Hey friends, let me take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Kelley and I am one of the co-owners of Queen City Training. My fiancé, Patrick, is the other half of the business, and together we are working to make Charlotte a healthier place. Today, I am going to talk about the transition from "talking about it" to actually "being about it". Let's do this.
June 2016: Patrick creates a joint Instagram account under the name Queen City Training (somehow that name wasn't already taken... baffling). We decided to share our knowledge and love for fitness with the world through social media. Disclaimer: We had absolutely NO idea what we were doing. But hey, we learn quick on our feet. Over the next few months we uploaded amateur fitness videos, focusing on our intense training sessions. At first, we had like ten followers (yes, our Moms were 2 of them). We had very few likes and hardly any comments, but that didn't deter us, it motivated us.
March 2017: QCT took over the fitness classes for a few apartment complexes in South End, Charlotte. We had free reign to design these classes however we wanted, so naturally we chose HIIT and Strength. Our 2 classes became known as Shape&Shred and Limitless Strength. We slowly but surely received feedback on our classes, and thankfully a lot of this feedback was positive. We even had participants reach out to us asking about one-on-one personal training.
June 2017: 10 QCT clients on the roster. TEN! I seriously prayed for the day when I would train more than one client per day, and now we were struggling to fit everyone into our weekly schedule. Dream. Come. True. We didn't let this progress go to our heads- we knew we had a ton of work ahead of us.
September 2017: We decided to seriously adult and transition from living in an apartment complex with a beautiful gym, to a house with no gym.... problem. I stressed for weeks, trying to figure out what we were going to do. I had ten clients that needed to train twice per week, WHERE was I going to train them? I decided to reach out to a fitness studio, hoping to rent out space and train my clients. It seemed like the best option until I realized the fitness studio owner wanted to take over all of my clients, and basically my business. That's going to be a hard no for me.
November 2017: Patrick casually suggests turning a storage unit into a personal training studio. This casual suggestion really got me thinking, why not? People use storage units for all kinds of things- why can't we turn one into a gym? I began reading a few blogs and doing my research. It turns out, many personal trainers opt for either a garage gym, or a similar training space, in order to keep their clients and not lose money to a commercial gym. I shared this information with Patrick, we weighed the pros and cons for a few days, and then decided to bite the bullet and go for it. We knew, if we put our minds to it, we could make it happen. And guess what? We did. In 3 days. THREE DAYS. We rented out 2 storage units, tore down the middle wall, put down rubber floors, and brought in our equipment. BOOM- welcome to QCT's official personal training studio.
We day dreamed for years, 5 to be exact, about one day having our own space to train clients. We would talk about it over dinner dates, on long car rides back to Ohio, and while we watched Netflix before bed. We could talk about this dream forever and ever, but talking about it only gets you so far. You really want to make something happen? Assess the risk, and go for it. If you succeed, awesome, if you fail, try again. There was no way in hell we were going to let ourselves fail. We knew what we wanted and we weren't going to rest until we made it. And by made it, I mean worked for it. We spent 8+ hours setting up our personal training studio, dragging around 80 pound rubber mats, putting together dumbbell racks and flat benches. We were so exhausted by the end of that day we could hardly move. Worth it? Absolutely. Would we do it again? Hell yes.
So what's the underlying message of this story? Quit talking, start doing. Life can be as amazing as you make it. But you have to choose to make it amazing. Things aren't just going to be handed to you- and if they are, these things won't help you grow. They won't make you a better person. You know the saying, good things come to those who wait? Screw that. Good things come to those who work. We were watching a stand up on TV last night, and someone in the crowd yelled out "life can really suck sometimes". You know what the comedian replied? "It is the greatest time ever to be alive. Maybe it's how you're living it". If you aren't happy with where you are in your life, make a change. Physically, get up and make a change. No one is going to do it for you, and no one is going to feel bad if you continue complaining about it without taking some type of action. Take a risk, go for it, dive in head first... if you hit rock bottom, climb back up and try again.
Queen City Training is just getting started. We still have so much we want to do and want to accomplish, we will be working for years until we are satisfied. Honestly, we will probably never be satisfied. Satisfaction is boring, we want challenging. But, I can say that we are damn proud of how far we have come since June of 2016. Get ready Charlotte, we are here to say.
- Kelley