Talking About A Revolution

Rob, John and Giuseppe in the Islington Gazette, 21 July 2005

A few days ago on 24th June we celebrated our sixth birthday and I thought it would be a great idea to share our story so far.

Giuseppe, John and I set up the business on 24th June 2005. We were young, incredibly enthusiastic and rather naive. Some have said stupid. We agreed a 5 year lease (seriously, 5 years?! what were we thinking!) at the Business Design Centre, and were armed with our start up funds. This included money scraped together from close friends and family, as well as personal loans since the banks thought that lending money to Revolution was too much of a risk. Bearing in mind that this was back in 2005, when banks were giving homeless people loans to buy a house.

None of us knew the first thing about running a business, but we knew that we didn’t want to work for a large gym chain anymore. We wanted to show clients that by setting goals, giving nutritional advice, taking measurements, assessing progress, and perhaps most importantly having fun, we could help anyone achieve what they wanted to physically.

The early days were exceptionally tough and the three of us worked 16-17 hour days regularly. John had boundless energy and Giuseppe had an unbreakable belief that we would succeed. I was just rather nervous and pensive, although after a while I realised that people mistook this for a savvy business brain.

It was tough getting clients through the door initially, as we hadn’t formulated any kind of marketing plan. So when people did try our free introductory offer, we had to be on top of our game. It wasn’t easy to convince people that they needed what we were offering when there was no-one else in the studio training. However, we did manage to convince people to train with us due to our real passion and desire to help them transform their bodies. This is part of the culture that is still at the core of Revolution today.

In those early days, we even heard on the grapevine that certain companies within the Business Design Centre were taking bets on how long it would be before we went bust. Fortunately, other businesses and people within the BDC gave us a chance.

Paul Morris, one of the five brothers who own the BDC, started training with us a few weeks after we opened. Paul is a fun guy and liked to take the mickey out of us, and I think it surprised and pleased him that we gave him just as much banter back. In some ways this set the tone for how things were to go forward at Revolution.

We made it to our first Christmas and invited all 12 of our clients to a party at the local pub in Camden passage. After a few drinks too many, one of my clients (an Irish girl who will remain nameless) started shadow boxing in the face of one of John’s clients, who it’s fair to say was no shrinking violet. After a bit of laughing and joking, they suddenly got serious and started swapping punches for real! We had to pull them apart and apologise to the pub manager who was understandably unimpressed.

In early 2007 we took on our first trainer, Peter ‘the cowboy’ Sullivan. Peter had built a personal website that included photos of him striking poses in cowboy outfits and other bizarre costumes, as well as some of his homespun philosophy. One piece of gold dust read “unless we have the right teacher in life we will forever crawl within the boundaries delimited by our own ignorance”. In May 2007, Peter hit the headlines in a big way. After chatting up a young lady who worked in a unit opposite Revolution, we asked her out on a date on his behalf. We emailed her a link to his website and said “before you decide if you want to go on a date with me, check out my website”. To cut a long story short, this website went global and within 24 hours Pete was being made fun of from Dubai to Australia to New York. His website received 100,000 hits and he found himself on page 3 of the Evening Standard, in centre page of Saturday’s Mail and featured in many other national publications.

Pete left us to become a world star and in November 2007 Aaron Brandon-Tyrrell replaced him. Aaron has a degree in Sports Science and played rugby for Scotland in the Under 19s Rugby World Cup, so obviously he came with a great reputation. He became a huge hit with the clients at Revolution due to his high standard of training and more importantly his willingness to get involved in the studio’s banter. After one night’s drinking with John, Giuseppe and me, Aaron missed the last train back to Essex, so proceeded to run the 12 miles home at 3am in the morning. This kind of legendry performance set the bench mark for all other trainers to follow.

Sometime towards the end of 2007 we stumbled across a way of advertising that was to prove successful beyond our expectations. Marc Morris, the son of Paul, lost an incredible 5 stone in 12 weeks and we felt we had to share this story with as many people as possible. After calling the local Angel magazine, they agreed to run a feature and for the first time our phone rang off the hook.

Our marketing plan then became very clear and simple – to help people transform their bodies in 12 weeks and advertise their results everywhere within a 1 mile radius of our studio. We displayed a succession of 12 week transformations on the huge billboard outside the Business Design Centre and we continued to increase our client base rapidly. One of our first 12 week transformation 'before and after' posters was of Jon Archer who lost 3 stone:



With the increase in clients came an obvious need to increase our number of trainers. In the summer of 2008 we brought on Will Cloke and Neil McGuigan, or as they are otherwise affectionately known “Bevis and Butthead”. Neil and Will continued the theme of helping clients achieve outstanding results whilst having fun, and they are an integral part of the success Revolution enjoys today as well as our plans for the future.

With a great team developing, in 2009 we doubled our working space by knocking through to the unit next door, and then our goal became to gain more clients and add more trainers. We found two top class trainers in Bex Maslin and Tim Wise. Bex and Tim both work an incredible amount of hours, and Bex I believe has become the best female personal trainer in London. At this point John, Giuseppe and I had the business we’d always dreamed of - happy clients achieving fantastic results in a studio with a buzzing atmosphere.

We continued to help more and more clients transform their bodies in 12 weeks and strived to improve our methods to do it better. Our personal training team was improved further when two cool customers joined our team - Ryan Pickard and Ollie Vandenburg. Ryan is one of the country’s top amateur boxers and has represented Great Britain on 48 occasions, winning a Junior Commonwealth gold medal and a Senior bronze medal at the European Championships. And Ollie is an absolute natural when it comes to personal training, and some of the results he has guided his clients to are truly exceptional. Here is a before and after picture of Ollie's client Sarah, who lost an incredible 5 stone whilst training with Ollie:




The team has been completed with the arrival of Alex Giannini, Anya Russell and Jay Copley, and the skill and enthusiasm that these guys have brought to the studio has been far more than we could have hoped for. Their story at Revolution is just starting, but they undoubtedly have the ability to achieve many great things.

The future at Revolution is bright. We regularly deliver over 400 hours of personal training per week, and are in plans to open our second site within the next 12 months. We’ve also set up a white collar boxing company in partnership with Tim Wise.

Revolution’s success has been built on clients achieving amazing results with 12 week transformations whilst having a lot of banter and fun. Just as importantly, we have happy and talented trainers. Our challenge is to continue to grow whilst maintaining the principles that make us unique.