How Revel came together

It took one cup of coffee.

Not one conversation, not one pitch meeting. One coffee. By the time it was finished we had the whole idea, and we already knew every person we wanted inside the building. We went to them one by one. Every one of them said some version of the same thing: awesome idea, let's do it.

That's still how this place works. Nobody here answered a job posting. We came to them.

The lesson from a taproom in Golden

The idea came from somewhere we love. Corby is a partner in The Golden Mill, a food hall in Golden that was built as a taproom and turned into the place the whole town gathers. The beer and the food are what bring people through the door. The community is what keeps them there.

So we asked an obvious question with a non-obvious answer: what happens if you take that same gathering and build it around wellness, longevity and vibrancy instead of around a bar? Not a gym with services bolted onto it. A gathering place where the reason to come is that you get stronger and stay well.

The community was already here

The thing that made it possible is that we weren't starting from zero.

Brandon Harkey had spent years building a gym community of well over two hundred members, many of them with him for a long time. He doesn't run the place so much as he is the place. That was never a marketing strategy. It's just his personality, and it turned out to be the foundation everything else could sit on.

It's a tight friendship, and it's very welcoming to anybody new. When you come into class, it's more than just strength training. It's community.

Brandon Harkey, The Gym at Revel

It's people who know how your mom is doing, whether the remodel is finished, how the new car worked out. Greet anybody in here and you're getting a hug. Fair warning.

Grip strength and community

A friend of ours put it to us plainly one day: the two best predictors of how long you'll live are grip strength and community. How well you treat your body, and who you've got around you. Have both, and you can more or less see how the next thirty years are going to go.

The first half of that is the easy sell: everybody already believes exercise is good for them. The second half is the one people treat as a nice-to-have, and it isn't. A meta-analysis pooling 148 studies and 308,849 people found that those with stronger social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival over a given follow-up period. The authors concluded the effect was comparable in magnitude to well-established mortality risk factors, the kind of thing your doctor already asks you about.1

So when we say the community part isn't decoration, that's not a sentiment. It's the other half of the same prescription.

The two questions we asked everybody

Here's the part nobody warns you about: finding excellent practitioners isn't the hard bit. Getting them to work together is.

Everyone in this building is someone we found years ago while fixing our own injuries. They are the ones we kept going back to, and the ones we kept sending our members, our friends and our families to. We are not sending our mom to just anybody for physical therapy. We're sending her to the best physical therapist we know.

So when we approached them we didn't open with are you interested. Everyone's interested. We asked two harder things first. Are you willing to keep learning and actually collaborate with the other practitioners in this building? And are you willing to put the ego down, to stop insisting that your discipline is always the answer, that massage won't help, that it has to be done your way?

Everyone in this building said yes. That's why they're in this building.

A physical therapist is really good at being a physical therapist. But sometimes they need to refer to the gym, or to the massage therapist. That's what we can bring them.

Corby Felsher

You don't know the treatment that's right for you

You think you do. Walk into a chiropractor with a bad knee and the chiropractor will help you, because it all works. We know excellent chiropractors, excellent physical therapists, excellent massage therapists. What you never find out, going to only one of them, is whether one of the others was actually the answer for your injury.

Under one roof, you find out. That's the entire argument for the building.

And most people walking in here don't want to be as strong as humanly possible. That's a small percentage. Honestly, that's us. Barely anybody else. What people actually want is to be able to say yes when a friend calls on Wednesday and asks if you're hiking a 14er on Saturday. They haven't hiked all season. Their knee is cranky from six hours of skiing. So they see the physical therapist, they see the massage therapist, and they're ready by the weekend.

You come here a couple of hours a week, and you live the rest of your life better because you did.

Why Central Park

We're on Havana just off MLK, which makes us easy to reach from Central Park, Park Hill and Lowry. But the real reason is closer to home than a map. Corby ran a business in this neighborhood for twenty-five years, and it gave him everything he has.

This part of Denver values small business, and not as a bumper sticker. People here would rather their money went to somebody raising a family and paying a mortgage a few blocks away than to a corporation.

We felt it the whole way through the build. Our electrician, our framers, our concrete guys, the drywall crew: every one of them got as excited about this place as we are, and every one of them wants to be at the grand opening. Building something out is supposed to be the stressful part. This was the fun part.

Our electrician believes in this so much he calls me almost every evening to talk about how it's going. He knew this place is special. It is special.

Corby Felsher

What we're actually building

Five years out, we want to have built one of the best wellness communities in the country. Not measured by revenue, but by the people who work inside this building and give it their days, and by the members who walk in once and stay for good.

Success in the first month is a lot simpler than that. It's somebody from the neighborhood getting curious enough to pull the door open and ask, so what are you guys doing in here?

All the energy these practitioners have built up separately, finally under one roof: that's potential energy. We cannot wait to turn it kinetic.

The second you walk in, I want you to feel welcome. Immediately. This was a great choice. This is exactly what I needed.

Brandon Harkey, The Gym at Revel

The longer version of all this, including everybody who got the doors open, from the bank to the drywall, lives on our About page. And if you'd rather just come see it, we're at 2954 N Havana St. Push the door open and ask.