Ep72: From Sleeping in the Gym to Scaling a Fitness Business: Ibrahim’s Raw Journey

What's going on, everyone? Matt here for another episode of the PT Profit, Leverage and Lifestyle show. I've got a superstar client with me today, Ibrahim. How are you this morning, mate?

I'm well, thank you. Thank you for having me, Matt.

No worries. I am super pumped to dive into your journey. You're not only working with, with me, but even, even before that because we were just talking just before we started recording, saying that, you know, you're not the usual type of person that works with me in terms of my mentoring. So I'm super keen to dive into, you know, what your experience has been like and a little bit of, a little bit of background about you. So for people who don't know who you are, do you want to give us a bit of a summary of, you know, what you do and what you're about?

Yeah, sure. My name's Ibrahim Kari Ali. I'm a full time combat sports athlete and I also coach boxing and Muay Thai in a private, a private personal training setting. I also offer normal fitness, personal training and nutrition coaching as well.

Awesome. Love it. And obviously you've got, you're in the, obviously in the gym now, which is, which is epic. So when you, when you say a private, private gym, just for context, it's not, it's not a 24, 7 gym, is it? It's, it's just kind of open when you've got classes or when you've got PT sessions.

Yeah. So it's not a 24, 7 gym. We have set hours for the facility where people can come and learn specific martial arts in that time. But that's from about 5pm to 8pm every day. All the other times the gym is completely empty and this is where I operate my personal training out of during those time window where there's no one here.

Yeah, love it. Awesome. I'm pretty keen to dive into obviously the business side of things. I'd love to, you know, understand all the success that you've had recently and obviously some of the challenges that you've experienced. Do you want to give us a bit of an insight into, I suppose, what life was like before we started working together, for context?

Yeah. So yeah, life before we started working together was pretty full on, pretty intense. I was super burnt out, super run down. I was trying to manage my sporting career as well as being a provider for my household. So I was doing a little bit of cleaning work, a little bit of commercial cleaning here and there. That wasn't doing so well. So I ended up being a Uber Eats Driver full time. That was pretty stressful because my car kept breaking down, so it was, like, hard to get consistent income. And during that period, I had recently gotten married. Literally weeks before I got married, I recovered from basically homelessness. The gym I'm in now, I ended up having to sleep here quite a lot. Yeah, pretty rough. Pretty rough. To be honest. I was doing a little bit of personal training at that time. I wanted to expand it, but didn't know how. So I was making about 100 to $200 a week off personal training, and I've been consistently making a thousand dollars a week now since joining the program. Yeah, Yeah, I don't need to Uber anymore. I'm not cleaning toilets anymore. So. Pretty good. Pretty good turnaround.

No, that's crazy. Yeah. I remember when we obviously first started having a conversation, it was, you know, you were in a pretty, you know, probably pretty desperate mindset to get something off the ground in terms of the. The business could. Obviously you just had the homelessness stuff, and obviously you were doing the cleaning side of things as well. So I'd love to go into, you know, how we've been able to have that turnaround, because obviously from a hundred a week to, you know, about a thousand dollars a week, that's. That's a huge difference in. In growth. So what are some of the things that, you know, whether it was my stuff or some of your own stuff as well, what are some of the stuff that you did to be able to grow so fast?

I think it was the I had to kind of start off with mindset was like, just how bad do you want it? And being 110% committed to finding something. And I've been looking for a coach that I've worked with personal trainers for a while, and I just saw your ad and decided to reach out. In terms of the actual skill set that's been most effective for scaling my business. Just to give everyone listening a little bit of context. Where the mixed martial arts kind of sector is different to the commercial fitness sector is that we don't usually have a club manager that will funnel us leads. So you have to learn how to develop your own lead generation, which I had no idea how to do at all. So one of the things we did first was we did a giveaway. So actually went around in my Uber and I was handing out pamphlets with a QR code to get people to enter. They kind of get some brand awareness happening in the community. And a thing currently that's been like an absolute game changer is Learning how to Sell by dm. So I've got an online dojo school and I'm also doing my face to face, one on one lessons. So for both of those things, learning how to actually interact correctly with your audience so you can convert that attraction into a sale online, as I said, has been the biggest game changer. So now I've actually got consistent leads and an audience to sell to that I didn't have before.

Yeah, I love it. And that's what I was saying before. Like, obviously a lot of people that we work with are in the commercial gym, so it's a lot easier for them to get leads. Whereas for you, obviously you've got to do everything, everything yourself. And obviously one thing you mentioned was the sell by dm, which is a huge training that, you know, a lot of online trainers don't understand how to do. And I'd just love to know just on, on your opinion, obviously, we obviously do a fair bit of training on that in our program. But even recently you said it's been relatively easy to get people from, you know, from following you to be able to book in for like either a session or have a proper conversation. So what's that process been like?

So the process for that, what we do is for lead generation. I follow 10 to 15 people on Instagram per day. People that follow me back, I'll just send them a message, hey, so and so, how you going? Are you interested in booking a session or are you just here to enjoy the content? So offer them a this or that question. That's something that I'll learn from you as well. Thanks for that one. I think that concept is literally you. I saw you do it in a TikTok video and I copied it. But the thing that's the most important about that, when you go for that, this or that question, it has to be very specific. So like that kind of gets people to understand that I'm a personal trainer. I'm not someone running a gym. For example, for a while I was saying, hi, so and so, thanks for the follow. Are you interested in learning either Muay Thai boxing? Most people would say yes, but the conversion rate would be incredibly low because they think, oh, it's a guy who's running a gym. They don't have the understanding that speaking to a personal trainer.

Yeah, so then just think, obviously. So the change in messaging that you were saying, yeah, that's a good point to bring up because, you know, if we're talking specifically on online trainers and like, if people are in Like a commercial facility, they don't need to necessarily do a lot of sell by DM that much. It's, it's there if you need it, but a lot of the time they don't need it. But for, specifically for online trainers, that's pretty much their main lead source is obviously organic content and you know, to a degree selling by dm, which most people are actually put off by the word sell by dm, which in reality just having a conversation with someone and seeing if there is a problem that needs solving and as you said there, it's obviously a very specific question that you're asking and it pretty much, you know, gets people. And this is why you've been able to book people in pretty much straight away. As soon as you've started the conversation it's like, cool, well, are you interested or are you just loving the content? And it's completely fine for people to enjoy the content because your content is really good as well. And at the end I'll, I'll, I'll give a shout out to your Instagram because it's actually really good content. But like what you just said, there is pretty much one of our marketing strategies for online coaches and obviously in your case you're using it for the face to face stuff as well. So when, when people actually respond to that is the natural progression just to book them in for like a free session or a consultation or what do you, what do you usually do from there?

So the most effective thing that I've found for selling to people after that is I want to get them to a discovery call as soon as possible. So we're provided. They've said, oh yeah, I'm interested in booking a session. My next response is usually I only work with people that I'm 100% sure I can help. So qualifying that lead straight away, get them on a call, qualify them further and then depending on that interaction, I either invite them to come down for a tour of the facility and an assessment if I need to build more trust with that person. And I'm not sure if I've qualified them completely if I need to see them in person or if I'm confident that I've qualified them on that discovery call, I then take them to book a PT straight away. We get a direct debit system happening and they develop a membership with me from that point onwards.

Yeah, love it. So you're obviously using, so you have a two step process which is one of the things that we suggest and obviously the discovery call is know five to 10 minutes, maybe 15, give or take, just to determine if there's an actual problem that needs to be solved and if you can actually solve that problem. Because just for context, for people listening, a lot of the time people will just, you know, book someone in for like a 45 minute consult pretty much straight away. And if they're not a good fit, you basically allocated 45 minutes for, for no reason, where, you know, you probably only needed to allocate 10 minutes to have a conversation, see if it's something that you can help them with. And then from there, as you said, you can book them in for the proper assessment required. So that's awesome. Thanks so much for the context. I'm super curious to know about some of the challenges that you experienced, going from $100 a week to a thousand. Do you want to give us some insights into some of the things that were quite challenging or some things that you struggled with?

Yeah, look, in terms of challenges, getting out of your comfort zone is quite hard because you've got to go out into the community a little bit and, you know, actually interact with strangers and stuff. So you have to be willing to put yourself out there and that can be a little bit confronting. For example, when I was in my Uber and I was handing out the pamphlets, a lot of people just want their food. So you're trying to give them something and they sort of snap at you and just take the food and go away. So I kind of had to become comfortable with rejection in order to, you know, move forward with the marketing phase of things. That was probably the biggest one. Like getting out of your comfort zone. Yeah, that's the one that comes to light the most. Actually. I can't really think of anything else.

Yeah, it was funny you bring that up because I remember when we first started having a conversation and you were basically saying, like, you know, I'll do whatever you want me to do. I'm like, I. I need to do this. You know, you have that mindset of like, this is, I'm either, you know, this is make or break it. I need to either follow exactly what you're going to say, otherwise, you know, I'm going to be stuck doing Uber eats.

Yeah. Or worse. The only thing that was probably keeping me from not going back to sleep in my mate's gym was like, my car, like, if my car broke down, I was thinking, I'm going to go sleep on the floor, floor again. It's not going to be good. It's nearly wins, it's getting closer to winter too. I'm like, it's going to be cold in there again. I'm not going back.

Yeah, you're, you're in Melbourne, right?

Yeah, it's pretty cold here right now, actually.

Yeah, I was going to say we're obviously up in Brisbane, so, yeah, for me it's pretty cold and it's like 15 degrees. But I know from Melbourne it gets down to single digits quite quite often. So, um, one of the things that I remember, obviously the, the workload that you had to go through as well when you were building this up. So obviously you had to do Uber Eats to kind of pay for a lot of the bills. When you first started, what was it like in terms of, you know, having to prioritize certain things with Uber going on? Obviously you're, you're married as well, plus you got your, your clients, plus obviously you got to do marketing. What was it like in terms of organizing your. Pretty much organizing your life at that stage.

It was pretty, pretty chaotic. I had to take a little bit of a break from my combat sports career to get this off the ground. It wasn't too bad. Look, I'll definitely give you credit where it's due in this area. Like, the way you structured the course is very, very easy to follow. And for someone like myself as well, I'm not particularly academically inclined, so I've found it very easy to. The way you coach is very, very easy to understand. So if anyone's like, you know, feels like that's going to hold them back, they should definitely disregard that and give it a go. How I actually got it off the ground was I was driving. So I had a friend of mine, I'd be driving the Uber and then I'll be telling him to DM people, like, telling him what to say. Because at this point, like, people watching, it's like, oh, why don't you just hire a PA from the Philippines? The Philippines. It's like I was that level of break where I didn't have the six bucks an hour to pay because in my head I'm calculating. I'm like, six bucks, that's like two liters of petrol. I can do another five, six deliveries of two liters of petrol. So that's like, for the audience watching, like, that's the level of brightness we're at. I literally have my mate, we're hot spotting off my phone. It was on my laptop, like just messaging everyone, like crazy to get this off the ground.

Yeah, that's crazy.

It was like that for a While. So pretty much I had a friend who's. He's younger than me, actually does a little bit of boxing with me sometimes, so he's just finished high school. I was like, hey, can you come and help me? I'll help you with your boxing in exchange. Yeah, we just spammed as many people as we could without getting Shadow banned. And, yeah, here we are now. That's probably what got me my first, I think, five clients, which is doing that.

Yeah, nice. I didn't realize that. So that's. That's pretty cool. To Kia. And it just goes to show the mindset that you had where, you know, you. You had to make it work and you were willing to do, you know, whatever it took to do it. And a lot of. A lot of online coaches especially, they'll. They'll tell. They'll tell people. They'll tell me. They're like, oh, yeah, I want to know, get 20, 30 clients. I want to make XYZ per month. And I'm like, okay, cool, you need to do this. And like, ah, no, I don't want to do that. Like, well, you know, people. People that have the. The results are actually willing to get uncomfortable, like you said. And one of the things you brought up was obviously getting rejected. That's a big thing. Obviously, in. In business as well. Have you. Was it something that you just had to, like, just suck it up, or is there any type of strategy that you had to kind of cope with that rejection? Because a lot of people, you know, struggle with that.

I don't think I had a strategy, but it's kind of like when I go to training and I get punched in the face, like, I just want to hit the other guy back harder. It's the same. Like, that sounds kind of messed up, but it's the only thing that really comes to mind is because they'd, like, shut the door on me. And the first few, I'd be a kind of cut. I'd be like, oh, that hurt my feelings. I just toughen up and be like, I'll just get the next one. It's okay. It doesn't matter. Get the next one. Get the next one. And kind of from having that mentality, I, like, learned how to give. Like, give people the pamphlet or the flyer, like, better. So we went to officeworks. After, like, the eighth or ninth rejection, we went to officeworks. Like, we've got to find a better way to do this. And we just bought a state Lapla. So we started stapling the pamphlets onto the actual UberEats bag, or we do like a super sneaky one when people do a big worse delivery. We put the pamphlet inside one of the bags.

Yeah.

And that seems to be a better strategy because we had a couple of entries off that.

There you go.

The main thing when we did the giveaway, this is also in correlation to what the pamphlets were actually for, was to funnel people into the giveaway I mentioned before. But the thing to get people to enter the giveaway was I started making Instagram reels and the engagement on it was quite high. So everyone that liked it the same, it was me and my friends. So in between Uber orders or messaging people and being like, oh hey man, thanks for supporting the content, we're doing a giveaway valued at 750, here's what's included, etc. And that's how we actually got the majority of people to get come into the giveaway and become leads and prospects. So that comes back to the sell by DM as what we're talking about before. So that comes to the, the. Excuse me, that comes to having the correct training to funnel people in to get that result, get them to fill out that form.

Yeah. So correct me if I'm right saying, saying this. So obviously there's a, the sell sell IDM training that, that we've got that obviously is for people who like, follow you back, people who engage on your content like, like and comment. Obviously we've got some different scripts that we use to, you know, go people, move people from liking the content, interacting with the content to having a conversation, to then booking a call or booking an assessment. Is that pretty much what you're saying there?

Yeah, yeah, pretty much that. Basically from that moment when I was doing the giveaway and making those reels up until now, anyone that follows me likes one of my videos, is consistently viewing my story comments on a post. They're getting a message as soon as possible. Ideally I just look at my phone all day, so and so commented, bang message.

Yep, love it. That's really good feedback. And let's talk a little bit about social media because as I said before, your social media gets really good engagement even though you don't have like a massive following right now. From what I can tell, it's still growing pretty consistently, but also the engagement that you get. So I'm just curious to pick your brain a little bit on the social media side of things. Is there anything or any tips that you could give the audience in terms of how to grow the audience or even how to get better engagement on your social media.

Yeah, look, to be honest with you, it's something I'm still learning. I haven't completely perfected, but to give the people listening a bit of an idea, I had an Instagram account for my personal training that was getting stuff all engagement. It was doing something like a thousand ish views a month. And when I checked the analytics, just under a week ago, I was doing 22k impressions in X amount of time. I think I measured off 30 days. Yep, 22,000 impressions in 30 days. So it went like up really quickly. Most of my videos now averaging 500 to 1.2 K in views and the like ratio is minimum 10. The most amount of likes has so far is 100 likes on Instagram video. But look, you just want to get people. My understanding so far has been like you just want to get people hooked because they're scrolling through, you don't have a lot of time, so you just got to say something, have a good hook. And also the other thing too is each different social media platform. My content slightly changes. So I have a slightly different formula for Facebook, Instagram and TikTok because it's a different age demographic on each platform. I've noticed that kind of answer your question.

Yeah, that's perfect. And I'd love to know kind of. And that's a really good feedback as well in terms of posting different things for different platforms. Because you're spot on. Like, for example, for my feel like the younger generation coming through, they're not really into Facebook that much. So if you want to attract that type of person, you've got to be like on TikTok or Instagram. But for like the, you know, people that 40, 50, 60, they're probably more on Facebook, for example. So you target certain, certain areas on different platforms. That's really good feedback. I'm curious, was there anything that you did to go from a thousand impressions or views to 20, 22,000? Was there anything specific? Was it just more volume or was the more reels or what kind of sparked that?

It was definitely volume. So I started off with all the content that I made my online school. So for example, we did a course that's got 17 lessons. It's called the Striking Fundamentals course. So it's a course I made that's compatible with mma, Muay Thai and kickboxing. So it's all the same fundamentals. So the content that we had from that, we just used a software called opusclip. And opusclip gave us a Bit of an idea. Okay, out of these lessons, which part of the lesson would people be most likely to engage in? And then we just made heaps and heaps of reels on file and we scheduled all of those in. So that became my posting strategy, well, my Instagram growth. And then I'm currently taking that strategy and then modifying it for TikTok. Most of the time, anything that goes on my Instagram, I just put it across to Facebook, where Facebook changes at the moment because as you said, you've got guys that are 40, 50, 60. I'm kind of tailing at the moment more towards your normalized personal training, nutrition, coaching and weight loss because it's more for the dads. And I've got the guys in their 20s and 30s on Instagram where it's more like this is how you do XYZ. And then on TikTok, it's just quick things to get people's attention. The younger audience doesn't seem to want to engage in long content as much.

Yeah, well said, well said. And just goes to show, like, especially for a lot of people watching, you don't need a massive audience. Like I don't have a massive audience. And you know, I'm still getting like, for me personally, like, I obviously run ads as well, but you know, I get 120 to 130, 000 views a month on just my Instagram, whereas you're getting, you're getting 20 odd thousand just organically. Obviously we don't really do ads right now, which I think we're about to start doing quite soon. But I wanted to kind of get context as well as well from you. What's kind of next, like what are you going to be working on over the next six to 12 months?

Oh, that's a big question. I can tell you what I'm doing over the next six weeks. We did our, in part of the course that we do with you as your students, as you know, we do the six week planner. So we plan our next six weeks. So my plan is to go from $1,000 a week to $2,000 a week. So I'll just be scaling that. That will give me kind of, I think a bit more breathing room to think about the next six to 12 months. Yeah, I'm juggling a lot of, kind of a lot of balls at the moment. The main thing is my. I've got a lot of goals as a sportsman that I still want to, you know, achieve or fulfill, but this has given me time where I can focus more on that. So one of my trainers actually commented last week. He said to me, oh, you've been coming to training more? So I said, yeah, I actually told him, I said, yeah, I've got some business coaching and things are doing a bit better. I'm not Ubering.

Yeah. So, like, are you, Are you doing any Uber eats at all anymore?

I haven't done Uber for like a month now, I think. I think it's safe to say I'm done.

Yeah. So good. That's awesome. That's a huge, huge milestone because, like, it's obviously a lot of time for, like, how much money you make as an Uber driver. Like, I don't know how much exactly you would make as an, as an Uber driver, but I would imagine for the time that you spend, like, it's like, it's good, but I wouldn't say it's like life changing. So that's really good to hear that. Yeah, that's pretty much, pretty much done and dusted now. And obviously that gives you more opportunities to grow the social media more. As I said, your content is obviously on fire. And speaking of content, if people do want to follow along on your journey or perhaps they're interested in doing some work with you because obviously you got online and face to face, where's the best place to find you?

Best place to find me is on my Instagram at Hard style personal training or lowercase.

And then you're obviously on TikTok and Facebook as well. But Instagram is your main one.

Yeah, I am the TikTok side of things. We're still developing. So if you want to see the best way to see a portfolio of my work is on my Instagram.

Yeah, awesome. Sounds like a plan, mate. And just last question for you. If anyone is kind of on the fence of getting some help, whether it's face to face or online, got any recommendations or tips on what they should do?

Do you mean as in personal trainers trying to grow the business or. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, if you're a personal trainer trying to grow your business, speak to Matt is 110%. Like, this reaction is not scripted at all. Like, yeah, thanks so much, man. Like, you've literally changed my life coaching. There's no way I'd be able to do this by myself. If you're sitting on the fence about working with Matt, go work with him, man. Like, just 110% commit and just do it because, yeah, everything will change for you, I promise you.

Awesome. I appreciate it so much.

No worries.

And yeah, I'll put the links for your Instagram in the description as well so people can follow along with with your journey. But yeah, thanks again for jumping on. It was really good to hear your insights and obviously listen to all the success that you've had recently.

Thanks for having me.