In this interview, Richard Toutounji talks with Sam Wood, founder of Gecko Kids Fitness, about how he built a successful children‑focused fitness business in Melbourne. Sam explains that the venture began in 2006 when he started training a few overweight and young athletes alongside his adult personal‑training work. Word‑of‑mouth grew the client base, leading to a dedicated daytime schedule where kids attend sessions while adult trainers are idle. Sam outlines the distinct psychological and physiological needs of children—short attention spans, need for immediate feedback, play‑based, dynamic activities—and how Gecko’s group‑training model trains coaches to work with “individuals in a group.” Coach recruitment emphasizes passion for kids, personality, and minimum qualifications, creating a strong community where children idolize their coaches. The business model relies on multiple revenue streams: 440 kids on direct debit (ages 5‑15), 150 weekly kids PT sessions, birthday parties, school groups, sports‑team conditioning, a Junior Gecko program for ages 3‑5, and an adult facility (Pro Health Club) with 250 members and 19 trainers. By using daytime slots, Gecko fills the “dead time” in gyms, improves trainer work‑life balance, and boosts trainer earnings. Sam also describes licensing Gecko’s program to over 40 clubs across Australia, generating $50k+ profit per club and driving a 25‑27% increase in adult memberships from kids’ parents. Additional services include mobile outdoor training, camps, and government‑supported school programs. The conversation highlights operational strategies, coach culture, financial structuring, and the broader impact of integrating kids fitness into traditional health clubs.
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Hey, how you going? It's Richard Mark Toutounji from Getting Raw, and today we're in Melbourne. I'm talking to Sam from Gecko Fitness. Now, I want to talk a bit more about Sam and what he's done in the industry because I think he's a really interesting guy, and we can learn a lot about him and what he does. What he's doing at the moment is groundbreaking. It's an area he's specializing in kids, so kids fitness. And it's an area that I've been involved in a couple of years ago when I wrote my book, Please Mum, Don't Suicide Me. And it's a very tough area, I believe. But Sam has actually trumped it and he's killing that industry. And I really want to know more about how to do it, the secrets to do it. And besides that, you've got a personal training business as well. Let me know more about this kids business. So, tell me about your kids fitness business because I'm really intrigued about what the whole deal is.
Thanks for having me. I don't know if I'm killing it, but I really feel like we have probably got a better grasp on the kids fitness industry than potentially anywhere else in the world from all the research that I've done and the travel that I've done. Gecko is the name of my company, Gecko Kids Fitness. We started in December of 2006. The idea came about purely because I started doing— I was working as a personal trainer while I was at university, and I sort of hit that plateau of 45, 50 PT appointments a week with adults. Yeah. Because I was about 20 minutes out of the CBD, so you've got a lot of into work and out of work trade. And so I started training a few children, young athletes, right through to kids that were, you know, in relative terms, really obese for their age.
And they just started coming to you?
Yeah, yeah.
They just started training with you?
Yeah, I never marketed it. It started with one or two and just spread from word of mouth with kids changing and parents asking other parents, Johnny looks great now, what's he been doing? Oh, you see Sam down the road? You should go and see Sam.
Yeah.
Before I knew it, I was doing 80 PT appointments a week and I was in— I worked in a studio with 30 personal trainers. And I was the only one in the gym from midday till 4 o'clock every day.
Every day?
Yep, I had the whole gym to myself. I had parents bringing their kids out of school at 1 o'clock, or midday, 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock, and taking the rest of the day off because their parents saw more value in them spending an hour with me than finishing that day of school. Now, of course, I believe school is very important, but For 1 hour of their week, what they achieved with me, not just physically, but self-esteem, confidence, emotional and psychological changes that were very gradual but very, very obvious. And before I knew it, I was doing 70 personal training appointments a week. And instead of earning $2,500 a week and paying $400 rent to work in this studio, Yeah. 24 years old and earning $4,000 a week and paying $400 for this studio.
So
it was, you know, it revolutionized sort of one, where my passion was. I realized that training children was what I loved to do and it's something I really wanted to focus on.
But training children is very different to training adults.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. I've done them both. Very, very different. You've got to have the right personality.
The biggest mistake gyms' personal trainers make is that they classify a child as a little adult. It's the worst thing they can do. They're a completely different being. Both physically, you know, kids can be 14 in age chronologically, but developmentally they can be 11 or 18. So you need to train a child as a child.
But even their mind, they're clearly not adults. They want to play with colors and balls, and they don't want to be sitting on a treadmill running.
It's not fun. I mean, the biggest psychological difference when training children is that they need immediate feedback.
Yeah.
And they've got a much smaller concentration span.
Sure.
So if you think that they're gonna run for half an hour or do a spin class for half an hour or whatever it is, you're kidding yourself.
Yeah.
It needs to be dynamic. It needs to have variety. It needs to be exciting. It needs to engage with them and challenge them in some way.
Yeah.
So you need to, even in group training with children, which is obviously a much more cost-effective method and how Gecko predominantly trains kids, Those individual Gecko coaches are trained right down to the finest point on how to not train an individual group, but train a group of individuals.
And they're coaches that, I'm assuming, are kids orientated. Like, they love kids. You know what I mean? You've got to have some sort of passion for kids. I don't think you can train just an adult who's fitness, PT, and wants to get kids. You can't do it, can you?
We look for passion number one, personality number two. Qualifications number 3. Of course they need to be a minimum Cert 3 qualified, but we can take them the rest of the way. If they're someone that is a role model for children, someone that kids love hanging out with and have that personality that can engage with children straight away.
Kids loving hanging out with, that's something new. Kids love hanging out with that person.
My Gecko coaches from our flagship centre here in Melbourne will walk down the street and there will be kids Beeping the horn, calling out of the car, yo, Gecko, how you going? Like all that stuff. It's crazy. It's like a cult following where those guys love their Gecko coach. And they don't see them one-on-one. They see them in a group with 15 other kids, maybe only once a week. But they love that person. They aspire to be like them. The Gecko coaches go and watch them on the weekend, you know, with their footy or soccer or whatever they want to do.
They go the extra mile. I want to talk about numbers now, okay?
Because— From a business perspective.
From a business perspective. Like, okay, you've got the kids there. Now, the reason why Sam— I've got Sam here today is because he's the only one doing it and he's doing it successfully. So take me through the numbers. How many kids do you actually have in your gym, your location?
We've got 440 kids on direct debit that come in every week between the ages of—
440 kids?
Between the age of 5 and 15. We run 6 birthday parties every weekend.
Yep.
We do over 150 kids' personal training sessions a week. We have 5 school groups come to our centre every week. We have 3 sports teams visit our centre every week to do sports conditioning for under-12s through to under-18s.
Yep.
And we run special needs physical activity programs for children on the weekends, on a Sunday morning. I think that's pretty much it. So across those 5 or 6 services. That's how we generate all of our revenue. We started off as a kids-only facility, so a 450 square metre facility in Victoria, and we had over 400 members join up in 3 months.
Yep.
And we still didn't really make money. You know, we were breaking even or perhaps doing a little bit better, but we still had some significant gaps where we weren't Crowding revenue. We then moved premises when our lease finished to an 800 square metre premises. So we've now got Gecko downstairs where we run all those facilities, and the one I forgot is Junior Gecko, which is a 3 to 5 year old early morning program.
That's separate, is it?
Yep. So that's, uh, so we've got 40 kids that are 3, 4, or 5 that pay $15 a week to do our developmental program. That's learning how to throw and catch and balance and all that kind of stuff. And then upstairs we've got our own adult facility which is called Pro Health Club. And we have, we only have, I think we've got 250 members, but we've got 19 personal trainers.
That's what you were talking about before, 19 personal trainers. Yep. And you were telling me that they're paying, what, $250, $275 a direct debit? So quite smart because then you can actually focus in on Not so much the— I mean, you focus on your club and not heavily involved in training. Is that the way to go?
I speak to a lot of other studio owners about the pros and cons to whether you have all of your trainers, all their appointments go through the books and have some kind of percentage split. There is obviously huge financial benefits to that, but the cons and whether you're Whether you're willing to admit that these exist or not, they do. It's a huge amount of administrative work. Whether you like it or not, eventually your trainers are going to begin to resent how much profit split happens. So, I mean, they've got a ceiling. If they can only do 50 appointments a week and they're generating $50 an appointment, so $2,500 in revenue a week, and you're taking half, they're eventually going to go, I'm better than this.
They're going to switch on, aren't they?
Yeah. I work it out. If I'm making $1,250 a week, you're making $1,250 a week from all of us. And they get their nose out of joint. I want my trainers to be able to do Gecko work as well, and that's the best part. As much as I hate the word synergy, the synergy of having the upstairs and downstairs businesses together and having a kids program that works in your facility is priceless.
Okay.
These guys can do 15 hours of Gecko work a week. In their downtimes, in the middle of the day, before they get busy with their after-work PT. And all of a sudden they go from a personal trainer that could potentially earn $1,200 a week to, I think 15 of my trainers earn over $2,000 a week.
Because they're training in the day.
Yeah, absolutely.
This, I think, is really the key because I think the golden nugget in the conversation is that most trainers, AM/PM trainers, they do the 6 AM, they do the 9 PM at night. They're quieter day. You said when you were 24, you did, you'd work them the whole day. So you can actually now fill your gap up with kids.
Yeah, I've got trainers that can now knock off at 7 PM without the guilt. They can have a morning off without it absolutely doing their head in to the revenue that they're losing. And from a burnout perspective and a lifestyle perspective, that's really, really important. If you do a 15-hour day, but it's effectively 2 4-hour shifts, Yeah. We all know that the bottom line is 99% of personal trainers aren't proactive in that middle of the daytime. They go home and watch a DVD and have a sleep. And then they go back to work and they go hard again. And when they're training clients, they're brilliant. So we, when we're selecting staff, we would much prefer to have someone that's not only a brilliant trainer with adults at a high end, because we're in a pretty affluent area of Melbourne.
Sure.
They have a passion and they're really good at training kids because we know that they're going to be a staff member for a long time. They're going to have huge job satisfaction and they're never going to look to work elsewhere because they're never going to have the opportunity to be able to earn that kind of money somewhere else.
Well, I'm just really amazed here because, you know, I hear so many trainers A and P, but if you can actually do these kids, you get a whole new market here. You know what I mean?
And we've— 18 months ago we adopted this same principle from a business perspective to clubs. So 18 months ago we started licensing Gecko to existing clubs around Australia, and by January of 2012 we'll be in over 40 clubs around the country in 5 states. The way that works is we come in and we show them how to implement a kids program within their facility. Because it's not just your staff that's dead, it's your facility that's dead. So we're working now in clubs with great big group exercise rooms that are the perfect environment to set up a kids program that ordinarily— They're
dead at
that time. Yeah, tumbleweed would be blowing through from 11 till 5. We now have Junior Gecko in those clubs. We have school groups doing circuits in the middle of the day, primary schools. We have After School Gecko where they have 60 to 100 kids at $15 a week on direct debit at that facility. We have team conditioning, birthday parties.
And they're all in the middle of the day.
Absolutely. Or on the weekends after midday, which is their other dead time.
Not in peak time.
When we do birthday parties.
Not in peak time. That's the most important thing.
So these clubs are now making upward of $50,000 profit from having a kids program that has absolutely no negative effect on their existing adult programs. In fact, They're actually finding they're getting 25% of the kids' parents join their facility as well.
Hang on, hang on. So 25% extra adults are joining their core business.
So if you get 100 kids doing Gecko, they're finding, I think it's 27%, so 27 new adult members at full price. They don't get a discount. Full price become a direct debit member because they've entered that facility to bring their children down and then gone, Hang on a minute.
I should get fit. And of course you've got to get fit as an adult, help your kids out.
Be a role model, lead by example.
Of course.
I think the other thing is just getting them through the doors. They come down, they've probably driven past that health club 100 times. They've thought about it 200 times. And when they go in for their kids' sake—
Because they always go in for their kids. Their kids come first.
It's not scary. Oh, he's a nice trainer. Oh, the person at reception is friendly. Oh, there's no bodybuilders in here. It's not the kind of stereotype I had in my mind. And before you know it, they're like, I was wondering if I could potentially try it for a week. Or usually the club says, are you a member of another facility? Would you like to try our club out? And they go, yes.
I think it's brilliant. Can you do it outdoors as well? Yeah,
absolutely. We have a mobile arm of our business, which is birthday parties, outdoor personal training. camps and school groups. And those trainers go out, visit the schools during the day. There's more and more government assistance with that kind of stuff.
And you have personal trainers that take those roles?
Yeah, absolutely.
I don't honestly think, like, you know, I've had a lot of experience in kids. When I wrote Please Don't Note Suicide a couple years ago, my wife's had kids' birthday parties, and to actually, you know, to have a product like yours Because I know it's very tough to get in the kids market, and anybody thinking that they can do it in a heartbeat is going to be— is going to really find it tough. You've gone through ups and downs here and there.
Yeah.
And I think it's a genius program. You can actually put in 25% extra clients, and obviously you're filling your day up with extra revenue.
Yeah, I think your point of underestimating how hard the kids market is is the biggest mistake people make.
