Business
Since co-founding Escape Fitness, taking it to a $33 million-dollar global business chosen by big brands and independent fitness professionals, such as the UFC, Equinox, 1Rebel, Sanctuary Fitness and more, Matthew has continued to be a powerful advocate for functional training. Their goal is to motivate and inspire people to get started and create exercise habits that last. Matthew travels the world, helping studios and gyms to turn their visions into world-class fitness destinations and awesome training experiences. During the pandemic, Matthew has become an advocate for at-home training and maintaining physical and mental health to persevere in the face of life's challenges. In addition to being a father, he has started five companies and sits on the board of three companies across three continents Most passionate about I'm very passionate about the health and fitness space. We have a company that I founded with my father 21 years ago. We started making basic equipment for fitness studios and gyms. We are very much into helping and motivating people to get fit. I predominantly work with a lot of the business community. We have a number of different channels within the business that we supply. Probably the biggest channel is the gyms, personal training studios, and fitness studios. We also do quite a bit of corporate wellness. It’s important to think about your model and how to adapt it and evolve it so that you can deal with things like the pandemic that is going on at the moment. It’s also important to realize that the people who are at the end of the website or email or social media app are humans. What do humans need? As we said at the beginning, there are two things. Look at the stuff that's constant. You mentioned marketing where it's people to people. If it's not business to business or business to consumer, it's people to people. If you go too much down the technical route and lose that human connection, then you're not going to get that engagement and that same experience. Best advice for entrepreneurs You’ve got to look at the new technologies and how your business evolves, but you've almost got to say, “Well, look, what is an important thing for human beings and for people and how can you do that in a way for social media?” I suppose my advice is, it depends on who we're talking to. Don't forget that we're all human and don't let technology confuse you. Try and understand how you can use that technology to create deep and meaningful personal relationships. Nowadays, in order to be successful, you've got to really narrow down on that audience. Humanization and personalization are probably two things that are key today. The biggest, most critical failure with customers One of the most difficult things for me to get over is when we have a customer who’s not happy with us. For us, the customers or clients, whatever you call them, are almost like family. Maybe someone buys a product and we let them down, or we messed up the delivery or they have a product and it has an issue. We had a client whom we started to work with and they were a long way from where we're located—the other side of the world almost. A big percentage of the product that we shipped them was wrong. The quality control wasn't what it should have been. They brought the containers into the country and then they started to distribute them to gyms. We'd read that they'd realized it had this same problem. So, it wasn't just a case of giving them a refund. They had a huge issue to go out and get these back. It was a total mess. Biggest success with customers One day, we went to a trade show and met one of the biggest customers in the fitness industry. We had one of the smallest booths out of all the people who were in there. This lady came up and asked for a catalog. She told us to give them a call. We managed to meet with this company and do a number of presentations. Eventually, they agreed to give us a try....