How I Built Resilience: Alberto Perlman of Zumba

Within weeks after the pandemic lockdown, the fitness program Zumba rapidly shifted gears and launched its own online workout platform. Co-founder Alberto Perlman says it's helping keep the community connected, fit, and—for instructors—employed. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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  get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built. Hey, everyone, and welcome to How I Built This: Resilience Edition. On these episodes, we're talking with entrepreneurs and other business leaders about how they're thinking creatively during such a disruptive time. And today, we're going to hear from Alberto Perlman, co-founder of Zumba. Zumba is a fitness program that combines Latin dance and aerobics. It's popular all over the world, but now, of course, many gyms and fitness studios are closed,

• 5:51Guy Raz?

  leaving Zumba instructors without a place to teach. So to keep people moving, Alberto's team got into action and built a virtual platform in just a few weeks. For people who don't know much about it, just how do you describe Zumba?

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Well, Zumba is a, I think it's the largest branded fitness community in the world. We have pre-pandemic, over 15 million people who take Zumba classes every week. And we're in 186 countries. And pre-pandemic, we were in 200,000 locations. We don't own the locations. We have instructors teaching those locations. Some instructors own their own location and some instructors work for somebody else. But we are a fitness community, a cultural community, a musical community, a community of people that just come together and have fun and get healthy and happy.

• 6:48Guy Raz?

  And basically, you you train instructors and then you license the brand and the program to instructors around around the world. And those instructors are like, they're like the entrepreneurs. I mean, they run their own Zumba business.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's we enable them to go out and create their business or work for someone and generate income doing what they love. That is the most important thing. If people love dancing, people love interacting with other people, people love leading, then they they get trained this, they can actually make money doing something that they really, really love.

• 7:21Guy Raz?

  Alberto, you know, we had John Foley of Peloton on a couple of weeks ago and Sadie Lincoln of Bar Three. Obviously, the industry as a whole has just been absolutely decimated, right? I mean, 20 for our fitness filed for bankruptcy, gyms across the country are struggling. Many of them may not survive. At the same time, working out from home is really, you know, anybody who's tried to get dumbbells online knows it's impossible to find them right now, right?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  I heard there's a black market for dumbbells.

• 7:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah. How has the economic crisis affected Zumba?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  So, so we set out and said, let's base our response to the pandemic. And we started seeing this in January and February because we have instructors in China. And our instructors in China were telling us, hey, this is really bad. You guys have to prepare for this because if this gets out, this is not good. So we said, we have to do three things. One, most important thing, how do we continue to help instructors generate income? Two, how do we deliver education virtually for people, new people who want to become instructors or our existing instructors who need further education, especially if they're transitioning to virtual? And three, how do we keep our promise to make the world happy and healthy? The first thing we did was we allowed our instructors to start teaching online.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  They started teaching on Zoom, but parallel to that, we started developing our own platform. And it's called Zin Studio. Zin stands for Zoom Instructor Network. So Zin Studio and Zin Studio allows instructors to livestream their classes. It allows them to upload pre-recorded classes with licensed music. It allows them to charge for their classes. It allows them to list their classes on a platform on zumba.com. We really focused on this Zin Studio concept to help our instructors generate income during the lockdown. And at the same time, we said, we, our instructors are not necessarily trained in using all this technology. So we better provide all the education that they need.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  So we created all these courses that were done through Zoom and some are e-learning courses that our instructors could take to become what we call virtual fitness pros. And to our surprise, within a month and a half, we had about a million people a week taking Zumba classes virtually, which is amazing for a new virtual product. And it was really our instructors telling their students, hey, now I'm teaching online and come take my class virtually. And every week we launch improvements to the platform. So we added chat to the platform so students can chat while they're taking the class. We added emojis, we added the things to the paywall so that instructors could take payment.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  With every week, we're launching new tech at a pace that our technology team had never done so before. And I'm so proud of them because they really took it to, to the next level.

• 10:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, you basically stood up a virtual platform within weeks. I mean, I'm imagining that if you had a plan, like, let's say a year ago, you said, hey, we want to do a virtual platform. It would have taken you like a year to put together, right? And you did this in like six weeks?

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, unbilled people working nights, weekends. It felt like we were starting Zoom again. It felt like, you know how Jeff Bezos says they won? It really felt like they won. We felt unstoppable. We were going at it. We were talking to instructors to get feedback on how to make the platform perfect for them. And at the same time, we said, we need to also help our instructors and the world at large during the pandemic in other ways. So we created a community fund where we gave funds out to instructors who were directly affected by COVID themselves, who were hospitalized, who had family members that passed away or instructors that were, because our instructors sometimes are, Zoom is their side job.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  So we had a lot of instructors who are nurses, a lot, huge population of nurses who are also Zoom instructors. So we helped them, they're frontline workers. We helped them with childcare services. So we, we created this community fund. And we also did something that we call the One Class, One Meal Program. For every person who took a virtual class, which we make no revenue on, all the revenue goes to the instructors. For every person who takes a virtual class, we donated a meal during the month of June, and we donated 1.1 million meals to food banks around the world.

• 11:43Guy Raz?

  Wow. So Alberto, so when, when somebody signs up for a virtual class on the Zumba platform, all that revenue and pays for it, it goes to the instructor?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything goes to the instructor.

• 11:52Guy Raz?

  Wow. So, so I mean, how are you guys? I mean, you know, you're still a business, you still have employees. How are you kind of managing the business? And I mean, have you had to have layoffs or furloughs, for example?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we didn't do any layoffs. We didn't do any furloughs. Surprisingly, our clothing business is doing very well. People are buying fitness clothing to work out at home. And we, we were able to manage it. Obviously, it's not going to be a very profitable year because we made a lot of investments to make all these things happen. But that's not our, our objective this year. Objective this year is about the people. It's about the instructors, it's about their students, it's about our employees. It's always been that. And this year, it's even more about just helping out others and we'll be fine.

• 12:42Guy Raz?

  So basically, if you are a Zumba instructor, obviously, you you know, you pay a monthly license fee, but if you want to have virtual classes, you can use this platform and all that money goes to you. Zumba doesn't take a cut. Wow.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know instructors. This is amazing. I know instructors who are making $25 a class teaching at the YMCA or $30 a class teaching at the YMCA. Suddenly, when they switch to virtual, they're making $150 a class. So some of them are making more money than before the pandemic.

• 13:10Guy Raz?

  Wow. When you were on, originally on the show a couple of years ago, you talked about the 2008 financial crisis. And all of a sudden, you started to see an uptick in people training to become Zumba instructors because people were losing their jobs. Here we are, once again, in an even worse financial economic crisis. Are you seeing an uptick in in brand new people joining, trying to learn how to become Zumba instructors?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  So we are seeing people coming in. It's not as big as the 2008, and it's not as big as what we predicted was going to happen at the beginning of the year. But we are seeing every day a large group of people registering to become Zumba instructors. It's not the same as the 2008. 2008 was crazy, and I think it's partly because there were so many people that were hanging out at the gym in 2008, 2009. They were laid off. They were hanging out at the gym and and the the fitness industry needed more instructors.

• 14:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah, of course. You know, I remember the other sort of shift for your business was when you made a huge pivot. Because originally, you you guys made videos, like Zoom home videos that were sold through infomercials, and that's how you could learn how to become a Zumba instructor. And you realized that that wasn't actually a sustainable model. You made a huge pivot to support training and to create a network instead of just selling videos. This seems to me what you're doing now with virtual courses and training, that seems to be the biggest pivot since your whole business model was established. Is that is that fair?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  I think our pivot now, yes, I think it's more than just the virtual piece. It's how do we pivot into a place where our instructors are going to have to be even more entrepreneurial than before. We don't know what's going to happen to the four walls, our, our great friends at 24 Hour, at Gold's, even a lot of the boutique gyms. It's tough and we've been trying to help them. And one of the ways we've helped is we really push their instructors and motivate our instructors to teach outdoors and tell our gym partners, hey, our instructors can teach in parking lots, in the parking lot at your gym, and you can partner with them and host these classes there. And so that could generate some income for you. Or some instructors would say, I'm going to go to the park and I'm going to talk to

• 15:21Speaker 01

  the park ranger and I'm going to rent the park for an hour and I'm going to charge $10 a person and I'm going to get 20 of my students to show up and I'll generate $200 in revenue for my classes at the park. And we're seeing every day, we're seeing more and more people teach outdoors. I saw a huge class happening in New York with, I think I had like 300 people outdoors in Central Park. And some instructors have even doubled up and said, well, I'm going to teach outside or I'm going to teach socially distant inside, but I'm also going to stream at the same time. And so I can generate revenue twice. I can generate revenue from my people who are live in person with me and I can do it at the same time with people all over the world.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  So I can have some people from Korea and from Argentina and from Brazil taking my class. And at the same time, I'm in my hometown in New York, teaching an outdoor class and generating revenue on both sides and making people happy.

• 16:20Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Alberto tells us about a new exercise program that helps you forget you just did 20 burpees and encourages you to do a few more. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This, Resilience Edition from NPR.

• 16:44Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This, Resilience Edition. And I'm talking with Alberto Perlman, co-founder of Zumba. And for Alberto and really for the whole fitness industry, one of the big questions right now is how do you replicate the experience of an in-person class online?

• 17:02Guy Raz?

  Things that I remember you talking about in the episode was this concept that you called FEJ, freeing electrifying joy, right? This like idea that like 20 minutes into a Zumba class, you just like hit a zone. You're just like liberated from the world outside, you know, this and anyone's taken a Zumba class probably knows what I'm talking about. Can you get that feeling when you're doing this virtually?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  So we did a survey of people who have taken Zumba virtually and we interviewed over a hundred thousand people. And 50% of them said that they started doing Zumba virtually because they needed to stay in shape. But the main reason that they're doing it now is because of stress relief. It's like forced meditation a little bit. It's like you have to follow those dance moves. You're you're concentrated, you're listening to this amazing music. All your other thoughts go away. It's just you, the music, the instructor and the movement. And that's what's beautiful about Zumba is that moment that we call FEJ, which is like our Zen, what Zen is to yoga, FEJ is to Zumba, freeing electrifying joy.

• 18:04Guy Raz?

  I'm gonna I'm gonna go to some questions from our viewers. This is from Claire Murashima. Hello, Claire. Claire asks, like, when you get tired of doing Zumba, what do you do? Because, you know, you don't, you probably don't do Zumba every day. I know you exercise. So what other things do you do?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  So Strong Nation is our new program, which is a high intensity interval training program. It's non dance where you're doing a push up, a squat, a burpee, 10 jacks. And then you go into punching and kicking and we synchronized music to it. So we went to our favorite DJs, DJs like Steve Ioki or producers like Timbaland. And we said, can you score music to this workout? Instead of the music being in the background, let's score music, just like you would score music to a movie, like a training scene in a movie or like the movie, a battle scene in the movie 300. And they created this very cool epic music that matches the workout completely. So if you take a Strong Nation class, you can take virtual Strong Nation classes,

• 19:03Speaker 01

  or you can take them outdoors, or you can take them in gyms that are open. And you feel like one with the music. You feel like you are completely Zoom was about fetch, Strong Nation is about hacking motivation. So it's like, remember Pavlov's dogs? Where the bell would ring and the dog would salivate? So we created a similar thing with music conditioning. So we're not counting how many burpees you're doing. It's every time that sound hits, you're doing a burpee. And suddenly you thought you could only do twenty and you just did twenty six. And it's because you were just hearing that sound and you were getting conditioned. So I'm really excited about Strong Nation. We're getting a lot of people hiring Strong Nation instructors to come teach in their backyards.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  As almost like personal coaches, personal trainers. Come teach me Strong Nation in my backyard, because that's the workout I want to do while I'm at home.

• 19:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Walk me through a little bit how you guys are successfully doing virtual training and virtual instruction. Because not only are you onboarding new people, but you're also updating and offering continued instruction. But then like teaching people how to use the virtual platforms. I imagine that it was kind of a rocky period at the beginning, right? When you were trying to do this?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Oh, it was crazy at the beginning. So we started off with helping our instructors get on Zoom, right? And Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, they were teaching on these platforms. And in a lot of audio issues or video issues, as they were learning, right? There's a lot of different settings that you can use on these platforms. So there was a whole learning process and a lot of issues at the first few classes. Then we launched our own platform. And in our own platform, we had to work out all the technical bugs. And now the platform is incredible. Our platform has better video than I've ever seen in any other platform. That's what we wanted to focus on is video and audio being crystal clear, HD, come through, amazing. And then we had to train our instructors, right? That was a big piece of it.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  So we created Zumba Virtual Facebook groups that people could join and learn how to teach virtually. We created courses, e-learning courses, and we created Zumba Virtual Pro, which would help them really, not only on their technical skills, but when you're speaking to a camera, when you're dancing to a camera. Your movements have to be a little different. You're, how do you engage when you're not seeing the feedback? When you're not seeing what the other person's expression is? How do you engage? How do you, it's almost like acting classes, right? How do you, and so we, we had a lot of fun doing it. And we learned a lot from our instructors, from their experiences. And how do you take that to the next level?

• 21:42Guy Raz?

  You know, are you guys strongly discouraging your instructors from doing indoor classes?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  We're not. We want nothing more than for people to be back at the gyms and for people to be teaching classes together because community is such a big deal. People are a lot more accountable to other people than they are to themselves, unfortunately. And so if you know your buddy is going to show up at your Zumba class or at your Strong Nation class, you're more likely to go because there's someone waiting for you there. So we want the gyms to reopen. We want people to teach indoors again. We want to experiment with this hybrid model of teaching indoors and teaching virtually. We want people to be teaching outdoors. The more we can get people together, the happier we are.

• 22:28Guy Raz?

  Um, I want to ask you, uh, this is an important question because a lot of people, as you know, Alberto, who, who listen to our program are starting businesses and are also in marketing. Um, how do you kind of market what you do and successfully reach people who may not know about, about Zumba? How do you get the word out? What, what are some of your strategies?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the world has changed, right? Obviously, the world of marketing has gone through an innovation period that has created lots of opportunities, but it's also a very different these days. Currently, we obviously use a social media. Uh, we have over 10 million people that follow us on social media. Uh, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars advertising Find the Class, even though we, we don't make any money from Find the Class, right? Because that money all goes to the instructors. We advertise it all the time and it's one of our biggest line items in our cost structure is advertising Find the Class.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  So we create thousands of ads for people to come and find Zumba classes. And obviously, the number one thing that drives people to Zumba is bring a friend.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Is when somebody tells you, hey, I'm taking this amazing class. I found this amazing instructor. Do you want to come with me? It's one of the best marketing tools we have. So we help our instructors and our gym partners encourage that as well.

• 23:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Alberto, before we let you go, what is something that you have learned about yourself as a leader? Or something that this crisis has forced you to be or become? That you want to take with you into the future as you continue to lead this company?

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Wow. And I think that focus has been so sharpened for me. Where because we're all working from home and because we are all trying to figure out what the next move is, having clear, crystal focus for the organization and aligning everybody together has become so much more important. And I think I've learned how to communicate better. Because now you're communicating in this virtual world, you really need to have people understand what it is that you want to get done and what it is, where it is that you want to go.

• 24:47Guy Raz?

  Right. Alberto Perlman, co-founder of Zumba, thank you so much.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Thank you, Guy. It's great seeing you again.

• 24:53Guy Raz?

  That's an excerpt from my conversation with Alberto Perlman, co-founder of Zumba. By the way, you should check out our episode on Zumba. We aired it back in January of 2017. It is hilarious and really interesting. To see my full interview with Alberto, you can go to facebook.com/HowIBuiltThis. And if you want to see all of our past live interviews, you can find them there or at youtube.com/NPR. If you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR events, you can go to nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by Candace Lim with help from Will Mitchell, Tyra Lockhart, Matt Adams, Gianna Capadona, John Isabella, Julia Carney, Niva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Thanks for listening.

• 25:37Guy Raz?

  Stay safe and I'll see you in a few days. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This.