8 Things Businesses Can Learn from the Rise of Joe Wicks, The Body Coach (1/2)

If you aren’t aware of Joe Wicks, known by millions as The Body Coach, then it seems you are probably in a relative minority these days. I have to admit to being completely unaware of him too, until my (previously slightly doughy-round-the-edges) brother arrived in Spain for our family holiday 6 months ago with a finely chiselled six-pack.

Since then, I have paid rather more attention to Mr Wicks and his growing fitness and nutrition empire. I have followed him on Instagram (the platform where he built his foundation and has over 1.5 million followers), watched his YouTube videos (he has over 11 million video views), and even borrowed one of his best-selling cookbooks from my brother (oh, yes, he writes cookbooks and has sold over 900,000 copies, more than any other author in 2016). His brand, Lean in 15, has been so successful, that he has been credited with a 25% rise in UK sales of tenderstem broccoli, which he uses regularly in recipes and refers to as “midget trees”.

He is by no means the first person to commit exercise routines or recipes to film though. We all remember Mr Motivator don’t we? We’ve all watched Ainsley Harriott, Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson. And countless celebrities have tried their hand at fitness DVDs. The Body Coach is operating in a crowded (though unconventional) marketplace with very few barriers to entry and very few competitive advantages, and yet he’s dominating, reportedly turning over ￡1million every month.

The question that has been nagging me is, what can his meteoric rise teach me (and you) about business, and I’ve come up with 8 lessons, the first 4 of which are outlined below:

1. Even overnight successes don’t happen overnight

Wicks has built his fitness and nutrition business in 2 short years, but what seems like overnight success certainly hasn’t been. He started posting simple recipe and HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) videos on Instagram in 2014, and has steadily built over 1.5 million followers. The strategy has been consistency. He has consistently posted 5 times or more every day, amassing over 7,250 posts to date. It takes serious commitment to consistently produce new and engaging content every day, and you can bet his early posts weren’t getting 20,000+ engagements to keep him motivated.

Flash back to a year earlier, and The Body Coach was running early morning Military Boot Camps in Richmond Park attended by a handful of people. He cycled from his home in Epsom, pulling a heavy trailer full of kettle bells and spent time handing out flyers outside the station after the sessions. It can’t have been easy work.

What we can learn from Joe is that, much like getting in shape, running any kind of business requires commitment, consistency and the ability to dig deep when things get tough, and then maybe one day we might appear to have had an overnight success.

2. Time is no longer money

Joe Wicks understood that as a personal trainer his income would always be restricted to the number of hours he can put in. Through leveraging video, Wicks has been able to train hundreds of thousands more clients than he ever would be able to fit into a normal work week. The real genius of The Body Coach, as far as I see it, is to transform an industry that is slave to linear income into one that generates residual income, with a potential to earn exponentially.

Assuming that a busy personal trainer works 6 days a week and trains an average of 5 clients every day, in two years Joe Wicks may have delivered 3,120 PT sessions. Again assuming that each client has 2 sessions a week at ￡30, Joe would be training 15 clients for an income of ￡93,600 (￡46,800 a year).

To date, with The Body Coach model he has sold 110,000 personal training plans at ￡147. That’s ￡16,170,000, without even factoring in the 7-figure book deal he has for his best-selling cookbooks. That is extremely shrewd business.

3. Understanding your audience is key

The Body Coach was born out of the Lean in 15 video series, which Joe continues to post to his Instagram account regularly. Originally, these were 15 second videos outlining a recipe or workout that his audience could digest quickly on the go. He quickly started to understand that his audience were hungry for fitness and nutrition knowledge, but they were time-poor or reluctant to devote hours and hours to achieving the results they craved. Whether by accident or design, he also hit on the notion that while his audience wanted to look and feel great, they didn’t want to stop eating out, having puddings or drinking alcohol on nights out.

His thorough understanding of his audience governs his proposition: 20 minute workouts that can be done at home, 15 minute meals that can be whipped up by anyone, and a trainer who is honest about his own love of dessert-scoffing.

As business people or marketers, we too need to understand who is consuming our messaging. Only then can we ensure that we produce content that speaks to them and their wants and needs.

4. Video has serious reach

Peddling from Epsom to Richmond at 6am on a weekday morning to hand out flyers, I doubt even Joe himself believed that he would one day be leading 200 people in a workout on Bondi Beach in Sydney in September 2016, or on Santa Monica Beach in October 2016, or in Dubai earlier this month. In fact, wherever Joe goes, people turn out en masse to work out with him. Why? Because video has given him a truly global audience. 3.5 billion worldwide internet users who can potentially consume his content.

So far The Body Coach has a YouTube subscribership of 240,000 and over 11 million total views. We know that video is driving engagement all over the internet. This is at the heart of what we do at Origins of Motion. But not everybody is embracing this yet. Joe Wicks’ sensational story should be another reminder that if we aren’t already, we should be creating regular video content to deliver our messaging.

And there's more...

There are plenty more business lessons to be learned from the sensational rise of Joe Wicks, and I will share four more with you in my next article next week. Let me know your thoughts on Joe and his journey in the comments... No pictures of six-packs though please!