The Entrepreneur DNA - Transforming Lives with Europe's #1 Fitness coach | Charlie Johnson | EP13

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

In this energizing episode of the Entrepreneur DNA podcast, we're joined by the remarkable Charlie Johnson, Europe's leading fitness coach who has not only transformed his own life but has helped countless others do the same. Flying all the way to Miami, Charlie shares his journey from struggling with self-confidence to building the biggest online fitness business in Europe. Dive into an inspiring conversation about the power of coaching, the importance of implementation, and the unstoppable momentum that comes from pushing past your limits.   Follow Charlie on Instagram - @charliejohnsonfitness Check out his program - www.charliejohnsonfitness.com Listen to Daily Mind Medicine - dailymindmedicine.com

What's up entrepreneur DNA? As always, I am here with an incredible guest, Mr. Charlie Johnson, the number one fitness coach in Europe, flew all the way to Miami just to see me and be on this podcast. Kind of joking. What's up, brother? How are you? Very good. Very good. I'm very grateful for the kind intro. Yeah. I'm excited to have you, dude. You've built an incredible platform. And if anyone's doing their research on you, they will see who you are today and what you look like today was not always the case. Let's jump right into what you've been able to develop today, who you are, the man sitting in front of me, the success you've had in the fitness industry, and your body transformation relative to how that all got started. What was that bridge? What had to happen for you to get

and become the person you are today? The beauty of what you just said is the most congruent things, who I am and what we do. The one thing that completely changed my life is coaching. And now that's the thing I do is coach other people to build a business and I have a fitness business to help people get great shape. And I struggled for a long period of time in terms of like self-confidence, the way I look, the way way i felt just felt shit about myself because of the way my external vehicle looked and that affected my internal vehicle to find and the secret i found in terms of changing that was i'd been going to the gym eating the right stuff for years nothing changed i hired a coach and then i realized okay i'm actually seeing results and then for me

that's quite everything my life changed it's like this is the hack of life it's literally like you just hire someone who can tell you what to do and you just execute that's right and like for anyone who knows me like i'm obsessed with implementation and even if you if you look in like linkedin for example um interesting stat like top three in linkedin is strategy but not on top thousand is implementation because no one actually want to do the thing. People want to talk about doing the thing. And for me, that's when I found out like, okay, this is the secret to success in life is who not how,

but with Anne Sullivan, it's like find the person who can solve your problem and just do what they told you to do. That's it. Just repeat that. And through that cycle, I transformed my own fitness life. I went from being a real estate agent in the UK

to setting up the biggest online fitness business in Europe. transformed my own fitness life i went from being a real estate agent in the uk to say i'm the biggest online fitness business in europe i then uh set up another business called seven figure scaling systems where we help other people scale the businesses online um and we've generated just under 10 million dollars in income so far over the last few years so um i've moved to dubai in that period of time and my big mission is to help other people believe in themselves and see what's possible because as soon as i it's like a flywheel approaches i start to get a bit of momentum i was time and my big mission is to help other people believe in themselves and see what's possible because as soon as i it's like a flywheel approaches i start to get a bit of momentum i was like fuck i can actually do this yeah because when i like left uh when i was about 21

i first went into a stage in real estate i felt like i'd failed at life because all my friends had degrees coming out university college and i didn't i was like i really screwed this up and that's my mission now is to empower people to see what they can achieve. Yeah. Yeah. So I think one of the things you just hit on is a big thing. People don't talk about momentum. I just had this conversation with an entrepreneur this morning, as a matter of fact, about momentum starts to kick in and you no longer have to push this boulder up the mountain, But people don't push the boulder long for momentum to actually take over.

They quit, they give up, they get tired. They don't wanna keep pushing the very next day. It's this funny line of like, if someone, a coach like yourself, or I'm a coach for real estate investors, if we could guarantee, and I don't put any guarantees in my coaching and I'm sure you don't yours, that at some point that boulder is going to catch momentum and it will start to push without you having to push it.

Would you keep pushing? What would your audience say? 100% they would do it, but most of them, they struggle at the beginning with the implementation. The number one thing I get is I don't have time. That's a fucking lie because I did it. And that's why like, and you did it. It's like, yes, it takes time. And yes, it's hard.

If it wasn't hard, then everyone would fucking do it. That's right. And that's the value of why you becoming successful makes you feel so good because not many people can do it. Yeah. Time is bullshit in my opinion. I mean, we all have the same, the age old saying of, you know, we all have 24 hours, right? Fine. You got to prioritize the actual activities over time management. You don't manage time. You manage your priorities,

right? So in your case, your priority was to become the man physically that you wanted to become, but then also actually succeed in business and not be your realtor probably making a couple bucks probably eating fucking pizza and donuts all the time right whatever and working out i'm guessing but you know you can't you can't outwork out a bad diet right so it goes back to this idea of like how are you gonna not and don't try to manage your time you need to be effective at managing the priorities what are the priorities that you would tell entrepreneurs that they should be focusing on first themselves because if you're not the greatest version of you then you can't be helping other people from the

greatest versions of themselves so like physically mentally so you have to put yourself first and the way i really look at that is you have to be selfish to be selfless that includes you being like a father husband partner like that's the only way to do it and in my opinion that comes down to you being organized and fitness was the greatest gift that ever happened to me because for you to be in great physical shape those attributes and character traits carry over perfectly like business because if you look at it you've got being disciplined you've got being consistent you've got being patient none of this shit happens getting in shape overnight right you don't go to the gym today and tomorrow you look great and the same thing with business it's like consistency discipline patience like if you can learn those character traits and become that type of person and you start to get momentum and you

get like little dopamine hits we start to see little bits of progress that's when you start to chase it more for like for me me, the moments I feel not sad, but maybe like slightly less happy is when I feel I'm stagnated. And when you start to get the wins, you start to want to chase the wins more and the momentum comes easier. And I think most people don't look at the outputs

that drive the inputs. And I'll give a correlation back to when I was a real estate agent. I realized that for me to be the most successful in our business i needed to basically just get all the leads and book them in and sell them for like viewings and uh sell them all properties right so i was like what i did i ended up becoming the the manager of the branch within like i don't know 24 months i was like 24 which is retarded i was managing people who were like 20 30 years older than me at the point and

have been doing the business 20 and 30 years like who's this kid yeah but i i thought around the system and i realized okay all the leads came into the business into one central computer and got distributed from there so what i did is i came into the business like early before anyone else took all the good leads called them on booked them all in i was like said i was always up to win doesn't that seem obvious but no one thinks like that straight line approach right like our whole business again realtor real estate investor coach marketer it's leads it is the only thing that really matters and it's funny so i was interviewing grant cardone and we kind of went back and forth between marketing and sales what's what's the senior what's the junior we agree it's marketing right no one's selling that's it because there's nothing else

to sell if you don't have the lead you'll have something to sell but what you just did in the realtor space that's the obvious thing like bring in all the leads and be the first to the lead and even i was the first to pick up the phone so where i looked it was like if i pick up the phone for anyone else i take all the leads i'm gonna be the highest performer by a mile which i was yeah so i became the manager or paid more than anyone else yeah and you were still self-producing so when you were managing were you also self-producing yeah i feel like that is one of the top five drawbacks of entrepreneurs is they get into a place of leadership they stop self-producing their income goes down they start to psychologically fuck themselves

because they're freaking out about income they become bad leaders and managers and the cycle rinses and repeats because those people quit and leave or you have to fire them because they suck because you suck as a leader and now you're back into the rabbit wheel right let's speak to the importance of actually becoming a leader but also continuing to self-produce right like i'll i'll give you a great example in my coaching business when i want to fire up my sales team, I'll get on the phone and start closing people. Say, guys, I took two calls and I have two closes. I have 100% close ratio today.

You've had 22 calls and in the last seven days, you have zero closes. And it's, for me, like we spoke about this off camera, but it's like the highest level authority is the person who does the thing and teaches the thing. And that's the same example. It's like I do that in our business. It's like, okay, we're slow. slow fuck it like i'll get on my phone start booking sales schools and like closing them and this is where people over complicate

in particular if you're running a an online education program or pretty much any business the two things that people don't understand you need to do to scale it is book sales call close sales yeah that's you can do that to like 10 million 100 million whatever you want like that's the simplicity of it but people over complicate this process and the better you get those two things and then more importantly you as a leader and growing a business the better you get your team at doing those two things by like teaching them showing them and doing it with them you can then scale because one of the things i really like is that um you want to find a lazy person to do a job i say i'm actually quite lazy in some regards i don't want to do shit myself for sure you want

because like lazy people will be efficient like taking all the leads computer because i don't want to do all the donkey work it was like straight line approach right so the same thing for me now it's like okay what are the core important things i need to do is training and managing ourselves team make sure we're booking calls and closing calls outside of that's not really anything that's that important because if we do that really well yeah we're going to print money and that's where most people they worry too much about things that don't make a big difference rather than like follow the money where's the lead flow coming through where's the like the hole in the system and a lot of people don't look at the numbers enough and i think one of the big

skills entrepreneurs will realize the more experience they have is pattern recognition you can just look at numbers like that's not right and i look at more i'll give you an example and One of the biggest skills entrepreneurs will realize the more experience they have is pattern recognition. You can just look at numbers like that's not right. And I look at more, I'll give you an example. And we run a lot of Facebook ads and we had 4X amount of leads come through on our report. And I was like, that's really weird. I was like, that doesn't make sense. And I opened up ads manager and I looked and I was like, someone messed up the budget and put too many zeros in. And that's where you being on the board and just looking at just looking at the numbers you can see okay that doesn't correlate like what's going on here investigate

if i let that go they were spending like five thousand five i think five thousand dollars a day more than they're supposed to being on one ad i was like that would have racked that would have been really costly and by the way that happened to me i wasn't paying attention we have a normal kind of budget i was asking him to increase the budget i didn't realize he made a mistake all of a sudden your amex charges charging every day and our amex charges charges like every three days because i have a high limit yeah i'm like wait a minute what is going on why are we because i wasn't paying attention and it happens right so keeping your eye on the ball is super important you have a phrase that i don't know if i've ever heard it

you say the person that does the thing and then teaches the thing yeah what is that that in my opinion is when you become the highest level authority so like say in my world of people being online fitness businesses and we had a big event in dubai last week like 150 people there and i even set the stage was like there's no physical question you can ask me about building online fitness business i don't know the answer to because i've done the thing yeah we've 1300 active clients in our fitness business so like i i there's anything you want to ask you can ask me i know all the answers and at that point it becomes easy for you to become the teacher and the master at helping other people yeah and also in terms of

you teaching your team because if your team also respect you and see you as a leader as an authority they're going to listen to you i think the more you can try and build yourself up to be that type of authority externally and also internally in your organization, people are then going to start to run through walls for you as well. Yeah. Was this your event? Yeah, it was my event. Is it a fulfillment event or was it of your clients that you were- It was 50-50. So like a marketing thing I did was sick and I just did it off the cuff and didn't really think about it. You know, like sometimes intuitively you get an idea like in the middle of the event i was just gonna do this yeah

we had uh probably 75 people were sitting in i literally just went around the room i was like calling out people's name and how much money they were making people the fuck how these people doing this yeah and then the last one we got a girl come up who's 24 years old she's making 170 000 a month um and like gave her this plaque and you can see everyone else's fucking face in the room dropping like this girl's 24 and there's guys who are like 35

and are like house kid doing it because he's breaking limiting beliefs and I can even see it in your face a bit like selling fitness programs on the internet

and she was 24 years old yeah and I'm just going to go out on a limb probably a decently looking girl not like you would think she she's like

nice yeah but um not to the extent you think but she's so it's not the typical instagram bullshit where it's just it's an ass all over yeah 100 and i actually say that people like that and people who are instagram influencers are the worst people to run businesses sure because their mindset's fucked like narcissistic like everyone who's successful has that to some degree but they don't have the brain to go with it and i'd actually say to her she has a lot of masculine energy which is why she's very good as an entrepreneur um and she doesn't over respectfully to female entrepreneurs they tend to overthink things get emotional she just fucking does it which i think is a a gift that people need to understand with being a business owner you have

to expect things not to work a lot of time but like it's the analogy in business that you can hit one home run there's a like equivalent of a thousand so you need to take a lot of swings yeah hey by the way if you're an entrepreneur if you do hard things big things a friend of mine taylor welch has one of the best podcasts out called daily mind medicine if you want to supercharge your thinking, your resilience, your problem solving, everything from how you do more and get more done to how you handle failure. You know this, but your number one asset is your mind. Bar none, nothing else compares. The reason I love this podcast is because it's only three to four minutes long.

So I grab my cup of coffee and I get my mind right every morning. You should absolutely check this out. Go to dailymindmedicine.tv or just look on Spotify or Apple podcasts. It's like a nootropic for your brain. Enjoy. I love that. So you had this event. You highlight her, give her a big plaque. And the 75, by the way, those 75 people, were they like seat deposits? Did they pay? Yeah. Probably half of them and the other half we invited because we knew they were a good fit.

Yeah. We've signed up a lot of people off the back end of that event and actually an interesting thing is um cultural differences between the us say canada versus europe and um dubai where i live if you try and pitch an event like that and i actually saw an american guy come in and do it it's like way down but they're literally like crickets it's fucking terrible so oh man and i did that and uh one of our first events last year i was like we're not doing that again um so we have a process on the back end of how we basically search for a follow-up yeah what you did brilliantly is so a key component of selling is right what i call jones effect and what that means is keeping up with the joneses have you heard that right yeah and so when you highlight those individuals on stage and say look at this incredible woman crushing life beating all you men out there

who want to try to make 170 grand a year she She does it in a month. People are like, I need to do whatever she's doing. I need to do. And it is a very powerful push for people, right? So things a lot of time are external, can be a big push. But whatever can trigger, I would tell all entrepreneurs that are looking to achieve more, whatever can trigger that thing. So for me, the thing typically is a design of lifestyle that I want that will push me harder to continue to work. I was just talking to Drew here earlier about like how hard you have to work to catch the momentum we just spoke about. It's insanity really, right? We were talking, I'm 42 years old. You were pretty impressed, but trust me, like I've worked my face off for the last 16 years and I'm finally at this place of momentum where things

are starting to somewhat come to me. So when I am spending my time, a lot of times it's about the design of what I want to create. So for example, people that we probably all look up to of a certain lifestyle, things. I do like nice shit. I don't give a fuck if you're out there judging me for it. You think Justin's all about money and nice shit. I like nice shit. I like our watches. I like my cars.

I like the house. I like nice shit. That is a motivator for me. And for many people, that would be superficial. Fuck off. I like nice shit. That is a motivator for me. And for many people, that would be superficial. Fuck off. I don't care. The point being is, if you can't go chase someone who has what you want, then it's going to be very hard for you to get there. And being able to edify that woman and not make it all about you, Charlie, that's a huge thing is to place other people on a pedestal. I'm willing to bet you made more money doing those things than putting yourself on that

same pedestal. A hundred percent. And that's the congruency in any business. If you do really like do a great job and you help other people succeed, you kill it. Our business from that model, for example, it's 35's 35 40 referral based because we're so good at what we do and even like i'll be on calls to people and like i just start laughing like when i take sales calls because like this is so fucking easy because i've done it so many times i see the same traits in the type of person and things they're not doing that i'm like there's no fucking way your business is not going to 3x in 90 days because like and i actually will say to them it's like what you're doing right now is the equivalent of like what i would do if i didn't want to make money

it's like sometimes people but they don't know and i did that at the beginning like when i first started as a real estate agent that i was selling 40 a month uh programs or like word pdf documents okay because i didn't know any better and no one taught me right which is why like for me is if i did it and no one showed me the way then it's much easier if someone's like carved the path for you before and be like yeah you need to do this it is everything right um if i were going to get in the fitness industry i would call you it's a charlie brown i gotta build this out right why even though i know internet marketing even though i know funnels the the tactical what you, why wouldn't I go after the best, right? I think the other component of this is you running these events are really meaningful

for other people in a bigger way than probably you would even recognize, which would be people are always looking for a tribe, but I'll always promise you this. I've made more money, and I'm guessing you'd be the same. I'd love to hear from you. I've made more money by the people I know by sitting on interviews like this. Part of this is why I have these interviews is because there's a day, maybe or maybe not, that Charlie and Justin Colby go make money together. And because of that, we will be further down the line of where we want to get in life. And it's all because the relationship that started from a podcast episode like this.

Would you agree about the power of the people? I probably write this down every day at the moment. It's like life is a people game. And the more experience I get and the further up the ladder I get, the more I see it all the time. A great example, we spoke about Eric Spofford. I mentioned to him on Saturday that i'm looking to do some stuff with

girl high level he's like oh don't worry i'll introduce you to the affiliate manager of a girl high level i met him yesterday and i got a call the night today yeah so it's like life becomes easy when you know the right people and that's the game i may even remember um an example i was getting really stressed for a while our fitness business was struggling maybe like two years ago it was like slow we're having a downturn. You know, in your head, where you like, you blow it out of proportion. Oh, of course. It's always worse in your head than it is in real life. There's no doubt. And a mentor to me at the time, a guy called Craig Ballantyne, he said, like, yeah, I know, Greg. Um, he said, uh, like, what are you worried

about? Like, you're like a made man fitness industry. Like, you know, me, you know, him, you know, him, you know, him is like, you fucking know all the best people. You've got all the network. You're all like, what are you worried about about and as soon as i listened to that i was like that's really interesting yeah that's also the value of mentors because they can reframe a perspective and completely change your outlook on a situation i think it's you should always be seeking mentors because well you should always be seeking mentors paid or not i would always tell everyone pay to play get to the table, be there, right? Because the next component is what you just talked about. Then you have a phone call you can make because there was eight people at a table and you connected with one person and

you said whatever you needed, right? But you paid to get to the table. I do this all the time. It is quite literally something I live by. Every year, I have a very substantial six-figure number that I'm willing to pay into masterminds. I'm willing to pay coaches. I'm willing to invest in my own self because I realize I'm nowhere near where I want to be. And I'm sure you're not near where you want to be. And we're going to continue to push. We're going to continue to drive. But it goes back to this, what you just said about hanging out with Eric. and you mentioned one thing to him and he immediately made a connection. Now you're going to go have another conversation to get to where you want to go.

It's also about talking about what you're trying to do. It's one thing to want it. It's another thing to put it on a vision board. The next phase of this iteration is talking about it because when you talk about it, it can turn into actual reality. And Eric then took what you wanted. He had a connection. He made the connection. You now have someone that's going to set you up to go high level, right?

And just to go into what you spoke about there, about thoughts become things. And speaking things out loud. Not this event when we had maybe six months ago. I stood on stage and I said, our vision, our mission, what we can do is build the biggest and best fitness mastermind in the world

in front of like 80 people. Yeah. Like vocally put out there, like this is happening. Like, and you could hear the conviction, my voice, the way I talk, we even talk about it now. There's no doubt.

That this is going to happen. And we went from one event of like 80 and then doubled it the next event. Yeah. I looked at the photo and I was like, photo comparing them to like holy shit like till you see the difference amount of people you're like that's wild oh yeah yeah well it is very real so here's another component you literally flew from dubai 17 hours to my 17 hours to get to miami fuck i thought it was a lot closer i was thinking like eight nine to 19 hours that's an ass beating

did you fly emirates yeah okay so i've heard everything great about emirates i've just never needed to take a european flight i don't think they really fly too much within the u.s yeah they only fly to dubai yeah but it's best airline in the world in my opinion that's what i've heard i've literally heard phenomenal stuff um but still an ass beating i don't care 17 hours of anything yeah is a lot you talked about what you wanted. You want to be the biggest fitness brand in the entire world. You come down to Miami, you set up certain meetings with myself and others. Your actions alone tell everyone you're

serious about it. You're not going to be on a top ring ranked podcast. You're not going to have, uh, reach out to me to be here if you weren't serious about building that brand. And what that starts with is a step before that, which is going to be talking about it. You just talked about at one of your own events, you said, I'm going to be the top ranked fitness brand in the world. Your commitment behind that is not just talking about, but being about it. You fly all the way out to the US, Miami, 17 hours to have sit downs with me and others to continue the momentum of what you're doing. And I think it just highlights, you know, really what all entrepreneurship is. It's an unrelentingness, being unrelenting on

the push that has to happen. I'm sure you're liking it here in Miami. I'm saying, but if all things were equal and I was in, you know, Dubai, you would rather me come Dubai and sit down and have a cup of coffee. Uh, yeah. Save a 17 hour flight. Yeah. Jellac. Right. But it's, um, I'm a big believer that life becomes easy when you put yourself the right circumstances. If you hang around the right environments and you're going to meet the right people. So you start flying business class, first class, you go to nice restaurants if you hang around the right environments and you're going to meet the right people so you start flying business class first class you go to nice restaurants you go to the right places you talk to the right people and it's life becomes easier it's them like become a people game so how do you meet all these people was i go to a lot of events i do a lot of podcasts

my own podcast yeah and i invite people on who i want to talk to and then you create a relationship and that's the compound effect of that over time is wild. I think, um, too many people aren't willing to put themselves out there. They say they want to do something, but the actions don't align with what they say they really want. They won't do it. Right. And it's funny. I smiled really big right there because you said something I firmly believe in. I think I've said it on this podcast. I only fly first class or whatever, you know, if it's business or first or whatever, because of what you were saying, is you put yourself in scenarios that you have at least a chance to win. Right. And very funny story about, I live here in Miami, flying from, I think it was Phoenix

or San Diego back to Miami. I'm in first class. I sit down first. The guy sits down next to me. He says something about political something or another. I hate politics. So I kind of smirk at him and I'm like, Hey dude, fucking Paul, you're terrible. And he smirks back at me and I'm like, you're in politics, aren't you? And he smiles and he's like, I'm the new incumbent speaker of the house in Florida. So basically there's the governor and then there new incumbent speaker of the house in Florida. So basically there's the governor and then there's a speaker of the house. They run the entire state. So he's like the second in charge of the whole fucking state. And I just said, politics is terrible. But now I consider him a friend and Hayes talking to me about like, man, I love real estate. What

do I need to be doing? You know, I'm in politics and my life is crazy and I do not have, how can I right? But now I have a friend literally that's second in charge of running the whole state of Florida. Do you think somewhere down the line, sometime ever, there's going to be a chance for him and I to do some business together? Probably. And do you think he knows some people that I don't know? Probably, right? It's all because of this whole, put yourself in a position to at least try to win. In first class, some people love, I love golf, joining golf memberships. Fitness, great example.

Lifetime fitness. Do you guys? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lifetime. So they just built this five diamond resort lifetime. There's literally a water park in the back of this thing. Like full blown, five different water slides, everything. This thing has a bar, it has a cafe, coffee shop, nails, hair salon, it's wild, right? But it's 250 bucks a month. And for some people that is just outrageous. For me,

I'm like, you can double it. And I'm going to, you can triple it. I'll pay a thousand dollars a month to be in this place. What people don't understand is the more expensive it is, the other person who goes there paid that as well. That's right. So that's the value. You know the quality of the person there is higher because of the price they paid. The same with mastermind events.

If the ticket price is high, everyone else paid it. If it's a high-value person, it's worth knowing. That's right. And going back to masterminds or coaching, a lot of people want to get into the space of like coaching masterminds, but they want to make money fast. They do out of desperation. The reality is if you really do the thing and then teach them the thing, your price should be pretty damn high, right? Like there's no doubt about it that you need to show the value of what you've done, what you've produced in the history and your resume. But if there's other people that pay that price, you're in the

right room. And it goes back to putting yourself in an opportunity to ask. And that's why I say this. I'm kind of harping on this because I'm literally doing a keynote speech at an event here shortly about the power of people and going from good to great. What makes you good is you produce and you do the thing and you're you're good what takes you to the greatness is actually connecting with the other people to get to the next level right and asking for what you want ask so when you're in do you run a mastermind or is it all so when you run the mastermind when people are in your mastermind they better be asking other people in that mastermind for the things that they don't do very well right not to mention you they should be hounding you i mean you should be annoyed like god everyone want great yeah i get that and it's good but

that's one of my favorite sayings is uh a genius doesn't have great answers he asks great questions and i always ask people a lot of questions are very inquisitive and even people who work for me i'll give an example our email copywriter is like do you think there's anything we can do in terms of like improving our emails and what we're doing to like generate more leads is like i don't know like you're a millionaire you tell me like i like yeah but i want your perspective like yeah because i'm curious not sometimes i won't agree but i want to hear the other side of the coin sometimes i a lot of times when people come to me with questions i'll ask them the question back and what do you think? You come up with some creative ideas,

think, because I have an answer for you, but I also want this to be a symbiotic like relationship. So in that example, I'd say, well, what do you think would be more intriguing or what would, you know what I mean? Because a lot of times people just want confirmation, what they already know to do. Again, they're scared to do it. They lack certainty. That's right. They lack the confidence to do the thing, right? And this goes back to do the thing, teach the thing, but like people don't take action because they don't have certainty. They don't know that their result will work or not. They're fearful, and this is going to go into the real depths of it. They're fearful of what happens if it doesn't work. What if this idea of an email copy doesn't pan out? I didn't ask Charlie. It sucked. Now what? Do I get fired? Then they freeze.

They just say, I don't know the answer. I'm not going to bring up any ideas. I'm just going to do what Charlie tells me. And that's where it all trickles down to is the fear of failure missing a step you know dropping the ball whatever it is it's nonsense right i think what's interesting you said there as well is which is why i think old school management techniques don't work in terms of having to go at people and like berating people if they make a mistake because then they do that they won't think for themselves they'll always want to to ask you for approval and everything. I think also people now have more options to go and work for someone else. I think that's why I see some businesses churning a lot of staff, whereas great businesses keep the right people in them. So I think if you can learn to man-manage people and then get them to think for themselves like you said, life becomes easier for you then as well.

Because the time for you to onboard and train someone who's good again is huge. It's a waste of time. Right. To get back to where you were before right and then again going back to you're not producing anymore now because you're focused on trying to hire someone train someone get it just to kind of get back to even not even excel yet right and so uh you said it again but good to great the great is when you're around the people, right? You bring people around you. You have a community, a culture, leaders. That is where good to great goes, right? Because you can be very good. You could be a good fitness coach making quarter million, half a million dollars a year. It's good. Everyone in the world would say, good for you. You've done very good for yourself. But Charlie doesn't want to be good. Charlie wants to be great, exceptional, amazing, right?

So that takes a level of people, to your point, even hiring, right? You need to go out and hire the best. I firmly have come to this realization that I don't want to hire from the bottom down. I want to hire from the top, or I don't want to hire bottom up. I want to hire from the bottom down. I want to hire from the top or I don't want to hire bottom up. I want to hire from the top down. I want great people around me. So I don't have to spend the time, you know, teaching them and educating. I have to be the leader all the time. I would rather say, hey, Parley, how do we, hey, Charlie, how do we partner?

Because I know you're the expert. You're the great one in your industry. How do we do something together where I don't have to be the leader to teach you how to do the thing? You can go do the thing, and then I can go run with you. I think it's a big thing of hiring, training. Do you ever feel like there's a revolving door? A hundred percent. I can give you a good story to go into this.

We hire a lot of remote workers, like virtual assistants. And this is a widespread thing in people with online fitness industry and online businesses. And one of the big mistakes we went down, which now knowing in hindsight I wouldn't do, is hiring a lot of people in the Philippines, Pakistan, third world countries. Now, the problem with this is it's very difficult to build a team culture. Sure. It's very difficult to get the right cultural fit across. I don't know if you ever tried to have a joke with sure it's very difficult to get like the right um cultural fit across and i don't know if you ever tried to have a joke with like the filipinos on a zoom call

i didn't fucking understand so um what we do now is we hire everyone who's first world english speaking we hire a lot of people from south africa because yeah they're very driven and great work ethic you don't have to pay them a lot for a living class and they understand the cultural fit so we're now driving so much team culture where everyone wants to help each other where do you find south african vas uh we have a recruitment company we work with and then we also use a lot of like digital nomad groups so if you search in like facebook group digital nomad cape town come up facebook groups and post job ads in there. We get a lot through referrals through our network. And that's really been one of the big things

I've seen a big shift in terms of, okay, if we just bring everyone in who speaks perfect English and is like Westerner, it's so much easier. And also it's easy to manage. I know the point where you're like, fucking micromanaging everyone. And then you don't need to have as many managers

in the business because people are more autonomous. Yeah. So being that you're in the fitness industry people are more autonomous yeah so being that you're in the fitness industry let's jump to the commitment it takes to personally change your body i i really do believe body mind spirit right meaning i don't have the energy to go do what i need to do if i don't get my body right. And what I mean by that is I'm not as jacked as you, but I still work out as much as I can. I don't even want to say every day, but four to five times a week I'm working out. Not because I'm going to get as jacked as Charlie and chase Charlie, but for me it gets my mind right, dude.

If nothing else, I get this thing working the right way, right? I don't get as irritated as fast i have a lot more patience i have creative juices talk to me about the commitment level to change your body which in my mind changes how you think what you do your capabilities in my opinion the real benefit of exercise and work out is your ability to change your physiological state it's the way you think and feel i inherently a lot of time wake up in the morning i'm in a bad mood i don't know why just the way i'm sort of wired something i'm fucking pissed off sometimes

uh hello the uk and yeah it's probably because i'm from the uk miserable right i now live in slightly less miserable but i just work on it um but i work i go and work out and i feel great afterwards and i'm happy like dopamine's going like you feel amazing And it's, I also think there's a huge amount, particularly as a man, of like you wake up in the morning, you're happy with how you look. You're starting the day stacking wins already. You've got self-confidence. You also have authority when you go into a room.

You've got a presence about you. Whereas if you're, say for example, a leader of a business, and I think this a lot when people try and sell me stuff, I'm like, okay, if you're 50 pounds overweight, you can't physically look after yourself then why am i going to trust you to look after my business because one of the key character traits of being in reasonable shape is discipline yeah if you're not disciplined to look after yourself then why you can be disciplined to work with me in my business and i think people

over complicate the process of getting in shape when you talk about uh businesses booking calls closing calls if you want to get leaner you need to be in the calorie deficit you need to eat slightly more less and move a bit more if you want to grow muscle you need to eat a little bit more and then you need to maybe weight train a bit more like people will try and overcomplicate the process because they're not willing to be patient enough to see it through which is i think the same thing with business perspective people implement a new ad strategy and it doesn't make money in the first three days. Oh, this doesn't work. It's like it takes a bit of refinement with everything

to get to the end result. And I think when you get into a pattern with being in good shape and seeing progress, psychologically, it becomes easier. You start to see progress, like you want to go to the gym more. Your barista at Starbucks is like, oh, you've lost those weight, Charlie.

You're in good shape. Like, yeah, I want to keep going. I'm not going to eat the muffins today or whatever it is. That's right. And I think- I did that today, by the way. I stopped myself.

I was like, fuck, no, I'm not doing it. And it's those small choices and the compound effect is huge. Two of the best books I recommend for everyone in terms of weight loss and also for business are Atomic Habits by James Clear, probably everyone's read.

And also The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, which talks like the small choices you make every day either take you towards your goal or away from it and when you think about it in life like no choice is ever neutral it's either going to take you towards what you want making more money being more successful being in great shape or it's going to take you away and when you start to think about that you think about all the actions you take every day like is this in alignment with the future child of who i want to be or is it taking me away from that well and then it goes back to do you even know what you want to be that's a big challenge i think in our world period entrepreneur not entrepreneur people don't even know what the fuck they want they don't oh i want boats and cars and a life that That's the concept they want,

but they don't really know what they're trying to do, right? Like I have five success principles. Decide what you want and who you need to be to get it. Commit to it. Take massive action. Be uncomfortable and don't have time expectation on the result. Fitness is a big part of that. Like time expectation and result is the mental breaker for everybody

they want to have charlie's six-pack abs in 30 days borderline impossible sure some crazy extreme example someone probably could figure it out but the reality is you need to be able to have the fortitude to keep going with this slight edge idea which is the decisions you make in repetition, even small ones, will actually get you to either towards the six-pack abs or not, or it's going the other way. Or even the way I'd frame it, I'd say to you is like, say you want to be walking down Miami Beach in the summer and you want to have six-pack abs. Don't think about the six-pack abs. Think about the habits the person who has the six-pack abs would have. That's right. Or if you want to be an eight-figure entrepreneur, stop thinking about the money. Start think about the habits the person who has the six pack abs would have that's right or if you want to be an eight-figure entrepreneur like stop thinking about the money

start thinking about how would that person start to think what would their day look like what their schedule look like how would they operate in their business who would they hire who would they train how would they deal with their staff that's right and you start to think like that if you become that person by default you then get the result eventually anyway yeah you know you brought up something that i find so interesting. I'm in sales. All entrepreneurs are in sales. I don't give a shit if you're a tech guy or not.

You're in sales because you're going to sell your tech, right? It is hard for me to look at someone trying to sell me something that's out of shape. 100%. And I'm not saying I am the most in shape i am in shape don't get me wrong but relative to people like yourselves or others but when someone's like obviously out of shape like obvious it's hard for me to say okay you want more you want to go win you want to go make a lot of money but you're you're mentally so weak you allow yourself to eat pizza donuts and whatever shitty stuff all the time that's hard i it genuinely kind of like repels me i would say

for anyone listening to who's in this position this is a harsh thing to say it's like you should be shameful and take the comment you said because i feel the same way i turned up at the airport and i was like what the fuck is wrong with this like we're not from the u.s you every time i come back i'm just shocked with like super obese people because you don't really see it anywhere else how the fuck does it even happen because it doesn't happen in the u.s yeah because it happened overnight right like you don't really get it anywhere else so being that you have sorry because you're from dubai coming here you see a lot more obesity from dubai europe as soon as you come to u.s like but the extreme level of

yeah you might get some people who are a bit overweight sure but there's people who are like 300 pounds i don't know what the fuck like yeah yeah yeah you don't really get that anywhere else and i think one of the things people should really take from that is like if you're in that situation or you're going that way it's like you should feel shameful of that and use that shameful to create pain to make you do something about it and like throughout my career and me transforming my own body that was built from um the stick not the carrot of like that i was running away from pain which then got me to where i wanted to be rather than like chasing the carrot because if you're and i think that's understanding your own psychology what motivates you if you have like tim grover talks about about

the dark side right if you have a dark side of like pain or insecurity that drives you which i think most entrepreneurs have yep it's why we're fucking wired that way 100 and use it as a fuel and i understand how to motivate myself as i'll make myself feel like that and also um in terms of like i'm competitive so i'll give a really good example you like this uh a competitor of mine sent me a really shitty abusive voice note and i was like for me i was like i said i fucking got you and you know when you're just beating someone you've broken someone and um for me i use that fuel because i like gamifications i come from a sport background as well i like to compete i always try and um not pick fights with people but like compete with people my food to try and get one up on them and a really good book i like is uh choose your enemies wisely by patrick bet david sure and i read the book and

i need some bigger enemies now so i was like who else can you target because when you start to try and target people ahead of you your actions then start to increase you're like fuck i gotta chase this dude down so it's like you start to think bigger that's right no it's it's 100 and in i just think whatever carrot or stick whatever can motivate you you actually have to figure that part out right um i was very much motivated by what i didn't want and i still am to this day right um but some people get motivated by the carrot right and so that goes back to this idea of like, listen, if you're going to just be mediocre and exist through life, I'm just not your tribe. You're not going to want to listen to this podcast.

You're not going to want to listen to Charlie. Trust me, you're just not because I'm not willing to play small. I'm not willing to just, you know, exist through this life because it is the only life we have. So, you know, we have to make decisions. And so for those that like can't put themselves together, I'm not, listen, I'm not going to judge people that are, are, you know, have physical reasons for being overweight. But what I am going to do is for those that can't mentally break themselves from stopping eating a certain way, like you need to find a way to motivate yourself because you just won't be here very long. I mean mean your body will shut down and just give out at some point i'll give a great example i was on a

boat with a guy called nick on saturday who's one of the best public speaking coaches in the world he got no fucking arms and legs oh yeah i was actually i sat down i was like fuck me i'm sorry like i thought it's so fucking easy and like people bitch and moan about like oh i can't do this kind of dude's got no fucking arms and legs it's like fucking easy. And like people bitch and moan about like, oh, I can't do this. Dude's got no fucking arms and legs. That's it. It's like sitting there drinking with like, respectfully on one stump to the other. I was like,

even just watching that, I'm like, that's fucking me. Like that's difficult. Yeah. And you then start to take context of like, I have every fucking tool at my disposal. Why the fuck can't I do it? And for anyone who's listening to this,

who's not in the position you want, like there's people in a lot worse situations than you who are achieving huge amounts of success like he's a millionaire got my fucking arms and legs i know exactly i just met him in the airport he and i were going to speak at the same uh event unbelievable the the and he's so happy i mean it's just a choice right and you kind of said earlier you wake up kind of unhappy, but then you immediately can make a choice to say, all right, fuck that. That's, you know, nonsense. Everything is a choice that we have to look in the mirror at and we have to decide, do this or don't do this. It is up to us. And then we have to take ownership for that decision. So if we want to be cranky all fucking day, then realize your day is going to be shitty. You're going to make

shitty decisions. Those decisions are going to have a ripple effect. It's going to keep going. Or you can choose to go work out, get the physiology going, get your mind going, get the endorphins going, and make better decisions. I mean, everything comes down to a choice. And I just feel like people don't want to be responsible for their own choices they want someone else to tell them what to do and i think the most important thing for anyone to understand if you don't have like control of your own mind the way you think and feel you look feather in the wind like you just blow around depending on who's pushing you that day and i think that's the most powerful thing you can have because you can control your state and i mentioned earlier using exercise to change a physiological

state sometimes if something uh irritates me in like a work environment i'll go go work out for a bit i'll go on rowing machine like something just to change your state because that's the quickest way to reframe it i think also one of the most important things everyone should do every day something physically very difficult yeah because you do something physically very difficult like well i'm sitting behind impute now it's quite easy or like i look out and my uh i live in dubai marina really really like beautiful skyline like overlooks of water and i'll be like getting stressed or irritated about something and i'll look out the window and i'll see like construction site of like pakistani workers are working all day and it's like 45 degrees i'm like

context of problems it's not that yeah do you know what i mean it is context the problems like real world first world problems are like not problems right when you literally have you know people trying to drink clean water in africa right like you just got to put some perspective on all this uh this has been a pleasure for this episode man you definitely think right there's a reason why you're running such a successful business i want everyone to go follow charlie but also where where could they go see more videos and what you do uh best place to connect and we'll be on our youtube channel so you just type in uh charlie johnson scaling systems which spoke before this video a day which is a huge task you can't ask so there's tons and tons of value on there some of our own podcasts and then if you uh check me out on instagram at

fitness as well bro i appreciate you being on. Thank you. All right, y'all. See y'all next episode.