After overcoming a battle with a rare cancer, Gwynda Jones tag-teamed with her daughter to take a leap into entrepreneurship.
Pivot From Corporate America
Gwynda spent three decades working as a project manager for PepsiCo. She made the decision to walk away from corporate America in 2020 due to a health issue she discovered unrelated to the cancer. While in retirement, she realized she wasn’t ready to throw in the towel completely.
“I’m sitting here. My daughter’s coming home from college soon. She may or may not come home from college. I knew that I didn’t wanna just be sitting around,” Gwynda told AFROTECH™. “So then I start contemplating a business and what could I do. I couldn’t do the high pressure corporate job that’s international, required me to travel and all of this, but I can do something. So I thought about franchising, and it sounded like, ‘Okay. I got a whole global company working for me, doing all the leg work, and I can follow? I can take instructors. I can hire a staff.’ So I started thinking about franchising.”
Journey To Franchising
HOTWORX, a fitness studio, was at top of mind for Gwynda’s quest towards becoming a franchisee, and she felt aligned as an advocate for health and wellness.
In 2020, she completed the discovery phase but then faced a four-month standstill due to the onset of COVID-19 and the discovery that she had been diagnosed with a rare, aggressive cancer that gave her only six months to a year to live.
“I took a big gulp, and I was like, ‘Okay. That’s a tough pill to swallow,’” Monica Nia, Gwynda’s daughter expressed. “And I was just like, ‘Okay. So what’s the plan? When do you start your treatments? Is there anything we can do to prevent this or to give you some remission?’ So really just supporting her fully on the journey.”
Monica Nia lost her job in corporate America at the wake of the pandemic, which allowed her to stay home and simultaneously breath light into a new chapter with the Miss America Organization while supporting her mother’s health journey.
This support included new diets and exploring holistic healing methods. After reaching out to a cancer treatment center in Arizona, the two learned about the benefits of juicing and infrared therapy.
“This holistic doctor said that infrared energy penetrates into your body, regenerate cells, it flushes out bad cells and reproduces new cells,” Gwynda said. “They use infrared to treat cancer while medical doctors use chemo to treat cancer. So that was news to me.”
She moved forward with her first round of cancer treatment. In the midst of this, she did not want her entrepreneurial dreams to be on the back burner. With divine timing, Gwynda received a call from HOTWORX located in Chicago, IL’s Lincoln Park to receive a free workout.
“I want to see how they operate. We’re not gonna let them know that we’re looking at it as a business,” Gwynda recalled. “We just wanna see how they greet people. What’s it like? What’s the experience like? What does it cost? We just want to see it from a customer perspective.”
The business met both Gwynda’s and Monica Nia’s expectations, and they signed up as customers. Per the company website, HOTWORX’s 24/7 operation includes various infrared sauna workouts led by virtual personal trainers.
When it was time for Gwynda’s second round of chemo, one of her tumors had disappeared and the remaining two had shrunk. For her final scan, she learned there was no trace of cancer.
“They assured me that no one had ever survived the cancer… and they said because it’s probably gonna come back. Well, it never came back. And when the year was over and they said not a trace, I literally called HOTWORX and said, ‘Let’s roll,’” explained Gwynda.
Leading Studio As Mother-Daughter Duo
In March 2021, Gwynda officially became a franchise owner of HOTWORX River North in Chicago. Monica Nia, who has a degree in business and special events management, signed on as a managing partner in July of that year, per her LinkedIn. Although entrepreneurship was not initially part of her plans, she was prepared to help her mother get the business off the ground and running.
“During that process, while I’m getting ready for Miss Illinois and doing all this, I was helping her, especially in 2021, really dive deep with the business. But it’s always, ‘I’m doing this for now,’” she explained. “‘I’m helping you out, getting you and your business started while you’re still healing and recovering, but as soon as you get this thing off and rolling and I get my life together, I will be a partner in the background,’ but I always fully supported her in this journey,” Monica Nia mentioned.
Gwynda commented: “I could not have done it without her. I have to be brutally honest.”
Monica Nia’s role at HOTWORX involves studio management and working with the marketing teams, whereas Gwynda is in charge of the business side, handling taxes, insurance, bills, rent, and various partnerships.
So far, the founders share the business has been well received, and it currently has a 4.8 rating on Google. Interest remains high with 200 leads a month, and they had more than 3,000 leads in queue in August 2024. They aim to add on 30 to 50 members and in the future open a second studio.
“People absolutely love our studio for so many reasons… We’ve learned the business inside and out. So now we’re at the position where we just need to get a few more members before we break even every month,” Gwynda said.
