Where perspective comes from.
This isn't really a résumé. It's an attempt to make sense of the experiences that shaped how I think today, what each one taught me, and how one somehow led to the next.
Very little of it was planned in advance. It only really makes sense looking backward.
Learning to show up.
I spent the better part of a decade competing professionally in squash, eventually reaching #64 in the world. I loved the complexity of it — trying to read another person while playing what felt like high-speed, intensely physical chess inside a cage. Anticipating, adapting, making decisions under pressure.
But sport taught me just as much away from competition. Getting up on cold winter mornings when nobody was making me. Training when motivation wasn't conveniently there. Losing, coming back, preparing again. And perhaps surprisingly for an individual sport, learning how much the team around me mattered.
Endurance sport later asked something different of me: patience, pacing and the willingness to keep going for hours. Eventually that led to a 2:59 marathon and a 10:03 Ironman.
Roth, 2008
Next — Teach
Fifteen thousand classes and counting.
I started teaching indoor cycling 32 years ago. For 16 of those years, from 2010 until early 2026, I was a Spinning® Master Instructor. Over the years I've taught and presented in more than 30 countries, trained other instructors, and stood on conference stages around the world, including six World Spinning Conferences. Somewhere along the way, the number of classes passed 15,000.
Teaching indoor cycling, late 1990s
Doing something that many times changes the way you see it. I learned that teaching indoor cycling isn't just about knowing the science or putting together a good class. It's energy and emotion. Training science and planning. Communication and storytelling. Reading a room. Knowing when to lead and when to get out of the way. And ultimately, creating a place where people feel like they belong.
And after all those years, I still love the moment a room becomes more than a group of people on bikes.
Next — Coach
Someone in your corner.
More than 6,000 one-on-one coaching sessions have taught me that the most important part of coaching is being in someone's corner. I care about the person first and the business owner second. That means listening, asking questions, helping someone see what they may not be seeing, and sometimes telling them something they probably don't want to hear.
I don't need to be the smartest person in the room or pretend I have all the answers. The business is theirs. The decisions are theirs. Sometimes I can simply help them see things differently — and be there when things get difficult.
Next — Operate
Fourteen years of operating studios.
For fourteen years I built and operated fitness studios across Belgium, India and Abu Dhabi, including THE CYCLING ROOM and THE ROOM Abu Dhabi. Some worked better than others. In Abu Dhabi we built THE ROOM into a seven-figure business.
The first studio, 2008
Operating taught me things I don't think I could have learned from the outside. Hiring people. Making payroll. Building a team. Getting the culture wrong and trying to put it right. Keeping customers coming back. Making decisions with incomplete information. And carrying the responsibility when things didn't work.
Ultimately, getting the culture wrong became one of my biggest failures — and one of the reasons I eventually stepped away from operating.
I know what it feels like when the business you're talking about is also the business paying your bills.
THE CYCLING ROOM and THE ROOM Abu Dhabi are former businesses (2008–2023). I no longer operate either.
Next — Advise
Seeing the patterns repeat.
Somewhere in the first few hundred conversations with founders, I started recognizing the same problems in very different businesses. Different people, different markets, different circumstances — but many of the underlying challenges were surprisingly universal.
Over time, I started documenting those patterns and turning them into frameworks. Not formulas — frameworks. A place to start after listening carefully to the person in front of me and understanding what's actually going on.
More than 300 founders and 1,000 business audits later, that library has become an important part of how I coach and guide. When I've seen a version of the problem before, we don't always have to start from zero. We can get to better questions faster, look at approaches that have worked elsewhere, and adapt them to the person and business in front of me.
There's something reassuring in realizing that the problem keeping you awake at night isn't uniquely yours. Someone else has probably faced a version of it before — and there may already be a way forward.
Next — Scale
From one business to the systems underneath many.
After years of working one-to-one with owners and founders, technology gave me a different lens on many of the same problems. Instead of looking only at what happens inside one business, I started looking at the software, data, integrations and partnerships that sit underneath thousands of them.
That's what fascinates me about scale. A useful idea, a better workflow or the right technology can help far more people than I ever could one conversation at a time. But scale also amplifies bad decisions, which makes understanding the people and businesses using these systems even more important.
Today I'm Head of Product Partnerships, Xplor Boutique & SMB.
Beyond Activ, 2024.
Next — Explore
The questions underneath the work now.
Human performance. Behavior. Communication. Business. Technology. Teaching. For a long time, these looked like separate interests — and sometimes like separate careers. Increasingly, I see them as different ways of exploring the same question: how do people, and the things they build, get better at what they do?
I don't have an answer to that. I probably never will. But I've become increasingly interested in the connections between these fields — and in what each can teach me about the others.
That's a big part of why this site exists.
Next — Write & Build
Turning repetitions into something that outlasts them.
For years, most of what I learned stayed in the room — in a class, a coaching conversation, a business, or a talk. Increasingly, I want to turn some of those experiences into things that can travel further: writing, books, frameworks, tools and projects that other people can think with, challenge and use.
Proud2b, Reflective Moments, Talking to the Llama and The Art of Teaching Indoor Cycling are some of the things taking shape. Some are further along than others. None need to pretend to be finished before I'm ready to share them.
Making the work visible is part of doing the work.
One more — what comes after nine chapters
Still figuring out what comes next.
I don't have a five-year plan pinned to a wall. There are things I want to write, things I want to build, and questions I want to understand better.
What I do know is that I want to keep learning, keep building things, keep doing work that matters to me, and spend as much of the rest of my life as possible around people I care about.
I'm curious to see where that leads.
Let's cross paths →