Welcome to The Dadlift

This type of playing has been most of our weekend.

I feel blessed to have two kids that 90% of the time play quite well together. I like to think that it’s because Z and myself and such great parents, but there is probably a fair bit of luck thrown in there too.

Speaking of luck, this newsletter is supposed to be about parenting and my business, so let’s talk about my lucky business.

In 2009, I started dabbling around with making websites that were very search engine friendly. After creating a bunch of random sites on topics I didn’t really care about, I one day stumbled across the keyword ‘bootcamp ideas’ and discovered that while it had a fair amount of search traffic, no one was really writing stuff for people to find.

Along came BootcampIdeas.com where I shared all of the wonderful workouts I was running in my fitness bootcamps as well as any resources I came across for fitness instructors.

Traffic to the site grew quickly thanks to SEO and the early days of Facebook pages – remember, back when each post was seen by most of your followers – and along with that an email list and along with that a way to make enough money to hang up my personal trainer hat.

I was lucky. The business was lucky.

I felt like I was doing the right things but it also seemed easy. Just show up every week and the business will grow. If I worked harder it didn’t really grow faster, if I worked less hard it didn’t really grow slower. This is why I always felt luck must have something to do with it. (And with that feeling there was a little gremlin saying ‘you haven’t earned this’.)

At it’s peak the business made enough to live off. Not super comfortably, like we weren’t going on trips and holidays, but enough to pay for things week to week, to have a nice work-life balance and for Z not to worry too much about working.

This next part is hard to describe.

I want to take you from there to where I am now. I want to tell you what is really happening without just sharing a story I’ve told myself over and over.

Hold on, the little one is crying. The big one is consoling. Aaaand now they’re giggling. Okay, back to it.

I had a coach turned friend who once said to me, ‘Wait until you have a child, your income will go through the roof.’

That didn’t happen for me. Since having kids my business has felt like it’s financially been in a downwards spiral. But slow. Like when your flight is delayed landing and you have to just do circles over the airport, slowing feeling more and more ill.

COVID definitely didn’t help.

My business has relied on a steady stream of new personal trainers entering the fitness industry. Being a PT was a great way to earn some extra cash and running fitness bootcamps only helped you leverage your time even better. But when the gyms and parks are closed, it makes it tricky.

Fitness instructors and personal trainers left the industry in droves for work-from-home and remote jobs.

I was worried, but I also knew it was only temporary, that eventually things would bounce back, that people would miss training clients and that new trainers would start joining the industry again. So I held strong and focused on making Bootcamp Ideas the best, most helpful site around when things eventually did puck up.

But things kept going down.

At what point can I keep blaming COVID? When do I pull the plug? Why do I have to be so darn optimistic?

I’m very much the proverbial captain clinging to the mast as the ship ever so slowly sinks into the water. But I’m determined that if I can just patch the right holes and maybe even rebuild some parts of the ship it will rise majestically and sail across the ocean once more.

(Or maybe turn it into a tree house like in Step Brothers.)

So that’s what this Substack will be about, me trying to right the ship while also juggling just being a person and a ‘good’ parent in this world.

Will I find some luck again? Is this all just a lesson for me to learn? Should I quit and get a ‘job’? I don’t have the answers but…

I’ll share my experiments, what I’m learning and hopefully connect with some wonderful humans on here along the way