We recently connected with Maxime Sigouin and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Maxime thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

I do what I do at Fit Vegan Coaching because over 3 years ago I lost my late partner to breast cancer.I was her caregiver and partner for almost 5 years as she battled cancer. She got diagnosed within 3 months of us dating. I loved her and stuck by her side until the very end.

I was vegan many years before I met her and when she got diagnosed the doctors gave her 1 year to live. So I helped her transition to eating whole food plant-based vegan and she was able to live just over 4.5 years with an amazing quality of life.

After seeing first hand the suffering that she went through from loosing her health and trying to get it back I’ve committed to helping others to not end up in the same position as her. I knew that with an active lifestyle, a healthy bodyweight and with eating a whole food plant-based lifestyle I could help greatly reduce people’s risk of dealing with chronic illnesses such as cancer.

That is what set me on this mission to help 10,000 people get lean, thrive and reduce their risk of chronic illnesses by 2033 and 1 million by 2050. We are just over 800 now. In addition we also donate monthly to cancer patients directly to help support them with bills, food, treatment, etc…

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

My name is Maxime Sigouin from Quebec, Canada but I now reside near Los Angeles with my beautiful wife and our dog Tempeh. I have been in the world of fitness, sports and working out since I was 12 years old and always loved helping people with that aspect of their life because I believe that having a fit and healthy body lays out a solid foundation for people to live an incredible life. It gives you true confidence and discipline.

As I shared in the previous slide about losing my partner to breast cancer and that is what got me started on this whole journey of starting my business.

I create a one-stop shop for a complete transformation. When people start working with us, they get access to a doctor, nutritionist, and trainer to work on them to help them accomplish the transformation they are after. As usually you would never be able to get your trainer, nutritionist and your your doctor to communicate and work on you.

We start off with blood work, a dexa scan, a fitness test to get an understanding of your starting points, deficiencies,imbalances in the body, etc… and then our team gets to work on building you a new plan every single month to ensure that there is no plateaus and that you never get stuck. Plus they get world class accountability and mindset training to help them sustainbaliy develop the habits that will allow them to be successful in this transformation but also for the rest of their lives.

We bring them through 4 phases. Phase 1 is the body composition phase, where we focused on getting rid if stubborn and visceral body fat.

Phase 2 is our reverse dieting phase where we help our clients speed up their metabolism post transformation to ensure that the weight doesn’t come back on.

Phase 3 is our lean muscle building phase, as most people we work with are between the ages of 45 and 75 years young and are looking to fight off sarcopenia (lean muscle mass loss) and osteoporosis (bone density loss). So we put an extra emphasis on that phase for longetivity.

And phase 4 is a maintenance phase to teach our members who to exercise minimally, effectively and how to eat more intuitively so they don’t have to track their food, follow a meal plan or obssess over their food for a lifetime.

The people who typically work with us are those who are tired of not losing weight and or continuously putting it back on (chronic yo-yo dieters) and who are ready to finally do it right once and for all and stop doing all the quick fat loss gimmicks out there and there are those who value their time and would rather outsources the figuring out part to a team of health professional like ours. So we work with a lot of entrepreneurs, tons of doctors and busy people.

One of my proudest transformation is the one from my mom which she always struggled with her weight her whole life and I’ve been able to help her lose over 50 + lbs at 57 years young and she has been keeping it off for 4 + years now.

And what I want people to know, is that it’s never too late to transform, our oldest client is in his 80’s. and that if you are going to transform with us, be sure you are ready to do the unsexy work and to do it right for the last time.

Because we guarantee our results but we are upfront in that we do the unsexy work that works and that is why we get such amazing results for our clients.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

I definitely had those ahah a few years ago I made some decisions to try something new for our marketing and it completely tanked which lead to us having a very slow level of leads for several months + it was happening around our slowest time of the year.

It was also after having had a streak of massive months which forced me to hire more employees.

The combination of a higher payroll, slower months, failed marketing strategy (which was expensive) led me to dip into my savings account to keep the team going. After 5 months of trying my hardest to pick things back up and having to take out 5K a month from my savings for those 5 months I had to have the hard conversation to let people go.

I honestly didn’t have the guts to have those conversation as they were uncomfortable and that led me to use up 25K from my savings account which ended hurting more. So I learnt my lesson, hard conversations suck but losing 25K sucks more ahah

I don’t have a background in business like many people so I was figuring things out as I went and this was a new level of learning for me. But now being almost 5 years into the business I’m glad I learnt those lessons back then versus now.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Honestly starting a podcast and recording success story episodes with my clients. My original business mentor would tell me to get them to record 60-90 sec testimonial videos and even if people got great transformation, many of them never got around to it.

So I just decided to start recording podcast episodes with them for 45 mins and those became my biggest piece to help me spread my mission and further expand my impact.

I’ve been podcasting for 4 years now and it took a long time to grow but it was absolutely worth it.

Now when members sign up with us, one of their goals is to record one of those episodes with me which is always a pleasure to hear that and record with them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://fitvegancoaching.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maximes_official/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thefitvegancommunity5
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/fitvegan
• Other: Apple podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-fit-vegan-podcast-with-maxime-sigouin/id1540427138