Jim Gerber’s gym on South Broadway is for the soccer mom and the pro athlete.
“It’s a really hard workout, and people are nervous to come here for their first time,” he said.
Gerber is opening a second location of Traverse Fitness on Saturday in a 12,000-square-foot building at 1409 W. 38th Ave. on the boundary of Denver’s Sunnyside and Highlands neighborhoods.
The new space cost $2 million to build and comes with “a little bit bigger of everything” – that includes a 36-person sauna, 32- and 42-person workout classrooms, a 2,500-square-foot open gym and a coworking space.
“By the time we open, we’ll probably be upward of 500 members … and we’ll be profitable on Day 1,” said Gerber, 46.
Today, Gerber’s gym has 850 members, paying an average of $220 per month.
He co-founded Traverse and opened its first location in late 2019 in a small building along a South Broadway alleyway. Today, it’s grown to span both that building and the much larger one next door, about 10,000 square feet in total. It offers an altitude room that can simulate the feeling of being at sea level on up to a 19,000-foot mountaintop, a sauna room, open gym and two other workout class spaces.
The business model is built off class work. Equipment includes the everyday squat racks and benches on up to sled pushes and fancy resistance machines.
The new location will offer even more cutting-edge equipment.
“We’ve got turf, we’ve got cardio with the treadmills – a new version of a treadmill that actually does incline sled pushes. We’re the first club in the United States, commercial club, to have this type of treadmill,” he said.
But the money hasn’t always come so easily.
“I’ve got some serious home equity loans and some serious debt,” Gerber said.
The idea for Traverse was born in 2018. Gerber was doing a skiing expedition with Kris Peters, his wife’s fitness coach. Peters, a trainer at a Wash Park Orangetheory, would lead groups to the mountain on weekends.
“He jumped in our car on a Saturday morning, and on the two-hour drive up to the mountains, we just hit it off, and we had very similar morals and values and thoughts on the industry,” Gerber said.
“I’ve been in the industry for 25-plus years, and I was always looking for deals. I always wanted to start my own business, a fitness business, and I know the operation side really well. And he was the fitness guy,” he added.
Gerber, who moved to Denver from San Francisco, California, in 2016, spent the bulk of his career working for the West Coast gym brand Bay Club. He started at 16 years old, painting fences for a summer job and moved up to being the general manager of a location. He then left to turn around a swim and tennis club before taking his first stab at running his own business selling inflatable bounce houses for birthday parties.
“I sold that in spring of 2019,” he said. “Liquidated the 401(k). I went all in.”
Gerber and Peters found a 7,000-square-foot warehouse on South Broadway to launch Traverse Fitness. That lease was inked in early 2019.
They never moved in.
First, Denver’s permitting process got in the way. The build-out was taking so long that they signed a separate lease for a small, temporary spot farther down the street, which opened in December 2019 with about 30 members paying $100 per month.
Then, the pandemic hit.
“I get a call from the bank going, ‘Hey, gyms are failing all over the world, the United States, we’re pulling your loan. We can’t loan you.’ … And we’re just two weeks away from starting construction.”
That same day, Gerber contracted COVID-19. He recalls sitting in his basement, calling high school friends, frantically trying to secure money for the business. Ultimately, he had to tear up the lease, losing $100,000 between earnest money and architecture fees in doing so.
So, the temporary lease became a permanent home. They were sharing the building with a bunch of music bands, and it wasn’t glamorous.
“We’d be doing a workout, and you’d hear ‘Stairway to Heaven’ just going crazy,” Gerber said.
About two months after the bank pulled his loan and he lost out on the big new location, Gerber was dealt another blow – his existing building burned down.
“You really learn what you got in your tank, and how to persevere when you’re dealt with these kinds of setbacks,” he said.
Gerber was able to save some of his equipment, moving it into the vacant warehouse next door at 2449 S. Broadway. That’s when his fortunes began to turn. He persuaded the landlord to let him lease the space. A few months later, he built the altitude room inside. When his old location next door was rebuilt, he leased it back, expanding to two buildings in July 2024.
All the while, he had been scouring the metro area for a second location. Armed with a LoopNet subscription – no brokers needed – he toured building after building to find Traverse’s next iteration.
Downtown? That was too dead and expensive. RiNo? Not enough parking. Then he came across the vacant 12,000-square-foot box on the corner of Mariposa Street and 38th – his future home. NAI Shames Makovsky brokers Joey Gargotto and Solomon Stark represented the landlord side of the deal.
“What’s always been cool about this place is we have members from Boulder. It’s almost unheard of inside the fitness industry. Anything outside of a 15-minute drive time, your membership levels just drop off,” Gerber said.
“We have members that drive 20, 25 minutes to come here. You get those early indications [that] we’re really doing something cool here.”
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