Local Homeschool family business makes Inc. Magazine's Top 500 list

A local homeschooler father of five and partner with his father in a family-owned business has just made Inc. Magazine's Top 500 list.  Fitness Plus, a local family-owned company based out of O'Fallon, Missouri, has made Inc. Magazine's list of the 500 fastest growing private companies. The company, which repairs fitness machines, is listed at #363 on the magazine's annual list of the 500 fastest growing private companies. Fitness Plus provides top quality on-site fitness equipment repair services in the St. Louis area and also operates FitnessRepairParts.com, which sells replacement parts for exercise equipment.

Fitness Plus is a debt-free company that was founded in 1995 by John Jacobs, who sought to provide repairs to workout equipment at health clubs, hotels, residential homes, hospitals and wherever else the equipment was located. In 1999 his son, Jeremy, joined the company as a service technician during the day while working as a contractor on web development in the evenings. In 2004, the father-son pair decided to launch an e-commerce site to sell parts to consumers while maintaining their local service to customers.

Jeremy Jacobs is also a homeschooling father of 5 children.  Many homeschoolers strive to own and operate a family business which they can pass down to their children.  By operating a family-owned business, homeschooling families can be successfully self-sufficient while passing a healthy work ethic onto their children along with a means to sustain their own families in the future.  The lessons learned by the children are valuable and hands-on alongside typical academic learning.  Jeremy and his wife, Melissa, are also actively involved in the rights of the unborn.  They recently ran in their first race to raise money for the cause.

Just five years ago, the company was operating out of a garage which soon expanded into the basement. After the launch of their e-commerce site, It didn’t take long for Fitness Plus to outgrow the garage and basement. They moved into 5,000 sq. ft. in September of 2005. Just four years later, in August of 2009, they added another 3,000 sq. ft. temporarily while they looked for a permanent larger location. Fitness Plus expects to make the move into a 15,000 sq. ft. facility in the next couple of months.

Their ability to provide ease of access to parts, quick response times, high quality, and integrity have created such rapid growth. The owner, however, is quick to credit integrity and adherence to his original core values of unmatched quality to be the hidden reasons behind the quick growth. John Jacobs is a retired Navy veteran whose self-discipline to focus on efficiency and eliminating waste is a key component that he strives to instill in every employee. His insistence on "trimming the fat" since the beginning has engrained itself into the Fitness Plus core culture. Every employee works to get as much done in as little time and effort as possible so they can move onto other tasks. This attitude has kept the company lean, debt free, and able to keep pace with the fast growth it has experienced over the last few years.

Growth came rapidly through the effective use of technology both internally and for the benefit of their customers. More importantly, they have been able to sustain the growth because of the strong work ethic embedded in the company culture and its focus on remaining debt free and highly efficient. Employees are encouraged to operate at peak efficiency in every part of their work; tools such as healthy competition and a company profit sharing program based partly on the annual expense ratio help to accomplish this. Jeremy's work ethics are grounded in his Christian faith, and he is quick to give God all the glory for any success.  Jeremy Jacobs, son of founder John Jacobs says:

“Good ideas initiated the growth, but without the commitment of our employees to see Fitness Plus become something special, we would have fallen on our face years ago,”