Starting Your Own Business and Navigating the Field:An Interview with Carla Robbins

Dear future kinesiology graduate,

Starting your own business in the field might be something that has crossed your mind already. I know I’ve often thought about it!

Today, I’m excited to share a conversation with Carla Robbins, the owner of Vital Strength and Physiology. Vital Strength and Physiology is a company based out of Calgary, but a lot of their remote clients come from all over the country and they even have some from across the pond. Vital is focused on tackling complex cases on both the rehab and the performance side of strength and conditioning, working with individuals on all areas of performance – from those dealing with chronic pain to those setting their sights on an Olympic podium.

Carla is not only someone that I currently work for as an endurance coach, but she’s also someone who I consider one of my mentors in the field.

I’ll leave it at that for now and let the interview speak for itself. Enjoy!

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I’m from Kelowna, BC and I moved to Calgary in 2007 for the University of Calgary’s Kinesiology program. I originally planned to move back to Kelowna and start up some sort of sport training or therapy-based job. I quickly realized that Calgary is a hub for the sort of career I wanted, so I’ve been here ever since.

Somewhere between moving to Calgary, finishing my undergrad, and getting my CSEP-CEP certification, I got into the MKin program at the University of Calgary. When I graduated with my bachelor’s, the MKin program was on hiatus so I essentially waited and hoped they would bring it back, which they finally did in 2014! I had my heart set on the MKin because I wasn’t interested in doing a research-based master’s program. I’ve never wanted to be a researcher. I just found it’s not practical enough. I also never wanted to be pigeonholed into any one niche. I was always a generalist and wanted to know a little bit about a whole bunch of things and be able to apply that to solve different problems.

Somewhere between finishing my undergrad and now, I started a company called Vital Strength and Physiology just for fun. I’m a creative and artsy person in general, so I thought starting a website would be a fun little side project to do in my spare time. It cost $150 to register my company with the province and now that I had the skills to write training programs, I started playing around with ways to sell these and other services.

Sometime between 2012 when I registered the company and now, I’ve incorporated Vital and it is now my full time job.

Tell us a bit about your company, Vital Strength and Physiology, as it stands today. What’s currently going on with the business?

Vital is currently still 100% owned by me. I have one full time employee, Nick Simpson, and two online coaches, Chantelle and Rick. It’s mainly us four right now with a few other contractors, but I’m looking at a potential hire for another full-time coach on the endurance side.

Vital currently doesn’t have its own gym, so we rent space from other gyms and primarily do remote-based work. Because of our limitation with space, we’re trying to expand online stuff more than in-person stuff, especially on the endurance side. We’re also trying to do more remote strength coaching. We released Foot Foundations last year and released Hip Foundations this past month. It’s programs like this that we’re really trying to grow.

What are the benefits of having remote coaching and programming as a large piece of your business?

Renting space is extremely expensive and your overhead can be really difficult. So, it’s a great way to grow with less risk and it’s a good way to confirm that your processes are in place. I think if you can help a client make progress without ever meeting them in person, your processes are strong and your communication channels are working well.

For us, we just don’t have a ton of cash flow. If we did, maybe opening and growing more with in-person training would be feasible. We’ve thought about going this route before and were even about one week away from signing a lease on a space in March of 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. At that time, we didn’t know a better way to grow. We were still wait-listed for clients and the space we were sharing at the time didn’t have enough room for everyone we wanted to train.

Right now, Vital is more focused on the online aspect because we feel we’re able to reach and help more people through remote work without taking on too much risk. If you put all your focus into growing an in-person space, it won’t be possible to develop online programs as effectively (and vice versa) since the physical space takes up so much time, effort, and financial cost.

A lot of people think that an online business sounds great because it would be “passive income.” This is very much not the case, although once more processes and automations are put in place, it does become easier. There’s really nothing passive about trying to grow an online business!

What were some challenges you faced when first starting your business?

Although I started Vital in 2012, I didn’t really get serious about it until 2017. Up until then, there were no challenges because I was still just doing it for fun and it wasn’t a main source of income.

I lost my full-time job in 2017 when the company I was working for at the time closed due to some leasing negotiation issues. When this happened, I tried to find another space to train their clients in, but that was a huge struggle since most of them were familiar and loyal to the company I worked for and I no longer had that name behind me. Some people were really keen to keep training with me though.

There were an endless number of struggles at this time. Where was I going to find a space to rent? How much do I pay for rent? How many hours per week are these clients going to train with me? How do I pay my bills with these minimal hours? How do I find more clients? Literally every struggle in the book hit me in 2017. Name a struggle and I had it.

Losing my job in 2017 pushed me to do Vital full-time because, at that time, it felt like there weren’t any other options that were the right fit for me or didn’t offer full-time positions. For example, I started doing some teaching at Mount Royal University, but this wasn’t full-time work. I couldn’t support myself on it.

Losing my job and pushing myself to do Vital full-time was definitely a blessing in disguise but did not feel that way at the time at all.

What’s the most fun aspect of running your own business?

The most fun part for me is that I can focus on something different every day if I want to. It feels like play to me!

Like I said, I’m a pretty creative person and having my own business allows me to explore different ideas whenever I want. So, for example, if I have a client with a labrum tear, I might choose to put all my focus and effort into scanning the literature and coming up with a plan to implement with that client to see whether it helps with their hip pain. Then, the next day I might spend my time on something completely different like the best approaches to endurance coaching for marathon runners, and so on. The fun part about running your own business is that it gives you the freedom to explore things like that. It’s very much like “What do you feel like doing today?” That doesn’t work for everyone, but I thrive on this type of work – forming an idea and working on a project long enough for it to come to fruition.

I think sometimes in a traditional job, they don’t make room for that. Time spent on researching different topics and playing around with different ideas isn’t usually built into an average person’s work week.

Vital Strength and Physiology has an internship program. How do you run this to set interns up for success?

Since we’re a small company, we typically only take on one intern per semester. We usually get our interns through the MKin program at the University of Calgary. This is partly because MKin students are a bit more advanced than an undergrad student, which allows us to involve them in more advanced projects and hands-on work in general, which is helpful for us as a company. This is an important consideration since it’s also an investment on our end.

I feel that our internship is a bit unique in that we like to tailor our internships to be very much based on the individual. I’d say that a lot of internships are really systemized where you’re checking off boxes, whereas I’d say ours is much more individualized. We’ll do an interview with the intern prior to starting to see what areas they’d like to focus on. If multiple people are interested then we’ll do an interview with each person and pick the best fit based on what they’re interested in and what we’re able to help with. Individualizing our internship experiences is mainly how we try to make the internship a little more successful for each person.

With our most recent intern, she felt her programming skills were really strong, but wanted to learn more about the individualization of programming, adjusting on the fly, and working with injuries. So, we paired up with a physical therapy clinic in our building (Coalition Performance Care) for her internship where she did 100 hours with us and 100 hours with them. She had a combined project with both of us, which was based on both her current strengths and the skills that she wanted to build. This project entailed building a bunch of rehab programs for different joints, essentially looking at prescribing different exercises for various stages of the rehab process alongside entry and exit criteria for each and what would be appropriate vs. inappropriate for various rehab clients. While programming was her strong suit, programming a rehab progression from start to finish with unique injuries was something she was not used to. It was helpful for her to see sessions with our clients and Coalition’s clients at the same time to figure out what’s feasible, what best practices might look like in real world scenarios, and how to take on more of a holistic and individualized approach when writing programs.

What advice do you have for someone considering starting their own business in the field of kinesiology?

Get your feet wet with as many things as possible before starting your business.

Make sure to try a lot of different things to learn a lot of different things, and work for a lot of different people. Eventually you’ll realize what you do and don’t like about working for other people and with different types of clients. That will really help you to figure out how to niche yourself… or not niche yourself if you don’t want to go that route. Niching in a business is a good thing, but unless you know what it looks like over the fence, it won’t be as successful in my opinion.

For example, a lot of people think that they want to work with athletes because it sounds “cool” but after working in this area realize that: A) It doesn’t pay as well as they thought it would, B) The hours are really tough, and C) It might not be as fun as they originally thought as there’s more stress and pressure. So, this then helps them to realize that athletes don’t need to be 100% of their clientele.

Until you work with a bunch of different people through a bunch of different businesses, you might not realize what amount of work or knowledge is needed to work with each type of client. In theory you could go straight into starting your own business after graduating from school, but I honestly think it’s really valuable to work for other people first.

If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice prior to officially starting Vital back in 2017, what would that be?

Be more prepared in negotiations. I don’t think I really had enough confidence to negotiate in these types of meetings (like renting space) and hadn’t done enough research to know what a good contract or agreement should look like to be honest. In hindsight, it all worked out, but I think it’s a good skill to develop. In the beginning, I think I trusted people too much and didn’t do enough research into what types of questions I should be asking. You wouldn’t want to do something like make a misinformed agreement on, say, leasing a space and be locked into that for 5 or 10 years.

It wasn’t until more recently that I became better at negotiations in general. As women, I think we don’t like to negotiate as much because we don’t like conflict. We’re way less likely to negotiate job offers, for example.

It’s way more common in the business world to talk about negotiations and it’s not really something they teach you when taking kinesiology in school. I think it’s important to learn though because we, as practitioners, get taken advantage of a lot in this industry. The wages are, by and large, a lot lower than they should be. I actually feel like the whole industry needs to step up and charge more money for services. It’s ridiculous to be seeing job postings for $37,000 per year that require a kinesiology master’s degree. Sport and rehab training should not be cheap because our physical health is really important. It matters a lot!

What do you see as the future of Vital Strength and Physiology?

I think there’s still a huge gap between the graduates that come out of school and what people actually need in terms of training. I came out of a practical master’s program that’s supposed to teach us all the practical skills we need and… it’s researchers teaching us those skills. Nothing against them – I love them, but it does create a gap. Even looking at undergraduate students becoming strength and conditioning coaches, they have big gaps in their knowledge. I feel like Vital will try to fill that for those types of coaches or therapists one day. Everyone is so numbers based and not human based enough, I think.

I think the way that we could have the biggest impact in the industry is not through our one-on-one work, but through teaching other coaches to have more tools in their toolbox. I think that’s where we’ll eventually be heading, although we’ll always continue to work individually with clients, too.

Where can people connect with you?

People can always reach out through Instagram (@vitalstrengthphysiology), but email (info@vitalstrengthphysiology.com) would be best if they have specific questions.

Also, I have a special surprise you can link here for your readers. I recently wrote an eBook about how to develop better endurance - on the track or in the gym called Effortless Endurance: A Guide to Building Work Capacity. If people want to read that, they can head HERE.

Let’s wrap things up

I’d like to end this by saying a huge THANK YOU to Carla for taking the time to sit down and share her thoughts. I originally wanted to interview her to get insight on what it’s like to start your own business in this field, but I think there were so many great take-aways outside of just this topic.

We talk about this a lot at Your Kines Mentor, but taking the time to build up practical skills and gain experience in different areas in the field is so so important – whether you plan to start your own business or not. I’ve always admired Carla and how much success her business has had over the years, but this interview has really reinforced the idea that our paths to success and to where we want to be are never linear. Everyone has their own unique journey and their own struggles. If you’re feeling lost in a field that’s often confusing and difficult to navigate, just know that you’re not alone. You can and will get to where you want to be.

As always – if you have any questions or feel like you’re in need of a little guidance, we’re here to help. Reach out to the Mentors at any time and we wish you the best of luck with your current and future studies.

Sincerely,

Your Kines Mentor