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

Danny, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about how you went about setting up your own practice and if you have any advice for professionals who might be considering starting their own?

I must qualify this entire story with the perspective that it wasn’t necessarily difficult having to transition to working for myself. The difficulty was in creating my own firm. The difference is having to create original systems, marketability, and brand for replicating myself into those I hire. This has been, and still, is the biggest challenge.

The most important question I had to answer, and still have to answer, is what makes me unique. Not my service but me as a person. At first, I attempted to do what would help me become successful sooner, but those methods weren’t mine. It could be things like how to market or onboarding newcomers or even little things like pricing packages.

I found out that If you don’t believe in the process/system you won’t put your whole heart into implementation. That contradicts the initial feelings about running your own operation, the feeling that you have no idea what to do and if you are even good enough to do it.

The best advice to myself and others is to approach every aspect of operating your own firm with uniqueness and with creativity. It fills every step you take with passion and might lead you to an even better way to solve the problem than anyone else has achieved.

Danny, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I founded a company called RX Fit which is a functional fitness personal training firm. There are 3 somewhat unique approaches to the way we do things.

First, in descending order of unique approaches is our marketability. We do not have a retail location and instead use what we call satellite gyms (rental spaces or small gyms that allow us to use space) across the city, or we will travel to our client. This is an important component of our business model. It increases retention (LTV of the client) and reduces the normally massive overhead of owning a space. This allows us to pay our trainers a real professional income so that our pros can stay in this field indefinitely. Which in turn means that we will have the best professionals in the industry.

Secondly, we created a style of training known as functional fitness. The idea is that we took corrective exercise and physical therapy approaches and combined them with traditional strength and conditioning modalities, alongside systems we created in optimizing sleep, hydration, mindfulness, and diet. The goal is to create foundational biology that is anti-fragile and thrives in physical and mental environments. This attracts our core demographic of higher professionals who need the energy and physicality to do their job while managing their households and cannot allocate time to developing on their own.

Third and finally is our, low barrier, integration with tech. Managing success in health is an incredibly complicated endeavor. On the one side, you have to solve what is healthy, and on the other how do you measure health? With the assistance of my other company, we were able to bring in formulas and integrations into our spreadsheets that can measure success by only using things like an Apple watch or Oura ring. This does not have to be managed by the client and is a showcase of improvement over time and represents weak points that need to be focused on moving forward. This is mostly for our professionals but also is accessible to the client. What gets tracked gets managed.

The truth of the matter is my own fear of death has led me to my obsessive nature of finding perfection in a lifelong approach to quality of life. I do not see us as personal trainers anymore, we are lifestyle managers.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your firm or practice?

This question has a core philosophy of mine attached to the answer. I do not take funding for my businesses. First I attempt to find the simplest version of what I want to do and then find a way to do so at a minimal cost. In essence, provide a service on my own and save funds, and then grow using my own capital.

Even with my tech company, we created the easiest and simplest-to-use version of our product ourselves before bringing in help. We had a product we could sell first and did so, then scaled with those earnings.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

As an ex-marketer, this is a very important focus, especially when choosing your clientele/demographic. Each client needs to have a high LTV, high potential for referrals, and some maven potential. The core of my initial clientele was in the business management consulting industry. These are extroverts, who travel frequently, have a massive network of professionals, and are trusted and respected when giving recommendations.

Those traits allowed me to keep them for a while because of how difficult traveling is on the body, are high energy and love talking to their peers/clients about their trainer, and are in the income bracket that time is a valuable resource and not price, and that type-A personality will commit to a consult within hours of receiving that recommendation.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rxfit.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefitrx/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10408318/admin/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA0XOdkw5VFGBkg3zO7Bp_w

Image Credits
Alex Diaz Danny Trejo