The Story of My First Online Business & The Mistakes I Made

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Last Updated on June 23, 2021 by Tyler Clark

There’s a common business mistake you don’t want to fall prey to if you’re entering the business world. It’s a sneaky mistake because you kind of get trapped in it over time and one day, you turn around and go: “Oh no, what have I done!?”

That’s what happened to me.

I made a 15 year long business mistake! Ok it wasn’t a compete mistake. I’m making it sound worse than it was. It was more of a strategic error. Lucky for me, I was able to remedy it to an extent.

But, if I was starting over, I would never make the same mistake again.

The Business Mistake

The age old business mistake I made was to become the dreaded self employed consultant. I was a personal trainer by trade and when I started working, the first place I worked at was a gym. Eventually, I thought it would be a good idea to start training clients on my own so, that’s what I did. I became a self employed personal trainer with my “own business”.

Before I knew it, I had a full clientele and was working in my own little business. The money was pretty good and I was making my way along just fine for for awhile.

I genuinely thought I had a real business.

The mistake was of course that I had built the business around myself. If anything went wrong with me, the money stopped. I didn’t have employee benefits or unemployment coverage. I didn’t even have coverage to have my teeth cleaned.

I had unknowingly put myself in somewhat of a compromised and risky financial position.

I always thought being a trainer was a good job. You get good pay for your time, you work with athletes and business folks and you get to be health conscious. Not the worst thing you could do for a living and I was really passionate about it too.

Seemed like a good fit and it was for a really long time and I don’t regret it.

I don’t regret it but I definitely learned from it.

The Business Mistake Gets Worse

After awhile, I started to get tired after long days of training people. It was also hard when I learned new things because I couldn’t train more people and show them the new stuff. I was full and had no room to take on new clients.

Then, summer and Christmas would come along and some of my clients would go away on vacations or take time off. That didn’t bode well for my rent money and though I was a good trainer, I certainly wasn’t good enough to get some filler clients during the holidays. This meant forced pay cuts during certain parts of the year.

Eventually, I started to worry that I would never move forward in my job and I’d have to struggle during off times of the year. Sure I could raise rates but, only within the range of industry standard. I could open a gym or go online but I didn’t really know how to do any of that stuff at the time.

Nevertheless, I’d become aware of the dangerous situation I was in and I started looking for a way out.

The Business Exit Plan

The first thing I realized is that I didn’t need to quit my day job. I made a decent living as a trainer, I just wanted to supplement it. I just felt like I needed a safety net for those quiet times and for emergencies.

The second thing I figured out is that there were very few trainers running successful gyms or going online and making good  money. Many of the gyms were struggling in my town because space was at an absolute premium. The other aspect to this was that gyms do best by having large memberships, they don’t make a lot of money off of personal training. It’s more of an add on service they just provide to members.

So how about going online? Honestly, at the time, it wasn’t like it is now, (now you should definitely go online). If I was starting now, I would go online right away. That being said, the online trainer is a different breed than I was. I was a good technical trainer and a strong coach but I sucked at Facebook and I didn’t really want to be “all over the net”.

I’d seen a few trainers do well on the web but they were super outgoing and engaging people. They were almost like actors, they shined in the spotlight.

I disliked the spotlight. I dislike it to this very day.

So, now what?

Was There Any Way Out?

I could’ve gotten a completely new job but I still wanted to stay in the industry so, I kept looking for options.

The brick and mortar gyms for trainers didn’t seem like a good way to go. I literally had gone around to gyms and asked colleagues if anybody was doing well and literally none of them were. So, that was out.

What if I hired another trainer and built a training business?

Hiring more trainers when you’re a small outfit and can’t advertise for more clients doesn’t go great either. Trainers don’t hang around too long if you can’t give them new clients. Forget that idea.

It was back to looking at an online option.

I don’t know how I came across it but I had learned about membership sites at some point. Membership sites only offered their content to paying members. This was content the search engines couldn’t see and thus it wouldn’t get spread all over the internet.

Sure you had to put a little bit of content on the front end but it wasn’t the kind of thing where you were going to be everywhere.

I liked this idea. It was sort of a half and half of being out there but not being everywhere. Lots of blogs are like this if you’re looking for another online option.

The Way Out

I had been a good athlete and knew a fair amount about training for a few sports. I thought it might be an idea to build a membership site around one of the sports and put some training content on it and see how it went. I had literally nothing to lose except the embarrassment and time lost on the project if it went south. I figured I could deal with those parameters.

Starting a website costs virtually nothing. I built the website on WordPress because I knew it needed to be a stand alone website. I used S2Member, a free membership plugin on WordPress which still works today and I used Bluehost to host it. They were like 4 dollars a month for great hosting, I was happy to pay it and I highly recommend them if you ever build a website of your own.

The site took about two or three months to build and fill with content. I built it myself which in retrospect, was a big mistake. Two smashed up keyboards later, I was a more balanced human being and I now had a membership website.

The Site Goes Live

I didn’t do a launch for the site.

There was no grand opening, and I didn’t tell anyone because I was so worried it would fail. I thought, if I don’t tell anyone, at least I can suffer in silence if this thing crashes and burns. Who cares anyway, I only blew a couple of months on the side and it’s no big deal if it doesn’t work. -Real positive attitude Tyler.

Once I got the it up, nothing really happened for a few months. I kind of knew this would be the case since people would probably not join up the first time they visited the site.

Then, I get this email. It was from a fairly prominent coach in the sport and it was nasty.

I need to give you a bit of context here, I’d written the site in a format where you click a heading to an article and it takes you to a page where it says the content is only for members. On this page, it lists information about the content and asks you if you want to join. It’s a pretty standard membership site model.

Back to the email. The coach basically believed all my statements were not true. Of course, the coach had never joined the site to see if their beliefs in the email were true or not. They just felt like leaving an opinion.

Being an honest john, I’d done everything I’d posted about and my results were real. I looked over the site and felt my claims were fine. They weren’t over exaggerated and it was as if my new site just got it’s first character scratch.

It felt great. My worries about the site failing all washed away.

The fact was that the ice was now broken and I could’ve cared less what people had to say after that.

My First Member!

I started getting some members a little while later and man, it was so exciting! The feeling of waking up and seeing an email that someone had joined my site was awesome. I think the first member was only for twenty dollars for the month but it didn’t matter, it wasn’t about the money. It was about the validation! It felt like I’d completed something and gotten this little reward.

Over the years, the site garnered more and more members. Because it was a niche site aimed at a very specific group, I knew it would never make loads of money but it did make that little pile of side cash for me. I felt like I had a little bit of a safety net in case I needed it.

I also had sales from time to time. This is the power of a platform or a properly built business. It has the utility to produce money and you control the dial. If you need more money, you can turn up the dial. Sounds crazy right? It kind of is but that’s the beauty of free enterprise. You’re allowed to build something like this and give it a go.

There are of course no guarantees that it will work for sure but, we’re all allowed to take our shot.

Here’s How A Sale Would Go

I had built an email list up over a few years and I would email the people on the list about an upcoming sale. By this time, I not only offered monthly memberships but also 3 month, 6 month and full year memberships to the site.

The sales would often get a few people to buy and on my end, there was no cost except to paste in the sales email into my email autoresponder. I used AWeber in case you’re wondering. Yes I’m promoting them because they were good back then and they’re excellent now.

Anyway, remember how I used to have those quiet months as a trainer? This was a way to offset that situation. If you have a real business, you can control your income to an extent. This is such a crazy powerful tool to have and that’s why I feel so strongly about it.

I couldn’t go and sell extra training during the quiet months. Most of the time, they were just dead months. It’s really hard to get new personal training clients during December. The other big piece of this situation is that I had to do the training of said new clients if I got them.

Even if I had a sale in late November to get new money coming in for December’s quiet time, I didn’t have the room in January to train the new clients. My regular clients were coming back and I had to train them so it was pointless to have a sale in the first place.

This wasn’t the case with the sports site. I could get lots of members. There was no danger of not being able to train them. Sure, more members meant a few more questions but the amount of time it takes to answer a few questions was fine. I was also able to answer these questions during any part of the day too. There was a lot of flexibility to the sports site that I didn’t have with my personal training clients.

Good Business Versus Bad Business

I can’t say that my personal training business was a bad business. It gave me a full time job for 15 years and lots of experience in the health and fitness industry which no doubt helped with the sports site. I can say for a fact that the sports site was a good business. Though it was a small one, it was a really good business. It was a better design and had a better format than my personal training business.

I had learned from my mistakes in the personal training business and that’s what had helped me set up the sports site business. Had I not made the business mistakes with the personal training business, I’m not sure if I ever would have built the sports site. And that would’ve been a shame.

What Should You Do?

I highly suggest looking at your situation and figuring out if you can build your own sports site of sorts. It doesn’t have to be on sports, It can be on anything really. If you don’t love the spotlight, give the membership site format or start a blog. It’s a nice way to circumvent the blast your face everywhere approach to online marketing.

If you don’t have atopic, perhaps you can join up with a friend and start something together.

In closing, the web is such a good learning space for this and unlike personal training, it has lots of options to grow your business properly because it’s reach is so vast. This is special and even today, we sometimes forget how powerful the internet business can be even if you’re a personal trainer who can’t code and breaks keyboards.

Check out my Resources Page. I have some affiliate links there to products that helped me build my sports site and many sites after that.

Watch out for these business mistakes and try not to get stuck in them but if you do get caught, look for a way out because there are almost always options. The world seems to keep coming up with new ones all the time. Good luck with your new site and look forward to your first character scratch, it may be the best thing that ever happens to you in business.

Best of Wealth,

Tyler.