More Money Podcast - 031 How to Be a Money-Smart Fitness Guru - Jaclyn Phillips, Fitness Coach & Champion Bodybuilder

Episode Date: January 6, 2016

For my first Mo' Money Podcast episode of 2016, I interview fitness coach and champion bodybuilder Jaclyn Phillips about how she turned her love for fitness into her side hustle and how she saves money when preparing for fitness shows. Long episode description: In this episode, Jaclyn and I discuss how she got into the fitness world and how she eventually turned her love of fitness and competing into a part-time business. For my first Mo’ Money Podcast episode of 2016, I interview my friend, and co-creator of the Rich & Fit 21-Day Challenge, Jaclyn Phillips. Jaclyn is awesome. And yes, I may be biased, but she really is. The reason we first connected was because we are equally passionate about helping others when it comes to finance or fitness. She loves fitness and wants to share everything she’s learned with people who want to improve their health. I love finance and want to share everything I’ve learned with people who want to improve their financial lives. When we met and started talking about what we do outside of work — well, it wasn’t long until we came up with our idea for the Rich & Fit program. In this episode, Jaclyn and I discuss how she got into the fitness world and how she eventually turned her love of fitness and competing into a part-time business. To give you an idea of what she does, here’s a look (she’s the brunette on the left): Yup, she knows fitness. She also does her own hair and make-up for shows to save on money (frugal too!). To learn more about Jaclyn Phillips, I highly suggest you check out her website and her Instagram. Her Instagram is seriously my daily motivation to get up and move off the couch. And as another special treat, I found this awesome recipe of her’s for Birthday Cake Protein Waffles with French Vanilla Glaze. I am definitely going to make these this weekend. Shownotes: jessicamoorhouse.com/31 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, and welcome to Episode 31 of the Mo Money Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Morehouse. Thank you so much for joining me and for all of you listening in real time. Happy New Year. It is 2016. I'm super pumped for the new year. I've got a lot of stuff on the go, including me switching my brand name from Mo Money Mo Houses to just Jessica Morehouse. Easy peasy. The new website is jessicamorehouse.com. Another project that I'm super excited to be part of this new year is I'm doing this really awesome finance and fitness program called the Rich and Fit 21 Day Challenge with my friend, fitness coach, and champion bodybuilder, Jacqueline Phillips. So if you want to get fit

and rich, you want to tackle some of your financial problems and also tackle your health, this is an awesome and free way to do it. All you have to do is check out either my blog or Jacqueline's website, JacquelinePhillips.com, or just go right to the registration page, RichAndFitChallenge.com. Another awesome thing about this program is we're giving away prizes. So if you want to not only get rich and fit, but you also want a chance to win $1,500 from Wealthsimple, a $250 gift card from Lowest Rates, a half a year supply of protein powder from Cygen, or an awesome fitness outfit from Ripped Angel, make sure to subscribe to sign up and join us for this awesome program. You will not regret it. Though you will regret if you don't sign up in time because registration closes Friday, January 8th. With all that said, of course, my next guest, my first guest of 2016

is Jacqueline Phillips. I'm very excited to talk to her because not only is she a fitness coach as a side hustle, she makes extra money on top of her full-time job by doing this. But I didn't realize before talking to her how expensive it actually is to become a bodybuilder. But because she's kind of like me, she finds lots of fun ways to cut back and do things herself to cut down on costs. So we're going to get into all of that coming up. Okay, so Jackie, let's kind of go, let's, you know, rewind and how did you get into fitness as like a whole kind of lifestyle thing? And you know, you're not just a fitness coach, you're like a champion bodybuilder and amazing lady. So how did this all

kind of start for you? Yeah, sure. So I grew up playing sports um i've played sports my whole life um i think the very first um activity my parents ever put me in was gymnastics um and i think i was three years old um so pretty much ever since then i've been active um i've played sports both in and out of school um and have tried pretty much every sport you can think of, from judo to diving to everything. Those are very different. Yeah, so growing up I was very lucky. My parents let me kind of try whatever I wanted. I always had to finish out the season, but I was able to try lots of different sports and activities.

So really I've been active my whole life um when i went away to university um i was lucky enough to uh play varsity sports at my university um that helped me really establish um like what kind of sports so in my first year at st fx i um i played rugby um i used to play rugby in high school. Did you? I know. Surprising. No, no, not surprising at all because I had the same experience. I played rugby in high school and then I went off to university and I was like, yeah, I can do this. I couldn't.

And no, varsity rugby was a little. They're giant. Yeah, yeah. Like they literally would have killed me. And my, and Santa Fex won the nationals the year before I went. So, yeah. So, I was totally out of my league. But I played, so, yeah, I played rugby my first year. I played volleyball my second year.

And volleyball, again, I wasn't great at that. You're tall, though. So, I ended up, yeah, that's what they all thought, right? It's like, oh, you're tall and athletic. Like, you can do this. Yeah. Turns out you need to have some sort of coordination. Oh, very well.

So, I ended up doing track and field in my last two years. And that I really found my niche with track and field. Like I said, turns out I can run fast and jump high, but that's pretty much it. So I was lucky to kind of establish really great habits and balance in my life between my academic career. Yeah, that seems like that's hard to do as a student that, you know, is studying, and then you also have all the sports. Yeah, no, being a student-athlete taught me probably more than I learned in real school. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In classes. No, fair enough. Yeah, I learned a lot about time management, prioritizing, you know, just generally feel it figuring out how to how to balance two elements of my life of my life. that schedule and that routine and that balance that I really, I found I really needed some sort of competitive, something competitive to work toward. Right. So you weren't just going to be happy just going to the gym and that's right. I'm doing this. That's right. No, I really needed, I know for me, I needed to figure out, I needed the motivation by establishing, you know, a certain event and date that i need to be ready for and i found that that works for me now and that's how i i do all of my fitness goals

by establishing an event or setting a setting a date or an event that i have to be ready for and that's what keeps me keeps me going and motivated yeah so when did you kind of first get into the but is it so is it bodybuilding or what do you call it to go to those competitions where you're just like, look at all my muscles? There's a couple different associations when it comes to fitness or physique shows. Physique shows. Yeah. So the association I compete in is the IFBB, which is the International Federation of Bodybuilding.

Oh, okay. And bodybuilding is both the general term they use for the whole sport, but it's also a class within the sport. Okay. So there's, you know, there's a couple different classes, and they all differ in terms of kind of what, what the ideal physique is within each of those classes. I compete in bikini, which is the least muscular class. Um, uh, and the reason I compete in that class is because it's best suited to my body. Um, I don't have to gain a whole lot of muscle. What's the class above that where the girls are just like crazy? So there's bikini figure that's a little, And even above that is physique.

And then above that is bodybuilding. Oh, my God. Yeah. So there's lots of. They get. They get big. They get big. They get big.

Yeah. And yeah, like I really have a lot of admiration and respect for those women that can do that. But for me, it's at this point in my life um bikini is that that class is the best suited to my my yeah my lifestyle and my and my shape and body and everything so so yeah it um it definitely keeps me motivated and keeps me going and uh so did you start that after university or yeah so i actually didn't i the first time i stepped on stage for a uh fitness competition was uh november 2013 so i had been out of school for um uh actually just a few just a few months i i was out of school um and i uh i was really at the, I was really kind of lacking motivation.

And I didn't want to go to the gym. And I wasn't, you know, I was just finding it hard to generally in life. I wasn't that happy. I was working at a law firm. And I didn't really have a lot of balance in my life. So I was, you know, I was working out at the gym. And someone asked, you know, are you training for the fitness competition? I said, what's a fitness competition?

And yeah, that was two months before the November 2013 show. Two months? Yeah. So you had two months to get ready for that show? I think, yeah, it might have been three months. Yeah, it might have been 12 weeks. I took and got ready for the show and I ended up winning my class in that show? I think, yeah, it might have been three months. Yeah. It might've been 12 weeks. Um, I took and got ready for the show and, um, I ended up winning my class in that show and yeah, I was, I was, I think it was a little bit of beginner's luck, but, um, yeah, I think, um,

it's, I've always said about shows, it, it, it doesn't really matter. Um, you know, you can work your ass off but it's really about who shows up that day oh really yeah you know so um yeah it's you can't really judge how you're gonna do in the show what do they judge that's what i understand it's like if everyone looks so good yeah like how do they know so it's a ranking system okay yeah so it's not i think that's actually i'm really glad I get to talk about this because I feel like a lot of people don't know how these are judged. Um, so the, the rank, the, the competitors are ranked. So you're literally ranked one through 15 or it

generally only goes up to 15 in each class. Um, because it's really hard to do the ranking obviously for the judges. Um, but yeah, you're ranked from one onward. So the lower your points, the better the score. Oh, okay. Yeah, and they add up. There's anywhere from five to ten judges, and they add up the scores. And then they actually subtract the highest and lowest score.

So they take an average, or I guess a mean of the scores. And that's how it's judged, yeah. It's really difficult to judge um the shows though like especially when the caliber of athletes is really high you know you kind of all they all look the same so it's like how do you yeah how do you know which um yeah it's it it can be you know a lot of people think it's political and it's you know it's it is what it is so i just approach i just go in try to manage my expectations's political and it's you know it's it is what it is so i just approach i just go in try to manage my expectations every show i go in you know with an open mind i try not to you know set too many expectations and you know too many um things like that but

yeah you know you set goals like you know i'm gonna i can come in at this body fat percentage and stuff like that but um to me it doesn't really make sense to set a goal like, oh, I'm going to come top five when you don't know who else might be competing that day. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's all about expectation management. Yeah, that's awesome. And so get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings.

Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. You were doing these competitions and eventually this kind of spun off into like, hey, I could actually probably do this as a side business to, you know, make some extra cash while I work full time and, some exposure and all that kind of stuff. That's right. So I ended up doing my first competition in the same year that I started working in business development, legal business development. So when I first competed, I had no intentions of kind of making it a thing or even a regular thing. I didn't even know if I wanted to do another one. Yeah. But I, at the time, I knew I needed the balance. Yeah.

So, yeah, I did my first competition. I did a second competition. And by the third competition, I kind of noticed how other competitors would come up to me for advice or people would reach out to me for fitness advice. I also, you know, I started getting offers from photographers to do shoots and stuff like that. And I started, you know, started becoming kind of a side thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I went and got my um my personal trainer certification um and i've pretty much just been collecting certifications since then as my side gig um

i've i've and yeah it's it's kind of blossomed into a really great um side gig yeah um and it's it's the best part about it is that i don't really have to do too much marketing or anything um it's all kind of word of mouth doing the shows are you know my own marketing and people reach out to me now and um it's become a really great um um source of income on the side yeah so i know we we talked you know kind of offline about this there's lots of ways where you um find ways to save money while you do the competition. Yeah. Because I didn't realize how expensive they actually are.

Like, I had no clue. I thought you just kind of got that stuff for free. Yeah. But no. So the competition world can be very expensive. It can cost upwards of, you know, $2, all said and done three thousand dollars if you're paying for a personal trainer um you know it can get really really expensive so um by you know training myself and um going with just programmers i save a lot of money that way but i also save a

lot of money on show day by doing my own hair and makeup and nails. So a lot of girls see competitions as kind of like a, you know, a spa treatment day and stuff like that. I don't really look at it like that. I look at it as more of a competition. So I don't really do it to kind of pay for myself. Yeah, you think more like the business side of things. Right. I do it as a business, right. So I'm not going to invest $3,000 into a show if I'm not going to get at least that much back. So, yeah.

So I save upwards of $1,000 every show by doing my own hair, makeup, and nails. If I could do my own tan, I would. But I don't think I'd be very good at that so um yeah so there's lots of ways to save money when you compete um you don't you know it doesn't have to be super expensive um i've competed in eight shows but i've only um had three different i've only bought three different suits so you know you can wear the same suit again a lot of people think you have to buy a new suit every show. But it's like, it depends on like if the judges

don't care. The judges don't care. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The judges don't care. Yeah, so things like, little things like that, you know. Getting your jewelry, you know, you don't have to buy like Swarovski crystal jewelry, right? Yeah, exactly. You can buy like, again, the judges don't care. Yeah, exactly. Just buy some like costume jewelry. Again, the judges don't care.

Yeah, yeah. The judges don't know where your fake diamonds are from. It doesn't, yeah, it doesn't matter. Yeah, and is there, so I guess part of the reason you do the competition is obviously exposure for you, for your personal brand to grow your business. The other side of it is there is like some prizes. Yeah, so you can, once you go pro yeah um in the um there's a there's some prizes in the amateur leagues yeah like it depends what shows you do you know if you win the overall you can win a

thousand bucks here and there um when you go pro um there is some money to be won um if you win the shows however it's it's not really a good source of income to depend on winning shows. So what most competitors do, especially in the pro leagues, is get sponsors. So even in the amateur division, it's kind of necessary to have the sponsors

to kind of supplement your training needs and, you know, so you don't have to pay up the yin-yang for supplements and nutrition. You know, like myself, you have a sponsor who provides the supplements and vitamins that you need to kind of get through your training. And we were also talking a while ago about how – I was wondering because there's so many fitness people on Instagram. That seems like the cool thing to do is to take the workout selfies and everything. But some of these people are actually making money off that.

Yeah. So the fitness industry is so funny. It's so easy and so hard at the same time. Um, if you want to, there's a lot of, the market is incredibly saturated, like so oversaturated. And a lot of that comes from, um, not having proper regulation in the industry. Right. Um, so, you know, you have a lot of people that, that, uh, kind of start out or do, you know, you have a lot of people that kind of start out or do, you know, get into personal training or get into these shows and then immediately become a coach, you know. Oh, and you're like, do you have that much experience? Right. of in developing my business and my skills and my education and knowledge around, you know, exercise and nutrition,

is because I do want to make sure that I'm not lumping myself in with, you know, the half-assers. Yeah, you want to, like, yeah. I don't want to take the shortcuts. I want to make sure that I'm fully informed and, you know, continually educating myself. But you're right. Like I said, there is – it is – on the other hand, it's really simple to kind of develop a business by using social media because that is the primary business tool for the fitness industry, especially for online coaching. Social media kind of rules the game. So the more followers you have, the more you can leverage those followers to get more money from your sponsors, to get more clients because, you know, as you know, um, the, the, the market

and consumers, um, oftentimes are, you know, don't exercise their caution when they hire a trainer and, you know, they see someone with a hundred thousand followers and they're like, oh, they must be good. Right. So, um, so yeah, it's like, oh, they must be good. Right. So, um, so yeah, it's, it's, it can be easy. It can be, you know, you can leverage the social media on one hand, but you also have to be careful on the other hand to, to make sure, you know, you keep your integrity and, and maintain good business practices. So, but I think you've got a good head on your shoulders and you've got a pretty good business. Like you say, you're pretty busy.

Yeah, no. So, like, it's become, you know, what started out as a few. It's kind of an idea, right? Yeah, yeah. What started out kind of just as, like, a side gig, you know, for fun. It still is fun and I still consider it that way. Like, I still look at it as, like, my fun side gig. But it's kind of grown organically and naturally

on its own just just from doing the competitions and um you know and educating myself and kind of um speaking out on certain you know certain topics and stuff it's it's it's grown pretty organically so i'm lucky yeah that's pretty cool i'm excited to see where it all goes. And, of course, it goes into our Rich and Fit 21 Day Challenge program. What, what? I know. Self-promo. But still, I think it's pretty cool. I'm excited for everyone to see the program we've created together.

Yeah, me too. It's awesome. There's nothing like it. There is nothing like that. And it wasn't just me being like, oh, I really wish Jackie would just train me for free. Let's see all of this for what this is. But I think it's a really cool way to explore just to, you know, our different audiences. You've got a fitness audience.

I've got a personal finance audience. Just how they're not mutually exclusive, you know, I'd say. You know, for me, I've always wanted to be more healthy and fit. And I always sometimes will like work out aggressively for two months and then stop for two months and then you kind of undo all the work that you did. So I think this is kind of a cool way to kind of do both and just have that like kind of perfect. Yeah, I know. And like you were saying, like a lot of the same the same concepts apply kind of to both both industries in both areas.

So, yeah, no, I'm really excited for it. It's going to be awesome. It's going to be awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, absolutely. Make sure to check out Jacqueline on her website, JacquelinePhillips.com. Easy to remember. So make sure to check out Jackie.

She's also on Instagram. It's super motivating. I like your Instagram because I'm like, all right, I got to get off the couch and do something. Move. Move. Thank you so much for listening to episode 31 of the Mo Money podcast. If you want to read the show notes for this episode, make sure to go to jessicamorehouse.com slash 31 and make sure to check out my new

website. It's pretty awesome. Spent kind of a lot of time on it and I'd love to know what you think. And of course, thank you again to Jacqueline Phillips for joining me on the program today. Also check out her website. She's got a ton of information about fitness and stuff like that on her website, which is awesome. Again, I'm going to plug our Rich and Fit Challenge. I think it's a really awesome and free opportunity for you to get your finances and your physique in shape this new year. And thank you again to our prize sponsors, Wealthsimple, Lowest Rates, Sijin, and Ripped Angel. They're giving away some amazing prizes. So make sure to go to richandfitchallenge.com to find out more information about all that. And without further ado, thank you again.

I will see you next Wednesday.