Why watching Tik Tok Reels will destroy your business growth❌
In this solo episode of the Marketing Muscle Up Podcast, host Richard Turtungi warns fitness and wellness entrepreneurs against relying on short‑form content (TikTok/Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts) as a primary growth strategy. He argues that such tactics lack the strategic roadmap needed for sustainable scaling and often lead to wasted time and money. Drawing on personal anecdotes—such as buying a $10,000 “Business in a Box” that offered a plug‑and‑play website without a supporting strategy—he illustrates the danger of copying tactics without understanding underlying principles. Turtungi emphasizes the need for a clear, stage‑appropriate plan, advising listeners to invest in coaches or advisors who can provide structured guidance. He differentiates between tactics (single‑use hacks) and roadmaps (comprehensive, time‑bound plans) and stresses that disciplined, tailored coaching can accelerate growth 3‑4× compared to DIY attempts. The episode also highlights the value of targeted mini‑courses to fill specific skill gaps (e.g., Facebook ads, organic marketing) and promotes his own “Fast Fitness Clients” mastermind, a three‑week program offering six organic client‑acquisition strategies for a $27 fee. Throughout, he urges creators to produce more content than they consume, to align business models with personal strengths, and to view “free” advice with skepticism, especially when solving large‑scale problems.
Chapters
If you are wanting to grow, just think about how much you wanna grow and think about the investment that you are putting into it. And you either put time in or you put money in, but make sure that you're really clear on that pathway. Focus on the roadmap, not the tactics, and you will grow your business so much faster. Welcome back to the Marketing Muscle Up Podcast Show. I'm your host, Richard Turtungi, and today's episode, I want to talk about one subject that I'm seeing more and more every single day, and it's disturbing to say the least. And, um, I think it's a disrespect to business, and it's like an inexperienced surfer going in and try to catch the biggest wave and the surf will teach you lessons. Now, I think in business, there's a few things that are gonna teach you lessons. And one of the things I wanna talk about today is anybody that's in business in any stage of the business thinking that watching more TikTok Reels will actually grow your business. And when I'm referring to TikTok Reels, I'm also referring to short online strategies or short strategies found in online platforms. Not so much university, not so much YouTube University, I should say, but really around short clips, Instagram stories, TikTok reels, even YouTube, but not, you know, sometimes YouTube has some great things, but certainly YouTube alone also won't grow your business. I think that will all destroy your business. And what do I mean by that? Well, I certainly mean that if you're wanting to grow a business, it's gonna take more than tactics alone to give you the roadmap of where you need to play and what you need to do to grow your fitness business, your wellness business, any kind of business that you have. And it's disturbing to say the least that I think over the last 2 years through COVID, there's been such amazing growth in certain businesses. And there's also been a lot of businesses that I've seen come up that are now starting to crash and burn because their whole business plan was built on watching a lot of reels on TikTok. Looking good on the front end, but having no structure in the back end. And that's only gonna take you so far. And so I do wanna really talk about that because it's something that you can easily get lost in. I've been lost in it many times before, not exactly in TikTok Reels, but in other short-term hack strategies that you start, but they just don't have any substance for you to grow. Now, what do I mean by that? In my case? Well, when I was learning digital marketing, there's a saying there that you've just got to learn everything, do everything, try everything. You blow a lot of money on courses that— and probably there wasn't a huge amount of courses, but there was structures. I remember when I say structures, there's like mini business structures. I remember buying a product called Business in the Box where you paid $10,000 and it was literally like a plug-and-play business that would just make you money while you sleep. And it was one of the most ridiculous things I've actually purchased in my life. It was a, you know, preset website with affiliate links everywhere and affiliate links going to Amazon or certain areas. And this was going back, oh, maybe 20 years ago. And it really, there was no strategy around it. It was just an empty shell. And that was one of the stupidest things that I did because I didn't buy the strategy. I bought a pre-done product But I didn't understand how that worked. I didn't understand it was for me or not. And when I say it was for me or not, not every TikTok reel, not every Instagram reel, not every YouTube video, anybody talking about growing a business, growing a fitness business is not— is the tactic that you wanna play, the strategy that you wanna do. And so I call this, you know, tactics versus roadmaps. They're 2 different things. A roadmap is a set structure plan for you to get to an outcome in a period of time, where a tactic is somebody said something in a short clip and you're taking that as gospel. When we say you, me, everybody, they go, oh, that sounds good. Let me just do that. Some people would call it, you know, copying. Some people would call it just, you know, cutting and pasting. And these things are all fine. I mean, even our programs, we give a lot of templates, cheat sheets, and most importantly, frameworks, frameworks that you can understand the framework and then change the direction of what you want. But certainly, I don't love to give tactical frameworks out unless there's some strategy and coaching behind it. Because otherwise, when it doesn't work, then you go back to the drawing board and say, well, how come that didn't work? I just thought this would work all the time. And so we wanna be really careful with the amount of information we have at the moment, the amount of way we consume information. We've got YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok. There is so many different people out there putting video content out there and talking about the best thing they've done in business. And this information is by far amazing. Because there is so many amazing people putting out information that you've never heard of before, which is quite like mind-blowing, the amount of info and free information of this that you can get your hands on. And so I remember years ago, there was like this information that's gonna be the next, the next wave, the information superhighway, you know, putting content out. I just think we've got so much content that with the amount of content we have, we need to curate the content. We need to understand what's for us and what's not for us. Now, what I, what I mean by that, like if you're hearing a piece of content for the first time in your own business coming from someone who's super, you know, have had many hours and practice and money that's gone into a tactic, that's gonna come off very different to someone who's just starting up your business. If you're just starting up your business, just starting up a PT business, taking on that strategy is a high-end strategy, but you may not know that because it sounds really good and it sounds really easy. There's so many, you know, in the internet marketing world, when I started out, a lot of information came from America. So when people say, when people say run this type of ad, it gets really cheap clicks and leads. I ran it, but in the Australian market, it's very, very different. And it takes some time to understand that. So, but I only found out that when I started to actually work with some coaches, specifically Australian coaches, to compare numbers and some stats and what they were doing as well. So I guess what I wanna get to here is that I believe this information we have is just amazing. It's great. But you wanna look for information that's really relevant to you and where you're progressing. And so one of the first things that I believe that you need to do is you'll need to get a plan. So number one, you'll need to get a plan. Then you wanna get that off. I feel anytime that I've ever done something and if I've ever seen people grow, they've always had an advisor advising them or a coach advising them The pathway to get there. That's number one. So I think you need to get someone to advise you to get to that outcome. And I, and I've never seen, very rarely I could say I've seen anybody that's— and if you, if you were going to do it by yourself, totally by yourself, you would have to have an extremely high level, extremely high level of discipline. structured discipline, smarts to, to understand which part has to go where to have, to have the growth that you need to have. And if you don't, that's totally fine. It's just gonna take you much longer to get there. And in certain parts, what I've done through when I've been a fitness professional, when I've been a a marketing consult, a consultant, when I've, when I've grown different businesses, sometimes I had a coach and sometimes I did it myself. Every time I did it myself, it takes around 3 to 4 times longer than if I was to get some clear soundproof advice. Number 2 is I would say you wanna get somebody that's at the next stage or progressing a few stages in front of you, but understands what you need to do wherever you are in the business and not copying their strategy or stage. That's really important. So if somebody's giving you sound advice, you want to make sure it's sound advice for the stage of business that you're at now, which is really important. Number 3, a coach is going to help you structure the business your particular business and have a look at it to see what you need to change, take out, and minus. And whatever the fee is, I think it's worth it. I look at things and going, well, if I'm, let's say I'm at $10,000 a month and I want to get to $50,000 a month in my business or $40,000, half a million dollar studio, I have a $30,000 problem. So over the space of 12 months, that's a $360,000 problem I have to get to the stage I need to get to. And so when you think about that and the way that works, I don't like to figure out if I can solve a $360,000 problem with TikTok Reels, viewing TikTok Reels or Instagram Reels or getting some free advice on YouTube. I think that's I, I think that's just stupidity because there's too much risk for that not to go your way. There's too much risk of like the unknowns because it's not focused information to you. So the other thing you can take on here is you can take on short courses, take on mini programs that if you're in a stage where you know what you're missing in your business, it might be Facebook ads. You need to learn how to do that. It might be organic marketing. It might be how to sell better. So if you can understand where you're falling short, then you can go and find the appropriate program or mini course that can get you, that can fix what you're going through right now and get you to the next point. And that's okay because it's a set structure to get you an outcome, and it's gonna get you some learnings, some progressions, some understandings as well. So just be careful on your business growth. Don't do what I did and hope that you're gonna get to a certain point without having a structure. I've tried it that way. It takes 3 to 4 times longer. I've tried it with business, tried it with business coaching, getting advisors aboard, and at every time it guarantees me growth much, much faster. And a lot of the time, I, you know, everybody pays attention when they pay. I'll say that again. Everybody pays attention when they pay. And for me, if I've got a big problem to solve, I wanna pay attention to the person that has done it multiple times and the person that knows exactly where the problem is and where that I need to get to. And so that is worth whatever the fee is to get it done, especially if your problem is big. If your problem's small and thinking, okay, I just, I just need to go from, you know, $200 a week to $300 a week, I think that's a really specific problem. And there's a, there's heaps of different strategies that can do that. And I wouldn't be paying big money to get that done because the problem over the year, when you look at that, it's a, what is that? Is it, it's like a $5,000 problem, you know? So again, everything's relative. You wanna invest in something that is not gonna be $5,000 worth that might be, let's say, $500 worth, you know, 10% of your problem. If you've got a $360,000 problem and, you know, you put 10% onto that, which could be marketing or coaching, whatever it's gonna be, the intent is to solve a bigger problem. Now, I'm not saying you have to go and spend $36,000 on that, but you get the point here is that whatever that fee is, if that's $2,000 for that, that's $5,000 for that, that $10,000 for that, it's still a substantial saving from what you're actually going to lose out if you don't have a structured approach. If you're in your head, you're watching on the sidelines. And that's another thing too. How many times have you watched on the sidelines seeing somebody grow and going, I'm just gonna copy their strategies. I'm just gonna go and look at their Facebook ads. We have people that go to our Facebook ads and literally just copy them. They'll go to your landing pages and copy them. I see it all the time. And you can do that. At the end of the day though, when that person or the strategy changes, you're, you're consistently having to just go and find that new strategy. You don't know what that person's strategy is. You don't know what they're spending money-wise. You don't know what the outcome is. You don't know a lot of different things. So if you are wanting to grow, Just think about how much you want to grow and think about the investment that you are putting into it. And you either put time in or you put money in, but make sure that you're really clear on that pathway. Focus on the roadmap, not the tactics, and you will grow your business so much faster. Close the noise of watching consistent Reels, stories. Be a, be a creator, not a consumer of content. What do I mean by that? You need to create more content than you consume. And when you do that, you learn much more and you grow much faster because you're actually outputting information. And then very fastly, you'll realize, is it working or not? And, you know, what's the action that you're getting back from that? So be careful of where you spend your time. Be careful of when things are free. They're not really free. Free is certainly not free. There's nothing that's cheap that's going to do the outcome that you want, especially if you're solving a big problem, because if it's cheap, it's mass market. If it's cheap, there's probably very rarely really focused strategy around you, your ups, your downs, your pitfalls, who you are. Yes, if business and life was that easy and weight loss is that easy, we just have a common thread to say, yep, eat more, weigh less. Well, if it was that easy, we wouldn't have an overweight population. If business was this easy, You wouldn't have— well, if this is that easy, everybody would be a multimillionaire with a higher profit margin, but it's not that easy. Every person has different circumstances. Sometimes the circumstance is our own mind. Sometimes it's past conditions. Sometimes the circumstance is the opportunity has gone in that kind of model that you're in. or that sector or that community. And sometimes when we look at these, there's certainly no way that our own eyes can, can understand that a lot of the time. And so, yes, not— it's not for everybody. Like, yes, some people will be able to get the timings, the structure, where things are in the world. But a lot of the time, you don't need to. You don't need to be super, super intelligent in business. You've just gotta follow a roadmap that's put in front of you that you know is set up specifically for you and who you are as a person and what your weaknesses are and what your strengths are. And then when tactics come, you can understand if the tactic is a good tactic or a bad tactic for you. So remember, by watching a lot of TikTok reels, I don't think it's gonna grow your business. By having a clear roadmap of the direction we need to go, talking with somebody, a coach, um, a consultant, is understanding who you are, listening to your backstory, seeing where you want to get to is a great way to grow at a, at a rapid pace to get you to your next outcome. And again, I don't want anybody here to be investing in something that's certainly not for them. You know, I go back to my story of Business in a Box. I think it's a great model for somebody who just wants to do cut and paste and doesn't want to create a brand. I think it's amazing and it's probably worked for a lot of people, but it didn't work for me and my personality. And I realized that after I go, okay, this certainly doesn't— it's not alignment with what I'm trying to do here. And so it didn't work for me. So it's really important to understand your alignment, what you want to do, what you don't want to do. And then we can, you know, move you to the next progression of where you wanna get to. Team, I hope that's helped talking about courses and structures on that. Every month we run a program called the Fast Fitness Clients. It's a small mastermind. It's 3 weeks, and we give you 6 different strategies, organic strategies that you can do to generate more clients. I just got off yesterday one of our clients in that program. And I think they had a small database, but they added an extra 5 clients, and there's one in the works to their business, and it brought them an extra $10,000 over a short period of time just by implementing the strategies because that's what they were missing. So for example, if you guys are missing out on more clients and you don't want to put money into Facebook ads, that, that is a great process that we link in my bio on Instagram or ComMarketing. And it's simply just $27. It's, it's, it does, it's, it's a no-brainer if that is your particular problem. You need more clients and leads. You have a small database on social media or emails and you want to learn the strategies to use that in a better structured way, that is what that's going to do. Um, you can go to commarketing.com.au and search for that. It's called the Fast Fitness Clients Team. Have an amazing day. I'll catch you next time on the Marketing Muscle Up podcast show. Bye for now.
