Matt's Story (So Far!)
My journey as a Fitness Business Owner has been varied in both the 'things' I have done and the 'success' I've had along the way.
I was asked by a podcast listener to share a breakdown of my journey (so far) and I hope that by doing so it inspires you as to what is possible…
The (Extremely) Shaky Start
My PT career started in July 2011.
I graduated Uni, ended my internship with Manchester City, and left my job.
I had a degree in Sport Science (specialism in S&C) and had spent my final year working at the Manchester City Academy in their Sport Science and S&C department.
It was a great experience but one that had led me to the decision that I no longer wanted to pursue S&C at elite level.
Instead, I wanted build my own business
(something I had dreamed of for years)
The First Client
Three days into my PT career I signed up my first client.
John, a Bank Manager who opted to sign up for a package that saw him train with me twice a week for the next 6 months.
"This is easy" I thought to myself.
I later found out that it wasn't easy at all!
What's My Plan B?
The first 3 months was a slog.
I averaged around 8-10 sessions per week.
There were countless setbacks:
People not showing up
People saying ‘yes’ - then changing their mind
People cancelling last-minute
…It was like a nightmare rollercoaster ride that felt completely unpredictable.
I was lucky to be surrounded by supportive people.
But even I was beginning to question whether I was cut-out for self-employment.
By September 2011 I was seriously considering my options.
> I was travelling 52 miles a day, to-and-from the gym.
> I was putting in the hours, but felt like I was spinning my wheels.
> My confidence was falling rapidly and I felt stuck.
But then two things happened…
First, on one of my regular visits to my grandma's (she's 93 now but still sounds like she's just arrived from Ireland) she said something as a passing comment that actually hit me smack in the face.
After asking me how things were going, and me clearly showing that I wasn't feeling great about things, she responded with…
"Oh well, Rome wasn't built in a day, was it?"
I'd heard this line before. Many times. But it had never meant anything to me until now.
I was just 3 months into building a business, something I had never done before, and I was already thinking of quitting. If I wanted it that badly, surely I'd need to give it longer?
This interaction got me thinking that I might need to keep going but alter my approach and expectations a little.
Then the second thing happened…
A mentor, Graham, spoke to me and reassured me I’d be able to make it work.
He also mentioned he wanted me to start a group program that would launch in October.
I used this as a self-imposed ultimatum - October was going to be a BIG month for me, I was going to give it my all and either…
A) make progress
-OR-
B) decide this wasn’t for me.
In that month I recall signing up 8 new PT clients (doubling my business) and successfully started the group program with 12 people signed up (6 men and 6 women).
Those results came off the back of a few things…
A workshop I delivered in the gym
Using the gym sales team for referrals
Being far more active on the gym floor
Being a little more direct with leads I had been chasing
It was also a result of having now spent 3 months in the gym and understanding things a little better.
My business was far from perfect, and I still wasn’t fully booked, but I felt like I was making progress…at last!
The next phase…
Looking back now, I can see what a huge impact getting the group program off the ground had.
I ran it alongside another PT (Nick) and our program was a huge success.
We put our all into it and people got amazing results in 8 weeks.
I think it gave us both a huge boost in confidence and it led to us organising our first social event - a client Christmas Party.
(Events would later become a huge part of 'experience' we offered clients)
To launch the next group, we ran another workshop in the gym. This time we knew exactly what our program could do for people, we had results to showcase and we felt pumped about the whole thing.
All our existing members were staying on and we wanted to bring in fresh faces to fill out the class.
Our workshop was only attended by 15 people but 13 of them signed up there and then to join our program and one of the other two people later became a 1-1 client of mine.
This was a huge win.
That same week, we ran the workshop again on the Saturday morning. At first, it felt like a mistake - only 3 people attended. But 45mins later, all 3 women signed up.
That week we sold a total of 16 spaces on our program for a total of £3,152 - all from two workshops. It felt unreal!
We now had 28 people in our group (12 originals and 16 newbies) and were flying.
By the end of this next program we decided to run two lots of the group sessions, capping each one at 22 members each, and we filled them both.
By this point, I was getting close to being 1 year into running my business and I was beginning to feel like I was finding my feet.
I had clients, but there were still plenty of niggling issues to iron out. Things I would later fix simply by improving my systems.
One Year In…
At the one-year mark I increased my prices. Current clients jumped to £35/hr and new clients went to £40/hr (this is in 2012).
I was delivering 90-100 PT sessions per month, plus the 6 group classes per week (3 per group) - so I was fairly busy.
I also treated myself to a new car…
…I swapped my 1L Citroen C1 for something a little more robust for all the driving I was doing. This 1.6L diesel felt like a massive upgrade.
Building My Systems
The next year was less focused on new stuff and more centred around making things run more smoothly.
Clients still came and went, people still cancelled here and there, sometimes payments got missed, sometimes people vanished entirely - I was burned more than once!
These same things cropped up in the group programs too. Overall, they were great, but there was always a slot that needed filling or an issue that could have been avoided that cropped up.
During this time, there were a few key things I got better at that have served me well ever since….
Client onboarding (including policies)
Lead Generation (my first ever iteration of my 'front-end offer' system)
Retention efforts (reviews, events, challenges - all introduced regularly)
Client communication - I started a weekly email to educate clients and update them on any important stuff.
Having got myself full, selling out the group programs, nailing the systems mentioned above, and having undertaken a fair amount of external education - I was approached to take on a role as a mentor to other new PTs.
This might seem a little wild given I was only two years in, but there’s a few things to take note of…
> 80-90% of PTs drop out within 2 years of starting their business, many never getting anywhere near close to being fully booked. I had bucked this trend.
> When learning from others, it can often be better to learn from someone who isn’t a million miles ahead of you and has recently been through your journey themselves - again, this made me ideal.
> I had thrown myself into additional education programs, on top of the Degree and CSCS qualifications I already had, and this gave me an extremely good knowledge base for someone still relatively 'new' in the industry.
> I was going to have to do one year of training and shadowing before being allowed to mentor anyone myself - by which point I would be 3 years in. I grabbed the opportunity with both hands!
Matt the Mentor…
Learning and honing the skills required to mentor others was something I really enjoyed. I also got the chance to shadow some of the industry’s best coaches and mentors to see what they did and use this to create my own approach.
Again, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see how useful this was an how lucky I was to get the opportunity.
Most 'Business Mentors' or 'Business Coaches' never go through any formal training or shadowing process. They just decide one day to call themselves a Mentor and off they go!
By the time I completed my year of training, it was 2014 and I was well established as a PT, still developing different skills as a coach, and ready to take on my first 'Mentees'.
2014 was also the year I first dabbled in the world of Online Coaching, which wasn't really a thing at the time - but we'll come back to that shortly.
The Next BIG Milestones…
Over the following years, the biggest area of growth in my business was the Mentoring side of things.
I hit my initial target of getting to 10 mentees, then steadily grew this to 22 over time. This also saw me take charge of overseeing 5 gym locations and being the personal mentor to the PTs within those gym sites.
But this wasn't my biggest milestone…
In July 2016 I married Leanne. We'd been together 10 years by this point (we met at 16) and had been planning our wedding for a couple of years.
We had an amazing day, surrounded by friends and family, and it was perfect!
Weddings shouldn't be about money, or a lot of the other 'stuff' people think about, but the truth is that money is a huge part of a wedding.
A few years earlier, when I was 3 months in and struggling, I would never have imagined that we would be in a position to get married and pay for over 150+ of our closest friends and family to share our day with us.
And then came the Honeymoon…
This was another BIG milestone, both personally and professionally.
Myself and Leanne had often talked about a dream trip we would love to do across the U.S. - a place we had never visited.
Our Honeymoon seemed like the perfect chance to make it a reality.
So in September 2016, we flew down to Heathrow from Manchester, before boarding a flight to New York.
The we spent the next 3 weeks travelling, visiting; New York, San Francisco, L.A. and Vegas. It was phenomenal!
In New York we scaled to the top of the massive buildings (like you do), rode bikes through central park, visited the Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island, stayed out late in Times Square, got lost in the food court of Gand Central Station - to name a few things…
In San Francisco we visited Alcatraz, rode the famous Cable Carts, went across the Golden Gate Bridge (a number of times), did night tours of the city (which was freezing!), and ate the largest slice of cheesecake we've ever had from The Cheesecake Factory…
In L.A we took in all the famous sites from the movies, took a trip to the huge zoo, visited Universal Studios (we made it to Hogwarts - see below), made friends with some of the friendliest bar staff we've ever met, and also learned that we don't fit in with 'celebrity' hot-spots…
And in Vegas, stayed at The Bellagio, watched Cirque du Soleil, met Penn & Teller, took a helicopter over the Grand Canyon, tried 'Shake Shack' for the first time ever, and baked in the desert heat…
Just like our wedding, this trip had seemed an impossible dream just a few years earlier. Yet here we were, starting married life doing the thing we had always wanted to do together. It was a trip of a lifetime.
But here's the interesting part for you, the reader…
To make this trip possible, I stepped away from my business for 3 whole weeks.
No PT sessions
No client check-ins
No emails
No calls
No texts
….Nothing!
I set everything up so that I could take the time off, relax, and enjoy the trip.
It took some organising - but I did it.
And it worked extremely well.
And this brings us to the next big milestone that created a HUGE shift in the way I operated my business…
A few months after our Honeymoon, we found out we were expecting our first child. Oscar was due in June 2017 and I had a few months to make some big decisions about the type of Father and Husband I wanted to be.
The business I was running was great. I was earning well, progressing every year, and getting to experience a lot of things. But it wasn't without its drawbacks…
I woke up at 4.30am each day to make the 26 mile trip to Huddersfield, ready to start my first PT session at 6am.
I worked until 8pm four evenings a week and sometimes did sessions at the weekend too.
In short, my days started early, finished late, and didn't leave me with much left over to give anywhere else.
This had to change.
I wanted to be present as a Dad and supportive as a Husband.
I didn't want to be the successful business owner who was never there for his kids.
It was time to change.
The Semi-Private Switch
Early in 2017, a few months before Oscar arrived, I made a big change to the way I ran the PT side of my business.
I increased my 1-1 PT prices to £50, which was unheard of for the area, and I introduced semi-private training as my core offering.
I did this as a means of reducing my evenings in the gym to one per week and massively reducing my diary overall.
The people who still wanted to work with me 1-1 would have to pay a premium.
The others could pay a smaller fee and work in small groups.
The introduction of semi-private training was a game-changer for me!
It allowed me to achieve my main goal - reduce my hours without losing clients - but also allowed me to earn far more per hour.
My semi-private groups were £25 per person and were capped at 4 people.
This meant that there were several times in the week where I was earning £75-£100 per hour in the gym - again, completely unheard of for the area.
Doing this allowed me to overhaul my diary and reduce it down to 3 days per week in the gym, whilst still taking care of all my clients and my mentoring efforts too.
I was at home every evening apart from one
I was free to enjoy the weekends
I had more energy in the week due to shorter days
Everything worked better
Side Note - This was my first experience of how a 'constraint' can force you into creative decisions that improve things that wouldn't have been possible had the constraint not been present.
Going Online
The additional time away from the gym also allowed me to revisit the Online side of Personal Training and take my efforts a little more seriously.
I had started this in 2014, as I mentioned earlier, but never really made a go of it.
Fortunately, despite my lack of dedicated time to this area, I had already decided to focus on a specific niche based on who I had been enjoying working with in the gym.
By pure coincidence, I went through a phase where I was training 5 women in preparation for their wedding day - this had been before my own wedding in 2016.
All 5 women did amazingly well and were the perfect clients.
> They were driven
> They took my advice onboard
> They put the work in every time they trained
…I even got invites to some of the weddings!
It had been during this time that I decided that 'Brides' would be the perfect clients to work with online. They had many of the attributes you would want Online Clients to have, given you wouldn't be seeing them in-person.
This was the birth of 'The Big Day Body Plan'.
An online program I developed over the years (in various forms) to help Brides-to-be overcome 'Dress-Stress' and enjoy their dream wedding day.
In the years I ran this, I ran the program as…
Group based online coaching
1-1 online coaching
One-off products
A membership
It gave me a great deal of insight in to the many ways you can run a business online and all the different moving parts there are in order to get it working well.
I stopped running The Big Day Body Plan in 2021 to give more focus to my Business Coaching service that I was keen to grow and explore further.
I had enjoyed the journey but felt the Online Coaching side of things had ran its course for me and had become too much like hard work, rather than something that excited me (like it had done in years previous)
The Most Recent 'Big Shift'
The most recent big shift, and milestone in in my story, was Lockdown.
Everyone has their own story to tell here, in a nutshell, here's mine…
The gym I had built my business in closed down…and never re-opened.
My mentoring business went from 22 clients to Zero.
Luckily, some of my PT clients stood by me and worked with me online.
For months…everything was uncertain!
…It felt like 9 years of effort and building vanished overnight.
It was time to start over and build something better.
It was at this point that I made a couple of shifts in how I did things…
I took all my PT services online
I built my own 'Business Coaching' service
This would allow me to run everything remotely, while we were forced to, and set the foundation for how I might operate once the world returned to 'normal'.
Luckily, it worked out.
It wasn't easy. But I've made it work.
Had the gym I worked at reopened, I'm 90% certain I would've returned.
But it didn't, so I continue to work with clients remotely to this day.
Our second child (Arthur) arrived in January 2022 and no longer having to travel 52 miles each day helped massively.
Sure, working from home has it's challenges. But I'm fortunate to have been able to convert our garage in to an office/gym space from which I can work.
Not having access to a gym forced me to find new ways of generate leads for Fitness Businesses and this is something I've built my Business Coaching services around.
What's Next?
With the experience I have, the knowledge I've gained, and the way I see things changing in Fitness over the coming years - I want to help the next generation of Fitness Business owners thrive and have a huge impact on the nation's health.
I will continue to work with people through my 1-1 Business Coaching and I'm currently building Fitness OS as another way of supporting Fitness Businesses. We already have people using the platform and it's having a big impact on their business.
I will continue to run the 'Fitness Insights with Matt Robinson' podcast and use this as my primary platform for distributing free advice to those who need it.
Finally…
There's so much more I could have included in this post - short stories, lessons learned, mistakes made, small wins, big wins, complete cock-ups - but we're already 3,000+ words deep.
If you made it this far - thanks for sticking around.
I hope my story can inspire you to create your own.
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