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A business owner, fitness instructor and motivational speaker, Meaghan St Marc wants to empower those around her with passion, teamwork and a little sweat.
Despite the fact that Meaghan St Marc, co-founder of studio cycling business Rev’d, has committed the majority of her life to fitness, she’ll be the first to admit that she was never the best athlete.
“I was never the best player on the team … but I was captain all the time,” St Marc says.
“It was because, I think, and coaches have told me, I have spirit and I have passion for what’s going on and I know how to identify talent and set it up in a way where we’re all going to benefit from the people that are there, not just me.”
“I loved sports because it’s a group activity where you play to your strengths, you identify weaknesses and you overcome them as a group,” she adds.
It’s St Marc’s ability as a natural leader, someone who can motivate and inspire others to push themselves physically and mentally, that has helped her turn Rev’d from a pipe dream into a decade-old franchised studio business with 50 trainers and more than 10,000 active customers.
It’s also what led Northeastern University’s 2024 Women Who Empower Innovator Awards to recognize St Marc, class of 2010, with its Powering a Healthy Tomorrow Award.
St Marc’s passion for athletics has been there since she was a child, but she admits it took her a long time to figure out how to turn it into a career.
She graduated from Northeastern with a degree in communications and an aim to pursue a career in broadcast media. After doing a co-op with NESN, she stayed on as a stage director for the network’s broadcasts of Boston Red Sox and Bruins games. Eventually, she started pursuing freelance work as a sideline reporter, writer, producer and on-camera personality.
But the 2012 National Hockey League players strike presented an early setback, drying up most of her work and forcing her to move south to Florida to look for work. In order to make ends meet, she worked as a personal trainer, something she had started doing as a student at Northeastern’s Marino Recreation Center.
She started teaching spin classes and before she knew it her client list was longer than she could handle. She immediately saw the power her classes had on her clients.
“We’re watching people achieve things and watching people do things that they probably didn’t think they could do without that additional layer of motivation, which is the trainer,” St Marc says. “Even though now they’re capable of doing it, there is something about that empathy and relationship of a trainer and a class of people.”
After another short stint working in broadcast media in Boston and a detour into software sales, which she says she was ill-suited for, St Marc felt like she was losing track of herself. She had drifted away from what she was truly passionate about: fitness and empowerment.
Then, she met Clyde Simms, a professional soccer player who would eventually become her Rev’d co-founder. The two connected over their passion for health, wellness and fitness, but they soon started to talk about potential business ideas. St Marc was unhappy in the world of corporate sales and Simms was planning to retire from Major League Soccer. They were both in the market for a bold change of direction.
St Marc identified that boutique cycling studios like Soul Cycle were just starting to become popular and successful. After some trepidation, St Marc bought into the idea of starting what would eventually become Rev’d.
The idea was to create a spin cycle studio that stood in stark contrast to major players at the time like Soul Cycle.
“The outfits had to be right [at Soul Cycle]. You almost had to be in shape to go there,” St Marc says. “We wanted to be the inclusive location. Literally, people come with grandmas and their grandpas and their nephews who are 14 years old and [everything] in between.”
St Marc and Simms opened their first location in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 2014, and since then Rev’d has expanded to three locations in Massachusetts, survived a global pandemic and even started franchising, with one location in Arizona and another soon to open in Portland, Oregon.
St Marc views her work not just as a trainer and business owner but as a motivator. It’s why she still comes back to Northeastern’s Boston campus to give motivational speeches to student groups.
Her goal isn’t just to make sure her clients succeed on the bike. She wants to see them empowered and motivated to push themselves outside the Rev’d studio too.
“That’s what I love to see outside of the gym, is people feeling empowered because they know, ‘Well if I can push the hill in the 6:30 class, that seemed insurmountable to me a week or two ago when I first started, so what’s stopping me from writing the email that’s been sitting in my brain for weeks?’” St Marc says.
Now that Rev’d is franchising, St Marc is also able to empower new business owners, all of whom have been women, she says.
“It’s a really cool opportunity to empower people who are not walking into boardrooms every day and don’t have the ease of getting bank funding,” she says.
“As I’ve gotten older, I see myself reflected in the people that I work with,” St Marc says. “It used to be the Meaghan Show at times. I wanted to be on camera in television, I wanted to do all these things, but now I’m motivated by the people that I’m empowering.”