In 2016, Dan Cooney and Mike Barney, co-founders and co-owners of Torrent Cycle, lived and worked and worked out in New York City. When visiting family in Salt Lake City, they were surprised to find very few fitness studios delivering the high-end classes and amenities they were used to attending.
Each trip West exposed more of the market gap, and eventually, the couple realized their appreciation and understanding of what was missing made them perfectly positioned to offer it.
While still in New York, Dan and Mike began meeting regularly on Saturday afternoons at their local gym’s co-working space to map out a hypothetical business plan. From the beginning, they knew their studio needed to inspire.
“For us, it was about going to a place where you felt it was an occasion, like something special that warranted this elevated experience because of the way you felt when you walked in,” Cooney says. “We used to say our litmus test for that was: Would you feel comfortable walking around barefoot?”
In a typical gym, going barefoot would be unheard of. In this new type of studio, however, Cooney says they wanted to provide customers with not just a killer cycling workout, but the same high-quality products they used at home — luxurious towels, deodorant, hair ties, shampoo, conditioner, razors, blowdryers — in a space that felt like home. From the spacious locker rooms to the curated scent as you walk through the door, Barney and Cooney planned to bring a new level of comfort and elegance to their space.
In 2018, the first Torrent Cycle studio opened in downtown Salt Lake City. Today, the three locations in the Salt Lake Valley demonstrate the demand for high-end, curated experiences.
“We’ve had several riders hit 1,000 rides,” Cooney says. “In the next month or so, we will have our first person with 2,000 rides.”
Kelly Sansom Know who you are
To ensure Torrent met Barney and Cooney’s high expectations for cycling from the very beginning, Cooney dug into his fashion retail background to develop a strong brand baseline. The first thing Torrent needed was a mission statement.
“We spent a lot of time in those first few weeks going through our mission statement and being very particular about the wording, being very clear about exactly what we want to say,” Cooney says. That statement has since helped guide the company through every major decision.
From there, Barney and Cooney meticulously created mood boards and designed every meticulous detail of their gym and brand. As important as branding is, it’s not the branding itself that is valuable, Cooney says; it’s knowing who you are and what you want to do.
“We were able to do this very inexpensively,” he explains. “But what helped was that we were super defined about what we wanted it to be. … We were tuned in to what we wanted from the beginning.” Consistency and clarity in values that “ring true to your customer” will always be more important at Torrent than a “big, flashy logo.”
Community as a strategy
Outside of the actual studio experience, Cooney says the founders’ main focus is community. Initially, the community and company grew organically, and the founders reinforced the growth with various ads in magazines, on billboards and on social media, but found that nothing worked as well as word of mouth.
“If it were just a workout class, I don’t think they would come back time and time again,” Barney says. “They wouldn’t ride 500, 1,000 times and still be going strong after all these years. It’s our belief that if the business is run well, people will want to come back and … will share the experience with friends and family.”
Today, Torrent focuses on building community by encouraging person-to-person advertising, focusing advertising dollars on “incentivizing existing customers to bring people with them,” Barney says. When gathering data on how the business is doing, the founders see the number of daily customers as more important than even revenue.
“If someone spends $100 on class credits but then never uses them, they’re never going to come back,” Barney explains. “For us, it’s a lot more important to look at how many people are showing up to ride because those are the people that are going to continue to spend money with us.”
“We were noticing that strength was becoming more important for people, just in general. And then, of course, we did find data to back all of that up.”
— Dan CooneyIt takes a team
As co-founders and co-owners of the company, Barney and Cooney split business responsibilities based on their strengths. Barney’s background in operations allowed him to focus on logistics, staffing and building maintenance, while Cooney’s experiences in the creative industry help him handle the instructors and their education, as well as marketing.
“The main thing to focus on here is we are married, and we wanted to stay married,” Barney says. “To do that, there had to be separation.”
While they still meet weekly to stay unified, the split allows the founders to make decisions without constantly getting approval from each other. At the beginning of the business, the division also helped keep them sane until they were able to hire help.
“In the first six months of us being open, we were at the business from 5:15 a.m. until about 9:00 p.m., five days a week,” Barney says. “We did that as long as we could. But we were juggling a lot of different roles. … I actually think that was really good for us, because it helped us see what had to be done so that we could then find the right people to fill those positions.”
Photo courtesy of Torrent Cycle
Classically, their fitness business took off during its first January. Cooney says they expected that to happen, but they didn’t expect the good momentum to continue to build for months afterward. At one point, the founders were collectively teaching almost 20 classes a week, leaving little time to actually run the business.
“In that first year, we trained four more instructors so that we could actually run the business rather than just teach a million classes every week,” Cooney says. That pivotal support allowed the founders to focus less on day-to-day operations and instead keep the business’s long-term interests and priorities in sight.
Intuition + data
Torrent has come a long way since 2018, but the growth never stops. In 2023, Barney and Cooney opened Tenet cafes near the Downtown and Sugar House Torrent locations to provide customers with “a healthy, convenient spot to re-fuel after class.” In August 2025, the downtown SLC studio began offering classes combining cycling and strength training. Both changes came from the same entrepreneurial intuition that started Torrent.
“We were noticing that strength was becoming more important for people, just in general. And then, of course, we did find data to back all of that up,” Cooney says. “We’ve seen a huge resurgence in how many strength classes there are. For us, it’s been a really good shift, and it started with just feeling.”
Just like the feeling that created it, Torrent Cycle continues to provide a high-end fitness experience to the Salt Lake Valley that evolves with the intuition of its founders.
