Outside of my mom (hi, mom love ya!) I can’t imagine there are too many of you that are reading this, but for those that are genuinely curious about my lack of a web presence lately this is for you.

I’ll cut right to the chase and say the future of Alex Andujar Fitness is very much up in the air. I mean, I’m sure you could’ve figured that out by the fact that I haven’t posted to my Instagram account in almost a month and it’s probably been longer than that for Facebook (at least fitness/nutrition related). In fact, I’ve barely even so much as looked at my Instagram account lately.

Why are things so up in the air? 

First, my day job takes up A LOT of my mental capacity. As time goes on and I have more and more responsibilities, it leaves less and less time for fitness stuff. Even when I do have extra time, I’m so drained that I end up doing my best to relax and take advantage of the down time. Creating fitness related content that is easily digestible and relatable is harder than I’d like it to be unfortunately. When I’m already drained and try to do so, what comes out ends up being half-assed. You don’t deserve half-assed information.

Second, and more importantly, I have barely had any success in getting this off the ground. In essence I’ve been trying to get this going for almost 2 years now. Admittedly, the first year was mostly nutrition coaching with this second year being both fitness and nutrition coaching. In that entire time, I’ve only worked with 3 clients. That’s pretty dismal.

It’s an incredible defeating mindset to put out content on a near daily basis, but to see little to no return. Between certifications, coaches, and various tools of the trade, I’ve invested well over $10,000 into this business and have unfortunately made well less than $1,000. At some point you have to become financially responsible and chalk things up to a loss. I can’t keep investing money into this without any return. That’s just financially irresponsible.

While I have helped the 3 clients that worked with me and all of them had good results, finding and attracting more than that has been nothing but failure after failure after failure. I’ve re-tooled my marketing and message several times, I’ve tried various ways of putting myself out there, and none of it has really ever worked. 

Even conventional ways of building a fitness business are hard. Most everyone will tell you to start with friends, family, and/or coworkers. Let’s take a quick dive into each of these:

Friends: most of my friends live on the east coast in either NY or DC where I lived most of my life. Makes it a little tough to train people that don’t live in the same place as you unless I dive directly into online training, which with little to no experience training clients and designing programs in-person is probably a bad idea. The friends I have in KC? Mostly people who already belong to the gym I help out at.

Family: See above. They all live on the east coast.

Coworkers: My job is remote. My closest coworker lives 250 miles away in St. Louis.

All of that makes finding people to coach as a beginner real hard.

Perhaps I’m not cut out to own and run my own business. Perhaps I’m not a good coach (I mean how would I know? I’ve barely worked with anyone). Perhaps people don’t believe in me or think I can actually help them. Perhaps I’m bad at marketing myself. Perhaps I’m bad at in-person networking and that’s why I can’t build an in-person clientele. Perhaps I’m not giving this enough time to grow. Perhaps I’m not consistent enough or trying hard enough (ya know in the limited time I have to build this between my day job, my band, and assisting at Kansas City Barbell).

In any case, something’s gotta give and my wallet, time, and emotional capacity for this are thinning out. I don’t know how many more failures I can take before I fully throw in the towel.

What’s next for me?

Well, I don’t really know. There are a lot of different avenues I can take I guess. Here’s everything I’ve come up with so far.

1. Continue trying to build my brand/presence, but at a slower pace than I was trying before. Just letting things happen as I can do them instead of trying to force new stuff every single day thereby relieving some of the pressure I currently feel.
2. Instead of trying to make a career out of this, simply do it as a hobby. 
3. Try to find a different path within the health/fitness industry. Maybe I’m not cut out to own my own business and/or be a coach. Maybe I can use my sales/marketing skills and work for an established business. Whether it’s a supplement company, fitness clothing line, gyms, or something else, Marketing Managers and Sales Managers are needed. I’d just need to find one that aligns with my values
4. Give up entirely, focus on my own personal fitness journey, and move on from trying to get into the fitness industry

I do know this – you’ll be able to find me assisting with floor coaching at Kansas City Barbell. That won’t change. It’s something I enjoy and it’s been fun learning from the owners and building better relationships with the members. 

As far as Alex Andujar Fitness, it may continue or I may decide to give it up. Only time will tell, but I wouldn’t expect much content out of me until I figure out what’s going on.

I’ll end this post with one last thing and that’s an apology. I got into this because I wanted to help people better their lives and with my minimal client list it’s clear that I really haven’t been able to do that. I think the reason this bums me out much isn’t so much because I’ve failed myself, it’s because I feel like I’ve failed you. I’m really sorry I couldn’t be the coach the helped inspire change.