Maybe you’ve heard of Precision Nutrition and my friend Dr. John Berardi.
If so, you know that John is one of the most respected experts in the fitness industry, especially when it comes to––you guessed it––nutrition.
But what you may not know is just how influential and successful his company–-Precision Nutrition––has become. That’s because John has never talked publicly about the business side of his company.
Until now.
I interviewed John recently and he agreed to share his personal story along with some powerful lessons he learned while building Precision Nutrition from a two-person startup into a cutting-edge company with over 60 full-time team members, 45,000 clients, and consulting gigs with some of the top brands in the world including Apple, Equinox, Nike, and Virgin.
(Note: We’re trying something a little different with this interview format. Instead of the usual Q&A, we edited out my questions and left John’s answers front and center. So all the words you see below are from the man himself. Enjoy. - SG)
The fitness industry saved my life
Smoking weed. Skipping class. Drinking. Getting arrested. That was my high school experience. There was absolutely no real chance of me going to college. It wasn’t really an option.
Then a year after high school, I got into a serious car accident. Everyone was drunk and the driver skidded the car over a lane of traffic, into a ditch, and smack, right into a tree. Thankfully, no one was hurt. But when I pried myself out of the car, I walked away from everything.
I never talked to any of those guys ever again. I just divorced myself from my old friends and my old life. At that point, though, I still had no idea what I wanted to do. I didn’t feel like I had a lot of options.
Somehow, I got into the gym and started working out. The guy who owned the place–-Craig-–took me under his wing and showed me how to train. He was a big, muscular guy who read philosophy and business books. I’d never met anyone like him before. So I started to work out with Craig, and he started to teach me things. He even gave me a job at the front desk.
It’s like he found a piece of shit in a pile, dusted it off, and gave it a purpose.
From that point on, I was a different person. I started working out and taking care of myself. I started talking less and listening more. And then I went to community college to study exercise and nutrition. Things just took off from there.
So I’m not kidding when I say the fitness industry changed my life. That’s why I’m so passionate about helping people get in shape, and why Precision Nutrition is passionate about helping fitness professionals become better coaches.
How I became an entrepreneur
Fast forward a few years: I’m working as a personal trainer in a gym in Miami, training clients and having the time of my life. But I start noticing that most of my clients aren’t getting the kind of results I think they should be getting. After a bunch of trial and error, it dawned on me what I was missing.
I wasn’t teaching my clients how to eat better. Not only that, I didn’t really know how to eat better, either. I was following a typical “bodybuilding diet”, and there was no way that my clients were gonna start eating bland chicken and broccoli because some kid told them to.
That’s when I went back to school to earn my PhD in nutritional biochemistry. I wanted to understand everything I could about nutrition and health. That way when I got out of school, I could use that knowledge to help people. That was my thinking. But as I was wrapping up my PhD, it wasn’t really clear how I could do that.
Understand that at the time, there were only a few job pathways for people like me. You could teach at a university. You could do research. Or you could work for a supplement company, start at $150k, get a nice corner office, and all that. As a guy who was in debt his entire life till his mid 30s, that paycheck and corner office sounded like a dream.
But I didn’t want some 9-to-5 job, either. A corner office sounded like a prison. At the time I was going through school, I was writing articles for some online magazines and training clients on the side. And that’s when I met Phil [Carravaggio]. He was a smart, systems-oriented guy and we clicked right way.
Phil didn’t want a 9-to-5 gig either. Even though he went to the University of Waterloo for engineering and turned down a job at IBM.
Then one day Phil said, “We should start a website.” I thought it would be a waste of time. This was back in 1999 when the Internet was just a baby. I remember using a dial-up connection and reading a book while waiting for a single page to load. But Phil was convinced everything was about to change, that more and more businesses would be moving online.
I’m glad I listened to him.
We were bootstrapped from Day One
With no investors, no bank loans, and no start-up money, we began a website and called it Science Link. I was a PhD student at the time. We were taking science and translating it into results for people. That became our tagline.
In our first couple of years online, we had almost no competition. Almost no fitness expert had a website in 1999, and honestly, we didn’t really know what we had.
Two years in, we had a newsletter list of 35,000 people. One day, a friend of ours said,“You know, that’s a business right there.” We were like, “Wait. Really? This actually could be a business?” At that time we were just writing articles and collecting names.
Our first product was called No-Nonsense Nutrition. It was a DVD. We filmed it over a weekend, guerilla-style.
We bought a camera from Best Buy and invited a bunch of people to come into a lecture hall that was never locked on the weekend. I gave a talk and we filmed the whole thing. And then we filmed some more cool segments in the lab, in a grocery store, and in our friend’s mom’s house.
The next week, we returned the camera back to Best Buy and got a refund.
That entrepreneurial spirit––the idea of “do the best you can with what you have”–– still permeates through our culture at Precision Nutrition. We have a lot of smart, scrappy people on our team. Thankfully we now have enough money to do the things we want.
And I’m also proud to say that we’ve still never used investors or bank loans. We’ve grown entirely with the profit we’ve made through working with real customers.
Growing pains and a tough business lesson
Things changed massively in 2006. By this time, we had changed from Science Link to Precision Nutrition. We had a small part-time team of 5 people, and we were selling our Gourmet Nutrition cookbook, a few small e-books, a mass-market book called Scrawny to Brawny, and our DVD. We decided the time was right to put it all together into one comprehensive system and sell a hard-copy version. And so we created the Precision Nutrition System.
The Precision Nutrition System sold 1,500 units at $100 a piece in the first two days. It was crazy. Up until this point, the business was pulling in just a few grand per month from product sales. And suddenly we grossed $150,000 in a weekend.
The only problem? We couldn’t get any of that money. Our credit card merchant account had never seen that kind of volume come through our business before and it was a big red flag for them. And so, for some bizarre reason, they decided to restrict access to the money for 90 days.
We had over 1,500 orders to fulfill and no money to fulfill it. In other words, our customers weren’t gonna get the product they ordered from us. We didn’t have a stockpile of books in a warehouse or anything. Instead, we were going to print on-demand, using the profits from the sale to finance the printing of the books.
We begged and borrowed from friends and family. I pulled out some of my own personal savings, and so did Phil. We made it work, but it was an incredibly stressful time.
Later on, I realized that debacle was one of the best things that could have happened to us as a company. Not only did selling an information product like the Precision Nutrition System enable us to learn about Internet marketing, hire more staff, and help more people, but the whole credit-card thing taught us how to manage risk, handle money, and make better decisions.
Of course, that story is only funny to me in retrospect.
Trying to change an entire industry and growing like crazy
We were only coaching 30 to 40 people at that time. Our information products were taking off, but our coaching program was capped-out. We couldn’t give people the attention they deserved, and it was starting to become too time-consuming the way we were doing it.
Then I got asked to consult with a corporate coaching company who wanted to add a fitness and nutrition component to their program. We didn’t end up working with them in the end, but I studied the way they ran their business, and it gave me an idea.
What if we created our own online coaching? It could have a complete exercise program, nutrition habits, daily lessons, and accountability. And each person could go through the program, learn and practice the habits it takes to make a real transformation, and get a coach to help guide them through it all. So that’s what we did.
We ran our first coaching program for 6 months and had a couple hundred people sign up. Suddenly we were able to help more people than ever before because we had a systemized coaching process and were working on building custom software.
We’ve always been an evidence and research-based company. Which is why this coaching program was so cool. We started collecting data on every client and everything they did––from how often they completed their nutrition habits and did their workout for the day, to how much time they spent on our site reading their lessons and more. We were able to see what was working and what we needed to change. Which means that every iteration of the coaching program we make is better and more effective than the last.
Since then we’ve had over 30,000 clients go through PN Coaching and we’ve given away almost a million dollars in prize money. I feel like we’re making a big difference in the lives of the people we help. These are people who’ve tried and failed to get in shape before, and they finally found us.
I love going through the before and afters and seeing the progress they’ve made. [Note: Check out the latest round of men’s and women’s clients. And here’s our men’s and women’s hall of fame.]
“To be an island of sanity and reason in an ocean of fitness insanity and faddism. To facilitate real and meaningful change in the lives of every person we touch.” That’s our purpose at Precision Nutrition.
More than just making money, or even changing lives, we want to change the entire fitness industry too.
Helping a new generation of fitness professionals
“I need a system for coaching nutrition.” That’s the one request we’ve heard more than any other. The good trainers and business-owners know the value of having systems, especially business systems.
But almost no one has a reliable system for helping their clients eat better. Instead they give out meal plans or “nutrition rules” and hope for the best. When you think about it, what your clients eat––or don’t eat––will often be the deciding factor on whether or not they get results with your program. Which means it’ll often be the difference between your business thriving or becoming irrelevant.
Do you know how to get your clients to follow your advice? Do you have a system in place for getting reliable results? Does your training staff understand how to coach nutrition effectively? We asked those questions to thousands of trainers in our network and the majority of answers always came back: “No.”
There was a serious gap, one that we were uniquely qualified to fill. My team and I have spent the past decade learning everything there is to know about coaching people, helping them change their habits and eat better. This was our opportunity to give back to the fitness professionals who looked to us for advice and guidance.
That’s why we created the Precision Nutrition Certification. It’s everything we’ve learned about coaching nutrition and helping clients change their habits. It’s a complete system for feeling confident in your ability to help every client that walks through your door. It even offers a business system for getting started.
From what we’ve seen, a lot of fitness professionals feel kinda guilty. They’re either nervous to give nutrition advice in general or they’re having a hard time getting their clients to actually follow their nutrition advice.
We knew we didn’t just want to cover the science of food and nutrition. Sure, it’s cool stuff to know, but it’s not really helpful or actionable. That’s why we dedicated half the textbook to practical examples and case studies for how to coach your client through changing their habits.
So far we’ve had over 15,000 fitness professionals go through the course. Pro sports teams, top trainers, world-class coaches… they’re getting better results with their clients, retaining more members, adding extra “nutrition consulting” services, and making more money.
What are we working on next? Helping a new generation of fitness professionals make a great living for themselves and a real difference for the people who hire them.
It’s work worth doing, don’t you think?
Want to learn more about Dr. Berardi’s coaching and business system? Want to develop your own system for getting reliable client results? Then check out this free 5-day nutrition coaching course. In it Dr. B outlines everything, even sharing the assessment forms he uses when working with clients and prospects.