The news is usually always bleak to TV. But you will remember that in 2008 we were supposed to be going into the worst recession since 1930.
From a personal perspective, a lot of things happened to us as a gym since then. From doing personal training non stop for many years, I had taken over the gym as my dad got ill and was intent on making it better, by investing in it out of profits made.
There was no profits to start with, and purchasing new stuff was slow and confined to smaller items.
As the gym grew, we started making more money and the discipline stayed as we continued to invest the profits directly into the gym, and we started buying more expensive highest quality equipment.
We became so busy training people and developing the gym, I didn’t think too much of the recession and 13 years of austerity to come, as my mind was working at 2000 miles an hour.
We hit bigger and bigger milestones through the incredible support of our loyal members.
Based on surface area after the purchase of the land to the back of us, the footprint of the gym area including outside grew massively incorporating outside sports, a great surface in any weather and a permanent outside area for classes which was a game changer-Dan Smith was incredible making it happen, and brother Martin, as well as Star Forge making custom made incredible equipment for outside.
Our online training with the help of Coleg Sir gar (Steven Morgan big thanks and Louis Dare) became a reality on a professional platform after 18 months of studying with them in the IT one to one business training.
Politically we had Brexit in 2016, and then we hit a different world in March 2020. Little did I know we would be closed inside the gym for 49 out of 61 weeks, but our outside investment became a life saver and we got going finding a way to make it happen outside.
Nobody thought we could make it work but we had great classes every morning and evening in great weather, plus monsoons and even snow on occasions, but our amazing members kept on coming, and we developed togetherness on a level that was incredible and emotional to live through.
Our online training was already in place so we could hit the ground running, and really took off when we started doing live sessions that could be watched anytime, that has continued as we currently have 1650 videos available to watch on our gym site, new one still goes on daily.
The point of this is to remind you that if you focus on what you can control, and don’t worry so much about what you can’t, you have a fighting chance in any recession. There are many great businesses I know in Burry Port, Llanelli and Swansea as well as businesses I train online like On Track expanding building bike courses all over Europe even in tough times, quality and devotion to serving your customer will always do well and I am deeply inspired by these businesses daily.
My recession advice that will help you immediately? Get up much earlier, turn off the news, put that time you used to spend scrolling your phone and the internet INTO your business instead, and watch what you thought you were capable of grow like crazy with the time and effort you put into it and keep investing into it, then your horizons and hopes for the future will soon shock you and everyone else around you.
You can’t do any of this without great health so start training regularly, look after yourself with as much natural food as possible, make sure you have positive supportive friends around you and ditch the energy vampires who tell you that you can never achieve anything, and hit the sack early most night, especially in the week so you have the energy to outwork anyone.
P.S. I had three football mad kids from 2008 on and got married to Nicola (who has been a tremendous help in our business and gym) in New York in 2015 and have had tremendous support from all of them to get us through all of this which I am forever grateful for, keep working hard and make it happen, believe in yourself and smash this recession out of the park.
