Getting Raw Ep #9 P1 Andrew Simmons, Vision Personal Training

Welcome to Getting Raw. It's Richard Mark Toutounji, and today I'm with Andrew Simmons. Welcome.

Thanks, mate.

Andrew, if you don't know, he's the mastermind, the brains behind Vision PT. It's like basically the— you You're the personal training McDonald's. I think that's a good way to sum it up. McDonald's is the leader in their fast food franchise, and Andrew is dominating the personal training industry. I think it's great to interview you because I think personal trainers aspire to one day have their own studio, get more studios, get more staff, and you're the king of the mountain right now. So, I really want to know how you've done it. That's the most important thing. Sure. So take me back though, where you actually started.

It became a Fitness First club in Sylvania. I basically grew up in a gym environment. I was really passionate about sport my whole life as a young kid. I basically thought, look, I went to school to play sport pretty much. Those things you did between 9 and 3 were pretty much recovery sessions for me. So needless to say, my grades at school weren't too crash hot. So, I just decided, well, I need to pursue something to do with sport when I finish, but I really didn't know what at the time. I played so many sports at school that I really was pretty unfocused at the time as to which way I was going to go. When I went through school, I was pretty much told what to do. I went to a private boys' school in Sydney, so my life was very much mapped out for me surrounding sport. When I left school though, I had really no idea what the hell I was going to do.

Right.

I was really grateful that my parents had basically put me through my whole schooling in a private school system. My mum worked pretty much to put me through the private school system, and I was really grateful for that. I didn't want to have to rely on them, so I thought I'd go get a full-time job and I'd follow my mates into what they were doing.

All sports orientated then?

Yeah, well, actually it wasn't sports orientated. I went into the world of chartered accounting. I worked in a chartered accounting firm for 2 years on a full-time basis and studied part-time, which many people would know for me was the dark side of my life. In working in an accounting firm. I was no good at it. And sometimes people get confused. They say, oh geez, you must be good at accounting. Well, mate, I'm actually not good at all at accounting.

But did you learn the systems? You must have learned something from that.

Yeah, yeah.

There must have been some good came out of that.

Mate, I just learned about professionalism. That was the biggest thing. And I realised that after being involved in a small gym, actually, funny enough, the gym I used to go to when I was working as an accountant is literally about 7 or 8 doors up the road. It no longer exists. But I sort of saw that it was actually a real family orientated gym. It was actually, I suppose, the professionalism at the time wasn't really around in the industry.

It was the heydays. It was still when Arnold was down the gyms pumping his iron. Yeah. And, you know, Lee Iacocca's Aerobics, wasn't it? That's the time it started.

Pretty much, mate. I remember staying in the back of aerobics classes with my sister. And we did aerobics classes together when I was sort of moved from the gym floor. So I snuck in the back of an aerobics class to muck around and have some fun. And I was terrible, but you're right, mate. Literally, there were the long leotards, there was the G-string with the leg warmers. That's what the instructors were pretty much wearing at the time. So it wasn't all bad.

Alright, so you started with that and then you stepped into it, you know, you stepped into, you started obviously personal training then?

Yeah, I finished up my exercise, sorry, my accounting course when I did that part-time part-time for 2 years and I just realized that was no good for me. So I went and studied exercise science full-time at the University of New South Wales. And I wanted to continue an income. I killed it in the first couple of years in accounting. I got paid $14,500 in my first year and $16,500 in my second year. So the $2,000 pay rise was huge. That is a good start. Then I was given the opportunity to work in a gym. So down at Sylvania Physical, I was employed by Pete and Fiona Cosgrove down there on the reception desk. Yeah. And that was awesome at that time. I went through uni, doing full-time uni, worked part-time on the reception desk and teaching circuit classes. That was awesome from the first year. And then I moved into the aerobics room.

And did your stuff in aerobics?

Yeah, did my stuff in aerobics, mate. I was on stage doing the stuff. I was hopeless at doing that, but because I got to know the members by working behind reception, they accepted me. So I was really fortunate that I was able to get started.

So you just did the same aerobics routine time and time again?

Pretty much for the first year. I started with a thing called New Body. Right. New Body was awesome for me because it was really slow. The music was slow so I could keep up with it rather than doing the high-energy stuff. And then I did some step, basic step stuff, because again the music was slow so I was able to get myself coordinated. That was really cool. And then just worked on the gym floor part-time for my second, years 2 and 3 of uni. And then after I'd finished my exercise science degree, So I started as a PT in the club.

And then you grew from there?

And grew from there. Probably the biggest thing was my involvement with Les Mills. At the end of '95, when Les Mills came across to New Zealand, Pete and Fiona had the foresight to see that was going to be something pretty big. So we were like the 2nd or 3rd gym in Australia to get Body Pump. And I was fortunate enough to get in contact with a guy named Steve Renato, who's one of the international partners. And he and I hit it off from the start. It was great. Similar rugby and triathlon backgrounds and that. We became mates and I ended up traveling the country with him in the early times teaching instructors how to do Body Pump. So it was really Les Mills influence that really made a difference for me.

It sounds like the systems came from there. Obviously, the county was bad, but I think you've got to have systems from there and come from system professionals from there.

I think the biggest thing I noticed was when I was traveling around the gyms doing Les Mills, I could see that there was no professionalism in the industry. I mean, sure, they were nice people and all the rest of it, but in terms of the actual standards from what I was used to in the professional world of accounting, it was just chalk and slate.

So interesting. So basically you've gone from an industry that has the standards, that's been more established, way more established than fitness. Bang, you put them straight into fitness. So that's, I think that's a really big key right there. Oh, it was massive. Huge. Given's been around for 10+ years, is that correct?

Yeah, it's August '99.

August '99.

I'm a starter.

To get to where you are today, you've got 47. Is that the count right now? If I put this up in a month, will it be 48?

Probably not in a month, but we have some growth plans for next year.

Massive growth plans, I'm sure. So you've got 47 at the moment. And so I really want to talk about the struggles to get to 47. Because you see, you will see a lot of trainers out there that have a couple studios. They'll have one, they'll have two. They struggle with the second, they struggle with the first. There must be a limit to where you get to a stage, you're doing everything by yourself, get to 3 or 4 or 5, whatever it is, and then there's got to be a shift, there's got to be a change. Where was the growth point for you with the number of studios you had?

The hardest one was going from 1 to 2.

Right, so that is the hardest.

No doubt the hardest was 1 to 2. It was about realising how to provide a career path for the guys coming through. So in the early times, we talked about franchising for 4 or 5 years, if not longer. I thought, I'm going to franchise, I'm going to franchise. I'm sure so many trainers say, I'm going to franchise.

It's the pinnacle, always a franchise. That's what they want to

do. But it was a case of you just don't go and franchise. You've basically got to, even from the systems, I never set up Vision to franchise it. I set up Vision to provide systems that our trainers could use. And that's what I think a lot of people get confused by. They think I was actually always going to franchise. No, I got sick to death of when I was working in the club, which became Fitness First, there was all these trainers speaking these different languages. So one trainer would be talking about the latest one set to failure training technique or overload principle.

Oh, yeah, I remember all that.

Low carb diet, no carb diet. And I didn't like that because I just realized that my involvement with Les Mills was when everyone was going for a common goal and following a set structure, you became a team and everyone grew faster. So all I wanted to do was make sure that my trainers were all speaking the same language to get results for clients. I think

that's the biggest thing as well. I mean, obviously having a franchise of 47, you've got to be very clear on it's this way or it's the hard way. Otherwise, you're exactly right, it gets wishy-washy.

So all those systems were actually built not for a franchise, to franchise it per se. It was actually just to make sure that I had systems so that all the trainers, you know, we had 16 trainers down here at one time, and, you know, we had to make sure they were on the same page. Speaking the same language. And as that evolved, we had all the great PT systems that were able to, you know, so that trainers could follow. The next struggle was to actually make sure that the business model was there so that it was actually franchisable.

And so I guess the hard thing and the thing a lot of hours probably people don't see is the systems, creating these systems. Who created them? How did you create them?

Mate, it was done literally when I, between the hours of, you know, 9 and 10 I understand that. So it was like you finish your normal day and then your system day starts. And that's what I did, I sat up late at night at the computer. I still do all that sort of stuff. I might leave here but I go home and sit on the computer a lot late in the morning. And that's what I spent a lot of time doing in the early times was creating those systems myself. And I really had a lot of support from a few of the key early trainers that I had. They obviously contributed to the evolution of it. But I suppose that's me, I'm just the systems sort of guy. So your key is systems?

Your IP is all about systems? Yeah. That's what makes you the systems guy?

Absolutely.

So going those systems and going to the second studio then, do you own the second studio or did you actually franchise that?

No, it was franchised straight away. I mean, really, I realised that unless I franchised Vision, Vision Caringbah, which is where we are today, the first one, mate, it was never going to survive. Because I lost so many trainers. They came through and they wanted to have an opportunity to grow. So it was either they were going to grow with Vision or they were going to grow outside of Vision. And that was what happened. A lot of guys actually grew outside of Vision, so most of the competition around here are my former trainers.

Former trainers, yeah.

You know, so that was—

And that was before you sort of reached the franchisors, went out and did some stuff?

Yeah, because we always talked about it. And then I realized that some of the key guys, as soon as you got, say, 2 or 3 away, And they were in the franchise, I had to make sure they were successful. That was the key to it. My early guys had to be successful.

And so say that first 2, 3, 4, they're the ones you just put more time and focus on before you had that big growth spurt?

Yeah, absolutely.

Because I remember you had a few there and then all of a sudden, bang, next thing I know there's 47.

Yeah, well it took us 5 and a half years to get to 6 studios. Okay.

So 5 and a half years to get to 6 studios and then you had 47 And then

the

next 5. So that I think is key and that sort of leads me to what I want to talk about is focus. I mean, to have that big vision of, okay, I want whatever number you want and then knowing that that 5.5 years is the struggle, it's the late nights, it's the stuff people don't see, it's probably been very stressful.

From a financial point of view, the model was in the first few years of actually having a vision itself, Even though from an outsider's perspective, we won National PT Business of the Year in 2003, but we were almost broke.

Yeah.

You know, because from a results perspective, we knew how to get results, but from a business model, we were terrible. You know, even when we had like— I spent my time pretty much working full-time in the franchising side, but I was away. Oh, you know, my studio was actually making the money. You know, I hardly made any money from the franchising for the first 5 years.

So for 5 years with a franchise model, and that's where I believe, I mean, unless you go past that number, right, it's tough. Yeah. As you're telling us, it's tough.

Yeah.

And then you can start to actually get some results, but you've got to stay focused.

Yeah, absolutely.

What do you get through to stay focused? Like, how do you continue to know that I'm doing it and I'm going to get to that number I want? Like, what are your tricks?

No, I think it's just, okay, my The reason for starting Vision, really franchising, was to provide careers for people. And that's what it's been all about. I mean, I want to get results. And so we've talked about what we're passionate about at Vision. It's decreasing diabetes and then providing careers for people. If I can't provide careers for people, I can't then decrease diabetes.

Why are you so passionate about providing careers for people?

Mate, because I've seen too many of my friends actually fall out of the industry and go back to having jobs they hated. But they're doing the stuff that I was doing for those first 2 years.

Yeah, sure.

When I worked in a chartered accounting firm and I hated what I did. And then, you know, I went through uni and most of the guys I went through uni with are doing other things because they said, oh, there's no career in fitness. You can't have a career in fitness. You know, I saw the model actually working in a gym. Clubs are costing millions of dollars to set up, but there's no progression for people who are coming through as trainers.

To continue through it.

Yeah, so I thought, well, I just want to be able to do that. And when you see a trainer come into our network and then get grown, and then they have the opportunity to have their own studio, to me that is awesome. I love that.

That's what drives you.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's what keeps you up at night.