We Bought A Great Camera And Got 200 Views

We share the real story of how our father-son coaching partnership starts and what it takes to build an online fitness business that actually helps people. We get honest about bad-fit sales, content doubt, and the resilience it takes to stay in the game long enough to win. 

• Vincent’s pivot from psychology to personal training 
• Brian’s health journey with diabetes and why it changes his mission 
• What Crunch Fitness teaches us about sales and systems 
• Why selling low-impact packages feels wrong 
• The hard limit of in-person training hours 
• The early online coaching myth that ads equal clients 
• Why perfect production fails without a clear message 
• Investing in business coaching and learning the audience-first formula 
• What “brand” really means for fitness entrepreneurs 
• The mental hurdle of posting authentic content consistently 
• Resilience as the main separator between success and failure 
• Our 80% content and 20% ads view of the business model 
• Why the podcast format helps us teach beyond short videos 

On May 11th through the 15th, we will be announcing our three-year anniversary sweepstakes. 
All you need to do to apply is visit Time and Retention PT on TikTok or Instagram and comment Tut on any of the ads beginning on May 11th. 
If you want to get a head start, you can just click the link in our bio on Instagram today. 
You could just go ahead to uh jump on the fan fan mail, click the fan mail button, it's in our description of every episode, and leave us a message. 

We’re a father-son coaching team behind Time Under Tension PT, and this podcast is built for men 30+ who used to be in great shape but now struggle with low energy, weight gain, and inconsistent habits due to work and life demands.

Resources:

Book a call // Book a call for more info about our 1-on-1 fat loss coaching.

4-Step Fat Loss Starter Guide // A simple starter guide.

Transcript

Welcome And Anniversary Sweepstakes

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey everyone, welcome to Tut Radio. I'm your host, Brian. I'm here with my son slash business partner slash co-host Vincent. And today's episode is for all you entrepreneurs out there. Coming up in May, we are celebrating three years in business, so today we thought we'd take you through our journey so far. But before I get started, I'd like to make an announcement. On May 11th through the 15th, we will be announcing our three-year anniversary sweepstakes. That's right, we will be giving away six months of one-on-one fat loss coaching. All you need to do to apply is visit Time and Retention PT on TikTok or Instagram and comment Tut on any of the ads beginning on May 11th. If you want to get a head start, you can just click the link in our bio on Instagram today.

Why We Started Coaching

SPEAKER_00 0:46

So let's get started with how all this got started. Vin, the mic is yours.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Yeah, sure. We'll start with college. So I went to Florida State University. Go Knowles. Go Knowles. And I had no real idea at that point, my freshman year, what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to help people. I took a few psychology classes in high school. I thought that was cool. Went through their like exploratory program, which was like undecided, landed on psychology. Maybe it'll be a therapist, social worker, whatever. That that'll that'll suffice as far as helping people. And then one day, and I think it was like my junior year or something like that, like mid-junior year. I'm not really sure. I woke up and I was like, man, I don't want to do this anymore. This is a grim future. I'm gonna have to listen to everybody's problems, and it's just horrible, and it's it's gonna be depressing. I'm gonna need a therapist to be a therapist. All these things are running through my head. And I'm like, uh this is this is a life of service that is brutal to navigate. And so I decided that that I don't think that really made any sense for me. But I always like working out, and it was always important to me to be healthy and to lift weights, and it was something that I just grew to love. So I figured the pivot would be okay, let's obviously finish the psychology degree. We're already this deep into it, but I want to be a personal trainer, that's how I want to help people because it's something I'm passionate about, and I think that that the the prospect of giving somebody their health back is awesome, and so so that's why that you know the the idea came from them, you know.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Cool. I mean, different for me. Um most of you don't know, but for me, I've been managing diabetes for gotta be like nine years now without any medication, and so that whole experience of getting you know sick like that and not really understanding how to get better, I did a bunch of different things and ended up getting myself in a good spot. But at the end of the day, you know, I thought to myself I was in the restaurant business for 30 plus years, and I thought, man, I I really I want to do something different. I don't I don't want to continue and retire in the restaurant business. It was kind of not my idea of something I really want to do. So I I you know got my certification, became a certified trainer and nutrition coach, just like Vin. And then together we thought this would be really cool, do a father-son thing and start working together. And so he kind of got started first because he he actually got a job with Crunch Fitness here locally where we are in Florida. So, Vin, why don't you talk about that experience for you? Because that is the beginning of how this whole thing kind of leads into the online training piece

Lessons From A Big-Box Gym

SPEAKER_00 3:34

that we got into.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

Yeah, sure. So Crunch Fitness was an interesting time for me. It I I learned a lot there. I learned how to sell personal training. I learned how to, you know, structure programs for people and manage a schedule, and a lot of the things that are required in running your own business, they almost kind of set it up so that you're already kind of doing things like that when you work for crunch, which is very cool. So, like a lot of the things that we do now, I kind of began to learn back then. What was I always, you know, uh super appreciative of their sales process and how you know there was you never take no for an answer kind of thing. Whatever, you know what I mean? It's it is what it is. It it got my foot in the door though, and it was definitely worth doing, and I don't regret it at all because it taught me a lot.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

I know you I this is something I want you to talk about because I think this is important that you became really frustrated with the sales process piece, and you know, you always talk to me about feeling like you know, you were almost a phony, and you you just hated selling something to somebody that they really, really didn't want. And so that's how we kind of get into this next piece of this. But but tell me about that frustration level there, what that was like, and what made you kind of just decide, okay, I've had enough with Crunch.

SPEAKER_01 4:55

Yeah, so it for me it was at the end of it, they would run a promotion, and you know, uh for for whatever reason they wanted to, and the objective was to sell it, and it didn't matter who wanted it, it didn't matter, you know, how much they could pay, or you know, like I I would sell training packages to people that I know really would not help them very much, and that didn't sit right with me.

SPEAKER_00 5:23

Like, what do you what do you mean it wouldn't help them?

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Well, I'll put it to you like this their most expensive package, as you could imagine, was four or five days a week, right, for an hour session, right? Because that's what we would recommend for most people. Three to five days in in any gym for an hour plus is probably what you need to get it done, right? For for a lot of people, again, depending on how you structure your split. Well, when you meet up with a personal trainer once a week for half an hour, how much of a lasting impact are you actually able to make?

SPEAKER_00 5:54

None.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

Right. So so it's uh and and I sold a lot of those because, as you could imagine, how much you want to charge for something like that? It was very cheap compared to everything else, and so I was just selling to sell it, and that didn't make me feel good about that. So, so I again that was one of the few reasons that I ended up stepping away from it because it didn't make any sense. You also learned that you know your schedule is capped very quickly, very, very quickly, because you can't be in two places at one

Choosing Online Training Over In-Person

SPEAKER_01 6:23

time, and so that's the limitation of in-person training, which I'm sure we'll get into you know shortly, but it's you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

And I remember the the first, I'll never forget this day, the first day that you came home and you're like, look, I've had it, I'm not doing this. And I remember you and I had discussions about possibly maybe opening a gym like that's kind of one thing we thought about, and then we thought, okay, well, that takes a lot of money, so how are we gonna get that done? And then there was a guy, a local guy here in town who had a gym, and he would allow personal trainers to kind of go to the gym, but you'd have to pay him to do that, and so that was something we kicked around too in the beginning of this whole business. And then, you know, Vin says to me one day, he's like, Look, dude, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna we're gonna do everything online, we're gonna do online coaching, it's gonna be awesome. All we got to do is just throw some ads up there, Instagram, whatever, TikTok, and look, we'll make a fortune. This is gonna be awesome. We'll just like I said, just ads, and next thing you know it, you know, we'll be clients going crazy. And so I I thought to myself, I have no idea what the hell he's talking about or or how this is gonna possibly work. I'm like, well, you know, I'm uh 58 at the time or 57 at the time. He he's 22. I'm like, well, he knows a hell of a lot more about this. At that point, I don't even think I had an Instagram account. So um, so I'm like, all right, well, that sounds that sounds good to me. You know, in the meantime, I had a couple of friends that I was helping along with, you know, with the training piece and you know, picking up a couple nickels here and there, just you know, doing some stuff locally, and then we were off and running on this whole other venture here. So, you know, why don't you let everybody know how that all kind of like worked out in the beginning, like that mentality of like this is gonna be easy and how it kind of turned out, and believe me, I know anybody out there who who's trying this knows is sitting there, I'm sure, just shrugging their head and going, that's not the way it works.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Yeah, so get so I think when you are a spectator of the industry, it is really easy to assume that man, this is really not that hard. Because a lot of people, what they do is they have incredible physiques, they just post their physique over and over and over again, and seemingly they have a a million followers, and now they're they're they're in some you know excursion somewhere where the water is you know as blue as your shirt, you know what I mean? Right, but yeah, it's it's clearly not that easy, right? So no, so the you know, we had a a false sense of of what it was gonna take in order to acquire people because it's not as easy as hey, this is what we do, and we we want to help people right now. Yeah, you know, come come check us out. It's because it's because cause you and everybody else is trying to do the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

So let me add this too, because I think this you hear this all the time from people, content creators, because everyone's out there talking about how to create content, like there's all those people, and our first attempt at this, like what we thought was you know, we went out and got a really good camera, right? But a green screen, all these different things, and the focus you know really was on how do we make the absolute best production quality we can. And they were really like our first videos, I think, were a whole lot like mini movies, like they were really incredibly well done. Yeah, and and it was like a miracle if if they got over 200 views, and it's like, how can this be? You know, because we're watching people do other things and going, how is it that our stuff just falls short all the time? And so after doing that, honestly, folks, for for well over a year, it was like, okay, that something's gotta change. We have to we have to figure this out, and we're not we're not figuring it out on

Authentic Content Beats Perfect Production

SPEAKER_00 10:18

our own. So I thought maybe this is a good time to make an investment. And so so we did. We decided to actually invest in some online business coaching. We hooked up some guys that were actually fitness guys, so it was a perfect kind of a match here. And I think the takeaway from from that was really kind of understanding that there is there is kind of a formula for this. The way the formula pretty much goes that makes the most sense here is that you have to first build an audience, you know, and how do you do that? So it it ends up ultimately being about how you can you produce quality content that is authentic, and that that's really, really important to understand. And I don't like to use the word, you know, building your brand, because you hear that all the time, and then people think like we've had a logo from the beginning. The logo is not the brand, the brand is you know, your point of view, your inflection of your voice, the smile on your face, because you cannot sell anything to anyone who has no idea who you are, and so that's why this the content creation piece and so is so important because you have to again build that first. And it's it takes a tremendous amount of time and effort. And you know, just recently, you know, we just started seeing some success here with you know being able to get X amount of views and things like that. So that that that helps, but more importantly, it's not about views, it's really about being able to have conversations and getting people to engage with what you're doing so that they they decide to follow you. And now at that point, then you get to say, okay, now I can talk a little bit more about what I do and and maybe even make an offer at that point on say, hey, you know, if you need something from us, this is what we can, this is what we can do. So for for this point, I'd like you know to talk, have Vincent talk about this piece. Is now we're into this, we're coming up on our our third year, and the how frustrating it has been day in and day out to produce things that you are so uncertain whether or not it's actually going to be of any value to anybody other than yourself. So, Vin, why don't you talk about that? Because there's more than enough equations. I mean, times we've done that. Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

I think that's the it's the biggest mental hurdle I've had in this entire process is okay, I want to be a personal trainer, I want to do my business online because I feel like this is how you can have even more impact on somebody's own transformation than than just meeting up with them in the gym. So you give yourself this task and you come to realize that this is really hard to pull off because, like I was saying earlier, and like you were just mentioning, it's it's not as easy as yeah, just you know, just let everybody know what you're doing, and then all of a sudden you you've got business because it's not like we were talking about the other day, it's not it's not a storefront that people are driving in front of. So, in an effort to build this audience, like he was just kind of touching on, you have to produce authentic content that allows an audience to understand you and know you and start to like you, because without those things, you don't ever really get the opportunity to offer your services to them. And so it's this weird crossroads that I have been, again, you know, struggling with and still continue to struggle with because I do things that are not always related to fitness and health and things like that, but on a business social media page, where does where where is there a place for that sort of stuff? Like where does it live? And I guess the more I come to learn is that it lives right there because it's you and you're the brand and it's your business and people have to know you. Right. But it's just it it it doesn't it doesn't like like making making a piece of content that just shares an insight to you as a person doesn't feel like something that is necessarily directly contributing to your work and what you do for your profession.

SPEAKER_00 14:47

Right. So that's not like people get off track because it does. Right. And you you just want to quit, you want to give up. And that's just not the way I mean it is part of how this goes, and it just makes it really, really, really difficult. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

But yeah, it's it's I think the hardest part is like you that convincing yourself that what you're doing is worth your time, worth your time, and still is relevant and makes enough sense to build an engaged audience.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

Yeah,

Resilience And The Long Road

SPEAKER_00 15:15

yeah. And I I think what's the the thing I've learned, because I've been in you know in corporate business my whole life over 30 plus years, and and I I own my own business for about seven years, but it wasn't quite like this. Uh, it was very different than this. But Alex Hermozzi, who I'm sure many of you have heard of, the thing that he talks about most if you watch him and you see him on Instagram or wherever, is it's really about resilience. And there ends up being really just two choices. You either can one go work for somebody else and have immediate gratification, right? So you'll have a job, you'll get paid every two weeks or whatever that may be, or you decide to become an entrepreneur and work for yourself, and then you never you have an endless opportunity to earn income for the rest of your life. Whereas if you have a job, that's always capped off somewhere, you know, depending on what job that you get. And so it's really difficult, especially. I mean, for me being my age, it's it's okay to like kind of look back on things. But if you're young, and I always advise people who are who are in their 20s, now is the time. If you have something that you're excited about and you you want to make a go of it and maybe start your own business, man, I highly recommend it, but I it is not for the faint of heart. And the number one thing you'll have to actually get over, the biggest hurdle is this this horrible feeling that you're not getting anywhere. And it doesn't go, it doesn't happen overnight, it just takes a shit ton of time to actually go through it. And that that resilience, again, that Harbosy talks about is is so so important. And it's the difference between the success or failure. It's really kind of that that simple. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

So most certainly. If you never stop, you never lose.

unknown 17:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

So where we end up now, so now we're at this point where I'm like, okay, let's let's really take a long, hard look at what the business model for this looks like. And uh honestly, folks, it's 80% of it is building the brand, meaning that you're continuing to do content, you're in people's face, so they know who you are, and you continue to build that know, like, and trust. People say that all the time. And then 20% of it actually then becomes advertising, so where you actually can make an offer to that audience that you've created, and that's why this podcast is so so important to us because we get the chance to sit here and yap for 15-20 minutes and actually tell you about something that we do, which is really, really cool because you can't you can't accomplish that in a a 60-second video on Instagram. It just it just doesn't you know work that way. So that's pretty much it for day. Is there anything else you want to add to the ending of this, Vin, as we you know, let people go?

SPEAKER_01 18:03

I think if you're an entrepreneur and you're just starting out, really understand that there's a long road ahead. But with that, I firmly believe with as much struggle as it as it brings, it's a it's an incredible opportune time for people that are passionate about things to go into business for themselves.

SPEAKER_00 18:30

Perfect. So I hope for everybody that's listening to this, again, thanks always

How To Enter And Reach Us

SPEAKER_00 18:35

for giving us the opportunity and giving us you know your most precious commodity, your time. We really appreciate it. And again, if you are starting out in your own business, man, hang in there, you can actually reach out to us. We'll be happy to talk to you about this stuff. You could just go ahead to uh jump on the fan fan mail, click the fan mail button, it's in our description of every episode, and leave us a message. You actually send us a text, we'll get right back to you when we can. And again, I hope you enjoyed everything because we sure did sharing our story. And once again, don't forget we got May 11th, those ads will start going up, and uh, you might be one of the lucky winners that ends up working with us for a whole six months, and uh, we hope that you do. It would be so cool if one of our podcast listeners actually wins the damn thing. That would be awesome. Yeah, so everyone again, thanks, and uh, we'll talk to you soon.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

See you guys.