Troy Taylor Is The Marketing Guru With A Million Ideas

AUSTIN, Texas—Troy Taylor’s career is inside his phone. His flip phone, to be exact. Well, that’s not true.

It folds. Sideways.

Taylor is one of those people whose smartphone doubles as a mini-computer. He’ll open it up and thumb through his calendar, then he’ll move three different windows across the screen so that he can manage all three at once.

“All-time scheduler,” says Taylor, who’s also an all-time multi-tasker.

About the only thing Taylor, 53, doesn’t plan is his workout, because he doesn’t have to. “I know I’m already going to be in the gym,” he says.

Meeting Taylor for the first time, you don’t have to spend much time understanding how he operates. Because the man has boundless energy. And 8-percent body fat.

It rubs off on the projects he throws himself into, and it’s made him an exceptional go-getter. Ultimately, he’s many things at once: The ultimate doer, a spitfire promoter, the type of person who will go to far lengths to get you not only to believe in what he’s doing, but also incentivize you to join in, too.

In Austin, you might know him as the Orangetheory Fitness guy. He once had the company’s logo—a four-fingered splat—trimmed into the side of his head. For 12 years.

But he’s more than that. Trust us.

“How can I help people or bring people to God with their vessel and work with what they’ve been gifted with?” said Taylor, a married father of two girls who leads a ‘Moment in Health’ program at his local church. “I think that’s a big part of my life moving forward.”

In Austin, a city ripe with new ideas, sparkling fitness gyms and wellness spaces, Taylor built a career from the ground up and made the most of it, streamlining a series of Orangetheory Fitness studios into new frontiers of success. His most lucrative, located in Central Austin’s Triangle Neighborhood, was a one-time “top five gym” in the Orangetheory Fitness universe, once holding just over 1,400 memberships.

But after exiting out of the business in 2023 and taking two significant buy-outs over a five-year period, Taylor moved on. Next on his to-do list, he says, is his latest marketing overhaul.

He partnered with a local meal prep business, Meal Proz, and is now searching for ways to scale up food delivery. This could be his third act.

“Locally made,” he said. “We’ll bring them to your house.”

A Fitness Career Forged

Taylor grew up in Northwest Philadelphia and attended Radnor High School, where he was a track and field standout. After moving on to Penn State University, where he walked-on as a sprinter on the Nittany Lions’ track and field program for a year, he graduated with a degree in Health & Education, minoring in art. “I used to say my specialty was in body sculpting.”

Taylor traveled the U.S. and landed on a few reality shows when he was in his 20s, including ABC’s ‘Are You Hot’ and MTV’s ‘ElimiDate.’ Later in his 20s, he connected with his former track coach at Penn State, Duane Carlisle, a strength and conditioning specialist who had ties to major league baseball teams. Taylor landed a job with the newly-formed Tampa Bay Devil Rays, working with MLB all-timers like Wade Boggs, Fred McGriff, and Jose Canseco in the early 2000s.

“(My former coach) said I have a job in Tampa, ‘Do you want to do it,'” Taylor remembers of Carlisle, who is currently a performance and wellness consultant for the NFL’s officiating department. “I said, ‘Hell yeah, let’s go.'”

Never satisfied with one thing, the early wisps of Taylor’s entrepreneurial sprint blossomed in Florida. He was hired as the head of personal training at the first Gold’s Gym in St. Petersburg.

“I would do my work in the day with the baseball team,” Taylor said, “and whatever time I had left, I would learn the ropes and try to understand pre-sales with Gold’s Gym.”

The Next Opportunity

By 2010, Taylor was pursuing the fitness and health industry full-time and was leading small group training at Anytime Fitness. A fortuitous meeting put him in front of Terry Blachek, a business executive who later went on to open 10 studios in the Tampa area over a three-year period.

Blachek secured a meeting with an up-and-comer by the name of Ellen Latham, who formed a business concept that later turned into the origins of Orangetheory Fitness (OTF). Taylor – along with four employees of Blachek – came along for the ride.

Founded in 2010 by Latham and her partners, OTF centered around high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Utilizing heart monitors to track performance across fitness zones, participants could raise and lower their intensity levels based on what the monitors were showing on a big screen.

The business was right in the pair’s wheelhouse. Blachek became the financier, while Taylor played the role of frontman, helping open the fourth studio in OTF’s history. And quickly, Blachek gave Taylor responsibility.

“He started by managing our St. Petersburg location,” Blachek said. “We soon had three studios. I promoted Troy to oversee all three.”

Chief among the skills Taylor learned over that acclimatization period was “pre-sale,” a tactic focused on bringing members into a business before it functionally opened. Taylor was a pro almost immediately.

“I had 72 clients at the time,” said Taylor, whose performance training business was flourishing. “I brought most of them to OTF.”

Heading To Austin

Taylor and Blachek were a star-combo. When Blachek eventually sold his stakes in Florida, he targeted Central Texas, where only one OTF studio existed. He put a feeler out to his team at the time, “Does anyone want to go to Texas and start this up?”

Taylor’s hand was the first to raise.

But that decision would become the best decision he ever made, because Blachek dispatched 25-percent equity to the hard-working souls who followed him to Texas. It was a moment that gave Taylor his first taste of ownership.

Blachek formed Austin Fitness Group, LLC, and by 2018, his consortium would eventually reach 133 studios across Texas, Arizona, Missouri, New Jersey, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma. Taylor’s promotional know-how went into hyperdrive as he became an OTF “owner” for the first time and opened a studio in Round Rock, securing 727 pre-sales.

He opened another, and then his next became the most successful Austin. The gym in the Triangle still exists today and is among Central Texas’s most popular studios. That pre-sale exploded, Taylor said, with 858 early buy-ins.

By the mid 2010s—now into his mid 40s—Taylor had developed a penchant as a charismatic marketer. He dyed his hair orange. He had the OTF splat trimmed into his head. He outfitted a JEEP Wrangler with orange colors and placed a mounted long-horn on the grill. The studio bought used bikes and tied them to local fencing outside studios, painting them orange.

“He’s always been a great front guy,” Blachek said. “He looks the part. And he was very creative in the way he promoted things. He played a big role in helping us get off the ground.”

Taylor sneezed, and big ideas popped out. Then came an orange lasso—and a new customer.

“The foundation has always been fitness,” he said. “I can talk and teach fitness in my sleep. But where I became the strongest was in my promotions. As I became the face of OTF here, people began to associate me with all these things.”

Taylor would go on television programs or radio broadcasts touting the next deal with Orangetheory. He would create fitness pop-ups outside his store. “In the forefront of explaining what it was, people wanted to get into something that was new and hot,” he said. “And as we opened up the studio, if there was a segment about health and fitness, we would talk about what’s different and new.”

Over nine years in Austin, Taylor built a mega-career. In 2018, when Blachek sold 70-percent of his equity for a cash release, Taylor earned a six-figure pay-out. The team endured COVID in 2020, and then in 2023, feeling the need to move on, Taylor opted for one last buy-out.

Blachek, meanwhile, moved back to Florida.

What’s Next On Agenda

For a time, Taylor linked up with the Nike Training Studio in the Triangle and consulted with other local gyms, including CrossFit Central – which was one of the company’s first studios back in 2005.

He built back his client base and tried to figure things out. “I was working on myself,” he said. He started an inflatable-house business with Blachek, doing that for two years. And if that seems weird, well, you don’t know Taylor. He says he’s engineered or been a part of roughly 8-10 businesses over his lifetime—and he’s not stopping anytime soon.

“We had a friend in Tampa who said, ‘I’m making some serious money off these bounce houses,” Taylor said. “We went to a convention in Florida and started one.”

A major injury—he tore both his tendons in his quadriceps—forced Taylor to work from home and recover in 2023. Two years later, he found a partnership with Meal Proz, a business led by a local bodybuilder Nick Noel. Taylor still personally trains on the side with about 50 clients.

The transplant Austinite is now using his marketing expertise to secure new business for Noel. Taylor thinks the business, which has four storefronts and offers healthy meal preps, can explode.

“I don’t need to have a big job with a big title,” he said. “I like the rollercoaster of building something up. I want someone to take a ride for the first time and say, ‘Yo, try this.’ And then I want to get people to believe and get on board and understand and learn that it’s something they can fly.”

In the meantime, Taylor is active in his church and advocates for local causes. Within the last year, he joined a paddle-board fundraiser on Lady Bird Lake, riding the water for nearly 10 hours.

Don’t worry. Taylor still works directly with clients. He still enjoys getting in the gym and helping people reach their goals.

In fact, he might just find some time in his busy schedule and put you on his calendar.