We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jason Leenaarts a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jason , appreciate you joining us today. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

When I started my business, I was in a town where I knew no one, so I was legitimately starting from the ground up. There were other merchants in the plaza I was in, so I went door-to-door and introduced myself to everyone letting them know I was a new personal trainer in the area. Mind you, I opened my business in the Spring of 2009 right after the economy took a downturn in 2008, so I knew it would be an uphill struggle to get clientele.

One of the businesses I walked into was a residential and commercial glass company. When I walked in, I was greeted by a husband and wife, the owners of the business. I looked around the perimeter of the shop and saw all of these pictures plastered on the walls. The young lady in the pictures was beautiful, to say the least. I introduced myself to the owners and told them what my plans were for opening. The wife (Amanda), told me that she would love to have a trainer and she assured me she would be my first client.

While in conversation with them, they made mention of the young woman in the pictures: their daughter, Marissa, who at the time was a performer at Disney World. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Marissa was striking, no doubt, but she was also 1000 miles away from where I had opened my business.

Nevertheless, Amanda did become my first client.

And by the end of 2009, I started dating Marissa despite the distance.

Fast forward to today and Marissa is my wife of eight years, Amanda is my mother-in-law and Marissa and I have a son, Sebastian, who recently turned 5.

It’s another reminder that first impressions matter because never in a million years would I have assumed that my first client would later be my mother-in-law!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Unlike a lot of fellow coaches in the industry, I did not grow up athletic nor did I have a weight loss transformation that carried over into wanting to help others with their physiques. I actually thought for many years that I would be a musician and would conquer the world with a guitar and a microphone.

While I was pursuing that avenue and holding down odd jobs, I fell into a personal rut which transitioned into a decade of drug addiction.

Fitness was merely an outlet for me shortly after the drugs started to take hold.

It would be 6 years after I started working out that I would finally get clean.

In 2006, I gave up drugs and at the tail end of 2007, I got certified as a personal trainer.

I had some unique opportunities come my way which gave me the financial backing to go into business for myself. Because nutrition was the area of health that I was most fascinated with, I put more of my time and energy into learning more about nutrition while still keeping an eye on exercise programming.

With my own background with drugs and getting clean, I felt I had a different side of understanding where people struggle with their diets. In my mind, many people fall into self-destructive coping patterns because they haven’t found better tools to help them work through stress, trauma or boredom or sadness.

Exercise can be a great tool to utilize as well as finding areas to improve the diet, finding a supportive community and having a coach who knows what it’s like to struggle and still prevail.

It’s on the topic of community that I feel we’ve done our best work with my business. We’ve celebrated 13 years and every year has been better than the previous despite the challenges thrown our way with the Coronavirus pandemic.

Our style of training is what we call “semi-private” personal training. That means that several people may be training at one time but each client is working their own individual program tailored to their needs and goals. I’ve also branched out into online nutrition coaching for those who can only work with me remotely.

What I’m most proud of is the people who have invariably created our culture. I could not have imagined a better and more diverse group of individuals who make it not only a great place to work but a place where people of all types can come and feel as if they’re a part of something special.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

In 2008, after a few attempts at finishing up my college degree, I was finally on the home stretch. Within months of graduation, I lost my maternal grandfather and one of my uncles on the same side of the family.

When they passed, I was gifted with several pieces of rental property in my hometown in Tennessee. By that time, I was out of work, degree in hand and in a state of limbo because my first marriage was deteriorating.

I tried to oversee the properties for as long as I could but I ended up putting just as much money into them as I was making.

I decided to do a fire sale on the properties so that I could take whatever money I could make and attempt to start my business closer to my son from my marriage.

With that money, I paid off the majority of the debt I had at the time and took the remainder of the money to buy all of my fitness equipment out right.

When I finally opened my doors, I was flat broke but I had no debt and only had to set my sights on paying the expenses of the new business.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

Two years after I opened my business, my father passed away. As a result of his passing, I had an opportunity to try and open a second location. It was a colossal failure. I wasn’t ready, I didn’t have the right pieces in place and I couldn’t successfully build clientele in two locations at one time. I knew I needed to expand from the location I started in to give myself a better opportunity to succeed but two locations was not the right move to make.

While I was trying to manage all of this, I was not taking care of the business financially. When it came time to shut the new location down permanently and relocate my original site, I had accumulated more debt than I could manage.

I had to turn to my family to ask for help.

The good news was that I got the help I needed but it came with a warning, if you will: That either I picked up a second job to make my ends meet or I made my business work of its own accord.

The latter won out.

We are now in our largest location, a spot we’ve been in since 2017 and business is better than ever.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.revfittherapy.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/jasonleenaarts
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/jason.leenaarts
• Other: www.jasonleenaarts.com

Image Credits
Staff picture courtesy of Courtney Prater