About Tyler Bass

Built By Hard Work. Nobody Handed Me Anything.

From a small town in southern Minnesota to building multiple companies from scratch — this is my story, in full.

1. Blooming Prairie

I grew up in Blooming Prairie, a small town in southern Minnesota, the kind of place where you learn what work ethic actually means before you’re old enough to drive. Sports were everything growing up — football, baseball, wrestling — and I threw myself into all three.

My senior year of football, I set 13 school records. I made it to the end zone 33 times, rushed for over 1500 yards and received 1200 — but here’s the part that says more about our team than it does about me: I only played two quarters a game all season. We were up 60–0 at halftime, every single game, all the way through the conference championship. My starting defense didn’t let a single opposing team cross the 50 yard line in the regular season, all the way until that conference championship game.

Baseball was the same story. I set the school record for home runs in a single season with 19. And I wrestled from kindergarten all the way through high school — I only sat out my senior year because I was already headed to college to play football.

13 School Records

33 touchdowns and only played 2 quarters every game.

19 Home Runs

As the only senior out for baseball I set the single season home run record.

60-0 Every Game

The starting defense didn't let one team past the 50 yard line until the conference championship game.

2006 MN All Star Football Game

2. Wrenches Before Weights

Before I ever built a business, I built engines. I grew up working on cars alongside my dad and grandpa. My grandpa sold me an ’82 El Camino for $1.00 as my first car and I bought a project car at the age of 13 which was a ’76 El Camino. We built a big-block 454 for it together, in the garage, the way you’re supposed to learn — hands in the engine, not a manual on a screen.

That’s where the work ethic actually started. Long before Congress was ever a thought in my head, I was a kid from a small Minnesota town who knew how to fix what was broken and build what wasn’t there yet. That instinct never left me.

3. Luther College & A Shot at The NFL

I played football at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, starting my freshman year. I carried a 3.0 GPA and was named Rookie of the Year. I was good enough on special teams — as a punt and kick returner — that I was ranked 16th in the nation, which caught the attention of the Kansas City Chiefs as a potential special teams player.

College football also took me overseas — I played in a game against a German team, traveling through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with my team. A few years later, I was recruited to play professional football in Italy for the Milan Rhinos. I turned it down. I had exactly one class left to finish my degree — American Sign Language — and I wasn’t going to leave school without finishing what I started.

I graduated from Luther College in 2010 with a B.A. in Exercise Science.

4. The Hard Years

Graduating in 2010 meant graduating into an economy that had nothing for a 22-year-old with a fresh degree and no connections. I put on a suit and walked all over Rochester, Minnesota, applying everywhere I could think of. I got a library card so I could use the public library’s printer in Rochester, because I didn’t have one of my own. I applied to over 500 jobs. Nothing.

There was a stretch where I was close to homeless. I went to the food shelf and asked for help — and was told there was a two-week wait because they had to run a background check first. I left, and I kept going anyway. I went hotel to hotel, business to business, and eventually landed a job as the night auditor and front desk attendant at the Country Inn & Suites South in Rochester.

I never gave up on myself, because giving up was never something I was raised to do.

5. The Post-It Note That Started Everything

While I was working the front desk, I’d talk about fitness and nutrition — I’d written four chapters of my senior thesis on whey protein back at Luther, and it was something I genuinely knew inside and out. One of the maids overheard me talking about how to lose weight and asked if I could help her lose 10 pounds. I didn’t have a computer, a printer, or even internet at my house — so I wrote it out for her, by hand, on a Post-it note.

A week later she came back and told me she’d lost the 10 pounds. She told me I should do this for a living. When I told her I didn’t have the equipment to start something like that, she just said: get on Craigslist and post about helping people with fitness in their own homes. So I did.

People started replying. I moved to the Twin Cities and started what became At Home Fitness Inc.

6. The $250 paycheck

When I first got to the Twin Cities, I was working odd jobs to survive — roofing, siding, some collections work — nothing that stuck. Then I made a decision: I took $250 out of a paycheck, bought gym equipment from Walmart, and built a website for a dollar. I taught myself how to build that website and learned how to run Facebook and Google ads off of YouTube videos, because I couldn’t afford to pay anyone else to do it for me.

For the next ten years, I trained around 20 clients a week, on average. No vacations. No real breaks. Just work.

Then COVID hit, and clients disappeared overnight. I was broke again — I didn’t even have enough money to get my taxes done in time to qualify for COVID relief. So I kept going. When the lockdowns dragged on and people got fed up being stuck at home under Governor Walz’s restrictions, the gyms stayed closed — but that left the door wide open for in-home personal training, and I capitalized on it. I posted on Indeed, hired trainers immediately, and brought them out with me so they’d learn to do it the right way — my way.

I learned a hard lesson running it that way, too: step back from a business too fast and let others run it, and things fall apart quickly. So instead of handing off my list of over 2,000 leads to trainers to work as cold contacts, I did all of that work myself and let the trainers focus purely on training. The business came back strong.

At Home Fitness Youtube, Can You Do a Pushup and Clap Behind Your Back?

7. Building More

Once At Home Fitness was running well, I wanted to expand what I understood about business — so I got licensed in life and health insurance and worked in that industry for two years. I sold life insurance, and I learned firsthand about Medicaid, individual market pricing, and exactly why health insurance costs what it does in this country.

In 2016, I started a sports recruiting platform called Recruited Athletes — the idea came directly from my own experience being recruited out of college to play professional football in Italy. The platform was built to work like LinkedIn for athletics, connecting coaches and players from all over the world.

I also built Sota Credit, a credit repair company — I became a licensed credit repair specialist to run it. And I founded Bass Financial LLC, where I sold life insurance under my own name.

At Home Fitness

In-home personal training built from a $250 paycheck and a Craigslist post. 2013.

athomefitnessmn.com →

Recruited Athletes

A sports recruiting platform connecting coaches and players worldwide — built like LinkedIn for athletics. 2016.

Sota Credit

A credit repair company. I became a licensed credit repair specialist to run it. 2019.

Bass Financial

Licensed life & health insurance sales — where I learned exactly why premiums are priced the way they are.bassfinancialgroup.com → 2023.

8. Back to what I grew up doing

Eventually, I got tired of being a personal trainer full time — it’s a long, physically demanding grind, and I never got the gym facility I actually wanted to build. For a while I poured everything I had into a fitness app, working with developers from around the world to build a platform connecting people with personal trainers nationwide. It went well, but without outside investors, I was funding every dollar of it myself. Eventually it was time to turn the page.

So I went back to what I grew up doing: construction. I earned my general contractor’s license and now run Cities Exteriors, where we handle concrete and gutter work, and take on a range of projects to make sure customers get quality work done right.

Cities Exteriors

General contracting — concrete, gutters, and exterior projects across the Twin Cities.

citiesexteriors.com → Present.

Why I'm Running

I've Watched Our Jobs Disappear. I'm Done Watching.

I grew up in rural Minnesota and watched immigration change our factory towns firsthand. Right out of college, I applied for a job at Hormel Foods and was turned down. Weeks later, a police officer pulled over an undocumented worker near the plant and — as a courtesy — told him a raid was planned for Monday morning, so he and his friends wouldn’t show up to work. No raid ever happened. But 45 workers didn’t show up that day anyway.

People like me — and mothers who need formula for their kids, single dads trying to make rent, hardworking Minnesotans of every background — need those jobs. Tim Walz and the far-left have run this state for 20 years, and working families have paid the price the entire time. I’ve witnessed it firsthand, from the Hormel parking lot to my own neighborhood in Minnetonka.

I am running to fix the job market for Minnesotans first. My position is direct: I want to stop immigration, 100 percent — in a perfect world, we would pause all immigration, including H-1B visas, for the next 10 years. That’s how we get our country back. That’s how we control our own wages, our own home prices, and our own lives again.

Here’s the number that should make every working Minnesotan furious: if we want the same buying power the Baby Boomers had in their prime earning years, economists estimate wages would need to be around $66 an hour. The federal minimum wage today is $7.25. That gap is the whole story of what’s gone wrong in this country — and it’s exactly what I’m running to fix.

Tyler Bass

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