Didn't read the whole article (too many clickthroughs) but I'm fairly familiar with the Crossfit model.
The problem with any gym is scaling. You have limited floorspace = limited number of members = limited revenue. To scale out it seems you need to open more gyms, with high fixed cost for each new location---that is, high marginal cost. This is the model most gym chains have taken.
The genius of the Crossfit business model is it scales without incurring high marginal cost. It does this by using an affiliate model. Affiliates pay a fee to be able to display the Crossfit branch and take on the risk and overhead of the new location. This is basically what fast-food franchises do, and similar to what companies like Uber are doing to achieve scale.
Now it is probably quite difficult to make good money as a Crossfit affiliate, for all the reasons that gyms have difficulty scaling, but Crossfit HQ doesn't have to care about that. There are always more young hopefuls to start a new "box".
(O bars are designed to be dropped. I doubt that is a major issue.)
I don't understand how franchising is supposed to solve the problem of "serving more customers means having to rent (or buy) more land". The franchisee still needs just as much land to serve his customers; the fee you can charge him has to take that into account. How does this make scaling any cheaper?
I thought the point of the franchise model was that your franchisees, instead of you, keep any surplus money that they generate, giving them much stronger incentives to succeed under your brand. Compare:
1. Local outpost of a chain store that doesn't franchise. The manager, like everyone under him, is paid a salary, and whatever money is left over after paying the store expenses goes back to corporate. This model is illustrated by a scene from The Sopranos (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz0uEzRSWXw ) in which the manager of a Starbucks has to break it to the mafia that he can't pay protection money because he doesn't have any discretionary funding.
2. Local franchise. The owner has no salary. Instead, he keeps whatever money is left over after paying the store expenses. This is likely to have several different benefits: the owner may feel like putting in extra time at his store. If the janitor has an emergency, maybe the McDonald's owner will clean the bathrooms himself. Similarly, the owner may take a different view toward cashiers dipping into the till than a salaried manager would. And the owner's pricing decisions are much more informed, and therefore more likely to be correct, than the pricing decisions corporate would make.
So with the distinction I describe, scaling your brand as a franchise rather than a chain boils down to one difference: in a chain your store operators are salaried and you keep all the extra money, whereas in a franchise you are salaried and your store operators keep the extra money (you might take a percentage, or a flat fee up front, or some combination. I don't know). Paying your store operators that much more under the franchise model means you can expect them to do more difficult and demanding work. It's not all about marketing.
The problem with any gym is scaling. You have limited floorspace = limited number of members = limited revenue. To scale out it seems you need to open more gyms, with high fixed cost for each new location---that is, high marginal cost. This is the model most gym chains have taken.
The genius of the Crossfit business model is it scales without incurring high marginal cost. It does this by using an affiliate model. Affiliates pay a fee to be able to display the Crossfit branch and take on the risk and overhead of the new location. This is basically what fast-food franchises do, and similar to what companies like Uber are doing to achieve scale.
Now it is probably quite difficult to make good money as a Crossfit affiliate, for all the reasons that gyms have difficulty scaling, but Crossfit HQ doesn't have to care about that. There are always more young hopefuls to start a new "box".
(O bars are designed to be dropped. I doubt that is a major issue.)