Today we’d like to introduce you to Chad Perry.
Hi Chad, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I spent years on a trading floor learning to read patterns. The one that surprised me most had nothing to do with markets.
During slow stretches between trades, I’d head to the gym. A few colleagues started tagging along. Then my roommates — investment bankers — wanted in. Then their coworkers. Before I knew it, I was designing training programs for a couple dozen executives on the side, and none of them were hard to convince. They were driven, successful people who had basically stopped taking care of themselves. Once they started, they didn’t want to stop.
That was the beginning of CSP Fit, though I didn’t know it yet.
By 2012, trading had lost its pull. I joined Equinox to formalize what I’d been doing informally for years — and I learned a lot. But I also noticed pretty quickly that the gym environment itself was a problem for the clients I wanted to serve. These were people managing packed calendars and real pressure. The last thing they needed was a commute to a crowded gym. They wanted training that came to them — at home, at the office, in their building. And they were willing to pay well for it.
So I left and built CSP Fit around exactly that.
What’s always set my approach apart isn’t just the convenience — it’s what I actually do in those sessions. I’m a NASM-certified Corrective Exercise Specialist, which means I spend a lot of time on the stuff most trainers skip: fixing the bad shoulder from fifteen years at a desk, the lower back that goes out a few times a year, the knees that have been quietly compensating for an old injury. My clients get stronger and lose weight, but what keeps them coming back is that they start moving without pain. That changes everything.
I expanded into several residential buildings in New York before relocating to Tampa. I’ll be honest — I wasn’t sure how quickly the model would translate. But the city surprised me. Tampa is pulling in ambitious, accomplished people from all over the country right now, and a lot of them are looking for exactly what I offer. The business grew faster than I expected.
Today, CSP Fit holds an 85% client retention rate, and most of my new clients come through referrals. I work with executives across Tampa’s top high-rise communities, and I’m actively building out corporate wellness partnerships with the same concierge approach I started with years ago in New York.
I built this business around one simple idea: the people who need fitness the most are usually the ones with the least tolerance for friction. Remove the barriers, deliver real results, and they’ll never leave.
So far, that’s proven true.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Smooth? Not even close.
In the early days, I was doing everything. Marketing, sales, recruiting, scheduling, client management — sometimes all in the same afternoon. I’d train clients at 6 AM, squeeze in admin work between sessions, and spend evenings knocking on doors at residential buildings trying to get in front of property managers. There was no team. There was no playbook. There was just the work.
Hiring was its own education. I learned quickly that finding good trainers isn’t hard — finding trainers who actually share your standards is. I made some bad calls early on and had to let people go when they weren’t the right fit for what I was building. That part never gets easy, but it gets clearer. You figure out what you’re really looking for, and you stop compromising on it.
Moving to Tampa after the pandemic reset the clock in ways I didn’t fully anticipate. I wasn’t just starting over in a new city — I was rebuilding credibility from scratch, without the New York network I’d spent a decade earning. The real estate landscape was different. The client acquisition process was different. There were stretches where I genuinely wasn’t sure how long it would take to gain traction.
But here’s the thing — I never wanted smooth. The part of this that keeps me going is exactly the part that’s hard. The direct feedback loop between effort and outcome, the problem-solving, the constant adjusting. I’ve pivoted more times than I can count. Some ideas worked immediately. Others didn’t survive contact with reality. You figure out which is which and you keep moving.
I can’t imagine doing anything else. This isn’t just a business I built — it’s genuinely who I am. The obstacles don’t discourage me. They just tell me where to focus next.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Most of my clients are executives in their late 30s through 60s who are great at their jobs and haven’t prioritized their health in years. That’s not a character flaw — the traditional gym model just never worked for people with real demands on their time.
So we come to them. Their home, their office, their building. No commute, no friction, no wasted hours. We focus on what actually moves the needle at this stage of life — losing weight, building functional strength, and getting out of pain. A lot of people find me because something has been nagging for years. A shoulder. A back. Knees that haven’t felt right since their 40s. Most trainers work around those things. We address them directly.
That’s honestly why people stay. And why they refer their colleagues without being asked.
The next move is corporate wellness — taking this model into companies where executive teams get real, on-site training as an actual benefit. Not a gym membership that never gets used.
We’re not the cheapest option. Never tried to be.
What were you like growing up?
I was a quiet kid, honestly. Introverted in a way that made early social situations harder than they probably needed to be. Fitness changed that.
Around 13, I started taking my training seriously — not because anyone told me to, but because I wanted to perform better in sports. I played Baseball and ran track through high school and played rugby into college, and after every practice I’d find my way back to the weight room. That extra hour became a ritual. The results showed up on the field, but what surprised me more was what happened off it. The confidence I built through training spilled into everything else. I became someone who could walk into any room and find common ground with just about anyone.
The entrepreneurial streak showed up early too. I was always drawn to the idea of building something, figuring out angles, creating my own path rather than following someone else’s.
I ended up at the University of Colorado Boulder — which, for someone who loved the outdoors, felt like the obvious choice. I studied economics, played rugby, and spent every spare hour in the mountains. Boulder shaped a lot of how I think about discipline, performance, and what a genuinely healthy life actually looks like.
Fitness has been the throughline since I was 13. Everything else — trading, entrepreneurship, CSP Fit — grew around it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.cspfittampa.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadsperry/
