Karen Stephenson isn’t slowing down. She’s just getting started.
What’s up, Gym World?
Karen Stephenson is 62 years old. She owns Hammock Coast CrossFit on Pawleys Island, South Carolina. She has a 90-year-old member, an 84-year-old member who just booked a trip to the Galapagos, and a senior fitness program that keeps growing.
She also says she plans to keep training until she falls over.
Mateo sat down with Karen at the Two-Brain Business Summit to hear how she got here and why she’s nowhere near done.
Here’s the summary 👇
She started later than most
Karen didn’t come from a fitness background. She struggled with her weight most of her life and weighed 237 pounds after having her kids, and her husband Scott had both ankles replaced.
Then their oldest son introduced them to CrossFit while he was away at college. They started doing workouts in the garage with their kids as homeschool PE, and Scott started dropping in at CrossFit affiliates while traveling for work.
Karen finally went to her first CrossFit box in 2015 while on vacation.
She learned about scaling.
She saw other women in the gym.
She had fun.
💬 There was no CrossFit affiliate in their town of Elkins, West Virginia. So eventually they decided to open one themselves.
They opened 1201 CrossFit in March 2017.
She took the “perfect day” exercise literally
A few years in, Karen started following Chris Cooper and Two-Brain Business. One of the first things he talks about is figuring out your perfect day as a gym owner.
Karen took it literally.
Her perfect day was at the beach, so she told Scott they would sell the gym and move to South Carolina.
He pushed back, but then two of their coaches offered to buy the business, and suddenly it was real.
💬 1201 CrossFit is still operating in Elkins today under those coaches. Karen is proud of that.
They found a condo on Pawleys Island through an Airbnb host who turned out to be a realtor. By the time they met in person, the coaches had already offered to buy the gym, and she was ready.
She opened a second gym during COVID
Karen’s daughter moved down with her in early 2020. They found a small rental space and planned to open on April 1st with six clients already pre-sold.
March 15th, the world shut down.
They went straight to Zoom. When gyms were allowed to reopen in South Carolina, they came back one person at a time, then chalk-marked individual boxes on the floor
By October 2020, they had already outgrown the rental space, and that’s when they bought the building.
She built something different the second time
At the first gym, Karen describes it as more of a hobby business.
Coaches trained for free, and the systems were loose. That’s when she decided to kick things into second gear and joined Two-Brain Business. At first, she worried that everything about her business would need to change.
- Stop doing her own ramp-ups
- Change programming
- Drop group classes.
She eventually changed all three.
Now Hammock Coast runs CrossFit group classes, a SeniorFit program, CrossFit kids, personal training, and is moving into semi-private. She hired a head coach to take over ramp-ups and day-to-day coaching so she could actually run the business.
💬 One of her members is 84. He had both ankles replaced over a decade ago, tried a big box gym trainer, and still couldn’t play golf. He came to Hammock Coast, started training consistently, and for the first time in 15 years, went to the driving range without any pain.
That’s why Karen does this.
She’s not slowing down
Karen has a granddaughter and another one on the way, and she just bought a house nearby so she can spend more time with them. The gym isn’t going anywhere.
When she opened the first gym, she did the worst-case-scenario exercise. If it flopped, Scott would go back to his job, they’d move wherever the company sent them, and they’d find a CrossFit gym to train at.
It didn’t flop, and it led to a beach town, owning a gym with a thriving senior program, and a community she’s building for the long haul.
When most people start thinking about winding down, Karen is building something she plans to be part of for the rest of her life.
TL;DR
Karen didn’t set out to build a gym empire. She figured out what she wanted her life to look like and then built a business that fit around it.
A few things worth taking from her story:
- She used the “perfect day” exercise as a real decision-making tool, not just a thought experiment.
- She tested the new market before fully committing by renting a small space first.
- Transitioning from a hobby gym to a real business meant letting go of things she had thought were non-negotiable.
Karen started later than most, built twice, and isn’t slowing down.
That’s worth thinking about the next time you feel like you’ve missed your window.
ttyl,
j
