I guess if I were going to sum it up in 5 words, those would be the five. But I’m going to share a little more in hopes that my journey can be of a little help to you in your own.
I’m a 49 year old guy that has built his share of successes from the ground up…and more importantly, have a beautiful wife, two incredible boys and a business that allows me to spend most of my time with them along with family and friends.
In the past decade I’ve built over a dozen businesses as a CEO and Co-Owner, with five becoming million dollar or multi-million dollar ventures. Two of those businesses, Athletic Revolution and Fitness Revolution, have been multiple time winners on the Entrepreneur Franchise 500 with each being the #1 franchise for it’s respective market. Another business, Fitness Consulting Group, was a multiple time honoree on the Inc. 5000, placing as high as #580 on the list of fastest growing businesses in the U.S. I’ve also been a Best-Selling Author 6 times over, presented in front of thousands of entrepreneurs and been featured in Entrepreneur, Men’s Health, USA Today and on hundreds of other media outlets.
“When it comes to sales, I’ve personally sold as many as 116 franchises in a single year and been the strategist and copywriter for over 10 million dollars in online sales from my own businesses and millions more in sales for my clients.”
In the fitness industry alone, my coaching & consulting clients have been featured in places like Men’s Health, USA Today, Men’s Fitness, Shape, Women’s Heath, Huffington Post and on ABC, CBS, NBC and pretty much any other media outlet you can think of. In addition to that, they’ve built some of the most successful businesses and brands in ever corner of the industry, from local business and supplement companies to online businesses, certification organizations and even became best selling authors. In fact, many (if not most) of the experts providing business coaching in the fitness industry have been my clients, customers or franchisees.
And the best part of this? I’ve been able to do all of these things and more while working from home, coaching my kids in baseball and soccer and enjoying a type of entrepreneurial lifestyle I would have never thought possible just a few short years ago.
How I Got Here
I grew up in Portsmouth, Ohio not really interested in being an Entrepreneur…no, I wanted to be a Major League Baseball Player.
As I grew up and recognized that making the Major Leagues wasn’t in my future (though I did have one very inauspicious season playing professional baseball), I set my sights on coaching.
At the age of just 23 I became the youngest College Head Baseball Coach in the country at Shawnee State University. While this may sound mildly impressive, I pretty much got the job because the program was in shambles and there weren’t many people interested in the position.
Over the next 6 years I built this program into a nationally competitive one, setting dozens of record and even finishing 5th at the World Series in 2000.
All this would lead you to think that things were rosy, but they weren’t. There was a great deal of friction between myself and an administrator that led to my resignation and a complete change of direction shortly before I turned 30.
At the time I referred to it as an early mid-life crisis, but being unemployed briefly gave me some time to decide what I wanted to do professionally with the rest of my life. My first ‘career’ as a baseball coach was rewarding and taught me many of the lessons I use today, but working in a corporate, bureaucratic environment just wasn’t for me.
I knew that I wanted to own my own business, but in spite of growing up working as a janitor in my dad’s small auto repair business, I really didn’t know the first thing about being an entrepreneur.
Within a month I took a position as a general manager at a baseball and performance training facility and did some personal training in the mornings to try to make ends meet. I started to study business, sales and marketing…the beginnings of my professional education. The baseball facility was sold and I moved to a role running the personal training in one gym, then later for all of the Gold’s Gyms in Kentucky.
Going Into Business
My home base for this position was Lexington, KY. There, not only did I meet my lovely wife Holly, but I also met a future business partner as I moved away from being an employee to being an entrepreneur.
Soon after, we first opened a personal training business in Elizabethtown, KY, then a health club in Owensboro, KY. We didn’t have any money to get these businesses off the ground and at age 33 I found myself along with my wife and my then 3 year old stepson living in the basement of a home that we shared with that business partner and another roommate.
Before long we started to have some real success (yes, even moving out of the basement), and looking to expand. We began sharing what had worked in our own businesses with other fitness entrepreneurs. After attending an industry event that focused on online businesses, we focused more of our expansion in that direction and shelved the idea of adding more of our own gyms.
Over the next few years what started as a small personal training business grew to a network of businesses ranging from franchises and certification companies to info-marketing businesses and real estate.
These days I’ve found my true professional calling – coaching and consulting with entrepreneurs who want more clients, more profits and more freedom to enjoy life. I’ve personally been able to build my ‘ideal business’ that so much is written about and I’ve done at a time in my life when I had a family, a mortgage and many of the responsibilities that hold people back from pursuing their entrepreneurial dreams.
So if you want to build your ideal business…regardless of where you’re at today…this is the place where you’ll find the blueprint to get you there.
