Lauren Foundos worked on Wall Street for over a decade before launching FORTË. She worked at Deutsche Bank, a hedge fund, and finally as a broker dealer selling US treasury bonds. She says, “I loved the fast-paced, competitive environment of the trading floor.”
FORTË is a tech company that helps gyms provides a quality digital experience for their members. It assists the gym in live streaming the content by utilizing its unique, fully-automated hardware and software streaming technologies, as well as developing a brand site/app that fits into their ecosystem and seems to be their own. Lauren says, “Our platform enables gyms to offer live and on-demand content to their members. It’s two-way video. You can compete on live-leaderboards by connecting your Apple Watch or MyZone, chat with fellow classmates, follow people, and much more.”
Tiffany Yu recently spoke with Success Pitchers about her entrepreneurship journey and how FORTË is empowering gyms to adapt to their evolving customers, enabling them to meet their customers wherever they may be that day, whether it’s at the gym or on-the-go.
Describe who you are as a person, inside and outside of the workplace.
I like to think that I am the exact same person inside and outside of the workplace. If you ask anyone that knows me well, they can attest to the fact that I am super high energy, I love to have fun, and I am extremely hard working and competitive. Since I spend merely every hour of every day working, I try to create a fun, laid back atmosphere at FORTË that makes putting in the work not feel like work at all.
What has been your biggest learning since becoming an entrepreneur?
Every day, I learn something new, which makes being an entrepreneur so interesting and exciting. One of my biggest learnings was ensuring that I was hiring people that fit the current stage of the company and culture. At a startup, it’s fast-paced and requires a specific mindset, so hiring someone from a very large corporation may not be the best fit. Most departments start as a team of one, so if they are used to hiring tons of people to do the work and are not ready to get their own hands dirty, then they may not be the best fit for that stage of the business. It’s important to be very transparent about the work environment, the pace at which you expect someone to work, and the hours you expect them to devote to the company, so no one is surprised later. Startups are hard and it takes a team of very dedicated people to make them succeed, so set the right expectations for those that you are bringing on-board; you want people that want it as badly as you do and want to put in that work!
What gets you up in the morning? What motivates you?
I go to bed thinking about FORTË and wake up dreaming about it. I am absolutely determined to make my company a success so that we can enable our clients to succeed in the evolving fitness industry. I am determined to make my investors, as well as all of my teammates that work for the company. I want all of us to succeed, and that takes perseverance, grit, and foresight, and that motivates me to work each day harder than the previous day.
Kindly describe how you will specifically know what success looks like for you.
I feel successful already because I get to wake up every day and work on something that energizes me more than I can put into words. It makes working countless hours so easy. I am working to build a company in an industry that I am so passionate about, with the goal of making working out more accessible, affordable, and enjoyable. For FORTË, success will be built upon building a multi-billion dollar company that enables gyms to leverage digital as a means to drive member engagement, member growth, and overall revenue. That said, on the journey to that goal, I most certainly celebrate the milestones along the way and acknowledge our small successes along the way because a lot of small successes will eventually end in a giant success story and we won’t stop until that is the case.
What is some of the advice you give to aspiring women tech leaders?
I would tell aspiring women tech leaders to stop thinking about what they want to do and just get to work. There is never a good time to start a company or a perfect way to start telling people about what you are working on, so just get going. The more you speak about it, the more you believe it, the more others will believe in it, and the faster your idea becomes a reality. I am a big believer that what you say and do becomes your reality, so start talking about what you want to build, and more importantly, start working on it very diligently because startups aren’t easy and take years of hard work. Be patient and believe in yourself.
What are your future plans to sustain FORTË’s success?
At FORTË, we are diligently working to ensure that our technology remains unparalleled, which is currently the case. The pandemic brought a lot of attention to digital fitness, and thus, we realize that more companies have and will continue to enter the space than ever before, which means we must always be ten steps ahead and really have a strong pulse on the market and where we think it is going. We are continuing to grow the team at a rapid rate, onboard more customers, and aggressively expand globally.
What sort of characteristics in employees contribute to success?
It’s important that the people we hire are highly motivated, self-starters, problem solvers, but also passionate about fitness, understand the clients’ needs, and are open to taking a more personal approach to dealing with clients. It’s important to me that our clients truly trust us, believe in us, enjoy working with us, and feel like we are in this together.
What is the best way to build a great team?
You must build a great team in order to make any company a huge success. It’s important to build a very strong core team that you implicitly trust. We have found success then by having those people recruit other people that they confidently know are strong players as well, and then from there, it makes it easier for new, more junior hires to have strong examples to follow that are great leaders, which just continues to grow and perpetuate a great culture and team.
What does performance culture mean to you?
At the end of the day, as much as I like to have fun, we are building a business, and performance matters both to the company, to our investors, and to our clients. We have companywide KPI’s, and then break them down for each team and person so that they can see how they can impact our company goals. It’s important to have goals for each team, so that you can track when things are ahead of schedule or plan and celebrate that, as well as be hyperware when you are falling behind so that there are no surprises if large goals are missed. It’s important to deduce what happened when things went very right and also when things went very wrong, as you never want to repeat the same mistake. It’s important to have long-term goals, as well as short-term goals, so that there are things to celebrate along the journey and so that people don’t feel as if their daily hard work is getting the company nowhere. I look at every day as if it were game day, and I work to perform my best and walk about with a win – whatever that means to me for the day.
