The method, before the roofs.
Michael Phelps Swim School. One teacher's method, written down, piloted once, then run by operators on six continents who did not work for me.
How it started
Fall 2008. I was at Coca-Cola in Atlanta. The job interview was a business plan for a swim school business that did not exist yet. I wrote it in my apartment. It took until the following summer to close. I started in July 2009.
Get it out of her head
The asset was not a brand. It was a person. Cathy Bennett taught Michael Phelps to swim at nine years old, when he was afraid to put his face in the water. She knew how to do that. It existed nowhere except in her.
So the first job was not selling. It was sitting with her and turning what she did into a documented, sequenced curriculum that an instructor who had never met her could run.
What it came out as: three progressive levels, each split into two age bands, because a four year old learning freestyle is a different problem from a seven year old. Six children per instructor, capped. Eight week sessions, same instructor, same six children, same slot every week. Every level had a written list of skills to master and a second list of signals that a child was ready to move up, down to whether the instructor could feel a relaxed body.
We piloted it at Meadowbrook Aquatic and Fitness Center in Baltimore, the pool Phelps trained in for most of his life. One location, one curriculum, one set of instructors. Over a thousand children went through it there.
The pilot was not the business. It was the evidence. What it proved was that the method worked in somebody else's hands.
One curriculum, two channels
The mission channel was the I.M. program, built for the Michael Phelps Foundation and delivered through Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Special Olympics International. I started writing that curriculum inside my first month. It taught swimming, and alongside it goal setting and healthy habits. I wrote the original curriculum and then traveled to install it chapter by chapter.
The document was written for people I would never meet. It carried instructor notes, class size rules, a scheduling model, enrollment forms a local chapter could customize, and a water safety test at the end of the progression. A chapter director in a city I had never visited could open it and run the program.
The commercial channel licensed the same program to health clubs and swim facilities. Merritt Athletic Clubs and LA Fitness as chains, independent facilities in Maryland, New York and North Carolina.
Licensing changes the job. The people delivering the program are not your employees. You cannot manage a licensee, coach them on a Monday, or move them to a different seat. You can only hand them something documented well enough to run without you, and then audit whether they ran it.
That constraint is the reason the curriculum had to be as tight as it was.
Owned, operated, and international
Summer 2012, timed to the London Olympics, we opened the first company-owned and operated Michael Phelps Swim School at OA Sports Center in Saco, Maine, built around a Master Spas swim spa as the training tool.
In 2013, after the London Games, we opened in Mumbai. I spent four weeks on the ground getting it running. Install and partner work also took me to South Korea, China, London, Amsterdam, Germany, Russia and Dubai.
In December 2012 I presented the build at the FINA world aquatics convention in Moscow, to roughly 250 delegates from national federations and swim schools. World Aquatics published the talk on its own channel, where it still sits.
By the end the network was 146 licensed locations across 26 U.S. states and 34 countries on six continents. The $50,000 the business started with had become more than $2 million in gross revenue inside the first twelve months, at 22 percent operating cash flow.
Running the building
My office was at Meadowbrook, and the club came with it. Michael Phelps and Bob Bowman owned it. I ran it the whole time I was there, alongside building the swim school.
It was a membership swim and fitness club doing about $2.5 million a year in net revenue. I had the full P&L: memberships, programs, payroll, operating costs, and the cash that went back to the owners.
Operating margin went from 1 to 11.5 percent. Membership sales grew 22 percent, and year-round membership grew eightfold once members moved to monthly billing. Payroll came down 15 percent by cutting roles that overlapped.
There is an older connection. In 1994 I was on the crew that built Meadowbrook's indoor pool, zip-tying heating hose to rebar for the deck. Fifteen years later I was running the place.
Why this is here
The method is the one I have used ever since. Find what lives in one person's head. Write it down so it outlives them. Prove it in a single location. Then replicate it through operators you do not employ, and measure whether they ran it.
In the roofing case study the operators were my own reps across nine offices, and I could hire, coach and move them. Here they were licensees on six continents and I had no payroll authority over a single one. The documentation had to carry the whole load.
One difference is worth naming, because it is a judgment call rather than a rule. In the pool I standardized the sequence and the standard and deliberately left delivery to the instructor. The curriculum said which skills to introduce and how to know a child was ready, not what words to say. In the living room I did the opposite and standardized the language itself. Same principle, opposite setting. What you lock down depends on where the variance is actually costing you.
I left in 2014. The I.M. program still runs today.