Doctors Diagnosed Her With a Rare Cancer and Gave Her Months to Live. She Survived and Opened a $500,000 Fitness Franchise.

As a corporate executive for PepsiCo for 30 years, Gwynda Jones was accustomed to high-intensity work. Then health complications derailed her ambitions. 

“In 2013, I had a heart attack and stroke and was disabled,” Jones says in a new interview with Entrepreneur. “Over the years, I did all the therapy. I was determined to get well.”

Around 2019, Jones was no longer disabled, but she knew she couldn’t go back to that executive job. It had required extensive travel, which she could no longer do. She started thinking about other ways to exercise her business acumen while still preserving her health. Her answer was franchising, and her focus was on something simple. 

Her research eventually brought her to Hotworx, a 24/7 fitness studio franchise offering infrared sauna workouts. Members choose a 30- or 15-minute workout conducted in infrared sauna rooms. 

“I started looking into it,” Jones says. “I didn’t know much about it except that it’s a franchise, you’ll need a staff of four or five, you don’t have to hire instructors because it’s all virtually instructed. Hey, I think I can do that, right?”

Right when she was about to start her business, the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Jones put her franchise plans on pause. 

Shortly after came an earth-shattering diagnosis: She had a rare, aggressive form of cancer with no cure. Doctors gave her six months to live and said they were going to give her six treatments of chemotherapy to extend her life long enough to get her affairs in order for her daughter, Monica Nia, who was in college at the time. 

Starting chemo

Jones didn’t know where to turn. One of her friends told her about a holistic cancer treatment center in Arizona and encouraged her to call. With nowhere else to go, Jones called the center and asked them what to do. 

They told her to clean up her diet, start juicing and cut out white sugar and white flour. They also recommended various therapies, including infrared therapy, which aligned with what Hotworx offered. 

Jones thought that Hotworx was closed because of the pandemic, so she followed all of the recommendations besides infrared therapy. She went for her first chemotherapy treatment, “the strongest they had,” and didn’t experience the standard side effects, like nausea and vomiting. 

Two weeks after her first chemo treatment, she got a phone call from Hotworx inviting her to a free workout session. When Jones mentioned that everything was shut down due to the pandemic and she couldn’t go, the Hotworx representative said that the city allowed the fitness studio to remain open because it isolated one person per infrared sauna room.

“It was pandemic-proof,” Jones says.

Jones went to her first infrared sauna workout and “felt so good” that she knew she had to do it again. She immediately signed up for a membership, which usually costs between $59 and $99 a month.

“I think part of it was because we were in the pandemic and it was just a place to go,” Jones says. “I can get out of my house and be safe. So I started going.”

A second lease on life

Weeks after her first chemo treatment, Jones went in for her second dose. The doctor told her that something unusual had happened: Her lab work was better than it was before, and it was supposed to be worse. They expected her body to deteriorate, but the lab work showed that it was doing the reverse. 

The doctor ordered an emergency scan. When Jones first came to the hospital, she had three large tumors in her liver. Because her cancer was so aggressive, she should have had at least six or more tumors at that point. Instead, the doctor said that of the three original tumors, one was gone and the other two had shrunk. There were no additional tumors.

The doctor told her to continue with what she was doing and keep coming back for additional chemotherapy. 

By the time Jones came in for her sixth chemotherapy treatment, she was hopeful. The doctor finally sat her down and told her what she longed to hear: that “not a trace of cancer” was in her body. Subsequent follow-up appointments showed that the cancer remained gone months and years after Jones finished chemotherapy.

With this second lease on life, Jones was ready to start a franchise. She called Hotworx and said, “Give me my license, let’s roll.”

She opened the doors to her studio in downtown Chicago on January 23, 2023. 

Funding her own franchise

Jones, 67, did not take out a conventional bank loan to open her Hotworx location. Instead, she drew on the retirement savings she had accumulated during nearly four decades in corporate America.

Before opening a franchise, Jones spent 30 years at PepsiCo and another eight years at GT Data Services. She began contributing to a 401(k) when she was 25 years old after receiving formative advice from a boss: Whenever she got a raise, she should put half of it into her retirement account.

That early lesson shaped her financial life. By age 30, Jones says she had accumulated about $40,000 in her retirement account. She used a 401(k) loan to help cover the down payment on a downtown Chicago condo, then continued saving as her income rose. Later, she says, she used retirement-account loans for other major life expenses, including her wedding and a home purchase.

“Major things, borrow money from yourself,” Jones says. “Because you’re getting raises all along the way too.”

Over time, the account grew substantially. By the end of her career, Jones says her 401(k) balance had reached approximately $1.2 million. She ultimately invested close to $600,000 in the studio.

“Chicago was a lot because it’s expensive,” Jones says. “I did it in the most expensive neighborhood in Chicago. I did it in River North, downtown Chicago.”

The first two years were difficult, she says. The third year was when she really started making money. 

Jones says the business generated more than $500,000 in annual revenue last year, though she stressed that figure did not account for expenses. On a monthly basis, she estimates that the studio produces roughly $20,000 to $30,000 in profit during stronger periods.

Why she chose to open a franchise

Jones says she chose a franchise rather than attempting to build an independent fitness business because she wanted the systems, vendors, marketing support and operating playbook that came with an established brand.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says. “Under franchise, you have a marketing team, you have all the systems that they use, and they have all the vendors that you partner with.”

That support includes marketing assistance, payroll vendors, equipment support, IT resources and a network of other franchise owners. Jones says she would have struggled to navigate all of those functions independently during the earliest months of ownership.

“If I was doing this myself, I would have failed the first six months,” she says. “There’s no way.”

Jones says the franchise community itself has become one of the most valuable parts of ownership. She opened when Hotworx had roughly 323 studios; the chain has since grown to about 900 locations, she discloses. 

For Jones, that support system also makes the business more transferable than a fitness studio built around a single trainer’s personal brand. Her daughter has joined her as a franchisee co-owner, and the pair are exploring a second location.

“My business can run without me,” Jones says. “Plus, I can easily transfer this over to my daughter if something happened to me.”