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

Kim, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Overall what I think it takes to be successful is not giving up, networking, feedback, always keep learning and improving. Also that you balance your work life and personal life because success is nothing if you’re not happy.

Kim, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My background includes business, dog grooming, agility, and dog fitness. I started Fitness with Fido about 8 years ago, back in 2015, as a way to save time because my dog Oscar had a lot of energy and gave me such guilty looks when I would leave to go to the gym that I started combining my workouts outdoors while on our walks. After a few times, other people may enjoy this too! I went to school for business and have worked with dogs since I was a kid, always intending to own my own business; I did not expect this business creation, but it came from passion and feeling unfulfilled at my past job.

I then researched how to start my unique business and still learning a lot. We offer Puplates (Pilates for you and your dog), Doga (yoga for you and your dog), working walks – outdoors classes focusing on exploring nature with their paws and working on obedience, canine fitness, and more! We also have branched off into dog fitness training as there were a lot of requests for people wanting to skip their portion of the workout and only their dog’s workout.

We also create online programs that people can do anytime, anywhere, which has been cool to reach more dogs and people out of St. Louis. Teaching online was especially useful for my dog Leah who didn’t like car rides and my dog Ike who came to me about 50lbs overweight who needed extra workouts, which he’s currently lost 40 of those pounds!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I started to try to build my social media presence before I actually opened my business with coming soon posts and inviting friends and family. Whenever I did events I would always try to direct people to my Facebook Page especially starting out because I was a seasonal business and to my email list.

I think it’s important to make sure to have a business page, not use your personal page so you can separate them, but also see analytics.

Otherwise try to create content that your audience engages with regular, getting them to comment is great engagement and sharing your post. Doing occasionally giveaways help organically spread the word, but want to make sure you’re attracting long term clients not there just for “freebies”. Also working together with other businesses and/or charities.

Growing my online presence with consistent posting and engagement did get me noticed by the Facebook Small Business Leaders Network! Which opened up more opportunities.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I do try to continue improving with continuing education and self-improvement, off the top of my head these 3 books have really helped with how I want to run my business:

“Nothing to lose, everything to gain” Ryan Blair
“You don’t have to be a Shark” Robert Herjavec
“Built to Sell” John Warrillow

Contact Info:

• Website: www.fitnesswithfido.fit
• Instagram: @fitnesswithfido.fit
• Facebook: facebook.com/fitnesswithfido.fit
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FitnesswithFido