There’s always something crazy going on in this industry. At any moment, there’s a maniac in a weight room taking a dangerous lift and a shady businessman in an office finding a way to turn dirty profits. The posts you find here in my log are the musings of a mashed-up meathead — the reactions I have as I spend my whole life watching this industry. I will share my thoughts with you here, unedited, uncensored, unfiltered, and Under The Bar. If you are offended by profanity - do not read this. 

So, you want to open your own business.

You want to be your own boss. You want to be the CEO. You want to have total control, you don't want to fucking answer to anybody. You want freedom. Well, the old saying the grass is greener on the other side comes true. I think some people are being sold a bag of shit by all the stuff that you see online - buy this book, buy this program, come to this seminar, get certified, do this, do that, do ... Whatever the fuck it is, to be able to make $100,000 in your own business is a complete, giant, huge crock of shit being sold to you by people who make their money trying to convince you that that's how they make their money.

To better state, they make their money telling you how to make money, which is fucked up because they don't make any money any other way. Most of them don't even make the money that they're talking about.

 Freedom in business?  if you have your own business and I've had my own business now for close to eighteen years. Before that, I was a contractor, I was a personal trainer. I grew up in a household where my parents owned their own business for thirty, forty years, I can't remember ... Fuck it all, my whole life, they've owned their own business.

Freedom in business!  You know what the fuck that is? Being able to decide what you're going to take at night,  Klonopin or fucking Xanax. That's the freedom of business.

Nobody ever talks about the bullshit and the stress that you have to go through when you own your own business. They always talk about how great it is, all the freedom, all this other bullshit, which just isn't fucking true. Money. Everybody that has their own business makes a ton of fucking money, just raining money.

Raining money?

Maybe yeah, I'll agree with that. Being a business owner is like raining money. It doesn't rain every fucking day. Sometimes you go weeks without rain. Hell, if you live in a desert, you barely ever see any fucking rain. Yeah, you got some business owners, the majority, who live in a fucking desert. Then there's going to be rare business owners who live in Seattle where it rains every fucking day. Some in Florida where it rains a little bit every day.

Owning your own business is like fucking money falling from the sky like rain. That makes sense, that works for me. I don't think most people understand that, because most people who have a business, if you asked them, they'll tell you that most of their friends and most of their associates, automatically the day you open your business, everybody thinks you make $200,000 a year. Matter of fact, you probably are $200,000 in debt.

What else to expect in this dreamland of owning your own business?

You can expect to be sued. That's a given. It's not a matter of if, it's when. Actually, it's not even a matter of when, it's how many fucking times. Expect to deal with that, and I’ll  tell you right now, the first time you deal with, it, it’s a living hell. Then you get used to it.

Expect not to pay yourself. I already talked about that. For long periods of time too. Because you have your own business, it's like it's your child. You have to grow it, you have to water it. You need to seed it. That means you need to put your money back into it to make it grow. Because you sure as fuck can't take your your employee's money or your supplier's money and put that back into it. It's yours. That's your responsibility. Or you just keep it all for yourself and you go out of business. Then you're right back to where you were.

What else do we got?

What else do you have?

Oh, responsibility. There's another good one. As soon as you open a business, you need to understand that anything that goes wrong with the business, it's your fault. Nobody else's.

Your staff fucks up, your problem. Your fault. Not theirs. You hired them.

They keep fucking up? Your fault, not theirs, because you didn't fire them.

Anything that happens with the business is the sole, 100% responsibility of who the owner or the CEO of the business is. Anybody who's to tell you otherwise is full of shit and has no business running a business because all they're doing is making fucking excuses for things they should take responsibility for, which is next on the list.

You're going to own a business you will  be partners with a shitload of people who won't take responsibility for things they fuck up on. You have to learn how to manage and deal with their bullshit. To add to that, many a times those people you do business with will become long-term relationships if your business does happen to last longer than a year, which most don't by the way. You will develop these long-term relationships with people and develop trust with them only to later find out five years later they've been fucking you the whole entire time.

That's a given too.

Expect that.

That's part of being a business. People who you think are friends or close business associates will be without a doubt the very first people to fuck you over. Those closest to you are always the first.

The next thing to add to the list.

Stress will become your friend. It never goes away. You only learn how to manage it better. When you start in business, the little things will drive you absolutely fucking insane because you don't know how to handle those. As I mentioned before, the first lawsuit will drive you absolutely nuts. By the time you get to the fifth one, they're not even a big deal anymore. You just deal with it and move to the next one. That is only if you learn how to grow from each experience.

 If you let the experience control you, and you think the experience is a failure and not an opportunity to learn or an opportunity to become better, then you've already lost.

If you don't know how to lose and learn, you're fucked. That's the key element to any business is to be able to fail but make it positive. I refer to it as positive failure. If you have negative failure, it's only going to drive you deep and deeper in the hole. You will become consumed with certain aspects of your business that will drive you absolutely out of your mind because you want to have the solution over and done with as fast as you possibly can, where the solution and reality, most of the time, is better for those who can last the longest and wait the most.

There's many ways to deal with conflict in business. Business is pretty much majority of conflict and handling conflict. Knee-jerk reactions will kill your business. Every reaction needs to be thought of and has to have a strategic plan. Every single one. They can't be knee-jerk reactions. Everything needs a strategy, everything needs to be thought out, and everything needs to be factual.

You cannot run a business based upon the stories you tell yourself in your own fucking head because you will make shit up.

You will run into situations where you'll lay at night pondering ten, fifteen different scenarios, only to find out two weeks later, the solution wasn't any of the fifteen that you were all worried about.

 As you grow and if you grow in business, you learn to shut those scenarios off and not even think about it. You learn to use your downtime to recharge and to clear your head. Business and owning your own business is not what it's all fucking cracked out to be. I'm tired and fucking sick of all these people who try to sell you on this big fucking dream that's bullshit. There's risk associated with business, and just because you have a business and it's a successful business, that doesn't mean that that person actually had to take a risk or not. Some people are just fucking lucky. Other people need to bust their ass and grind.

Expect that you're going to have to grind every single fucking day and that you're going to have to get better every single fucking day and you're going to have to learn every single fucking day and you're going to have to learn how to control your stress every single fucking day and you're going to have to learn how to maintain your composure every single fucking day and you're going to have to become better at solving problems every single fucking day and you're going to have to become better at every single attribute associated with business, every single fucking day.

If you're not, you're done. You will be out of business.

Why bother?

Good fucking question. Most of the people that I know that have started their own business started out in necessity. They ran out of other options. They got fired, they got pissed off, they couldn't work for somebody. It's a biased view, it's a limited view based upon the people I know, but I don't know very many people who have businesses that I would consider successful and that's not financially that's successful that they're living a life that they enjoy and enjoy the grind associated with it. Because you're not always going to be happy. As I've said before, happiness is an emotion. It's not a state of being. If happiness was a state of being, you'd always be happy so then what would be happy?

Those people who I know to have a business pretty much have it because they couldn't fucking do anything else. It's all they got. When you talk to them, their greatest fear about going out of business is they don't know what the fuck else they can do. They don't know who's going to hire them or what they would do. They really don't have a backup plan, so they got to make it work. They got to find a way to enjoy the grind and to learn from it and to move forward. They're the ones that will be realistic. They're the ones that are going to tell you the truth of what the grind is really like and how it impacts everything and how it takes years to be able to master and try to find some type of balance in your life, to where you're not working 20 hours a day and never seeing your kids. They're the ones that are going to be able to tell you, "Time management is essential. It's not something you read about in a book, it's something you fucking figure out for yourself, which is best for you and your family."

You could read all the books you want on time management, all you're doing is wasting fucking time. Sit down and figure out how you can manage shit better yourself. You don't need a book to fucking do that. If you need a book to fucking do that, then you shouldn't have a business. Waste of fucking money.

What are the benefits?

All those negatives are positives. Yes, there's responsibility. As a business owner, I have the responsibility of putting food on employee's plate. I have responsibility of helping suppliers move their products. I have a lot of these responsibilities but you know what, that's cool. Because I'm helping put food on people's plates. In the business I'm in, we educate and outfit people to increase their strength.

We're helping people become better people.

We're helping them become stronger people.

We're helping them become more confident in what they do.

We're not trying to inspire them to open a business.

We're trying to inspire them to embrace whatever passion they love.

For us, it's training. If they love training, we want to help them break every PR that they can and that's cool.

That's worth it!

If we can design a product that helps somebody break a personal record, that's worth it. That's worth all of it. That's worth all the stress, that's worth all the bullshit, that's worth all the days it doesn’t rain.

 Because you're making a difference. You have the ability as a business owner to make a difference. That difference isn't being made just by you. The difference is being made because you have the responsibility to inspire others who work for you and that are associated with your company to go out and make that difference. You're not really the one doing it. You're just the one leading the charge. That's what's cool, because you're showing them what they're really capable of doing and doing it in a way less evasive environment than you have to operate in as the business owner.

How cool is that to be able to offer somebody all the benefits associated with giving and making a difference but not have to take all the risk associated with owning that or owning that business?

To me, that's cool. To me, that's worth it.

When you can inspire others to become stronger and just to empower them to try to be better at what they do, regardless of what they do, then it's worth all the pain and all the suffering.

 Because giving is the greatest feeling in the world. When that giving can be spread throughout your company, throughout your team, and then throughout customers, clients, followers, readers, or whatnot. Change can be made. Lives can be changed. The sacrifice you make if you're willing to make that sacrifice and do the things that I said at the very beginning, then it's worth it. If not, and you're nothing more than a big fucking pussy and you can't handle dealing with adversity, you can't handle dealing with conflict, then get the fuck out and have somebody else run it. Take your role working for somebody else because that's not a bad thing. It pisses me off when I read how people say it's a bad thing, you're working for the man, or whatever the fuck this statement is, you know, break out on your own, do this, do that, do that. They're only saying that because they want your fucking money to buy their book, mastermind or seminar.

If you love what you do and you're working for somebody else, fucking do the best job you can do. That's going to build the company and that's going to build your job security. It's never a bad thing working for somebody else. Most business owners would agree half the time, we'd rather fucking be working for somebody else and if you want to be completely honest about it, no business owner alive today works for themselves anyhow. They work for their customers. They work for their staff. They work for their suppliers.

That's the reality of owning a business and what it's really like, coming from somebody who's lived in the trenches for eighteen years.

 How does any of this matter to the industry? 

 The point of this posts and all of the future ones moving forward are to provide my opinion based on close to 4 decades "Under The Bar" in the industry. From a kid pulling deadlifts in my basement, to a top 10 Powerlifter and now CEO and Founder of one of the most trusted names in the industry. I've seen it all, I have seen more than you can imagine and I've seen far to much I wish I could forget.

The take away from this post is much of this industry is a mess. Few would deny that. It's always been that way. I feel this is because so many who start businesses in the industry have no idea what they are getting into. NOT! In over your head stuff - but completely clueless and proceed forward making tons of mistakes. We all make mistakes but the difference is with those who learn from them and become better and those who don't take responsibility for them. Too many in this industry lie, steal and cheat and know they are doing so. Some make fortunes off doing this and I am not one to stand back and say "good for them" because there are so many others busting their ass to increase the standard of the industry because in the world right now, strength and fitness is a BIG deal. Not that it is popular but that it is needed so badly. This industry can seriously make a huge impact on the world.

Look around - see how many issues could be solved with better strength and fitness. If our industry doesn't step up and take accountability to help in our own way then we have only ourselves to blame.