Twenty years of learning what customers want from a local service brand

In 2007, Bary El-Yacoubi was a personal trainer at a big-box gym in the Washington DC area. Within two months he'd sold the second-most training programs of any trainer on the company's east coast — and watched a lot of those clients cancel at the last minute. Stuck at work. Traffic. Life. They were serious about getting healthy; getting to the gym was the problem.

So Bary offered to come to them, and everything fell into place. At the same time, Muhssin El-Yacoubi was finishing his MBA at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, specialising in entrepreneurship. He saw the momentum and wrote the business plan as a class project. Bounce Fitness was born.

Over the next decade, Bounce Fitness became the leading provider of in-home personal training in the DC metro area, with a large network of trainers and more than 100,000 sessions delivered in homes, apartment gyms, office gyms and parks. We opened in Doha, Qatar and became the leading provider there too. We worked with residential communities and companies including Bozzuto, Avalon, Equity Residential and Accenture.

But growth brought complexity. We were spending our days matching clients with trainers and running payroll. To scale properly, we needed technology that ran the operation for clients, trainers and us. That was the next chapter.

After ten years of client and trainer feedback, we knew exactly what to build. We immersed ourselves in the tech world — pitching at TechCrunch, Collision and Silicon Valley Open Doors, and going through mentorship with Google Launchpad in Silicon Valley — and spent our days with designers and developers, wireframing, prototyping and iterating.

At some point we looked around and realised we were no longer a fitness company. We were a technology company that happened to have started in fitness.

When we told people “Bounce Fitness,” they’d ask where our gym was. We weren’t a gym. With the mobile apps ready, it was time for a name that said what we actually did, and Send Me a Trainer was born.

We beta-launched in DC and the response was immediate: an app-driven experience for clients and trainers, and automation for all the operational work that used to slow us down. Press coverage followed, and with it a question we kept hearing — “are you in my city?” Our standard reply was “coming soon.” Then people started asking something else: “what if we franchised you here?”

We hadn’t planned to franchise. How do you even franchise an on-demand tech business?

The more we thought about it, the more it made sense. Ours was a personal service — the relationship between client and pro was warm, unlike a ride-share where driver and passenger barely speak. A local owner building relationships with a group of pros and clients keeps the quality high, and does grassroots marketing better than we ever could from a distance.

So we pivoted and launched the franchise. In researching the industry, we found a world built around brick-and-mortar: clubs, restaurants, van-based businesses. Exciting to an earlier generation; not what the tech-savvy entrepreneurs we were meeting wanted. When we launched, we were a breath of fresh air. No physical location, no expensive equipment, work from anywhere, and proprietary technology running the day-to-day. That’s how we became the franchise from the future.

As we grew, clients kept asking us to send them someone for the next thing they needed — and that told us we were really in the business of connecting people with vetted pros. When we looked at where the demand actually was, it pointed one way: home services was a far bigger opportunity than in-home personal services, and within home services, handyman had the highest search volume of any category by a wide margin.

We evolved on that evidence. Send Me a Pro became the first franchise to aggregate multiple home services under one business model, and in 2026 we sharpened it into Handyman + — every franchisee opens as a handyman business, keeps that customer, and grows from there. Once you’ve delivered one service well, there’s a 97% chance that household hires you for the next thing. Their model ends at the first job. Ours begins there.