The 9 Business Mistakes That Cost Me the Most (So You Don't Have To Make Them)

Introduction

Operating a business & making mistakes. You can't have one without the other.

In fact, I'm a firm believer that failing is part of the process. But you have to fail often. You have to fail enough so you truly understand what not to do. Failing doesn't mean you're a failure, & I think that distinction is worth naming early, because a lot of people collapse the two & it costs them everything.

To be a failure means you're quitting. Giving up. You can't take another loss, so the only way out is to pack it in & walk away. A fail, on the other hand, means you gave something a genuine shot. Something you truly believed in. Something that, despite your best intentions & real commitment, didn't quite work out the way you planned. One is permanent. The other is data.

Michael Jordan missed more than 9,000 shots during his NBA career. He lost more than 300 games. On twenty-six separate occasions he was handed the ball for a game-winning shot & didn't convert. He is widely regarded as the greatest basketball player who ever lived, & the shots he missed didn't define him. The fact that he kept taking them did. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take," Wayne Gretzky said, & Jordan proved it in every game he played.

Research from Harvard Business School found that first-time entrepreneurs succeed approximately 18% of the time. Serial entrepreneurs, those who've failed at least once & kept going, succeed at a rate closer to 20%, & the gap widens with each subsequent attempt. Failure, when you actually process it, isn't just acceptable. It's statistically advantageous.

Today I'm looking back over ten years in the fitness industry & being honest about my fails. Some are epic, expensive, years-in-recovery mistakes. Some are quieter, more personal errors that accumulated into lessons I couldn't have received any other way. But every single one of them, without exception, led to growth I couldn't have reached without the stumble.

I'm writing this in the hope that it saves you some time. That you receive the lesson without having to carry the shame, embarrassment & guilt that sits at the front of a fail early in your career, when everything feels like it defines you & every mistake feels permanent. I promise you, none of it is.

Here are nine things I wish I'd known earlier.

Chapter 1: Opening a Second Location Too Soon, Too Close & With the Wrong Landlord

Within the first year of business, I opened a second F45 location just ten minutes from our first.

Let that sink in for a second.

Ten minutes. Two gyms. One year in. I hadn't even proven the first model was sustainable yet, & I was already signing another lease, in a retail strip with retail rents to match.

The location was bad. Not "less than ideal." Genuinely, measurably bad. High foot traffic does not automatically mean the right foot traffic, & this strip attracted the kind of pass-through volume that doesn't translate into gym memberships. The rent was expensive & completely inflexible. And the landlord treated every conversation like a negotiation he intended to win. Every request, every concern, every conversation about what we needed to make the space work, met with indifference or a counter-offer.

The gym never reached the membership numbers it needed. The cost of keeping it open began draining the resources that should have been going into stabilising & growing the first location.

The lesson isn't just "don't open a second location too fast." The deeper lesson is about ego & the confusion between growth & success. A Harvard Business Review study on small business expansion found that premature scaling, growing before the core model is proven & profitable, accounts for approximately 70% of startup failures in the early growth phase. I wanted to grow because growth looked like success from the outside. What it actually was, at that stage, was risk I wasn't equipped to carry.

Before signing a second lease, ask yourself three questions honestly: Is the first location consistently profitable? Do I have an operational model that can run without me in it every day? And is this location serving a genuinely new market, or cannibalising the one I've already built?

I answered no to all three. I signed anyway.

On landlords: a great one is a genuine business partner. A bad one is an anchor. Before you sign anything, talk to other tenants in the same development. Understand the break clauses, the rent review mechanisms & what happens when you have a tough trading month. A flexible, commercially reasonable landlord in a slightly worse location will serve you better than a nightmare landlord in the perfect one. I know that now.

Chapter 2: Not Working With a Strategic Financial Advisor From Day One

I had an accountant. He was good. I liked him. We spoke at lease signings & at the end of the financial year, & that was roughly the extent of it.

That was the mistake.

What I needed & didn't have for years was a strategic financial advisor. Not someone to file returns & confirm what I'd already done with money. Someone sitting across the table from me regularly, showing me what the numbers actually meant, helping me make decisions about where capital should go, where we were bleeding & where we were genuinely positioned to grow.

There's a meaningful difference between a compliance accountant & a business advisor. A compliance accountant ensures you're meeting your legal obligations. A business advisor helps you understand your financial position in real time & uses that understanding to shape strategy. I needed the second one from the very beginning & didn't engage one until roughly three years in, by which point some of the habits & structural decisions that were quietly costing money had already been embedded.

A study by Xero & Deloitte on small business financial management found that businesses which work closely with a professional financial advisor are 70% more likely to hit their revenue targets & significantly more likely to report confidence in financial decision-making. The businesses that don't engage advisory-level financial support describe feeling reactive with money, responding to cash flow problems after they've already arrived rather than anticipating & preventing them.

Understand your profit & loss. Know your gross margin, your net margin, your fixed costs & your breakeven point at every stage of the business. Know what it costs to open your doors each month before you make a dollar. If those numbers aren't clear to you right now, that is the first thing to fix. Not the marketing. Not the programming. Not the branding.

A saving grace for Life’s Peachy FIT franchisees is our exclusive chartered accountant, he understands the numbers, the business model & offers real advice (the advice i needed 9 years ago) on how to make a profit. As the saying goes, ‘cash is king’.

Find an advisor who challenges you, not just one who signs off on what you've already decided to do. The discomfort of that conversation is the point.

Chapter 3: Hiring Too Fast & Firing Too Slow

This one cost me more than any lease.

In the early years I hired out of desperation more often than I hired out of strategy. I needed someone on the floor, I needed them this week, & the person in front of me had the right qualifications & seemed enthusiastic enough. So I hired them. And more often than not, within three to six months, it became clear that something wasn't right. The attitude. The culture fit. The standard of work. But instead of acting on that clarity, I delayed. I told myself it would improve. I gave it another month. And another.

Bad culture spreads. That is not a metaphor. Research by MIT Sloan Management Review found that toxic workplace culture is the single strongest predictor of employee attrition, 10.4 times more powerful than compensation as a reason people leave. And in a business built on human connection & community, one person bringing the wrong energy into the space affects every staff member, every coach & ultimately every member who walks through the door.

Jim Collins, in Good to Great, describes the concept of getting the right people on the bus before deciding where the bus is going. His research across 1,400 companies found that the highest-performing organisations prioritised who before what. Before the strategy, before the product, before the growth plan, the question was: who are the people carrying this?

The cost of a wrong hire is not just the salary paid while you delay the decision. It's the cultural erosion. The team morale that quietly degrades when people see you keep someone who doesn't belong. The coach who watches you tolerate a low standard & adjusts their own expectations of what you'll actually hold.

Hire slowly. Define the values you won't compromise on before you interview anyone. Be honest in the interview process about what you expect & what you won't accept. And when someone consistently falls below those values, act with respect & without delay. It is the kindest thing you can do for everyone involved, including them.

Your team is your business. Treat the hiring process like the most important investment you make, because it is.

Chapter 4: Chasing Shiny Objects & Losing My Focus

I have started, invested in, pivoted toward, or seriously considered more business ideas than I can comfortably recall. A new service offering. A different program format. A content strategy that was trending. A business in an adjacent space that seemed like a natural extension of what I was already building.

Most of it went nowhere. And the time, money & mental energy spent on all of it was time, money & mental energy that wasn't going into getting genuinely, deeply excellent at the core thing.

Cal Newport, author of Deep Work & So Good They Can't Ignore You, argues that the most valuable skill in any field is the ability to produce rare & valuable work through sustained, undistracted focus. The people who become the recognised names in their industry, whose prices command a premium & whose waiting lists grow without advertising, are almost universally people who chose depth over breadth & committed to it for long enough to become genuinely exceptional.

The shiny object trap is seductive because each new idea arrives with a burst of energy & possibility. It feels like expansion. It feels like ambition. But diffusion is the enemy of mastery, & every hour spent on the next thing is an hour not spent getting better at the main one.

Gary Keller's book The ONE Thing makes this argument with precision. Most of the meaningful results in any area of life come from a disproportionately small number of focused actions. The person who narrows their focus & asks "what is the one thing I can do right now that makes everything else easier or unnecessary?" consistently outperforms the person trying to do ten things adequately.

My main thing was building excellent fitness communities. That was what I was genuinely good at. That was where I had evidence of results. Every time I chased something else, I diluted the one thing I was actually qualified to build.

Pick your thing. Get exceptional at it. Make a habit of saying no to the things that feel exciting but aren't it. The discipline to stay focused is harder than the work itself. It is also where the real results live.

Chapter 5: Pay Your Taxes — Consistently, Not Eventually

I'm going to be direct here because I see this mistake constantly in the fitness industry, particularly among sole traders & small studio owners operating close to the margin.

Pay your taxes. Not at the end of the year as a lump sum that comes as a surprise. Regularly. Intentionally. As a non-negotiable first claim on every dollar that comes through the door.

In Australia, the obligations are specific. If your business has a GST turnover of $75,000 or more, you are required to register for GST & lodge a Business Activity Statement, known as a BAS, either monthly, quarterly, or annually depending on your turnover & registration type. The BAS captures GST collected on your sales, GST paid on your business expenses, PAYG withholding for any employees, & in some cases PAYG instalments for your own income tax. Getting behind on BAS lodgements doesn't just attract penalties. It creates a compounding debt that becomes harder to resolve the longer it sits.

Superannuation for employees must be paid at the current statutory rate on ordinary time earnings, & must reach compliant super funds at least quarterly. Late super payments attract the Superannuation Guarantee Charge, which is non-deductible & comes with interest and an administrative fee on top. The ATO has become significantly more active in pursuing unpaid superannuation in recent years, & the personal liability implications for directors of companies that fail to meet their super obligations are serious & personal. This is not a business problem that stays in the business.

The mistake I see most often is treating tax obligations as the last claim on the cash flow rather than the first. The business earns, the business spends, & if something is left over at the end of the quarter, the BAS gets lodged. This approach is how businesses end up in ATO payment plans, trading with debt hanging over every decision.

The fix is unglamorous but effective. Open a separate bank account, call it something like "Tax Obligations," and move a percentage of every dollar of revenue directly into it before anything else is allocated. For most businesses the combined GST, income tax & super set-aside sits somewhere between 25 and 35% of gross revenue, depending on structure & margins. Talk to your accountant about the right percentage for your specific situation.

The ATO is patient up to a point. Beyond that point, they have significant powers & they use them. Do not find out where that point is.

Chapter 6: The Communication Failures That Cost Me — In Business & at Home

In business, I operated for too long on a "need to know" basis with my team. Updates filtered down when I decided they were relevant. Challenges were managed by me, quietly, in the background. Problems were solved before anyone else had to see them. I thought this was leadership. I was protecting the team. Keeping them focused on the work rather than the noise around it.

What I was actually doing was creating an information vacuum that filled with assumption, rumour & quiet disengagement.

When people don't have context, they invent it. And the stories people invent when they're operating without information are almost always worse than the reality. The team knew something was happening. They just didn't know what. And without transparency, they couldn't trust that I'd tell them if it mattered.

Harvard Business Review research on organisational transparency found that employees who feel genuinely well-informed by their leaders are 53% more likely to report high job satisfaction, & significantly more likely to remain with the organisation long-term. Transparency, even about difficult things, builds trust faster than almost anything else. It signals that your team is actually part of something, not just employed by it.

Once I started communicating more openly, about the numbers, the challenges, the decisions I was wrestling with, something shifted. The team brought solutions rather than just problems. They started owning outcomes in a way they hadn't before. The communication I'd been withholding in the name of protecting them was the exact thing they needed to genuinely care.

At home, I made the same mistake in the opposite direction.

I didn't want to burden my wife with the daily fires of running a business. The lease negotiation that wasn't going well. The cash flow month that was tighter than I'd budgeted for. The staff situation keeping me awake at 2am. So I absorbed it all. I brought the stress home in my body but not in my words, which meant she was experiencing the weight of it without any of the context to understand what was happening or how she could help.

I went quiet. I went into my own head. I told myself I was protecting her. What I was doing was shutting her out. And a partner who is kept outside the real version of your life can't actually support you. They can see something is wrong. They just have no way to help.

John Gottman's research on relationship longevity, the most extensive study of couples ever conducted, identified that the most consistent predictor of long-term relationship breakdown was not conflict or incompatibility. It was emotional withdrawal, the slow, quiet closing of the door on genuine communication. Couples who talked openly about difficulty, including financial stress & professional pressure, consistently demonstrated stronger bonds than those who managed it in silence.

Communicate more. With your team. With your partner. With the people who have chosen to be in your corner. The weight doesn't disappear when you carry it alone. It just means no one else can help you put it down.

Chapter 7: Not Delegating Fully & Not Investing Enough in My Team

For the first several years of business, I was the business. In every session, across every decision, handling every problem as it arrived. I wore this like a badge of honour. Hardworking. Hands-on. Committed. The kind of owner who doesn't ask his team to do anything he wouldn't do himself.

What I actually was, was a bottleneck.

Michael Gerber's distinction in The E-Myth Revisited between working in your business & working on your business is one of the most important ideas in small business management, & I came to it later than I should have. When you are absorbed in daily operations, the business has no capacity to grow beyond what you personally can manage. You are the ceiling. And because you're busy surviving the day, you have no time to design what comes next.

The business grows when you step back from it. That sounds counterintuitive. It felt counterintuitive to me for a long time. But the evidence is clear: businesses with documented processes, genuinely empowered teams & leaders who operate at a strategic rather than operational level consistently outperform those where the founder remains the primary operational fulcrum.

The second part of this mistake was in how I showed appreciation. Or more accurately, how rarely I did. I assumed that employment, a stable income, a good culture, interesting work, was sufficient acknowledgement of contribution. It isn't. Not even close.

Gallup's research on employee engagement, conducted across more than 1.8 million employees in 82 countries, found that employees who feel their work is recognised & their contribution is genuinely valued are 23% more productive, 66% more likely to remain with their organisation, & produce measurably better outcomes for the people they serve. The most powerful form of recognition, the same research found, is specific, personal & delivered by someone the employee respects.

Your team needs to feel seen. Safe. Valued. Appreciated. When those conditions are present, something remarkable happens: people stop working for a business & start working for a mission. They make decisions the way you would make them. They protect the culture the way you'd protect it. They become, in the truest sense, co-owners of the outcome.

Delegate fully. Invest intentionally. Show appreciation with specificity. Say thank you more than feels comfortable. Not one of those things is wasted.

Chapter 8: More Services Does Not Mean More Profit

At various points across the business, I added services. New program formats. Additional membership tiers. Specialist offerings that seemed like natural extensions of what we were already doing well.

Almost none of them improved profitability. A meaningful number reduced it.

The reason is straightforward once you see it: every additional service line requires attention, staff capacity, marketing, operational infrastructure & mental bandwidth. Each one dilutes the focus of the people delivering it & the clarity of what the business actually is. Members who were clear on your offer become less clear. Staff who were excellent at one thing become adequate at several.

Bain & Company, in their research on business simplification, found that companies which focus on their core service & resist premature diversification consistently achieve higher margins, stronger retention & faster growth than those that expand their offering before the core is fully optimised. "Complexity," they observed, "is the silent killer of profit." In a service business, that complexity almost always begins with adding the thing that seems like a logical extension.

The question is never "could we offer this?" The question is "does this make us measurably better at the thing we're actually here to do?"

What got you to the position you're in today is your core offer. The program that fills by word of mouth before you've spent a dollar promoting it. The service that people talk about in the car park after sessions. The thing that, when someone asks what your gym is about, you can answer in one sentence without hesitation.

That is the thing to protect. To deepen. To get better at every single quarter. Not to build away from in search of the next thing.

Resist the temptation to grow wide before you're deep. Depth first. Width earns itself later.

Chapter 9: Paying $55,000 for a Mentorship Program That Was Right for the Wrong Time

Let me be fair about this one, because it wasn't a total loss & I don't want to misrepresent it.

I paid $55,000 for a year-long mentorship program with a well-known Australian entrepreneur. The program was good. The content was sound. I learned things about myself that I hadn't been confronted with directly before, & the facilitator was genuinely excellent at what they did.

The problem was timing. The program was designed for a business owner at a specific stage, one who was ready to diversify, build multiple income streams & scale across different verticals simultaneously. And that's exactly what I proceeded to try to do.

What I actually needed at that point was the opposite. I needed to narrow. Get deeply focused on one thing. Build genuine excellence & the infrastructure to support it before attempting to go wide. Instead, I spent close to two years trying to implement a framework designed for someone at a different stage of the journey. It cost me time & money I didn't have available for that experiment, & it took a few more years to build myself out of some of the situations it created.

The lesson is not "don't invest in mentorship." Quite the opposite. Mentorship & coaching are among the highest-return investments available to a business owner. A survey by the American Society for Training & Development found that companies investing in structured coaching & mentoring for their leaders see an average ROI of 788%. That figure is not a typo. The right mentor, at the right time, can compress years of hard lessons into months.

The lesson is: choose the mentor for the stage you're actually at, not the stage you aspire to reach. The mentor who is right for a founder scaling to $5 million is not necessarily right for someone still building the foundations of their first $500,000. Ask not just "is this person successful?" but "is this person's success relevant to where I am right now?"

A mentor who meets you where you are is worth ten times one whose framework fits a version of you that doesn't exist yet.

Invest in the right guide for the right terrain. The map only works if you're actually in the territory it covers.

Summary

Don't mistake me. I'm proud of every single one of these.

I can say with complete certainty that I wouldn't be in the position I'm in today without having made them, sat with the discomfort of them, learned from them & kept going anyway. The compounded education from ten years of getting it wrong in specific, recoverable ways is more valuable than any course, any book, any conference I've attended.

That's not the message here.

The message isn't "be more careful." It isn't "wait until you're sure." It's: make your mistakes intentionally. Not carelessly. Not out of ego or impatience or because the shiny thing was too bright to look away from without having done the work of assessment first.

Go all in. Take the risks. Try the things. Make the mistakes. They are how the knowledge actually lands. There is no other way it lands with the same weight. But before every major decision, slow down enough to genuinely assess it. Cover the upside & the downside with equal honesty. Understand what success actually looks like & what the failure scenario will cost you, in money, in time, in opportunity. Talk to people who've done it before. Sleep on it. Then go.

Almost nothing works out the way it's meant to. That is not a warning. That is one of the best things about building something. The version you end up with is always more interesting than the version you planned. But the people who navigate the gap between plan & reality most effectively are the ones who went in with clear eyes, realistic expectations & enough self-awareness to know which mistakes were avoidable & which ones were simply the price of the education.

I paid full price. On almost everything.

Go get your lessons. Just don't pay more than you have to.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

If you're a personal trainer who's been wondering what's next, & this article gave you something to think about, we'd love to have a conversation.

Life's Peachy Fit is a community-first group training franchise built for people who care about results, culture, & doing the work that actually matters. If you've got the passion & the people skills, we can show you the rest.

Reach out to our team at hq@lifespeachyfit.com or visit www.lifespeachyfit.com.au to learn more about what a Life's Peachy Fit franchise could look like for you.

The doors are open. Come have a look.