How One Coach Turned a Gym Into an Industry Network

Frank Sahlein was 23 years old when he drove from San Francisco to Boise, Idaho, with a trampoline, a waterbed, and his grandfather's desk. He was a gymnast and coach, and he had come to start a gymnastics school with some people who were interested.

Sahlein had competed as a gymnast at San Jose State University after earning a college scholarship and began coaching there before he graduated. After college, he spent about a year looking for the right opportunity before the Boise plan came together. According to him, the school opened with 16 children in a backyard. And, by the time Sahlein sold it decades later, it had grown into a 40,000-square-foot facility serving roughly 2,500 children a week. It had expanded from gymnastics into dance, cheerleading, martial arts, after-school programming, preschool education, an indoor playground, and an indoor rock wall. Sahlein started calling it a children's learning opportunity center: sports, arts, education, and entertainment in one place.

That model became a template. By the late 1990s, Sahlein was receiving calls from operators around the country asking how he had built it. "About the tenth call, it finally dawned on me," he says. "Maybe there's some consulting opportunity here."

In 2000, he founded 3rd Level Consulting, a business development firm serving the children's activity center industry. It began as a sole proprietorship. It now operates as a network of consultants across multiple countries, offering expansion planning, business valuation, brokerage, and mergers and acquisitions.

The industry itself was changing. According to Global Information, the global kids' recreational services market was valued at $148.6 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $270.91 billion by 2033, growing at a compound annual rate of 6.9%. That growth has attracted investor groups that previously ignored the sector. Sahlein's firm became busy helping operators navigate acquisitions and consolidation.

Then Covid arrived. In 2021, Sahlein organized a Zoom call for child development center owners around the world. He did not pretend to have answers. He asked whether they could generate solutions together. "We had 375 owners from all over the world on that first Zoom call," he says. The call generated a demand for ongoing connection. That demand became the International Association of Child Development Programs, a nonprofit that now operates independently, with Sahlein as ex officio president on the board.

The association was one response to a problem Sahlein had been watching for years. The industry was fragmented, and individual operators were solving the same problems in isolation. "We're all stronger together than we are separately," he says. "But somebody has to be a catalyst for pulling people together."

That belief led to his most recent venture. In 2023, Sahlein co-founded MetaSpheres, an AI-powered platform built specifically for the children's activity center industry. The platform provides a private, secure environment where operators can organize their own information, access training from industry experts, and connect with suppliers, associations, and investor groups. It is designed to sit alongside existing systems rather than replace them, and its architecture allows it to be white-labeled for other industries, including paint contracting, holistic healing, and industrial engineering.

The timing reflects a broader shift. According to Thryv's 2026 AI and Small Business Adoption Survey, 66% of small businesses now use AI, up from 55% the previous year, and 70% say they need more training to use it effectively. The same survey found that 70% of small businesses using AI report increased revenue. The tools are arriving faster than the training to use them well. MetaSpheres is an attempt to close that gap for one specific industry, with industry-specific data and expert-trained models rather than generic AI assistants.

Sahlein's role across these ventures is consistent. He is not the person who does everything. He is the person who identifies the gap, builds the structure, and brings the right people together. The gymnastics school, the consultancy, the association, the platform: each one started because Sahlein saw a need that no one else had organized around.

His message to the next generation is direct. "I was a 23-year-old little coach starting a little facility," he says. "If I can do that and have traveled this journey, where is your journey going to go?" The question is not rhetorical. It is the same question he has asked himself at each stage of his career, and the answer has always been the same: find the gap, become the catalyst, and build the structure that lets others succeed.