From Local Gym to a -2.5M Brand - Tim Beynon on Fitness Business Growth

This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now, Sebastian Russ. Kim, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, my friend. A pleasure. Hey, thanks for being here. It's so great to connect with you. I know that we had an opportunity to meet through the great Dan Martell's Agreed. Yeah. One of the best. I think just about the best I've ever had. I've had a ton. I've been in loads of groups, loads of coaching groups, loads of one-to-one coaches, loads of events. For me, Dan, I agree. That's how I describe him, Michael. He's the best coaching I've ever had. He's like a hug with I heard you say that on another app. Yeah, I love that. It's so true. But that's the best coaching, right? I love it when a coach just boom, just Sometimes I think he said it before. It's like he or maybe somebody described him. It's like he. Talks to entrepreneurs and business owners the way you need to be talked to. He's going to he's going to use colorful language. He's not going to sugarcoat anything. He's going to go right in the paint, but he's also going to tie in some compassion, too. And that's a that's a lethal combo right there when you can just go in there and just just absolutely rip someone's head off and then, you know, cradle them. you know, towards the end with a, with a game plan on what to go and do. So yeah, he's a great human too. That's, that's, that's, that's the, that's the even better part about it. And he's produced an incredible community by default. Like that, that community of business owners, entrepreneurs, and humans is just a second to none. So. Amazing. And this is how we met and we've ended up here. I love it. Now Look at that. And I still love the title, but it took me a while to figure out podcasts suck. Like Okay, good, good. Now you get it. Yeah. That's my podcast about podcasting. This one's story-based. So beyond the story is I like to speaking of that leads me right into what I was going to say next. I love to tell people's stories, but for context, for our listeners, I always like to go back to the beginning of the story. So our listeners can really understand where this all started. Now the beginning is different for everybody. So let's take a few minutes, bring us back to the beginning of the story and what brought you to present day. I know you got a lot of irons in the fire with what you do. Very, very unique combination of a business. I love it. And I'm excited to Let me do that. And I'm going to do the quick version because I know we're about 12 minutes total, right? So I've got like a three hour version of this for you. Another time we'll meet someone somewhere, but I'll give you the quick version. So walked into a martial arts hall, kickboxing when I was 14 years old, 33 years ago. I know I don't look old enough, right? I'll take my hat off. Now I look old enough, right? I walked in and I fell head over heels in love with kickboxing and then martial arts. It has been a wonderful journey. What made me fall in love with it, and I always laugh at this because I think 33 years ago, you had to be slightly unstable to do martial arts. It's tamed. A lot of martial arts is more gentle and a bit more sensible nowadays. My very first session, I nearly puked in the corner through the fitness, which I couldn't handle. Then at the end, I had to spar the instructor. He said, okay, are you ready? I said, I kind of think so. I don't really know what sparring is. It kind of looks like fighting, but I don't really get it. Let's have a go. And someone walked in the door to the gym where we were training, and I looked over at the person who'd walked in and then got round kick straight in the face. He said, let that be your first lesson. Never take your eyes off your opponent. I love it. I'm in. I'm hooked. This is insane. So I nearly died. I nearly threw up and then got kicked in the face by the instructor. And for my ridiculous 14-year-old world and view on the world, that was it. I was in. I was hooked, fell in love. And so I went on this wonderful journey. I've spent probably about 25 years out of the last 33 kind of working in the martial arts industry. I've supported dance businesses as well. And I've helped other people build their businesses within the industry. And I've built my own. I've built and lost my own as well. I've been through a wonderful journey. I think never quite fully in the business world until you've actually lost one, right? You got to do a crash at some point. And 18 years ago, I had a martial arts business, lost everything, a hundred grand of debt, house, wife, car, gone, like the full shebang, did it all and learned the most amazing lessons from that. As you always do, it was a tough couple of years, but learned some stunning lessons out the end of And then I went and worked for a couple of other places. And I kind of really wanted to learn and figure out where my shortcomings were and how to figure out this business thing, especially in my niche, which is kickboxing, martial arts, yoga, and dance, which is what we run. And then it led me to about seven years ago. Yeah, this is the short version. There's a whole ton of stuff in there. But it led me about seven years ago to start this brand, which is Elite Ladies Kickboxing, which we started with. So we very much did a ladies-only brand. We do juniors and bits and pieces now, but ladies is still our core, our ladies only brand. And then about four years later, we added the dance to it. And then we've literally just launched four months ago. Now we've just launched a ladies only yoga brand here in the UK. So we're dotted across South of the UK. We're in London. We're across to Bude in Cornwall. We're down pretty much to the South coast and we're up to kind of Warwickshire. But if you've got a mainly American audience, they won't have a freaking clue what I'm talking about out of that apart from London. All over the US, all over the UK. And now we're at a point, Seb, Sebastian, we've got about 2,700 members. We turned over 2.5 million US last year. I franchised it out. I've kept the yoga and a bit of the dance on an ownership model. We've got 240 of our members that are instructors and training to be instructors. We're on a bit of a build now because of the wonderful people like Dan Martell and the other coaches and mentors I've had. We've kind of building this beautiful vision now of taking it to 100,000 members across the UK, 100 million US turnover. That's the big, beautiful vision that we are now chasing for various reasons, which might come out in the next seven or eight minutes. How was that? Is that That was great. That was a great catch-up session. I feel like I've caught up How many do you want? This is another one. I've got a list of 100 things. We'll do the short version. So you can relate. I think anyone running a business can relate. The hardest part would take me a while to think of what I think is the hardest. Let me just reel some. So I think the courage to keep going is huge because I think business isn't for everyone. I think kind of anyone could to a degree, but not everyone's geared and set up for it. I think it's a gladiator sport. I think it's for warriors and whatever form your warriorship comes in. I think Most businesses fail. Interesting statistics. I'm sure you've heard them. 80% of businesses are gone in the first five years. 96% are gone in the first 10 years. And when you get to the 15-year mark, 1% left. So for every 100 businesses that opened today, one of them's left in 15 years. And I think that tells a story. Business is really tough. I think it's the only space in the world. I used to say it was parenting and business. I used to say parenting and business are the only two places where you have to grow. But then I started to realize, well, some parents don't grow. Some parents are shit parents forever, right? So that's not right. But business, if you want your business to build and to actually be a successful business, there's no chance of you staying the same person you are right now. So if you've got a business at 100 grand, 200 grand, 300 grand, 400 grand turnover, whatever, and you want to push to the next level, you have to change. There's got to be a different version of you showing up at a million, a different version at two, a different version at five. And I think that's the hardest part about it. We cling very often the skills and the mindset and the identity that get us to a decent level. To give you an idea, I coach owners of dance, gymnastics, martial arts, yoga, CrossFit, anyone who runs an in-person fitness class-based business. I coach those owners. And specifically, I coach the owners who get stuck around 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 grand. Around that range, they hit a ceiling. It's all about them. It's all on them. They can't push through it. They don't know how to break through. And I help them understand the simple levers to pull to break through that revenue ceiling, get to their first million plus year and then beyond that in their business. And the issue they've all got is that what got them to two, three, 400 grand, the skills, the mindset, the habits that got them there now won't work to take them from four or 500 up to a million. So I think the short answer to what you've just said, I think it's the hardest thing. I think business confronts every single insecurity inside you. I think it hits every ounce of doubt and fear and self-worth and insecurity that you ever hold inside. And we've all got a ton of them. I've still got loads. I think trying to build a business just hits them all. Because you're constantly getting feedback from the market. You're constantly getting feedback from your customers. You're constantly getting feedback from your team. And it's not always pretty feedback, right? It's always butting up against your limitations. And that's painful. And unless you've got a warrior spirit to be in business, I think that's what cripples a lot of business owners and makes them stop, makes them quit. And even if they don't stop the business, they kind of just quit emotionally and What's the very best part about having the business besides the money? Yeah. So I mean, it's impact all day long, right? It's just the love. We've built such beautiful communities. It's the impact and the love we get to share. And what we've done specifically well in my brands, I say, and we're not perfect at it and we still make mistakes and I get that, but we're really good at creating community. And the whole vibe of our brand was, let's make kickboxing accessible to all women. I don't care if they're 25 stone, if they're suffering with anxiety, depression, mental health, if they've got a weird, wacky, quirky personality, if they're ridiculously shy and can't speak to people. I just don't care what's going on for them. I want to create a space where they can come in and they can hit stuff and they can learn some cool kickboxing and they can become part of a community. And we've got this wonderful kind of tagline to our brand now, Women Empowering Women. which is kind of funny because I'm a dude, but I'm the only dude out of 2,700 people in the organization. So you're like the women empowering women. And I've got this beautiful community. So that's the one. I think I love creating opportunity for my team, for my members to learn and develop as well. And when I turn it back to me, it's the freedom. So it's what the money gives. And I'm blessed enough now. I've built the business to a place and I've built the team to a place where I get to go for a dog walk every day with my wife whenever I want. We hit the cafe up most mornings for brunch. I hit the gym whenever I want, and I work whenever I want. I work on what I want and with who I want. So just hit that beautiful blessing that I think we all yearn for, which is that freedom and flexibility of the day. I don't want freedom from work, just for clarity, because people chase that, and that's bullshit, and you'll be miserable as sin, no question, because I did that a couple of years ago. handed over my last class and I got to chill out a little bit. And my wife came out of nursing and she's done with that career. And we kind of didn't really have a lot to do. We weren't mega rich or anything, but we had enough from the business kind of, it was just trickling in. And I remember we got about three months into it and we were both miserable, like flat, like nowhere, like almost like it, not quite a depression, but like it was starting to edge into that sort of energy. Right. And that was one of the greatest lessons I've ever had. I've read it in books. People sell the business, sit on the beach, bored out their skin to kind of feel it myself. So it's the freedom. And I think it's just how we get to just give I absolutely love it. So we got the worst part, which really isn't the worst part kind of sort of is. I mean, that's business ownership one on one. Then we got the best part of there. And so how long This one, seven and a half years. Our brand has been going, we launched just before COVID. So that was an interesting time. Yeah. Well, Tim, it's been great to, to finally meet you here, even though it's virtually and meet you over a podcast. Um, something that I do a lot of, um, band, I really appreciate you taking some time out of your day. I know I had a little bit of a time difference in between you over the pond and me here in the States, but we made it happen. Uh, any final thoughts for our listeners? I think Just do two things, just keep showing up, keep iterating. I think if you keep showing up, you beat 95% of the people who quit. But it's not about just showing up because you can just beat your head against the same wall for 20 years and not get successful. Keep showing up and keep iterating, keep improving, keep refining, keep trying to make things better. You literally are Sebastian, my brother, it's an absolute pleasure, my friend. Can't wait to see you over here I'm looking forward to that. Thanks again, man. Thanks for having See you. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. We sure do appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios.