Today we’d like to introduce you to Luke Gibson.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My business partner Aaron Johnson and I, went to school together in Chillicothe, MO Class of ’97 and hadn’t seen each other in 20 years before I moved to Savannah, MO where he had relocated. We would run into one another from time to time, both having kids in the Savannah School District as well as Savannah just being a small town. As time went by, we became better friends and started hanging out and having lunch occasionally. During one of these lunches we were talking about doing something to create passive income that would benefit both of us. We talked over several ideas and landed on buying the neglected old grocery store building in town that you had to drive past to get to the town square. We spent some time talking it over trying to come up with something that would benefit the community as well as gain community support and decided that we would build out a Fitness Center. Since nether of us had ever done anything like this before, we spent the next 9 months working with our amazing banker Jenna at HNB Bank across the street to achieve our goal of becoming “Developers”. To use the word developer literally made me laugh while typing it because we are just two dudes that bet their retirement money on themselves and are currently praying that it was a good decision. We closed on the building Dec. 5 of 2024 and got to work! We wanted to be done with construction by April, but April came and went quickly! We ended up finishing construction, most of which we did ourselves, while working full time jobs and raising kids. October 20th 2025, we opened our doors and have been blessed with constant growth since. As I write this on 5/9/26 We are almost to our goal membership in just 7 months and Savage Fitness was paying for itself the first month! We attribute this “success” if you will (we still pray daily) to a wonderful community that wants to support new business and build up the people willing to invest in the community.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Lol!! It was never meant to be a smooth road! We knew going in that sacrifice was going to happen and it did, everyday missing time with our families and missing some overrated sleep! By doing all of the demo and most of the construction ourselves, any “family time” was pretty much at “The Building” which is what we called it during construction because it wasn’t a gym yet. The Superbowl in ’25 we spent cutting 16 floor drains out of the concrete. Memorial Day Weekend of ’25 we had 3 semi trucks of gym equipment show up that needed to be unloaded in under 3 hours. Thank you to our Savannah Savage High School Football Friends! 4th of July we spent on top of The Building cleaning and straightening coil fins on our roof top unit. We missed a lot of get-togethers and things that were important, not only to us but family and friends. The undertaking was a lot but it was knowing that if we didn’t succeed everything we were doing was for nothing and that we had failed in front of our friends and family that kept us going.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Aaron and I are both currently sales reps for different companies. Aaron specializes in Utility Sales, Power lines and substations, best in the world at it! I sell pretty much anything that plugs into a network, security, managed network services, etc.. its not exciting, but you need me.
We like people and people usually like us.
What were you like growing up?
We were kids growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, we played outside as kids and made bad decisions as teenagers, LOL!
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/savagefitnessmo
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61579132419581
