Gold’s Gym, a Dallas-based fitness brand that traces its roots to Venice Beach and Arnold Schwarzenegger, has named Brad Reynolds as its new sole CEO, the company announced Monday.
Reynolds joined Gold’s Gym in September and was previously serving as co-CEO alongside Danny Waggoner, a company veteran who will now serve as chief operating officer. Before joining Gold’s Gym Reynolds had served as chief financial officer for Shipley Do-Nuts and Blaz Pizza, among other roles.
His elevation to sole CEO comes as Gold’s Gym, which went through a Covid-era bankruptcy sale, is increasingly focusing on a franchise model as a means to continue growing its brand.
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“We are going to build a best-in-class franchise organization, raise the bar on member experience, reflecting the full weight of what Gold’s Gym means to people,” Reynolds said in a release, “and make Gold’s Gym the standard every other fitness brand measures itself against.”
The brand later this year is planning to open a flagship location in greater Dallas as a kind of testing ground for equipment and various “creative experiences,” the release noted. Its existing locations include gyms in Richardson, Flower Mound and Highland Meadows, as well as Waco and Austin, where it opened another flagship last summer.
The first Gold’s Gym opened in 1965 in Los Angeles’ Venice Beach neighborhood by Joe Gold, an entrepreneur and bodybuilder, and a few years later emerged as the “second home” for a young Schwarzenegger, the former California governor wrote in a blog post last year.
While in its early days the gym was largely associated with bodybuilding, over time the company expanded into one of the largest fitness brands in the world, with hundreds of locations in the U.S. and abroad. The company moved its headquarters from California to North Texas in the early 2000s, and moved into its current corporate headquarters in the Lincoln Center office complex in North Dallas in 2020.
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The same year, as COVID-19 ground much of American life to a halt, the company, then mostly owned by Dallas billionaire Robert Rowling’s TRT Holdings, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protections and closed dozens of corporate-owned clubs. “We are 1,000% not going out of business,” then CEO Adam Zeitsiff said at the time. “This is a result of the Covid-19 global pandemic.”
Soon after Gold’s Gym was purchased for $100 million through a court-run bankruptcy auction by the German firm RSG Group, which still owns the brand.
