We were lucky to catch up with Kelly Starkey recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Kelly thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the best thing you’ve ever seen (or done yourself) to show a customer that you appreciate them?

At FIT4MOM West Orlando, we strive to help our members feel good about themselves all year long. However, during the month of May, we like to go above and beyond all month long to honor the amazing moms in our community. We call it our Month of Mama because we think that moms deserve more than just a day. This year we showed our members how much we appreciated them by placing signs in their yard that said “An Amazing Mom Lives Here!”. It felt good to highlight these moms and let them be recognized. So many of our moms, especially our moms celebrating their first Mother’s Day, expressed how much it meant to them. We spent the rest of our Month of Mama spoiling our moms with a huge Celebration of Moms class with goodie bags and giveaways, Muffins with Mom after one of our classes, a floral arrangement and charcuterie mom’s night out, plus we partnered with local businesses to have giveaways all month long. Moms are truly amazing and we wanted to do our part to make sure our members felt the love,

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

My name is Kelly Starkey and I am a wife, a mom to two wonderful girls, and the proud owner of FIT4MOM West Orlando- a place where moms can get a great workout as well as a connection to other moms through our stroller friendly workout classes. I started my professional career working in nutrition and always had a passion for health and fitness. After the birth of my first daughter in 2019, I made the decision to stay at home with her and that is when I first learned about FIT4MOM. We were living in the Tampa area at the time and I didn’t know many people so I was looking for things I could do to make some mom friends and get out of the house with a new baby. I quickly fell in love with the community I found there because it was somewhere I could workout, talk to other moms, help my daughter socialize, and so much more.

When my husband’s job took us to Orlando in 2021, I was leaving behind all of that amazing community and going to a place where I didn’t know anyone and basically starting over finding moms friends and things to do. I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands and help create a community here in West Orlando for moms that were looking for the same things I was. It was a labor of love to start something from scratch but it’s something that was missing here and something that moms deserve. Moms need an environment where they can be themselves, where they can feel strong and confident, where they can show their children what being happy and healthy looks like, where their children can make friends and have a safe space to play and grow. At FIT4MOM West Orlando, we provide a variety of amazing fitness classes for moms but we also provide a village so these women don’t have to go through motherhood alone,

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Our best source of clients come from what we like to call “word of mama”. This means one of our members or another mom in our community tells someone they know about us. They bring a friends to class, they meet a new mom at the park and invite her to join, they mention it to another mom at their kids school, or they leave some of our flyers with their child’s pediatrician. Moms value other moms opinions and therefore are much more likely to give us a try if they hear our name from another mom.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Building a good reputation in our area has been all about providing a positive, consistent experience for every mom that comes to one of our classes. We want to make sure that every time a mom comes to one of our classes, she leaves feeling like she got a great workout, got the opportunity to connect with other moms, and had the chance to bond with their children. If we succeed in doing that, we know we can count on that mom having nothing but good things to say about FIT4MOM West Orlando and therefore helping us build a positive reputation.  

Contact Info:

• Website: https://westorlando.fit4mom.com/
• Instagram: @fit4momwestorlando
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fit4momwestorlando

Image Credits
Real Square Media Abby Craft Creative