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The Business of Fitness Podcast

The Business of Fitness Podcast

By: Dan Williams
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 Actionable ideas to build your fitness business. Presented by Fitness Business Mentor, Dan Williams.2023 Economics Hygiene & Healthy Living
Episodes
  • 83: How my business earns me 23 hours a week

    83: How my business earns me 23 hours a week
    Sep 28 2025
    Summary: In this episode Dan explores why business owners should stop measuring success only by money and start valuing time as their true currency, helping you design a more profitable and balanced business life. 4 things you’ll learn in this episode: Why revenue and profit can be misleading measures of business successHow tracking hours worked reveals your true hourly rate and workloadWhat it means to switch from 'dollars as currency' to 'minutes as currency'Practical ways to redesign your business to earn time, not just money Need a website? I can help. Transcription: I think just about every single one of us is measuring the wrong thing in business. I’d like to share something I’m struggling with a bit at the moment. My very first business was selling shells I’d picked up off the beach. My business premises was the top bunk of my bed. My customers were Mum and Dad. I was six. From this moment, the measure of success of my little business was how much money it earned. And from that moment forward, every business I had was measured by the same metric. Money. And it makes sense. We live in a capitalist world. And I’m fine with that. I believe that people should get paid for solving other people’s problems. But living in that world makes it really hard to gauge the success of your business by anything other than the size of your bank account. That mindset has been drilled into us since before we could walk. Money is our measure of business success, and for some of us, it’s also a measure of life success. Society tells us that dollars are the currency that matter – they’re the scoreboard that tells us if we’re winning the game. And we know it shouldn’t be like this, but it is. So back to the thing I’m struggling with. I’m struggling to break way from a lifetime of ‘money as the measure of success’. Within the last couple of years, I’ve made some major structural changes to the businesses I run. Let me take you back to what business looked like before these changes. I was working around 45 hours a week on multiple businesses, I had a team of 12 staff, brick and mortar premises, and my wife and I owned a home and three investment properties. Revenue was high – I was earning more than I ever thought I would. But the nature of running businesses in that way meant expenditure was high too – but not so high that there wasn’t a very tidy profit margin. And it’s that profit that was my scoreboard. If I profited more in February than I did in January, I was becoming more successful. Sure, it was pretty stressful, and I was always worrying about something, but that’s just a cost of doing business right? But then, I made some very deliberate and intentional changes to how I worked. Fast forward to today. Zero staff, no premises, no investment properties, lower revenue. By most traditional measures, you’d say I’m now less successful than I was. However, expenditures dropped by about 75% and profit (which is the only financial metric that only really matters to me) dropped by only about 10%. And importantly, most importantly by far is something the accountant can’t see. I’m achieving this off the back of an average of 22 hours per week of work – that’s all types of work – billable work, admin, business development… everything. You’ll remember I was working 45 hours a week. And it’s now about 22. That means I’m doing HALF the amount of work I was. 50% of the work for 90% of the profit. That’s a massive increase in profit per hours worked, and probably a 90% drop in stress too. But you know what, there’s a tiny little niggling part of my brain that’s still telling me I’m less successful than I used to be. Because of that small drop in profit. Part of me is still a slave to the notion that dollars are the true and only measure of success. I’m working really hard on this, and I think I’m slowly winning. I’m slowly honestly believing that the currency that measures the success of my business is not money, but time. Time is the currency. Time is the resource I’m earning. I’m flipping my thinking. I no longer engineer my work to optimise for financial earnings, but to optimise for temporal earnings – earnings of time. I base business decisions on the time they’ll earn me, not the money. The changes I’ve made are paying me 23 hours a week. That is the value of the business I’ve built. That’s the salary my business pays me. Not money, but time. A traditional approach would see people put that 23 hours back into their business. For my highest financial value tasks, I charge my consulting out at a rate of $300 an hour. That’s just under an extra $7000 a week if I was to trade my free time in for money. But you know what, I’d rather have the extra 1,380 minutes per week than the extra $6,900. Bear in mind that I started my business 19 years ago – and I’m not denying the need for hard work and long hours. But I am denying that ...
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    11 mins
  • 82: How to turn your website into a lead generating machine

    82: How to turn your website into a lead generating machine
    Sep 16 2025

    In this episode Dan Williams explores the six essential sections every fitness business website needs and the psychological strategies you should include to convert more leads into paying clients.

    Check out the demo websites Dan has built to accompany this episode.

    Let Dan help you build a beautiful, one-page website that generates leads for your business: Learn more.

    6 things you’ll learn in this episode

    • Why your website should be the centre of your fitness business marketing

    • The six must-have sections that guide visitors towards taking action

    • How to write customer-focused website copy that speaks directly to your audience

    • Psychological principles like scarcity and loss aversion that boost conversions

    • Practical examples of how to apply these strategies to your own fitness website

    Your action steps:

    1. Redesign your website around the six core sections to guide visitors from interest to action.

    2. Use customer-centric language that speaks directly to your target audience’s pain points and goals.

    3. Add short, clear testimonials and client stories to build trust and social proof.

    4. Apply psychological principles like scarcity, loss aversion, and the endowment effect in your calls to action.
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    27 mins
  • Quick thought: Is your work becoming your identity?

    Quick thought: Is your work becoming your identity?
    Sep 12 2025

    In this 'quick thought' Dan asks us to rethink identity, not as what we do for money, but as how we actually live and spend our time.
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    7 mins
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