Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Legion made the Inc. 5000 List! And Muscle for Life Is Going to Disappear!

Episode Date: June 7, 2019

“When’s your next book coming out?” “What kind of supplements are you going to release next?” “What would you name your boat if you had one?” I’m asked questions like these all the time and so I thought I’d start doing monthly updates about what’s new and exciting here at Legion and MFL HQ. So here’s a quick hosedown of what me and my jolly band of pirates and bums have been up to lately. Enjoy! Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

This episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my fitness book for women, thinner, leaner, stronger. Now this book has sold over 150,000 copies in the last several years, and it has helped thousands of women build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 1,200 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average. So if you want to know the biggest lies and myths that keep women from ever achieving the lean, sexy, strong, and healthy bodies they truly desire. And if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate female body, then you want to read Thinner,

Leaner, Stronger today, which you can find on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. Now, speaking of Audible, I should also mention that you can actually get the audiobook 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend that you do if you're not currently listening to audiobooks. I myself love them because they let me make the time that I spend doing things like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog, and so forth into more valuable and productive activities. So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my book for free, simply go to www.bitly.com slash free TLS book. And that will take you to Audible. And then you just have to click the sign up today and save button,

create your account. And voila, you get to listen to Thinner, Leaner, Stronger for free. All righty, that is enough shameless plugging for now at least. Let's get to the show. Hello, I am Mike Matthews. This is the Muscle Life Podcast and welcome, welcome. In this episode, I am going to babble about what my team and I have been up to for the last month or so and what is new and exciting. And so let's just get right into it, shall we? The first bit of exciting news is that Legion Athletics, my supplement company, was Inc. Magazine's 587th fastest growing company in America in 2018. Yes, go us, go team. And if we had grown just 20% faster since our inception in 2014, we would have made the top 500 list.

We almost made it so close yet so far away. And I've never really been one to celebrate milestones or small wins very much. I've always tended to just keep my head down and soldier on toward the next target, but that is a bad habit. So let's take a moment here to bask in our greatness for a moment, shall we? And yes, chances are you are part of that we because, quite frankly, Legion would not exist if it were not for all of its many supporters. Not only customers, even just supporters, people who spread the word, who spread the content, who tell others about Legion and what we're doing. So here are some highlights since Legion's launch in 2014. We have served over 175,000 customers. We have sold over 1.1 million supplements. We have generated over $44 million in revenue. We have sent over 210,000 emails to customers. And I'm not talking about marketing emails broadcast to tens of millions of people. I'm talking about individual personalized emails, responses to customers. So that's pretty cool. We've also received over 35 million website visits and we have collected over 240,000 email addresses. And then there are the

tens of thousands of pounds of fat and muscle that we have helped people lose and gain, respectively, and ultimately the tens of thousands of lives that we have changed for the better. And the best part is that we're just getting started because we want to turn those tens of thousands of people into hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of people. And we can do it too. And especially if enough people like you believe in us, shop with us and help spread the word. If we can get enough support, we will do it. will do it. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who

might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Muscle for Life is going to disappear, kind of. So the story here is six years ago, I bought the domain muscleforlife.com for 500 bucks, and I got a website designed and started posting a couple articles per week on it. And then just six months later, it was receiving over 700,000 visits and tens of thousands of social media shares per month. And as you can imagine, I was floored. I had absolutely no expectations going into the project

and wasn't sure if it was going to go anywhere, honestly, let alone quickly become one of the biggest fitness blogs on the internet. And so I just went with it. I kept publishing articles and traffic kept growing. But then I began to wonder, considering how much time was going into building this website, how could I turn it into a real business? How could I leverage the resources that I was putting into it and the readership that I was building to make a better living? I then had the idea to create a supplement company. So this was back in 2013. And not just another supplement company either. I wanted to scratch my own itch, so to speak, and make the products that I myself have always wanted. And that meant that I was going to have to do things very differently. And namely,

I was going to have to create products that could actually deliver the types of results that are worth paying for. I know, novel idea in the supplement space. And that's exactly what I did. supplement space. And that's exactly what I did. So that company, Legion Athletics, started in 2014 and sprouted like a weed in a hothouse. It did 1.1 million in sales in just its first year. And as you can imagine, I was beyond floored by that because statistically speaking, most small businesses fail within their first five years and less than 10% produce more than 1 million in annual revenue. According to 2018 data, only 7% of small businesses get there. And that means, of course, that Legion was an instant outlier and that I had a very special opportunity on my hands. And so for the next

couple of years, I made the most of that. I split my time between working on building Legion and Muscle for Life while also chipping away at book projects. And I continued to advance on all fronts, mostly due to long hours. I probably was averaging 70 hours of actual work per week, not 70 hours at the office and maybe 30 hours of work and 40 hours of dirtling around, but 70 hours of real work. And so in that time, Legion broke 10 million in annual sales, which only a fraction of a percent of businesses ever achieve. Muscle for Life peaked at nearly 2 million visits per month and my books surpassed 1 million copies sold. There was a problem though, because for all the work that had gone into Muscle for Life and for all its relative success, it was losing

its strategic luster because it was at bottom just a glorified blog run by a skeleton crew barely producing seven figures in annual revenue, which mostly came from online coaching. Furthermore, due to trademark concerns, Muscle for Life couldn't become a brand of, well, anything related to health and fitness without me risking litigation. And for various reasons, both strategic and moral, I didn't want to turn Muscle for Life into an affiliate income engine, i.e. I didn't want to stuff it full of promotions for other people's stuff. Also due to the terminal decline of the expensive online course business model, which flourished a decade or so ago and has just been getting worse and worse ever since.

And I think we'll be dead more or less in the next five years or so due to the amount of good free information online, including free courses offered by universities and very cheap courses offered by Udemy and the great courses and so forth. I didn't want to go in that direction either. I didn't want to create big digital courses that I would ask people to pay hundreds of dollars for. And finally, while services like coaching and digital products like meal and training plans can make money. They don't make for a powerful core business offering that strongly differentiates you in the marketplace and achieves scale. So in other words, although Muscle for Life was a popular website and it did have a large and

loyal readership and strong domain authority and thus definitely had tremendous intrinsic value, it really couldn't be effectively monetized. And so what to do, what to do? How could I best tap into that value? And then it hit me. The two horses that I have in the race need to become one, like some kind of freakish Game of Thrones, The Mountain, Frankenstein type of experiment. Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics need to merge. Now, the more I thought about this idea, the more I loved it for a number of reasons. Legion already had a popular blog that was generating seven figures in annual sales. And by merging Muscle for Life into it, we would be effectively doubling the size of that blog. The merger would simultaneously eliminate a strategic weakness and disadvantage, which is Muscle for Life,

and enhance a strategic strength and advantage, which is Legion. It also will allow for more resources to be invested in and focused on that strength slash advantage, which is Legion. It is easier and more efficient to run one business and e-commerce platform than two. It'll be less confusing for readers and followers. So for example, instead of having to search two blogs for articles, because while there is overlap in the content between Legion and MFL, there also are a lot of unique articles to each of those websites, like Blood Flow Restriction is over at Legion, but not MFL, for example. So instead of having to try to remember which website you saw an article on or having to search both websites to see if I've

written about something, you only have to search one website now. Everything is going to just be a legion. And lastly, the merger diversifies legion's offerings and income, which improves its perceived value in the eyes of consumers, because now it's more of a one-stop shop for getting fit as opposed to merely a supplement company. And it also improves its value to potential investors, should the need to raise capital ever arise. And so the only downside, as I saw it, really was emotional. Muscle for Life is a part of my DNA and a part of my personal brand, so to speak. Without it, there would be no Legion. And to some degree, there would be no Mike Matthews, the educator and thought leader without Muscle for Life. But even as hack writers

know, you got to be willing to kill your darlings if the plot demands it. And that time had clearly come. Fortunately for Muscle for Life, a public beheading isn't called for here, just a graceful retreat to make room for the new star. And so here's what's going to happen over the next couple of weeks. All of the content over at Muscle for Life, every article, podcast, success story, the About Me page, literally everything is going to be republished on Legion's website. And we are going to be updating the menu and other aspects of the website to accommodate everything. All of Muscle for Life's URLs are going to redirect to their Legion counterparts. So all of your bookmarks are still going to work, and even everything in Google is still going to work. It's just going to go from the Muscle for Life page to

the Legion page. Muscle for Life coaching will become Legion coaching, really just a difference in how we refer to it, a mild change in branding and that most people are just calling it personal coaching. But otherwise, it's going to remain the same. It's still going to be offered. Nothing is going to change in terms of how we run it. It's just going to live over at Legion. All the digital products that are sold over at Muscle for Life, like the meal plans are going to be sold over at Legion. And we're going to be expanding on that. We're going to be offering more meal plans. We're going to start offering training plans, which I'm excited for. A lot of people have asked for that. And all Muscle for Life user slash customer accounts will remain separate from

Legion user slash customer accounts, just to keep things simple and clean. And all Most For Life accounts will remain accessible at mostforlife.com slash my hyphen account. That. So in other words, Legion is going to become my official home base, which incidentally is another benefit of the merger because now when people ask where they can find me online, I'll have just one answer instead of two. And so yeah, it's a big move and honestly, a slightly bittersweet one, but I am excited because I think it's clearly the right move. It's a 360 degree win as they say. So that's really it for now. I think that's the creamiest of this month's batch of news, but there's much more to come this summer, including new Legion products and flavors, quite a few actually, the official launch of the new third editions of my books, Bigger Leaner Stronger and Thinner Leaner Stronger, which are currently live

on all online retailers, but we're working out some of the kinks. I don't want to officially announce everything until we've sorted out some of the product page issues and there still are some 2.0s of the paperbacks lurking. So I want to make sure all the 2.0s are fully cleared out and all the product pages are working the way they should before we kick it off. And I also have the new and improved stacked workout app coming. That's going to be this summer release. Everything is moving along nicely there and more. So get ready. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most

popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mikeatmuscleforlife.com

and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback. So please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.

And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my fitness book for women, thinner, leaner, stronger. Now this book has sold over 150,000 copies in the last several years, and it has helped thousands of women build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 1,200 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average. So if you want to know the biggest lies and myths that keep women from ever achieving the lean, sexy, strong, and healthy bodies they truly desire. And if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate female body,

then you want to read Thinner, Leaner, Stronger today, which you can find on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. Now, speaking of Audible, I should also mention that you can actually get the audio book 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend that you do if you're not currently listening to audio books. I myself love them because they let me make the time that I spend doing things like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog, and so forth into more valuable and productive activities. So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my book for free, simply go to

www.bitly.com slash free TLS book. And that will take you to Audible. And then you just have to click the sign up today and save button, create your account. And voila, take you to Audible. And then you just have to click the sign up today and save button, create your account. And voila, you get to listen to Thinner, Leaner, Stronger for free.