How Farm Girl Fitness Came To Be
If you told me a year ago that by now I would have quit my job, opened up my own studio and even hired others because I couldn’t keep up with all the success, and all during a global pandemic, I would have laughed at you. Hard. Looking back on the past year brings up a lot of emotions and feelings: fear, exhaustion, joy, gratitude, anxiety, pride, self doubt, and about 100 other things.
Thinking about writing the story of how this all came to be is so strange because even with all the fears and doubts I’ve gone through I can’t imagine my life without this opportunity. You know when something feels so right you wonder how you ever existed before? Thats me. On March 15th 2020 I received an email telling me not to go into work the next day because the fitness club I worked at was shutting down, along with hundreds of others, due to COVID-19. At the time I worked for the biggest fitness company in Canada and was managing a small group training program for the last 2 years.
I loved my job. I loved the people, I loved getting to see people progress and grow in front of my eyes. I loved the mix of sales, marketing, program creation, leadership and coaching that the job entailed. Looking back now I see that the reason I loved those things is because one day I needed to become my own boss. To take this story even farther back, I need to explain where that entrepreneurial spirit came from: my dad. My father has been his own boss since he was 18 years old. He was born and raised in Saskatchewan on a family farm that taught him everything he needed to know about how to get the job done. My father has no post secondary education. In fact most of his schooling was done from a 1 room school house where his mother was the teacher.
Long story short I grew up watching him create, manage and grow multiple businesses from the ground up. I’ve never thought it was unusual to run your own business because I had a front row seat to everything involved. I often thought about starting something on my own but either couldn’t find the right fit, didn’t have the money to start, and was always convinced that I didn’t know enough and would fail. So, this takes us back to March 15th, 2020. I find out that the gym is closed and I figure that this is hopefully for only a couple weeks. I started posting LIVE online workouts via instagram for my social media account that was linked to the gym. I figured that it would give me something to do, it would keep my members happy so that they would be there when I went back. Then 1 week turned into 2, which turned into a month, which turned into 2 months and before I knew it there was no end in sight. A good friend of mine reached out to me privately saying: “Girl, you know you have to start charging for your workouts right?” I was flattered by the statement but brushed off the comment quickly.
“Charge for an online workout?? What would people think! I don’t want people to think I’m taking advantage of them. I think charging right now is too soon. This could be over next week. Plus there are 1000’s of other online workouts, why would someone want to workout with me?” Can you hear all the self doubt?? There were a lot of other fears coming to mind that I’m not going to get into here but needless to say I eventually had to realize that fears aren’t facts. I actually sat down with my notebook one day and wrote out all the things I was afraid of. Then in another column I wrote down what was actually true or factual. I quickly realized that my fears were made up and I had to start thinking long term for the well being of myself and my family. So, I started training a few people online, in my living room, with poor lighting, no space, no music, and two cats that loved to get in the way. But I did it. And people liked it. Then the weather started to get nicer and I started to think that maybe I should offer something outside.
One day I had a visit at the farm with a dear friend and fellow instructor and I was telling her about the idea of running classes outside. At the time I was thinking I would wait till the parks reopened and would then apply for a permit. As we’re walking around the farm she looks at me and says: “Why are you waiting for parks to open? This is a park!!” I hadn’t really given it much thought because I assumed no one would want to drive to me. I figured I had to do something in town so that people would come. We then started to scope out the property from different eyes thinking of where we could set up. At the time I was only allowed to have groups of 5 people outside so that meant I could only have 4 participants. I put the word out and right away had a few people agree to come give it a try.