An Open Letter to Berkshire Partners
Berkshire Partners is killing CrossFit. And nobody with a platform is saying it out loud. So I will.
I also have the answer. It's not complicated. It's not easy. But it's doable.
Here's the irony nobody at Berkshire seems to have worked out yet: they only care about preserving their investment. Fine. That's PE. But the one and only way to preserve that investment is to do the thing that probably feels most unnatural to them. Hire someone who cares about the CrossFit community more than they care about the board. Then get out of the way and let them work.
That's it. That's the whole answer.
Do anything else and the investment is cooked. Not damaged. Cooked.
(And if they keep doing what they're doing, I'll happily buy the whole thing for the $500,000 it'll be worth in a couple years. Call me, Marni.)
Let me walk you through exactly how we got here.
Don Faul deserved better
Don Faul stepped down as CrossFit CEO on March 6th. Before anything else, I want to defend him.
I have a working relationship with Don. He's never gone deep with me about the challenges he faced. Always professional. Always measured.
But I could tell... this was a handcuffed man.
Here's what I saw from the outside: a man who genuinely loved CrossFit, who came in and made real progress rebuilding trust with affiliates... while simultaneously answering to an ownership group whose primary frame was investor returns. Not community health. Not brand integrity. Returns.
That is a guaranteed recipe for failure. You can't serve two masters when those masters want fundamentally different things.
Yes, he faced real criticism. The handling of the Lazar Đukić tragedy at the 2024 Games drew heat, and some of it was fair. But my honest read: he got it wrong because he cared too much. Not because he didn't care enough. There's a difference. A CEO who botches a crisis out of genuine anguish for the sport is a different animal than a CEO who botches it out of indifference. I believe it was the former.
Don fought hard for the right things. I'd bet on it. He ran into walls constantly that had nothing to do with his competence or his care. Whatever frustrations exist about the last four years, a significant portion of them belong above Don's pay grade.
He deserved better too.
CrossFit isn't a normal company. That's the part Berkshire keeps missing.
Most businesses can survive an ownership transition. The product still ships. The software still runs. Customers don't need to care who signed the wire transfer.
CrossFit is not that business.
CrossFit's entire value is the community. The affiliate network. The coaches who built their lives around this brand. The members who walk into a box every morning and feel like they belong to something. That's the asset. Not the trademark. Not the Games media rights. Not the training certifications. The community.
And the community runs on faith. Specifically: faith that the people at the top give a damn about the thing they built.
The moment you put a community based brand up for sale publicly, you are telling every member of that community one thing: the current owners are done. And once you've said that, every affiliate owner, every coach, every member starts doing math they weren't doing before. The $4,500 fee. The hedge. The exit plan. Things they never needed to think about are suddenly on the table.
You can't unring that bell. Every month the sale doesn't close is another month of doubt compounding. And doubt, in a community business, is the thing that kills you.
Berkshire announced CrossFit was for sale 12 months ago. In public. To every affiliate owner. During the CrossFit Open, of all weeks.
Most companies do a quiet sale. Bankers talk to bankers, customers find out after. CrossFit doesn't get that luxury. And this didn't even start as a leak , the official confirmation came directly from Berkshire. In writing. To every affiliate. That's not a rumor. That came from them.
12 months. In public. No buyer.
What followed is one of the most botched brand stewardship moments I have ever seen in this industry. Here's the actual timeline:
Early 2025 , Rumors start spreading. Before any official word, sale speculation is already circulating through the affiliate community. Berkshire says nothing. The narrative is already out of their hands before they've said a word.
March 12, 2025: Don Faul is forced to confirm. The rumors have gotten so out of control that silence is no longer an option. Don sends an email to affiliates confirming the sale and announcing Moelis & Company as their banker. To be clear: this isn't Don's failure. Berkshire let the internal narrative spiral so badly that he had no choice but to address it publicly. He's cleaning up their mess. The timing (final week of the 2025 CrossFit Open, community mid-competition) isn't a decision Don made. It's the corner Berkshire backed him into.
Early frontrunners emerge, then go quiet. Malek Chenia surfaces as a candidate. BeSport (a Swiss company with Saudi ties) is reportedly the frontrunner per the New York Times. TPG (a $100B+ PE firm) is said to be circling , but their reported interest is in splitting CrossFit in half: the Games and media business separate from the affiliate and training network. The most serious financial buyer wanted to carve out the soul of it.
Berkshire flies to Cookeville to meet Rich Froning. The most iconic CrossFit athlete alive, the man who IS CrossFit to most of the world, has to be personally visited and apologized to just to stay in the tent. It doesn't fully work. Froning publicly says he is considering deaffiliating CrossFit Mayhem. Read that again. Rich Froning. Considering leaving the brand.
November 2025 , Diebner and Mastrov claim exclusivity. Wade Diebner and Mark Mastrov surface claiming a 90-day exclusivity agreement. The story breaks via an anonymous Reddit post believed to be leaked by insiders. Berkshire declines to comment. Moelis declines to comment. Affiliate owners get their news from Reddit and fitness blogs.
A pattern emerges: someone is close, then they're not. This becomes the defining feature of the entire process. A name surfaces. Rumors build. The community holds its breath. Then nothing. Silence. The ball gets pulled away. Over and over. Diebner and Mastrov are just the most recent example (targeting late January, then "most likely by Christmas," then Christmas passing with nothing filed, nothing announced, Mastrov quietly closing a separate deal to reacquire 24 Hour Fitness with a completely different PE firm the whole time). But the pattern started long before them. It's Lucy and Charlie Brown. And every time the ball gets pulled, another batch of affiliate owners quietly starts hedging.
March 2026 , Still no deal. Now no CEO. Don Faul steps down. The company is exactly where it was 12 months ago, minus its leader.
Real brands with real value get acquired quickly. What you watched play out is what a broken process looks like. In public. In slow motion. In front of every affiliate owner, every employee, and every future buyer who is now wondering why nobody wanted it.
The canary is already singing
Think about what 12 months of no deal actually means in market terms. Berkshire has a number in their head. Sophisticated buyers (people who do this for a living, people with access to the financials, people who ran real due diligence) looked at that number and said no. Repeatedly. That gap between what Berkshire wants and what the market thinks CrossFit is worth isn't a small rounding error. It's wide. Wide enough that deal after deal has collapsed or quietly disappeared.
The whole world can see that signal. Including every affiliate owner paying $4,500 a year.
Every suitor who walked away told the community something Berkshire never intended to say out loud: the people trying to buy this don't think it's worth what the people selling it think it's worth. That's not a rumor. That's the market talking.
Chris Cooper is the most credible voice in CrossFit business coaching. He has spent his career helping affiliate owners succeed. He is not a critic. He is not a hater. And he is now publicly questioning whether that $4,500 fee is worth it.
When Chris Cooper says that... you have a crisis.
Meanwhile, Hyrox added 650,000 competitors. 5,000 affiliated gyms. $110M in projected revenue. Expanding to the 15 largest US cities this year. A growing number of CrossFit boxes are already dual-affiliating with Hyrox as a hedge.
That hedge becomes a replacement. Slowly, then all at once.
2025 CrossFit Open registrations dropped 32%. Lowest since 2014. During an ownership transition that created 12 months of public uncertainty. These things are not unrelated.
And now there's no CEO.
There are CrossFit employees who stayed through all of this because they believe in the mission. Affiliate owners who renewed their fees despite everything because they've built their identity, their livelihood, and their community around this brand. They are waiting for a signal that someone is in charge.
They deserve better than silence and a press release about a search firm.
The real CEO search problem
The person who could actually save CrossFit right now knows something Berkshire may not want to hear. To do this job correctly, they need to put the community first.
Not the board.
Not the ROI.
Not the exit timeline.
The community. Because that is the only path to the financial outcome you want. Serve the affiliates, grow the brand, restore the trust... and the money follows. Do it the other way around, and you are guaranteed to fail.
Here's the problem. Anyone who truly understands this, anyone who has the credibility and the conviction to pull it off, is looking at the board structure and the ownership dynamic and quietly saying no thanks.
Not because they can't do the job. Because they know they won't be allowed to.
That is the real CEO search problem. And until Berkshire reckons with it, no hire will save this.
You have to give the right person the actual reins.
What I'm offering (and what I'm not)
To be clear: I'm not interested in the CrossFit CEO job. I have my own company to run. PushPress powers thousands of CrossFit affiliate owners and I'm completely bought into their success. That's not a side project. That's the mission.
But that's exactly why I'm writing this.
I talk to affiliate owners every single day. I know what they're scared of right now. I know what's making them question their renewal. I know what it would actually take to restore their confidence , not in theory, from a consulting deck, but from the ground level of this industry. That perspective is hard to find from inside a PE boardroom.
So here's what I can offer: a direct line to what the affiliate community is actually thinking. Counsel on what a community-first CEO search looks like and what red flags to avoid. A gut check from someone who has no financial stake in the outcome of the sale but a very real stake in the health of this ecosystem.
Why do I want to help? Because CrossFit built a fitness culture that is genuinely extraordinary. Because the affiliate owners in this community work incredibly hard and deserve better than watching their brand be managed like a balance sheet line item. And because if CrossFit collapses (really collapses) it damages the entire independent gym space that I've built my company to serve.
I care enough to say all of this publicly. That should tell you something.
If you can't figure this out quickly and with real authority, you might as well give CrossFit back to the affiliates and let them sort it out. At least then it would be in the hands of people who actually give a damn.
I'm talking directly to you, Marni Payne.
You were quoted in 2020 saying you were "thrilled to partner with the entire CrossFit community." That community is still here. Battered, anxious, and waiting. They held up their end.
The brand isn't dead. The community is extraordinary. But loyalty has a limit, and the clock is running.
Berkshire: you have made this brand look weaker than it is. You still have a chance to reverse that.
The window is closing.