Ep1: How Matt Went From $0-$15,000/week in under 2 years.

Welcome to the first episode, the PT Profit, Leverage and Lifestyle Show. I'm your host, my name is Matt Dart, I'm here on the north side of Brisbane and I'm super, super pumped to start this podcast and bring heaps of value to you guys. So at the start I'm going to be doing this once a week. But to start with, for the first podcast episode I wanted to give you guys a little bit of context on my journey, what I've been through in the fitness industry, where I've come from and I suppose the direction that I'm heading in in the future. So yeah, I'm super pumped to, to deliver some value for you guys today. If you do like the episode, make sure you like and share it with your friends or subscribe where wherever you're listening to this, it is going to be on all the normal podcast channels, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, etc so let's get stuck in. So I'm going to give you guys a bit of a, a detailed summary of my journey. So take it back, take it back to before I was a pt. I was a, I was a travel agent at a flight center for about six or five or six years. Did quite well in the, in the travel industry. Worked my way up to be assistant team leader, then team leader, ran couple of different teams or a couple different stores, sorry. And then you know, won a couple of free trips for example. But for me it was like, it was great but it wasn't, wasn't as fulfilling fulfilling to me. Like I really enjoyed the travel, it obviously is pretty heavy focus on sales as a travel agent. But I really, I didn't really, I had a choice but I basically I started as a PT during COVID and the reason why I transitioned to PT is because the travel industry went to absolute crap obviously. So based on the experience of the travel industry, I wanted to get out of the industry and try something different. And the reason why I decided to go into PT is because I had my own personal journey of getting a lot of confidence, getting a little bit of muscle, many, many of the confidence, hanging around the right type of people in the right environment to get that back for me and I wanted to give that to other people or share that experience with other people. So decided to do my qualifications and how I actually got qualified. I was working, I was on the Gold coast at the time and I was working full time as a travel agent in, in corporate. I was also doing Uber, was an Uber driver. For those who don't know, not many people know that actually that I was an Uber driver on the Gold coast which was interesting. I was about 20, 24 years old being an Uber driver. Like I've got a quarter young face I guess so people are quite shocked when they saw me pick them up. Quite, quite fun. But I was doing Uber for pretty much every night plus the weekends and I used to study all day Saturday, all day Sunday. As in you had to be there to get the qualification like 8 April 4th. So the usual week for me would be work Monday to Friday, 9 till 5, do Uber on the way home from about 5:30 till about 8 during the week. Friday night I would go out till about midnight. Saturday night I would go out till about 3, 4am as in doing Uber and then get up at 7 to start my study at 8 o' clock in the morning. So that, that was a good three months. So three months to get me qualified and then yeah became a pt. But even, even before I started as a PT I actually I was always looking to find someone that had been successful in the industry. Like before I was a PC. I invested in drop shipping and Amazon FBA which is basically you had your own products on Amazon that I used to sell which is all automated. So I invested in a coach for that. I invested in coaches before to help me get results. I invested in people to help me find my first investment property. So it's always been something that have always done is to invest in other people to help me or teach me how to do certain things or how to get certain results. So I invested in a business coach before I even became qualified because I knew I would get qualified. I just didn't know how to run the business. So anyway I was eventually got qualified. I, I was still working at flight center at the time and I started as a, as an online trainer believe it or not started as an online trainer and I was doing quite quite well. It kind of timed well with the whole Covid thing and lockdown. So a few people were looking for online trainers to keep them accountable and keep them on track. So I started as an online trainer. I was doing quite well, probably making anywhere from six to $700 a week in additional income on top of my full time income which is awesome. But the goal was always to be a face to face trainer. I think I preferred, preferred that rather than the online space. So yeah, ended up finding a location once the lockdown's finished at any time. Fitness at Burpengary and yeah, it's absolutely bonkers. I was, I was doing about 35, 40 sessions a week after two weeks in the club and after two weeks I quit my job at flight center. So I'd make, I would be making, I was making more as a pizza than I was at flight center but I was working half, half the amount. So 40 sessions, I was only doing 30 minute sessions so it's only 20 hours a week of actual PT. But I didn't want to stop there. I always wanted to leverage my time and hire people. I didn't want to be constrained to time. Which is why previously I invested in Automations or like an automated business. Give me to give me that side Hustle money. So currently Anytime Fitness fully booked. I ended up hiring two trainers pretty much within a couple of weeks of each other because I was getting so many new clients sign up. So what I, what I ended up doing is hiring two people after three months with those two trainers we were doing a 100 pt sessions per week. So they were both doing 40 sessions each, I was doing 20. So I basically handed over half my sessions to the new trainer, kept building her up. Once she was full, I got the new trainer fully booked as well and basically I just kept doing the sales and marketing which is what I'm really good at. So fast forward that after we got to about 100 sessions a week, I decided to expand into a second location which is Jets, Jets Bracken Ridge, which I'm still at to this day, which has been an awesome club for me. And that was even better. I got, I did one text message to that database and I got about 30 consultations. So in three days I had about 10 to 12 consults per day for the first three days I was there and I added an additional 35 sessions in three days. So I didn't do any sessions myself. I hired another trainer. They got fully booked in about a month. Not even, not even that. In like two weeks they were fully booked, doing 40, 45 sessions per week. And yeah, I just replicated the process as I, as I scout and made more systems to handle the, the growth. And I just kept doing sales and marketing. So fast forward after that we're probably doing, you know, probably 100, 140, 150 sessions per week. And I wanted to keep going. I got addicted to it. Not gonna lie that fast growth becomes quite addictive and a little bit carried away to be honest. Upon reflection. So for those who know a little bit of the story, I kept, kept expanding, I kept going into new, new clubs. I went to another and I went to two other anytime Fitness clubs. I went to another jets club all across North Brisbane. But while all this was happening, I had a massive falling out with the club manager and the owner at any time. Fitness Birkenay. I won't go into specific details, but all I can say is this is probably one of the hardest times that I've had in, in business where we were doing 80, 90, 100 sessions a week and then I was having some issues with my, my team members or my staff and one of them was becoming quite toxic. So I ended up removing her from my business. But the club manager had some issues, my other trainer had some issues with that. So there was, there was a little bit of conflict there. And from that conflict, my other trainer resigned. So I had to cover 100 sessions per week while managing another location and other trainers. So what I had to do, I didn't really have a choice. But the club manager basically forced, forced the members and forced me to give them my clients and I didn't really have an option. So anyway, I ended up losing about 60 sessions overnight, which, if you can do the math, I was charging probably 60, $65 a week for about 4, 4 or 5k per week in income. I lost overnight from that decision. So what I decided to do was, I mean, I didn't want to take the extra sessions anyway, so I just, I took about 40, 45 sessions per week. Well, the clients that wanted to stay with me, which was most of them, so I retained most of them. And what happened from there is the whole environment in that gym kind of turned on me in terms of the staffless slash the members. The members were great. It was more the staff and it became a bit of a toxic environment for me to be in. So I wanted to remove myself. And what I decided to do was I wanted to open up my own gym. So that's exactly what I did. So I bought a gym in cash, bought all the equipment or not straight away. But I signed the lease, told my clients and then I gave my 12, I give 12 weeks notice to leave the club. And basically what happened after that was an absolute nightmare, a disaster. So basically the club manager, once I told her that I wanted to leave and I wanted to give my 12 weeks notice, she understood why, but she was, you know, quite annoyed or pissed off about it. But she didn't know that I had just signed a lease for literally right beside the club to open up my own gym. She didn't know that at the time. But anyway, they had, they had conversations with, shared conversations with the Owner or the other trainers which as I said they've kind of turned their back on me a little bit. So she sent me a text message basically saying that I needed to come in for a meeting at a certain time. And I responded and said that I couldn't make it at that time and I would be 15, 20 minutes late. Anyway, I arrived that she wasn't there saying hey, I just got here, where are you? She replied saying I've left you a letter on your desk. And the letter was that I was terminated immediately and I needed to basically pack up all my stuff and be out by the end of the week. So I had 40 sessions. Boy I had 100 sessions a few weeks before that or a month before that. Now I've got 40 sessions. I've just signed a lease with no equipment, no fit out, done. I've got nowhere to train these clients. So I was like balling my eyes out at this point, didn't know what to do. So what I ended up doing was called my mum and dad and I asked if I could use their garage to train my clients until my gym was ready because it was going to take about two months or three months to get the gym ready. So that's what I did. I rang up a gym wholesaler and I basically bought everything, every single bit of equipment that they had in stock that I wanted on the spot, paid for it up front and hired a trailer in a ute, went and picked it up and set it up in my parents garage and told all my clients if I've been kicked out because of this reason, this reason, this reason, I've got my own gym that's going to be ready in a couple of months. I just have to train you out of the garage. And most of my clients said that was okay, which I'm very grateful for, otherwise I would have been pretty screwed. And then yeah, opened up the gym, had the gym for about three years now which is awesome. Loving the journey of having having my own own space. But yeah, even while having the gym and and keeping keep training those clients I managed to scale to to six clubs at once. I had 12 trainers working for me. I was doing zero PT sessions. This is like after the gym's built and st bob trainers working for me, I wasn't doing any PT sessions, I was just managing the team. I had a salesperson or a full time manager as well and we're doing 250 sessions per week which is around about 14 to 15 thousand dollars per week in income. So that's that's how it all happened. Bit of a longer version but not many people know that full story. So that's. That was at our peak. But what I discovered after that was I wasn't really fulfilled or I didn't really enjoy the stress of having that responsibility. You know, 12 people relying on you for income. We weren't really. We were getting some really good results but not, not the results that I wanted from all the work we were putting in. So I decided to start to scale down. I closed down a couple of locations that weren't performing as well as I would have liked. We had a couple of issues with. We couldn't find a trainer that, that was a good sustainable fit for us and you know, variety of different reasons in terms of retention of certain locations that we couldn't, couldn't really seem to, to manage. So I decided to shut a couple of them down, scatter back down to three locations and here we are now with just the two locations. I don't have most of my team I've fortunately gotten rid of in a nice way of course, redundancies and stuff like that. But you know, right now We've got the two locations. I currently do about 30 sessions per week. I've got a couple of trainers that, that work with me which hold the fort down quite well. But as you guys might know, I've started to, you know, help. Help other PTs get similar results that what I've got. So the first goal that we, that we go through is helping them get fully booked face to face. Then we help them leverage their time and get the lifestyle of their dreams. So the leverage comes from either scaling to online or to hiring people face to face to do picnic sessions. So I'll let people choose what they do from there. But I find it's a lot more fulfilling helping people, you know, generate more income or create more wealth for their friends or not friends, but for their family and for themselves rather than helping people on their health and fitness which I, I still really enjoy. I still really enjoy doing my PT sessions right now and you know, helping people with their confidence and stuff like that. I think I'll still keep doing that for a fair while now. But that's a bit about my story. So let's say I went from zero to $15,000 per week within two years. I'm actually in the paid in cash and yeah, on a journey I have to help other people do the same thing. Not so much. I mean I can help someone do exactly what I've done in terms of scaling to multiple facilities, multiple trainers, etc, it just depends what level of lifestyle that you want. You can have a very good lifestyle with just one facility and having a really good leveraged model. So that's where I'm more working towards now myself. But hopefully you enjoyed that little story. It's been an awesome journey that even with the highs and the lows, I wouldn't change it at all. It's taught me a lot and I've become a much better person over the last. This is my fourth year now as a pt, so super pumped to share more value with you guys and share the journey and if you have any questions I'm happy to answer questions in the comments but I'll leave it at that for now. Super pumped to share more value with you guys and again if you can like and subscribe, share this with a friend if you've got some value. But that is my story. So enjoy the rest of your day and I'll see you in the next podcast episode.