Wellness Wonders: Meet the co-founder of The Fitness Group

Wellness Wonders delves into the stories and innovations driving the UK’s thriving landscape of health, wellbeing, fitness, and nutrition. Join City A.M. as we meet the visionary minds and passionate entrepreneurs behind leading brands and the impact they’re making on the pursuit of wellness.

For this feature, City A.M. sit down with Steven Dick, the co-founder of The Fitness Group, one of the UK’s leading providers of personal trainer courses, who was on a mission to bring affordable and accessible learning to budding PTs.

What was your financial position when you started The Fitness Group?

We started our first business in 2015, an independent gym at 7,500 square feet in Glasgow. We had no significant savings, we only had around £3000 each plus an overdraft facility of around £1500 each. We bought gym equipment at over 150k in value on finance to buy agreement.

We had to make enough months of this gym business to ensure we covered our equipment purchase bills, the landlord bills, and all other bills (utility, staff etc). It is proof that you can start a reasonably big business with no funding and no initial investment.

We then developed The Fitness Group Education in 2017 and separated this business from the gym business in 2018. We had slightly more personal savings at this point after 2-3 years of successfully growing the gym business however this was still a relatively low level of savings.

Personally, we did not own our own home at this point for example. We grew the business locally around Glasgow and the west coast of Scotland and we used the profit within the business to incrementally grow the business to become the UK’s leading fitness education training provider.

Did you actively decide to bootstrap your business and if so, why? 

We had the experience of launching the gym business successfully without the need to take on loans or investment so we knew we could do the same with our education business.

The gym as a bricks-and-mortar business with huge equipment overheads was much harder at the initial launch stage to do without investment. With The Fitness Group, the fixed costs are much lower so we knew that if we gradually grew the variable costs, marketing expenses, staffing etc in line with gradual growth we could utilise business profit to do this, alongside paying ourselves.

This would involve sacrifice initially, taking a low level of profits out of the business personally to aid the business growth, however, it was a sacrifice we were willing to take for increased growth over the longer term.

Can you describe how you successfully bootstrapped The Fitness Group? 

We gradually grew the business over time. Initially, Scott, my business partner, carried out most of the tutoring, alongside picking up sales and I took the responsibility of growing the brand, marketing and finances. We had a small team of three, us both and our internal quality control officer who was very experienced in the fitness education industry.

In the period of 2018 to 2020, we harnessed organic social media, referrals, and partnerships to grow the brand. This allowed us to quickly expand and by 2019 we had moved from locally educating in Glasgow and the west coast of Scotland on to all of Scotland, Manchester, the Midlands, and London.

Covid and the lockdown period helped us to expand and take advantage of the growth in learners’ desire to study online and develop new careers. We moved away from in-person education to a purpose-built learning platform and a full-time timetable for expert-led lectures. We pivoted quicker than any other training provider and had this up and running on day one of lockdown. During the same period, other training providers had paused trading to ‘wait and see what would happen next.’

We continued to successfully bootstrap the company by reinvesting in growth from retained profits, reinvesting in marketing activity, expert agency support and the growth of the team.

What size did you manage to grow the firm?

During our initial growth phases in 2018 to 2020 we grew our physical locations across key cities across the UK, namely Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, London, the Midlands, Birmingham, Derby and Nottingham.

Our quick innovation and pivot at the onset of Covid then allowed us to cover all corners of the UK with the focus turned to online learning.

We are now targeting international expansion and we have a suite of international qualifications ready to deliver outside the UK.

We have grown our partnerships to support some of the biggest and most respected UK organisations, including the MOD Police Force, PFA England, PFA Scotland, Football League Education, and many of the local authorities across the UK. We are proud to support lots of charities that change lives through employment and new careers, for young people, disadvantaged individuals, and unemployed adult learners.

We have grown the business revenue to 1.5 million and we are forecasting a growth of this to 2 million+ year to date.

What challenges did you face while bootstrapping The Fitness Group? 

We have had some challenging times over the earlier years. Ultimately when we had quieter months or periods as owners, we had to take the financial burden of paying our team first – which led to virtually no available dividends for Scott and I.

This is the risk you take as a business owner and over the long term it has been worth it however in the months when you have no financial income it is a difficult situation to be in both financially and mentally.

We grew too quickly in 2021 to 2022 and found ourselves over-employing, we grew quickly and, in an attempt, to support the growth we hired too many tutors. This ultimately led to a reduction in profits and proved challenging to reinvest in the business to our planned levels. We even had a few months where cash flow was so tight we were working to the final hour before salary payday to ensure the business could meet our expense payments.

We had to reduce our team’s size slightly at this point and re-plan our team growth over the next 12 to 24 months.

The business has consistently performed well year on year since we founded the business and there has been a linear growth in revenue every year. We are fortunate and grateful to be in a position today where our fantastic team can support thousands of learners each year in the fitness industry to change their careers and change people’s lives.