplexed. Dee sighed.
The rest of the leadership team appeared — assistant Sheldon; marketing and communications lead Coral; and operations lead Ben — and helped set up for Dee’s talk, “The FitFams Way,” moving the chairs and tables back into place and setting the new training manuals on each chair in the Summit Room.
Georgina created centerpieces with pale-pink yoni eggs in four sizes: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, and Expert. Lest anyone think they were free, she made sure the price tags were on clear display, along with the description: “Yoni — which in Sanskrit means ‘sacred place’ — eggs have been used for more than 5,000 to increase sexuality, enhance moistness, and improve urinary control. FitFams cares about you and your pelvic health.”
“We really want to have the words ‘moistness’ and ‘urinary’ at top of mind during your talk?” Jimmy asked.
Dee narrowed her eyes at him. “Yes, Jimmy. Yes, we do.”
“Cool, cool,” he said, turning to focus on his laptop and Dee’s slide deck.
At 7:55 a.m., the Studio Managers started filtering back into the room. It wasn’t difficult to differentiate the winners from the losers. The winners had dry, clean, styled hair. The silver medalists had shower-wet hair. And the losers looked like they’d only had time to spray in some dry shampoo, contort themselves out of their wet sportsbras, and blot their T-zones.
At 8 a.m., Dee began.
“Good morning, everyone,” she said, going into autopilot. “I want to thank all of you again for being here, and for being such wonderful members of the FitFams family. We are so appreciative of each and every one of you. There’s a lot we want to cover during this weekend together, but it’s important we start at the beginning.”
The lights went down and Jimmy cued up a slideshow of photos from the life that Dee let people see. Chubby-cheeked baby pictures. Action shots from middle school badminton. A team photo from high school soccer intramurals. A portrait of Dee sitting on the Junior Bench between Randolph Residence Hall and Memorial Chapel at Sweet Briar College. Adult Dee welding something while wearing a crop top at the first FitFams studio. Dee smiling with a giant pair of scissors at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for her 20th location. An abdominals retrospective.
“Today, FitFams is a fitness juggernaut with 56 studios in the United States — and more to come,” said narrator Reese Witherspoon, in a voiceover. “I, for one, wouldn’t be surprised if Dee and the team took over the world. But they can’t do it without you.”
Dee looked out at the audience and was pleased to see that no one was nodding off.
Jimmy turned up the house lights.
“Reese is right — I can’t do this without you,” Dee said, simultaneously thinking about the fact that she could indeed do it without them by copying the business model of 24-hour gyms and letting clients call up workouts on an app. But anyway. “Together, we can change so many lives. To do that, we all have to be on the same page. So today, I’m going to talk to you about ‘the FitFams Way.’ Let’s begin.”