235: Plant, Grow and Serve with Tim Whitmire

Tim Whitmire, Co-Founder of F3 and CXN Advisory, is driven by a desire to plant, grow, and serve groups, harnessing the synergy of people working together to achieve greater things.

We learn about Tim’s journey from founding F3, the largest network of workout groups in America, to creating CXN Advisory. He shares how F3, which stands for Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith, grew from a local workout group to a national movement impacting over 100,000 men. He explains his Tentpole Leadership Framework, which involves centering your tentpole around core principles and your ideal customer, stratifying your audience, and managing the tension between groups. This approach helps leadership teams grow, maintain alignment, and effectively expand their organizations while staying true to their foundational values.

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Plant, Grow and Serve with Tim Whitmire

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest today is Tim Whitmire, the Co-Founder of F3, the largest network of workout groups in America, and CXN Advisory, creating strength and internal alignment for company leadership teams. Welcome to the show, Tim.

Thank you, Steve. Glad to be on and appreciate you taking the time.

So Tim, before we get into F3 and your work with CXN, I’d like you to share with us what is your personal “Why” and how did that play into the co-founding of your companies?

Yeah, absolutely. Because both F3 and the founding of my company are really kind of all about my personal “Why.” I’ve always my whole life been kind of a group builder and somebody who’s trying to get people together to achieve things that they can’t achieve on their own. No man is an island, and nobody completely builds something by themselves. And as far back as sixth grade when I was trying to get a drama club going at my elementary school and put on plays and learning some lessons from that, and from then on, I’ve been always trying to kind of get people together and harness kind of the synergy of people working together to achieve things greater than what they can achieve on their own.

So you’re a group builder. So why is this important for you?

I don’t know. I mean, you could put me on the couch and we could spend some time with a psychologist. I don’t know, a child of divorce and a little bit of a loner as a child, didn’t always necessarily fit in. So maybe a way of gaining social acceptance as well and finding a way to build friendships and connect with people. But just for whatever reason, and it’s just been this recurring theme of like, I’m trying to start things, I’m trying to, and that’s of course an entrepreneurial mindset as well. Let’s get a bunch of people together and put on a show or create a product or build something better than what we can build if we’re individually on our own. So I don’t know. It’s just the itch that I need to scratch. I’ve needed to scratch my whole life. We talk about in F3, talk about a man’s dolphin and his daffodil. And I won’t explain the whole metaphor there. You can read the book, free to read if you want to. But the daffodil is, or the dolphin is the thing that you’re born to do. So like a dolphin is born to swim. And your daffodil is the group of people that you feel most strongly about doing that thing on behalf of. And for me, F3 ended up being kind of a perfect matchup because my dolphin was that sort of group building and getting people together and my daffodil happened to be grown men who have the ability to be more than what they currently are.

Yeah, well, that’s fantastic. So tell me a little bit about F3 and how did it come about, what it does and how does it help people?

Yeah, so, look, surely by accident is the answer. And it’s a series of happy coincidences. But a friend brought me out to a group workout in a park here in downtown Charlotte where I live back in 2008. And it was just a group of guys who got together every Saturday morning at the railroad train engine that was in the park for kids to play on. And they would meet at the engine and we would do pull-ups on the jungle gym and we would run hills and we would use the little slots in the parking spaces to do different exercises. And it was just, it was led by a different guy every Saturday and it was all kind of using your own body weight to get stronger and fitter. And it was really like nothing I’d ever encountered before. And it brought me into contact with a group of men at that time who I really would never have known otherwise. And so when the guy who had started that workout handed me the keys one Saturday and said, hey, why don’t you lead? That was a huge moment for me. I was a runner at that time. I did a lot of distance races, although I was heavier than I am now, but I was still running marathons at 250 pounds and just kind of grinding it out. And I could run long distances. And so what I did that Saturday, I had the chance to lead, was I took the guys out of the park and down a greenway and made them run hills for an hour. And they didn’t like that. Most of them liked doing pushups and pull-ups and so forth. And so they kind of cursed me about it and so forth. But after that experience, I literally through sweat equity, I owned a piece of the workout, right? I was a part owner of the workout. And that was the genius of what Jeff Gillibeau did when he created this workout group. And Jeff passed away, sadly, earlier this year. But he kind of built this group and incubated it. And when it got to a certain size in 2010, where there were kind of more than 25 guys coming out on a regular basis, he felt like that was too many people and he wasn’t going to be able to have a real relationship with each of the people in the group. And so he said, you know what, that’s it, I’m going to shut this workout down, no more new people. And I had met a guy named Dave Redding through the workout and Dave and I had started having lunch and we both worked near each other in downtown Charlotte and we started having lunch and talking about what this workout had meant to us in our lives and what it was doing in our lives. And we kind of turned to each other and said, this is crazy, we got to get this in front of more guys. And so we launched a spin-off workout on January 1st, 2011 that grew into what is today known as F3. And the guys who originally, the original founders, Jeff and that other group, they stayed separate. And then as F3 expanded over the next 13 years now across the country, that really became our mission was to get this mode of working out in front of as many men as possible. Just to anticipate the question, F3 stands for Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith, and it’s a free workout group open to all men. Anybody can show up at any time. We’re always very welcoming of new guys. And that fitness is really the magnet that draws guys in. It’s easy to have this thing come into your life and have it make a difference and then say to another guy, hey, I go to this workout, why don’t you come with me? And the fellowship is just what naturally develops when you do hard things with other guys at 5.30 a.m. or 7 in the morning or whatever the time happens to be. So when you’ve gotten your sweat on with some guys or done some burpees in the mud, there’s a bond that builds up. And what we found was that that second F, the fellowship, was really making a huge difference in guys’ lives. And at the time we were doing this in 2011, it wasn’t talked about as much as it is now, but that whole thing of male loneliness and adult men being very isolated in their lives and not able to talk about their problems or their feelings or so forth, like that was really what we were addressing in F3 and that was what was fueling the growth. And that was what made us able to turn to guys once they had this thing in their lives and say, hey, why don’t you drive over to the next town and help plant this and bring it to some other guys and make a difference in their lives.

235: Plant, Grow and Serve with Tim Whitmire Share on X

That was just the best word that we could find for what happened when a guy was in good shape and had a close network of friends was that he suddenly, we saw so many guys who all of a sudden had a ton of energy to do things beyond just deal with their own survival and make a living and provide for their family. They wanted to go out there and make the world a better place. So that was the best word we could find for believing in something outside your own survival. And for some guys, it’s a religious thing, but we’re open to men of all faiths and no faith. So that can be off-putting to some people to have the word faith in the title. It can be off-putting to others who want us to pray to a very specific God. But our view has always been that you’ve got half the world’s population as your total addressable market. And if you slice off 7.5% at each end of the spectrum, you still got 85% of half the world’s population.

Yeah, that’s awesome. So you’re paying it forward and everyone is paying it forward. So there’s a little multiplier effect going on here. So how big is F3 as we speak?

It’s about 100,000 men and there are workouts in, at last count, 48 states. I think we’re still waiting on Maine and Rhode Island to come on. And then 15 foreign countries as well. So it’s really, at this point, an international movement. It started from that one workout on January 1st, 2011, and we’ve never charged anybody for a workout. I tell people I’m America’s most successful, least successful fitness entrepreneur. I never made any money particularly off the idea, but at the same time, it’s brought a tremendous amount of good fortune into my life through the relationships and the other things it’s brought me.

That’s amazing, that’s really amazing. And it’s a huge issue, male loneliness, especially middle-age. And what drove it home to me was a quote I read a few months ago or maybe it’s a statistic that for the average 50-year-old male, their best friend is their spouse, but that’s not reciprocal.

Yep, yep, exactly. And my co-founder Dave used to always berate people for saying, my wife is my best friend, because your wife is a lot of things to you. Maybe the mother of your children or your life partner or somebody with whom you share a lot of interests and hopefully you enjoy being in each other’s presence, but she’s not your best friend. Your best friend is somebody you can tell the stuff about, but maybe driving you crazy with your wife.

Yeah, so that was the eye opening for me. Well that’s amazing. So you have basically, you have your F3, which is how you’re paying it forward. And then you have CXN, which is your advisor firm. And then I’d like to switch gears here and talk a little bit about your framework, because we always describe and explain a framework on the show, and you’ve developed a framework called Tentpole Leadership. So tell us about Tentpole Leadership and how did it come about and how does it help you help other people?

Yeah, so look, think of a giant circus tent, Steve. Ringling Brothers, Farnham & Bailey’s come into town and the first thing they do if they’re in a field, if they’re not in the local basketball arena or whatever, is they come to town and they put a giant tentpole at the center of where the circus tent is going to be. And that tent pole has got to be really strong, it’s got to be really stable, it’s got to be really sturdy to support this giant tent and the stays at all the ends. It’s going to cover a literal three ring circus. You’re going to have lion tamers, you’re going to have trapeze artists up in the rafters. You’re going to have clowns and jugglers and all that stuff. You got to cover that area. And so that center temple has got to be really strong and stable and sturdy. And the framework that I work with a lot of my clients at CXN on, and they’re mostly corporate clients and they’re mostly growth stage companies that kind of want to understand how they’re going to continue growing. And how we’re going to continue adding people and really expanding the tent of what the company is. Who we cover as customers, who we employ as employees, who we’re going to bring into the business, how to grow. And my argument, and this is very much from the F3 experience, has been that there are a bunch of kind of what I think of as 36,000 foot stuff. Think about the airplane cruising at 36,000 feet and it’s all laid out below you. And those are often kind of high in the sky things like a mission statement, like a vision, core values, core principles, credos, that sort of thing. And I think, in my experience at least, you look at a lot of corporate websites and a lot of companies have very vague mission statements. We want to be all things to all people at all times. And I call that kind of the puppies and kittens and uniforms version of a mission statement. We’re going to be everything to everyone, rainbows and unicorns. And what we did at F3 that was really powerful, and I’m going to kind of bring it back to some F3 examples here, and I give all the credit in the world to my co-founder Dave Redding, who was an Army veteran. He had been a Ranger in the Army. One of the things the Army does really well is teach people the right mission statements. And a mission statement in the Army is very simple. It’s your task and your purpose, and that’s it. And it’s very narrowly defined, and it’s not all things to all people. I mean, ultimately, bring it out to the U.S. Army writ large, and I think the task of the U.S. Army is to remain in a state of preparedness to advance U.S. interests overseas and perhaps domestically if the need should be. Like that would be the big one. But a unit, and a particular unit in the Army might have a very specific mission that would be very narrowly defined. So Dave and I helped craft kind of a really very specific mission statement for F3. And it’s something that’s been burned into my brain so that the task of F3 is to plant, grow, and serve small workout groups for men. And that’s not workout groups for small men, it’s small workout groups for men. And all those words are very carefully chosen. So we had a group of four of us who kind of ran F3 from Charlotte, and we were very distributed across the nation as it grew, as I told you, and we needed to be very clear on what our job was and what the job of the people at the workouts in Dallas or Chicago or San Francisco was. And so our job at the center was to help plant those workouts, oversee that part of it, and then help those workout grow to a certain size, and then provide any other services that those workout groups might need and those would be small workout groups. That was the other key was that there was an expectation that once a workout grew to a certain size, grew to 30 guys, there was going to be an expectation that you would split that workout because to address the problem I referred to earlier, when you have 30 guys at a workout, not everybody is gonna be known and not everybody is gonna be seen. And it’s too easy to be in the back of the pack and nobody knows who you are. And so we made it a mandate of like, no, you’re gonna grow to a certain size and new guys are gonna come in and then you’re gonna split that workout and that’s gonna provide more leadership opportunities. And so small workout groups for men, so that’s sort of self-explanatory. And then you get to the purpose. And the purpose of F3 is to invigorate male community leadership. So what Dave and I saw going on, and we referred to it earlier, but an epidemic of loneliness. Guys kind of purposeless in their lives, a little bit of drift, and frankly, not a lot of really great leadership around us. We saw a lot of institutions kind of failing. I think you can look at our political system today and question whether it functions very well and whether we’re really providing leadership there. And we said our purpose, we’re not going to try to reinvigorate male community leadership because that would suggest that at some time in the past, male community leadership was great. We’re not going to cast judgments about that. I mean, also in the past you had a lot of sexism, you might have had racism, you might have had some other stuff where not everybody was fully participating. But what we are going to say is we’re going to invigorate this going forward and that’s going to be by means of these workouts that get men out of their shells and active and into their lives and acting basically to make the world a better place. So that was the task and that was the purpose and it’s very clear what we do and also, very importantly, it’s very clear what we don’t do. So we’re not gonna go down to the local workout level and micromanage that and tell those guys how to run their local workout. We’re not going to be in the business, for example, I’ll give you a real world example of providing F3 branded gear, even though guys want shirts with the F3 logo on it. And that was a need that came up very early and we could see that there was a strong usefulness to it because it advances the brand and you get a bunch of guys with F3 shirts out there and people wanna know what it is. But we didn’t wanna be in that business.

Our business was to plant, grow and serve. Share on X

And so we stood up an F3 guy who wanted to make that his business and wanted to actually launch a sportswear brand. And we said, we’ll give you the exclusive licensing agreement with F3 if you agree to serve all of these workouts and make sure that they can get shirts and provide the fulfillment and collect sales taxes and so forth. But we don’t wanna be in that business because it’s not planned for a serve. And similarly, we would have people often come to us and ask us, hey, you’re doing a really good job with the F3 guys. They’re really full of energy. They’re doing great things. Can you solve the problem of bullying in our elementary schools? Or can you solve the problem of getting people excited or concerned about global warming and the flooding it’s creating? I literally had a client hire me to do that. And we would often say, that’s not our thing. Our thing is invigorating male community leadership. And we’re going to be very focused on that. You’re welcome to take advantage of the principles that we’ve elucidated here to address this problem that’s on your heart. But our daffodil, to go back to what I said to you earlier, is not bullying, is not coastal flooding. It’s invigorating male community leadership.

Yeah, so I love it. It’s a great example of how important it is to focus on your I call it the Core Business, your Core Business. So what you can really where you can really make a difference and not spread yourself too thin and and just become mediocre, but you just stick to your core and you just deepen it and make it richer rather than straying and going after shiny objects. So I love it. That’s great. So is there like a big, hairy, audacious goal for F3, or is it just a purpose? And then wherever it takes it, how do you look at that?

Well, for me, we do these what are called convergence workouts on kind of anniversaries or important days, maybe a holiday or something. And that’s where a bunch of different workout locations come together. And I often attend these and someone will invariably come up to me at some point and put his arm around my shoulder and look out at the massive 100 or 200 men working out together and say, man, did you ever imagine that it could be this? And I used to say, aw shucks, no, I never imagined that, boy, isn’t it amazing? But to be completely honest, and I told you the story earlier, I mean, the intention when we launched it was to get it in front of as many men as possible. So eventually, it was a convenient lie to be all shucks about it, but eventually I started saying, actually, yeah, I mean, that was kind of the vision, this was a great workout, but it’s also kind of a movement. And the intention was really to start a movement and to get as many men literally moving as we could and see what kind of changes we could bring into their lives.

So is this still the most exciting thing that you do or there is something else that you’re working on that really keeps you jumping up and down?

Well, I’m always working on something. I mean, in this case, look, I’ll tell you a quick story about where that tentpole leadership stuff really came from. So the tentpole is has got to be strong and it’s got to be sturdy and stable like I told you earlier strong mission statement and we had a set of core principles for f3 as well that govern what an f3 workout was and an F3 workout is free, it’s open to all men, takes place outdoors where possible, rain or shine. It’s led in a rotating fashion by somebody who is a member of the workout and is participating in it and it does not need any kind of certification. So we didn’t want to be in that business of are you certified to train at the Y or not? We didn’t want that. And we wanted it to be freely accessible to people, to be outdoors at a public park or on a school campus or wherever, not at somebody’s country club or anything like that. And then the fifth core principle is that it has to end in what we call a circle of trust. And that is you get everybody in a circle, you count off, so you know how many guys were there, and then guys go around and everybody gets a nickname at an F3 workout so it’s a very tribal kind of thing and you say your name, what we call your hospital name, which is the name they gave you in the hospital, your F3 name and then your age. And then we do announcements and that’s our goal and then we end with what we call a shout out, which can be a prayer or it can just be kind of words of wisdom and it’s always a great way to kind of end the workout. So those are the only five rules about what an F3 workout has to be. And you can sort of run them through that, run ideas through that filter. Do I want to do a five-on-five pickup basketball league? Well, I’ve got the key to the gym. It’s open to all men. It’s free. Somebody’s going to be playing all the time, and we’ll end with a circle of trust. Okay, I can do that. And we did have somebody to do that down in South Carolina and with a bunch of guys in their 40s. And it lasted about two weeks and then several guys tore their hamstrings trying to, so yeah, but that again, you have your sort of filters and so we have this very clear identity for F3 and we had a bit of a crisis in 2014. We’ve gotten very big in Charlotte and in the Carolinas and at that point we still had a website where it was basically open to anybody who wanted to post on it. There was no credentialing whatsoever. You could just come in and post whatever you wanted and we used it to write up summaries of workouts that we thought were very funny, but maybe the general public wouldn’t understand. But it was a bulletin board and a mode of communications. And a lot of F3 teams had really focused on an obstacle course race down in Columbia, South Carolina. That was kind of a Marine Corps mud run down there. And that spring of 2014, an F3 team not only beat all the other F3 teams that were in it, and there were like 100 F3 teams of four guys each. And they beat everybody else. They won the entire race. Share on X And the guy who captained the team basically took over our website for the next week and basically trash talked all the rest of F3 about how you guys can’t keep up with us and we’re better than you are and this was the most glorious victory in the history of obstacle course racing. And we started getting text messages and phone calls of like, this is really obnoxious, this is not F3 like behavior, this is not gentlemanly behavior or whatever. And one guy told me, you should really kick him out. Now, I was not gonna kick him out because as I told you earlier, F3 is free and it’s open to all men. So, you sort of have a problem of kicking people out of their free workout. So, that wasn’t gonna happen, but I was interested in what was going on with the group as a whole because that was a period of time we had kind of increasing stratification of workouts. We had sort of, there was the hard workout, and there was kind of the medium workout at this location, and there was an easier workout here, and we were starting to get workouts for guys who were 50 plus and 70 plus and so forth. And I wanted to understand what was going on, so I sketched a four blocker when I was on a plane that spring. And if you can imagine the x-axis on a four blocker, on the left side of the x-axis, I sketched out social orientation. And that was, if you were on the left side of it, you were a pack animal. You were interested in what the pack was doing. If you were on the right side, you were a lone wolf, and that was kind of your social orientation. And then your Y-axis, the vertical axis, was how hard you liked the workout to be, right? So, soft as a pillow at the bottom, and hard as nails at the top. And what I found was those two axes, if you boiled F3 down to just that, what your social orientation was and how hard you like the workout, I could plot pretty much everybody I knew in F3 somewhere on that four-blocker. So, my guy Cindy, that was his nickname, who had built the team that had beaten everybody at the mud run, he was up in kind of the northeast corner. He was a lone wolf, and he liked to work out as hard as possible. And his orientation was, if you can’t keep up with me, screw you. And I could think of another group of guys, and there were a lot of guys, there was a cluster of guys who kind of had that same orientation as him. But there were an equal number of guys, think about the northwest corner, which is the guys who want to do hard things, but they really want to do them with other people in a pack. And we had a lot of guys like that. We got a ring road that runs around downtown Charlotte called 277. And we used to joke that if someone if one of those guys tweeted out at five o’clock in the afternoon, hey, let’s all go run a 5K at rush hour on 277. Yeah, there would be 20 other guys who’d be like, I’m in, let’s do it. Yes, that’ll be fun. And but that was their orientation and and then there were guys down in kind of the southwest corner who didn’t really care how hard the workout was but they really liked being part of the group. And that was their main thing and then even some guys in kind of the southeast corner who just like the fact that they weren’t particularly pack-oriented, they were kind of lone wolves, but they liked the fact that F3 was always there and they could drop in and get a workout whenever they wanted. So all four of these quadrants were really covered and it was looking at that and realizing that we had people in all four of the quadrants, and also that the four of us who were in leadership, actually, I could plot out where each of us were on the quadrant as well, and we were not necessarily in the center. In our natural orientation, I told you I’m a group builder, so I always wanted to do things in a group, and I liked a pretty hard workout. My friend Jason was kind of similarly situated to me. Our friend Jimmy, less so probably in terms of the intensity of a workout. And then Dave, naturally, my co-founder, would naturally go to that Northeast corner and make things as hard as possible and run away from everyone, if he could. And so what the realization that I had was that as leaders in the group, all those different factions were gonna always pull in their own direction. Think about pulling on the strings of a tent. They’re going to pull in their own direction. First of all, if I cut Cindy and his guys off, then the other guys are going to keep pulling and they’re going to pull the tent over in their direction.

Tents will come down.

Yeah. So the tension is important. I want him in my big tent. I want him in those guys. And that tension is hugely important. But the call to leaders in the organization, they have to come to the center of the tent pole. And they have to be the ones literally propping up the tent pole so that all those other groups can pull in their own directions and provide that necessary tension so that the tent covers as many people as possible. And so it was really a leadership lesson for me of like, okay, you can have your own personal biases, you can have your own internal wiring, but you’ve got to come to that center and be able to kind of lead the group on behalf of everybody. And at the core of that, that tent pole was really composed of the mission, the vision, and the core principles.

I agree to that metaphor. And it really is a very hard job for the leader to create that stability in the center and to align everyone. And it’s not a thankful job either, because no one four quadrants, nobody’s happy. No one is fully happy, but it keeps the balance and it keeps the things going. This is an amazing metaphor. I see a lot of leaders in my class that they are struggling with this idea of being that tentpole, holding up this tentpole and not getting much gratitude for it, and always having to grapple with the unwelcome parts of the job, but this is a job. It’s not an easy job, and if you want to be a leader, then you have to embrace it. So Tim, this is awesome, it’s a great metaphor, a great framework. So if the listeners would like to learn more, and maybe they have a tentpole problem in their business, and they need someone to make it sturdier, or to prop it up, or show them how to do it? Where should they go and how can they learn more and reach out to you, maybe learn more about F3 as well?

Yes, absolutely. So the website is www.cxnadvisory.com. And if you want to go directly to the page to book a free call, it’s cxnadvisory.com/call, and there’s a scheduling thing and you can book a call and that’s a chance for me to just get to know you and know your story. I often do calls like this where there’s no engagement necessarily, but it’s just a chance to hear somebody’s story. And as I tell people, I don’t need to get paid for that hour because I usually learn something from them that I can then use with my other clients as well. It’s at the core of what I do is try to work with those leadership teams and then we can advance to kind of goal setting and execution and all that. But the very first thing is really, let’s understand what our tentpole is, who we’re trying to cover internally and externally, and what you need to do as a leader. I have a lot of sympathy for folks who come out of, say, sales. And they’ve grown up in sales, and they’re a great salesperson. Now they’re asked to be a sales leader. And you have all these colleagues in sales who are wired like you are, and just want to go out there and sell the heck out of a software product, for example. And you’re being asked to have other priorities. You’ve got to not just discount as much as possible, but you’ve got to keep unit prices high, you’ve got to keep customer acquisition costs down, and participate in a leadership team that has more in mind than just ramping up sales as much as possible. So it’s a challenge for anyone, really.

Fantastic. Well, Tim, thanks for coming. Thanks for sharing your gems and the Tentpole Leadership and what you did for F3 and how it works. And those who are listening, stay tuned, because twice a week, there’s exciting entrepreneurs like Tim coming on the show and sharing their unique frameworks. Thanks for coming and thanks for listening.

Appreciate it.

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