Today Marks One Year... Thank You!
Exactly one year ago today we made the move. To a new gym, a new brand and an opportunity with a bigger better facility to help more people on their fitness journeys.
Our journey here is not something I talk about often but today I feel it is relevant…
Matt and I started CrossFit Agilis now known as Accelerate Strength as 2 guys from the military who fixed helicopters. Neither of us had any business experience or nouse but what we did have in our favour was an extremely good work ethic and a passion for what we did that nobody else could match!
The first 2 years were tough with Matt still keeping his job in the army for an income and I was living off my savings and a paycheck of $300/week. I don’t mention this to make you feel sorry for us but purely to give you context as to the financial challenge we were facing…
In this situation I feel most people would cling back to the security of working for someone else. Not us though! Whether it was naivety or sheer stupidity we just knew it would work out!
It wasn’t until we enrolled the help of a business coach, Drew, where things really started to turn around. We started to build systems, understand some of the metrics we should be focussing on and hired coaches to help us. This freed up time so I could focus on growing our business and not just working in our business.
Fast forward another year and we were faced with another challenge. The business had grown to a stage where we needed to upscale. This meant to find a new bigger facility to house all our clients and provide a better training experience for them.
Finding the facility was easy enough. The warehouse across the road became vacant and suited us perfectly. The next challenge was the council and the processes involved. (For anyone who has dealt with this you will know what I mean) All up this took a full year of back and forth and in the end standing in front of a panel including 1 supreme court judge and 3 20+ year subject matter experts to state our case…
To say this was an intimidating experience is an understatement. To have your whole livelihood and the growth of your business challenged and ultimately left to the opinion of 4 complete strangers is hard.
Not to mention the fact we were on the hook for 2 leases which would financially ruin us, we had sunk 10’s of thousands of dollars into reports and gotten the hopes of our clients up promising them a newer better space to train out of…
If I’m completely honest even though at times it felt like we were going nowhere and the world was against us, I knew we would get there!
To everyone who has stood by us these last few years I want to say a huge thank you. Your support of us and our vision has been something we are truly grateful for and we wouldn’t be where we are today without you!
Shaun Diachkoff
@shaundiachkoff