The Business Wins That Changed Everything (And the Mindset Behind Each One)

Introduction

The business mistakes are the ones that keep you up at night.

The business wins, on the other hand, get you out of bed in the morning.

I've written honestly about the mistakes I've made across ten years in the fitness industry. The bad locations, the wrong hires, the shiny objects chased at the expense of what actually mattered. I'm proud of those failures the way you can only be proud of something that genuinely hurt & genuinely taught you something. What's on the other side of each one is a clearer, sharper version of who you're becoming.

But this article isn't about those.

This one is about the decisions that worked. The calls I made that, looking back, I'd make again in exactly the same way. The moments where something shifted, not because I was lucky, but because I had enough information, a gut feeling, or enough good people around me to move in the right direction.

For as many mistakes as I've made, I've made just as many decisions I'm genuinely proud of. And I think the wins deserve just as much airtime as the failures, because they're just as instructive. They tell you what to repeat. What to protect. What to double down on.

Here are nine of them.

Win 1: Choosing the Right Values From Day One

Summer, 2016. My best mate sends me a link to this gym called F45 Training.

The branding looked sharp. The class structure was clear. The training was functional, similar to how I was already training. I looked up locations, found the Cockburn studio, ten minutes from my workplace, & booked a trial for the next day.

And then I sat in my car outside & I was nervous.

I want to sit with that for a second, because what happened next shaped almost everything that followed.

At that point I was four years out of my bachelors degree in Exercise & Sports Science. I'd competed at a high level in wakeboarding as a teenager. I held my Level 1 & Level 2 Crossfit certifications. I trained five to six days a week, consistently. By any measure, I was someone who knew their way around a gym.

And I was nervous.

Not scared. Not overwhelmed. But there was something sitting in that car park that I had to consciously manage before I walked through the door. What I realised almost immediately was that it wasn't fear. It was anxiousness. The low-grade uncertainty of walking into an unfamiliar space for the first time, not knowing exactly what was expected, what the culture felt like, whether I'd be welcomed or assessed.

And then a thought followed that I've never forgotten.

If I felt that, with all of my training background, all of my confidence, all of my years in and around gyms, then how must someone feel who has never set foot in a gym before? Someone self-conscious about their weight. Someone managing low self-esteem. Someone who has been building up the courage to book a trial for months before they actually do it.

I dare say they'd be far more anxious than I was.

Right there, in that car park, I made a decision. If I ever opened a fitness business, it would be the most welcoming, caring & supportive environment in the industry. The moment someone walked through the door for the very first time, that nervousness, that quiet vulnerability, would be met with genuine warmth before it was met with anything else. Before the program. Before the pricing. Before the results conversation.

Warmth first. Always.

Research on first impressions in service environments backs this up. A study by Princeton psychologists Janine Willis & Alexander Todorov found that people form reliable first impressions in as little as one tenth of a second, & those impressions are remarkably stable and resistant to revision. In a gym context, the experience a new member has in their first sixty seconds inside your doors will shape their perception of your business for months. You do not get a second shot at that moment.

Research published in the Journal of Fitness Research found that 'gymtimidation,' the anxiety experienced by new exercisers in unfamiliar gym environments, is one of the leading causes of dropout in the first 90 days of membership. The social environment, how staff engage, whether people feel seen & genuinely welcomed, matters more than programming quality, equipment availability, or price in predicting early retention.

9.5 years later, the thing talked about most in our testimonials isn't the results. It isn't the programming. It's the feeling of being welcomed. The warmth of the coaches. The sense of belonging from session one.

That's not an accident. That's a value, chosen on purpose in a car park in Cockburn in the summer of 2016, & held every single day since.

Your values are not a marketing statement. They are the standard you hold when nobody's watching, & the thing your members talk about when they recommend you to their friends. Get them right from the start & everything else builds on top of something solid.

Win 2: Choosing a Franchise as My First Business

When I decided to go all in on a fitness business, I chose to do it inside a franchise system. And while my time with F45 didn't end the way I'd hoped, the decision to start within a franchise rather than building independently from scratch was one of the smartest moves I've ever made.

Here's what most people don't fully appreciate about a franchise: you're not just buying a brand. You're buying time.

The systems that would have taken me years to develop from scratch, the operational processes, the member management structure, the marketing frameworks, the sales methodology, those were already built & proven. I walked into a model that had been tested & refined by hundreds of operators before me. My job wasn't to figure out how to run a gym. My job was to learn from a system that already knew how, & then get exceptionally good at the human side of it.

The Franchise Council of Australia reports that franchise businesses have a five-year survival rate of approximately 90%, compared to the 80% failure rate for independent small businesses. That's not a small margin. That's a fundamentally different risk profile. And for a first-time business owner with no prior experience of running a business, that structural safety net is enormously valuable.

But the real value for me wasn't survival. It was education.

Seven years inside a franchise system taught me things about branding, operations, sales, marketing, member retention & business management that I couldn't have learned any other way without paying for the lessons in the most expensive currency there is: time & mistakes made alone.

When the time came to create Life's Peachy Fit, I wasn't starting from zero. I was starting from seven years of lived operational experience inside a proven model, with a clear picture of what worked, what didn't, & what I wanted to build differently with my own name on it.

If you're a first-time business owner, particularly in the fitness industry, a franchise gives you something that independently built businesses rarely have in the early years: clarity. The model is proven. The product is defined. The operations are documented. You know what good looks like from day one, because someone else has already done the work to figure that out.

That clarity allowed me to focus my energy on the things that were genuinely mine to develop. The culture, the relationships, the community, the client-facing experience. The things no systems manual can teach you. The things only you can build.

Win 3: Finding a Mentor Before My First Day of Trading

Before I opened the doors of my first gym, before a single membership had been sold, before I'd run one session as a business owner, I reached out for help.

That decision, to find a mentor before I felt like I needed one, is something I'd recommend to every first-time business owner in any industry.

The trigger was the software. We were using Mindbody as our CRM for bookings & payments, and as the opening date approached & everything started compressing at once, fitting out the studio, building a pre-launch membership base, managing social media, learning the billing system, the software alone started consuming days I didn't have.

So I reached out to Trish Freeman. Trish had worked for Mindbody & had since built her own consulting business helping fitness operators grow their member numbers. She had also owned & run a gym herself, which meant the advice wasn't theoretical. It came from someone who had lived it.

From the very first call, Trish had a quality about her I can only describe as calm authority. A quiet confidence that said: I've seen this before & I know exactly what to do. A warmth that made the overwhelming feel manageable. I signed up immediately. It was one of the best investments I made in that first year.

Research from the American Society for Training & Development found that structured mentorship & coaching programs produce an average return on investment of 788% when measured across business outcomes including revenue, efficiency & decision quality. A study from Sun Microsystems found that mentored employees were promoted five times more often than those without mentorship, and that mentors themselves were six times more likely to be promoted as a result of the relationship. The investment flows both ways.

The pattern I've kept since is deliberate. I always look for a mentor who has already done the specific thing I'm trying to figure out. Not a generalist. Not someone who talks broadly about success. Someone who has navigated the exact territory I'm standing in, made the mistakes in it, & built something on the other side of it.

You save time by finding someone who's already paid for the lessons you're about to learn. You save money by not having to discover them through the most expensive method available: trial & error, alone.

The return on a good mentor isn't just financial. It's confidence. Clarity. The ability to make decisions with better information than you'd have on your own. And if you're fortunate, it's also a relationship that extends well beyond the engagement you originally paid for.

If you're at any stage of business ownership & you don't currently have a mentor in the area you're most challenged by, finding one is the next best move you can make.

Win 4: Taking Personal Development Seriously

The biggest constraint in most businesses isn't the market, the competition, the location, the product, or the team.

It's the owner.

I say that with full awareness that it applies to me as much as it applies to anyone reading this. A lot of the problems I had six years ago were problems I created. My leadership wasn't where it needed to be. My communication was incomplete. My decision-making was more reactive than strategic. Not because I was careless. Because I hadn't yet developed the skills those situations required.

The turning point was books.

I never read in school. At university, only when it was absolutely required. My first book as an adult, chosen deliberately, was Unleash the Power Within by Tony Robbins. I read it the way I'd watched people play video games when I was younger, completely absorbed, hours disappearing without noticing. Something unlocked.

Since 2017, I'd estimate I've read or listened to hundreds of books & thousands of hours of podcasts across leadership, business, psychology, personal finance, relationships & anything else I was either struggling with or genuinely curious about. The pattern has been consistent: when I identify a gap in myself, I go looking for the best thinking available on that gap. Not to consume content. To actually change something.

The neuroscience of this is worth understanding. Research on neuroplasticity has comprehensively dismantled the outdated idea that personality & capability are fixed after a certain age. The adult brain remains malleable throughout life, capable of forming new neural pathways in response to new learning, repeated practice & deliberate thinking. You can become a measurably better leader, communicator, thinker & decision-maker at any age, if you put in the work.

A study by the ICF (International Coaching Federation) found that 70% of business owners who engaged in structured personal development reported improved work performance, 61% improved business management skills & 57% reported improved communication, all of which translate directly into better business outcomes. These aren't soft skills. They're the skills that determine whether you grow or plateau.

One of the most underrated qualities in business, I've come to believe, is curiosity. The willingness to not already know. To ask a question without being sure of the answer. To follow a thread of interest without knowing exactly where it leads. Curious people build better businesses, not because they know more, but because they never stop updating what they know.

I look at myself now compared to who I was at twenty-six. At twenty-six I was still going out every second weekend, carrying real personal challenges I hadn't done the work to address, operating on autopilot in ways I didn't yet recognise as patterns. Now at thirty-four, I have a wife I'm deeply grateful for, a son Cory turning eight this year, a daughter Mia turning five, a home that feels like a genuine sanctuary, & a business I'm proud of in a way I couldn't have been at twenty-six.

The compound interest of choosing growth over comfort, sustained over years, is a life that looks & feels different in every measurable way.

When you find something that's no longer serving you, something that isn't improving your life or the lives of the people around you, you stop it. That's not restriction. That's clarity about what actually matters.

Personal development isn't something you do when the business is quiet. It's the work that makes the business better.

Win 5: Investing in My Team & the Culture Around Them

Working by yourself can only take you so far.

There is a ceiling to what any individual can build alone, & it arrives faster than most people expect. The businesses that grow beyond that ceiling, that develop genuine momentum rather than just individual effort, do so because of the people inside them. Not despite the investment in those people. Because of it.

The win here wasn't just building a good team. It was understanding early enough that a great team is the business strategy, not a support function within it.

A team that genuinely cares, that operates with a sense of ownership rather than just employment, that makes decisions the way you would make them even when you're not in the room, is the only real answer to the question of scale. You cannot be everywhere. But your culture can be.

Gallup's research on employee engagement, conducted across 1.8 million workers in 82 countries, found that highly engaged teams produce 23% higher profitability, 18% higher productivity & 66% lower turnover than disengaged ones. The financial cost of losing a team member, when you account for recruitment, lost productivity, onboarding & the time to reach full capacity, typically runs between 50 and 200% of their annual salary. A team member who stays three years & performs at a high level because they feel genuinely valued is one of the most financially significant assets a small business can have.

But this isn't primarily a financial argument. It's a values one.

The people who come to work for you are putting their time, their energy & their professional credibility into what you're building. They deserve a leader who takes that seriously. Who is honest with them. Who develops them. Who makes them feel their contribution matters, specifically & genuinely, not just with a bonus at Christmas.

The businesses that lose their best people almost always lose them for the same reasons: they stopped feeling valued, they stopped growing, or they stopped trusting the person leading them. None of those things happen overnight. They accumulate.

The wins in this area came from getting the basics right consistently. Showing up as a leader worth following. Being transparent about the challenges without offloading them onto the team. Investing in development. Celebrating the people who hold the standard. Making sure the culture we talk about is the culture people actually experience on a quiet Tuesday morning when nothing particularly exciting is happening.

If you've been in business for a few years & you have team members who've been there since the early days, take care of them. They were there before the momentum. They held the standard when the business was still finding its feet. That loyalty is rare. Reward it intentionally.

Win 6: Rebranding to Life's Peachy Fit

A few years ago I was close to signing with another franchise system.

The conversations were progressing. The paperwork was in motion. And then my mentor, Dan Williams, said something that stopped me.

He told me to use my own brand.

I had seven years of operational experience inside a franchise by that point. I understood how memberships worked, how systems ran, how marketing operated, how retention was built & how culture was maintained. I'd seen behind the curtain of a major national brand & understood, at a level most operators never reach, exactly what made it work & what I would have done differently.

The case for building on someone else's brand is real, & I've made it in this article already. But there is a point, if you develop the experience & the confidence, where you've genuinely earned the right to build on your own name.

Dan helped me see that I was at that point.

Life's Peachy Fit is mine. Every decision about the member experience, the programming, the visual identity, the culture, the direction, those are mine to make. When the fitness landscape shifts, & it will, I can respond immediately. I can evolve. I can refine. I don't need a national franchisor to approve a change my local market needed six months ago.

Research on brand ownership in small business is consistent. Businesses that operate under their own brand demonstrate higher owner satisfaction, greater strategic flexibility & stronger community identity. A study by Bond Brand Loyalty found that customers of independently branded businesses report higher emotional connection to those brands than customers of franchise businesses in the same category, when the independent brand has developed a genuine community presence.

In Byford, Life's Peachy Fit is not a franchise outpost of a national chain. It is the gym. Built for this community. Shaped by the people who've been through the doors. Evolving in response to what our members actually need, rather than what a national operations manual prescribes.

That's what brand ownership gives you. Control, yes. But more importantly, identity. The ability to stand for something specific, in a specific place, for specific people.

I'm grateful Dan pushed me toward it. The decision to back myself was one of the best I've made.

Win 7: Purchasing Our Commercial Warehouse Through Our SMSF

This one requires a bit of context, but stay with me, because it's one of the most significant financial decisions I've made & one I'd encourage any established business owner to explore with the right professional guidance.

Alicia & I had set up a Self-Managed Superannuation Fund. We'd been contributing consistently for years & had built enough within the fund to apply for a commercial property loan.

We used the SMSF to purchase the commercial warehouse that Life's Peachy Fit operates from. The gym, as a business entity, became the tenant & pays rent directly into the fund. There are strict rules governing this arrangement, as there should be. The rent must be at market rate. You cannot reduce it, defer it, or offer yourself a free period. Everything must be arm's-length & commercially reasonable.

But when those rules are followed correctly, the structure is enormously powerful.

The rent that Life's Peachy Fit pays every month, money that would otherwise leave the business entirely & flow to an external landlord, now flows into our superannuation fund. It's building wealth for our family's future in the most tangible, controlled way I can imagine. An asset we own, that our business uses, that appreciates in value over time, & that generates rental income inside a concessionally taxed structure.

The ATO reports that more than 600,000 SMSFs operate in Australia, managing over $900 billion in assets. Commercial property held inside an SMSF is one of the most tax-effective long-term wealth strategies available to Australian small business owners precisely because the rental income is taxed at the super rate of 15% rather than individual or corporate rates, & capital gains on assets held for more than twelve months inside the fund attract a 10% rate rather than the standard rate.

This decision was the beginning of what I think of as legacy wealth. Assets not tied to how many sessions I run or how many memberships I sell. Wealth that compounds over time & will continue to do so long after I've stepped back from the day-to-day. It was the moment the business stopped just being an income & became part of something larger.

If you're an established business owner who has been operating for three or more years & you haven't had a conversation with a specialist SMSF advisor about what this structure could look like for you, that is the conversation to have. The sooner you start, the longer the compounding works in your favour.

Win 8: Selling Our Other Locations & Focusing on One

For a period I was operating multiple locations simultaneously.

It felt like growth. It looked like growth. By the conventional metrics of business expansion, it was growth. More sites, more members, more revenue & more complexity.

But complexity has a cost that doesn't show up immediately on a profit & loss statement. It shows up in your attention. In your decision-making quality. In the dilution of everything you're actually good at, spread across too many fronts simultaneously.

The decision to sell the other locations & focus entirely on Life's Peachy Fit Byford was the decision to choose depth over breadth. And it was one of the most clarifying business decisions I've made.

Bain & Company's research on business simplification found that companies which reduce operational complexity & focus on their core offering consistently outperform diversified counterparts in profitability, customer satisfaction & team performance. The energy saved by not managing multiple sites, multiple teams & multiple leases goes back into the one thing you're genuinely trying to build. The return on focused attention is one of the most underappreciated forces in business.

Jim Collins describes it as the Hedgehog Concept, drawn from the ancient Greek parable of the fox & the hedgehog. The most successful organisations do one thing. One thing they can be genuinely exceptional at, that they're deeply passionate about, & that drives their economic engine. The fox knows many things. The hedgehog knows one thing very well. It's the hedgehog that survives.

Since focusing on one location, the clarity has been remarkable. The ability to be genuinely present. To know every member by name. To invest in the team without spreading resources thin. To build a community rather than manage a portfolio. That's the business I actually wanted to build. It just took some time & some complexity to get there.

More isn't always more. Sometimes the most powerful business decision is the one that removes things rather than adds them. Complexity was slowly killing what I'd built. Simplicity gave it back.

Win 9: Building Property & Buying Our Forever Home

This one isn't strictly a business win. But it's one of the most significant financial decisions of my life & I think it belongs here.

There's a strand of entrepreneurial advice that's become popular over the last decade. The idea that you should rent your home, keep your capital liquid & invest in assets that generate yield. I understand the logic. I've read the arguments. I've listened to the people making them.

I respectfully disagree. Or at least, I disagree for me, in my context, with my values.

I built my first house in 2012. My second in 2016. In both cases I was building equity, paying down a mortgage with money that would otherwise have gone to a landlord, & creating an asset that compounded in value over time. When we eventually sold, the equity accumulated across those years, through consistent repayments, capital growth & a period of renting the first as an investment property, gave us something money alone couldn't have: optionality. The ability to make a choice that wouldn't have been available to us otherwise.

In 2022, Alicia & I purchased our forever home. A four-bedroom, two-bathroom property on 2.5 acres, with a pool & a shed. Eight minutes from the gym. I genuinely pinch myself that we managed to do this. Not because of luck. Because of a decade of decisions that compounded in the right direction. The 2012 build started a chain that made everything else possible.

CoreLogic research on Australian property values shows that median dwelling values across Perth have grown at an average annualised rate of approximately 7 to 8% per decade, meaning a property purchased in 2012 has, on average, more than doubled in value. That's not a guarantee & it comes with the responsibilities of mortgage repayments, maintenance & illiquidity. But for someone building a life & a business in Perth long-term, who needed the stability & the space to anchor a family, property ownership was the right vehicle.

More than the financial case, though, is the lifestyle case.

Perth is home. When Alicia & I come back from holidays, we always say the same thing to each other: Perth really is the best. Coming home to our property, the kids running in the backyard, the quiet of 2.5 acres, the space to actually breathe, that grounds me in a way nothing else does. I come home from a big day at the gym & something in me exhales. You cannot put a yield calculation on that feeling.

Conventional entrepreneurial wisdom says don't buy your home. My response is: if you love where you are, if you're building something long-term in one place, & if the stability of ownership gives you a foundation from which you build more confidently, then buying your home isn't a failure of financial sophistication. It's a choice made with full awareness of what matters to you.

We could never have done this without the 2012 build. Ten years of paying down a mortgage, a period of it as an investment property, enough equity to put the deposit on our dream home. Every good financial decision compounds into the next one if you let it.

Build wealth. But build it in a way that serves the life you're actually trying to live, not the one that looks best on a spreadsheet.

Summary

For every mistake I've catalogued, every wrong hire & bad lease & shiny object that cost me more than it gave back, there is a corresponding decision I got right.

The wins & the losses aren't separate stories. They're the same one.

The values I chose in a Cockburn car park in 2016 became the thing our members talk about most. The franchise system I learned inside became the foundation for the brand I eventually built with my own name. The mentor I found before I needed one gave me a decade of better decisions. The books I read changed who I am as a person & as a leader. The team I've invested in has given me the ability to build something I couldn't build alone. The brand I finally made my own has given me the freedom to evolve it. The warehouse, the one location, the home on 2.5 acres, the superannuation structure, those are what compounding looks like when you make enough of the right calls across enough years.

None of it was linear. None of it happened because I had a perfect plan. Most of it happened because I paid attention to what was working, doubled down on it, & didn't let the setbacks talk me out of the direction I was heading.

The business wins don't always look like wins while they're happening. Sometimes they look like a scary commitment, a significant investment in someone you're not sure you can afford, or a decision to sell something you've worked hard to build. They look like wins in retrospect, when you can see what they made possible.

Pay attention to the decisions that feel right at a level deeper than pure logic. Those are often the ones worth trusting.

The mistakes keep you up at night. The wins get you out of bed in the morning. Make sure you're building a life with enough of both.

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.