 I didn't know until the last year of college what I was even gonna be doing with my life. A lot of people got into cardiac rehab. They stayed in school for physical therapy. They became sports coaches for school. Some of them just didn't use their degree at all. So me, I was really into working out. I love the science that I was studying and I also love the science of understanding how to do everything versus just what you're taught in a gym and hopefully that's right, okay? So I always wanted to learn more and just to be smarter at training. When I started college though, I was a finance major. Go with numbers, but it was a very boring job. Didn't fit my personality and honestly I can't sit still. So that's when I changed degree plans when I went to Texas State. My last year of college, that's when ESPN Sports Science did a segment with the Auburn Tigers and the Oregon Ducks when they played a national title game and Auburn had Cam Newton, who's now an NFL obviously. So when watching this segment, they're just going over the recruiting differences, training philosophy differences, what parts of the science they tap into the most and that totally blew my mind because it really spoke deeper to me that there are similarities in training athletes to be at elite levels, but also other deciding factors on how you go about it and how you can really make them excel. So it was at that time, my last year of college when I said, I wanna train athletes, but I didn't know anything else after that. If I'm being really honest, I didn't know, do you go for a college, go for NFL team, other high schools that hire these guys, do you work at a gym? I already had a gym where I ever saw train athletes, really just did it for like a fun sports camp in the summers, okay? So I didn't wanna do that really. And is there big commercial gyms that do it where they're small mom and pop studios? I had no idea what was out there. I had no idea even how big the new sports and youth training industry was and be coming to to this day, okay? So I knew I had to get learning under somebody and luckily I had an internship requirement to finish my degree. And that's where I met my mentor, Sean Dassy. He was one city over. So he had all the experience that I wanted and somebody to mentor me. He had played division one sports at Iowa State, got his bachelor's and master's there, worked at Drake University with the basketball team for strength conditioning, then he went prime performance in California and had over 30 first round draft picks and basketball, football and baseball. Then he eventually moved his family down to Texas. So that's who I learned under but I still didn't know how he could help me. I started off at a YMCA where he was a fitness and sports director at. But most that time getting adult clients who need to be healthy and stronger was a lot easier. And I still do that today but that was the main focus right there while I had to slowly build my name to get parents to pay me to train their kids, right? Adults would be more willing to give another adult money for training them versus somebody with their kids, I think at least in my experience. So I went under a mentorship of Sean started with a one semester internship and then about seven or eight more months as an employee Sean eventually moved his way down to San Antonio back where I was from and he became a sports director from somebody who already had a small private studio and a few months after he left, he brought me among. So that's when I really got my first full time experience training athletes. I was really excited, I moved back. There's one problem, the place wasn't doing too well and both he and I were not given those details. So while I'd go in days really excited to train athletes cause that's most of my clientele in the evening was going to be athletes. You know, they did football, basketball, baseball, soccer, volleyball, they, the company was so far under we couldn't always get paid. So I was basically doing another internship while trying to struggle on weekends to make money to pay my bills. The place unfortunately evolved, it closed down and filed bankruptcy and as a staff, we wound up in another gym and some of you might remember this place cause it was all of the United States. It was called Velocity, okay? Velocity had closed down actually a year before and it became elite athletics if I'm being really technical. So we go inside there, 20,000 square foot facility has the big turf, all the big giant lifting rigs and everything, 40 yard track, it was awesome. You know, we became the team and there was less stress cause you know, we're not the ones paying the bills. So we go at it, we're having a great summer ramping up their business and everything as the new staff. But then we find out how much in debt they really are and there was no way we were coming out of helping them with six figures in debt after like so many years. It was bad and it became a lot of stress and we all left and went our different ways. For about a year, I worked for Gold's Gym and I also worked for a physical therapy company, one of my athletes from the other gym elite athletics his dad owned five clinics and he let me get hours in the morning as a technician. Okay, so bounce around, make multiple jobs. This is all within a year and a half of leaving the small city after graduating college, okay? So post college was definitely stressful but I thought that's just how the grind was, right? I didn't know any better. And then I worked for Gold's Gym, okay? Big nationwide company actually, it's in other countries too and it's mostly adults, okay? It's not fully what I want to do but it pays the bills, okay? So I get to practice what I went to school for. Eventually I started training kids out at the football fields, okay? I'm just doing all the speed and agility stuff I can, anything with cones, hurdles, resistance bands, using the track, all that good stuff, okay? Very simple stuff. I decided, I was like, you know, I want to go and do that 100% starting January 2016. And this is like April or May 2015 when I decided that. Fast forward to September when I was training those athletes on the side. Corporate got wind of it. They saw some social media pages of mine for training athletes and I got fired for breaking the no compete agreement, okay? This was a little stressful because it was four months before I really wanted to go and save up money. And so now I'm in the middle of a fall season. Most of my athletes are football players and they're all in practices and games. So I have no idea what I'm doing. Just trying to get kids on weekends at this point and still wait tables to make the bills get paid, okay? So that's how I started off in 2016. But luckily some of those guys I trained in the fall did really well and it started teaching me how their success can bring me more clients, getting to know parents can bring more clients, okay? So I struggled a little bit in 2016 but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. It was actually way better than working on goals. I was a little more independent. I was just training at the fields and the track. All I needed was decent weather and the gates to be open, okay? So I've been my own business for seven years of 10 years out of college. I've tried so many systems for marketing in word of mouth and knowing how to talk to parents has been the best. Knowing how to talk to coaches has been the best. Getting kids really excited and building a relationship with them to where they wanna tell their other friends and their parents to come. I've managed to go from middle five figures up to six figures for multiple years and that is the fifth straight year of doing that. So that is no fluke. I continually always learned to grow, work smarter. In the beginning, I never knew what I would, one of my income to be or what, how many hours a week I wanted to work, how smart to work, I had a lot of payment mistakes, getting money as I went instead of getting money upfront, okay? So I did a lot of things the hard way and if I could go back, there would be a lot of things I changed but I've done a lot of smart things now that you will learn in our Accelerator coaching course for make money coaching sports. If you ever wanna just contact me, ask me about my experiences more, discuss your experiences, then there's a call to action below this and you're gonna go to SWIP Performance Training at gmail.com or you can text me first at 210-414-3077.