We were lucky to catch up with Tyler Valencia recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Tyler thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Talk to us about building your team? What was it like? What were some of the key challenges and what was your process like?
Instructors are the lifeline of Time 2 Train Fitness. Without instructors that are willing to learn and adapt, Time 2 Train Fitness would still be trying to do what we did in 2020. When we first started back in September 2020, the idea was to create a gym experience at-home. Fastfoward to today and we know from experience and listening to content creators that have been doing it for longer, that online workouts are very different from in-person classes.
One of the biggest things I’ve learned over the years of working with different instructors and different personalities, is to be patient. Be patient with the process of bringing on a new instructor and not to rush the initial phase of getting to know someone. When you meet someone new and decide if they can be a good fit for your company, make sure you both feel comfortable with the process. I’ve realized that I have to be more open about the difficulties of doing online workouts and how the process isn’t for everyone. During this process it’s basic human nature to want to please everyone and it’s easy to say ‘yes’, but what I’ve learned through this process is that learning a new skill set outside of teaching workouts can cause stress and frustration. It’s these experiences when describing what goes into an online workout that have helped me shape each discussion and take a much more drawn out process.
Tyler, 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 consider myself a fitness entrepreneur, meaning the work I do is all within the health & fitness realm. I own two online companies, Time 2 Train Fitness and the Kinesiology Institute for Performance Specialists (KIPS). With Time 2 Train Fitness we create online workouts primarily for YouTube, which are free for everyone around the globe. These classes include cycling, barre, strength training, and HIIT workouts. At KIPS, the goal is creating online education for health & fitness professionals. This was my first major dive into entrepreneurship and was started back in 2016. Before starting KIPS, I had owned smaller scale businesses and also had an executive-level job working for one of the top fitness education companies in the world.
Working for different companies and learning how to be an entrepreneur prior to starting KIPS was a valuable learning experience that helped set me up to start fast in 2016. With all these experiences, it set the foundation of learning how to film, edit, create content, market, build websites, and do all the small items that help businesses save money. Even though my educational background is in kinesiology (exercise science), when you’re an entrepreneur you’re quickly learning that it’s more than your traditional education that needs to be utilized on a daily basis.
With both of my companies, I’ve always said that I want to be different. Not for the sake of being different but because outside of the norm there’s creativity and growth, but of course the road to getting there is tough and long. The goal of both companies is to be able to operate regardless of how the economy is going and not be influenced by traditional fitness industry politics. Both companies seek to provide valuable content to their respective audiences that help them grow, whether it’s education or workouts, our clients should be able to progress their lives forward.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
I share with all new instructors for Time 2 Train Fitness that the business model that we have now is completely different to when we started in September 2020. During the first few months we were streaming 20-25 live classes per week on our website, offering 6 different formats, and spending thousands in monthly business expenses. Looking at what our goal is now and what we do on a weekly basis, we release three workouts to YouTube, and focus primarily on ways to create more engaging online workouts. Our marketing budget is much more realistic (zero) and yet our monthly output is exponentially higher than before. We reach a global market and in-terms of monthly watch hours, average around 700 hours per month without being a monetized YouTube channel.
Anyone that is a YouTube content creator can attest to the current marathon that we are in with Time 2 Train Fitness, but we can honestly look at where we are and say the finish line is in-sight. The current goal of getting monetized on YouTube is a short-term goal because after that we want to continue to create new engaging workouts and find ways to push the envelope of online workouts.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
This is an easy question. Not because there’s been so many experiences in this area, but because I recently started to share more about a major life moment that I look back on and helped shape my outlook.
Recently, I received an award from the fraternity that I was a member of in college for being one of the 20 Under 40 Successful Alumni. One of the big reasons why this award means more to me than just getting a certificate and being in a magazine, is from the pains I’ve had working in the industry that I do. I’m not going to name the organization but roughly six years ago I was taken out of a publication in the fitness industry for the same award title. This actually happened twice from the same organization and each time the feeling of hurt hit just as hard. Anyone that works in the fitness industry can probably guess which organization this is but looking back on ‘what’ happened and ‘why’ it happened was a valuable experience for my career. I have never forgotten these moments and used it for motivation over the years. All the nights I am sitting at my desk editing hours and hours of video content, writing new manuals, filming content, or speaking at conferences, I think back to the feeling I had when this experience happened. I dug deep after and kept pushing. You hear how the greatest entrepreneurs find motivation in anything. This experience was easily enough motivation to help me create amazing projects and continue to do so.
Contact Info:
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/Time2TrainFitness
- Website: https://time2train.fitness/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/time2trainfitness/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/time2trainfit
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/time-2-train-fitness/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/time2train_fit