A conversation with Jen Collins, Director of Coaching and Delivery at Fitness Profit

I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. Jen Collins has more than 30 years in the fitness industry, and she's someone who has genuinely lived every stage of it: PT, gym owner, and now a business coach helping fitness professionals build something that actually works.

She started teaching aerobics as a teenager, built her way through big box gyms, bought her own studios, sold them, and now leads the coaching team at Fitness Profit, working with around 150 fitness business owners at any given time.

What came out of our conversation was one of those episodes that I think every trainer and fitness business owner needs to hear. Because Jen doesn't just tell you what to do. She tells you why you're probably avoiding it, and that's a different conversation entirely.

Here's what she shared with me.

Why she left big box gyms and what happened next

Jen spent years working for investor owners in big box facilities, people who were outside the industry and had a very different idea of what success looked like.

The moment that pushed her over the edge? She turned up to a leadership meeting with an engagement challenge she'd put together to get more members actually attending the gym. She was pretty much laughed out of the room. She was told that a good member is one who doesn't attend.

That was it. She knew she had to leave, and she knew the industry needed more passionate people running gyms from the inside.

Those early days of ownership were a different story. She describes them as very daunting. She learned on the job, made plenty of expensive mistakes, and felt genuinely overwhelmed. Her friends and family weren't business owners, so no one around her could really relate to what her day-to-day looked like. That loneliness, she says, is a huge part of why she does what she does today.

Three things owning a gym taught her

Jen doesn't sugarcoat this. Running a gym is hard. But she came out the other side with three lessons that she still teaches every day.

Community and culture is everything. Any gym can buy a fancy rig or the latest equipment. What they can't buy is how it feels to walk through the doors. The strongest retention Jen ever had at her gym came from things that cost almost nothing. Members knowing each other's names. Coaches noticing when someone hadn't been in for a week and picking up the phone. Celebrating people's wins, not just their PBs, but every moment that mattered to them. The people who stayed for years versus the ones who left in months? It had nothing to do with equipment or programming. It had everything to do with whether they felt like they truly belonged.

Systems are the only path to freedom. If the business only works when you're in it, you don't own a business. You own a job. And probably a worse-paying one than the one you left to start it. In the early years, Jen was the system. Every class, every consult, every renewal conversation had to go through her. The shift came when she pulled everything out of her head and into documented processes that anyone on her team could run. Onboarding, follow-ups, how to handle a cancellation, even how to clean the bathroom. It was slow and boring to build. But she says it was the single highest-return work she ever did. The first real holiday she took, knowing the business would run exactly the same without her, she actually got to switch off. That, she says, was massive.

Build it to be sold, even if you never sell it. A sellable business is one with clean numbers, documented systems, and a team that runs without you. Those also happen to be the exact things that make a business enjoyable to own. When the time came for Jen to exit, there was actually something to sell, because the value wasn't all walking out the door with her. Most fitness businesses, she says, have nothing to sell because the entire value is the owner. Even if you never plan to leave, build it as if a buyer is going to inspect it. You'll end up with a better business and you'll keep your options open.

The gap she sees most often in fitness professionals

This is the part of our conversation that really stuck with me.

Jen says fitness professionals struggle with the business side not just because they haven't been trained in it, but because of something deeper. Identity.

They see themselves as a trainer. Not as a business owner. And until that shifts, no amount of tactics or strategies can fix what's underneath.

Every fitness professional she coaches can tell you who they are in one sentence. I'm a trainer and I help people get fit, get strong, feel better. That identity is comfortable. It's earned. It's where they feel confident. And we always do more of what feels like us, and avoid what doesn't.

So a trainer who doesn't see themselves as a business owner will fill their diary with sessions because that's where they feel competent. Marketing, the numbers, the sales conversations get put in the too-hard basket. They underprice and discount because charging properly feels like greed, not like running a business. They can't delegate coaching because nobody does it like me.

The result? The business can never grow beyond their own timetable.

Jen's reframe is simple but it's not small. Stop saying I'm a trainer who does XYZ. Start saying I own a business that transforms people's lives, and coaching is one of the services we deliver. When you see yourself as the owner, your job description changes. And that's where everything else starts to shift.

Revenue feeds the ego. Profit feeds the family.

When I asked Jen what she wishes someone had told her at the very beginning, she didn't hesitate.

Our industry talks a lot in vanity metrics. I've got 300 members. I make 60k a month. And those numbers can sound impressive. But Jen's only interested in one thing: how much of that you actually get to keep.

She's seen seven-figure business owners who barely take home a full-time wage. Heartbreaking, she calls it. Because it almost always comes back to the same thing. They've never done the maths on what they need to charge to actually be profitable. They've priced based on what's going rate around here, not on what their business needs to sustain itself.

Understand your margins. Price for profit. Then build everything else on top of that. That's what she'd go back and tell herself from the start.

What she'd say to a woman thinking about making fitness her career

You're probably right. You're not ready. No one ever is. Don't let that stop you.

But Jen does want you to think before you leap. Not in a way that kills the excitement, but in a way that actually keeps you in the industry long-term. Because passion gets you started, but a plan is what keeps you there. Most new trainers don't last their first year. And it's usually not because they weren't good enough. It's because they didn't think through the practical foundations first.

Things like: do you want to work full time, part time, or around your kids? Do you want to be employed, self-employed, or build a business? What income do you actually need, and what hours do you realistically have?

Start with the end in mind. Get clear on what this looks like for you. And know that the foundations will always take longer than you think. But once they're in place, your odds of succeeding in this industry go up exponentially.

I left this conversation with a lot to think about. And I think you will too.

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