Tyler Davis on Connection, Practice, and Turning Trials Into Triumph
Entrepreneurship · From Student of the Game
Tyler Davis on Connection, Practice, and Turning Trials Into Triumph
Tyler Davis is the owner of Triumph Studios, a fitness studio in Fort Wayne's Apple Glen area where the lights go down, the music comes up, and coaches lead the room through every rep. Brad Noll's team took a cycle class there shortly before this conversation, and Brad calls it one of the best team bonding experiences they have ever had.
But as Brad tells listeners on this episode of Student of the Game, what makes Tyler's story powerful "isn't just the fitness studio. It's the journey." That journey includes years of grief and substance use, a night in a jail cell that became a turning point, and the rebuilding that followed. Tyler shares all of it openly, then explains the fundamentals that keep his business, and his life, on track.
A Waynedale Kid With Music in His Soul
Tyler grew up in Waynedale and went to Wayne High School. He was not an athlete, he says with a laugh, and still is not the most athletic. While friends traded baseball cards, he was collecting albums, digging through vinyl, and DJing his first party in seventh grade with a Radio Shack mixer. "Music just had a pull," he says.
He started working at 15 and later joined his dad's trucking company, beginning with the grunt work: cleaning toilets, degreasing motors, running for parts. By 18 he was running snow plowing crews of grown men. On the job he never called his father dad, only by his first name, and he did the same with his mom, with whom he later worked in real estate. Brad relates. He played college basketball for his own father and always called him coach.
One lesson from those years still sums things up for Tyler. The first time he swung a sledgehammer to pop the axle on a dump truck, it bounced back and hit him in the shin. His dad, who saw it coming, told him, "You'll never do that again." Tyler says business owners often learn the same way: "Sometimes you don't know the stove's hot until you put your hand on it."
“Winning at the game of life for me is that people will have my back in rooms I'm not in.”
Tyler Davis
The Weight He Carried
Between the ages of 16 and 18, Tyler lived through three hard events in a short span. He and his high school girlfriend placed their newborn daughter for adoption. A close friend died in a car accident that Tyler and other friends came upon moments later, and they tried to save him. Then his stepdad of 14 years left a note on the table and never came back.
With no one around him ready to have those conversations, he turned to music, and to alcohol and drugs, to cope. "Music became my therapist, which wasn't always the best," he says. "I just learned how to stuff everything down." Years later, his father died suddenly at 56, before the two could repair a falling out. At the funeral, about 100 pounds overweight, Tyler heard his dad's old friends say he looked just like him, and he knew he was walking in his father's shoes.
Through it all, one person kept showing up: a girl he first met in kindergarten and reconnected with at 21. She asked him out, he admits, because he was not picking up on the clues. He calls her "that guardian angel, that beacon of light," and today she is his wife.
A Prayer in a Jail Cell
The breaking point came with a DUI on a late night drive to Taco Bell. Tyler spent nine hours in Allen County lockup on a little green mat, and staring at the ceiling, he prayed. "If you will provide me a path out of this, show me a way I surrender," he remembers saying. When he walked out, the woman who is now his wife was waiting, pregnant with their daughter, with his two sons beside her on purpose.
Even then, the change took a little while. "I'm a really stubborn person," Tyler says. The real moment came soon after, ahead of his first probation meeting, when he asked himself how many times he would have to learn the same lesson. "Things felt so hard until all of a sudden clarity happened," he says. "And then that decision to change was like, okay, we've got a ton of work to do, but here we go."
He did the work. He lost 100 pounds, or as he puts it, "I got rid of it because I ain't trying to find it." Brad shares a line his own father used to say that fits Tyler's story: "If you don't know the struggle, you don't know the strength."
Connection Is the Fundamental
Student of the Game is about mastering the fundamentals, and when Brad asks what is fundamental to running Triumph Studios, Tyler answers with one word: connection. That starts with himself and his faith, so he can connect with his team and the people in the room. "That's how we turn trials into triumph," he says. "Like that's a phrase that we use at Triumph all the time."
Brad frames it as a three-legged stool, connecting with yourself, your team, and your clients. Referrals and introductions, he adds, come from working for them, not waiting for them.
Tyler's years in sales, mortgage lending, and his dad's company taught him to listen. "You ask the right questions and a lot of times people will tell you what they need," he says. But a leader has to genuinely care about the answer, because sometimes it is not what you want to hear. Brad ties that to Donald Miller's StoryBrand idea that a business should be the guide in the customer's story, not the hero.
Keep Showing Up
Fundamentals are the base, but Brad believes success takes falling in love with practice. For Tyler, that love comes down to a phrase he repeats constantly: "keep showing up." It also looks like preparation. Every room at Triumph now has two microphones, and coaches bring three sets of batteries, because the question is not whether something will go wrong but whether they have practiced for that moment. Brad answers with one of his favorite lines, "preparation creates separation," and a saying a Navy SEAL buddy shared with him: when you have three, you have two; when you have two, you have one; and when you have one, you have none.
The details of the studio are built around connection, too:
- The lights stay low on purpose. Tyler remembers sitting in a gym parking lot, too self-conscious to walk in under bright lights, and "lights off, sweat on" removes that barrier.
- Phones stay out of the rooms, and members are encouraged to put smart watches in theater mode.
- The team learns first names before new members arrive.
- Members get a handmade card on their birthday and at class milestones like 100, 500, and 1,000.
- The scoreboard includes total members, monthly recurring revenue, and class utilization, plus a regular check on how each coach is doing emotionally.
Tyler says the team keeps running the play even when it feels like it is on repeat, because for someone in the room it may be their first time hearing it. "Even if I don't close my rings, the work still counts," he adds.
What Does Winning at the Game of Life Look Like?
Brad closes every interview by asking guests what winning looks like. Tyler says he feels like he is already doing it. "Winning at the game of life for me is that people will have my back in rooms I'm not in," he says. It means people feeling better for having been around him and his team, and a wife who will never have to question if she can trust him.
He shares a story he once heard about a man at the end of his life, surrounded by strangers who turn out to be the gifts and talents he never used because he was too afraid to take the leap. Tyler's one fear is leaving anything on the table. When Brad asks him to send some virtual flowers, he names his wife, who "pulled me literally out of the pit of darkness," his grandpa, his parents, and his team, who challenge him to be better. As Brad puts it, you know you are with a strong leader when he gives his team the flowers.
▶ Listen to the full episode
Beyond Strategy: The Real Foundations of Success with Tyler Davis, on Student of the Game.
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