Dan Uyemura is the co-founder and CEO of PushPress, a member management and billing solution platform for CrossFit gyms. On Monday Uyemura wrote a public letter to Berkshire Partners, the private equity firm who acquired CrossFit, LLC, from Greg Glassman in 2020.
Uyemura says “Berkshire Partners is killing CrossFit. Nobody with a platform is saying it out loud. So I will.” Respectfully, Mr. Uyemura, plenty of people with a platform have been saying this.
But, regardless of semantics, Uyemura wrote a lengthy article detailing the past 12 months and what he thinks needs to occur to save CrossFit.
Here’s an excerpt from Uremura’s Open Letter…
An Open Letter to Berkshire Partners
by Dan Uyemura
Berkshire Partners is killing CrossFit. And nobody with a platform is saying it out loud. So I will.
I also have the answer. It’s not complicated. It’s not easy. But it’s doable.
Here’s the irony nobody at Berkshire seems to have worked out yet: they only care about preserving their investment. Fine. That’s PE. But the one and only way to preserve that investment is to do the thing that probably feels most unnatural to them. Hire someone who cares about the CrossFit community more than they care about the board. Then get out of the way and let them work.
That’s it. That’s the whole answer.
Do anything else and the investment is cooked. Not damaged. Cooked.
(And if they keep doing what they’re doing, I’ll happily buy the whole thing for the $500,000 it’ll be worth in a couple years. Call me, Marni.)
Let me walk you through exactly how we got here.
Don Faul deserved better
Don Faul stepped down as CrossFit CEO on March 6th. Before anything else, I want to defend him.
I have a working relationship with Don. He’s never gone deep with me about the challenges he faced. Always professional. Always measured.
But I could tell… this was a handcuffed man.
(continue reading on danuremura.com)
