Lauren Kleban, Founder of LEKFIT, on building a company that’s ruthlessly you

Lauren Kleban started her career as a professional dancer. She moved to Las Vegas and booked a show at the Paris Hotel. But like every Vegas dancer, that wasn't her only gig. She was stacking five jobs at once, showing up to a 10am audition after a job that ended at 3am. As a dancer, no one hands you drive. No one teaches you to read your own call sheet, or to advocate for yourself, or how to pivot when the steady thing falls through. Looking back, she credits most of her success as a business owner to those years.

Today Lauren is the founder of LEKfit, the dance-based method she started out of her garage in Hancock Park. While the market was selling bikini-body countdowns and 30-day challenges, Lauren built the opposite, a complete method you do every day in under an hour. Her company grew into one of the most loved workouts in Los Angeles.

Her studio on La Brea draws a client list that reads like its own call sheet (Busy Philipps, Michelle Williams, Kate Beckinsale, Emmy Rossum), and Lauren was one of the first trainers anywhere to put her classes online. TIME and Entrepreneur have both told her story, so I’m beyond jazzed and honored that she wanted to come onto Mimir. She built every bit of LEKfit self-funded, and mostly by word of mouth.

Lauren is so impressive but also so fun to talk to. I learned from her how, as a dancer, being your own manager, agent, and basically CEO before anyone hands you the title, becomes the engine for building a company. The other thing I took home from this interview is something I’ve been trying to lean into on my own founder journey. Refusing to fake who you are is the single most important thing that builds your community and carries you through the challenges.

You guys are going to learn a lot from Lauren. How to let demand pull you into overhead, not the other way around, and how to manufacture exclusivity before you need it. If you’re a founder whose revenue is capped by your own time or square footage, you’ll particularly find this interview useful since Lauren teaches you how to productize early so you don’t have to worry about those ceilings. And finally, what it means to split your company by zone of genius, and why it’s some of the best money you’ll spend on your business.

More than anything if you're in the early stages of building something and you're scared that staying yourself will cost you, you need to hear this.

Connect with Lauren:

Perfect 10 App

LEKFIT App

Website

Instgram

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