From Fat Kid to Australia's Top Fitness Coach (My Full Story)

So then came the idea of competing. It was bad on every level. I always think like, what if I came first that day? Would that have motivated me as much? I went to Tony and I said, how are you today, Tony? He clapped his hands. He's like, we have the best jobs in the world. I remember I was trying to run a seminar, do all the pays, manage all the team, do my own training. And I remember I actually ended up in hospital. As we've gone along to the point now where it's like, yeah, I'm going to buy the building. It spoke to me and it said, if you don't do it now, you never will. So I ended up saying, fuck it. I'm just going to fund it myself. What's important is that you chase something that's meaningful for you, because that's the only thing that's going to sustain. I want to share with you how I went from fat kid to opening up one of Australia's best personal training studios. And I've been through many highs and lows along the journey. And if you're a personal trainer, want to be a personal trainer, or one day want to own your gym, I'll need to share with you key insights on my journey, and hopefully it inspires you to follow a similar path without as much heartache and pain that I've had to go through. So So with that said, let's get started. So I vividly remember when I was the fat kid and I was the loner at school, and I hated lunchtimes because I would walk around the school by myself. Going from, from that experience then to high school and still getting kind of, uh, I suppose I wouldn't even say bullied, but picked on for, for being, uh, it was bigger than everyone else. It left you with a sense of you're not good enough, you want to be better. And I remember one of the teachers said to me that out of a scale of 1 to 10, I'm an 11 in useless lumps. And it was in year 9 going into year 10 where I actually started to train. And when I started training, really my whole life changed. It doesn't matter where you start, it's about where you finish. And often it's the obstacles that you face that make victory so much sweeter and makes it so much more meaningful and gives you I suppose the emotional fuel to keep going. So then came the idea of competing, and I was never really sold on competing, but there was a guy at the gym— was at a local gym— and he really like talked me up and really wanted me to compete. And eventually I was listening to everything he said, and he sold himself as a guru. And it turns out this guy was not a guru. And I remember when he told me that he couldn't be there on the show, I just started crying. It was bad. It was bad on every level. But it was the emotional climax point, if you will, that made me decide I'm not going to follow another guru. I'm going to be my own guru. Anyone who comes into my care as a trainer, they're going to be looked after. I'm going to know the answers that they need to get their body where they want to go. I always think like, what if I came first that day? Would that have motivated me as much? I, I think hell no. And I started working for Genesis in Ringwood in 2006, and I was actually employed by Genesis Ringwood, and I was paid $16.75 an hour, which is below by today's minimum wage standard in Australia. And I failed a lot, and I was charging, you know, I thought $33 for a half-hour session, $60 for an hour session. And eventually I realized like, this, this is not great, and I actually wanted to move to sales. And my manager at the time said, hey, we're bringing this new program, it's called the IBO program, Independent Business Owner. You'll rent the floor from us and you'll run your own business. I agreed, and it actually worked out. I think was I'll do a trial session with someone and just ask the question, would you like to go ahead? The way I look at Genesis was the first gym, big box gym that I worked at, was that was my dojo. I wasn't paying $1,100 a month because they had great equipment. I was paying $1,100 a month because they had a sales team that was bringing in clients every month. And so long as I was there, there was always going to be new members. And I treated every night on the gym floor, every morning on the gym floor, as a performance because I knew the gym was always watching. So as I was at Genesis Ringwood, I joined a mastermind program, and in the mastermind program, the lady encouraged me to put together an online membership program. Now keep in mind, this was 2007, before Facebook really, and before like MySpace days, right? And at the same time was when I met this kind of hardcore bodybuilder dude and he offered me a position at his, at his gym. Or I shouldn't say position, he offered me to work there. So I moved over. And also one of the big motivating factors is I wanted to learn hardcore bodybuilding, and I wanted to be in that hardcore environment because proximity is power. Being around like-minded people is very, very powerful. And in that time, I mean, I wrote ferociously, I researched ferociously, I put together this amazing membership program called the Alpha Body. And I put it online, and I think I had 10 members. Eventually, the Alpha Body fizzled out, but I started teaching at actually the Australian Institute of Fitness. It was, it was a great experience. It gave me a lot of cracks at Target. And I remember the guy who let me go, his name was Mark, and he gave me the best advice when he let me go. He said, you know, I think you've got a lot to offer the industry, and I really think you should teach your own courses. I really took that to heart. Because the next day I called a friend of mine who is in internet marketing and I said, look, I need to teach my own courses and how can, how can I get my courses online and people to buy them? And he helped me out and we came up with a program called Eat Your Way to Apps, actually. I've always found people who inspire me and that's who I learn best off. Go to people who are inspired by what you want to learn and be around those people because what you learn, it's night and day. Learn from those people and it will be money well spent. If you're a personal trainer and you want help in building your business, I've put together a free battle plan which I'll share with you at the end of this video. In the battle plan, I cover sales, marketing, nutrition, training systems, everything you need to know to both grow and scale your team as a personal trainer. When my career really started to go on the upscale was when I met Charles Poliquin. And Charles has passed away, really is looked at as the best strength coach who ever lived. If you go deep enough on, say, your favorite influencer and you look at who they learned from, the— probably the person who they learned from learned from Charles. He really was game-changing for me in so many ways. Like, he was the first guy in— that I knew of, I think the first guy in the fitness industry to charge $1,000 an hour for a consult. And I remember the first consult, he showed me how to charge, how to price up my packages. And I can tell you, like, that hour, that changed the direction of my business completely. That was actually the thing that really helped me grow Enterprise. Now look, there's a lot of people who will say unsavory things about Charles. Yeah, some of his protocols were a little questionable, particularly like some of the stuff on like carnitine that he did, like 3 grams of carnitine. He pushed things to Didn't really get like a 40 grams of fish oil or 40 grams of BCAAs. I get it, I was there, I tried the protocols, and I know firsthand some of them did definitely push the boundaries or the need to do things like that. But again, on a whole, Charles was a big influence of mine, and that was an essential piece for me to fill the other blocks. So what are the other blocks? I kind of feel like that was you know, in strength, in strength coaching, personal training. Charles is like— in university, you know, you've got your core subjects. Charles was kind of like the core subjects. And then from Charles, you would spring off to powerlifting, you'd spring off to bodybuilding, you'd spring off to functional medicine, you'd spring off to gymnastics or movement or whatever it was. So, and that's exactly what I did, was I started to spring out into these different, different directions. So I met the best powerlifters, I met the best bodybuilders, I met the best movement coaches and gymnasts and weightlifters and functional medicine experts and learned directly from them. But without that piece of Charles, I think I wouldn't have had that, that foundation. There's been so many people who've impacted my career, and I've been fortunate to get close with, with many of them. And without them, I would not be where I am today. So I'm an amalgamation of all the great coaches that I've gotten to learn from. So if you enjoyed my story so far, check out my book, The Enterprise Diet. This has my exact philosophies in how to get in shape from a mindset point of view as well as a very practical point of view. I particularly enjoyed writing chapter 3, which is a discussion of calories and hormones, where I break apart the two most fundamental, I suppose, at war with each other philosophies in nutrition and explain how they both can cooperate in making nutrition plans. So this is available on Amazon and also on audible. So I, yeah, I got, I got kicked out of the hardcore gym and then went to the world-famous Doherty's in Brunswick, which is the mecca of bodybuilding in Australia, with, with the legend Tony Doherty. I remember the first day, it was 6 o'clock in the morning. I went to Tony and I said, how are you today, Tony? He clapped his hands, he's like, I'm fucking great! We have the best jobs in the world. Some poor bastard out in a third world country has to go up and down and put rice on their head. We get to be in this amazing environment, in this gym, and change people's lives. How are you? I was like, like, this is great. Like, this is the energy I wanted. This is— where have you been? Why didn't I do this sooner? Needless to say, being at Dougherty's, I grew the business very, very fast. I mean, I grew my personal training very, very fast, and I went from myself to— I think I brought along one other guy. He was with me not even for a week, but I filled him out. Then I brought on another guy, filled him out, brought on another guy, filled him out, and I was ready to bring on my fourth person. And within essentially 12 months, left Doherty's and opened up my own studio, opened up Enterprise Fitness. And Tony was the first person I told. Lesson there, I suppose, is one of the things that I've been able to do throughout my personal life and career is bounce back, but bounce back not in People take time, they waste time. It's like, I've gotta, you know, you know, I just gotta give myself 3 months to figure this out. Where really you don't need time, you need to get clarity. Focus on the solution more than you focus on the problem. And I think my thinking inherently is always solution-oriented. So I remember it was 2012 and my partner at the time, she went to see a place and said, oh, I don't know about this one, it looks a bit small, it's a bit dingy, you probably won't like it. I had a look, it's really not nothing. And I was like, oh no, I'll go have a look. So I had a look and instantly from the moment I walked in, I'm like, this is the place. Negotiated the lease and in 2000, March 2013, we opened up Enterprise Fitness. We opened our doors. You know, they say the skills to get to the first part of business or to make your first million in business is the exact opposite skills that you need to learn to, to grow your business beyond that. And I, I would agree with that because from the early days, I was doing everything. I was absolutely doing everything. I was doing the sales, the training, the programming, the nutrition, the admin, everything. It was working from 5 AM to 11. It was an insane schedule. I remember I was trying to run a seminar, do all the pays, manage all the team, do my own training. And I remember I actually ended up in hospital in the middle of a seminar. And it was one of my biggest fears that I could have is One day I'd run a seminar and I couldn't teach a seminar, and then what people paid for wasn't going to get taught. And I lost the point where I actually ended up in hospital. My team pulled me through it. They ran the course and helped me manage. But from that experience, I hired my first salesperson and the business grew and trained them and started to really delegate and understand what it meant to have people on your team and how to grow people and investing in people. And it was a very important lesson. It was very— another one of those inflection points where you think terrible, and you know, it sucks, but out of it you learn. And that definitely helped me understand, okay, I can't do everything myself if we want to grow, if we want to have more trainers, if we want to have more clients, if I don't want to have to do everything, right? I wanted to open up the gym. Funny story, I went to the bank and one of the guys I went to school with was actually the guy who was doing my loan application. And he didn't like me. He didn't like me, so he didn't give me the loan application. Asshole. But I applied. He's like, nah, we're not going to give it to you, you're a sole trader, you don't make enough money. So I ended up saying, fuck it, I'm just going to fund it myself. I bought all my equipment outright, paid the lease, did everything outright, and off to the races we went. And all the money I made, I just kept buying equipment and I kept just putting it back into the gym. And now I opened up with a bare minimum But then over the years, like, I've just kept adding, adding, adding, adding as we've gone along to the point now where it's like, yeah, I'm gonna buy the building. People are like, why do you wanna buy the building? 'Cause I wanna be my landlord and I wanna own everything. I don't want any banks or anyone to fuck with what I've got. I moved into Swan Street in 2013 and from probably 2014 to 2020, so it was almost like 7 years, I was looking at properties in Richmond. I was looking at properties actively. Like, I was going to the auctions, I was looking at things. Even at one point, I hired a buyer's advocate to find me properties because I couldn't find everything. And especially around like 2016, the Richmond market was just hot. And I was going to properties, auctions that I was expecting like places would go for like $1.5 to $1.7, and they'd go for $3 million. And I was like, how? Why? And it was because developers at that time in the market were just buying everything. So there's just no way I could compete. And I really thought, I really thought towards the end of 2016 that this was just a pipe dream and I was just gonna have to accept that I'd never own my own property. And then COVID happened. And what happened in COVID was news cameras were going into, they did this whole exposé on retail and they were showing everyone closed and out of business. And what that did for the property market was it shoved all the prices down to bargain basement prices. And you know, you don't always have it, but I had that little voice in my head or in my heart maybe, I don't know where it came from, but it spoke to me and it said, if you don't do it now, you never will. You have to strike right now. You have to buy it right now. And funnily enough, a property that I made an offer on in 2017 came up and I knew the price of what it went for in 2017 and I, I got it at bargain discount. And I think it was a case of me knowing the market and having all that prior experience, that 7 years of understanding what property in my area is worth through going and showing up time after time to all those auctions, and then having that equipped in my heads, actually knowing what value is, and then being there at the right time. It's to make the right deal, which we did. And that's eventually what got the deal over the line. Now, might sound like, okay, cool, really cool story of how I secured the property. And it is, but it took me 4 years before we even moved into the property. So I bought the property in 2020. We moved in June 2024. And that 4 years was every single headache you could possibly have with a property. You bet I had it. Getting permits, to builders, to engineers, to demolition, to putting a roof back on. But you make those mistakes. But again, I can think about all the money that I wasted and time that I wasted from not knowing, but it was a learning experience. And eventually, you know, we got there. And that money that I quote unquote wasted, I look at it, well, that was my investment into learning how to do construction. So as the saying goes, good judgment is the result of experience, but experience is a result of bad judgment. So I had to make a lot of bad calls to get the experience. Now I'm able to make good judgment on these things, and I suppose it's just the circle of life. Now, the lesson for the viewers, I think personally, is that a lot of people may not understand why you want what you want. And even more to the point, there's probably a lot of people who will try and talk you out of what you want. What's important is that you chase something that's meaningful for you, because that's the only thing that's going to sustain. For me, it was about this, just having this kind of like unfuckable with place where people can come and feel safe, and my employees would feel safe, and they knew that this is, this is going to stand. I think really the message that I'd have on that is, yes, take outside advice and opinions and that, but you need to sit with the thoughts of what other people are saying and then weigh them up against what you actually want to do and be clear on what you actually want to do and not, not allow people to sway what's meaningful to you. So I think find what's meaningful to you and chase that because that's what's going to sustain you over time. So I hope you've enjoyed insights into my journey, and I hope there's been some valuable things that you are able to implement in your own. If you are a new trainer or perhaps want to open up your own gym, you can check out my website Enterprise Fitness Academy. Or a blueprint. It's called The Battle Plan of how I— the most important things to put your business together and some really key lessons which you should enjoy. Till next time, friends, train hard, eat well, and supplement smart.