We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alexandre Carneiro. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alexandre below.

Alexandre, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?
If one is to define happiness as a state of mind which brings joy and content, than the answer is yes, being a business owner does make me happy. However, too many people these days seek becoming their own CEO or “Founder” of a business to impress others instead of truly understanding what being a business owner is. In my opinion, a business owner has to be the first one there and the last one to leave. He/She will be doing most of the work initially and work long hours to build their business and most likely will still fail and perfecting the business they own several times. It’s not about impressing anyone, but to understand that being a business owner is not a 9-5 job, but at 24/7 job, you truly never stop and you most likely will work more than the average job. Forget about long weekends, holidays and time off, you must be on top of your game non stop if you truly want to succeed. Several sacrifices will come along the way and you must be strong willed to overcome it all. The social media image of owning a business these days is completely incorrect. Images of non stop vacations, freedom and money coming in, is not what it’s like to be a business owner. In fact, if you have employees , you are now responsible for someone’s success, financial and much more. Happiness comes to me when I realize that I have control over how I want to help people reach their health goals and how my trainers will assist them in their journey. But most of the time it’s stressful and not joyful to constantly be putting fires down. Sometimes I do think of what it would be like to just be done at 5pm and not have to think about work anymore. But then the image of having people telling me what to do, when to do it and not having the potential to make more than the salary I was promised isn’t something appealing to me. I’ve always had a vision of how I wanted to run a business and from young age I’ve never been good with authority. So as much as it would be much more relaxing to have most weekends off and be done with work at the same time I still enjoy having the freedom to create my own schedule, control how I will further grow my business and also hiring the trainers that I know will truly help clients in my community.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
Fitness and health have always been my passion. I’ve thought several times of leaving the industry and doing something completely different and yet the idea of not having a fitness related job always crushed me. I’ve only had one corporate job and I truly loved my boss; she was a great leader. However, when I saw potential in myself to do bigger and better things I knew starting my own business would be the ideal occupation for me. At the age of 23 I founded ACFIT LLC, which now is a 4,000 sq ft private personal training studio in Lakewood Colorado. With 10 trainers at the facility and a clientele that is over 150 members I truly pride myself in my team and the idea of helping as many people reach their ideal body and mental image. Being an owner of a private studio and being a personal trainer are completely opposite jobs. Managing a studio requires marketing, e-commerce, media, social media, and several other skills that I had to learn along the way of expanding my business. Skills I had to slowly learn and ask for assistance in order to expand. If it wasn’t for the abilities my wife had/has I wouldn’t be where I am today. We are a strong team and compliments our weaknesses and strengths. We solve a universal problem. Weight loss and improvement of quality of life. How do we do that differently than other locations? Well, I always had a problem seeing how many other locations initially tackled their clients weight loss problems. The typical low calorie diet and high amounts of cardio. I wanted to understand how each client lived their life and comprehend their relationship with themselves, to nutrition and to exercise. That’s why I created what I call today the “Driven Lifestyle Questionnaire”. This allows us to understand in much more detail how our clients live their life and how we can add fitness to their lives instead of forcing them to do a cookie cutter approach that most of the time ends in clients failing or quitting because of the drastic changes in their life in their day to day actions.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
More isn’t better. This is a quality many businesses fail to realize when it comes to building a brand on social media. I would rather have only 200 local followers for my business than over 10,000 that are either not in my business reach or not interested in what I provide. Social media is and will always be in my opinion a somewhat unreliable source to get new customers. I only use it to highlight what we do but I don’t use it to generate much income. Sadly these days I see many businesses buying followers to give the impression they have a successful brand and I don’t. understand how they believe that will come in handy. Illusions are easily unmasked and when you invest so much on one platform and it is not bringing a business the income they originally believes they would have had than all that time and money is wasted. I build my audience primarily with clientelle coming into the business for a consult and then with emails they leave on my website, but I will not build an audience with spending on ads when the potential customer I want to help might not even be looking at social media. I don’t even advertise my own business from my personal page that is verified and has over 220k followers, but my image is not what I do for a living and my business is not a workout page, it’s simply a page to highlight how customers enjoy the training we provide. My best advice for anyone seeking to grow their social media is to be patient but also realize that using only one platform to engage business might not end up the way they expected. Know thy audience as several businesses just want any customer, I don’t. I seek a specific type of client and that’s not something I can easily target just on social platforms.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
Trust and credibility. These are two aspects that I want every one of my clients to know when they enter my business. How did I achieve that. Well it all began with. myself. I have been training clients now for 15 years, got my certification at the age of 20 from one of the harder institutions to certify trainers, I’ve worked on my name and been featured in more magazines, television shows, and website than any other trainer in the state of CO and so much more. Between being a television host, published author, guest at other television stations and working with companies such as Nike, Muscle & Fitness and Amazon to name a few, I built my credibility throughout the years. I then selected an elite team of trainers to represent me at my studio to which have become an extension of my work. People want to know how one’s services will help them, so having spent the larger of 15 years building credibility is one of the main reasons customers seek my business.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.alexcarneiro.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/acdriventraining