Erin Wilson, Temporarily Burntout, Leaves the Fitness Industry and Comes Back To Start Own Her Gym at 25
This episode was brought to you by the Hunter Futurepreneurs Program.
Erin Wilson discovered her passion while she was still in university. However, it wasn’t exactly what she had planned. Erin studied Exercise and Sports Science at University and after finishing her degree Erin didn’t want to take the obvious career route and instead wanted to share her passion with those who were looking to make a positive change in their lives.
‘At the end of my Exercise Science degree, I was just like, “Nope.” And I was like, “This isn’t what I wanted to do. This isn’t where I want to go.” I had a little crisis. And then I found this job working for Vision Personal Training in Gladesville.’ -Erin Wilson
Erin became a personal trainer and with a lot of hard work she was making a difference, but her passion began to turn into a grind and the numbers game of getting bums on seats, not being able to focus on achieving a quality outcome for her clients was beginning to take a toll. After needing to step away for a while, Erin returned and started her own gym, Urban Base Fitness, at 25 years old. Taking everything she had learnt she was able to build the right environment and focus on the outcomes that her clients wanted.
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Transcript
Erin:
I think to trust yourself, to trust your intuition, to know, because in the back of their heads, they know that they can do it.
Adam:
Welcome to the Youngpreneur Podcast brought to you by The Hunter Futurepreneurs Program.
The Hunter Futurepreneurs program has been designed to inspire, educate, mentor and connect future entrepreneurs to start or build a sustainable business.
It’s a free program for young people supported by the Commonwealth Government, under the Entrepreneurship Program Initiative.
On the show, you’ll meet other young people, not unlike yourself. These young entrepreneurs had an idea for a business and decided to take action and just got to work creating an opportunity for themselves. If you enjoy these stories please join us by subscribing to the podcast and checking out the other ways you can get involved by visiting the show notes at hunterfuturepreneurs.com.au/erin.
I’m your host Adam Spencer and I’d like to introduce you to your mentor today.
Erin:
I’m Erin Wilson and I am the owner and director of Urban Base Fitness.
Adam:
Erin started her business when she was 25, after a lot of experience, of both ups and downs and after leaving the fitness industry Erin came back stronger than ever to start her own Gym. We start this conversation off with me asking Erin what she studied at Uni.
Erin:
I did Exercise and Sports Science at uni, I had this idea of what that might mean. I had that idea in my mind of what that could look like for me in terms of a job. I’ve always wanted to help people and share my passion and see if I can’t change the industry a little bit. When I was going through the Exercise and Sports Science pathway, I learned all the things that made me a really good PT today, and a really good S&C coach today, and I don’t regret that. But when I went through the uni it was very, I felt very institutionalised, my next step for success is to then go on and be an exercise physiologist, or to then go on and work with unhealthy clientele that might need that little bit more of a scientific understanding of heart rate and things like that. And for me, I put a stopper on it and was like, “Hang on a minute, my understanding of exercise physiology is that they get sent to you from a doctor.” A lot of the time they don’t want to be there, sometimes it can be too late for a lot of those guys in terms of changing their lives completely. And I’m not disregarding that space there, I think that’s so important, but it just wasn’t for me. I looked around and was like, that’s not what I thought, that’s not what I felt for myself. And I’m sure so many people have gone to uni and gone, “This isn’t what I thought,” but finished it because they go, “I’ve got to finish that degree,” or, “My next step would be to do this thing.” So, at the end of my Exercise Science degree, I was just like, “Nope.” And I was like, “This isn’t what I wanted to do. This isn’t where I want to go.” I had a little crisis. And then I found this job working for Vision Personal Training in Gladesville. To me, it was like, “Okay, this is what I want to do.” And it might sound like a little bit of a fall from grace from someone who always wanted to be, always wanted to succeed in life, I always wanted to do really well, I wanted to make something of myself. And a lot of the time after all that, and trying really hard through school, through uni, all that sort of stuff, and it’s people ask what I am and I’m like, “Well, I’m a PT.” So some people can seem like, “Oh, okay, right.” But I think you can be a PT and then you can be the best PT. And I was like, “Well, if this is the space I love,” and I absolutely loved it. I loved the people, the growth, helping people out, utilizing practically what I’d learned at uni and understanding that and just seeing results in people. That was just, that was awesome, it was everything I could ask for in a job. So I went, “Well, if I’m going to do this then I’m going to be the best at it, and I’m going to change what that looks like, what a PT may be.”
Adam:
Why do you care so much about that? Why do you care so much about people, and helping people, getting the results that they want in their life?
Erin:
I think it’s really, really rewarding. If you can do what you love and be passionate about it every day and you can feel that you’re making a difference. I think making a difference, it might come back to, if I can make a difference in someone else’s life, then that makes me feel awesome. And if I can feel like that all day, every day, with multiple clients every week, then that to me is a happy life, feeling of purpose, if that makes sense. That’s my feeling of purpose that I can help and change people’s lives, I think.
Adam:
Why did you want to study, was it Sports Science?
Erin:
Sports Science, yes, Exercise and Sports Science.
Adam:
Why did you want to study that?
Erin:
So I think it comes back to, I’m an ex-athlete myself, I was really sporty through school, it was something that I loved. But not only that, very early on it was clear that sharing that was even better than success within the sport itself. Sharing that and making a career out of that, to me sounded really cool. Because as a female athlete at the time, I was a footballer, if I were to succeed within football, which, I ended up succeeding fairly well. I went to Sydney uni, I got an elite athlete scholarship there, it helped me go through my uni degree with a little bit of money on the side. And eventually I did get a contract offer for Western Sydney Wanderers. But at that point in time for me, and for the age, and the time that I went through, it was 2,300 for a season. Which, by the time I did get that offer I was already working for Vision, I was making that in a week and a half. So for me, it was like, this might not be something that I can do now, but I can still make something or make a career out of this and then hopefully then influence female athletes in the future to be able to make a career out of it, which is what I do get to do with UBF, which is really cool.
Adam:
Yeah. Now let’s fast forward back to where we were, working at Vision, what happened there, because you transitioned into-
Erin:
Jets after that, yeah.
Adam:
Jets after that. Why did you want to make that transition? Did you learn everything you could learn?
Erin:
Yeah, I think definitely I had learned everything I could. I think there was, definitely being that franchise environment, there was things that, this was this way because that’s how it is and you have to do it. Again, that didn’t really sit well with me. There wasn’t really a career there, it was like the perpetual casual, I was doing 45 hours of one-on-one PT, but what if I was sick, or what if I wanted to one day get a loan and get a house? I did really love it there for a lot of reasons, but it really just didn’t, it felt uncomfortable there for a lot of reasons too. Now this job here was definitely the gateway into me being the whole package in terms of the focus that they had on the client themselves. It was-
Adam:
At Jets?
Erin:
It’s about, yeah … no, this was at Vision, before moving on to Jets. They are really client focused, it’s about truly caring about people, checking in on people and I feel like you’d self select out if you weren’t that type of person. So it was very much like, you keep in contact with your clients, you do this, you do that. The fundamentals of what it is as a service itself. But then, I had this Exercise Sports Science degree where I knew there were certain things that I would do differently, or I’d like to program differently, but the programs were set, you had to follow their programs and things. So for me that’s where it came to an end. But I do love that place and have fond memories of that place, it made me understand what it is to be a good personal trainer in terms of retention and results, they were very results driven as well.
Adam:
Were there any little things that you, and you mentioned a couple just then, but where there a couple of little things that you took note of and have taken with you into UBF?
Erin:
Yeah, definitely. I already feel like that’s the type of person I am, but just the client focus, it’s about them, not you. And in the fitness industry, a lot of the time you’ll see PTs and it’s very much about the PT and what they look like, not about the client themselves. I would definitely run into that a little bit in the fitness industry whereby I wouldn’t necessarily be the perfect example of what a personal trainer would look like. I was sporty and I was fit and this and that, but definitely if you’re looking at that social media type fitness trainer, that’s not me, I’m not going to buy into that. It’s about the client, it’s about their results, I’m there for those reasons and that’s definitely what Vision taught me, for sure.
Adam:
And then you moved into Jets-
Erin:
Yes.
Adam:
And were getting very close to the burnout period of your life. What happened at Jets, was that the catalyst?
Erin:
I think I’d started to burn out at Vision for sure. I was like, “What more can I do here?” I was training trainers, I was in charge of educating the new trainers coming through, I was training trainers. I was looking after clients, I was doing big hours and I was like, “What is the end game here, what is happening? Can I make a career out of this?” It wasn’t sustainable, that was 30 minute sessions, so to do 45 hours, do the math, that’s a lot of sessions of one on one per week, plus training trainers, plus … I just felt like the model wasn’t really, didn’t make for a good work life balance for me. And then it was like, “What more can I do to try and nab a full time job here?” And it just wasn’t available to me and I had to move on. So I actually got contacted by Jets to help grow their brand new facility. So they were opening a facility in Kings Cross and they wanted me to come over, and they wanted me to help grow that, because I’d been a big part of growing the one that I was just at. And I was really excited about that. For me, I was like, “This is cool.” I had the role of actually doing a lot of the sales, for me, the business component, the product component I’m excellent at. And then, still today I think even, the business stuff’s what I need to be better at, the pure business stuff. So I was really excited to be able to bring what I’d learned over. I had some really good ideas of what I thought a gym should be and what has worked and been successful in the past. And I was just super excited. And I came over and it was just, to me, it was just another set place where you couldn’t really do this, you couldn’t really do that. And look, I don’t know if it’s Jets in general, but my experience was that, I got brought over for certain reasons and then every idea I had would fall on deaf ears. It was like there was just bums on seats for them. And for me, that’s just not what I’m about. And I refuse to be involved, and care about something that doesn’t align with my values anymore. After having a place that aligned with a lot of my values, I moved on and it was not what I wanted. I ended up, they wanted me to hand flyers out outside, and it was just like, “First of all, this is not how marketing works anymore. But second of all, I’m highly skilled and you brought me over here for a reason, yet weren’t willing to listen.”
Adam:
Did they want to put you out the front to hand out flyers because you are a female, and how you looked? Is that what they were thinking?
Erin:
I think definitely part of it was that, I’d say part of it was that, they’ve said that at one point in time.
Adam:
Really?
Erin:
Yeah, I’d get more numbers, I’d get more … so it was very cold, it was cold leads at the front. Who knows what they’re looking for, what they want? And it was just, I just couldn’t live like that, I couldn’t live like that.
Adam:
So was that the tipping point? Was that the final straw?
Erin:
Yeah, I think definitely, I was like, “If this is the fitness industry and this is what it means to be a PT within that industry.” Or, what these guys are valuing in terms of what they’re bringing, they didn’t value their employees, they didn’t really value the clients, it was just bums on seats, lock them in, that sort of stuff. And that to me is just, no.
Adam:
Right. And so you’ve had enough, you hung up your towel there, in the fitness industry. At that point did you think you were done?
Erin:
110% done, I was like, crisis, I was like, “What the hell have I been doing with my life?” I was like, “I’ve been, in my opinion, trying to be the best I could possibly be within that job, doing whatever I could do.” And it was just like the fitness industry is broken, and I was like, “It is broken, that’s it, I hate it, I can’t do it anymore.” So I completely quit and then went to work in a bar, and that is just not anything I’d ever planned for myself. And imagine hitting that rock bottom, like, “Oh cool, I’m a PT now.” Building up and really loving what I did and having a good vision for where I wanted to be, and then that just being, I just felt like I just kept being beaten down to the point that I was like, “And now I’m working at a bar.” Do you know what I mean? It was just like I’d had enough, I didn’t want to even hear about it.
Adam:
How did you feel? Were you completely destroyed?
Erin:
Yeah, I was-
Adam:
Or were you like, “Okay, it doesn’t matter about the fitness industry, I’m just going to go make some money.”
Erin:
Yeah, I just got to the point where it was like, “I’m sick of trying.” I was like, “How much more can I give?” Or, “How much more can I try to be?” And I just felt like a bit of a failure. And I’m really hard on myself too, so I was like, part of me was like, “Can I just not cut it?” Like, “Do I just not have it, what it takes to succeed in the fitness industry?” I was like, “Maybe it’s me?” So I just did that and it was nice. I did that, I did nothing, I left work and I didn’t care about work, I just was able just to be. And I barely, I worked for four days a week, that to me was, coming from the hours that I was doing-
Adam:
It was a holiday.
Erin:
I felt like I was a bum. But I was like, “You know what? This is what I needed to do.” I needed to do it, for sure.
Adam:
So how long were you working at the bar before people started asking you questions?
Erin:
So-
Adam:
About fitness, I should specify.
Erin:
Yeah. So I had some amazing, beautiful clients who I absolutely love, from Vision, and who would still keep in contact, and ask me things and stuff. I built a really good rapport there, we got some really beautiful results. And so I stayed in contact with them for sure. And they would ask me questions, and I’d still love to answer them. And you know you love what you’re doing when you do it for free. So I’d still be helping them from afar, and I’d still be helping them write programs, or semi-coaching them and just talking them through stuff. And then when everything settled down and the dust settled, I was just like, “I love this, I love it.” And like I said, I’d do it for free, honestly. And that’s a lot of the way that I built things up to begin with. And I’m not really advocating for work for free, but to start off with, and if you are going to start your own business and you’re going to try and grow anything, whether it be your own client database or a business, you’ve got to sacrifice and you’ve got to give. But to me, it didn’t feel like a sacrifice, so I was super lucky. Before I knew it, I was like, “So many people are wanting to train with me.” I was just training friends and stuff and so I wasn’t really doing it through a business or anything, just doing that. And then I was like, “I’m going to need to get an ABN here.” Because I was like “This is a bit dodgy.”
Adam:
How was that working on a day to day basis? Where you doing that through the day and then going to work at the bar at night? What did that look like?
Erin:
Yeah. So, like I said, I wasn’t doing many hours, I was literally just like, “Time to do nothing.” The first time since leaving uni, since leaving school, it was like school, uni, job, job, job. And then it was the first time I could chill out. So I wasn’t really doing big hours. So I’d wake up in the morning, I’d do my 5:30 AM, 6:30 AM, those ones, then I’d go to work. And then I’d come back and I might do some arvos, mainly mornings really. And so it just worked in really well.
Adam:
Yeah, right. How long did you wait? How much time passed before you went-
Erin:
Time to get an ABN?
Adam:
Yeah, there’s something here.
Erin:
The whole time I was ever working, I was always in my mind like, “This is how I’d like to do it. I would love it if I could do it this way.” So it’s something that I’d been thinking about for so, so, so many years in terms of the concept of what I would do. So it was when I started having lots of people banging down my door, pretty much, being like, “Can you please train me?” That I was like, “Well let’s do this for fun,” was the first thing, “I’m going to do it for fun.” So I just started, got it, registered Urban Base Fitness as a business name, got an ABN, and I was just putting it through the ABN like that properly, because I’d got to the point that I was like, “There’s a few too many sessions,” they’re not friends anymore, things like that.
Erin:
So my book was growing like that, three months, full books. And that was just like, and it made me feel good again because it was like, “You are good at what you do, people want to train with you, they get results.” And results speak, you can market this, and that, and the other, but if you don’t produce that result, people are there for results. So, that’s what I was good at, and I was like, “If I can train, maybe, others to do this and this could be onto something.”
Adam:
So there were no clients that came with you when you …
Erin:
When I started my own, there were people who’d stopped training elsewhere. So they’d stop training at the other gyms that I’d worked at, and sought me out and definitely came and trained with me. Yeah, there were a few.
Adam:
Right, okay. Were there any new customers, because you told me this story when we did the pre-interview chat about some friends at the bar that were asking you questions and they turned into customers.
Erin:
Yeah, for sure.
Adam: Can you tell me that story?
Erin:
I think giving information without expecting something in return puts people at ease. If that make sense? So, obviously not eating into your product itself, but giving people, and genuinely giving people answers to their questions, and helping them where they need, that develops a massive level of trust. And they, knowing what I’d done before, I would give them just loads of value. I think if you give people value, they appreciate that and the way that things are with marketing and stuff, and it is changing, but the way things are, it’s very much like it’s transactional. It’s like, give me something, I’ll give you something. Do you know what I mean? So I guess for me it was, I was happy to give them as much advice as possible because I knew that if they sought more advice, I’d be the first person that they would come to. And I wasn’t thinking about that from a perspective of, I’ll catch them in this, but it was just genuine, being genuine. And again, that’s another big value of UBF is being authentic and genuine, and truly caring about the product and what you’re giving. A saying that I actually learned off one of the leaders in the industry is, people, passion, pride over profit. And I think that’s definitely something that we’re all about here, and that resonated with me a lot. And when I look back it’s like, “Yeah, that’s what I was looking for. That’s what I was chasing.”
Adam:
In those early days, you’re at the bar, your books have filled up after, how long, how long did it take?
Erin:
Three months.
Adam:
Three months, you’ve filled your books up, and this is all referrals, word of mouth kind of stuff? At what point did you go, “Okay, I need a space, I need to actually get somewhere that I can call, this is Urban Base Fitness, right here.
Erin:
Yeah. So the first bits and pieces, so the first couple of clients before I got full books, and before I registered an ABN, I was just training them outside in a park. So literally, as soon as I got about five, six people, I was used to training people with certain equipment, and I was used to a certain service, and a certain level of service. Especially, from those Vision days, it’s very service oriented. And so I felt like it wasn’t good enough. So as soon as I got four or five people, I went down to, I can’t even remember what it was called, some gym warehouse, I think it’s closed now. And I just got a squat rack, a barbell, some mats, free weights, and I set it up in my double garage. And that’s where I had UBF for the first, almost six months before needing to move into a bigger space.
Adam:
Really, four or five people, so that’s not a whole lot of revenue for the business, four or five people?
Erin:
Well, when you start working for yourself and you’re used to making a wage, and to me, I was like, “Right, let’s get after this.” And I knew that if I even wanted to do it, if I even wanted to register a business name, I wanted to do it properly. I wanted to train people properly, I didn’t want to be limited. Like I said, I was used to training people at a certain level, I didn’t want to drop under that. And that was super important to me, and it still is today.
Adam:
Okay. And so, did you have a set of criteria or how did you know that, okay, we need to get into a bigger space now? Was it just a case of looking more professional, or was it a case of, we need more space because we’ve got too many clients?
Erin:
Well, I was outdoors and I don’t like training outdoors. Because I’m very much, sport, outdoors is for enjoying your life, is for running, playing sport, going for swims, going for walks, all that sort of stuff. And the gym will help facilitate both your sport, or your lifestyle. So I was very much like, it’s separate. It doesn’t have to be, and you can absolutely get beautiful results outdoors, but I just didn’t like it. I didn’t like it, I wanted to be in one space, I wanted to go back to back with the equipment that I wanted to have there, I wanted to program a certain way.
Adam:
You wanted a base?
Erin:
Yes. And that’s where we got, kicked off with the name, Urban Base Fitness.
Adam:
Where is Urban Base Fitness today? Can you wrap some numbers around whatever metrics you use to gauge success?
Erin:
We’ll go with how many clients, now it’s going to seem underwhelming, but our gym doesn’t actually allow for access, so we don’t do a weekly membership where people roll in and out. So all of our members are either on our group class membership, or on our programmed athlete membership, or doing one-on-one or athletic development. So it can vary from 45 a week up to 200, and stuff like that. So without going into the numbers themselves, we have about 250 members.
Adam:
Wow. And don’t talk that down because that’s amazing.
Erin:
Yeah. Look, I think for me it’s …
Adam:
This comes back to the thing that you’re really hard on yourself, right? You’ve probably got massive goals, massive ambitions as to where you want to be. But I think that’s still incredible.
Erin:
Yeah. Look, I’m really happy with that. We’ve got six other staff members, and to me, up until this point in time, it’s been product, making sure it’s perfect, training my trainers, ensuring that the service that I give is the same from any of our other trainers before getting to this point in time right now where it’s like, okay, everything I’ve done so far has been word of mouth to grow to this point, apart from social media. And it’s like, okay, we’ve got the quality, we’ve got the staff, we’ve got the space, we have the programs, we’ve got the software, and now it’s time to prepare ourselves to market properly. And that’s what I’m really looking forward to, and it’s really exciting at the moment.
Adam:
Then that’s the future, right?
Erin:
Yes.
Adam:
Is there a strategy in place for the content? And what type of stuff are you wanting to put out there?
Erin:
I’ve got a lot of ideas, which I’ve got to get a handle on and work out where I want to go. But at this point in time it is just, to start with and keep an eye out, because the stuff we’ve just started doing and we’re really about to push out very shortly, is just to give people an understanding of what we’re about. So just a broad understanding for people of what we do, what we’re about. And so that’ll allow people who are interested in what we do, as opposed to, say, bodybuilding, or as opposed to, say, something else. Allowing them to go, “Okay, cool. Yeah, that’s what I’m about too.” And have a look. And then, we have a couple of pathways within UBF, so we have athletic development, or general population, or Olympic lifting and things like that. So then from there it’s about releasing content where people might go, “Okay, that captures me there.” And understand what they’re about. Or go, “Yeah, they’re the concerns that I might have.” Or, “Oh, that’s exactly what I wanted to learn about, or understand about.” And they can filter down through and work out what it is that they really want and need, or if they didn’t really have a good understanding of what it is that they needed to get out of the industry, or whatever, they can follow on with what we’re doing and go, “Yeah, that’s what I’m about.” Or go, “You know what? No, that’s not what we’re about.” Like, “I’m more interested in something else.” And so they understand, do we have what they want and need? Everything comes back to them, about addressing their, what they want, and their goals. Or, do I need to go elsewhere? You know what I mean? So that to begin with, I think.With that, we’re going to be releasing a few things like video series for football, or footballers, video series for goalkeepers. We have a really cool niche where we’ve got, one of our trainers, Declan, he’s a goalkeeping coach already, moving into the space of being a goalkeeping strength and conditioning coach. Which is really exciting because we get a lot of people contacting us, because nobody does that yet. So, just things like that.
Adam:
What’s been the biggest challenge in growing and starting a gym?
Erin:
The biggest challenge? Hard work is never a challenge for me, I’m used to that. I guess the biggest challenge initially was to let go and allow my staff to take things on. So delegation. And again, that comes down to, paralysis by analysis comes in here too. But then also that comes in that I have a really good idea of what I want my product to be, and I don’t want it to be any less, if that makes sense. So I’m passing through that space of, I need to scale, but how can I ensure that everything remains the same through scale? So for me it wasn’t until I finally took the time to train my trainers, we train every, well, we used to train, it’s now Tuesday, we used to train every Friday for a couple of hours to get them to the level that I needed them to be. And now I can comfortably delegate. But delegation, and being the bottleneck to my business, is massive for me. I am still a bottleneck in so many areas, but I’m trying so hard. It doesn’t just happen on its own, you actually have to make it a goal of it and go, “Okay, if I’m the bottleneck, what is it that I’m not willing to give away, or what skills do I have to teach my trainers? So that I can give them that, and then I don’t have to be the one who’s continually coming back to.” And I’m so busy too, so I’m letting them down, I’m letting my trainers down by not giving them the freedom.
Adam:
Yeah, that’s, being the bottleneck in your own business, it’s so great that you’re just so aware that that’s a challenge. Because that’s a challenge for every small business out there.
Erin:
It’s massive.
Adam:
It’s just, they don’t, they can’t get out of their own way.
Erin:
Yes. Big time.
Adam:
Last thing I want to talk about is, what’s the gender split here at Urban Base Fitness?
Erin:
Of our clients, or of our trainers?
Adam:
Of your clients?
Erin:
Of our clients, we have a lot more female than you would see in a gym normally. And I don’t know whether that comes from me being female myself and appealing to that market, or if it comes to a lot of women within the fitness environment, it can be intimidating for them. So I don’t know whether, I can’t really put my finger on why that is the case, but it’s not that we market specifically to females. I think it’s just an environment that allows them to be like, “I can get after it in here, I can be trained how any elite athlete will be trained, any male, female, whatever.” Any of these women that come through this gym, they could walk into a commercial gym right now and out lift a lot of the men in there, in terms of form and things like that. So I don’t know why, whether it’s just the environment itself, whether it’s that I’m female, or whatever. But we definitely have a higher split, it would be something like 70, 30. Definitely, a big thing for me, and also Ash, another one of our trainers here, she’s a female S&C coach, and she did Exercise Sports Science as well. We’ve gone through that environment where it’s like women feel like they need to be even better to hold space in their environment. So I think for us, having known that and experienced that, we endeavour to make this space an environment where women can come in and feel just as comfortable, or just as important, as men. We’re definitely not marketing just to women, but I think that it is a big goal of mine to have a space where women can come into and know that they’re going to get the same thing as what a man might. And that they can hold space within the gym environment, and a high performance environment, definitely here. So they can hold space within that environment really well and feel that confidence. But we have lots of elite men that come through as well, they just appreciate that the product is sound. And I think that, once we market a little bit more and it’s a little bit more of the influence of all of our trainers, not just my influence, that they get to push a little bit more on social media, I think it’ll just even itself out at a time.
Adam:
For young women out there who are wanting to start a business like yourself, what advice do you have for those guys?
Erin:
I think to trust yourself, to trust your intuition, to know, because in the back of their heads, they know that they can do it. They have their opinions on something, they’re like, “No, this isn’t right, or, “That isn’t right.” But it’s not as comfortable for them to make that known, or they can’t walk into a room and demand as much respect and attention as what men can. But for me, and that will change, but for me, what that drove me to, and Ash as well, we’ve got that similar experience, is to be even better. And so for me, it’s I now like that a little bit, because it’s like, “No, I’ve got to be even better.” So I endeavour to be above and beyond, I can’t just rest on my laurels and know that I’m good at my job. It’s like, I need to know I’m good at my job and prove it even more. And while that is, I want that to be something that’s not there anymore, it’s a barrier that women don’t have, I think for girls now, if they are feeling that, use that to your own advantage and be better. And that’s what I’ve done. And I think that, to me, I feel really proud about that.
Adam:
Thank you for listening to the Youngpreneur Podcast brought to you by The Hunter Futurepreneurs program. What exactly is the Hunter Futurepreneurs Program? I’d like you to meet the Entrepreneurship Facilitator at Hunter Futurepreneurs…
Cheryl:
I’m Cheryl Royle and I’m the entrepreneurship facilitator for the Hunter Region.
The Hunter Futurepreneurs Program exists to support, inspire, educate and mentor young people who have an idea or a passion they want to explore. We show you step by step how to validate your idea and build a successful business.
If you are…or know a young person with an idea,
Hunter Futurepreneurs are here for you.
Adam:
Do you have an idea for a business but have no idea where to start? I’ll tell you where to start, it’s simple, all you need to do is go to the show notes page for this episode, hunterfuturepreneurs.com.au/erin, and there you’ll be able to answer a couple of quick questions and then Cheryl will be in touch with you to schedule a free meeting to help you get started the right way.
Cheryl:
So that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. Two young guys coming in, knocking on my door, saying, “This is my idea. What do I do with it?” And we developed it to at least getting them a grant to make it happen.
Proud. Proud, but I felt that the opportunity, the opportunities that were going to open up for these young boys were incredible, and the journey that they’ve been on has been incredible as well. So they’ve learnt so many things. They’ve learnt about finances. They’ve learnt about resilience on how … They’ve learnt about how to develop an app. They’ve learnt about things like contracts, working with other people. It’s just been amazing and it’s been an amazing journey. Whether that app is successful or not doesn’t matter now. These young boys have walked away with skills that will hold them very high throughout their lives.
Adam:
Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts for more incredible stories from other Young Entrepreneurs to learn how they started and built their businesses. They started from scratch just like you, there is no better time to get started than right now, get in touch with the Hunter Futurepreneurs team today at hunterfuturepreneurs.com.au/erin.
Thank you for listening!