Grit Rising Podast: The Turnaround CEO at DealMAX

DealMAX 2026 hosted a pavilion session featuring a special live recording of the Grit Rising podcast with host Trent Bryson, CEO of Bryson Financial, and guest Kevin Duffy, CEO of iFIT. Kevin is no stranger to high-stakes situations. This conversation pulled back the curtain on what it takes to walk into a company on the verge of bankruptcy and walk out with a thriving enterprise. Kevin shared his unfiltered mindset and deliberate moves that separate great turnaround CEOs from the rest. Whether you are a founder, an operator, or a private equity professional, the insights in this session offer a rare and ground-level look at how mid-to-large market transformations are won. Below is the full interview.

Trent Bryson: When I met Kevin ten years ago, he was running a company that was about to go bankrupt, and a few years later they sold for over a billion dollars. And then he got brought into iFit about three years ago that was also about to go through bankruptcy, and now we hope that goes for a billion as well. I’m going to start with a question, when you walk into that, sometimes referred to as a dumpster fire, what’s the first thing you do running these companies?

Kevin Duffy: Maybe the most recent company is the most relevant. When you show up in situations like that, what matters most is the cash. I showed up in October of ’22, and my first meeting with the CFO told me we would run out of cash by January. I didn’t know that was going to happen before arriving, so that was a bit of a shocker. But that changes everything. If you can’t even focus on cash, you’re not worried about anything else. You’ve got to find a way to make sure the company survives before you do anything else.

Trent Bryson: In that situation, you must become somewhat emotionless. You had a family-run business that had a lot of family members in it. I remember when you would tell somebody to fire people and they say, “That’s my brother, that’s my cousin…” So how do you take the human side of you and bring in the emotionless side to do what it takes to survive?

Kevin Duffy: Well, first I told my wife I was a lot nicer in my 20s. It does trickle on you over time. But you get pretty clinical about decision making. It’s not a personal thing; you’re attempting to maximize the business. And in a case like that, we had negative $250 million on the books, and I was told we were going to run out of money. It creates a fire that’s not artificial, and it’s easy to stay focused. The altruistic part of it is you’re doing something to save a lot of jobs for the people who remain and the families that they support. So sure, it’s economic in many ways, but at the same time, you do have to part ways with some people to leave a company that can support others.

Trent Bryson: I’m sure you felt a bit like a villain when you first got there and started having to cut all that payroll. As you sit here three years later and you guys are going to do over $700 million in revenue, how does it make you feel today?

Kevin Duffy: I’m not good at pride. I want to say I’m on cloud nine, but I have a hard time with that. I just think about what’s wrong most of the time, that’s the main thing I think about. I just think about what we can do next. I still think there’s a lot to fix. The company could be a lot better. I’m happy that it survived and is doing well, it supports a lot of families, and a lot of people came along for the whole journey. But I think there’s a lot more to do.

Trent Bryson: So when you walked in, L Catterton was the owner. Did they give you much direction or did they say, “Kevin, go figure this out?”

Kevin Duffy: I think they’re a great investor because they’ve been around for a very long time. They had taken control of the company in early ’22 and did a search that culminated in me joining in October of ’22. They’re not in the business of instructing leadership; they’re in the business of buying companies where they think there’s an opportunity and hiring the right people to lead them. They’re super supportive. Like a lot of big private equity firms, they have an operations group with experts we can consult with, and I think that’s valuable. But they never push that on the team. It’s more of a resource than a requirement.

Trent Bryson: One thing I’ve been so impressed with about you is, how you don’t cut corners on hiring. You go out and find the best, you use search firms, you do behavioral assessments. I think so often you see people say, “I know Tom, he was a CFO somewhere, I’m gonna bring him in,” just because of familiarity. How do you stay so disciplined in avoiding that, while at the same time also bringing in people you do know? Where do you find that mix?

Kevin Duffy: When I first became CEO at Sound United, the prior company, we were doing maybe $10 million a year and when I left, we were doing $130 million. But the journey was very different at the beginning. I was a new CEO trying to do everything myself. That got us from $10 to $18 million, and I almost passed out. It was not sustainable. I still remember looking back and asking, “Did I do this wrong?” And concluding that there is nothing more important than the team.

When people ask how I turned things around, it’s the team, it’s the people you’ve recruited. Ninety percent of my direct reports didn’t work there when I arrived. And a lot of people get cheap with those hires. You think you can save 10% here, 20% there. It’s the most foolish thing you can do. If you have to replace that person, it’s going to cost you at least four months. So now you’ve lost a year. What does that cost? A lot more. And when you’re owned by an institutional investor, time is the most important thing. You have to move quickly.

So often when a search comes up and somebody says, “I know John, I’ve worked with John, he’s amazing,” I’ll say, “Awesome. John can be a candidate.” John will be someone we put up against the field. We’ll hire a great headhunter, and John should win if he’s as good as you say. But we’ll bring in the best in the world and compare John against those people, and then we’ll select. That’s hard to argue against, even when someone really just wants to hire John, it’s hard to say you don’t want to run that process.

And I’ve found that when John does win, it’s so much better for John. Because now he got hired not because somebody he knew brought him in, but because he proved to be the best possible candidate. And that gives him so much more credibility with the new team. People may not love the process, obviously, but it’s literally better for them.

Trent Bryson: I’ve also been so impressed with how you demand accountability within your team. But there’s always this gray area between accountability and loyalty. If you push somebody too hard, they might leave, either because they can’t step up or because they don’t feel like you have their back. How do you keep motivated, talented people while still enforcing that extreme ownership and accountability?

Kevin Duffy: The way I think about it: my job is really only three things. Number one, what are we trying to accomplish? Call it a vision, call it a mission, but what are you trying to do? Two is the people you’re going to hire. And three is aligning incentives. If I do anything else, I’ve most likely destroyed value. So, I don’t go outside those three things.

The third one has a lot to do with how we keep people accountable. Everybody in leadership is compensated with incentives, but we also set up commitments every year. We don’t have goals at our company, we have commitments. Those commitments are how your annual bonus is paid, and they are incapable of being misunderstood. When we write them, they’re so clear that there’s never a discussion at the end of the year about whether or not they were met. It’s really quite obvious. That way I’m not getting involved in some personal dispute, it’s written down, it’s committed to. You did it, awesome. You didn’t, then we have a real conversation.

Trent Bryson: Let’s stay right there, because I think I’ve shown you comp packages before and you’re a big believer in variable compensation, in big bonuses. A lot of people want a higher base. But you believe in a meaningful base with serious upside, I think up to 200% of their comp in bonus. Walk through the why and how you create those.

Kevin Duffy: It makes it harder to recruit, for sure, because people would often prefer just a big salary. And it does self-select who we get, which is exactly what I want. I want to self-select people who have less risk aversion and are more willing to bet on themselves, to better the company and better the team. You lose candidates over it; there’s no doubt about that. You’ve got to be willing to let a person walk because they didn’t want to commit to that structure. But when you get somebody who is willing to commit to it, you’ve got the right person.

Trent Bryson: One thing that stood out with L Catterton, when you hit your goals and got your full bonuses, they were immediately proactive and came to you and said, “We never want you to get complacent. Let’s revamp the next executive package.” That gets missed a lot. People hit a goal and then the incentive is gone. And when you’re operating at an extreme level on a short timeline, if I’m a founder and I grew my business to $100 million over 30 years that’s one thing, but if you’re trying to grow from $7 million to $100 million in five years it can be flipped, every minute and every second counts. Talk about that.

Kevin Duffy: There are two philosophies. One is: I’m going to wait until this individual comes to me and asks for something. The other is: I’m going to proactively go to the individual who’s performing and offer something in advance. Great leaders do the second thing. It’s so impactful how L Catterton thinks about this. They’ll look at the situation and say, “This person has accomplished a lot, let’s get them rolling on something new. Let’s come up with an incentive plan that’s even more lucrative than before.” I try to do that with my own team all the time. I think it’s very impactful, and it keeps people growing proactively.

Trent Bryson: A lot of times when a founder is getting ready to sell, they’re thinking about the boat they’re going to buy or the house they’re going to build. So, when you come into these situations, do you think the business is broken, or did the founder or CEO take their eye off the ball because they started thinking about their next chapter instead of what they need to do to get across the finish line?

Kevin Duffy: I think founding a business is really, really difficult. The kind of people who do it have a certain skill set that is remarkable and rare. And I don’t think it’s often the same skill set required to take it from wherever they got it to the next level. Not always. There are definitely plenty of stories of founders who have been able to do that. But often I think it’s difficult for them to make that transition. Or maybe they’ve reached a lifestyle they’re happy with. Either way, that can be a great opportunity for a founder to exit and have an institutional investor take it to the next step.

Trent Bryson: So as private equity looks at companies in a distressed situation, let’s role play for a second. Say you get brought in as a board member and they make widgets. What are your first three questions to help figure out how to turn the business around?

Kevin Duffy: I already said it, but the first thing I’d look at is the team. If you don’t have the right people, it doesn’t matter what the strategy is, it’s not going to happen. Next would be: what are the core assets of the company, and what’s extraneous? At iFIT, for example, we had powerful brands like NordicTrack. We have a subscription business. These were assets that had been built over five decades. But a lot of noise had come in around all of that, and that noise was diluting the power of the overall company. A lot of companies end up with too many things outside of the core that are diluting the business, when the thing in the middle is still super powerful. So how do you quickly identify what that core is and go all in on it? Once that’s fixed and growing, then you can talk about adjacencies and what’s next. But in a difficult situation as you described, I would focus there first.

Trent Bryson: Alright, let’s go geopolitical. I’m going to make it hard on you. Software has been sexy for the last 10 years. And then the other day you said, “Who would have thought that hardware was going to lead?” You came into this company planning to focus on the core, and the core probably looked like software. And now suddenly hardware is gold. Talk through the luck involved, and whether all companies can survive that kind of shift.

Kevin Duffy: It is luck. I did say hardware is the new sexy in that meeting, that’s right. Look, we write 20 to 30% of our code right now with either Cursor or Claude. And that’s today, so six months from now it’s going to be exponential. It’s pretty difficult to differentiate in a software-only SaaS environment today. So having a tie to some real-world experience is a real advantage. As you know, we’re number one in treadmills, number two in bikes, number one in verticals, number one in rollers, and we’re launching a rowing machine next week. All our software interacts with these hardware products, which I think provides a big advantage. But to your point, I didn’t think that three years ago. Three years ago, I thought the subscription would be everything. We have a lot of investment in personalization and utilizing AI. I think that’s going to be useful off equipment, but also very useful on equipment. Trying to tie the real world with software, I think, will create a lot of value for the future.

Trent Bryson: So, while you’re doing all this, one minute there are tariffs, the next minute there’s something stuck across the border. How do you deal with these constant hiccups and keep everybody focused on just stacking wins?

Kevin Duffy: To be a good CEO, you have to wake up in the morning with a very large stress tolerance. Because you have to wake up, and I do, with the same amount of energy and optimism every single morning. And it’s unrelated to anything I do intentionally. It literally is just how I’m wired. And I don’t think you could survive as a CEO for a long time without that, because what you described happens over and over again. Tariffs, for us, were a massive amount of money as you can imagine. We were sitting there cranking along, and then they hit. Now they got reversed and now the situation has improved significantly, so we have a huge earnings upside. That was obviously an easier morning to wake up to. But yeah, I think if you can disassociate your emotions from it and just be a clinical leader, it helps. You have to take a lot of these unexpected hurdles in stride.

Trent Bryson: Let’s go back to Sound United for a minute. You built that up and sold it for over a billion dollars. The group that bought it ended up making some decisions that hurt it significantly. Now you could probably pick it up for around $250 million, there’s a billion-dollar discount there. When they bought it, what do you think their biggest mistake was? If I’m a PE guy sitting out there paying over a billion dollars for a company, what causes you to mess it up that badly?

Kevin Duffy: You read about this all the time; culture in mergers is so important. It sounds like a cliche, but it just is. There’s not good culture and bad culture, there’s just different cultures, and some integrate better than others. In this case, our cultures were fundamentally different. I actually think the vision for where that business was going was profound and compelling, but it was very long-term. The mistake was not fully assessing how those cultures were going to come together.

Trent Bryson: And when you’re buying a small HVAC company with 20 employees, culture is one thing. But when you’re buying a big company, what are the big steps you’re hitting on from a culture standpoint?

Kevin Duffy: Transparency in communication is really important. You know that about me, I don’t mince words. I’m super direct from day one about what will change and what won’t change. Everyone already knows things are going to change. If you don’t address it, people spend months assuming nothing will, and then they get blindsided. So, I’ll say: “Here’s why we made this acquisition. Here’s the thesis for why we think it’s going to be great. Here’s what we’re going to change in the next 30 days. And we’re going to treat everybody fairly.”

By fairly, when we would buy companies and there were two executives competing for one role, both teams would apply for that job and we’d run an assessment to find out who’s better for it. That’s direct. But you’re setting the stage for the whole company about fairness, right from the beginning.

Trent Bryson: A lot of people say fairness, but then go, “Well, they’ve been here longer, so it’s fair to keep them.” How do you define what fair actually is?

Kevin Duffy: I don’t think history has a lot to do with it. As a leader, you have to constantly reevaluate what you’re trying to achieve in the future and decide whether the team you currently have can get you there. That’s your job. And the reality is, it will change. Because you will accomplish things, you’ll get to the top of one hill. And unless you’re satisfied with that, which I don’t think most driven people are, you’re going to want to climb another hill. And you’re going to look around and ask, “Do I have the people with me who can get me there?” A lot of times the answer changes. Fairness to me has nothing to do with tenure. Fairness, in my definition, is: we want to get here in three years: who has the highest probability of getting us there?

Trent Bryson: That’s unique to hear because I run a second-generation family business, and there are people who have been doing things for so long that I feel a very human pull toward keeping them. But I also see clearly when someone was great for where we were but isn’t great for the next stage. And making those decisions faster is literally the difference between getting to $100 million in 30 years versus 5. Let’s go to firing: always a fun topic.

Kevin Duffy: (laughs)

Trent Bryson: You have somebody who has done a lot, there’s a sense of loyalty, and yet they’re just not the right fit for the next stage. How do you approach that conversation?

Kevin Duffy: I have a rule I call the baseball bat rule. You’ve got to hit somebody with a baseball bat far in advance of that conversation, meaning it better not be a surprise. If someone can say, “I never knew I was underperforming,” that’s the leader’s fault, not theirs. So I will sit down with someone six months in advance and say quite clearly: “This is what’s going on, this is the expectation, this is where we’re trying to go, and here specifically is what’s not happening and why.” I’ll try to get them to repeat it back to me, give them an opportunity to course correct. But then if they don’t achieve it, I let them go. No surprises. That’s the way I try to live it, it’s better for everyone.

Trent Bryson: There’s a consistent theme throughout all of this. The commitments have to be absolutely definable. I remember going through that exercise and getting to the end of the year with commitments that weren’t clear enough. Jack Welch talked about cutting the bottom 5%, but he also said it’s a shame if they didn’t see it coming. It all comes back to being very definable upfront. Let’s talk about time. You’re a CEO, you have six kids: where do you create the time to make all of this work?

Kevin Duffy: Most people, including myself, maybe 15 years ago, aren’t that good at managing their time. I used to blend too many things together. Then I realized I wasn’t being effective. With my kids, for example, I used to work while spending time with one of them. And I realized that wasn’t good for either of us. If I could spend 20 minutes with a kid, 100% focused on them, it was so much more valuable than spending 20% of my attention over a much longer period.

I try to apply that everywhere. I block my time to focus on one thing at a time. And we live in a world that’s almost perfectly designed to prevent that: email, WhatsApp, Slack, every notification and tool is set up to distract you. To the best of my ability, I try to remove all of those when I’m focusing on something important.

Trent Bryson: Fast forward: let’s say you have another ten-figure exit and you have your own fund and you’re looking for a CEO. What’s the number one quality you’re looking for in that hired gun?

Kevin Duffy: You have to be able to hire above your weight class. You have to be able to get people to join who wouldn’t join otherwise. That only comes from having a compelling vision and being able to articulate it clearly. People want to believe, but you have to lay it out for them. And it’s got to be someone who is constantly recruiting. If they can’t do that, you’re not going to get very far. Very few companies are built by one person.

Trent Bryson: What can you tell us about employee buy-in and your best tool to measure that?

Kevin Duffy: What we do is measure it empirically with an employee Net Promoter Score. There’s one question: “How likely are you to recommend working at iFIT to a friend?” We run it every quarter. It’s completely confidential, we can’t see who answered. But we can cut the data by the leader, if there are more than 10 people in a group, I can see that group’s score. So if there are 30 people in our France office, I can see the France office results. You can quickly spot the differences between leaders.

There’s also a second question, “Why?” and a shocking number of people actually fill that one in. That blew me away, and it’s a good sign because it means there’s trust that it’s actually anonymous. It’s become a little competitive among my leadership team who has the best eNPS score. When we arrived, it was negative 30. Now I think it’s around 35, so it’s gone from significantly negative to positive, mostly because of the things we’ve already talked about, transparency, communication, clear expectations.

Trent Bryson: Let’s talk for a second about the culture of speaking up.

Kevin Duffy: A lot of people stay quiet. But the people with the best ideas are usually in the trenches, they’re talking to customers, they’re seeing quality problems, they’ve known about them for a long time. There has to be a culture where someone feels safe standing up and saying, “There is a problem right here and we need to stop selling this product.” That’s a courageous thing to say. But it absolutely shows up in the financials when people don’t. The best ideas are throughout the whole company. It has to be a culture of transparency and of speaking up.

Trent Bryson: And I’ll just add, in working with Kevin over the last couple of companies, his Head of HR is the most strategic HR leader I’ve ever seen. He’s not there just to run reviews. He thinks strategically: net promoter scores, how we’re going to recruit, how to take things off Kevin’s plate. He doesn’t want to put Kevin in meetings; he wants to take Kevin out of meetings. He is exceptional at just being strategic.

Kevin Duffy: I’d add to that, when a lot of people think about their most important executives, HR often doesn’t make the list. But if you believe your most important asset is your people, how would you not think of the person leading that function as one of your most important executives? It just doesn’t make sense. I think that’s a really important point.

Trent Bryson: Thank you for joining us.