150: Brooke Meek (PLNK Fitness)

Brooke Meek on Innovation City

“I believe I can always do something better than the way I am doing it.” – Brooke Meek

Welcome to Season 3 of Innovation City, a podcast featuring innovators, creators, and disruptors to discover how business is changing in the modern world.

Created and produced by SLAM! Agency in cooperation with Venture Cafe St. Louis and Venture Cafe Miami, Innovation City gives you an inside look at how rapidly business and culture are changing thanks to increasing diversity and inclusion, heightened creativity, and a stronger and better-connected business community. Venture Cafe is the largest combined gathering of entrepreneurs and innovators anywhere in the world. Events are held every Thursday in St. Louis, Miami, and other leading innovation cities around the globe.

Today’s guest is Brooke Meek, Founder of PLNK Fitness. Her love of fitness and “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” inspired her to turn an innovative design into a full-fledged business. Her studio focuses on a piece of workout equipment called The Megaformer. A need to nurture her mental and physical health combined with a love of learning and a good opportunity was her catalyst for becoming the successful female founder she is today. In this episode, Tyler and Leigh-Ann sit down with Brooke to learn about how she made her vision a reality, how she approaches building great teams, her focus on maintaining a well defined brand, and much more!

They discuss:

• How identifying a need and aligning it with the right innovation is how good business ideas come to life
• The importance of setting an intention
• Learning to delegate and build great teams
• The challenge of undertaking the unfamiliar and the process of learning and building the necessary components to realize a vision
• What it is like to be a female founder in a male dominated business
• Negotiating contracts
• Working to support and nurture female centered spaces
• The importance of understanding geographic locations and making appropriate adjustments when expanding
• What it is like being a mother and a founder
• Why the willingness to take risks can lead to a more fulfilling life
• Finding impactful opportunities to give back and taking on greater social responsibility
• Navigating the fitness world and the challenge of adjusting to the current global pandemic
• The importance of being courageous

Lightning Round:

• What risk are you happy that you took?
  • Expanding my business out of state
• What is something new you recently tried and loved?
  • Hot Yoga
• What are you passionate about and want to do more of?
  • Further developing the social aspects of PLNK and giving back in a more directed way
• What does the world need more of?
  • Love
• What are you working towards that you need help with?
  • Staffing in out of state locations