Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in health and fitness but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Philip Pape, Founder and Head Coach of Wits & Weights Nutrition and Health Coaching, located in North Granby, CT, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

I am the founder and head nutrition coach of Wits & Weights, which offers nutrition and lifestyle coaching to high-achieving people with busy lifestyles. We help clients build their bodies, reclaim their time, and gain control over food without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions. Our approach emphasizes sustainability and self-mastery of both body and mind to achieve optimal health. We do this through evidence-based nutrition, strength training, and simple but sustainable approaches to improving body composition. Supporting this mission is our podcast, Wits & Weights: Strength and Nutrition for Skeptics.

Tell us about yourself

I am a husband, father, and techie with a passion for strength training and nutrition science. Weight was always a struggle, and I started my fitness journey later in life (in my 30s), first with CrossFit and then with strength-focused training. Over the years, I tried fad diets like Atkins, Paleo, keto, and even intermittent fasting to lose weight. In 2020, I built a home gym and started learning about evidence-based nutrition and training. As others noticed my results, I gained confidence and started sharing what I had learned. In 2021, I started the Wits & Weights podcast to do just that, eventually leading to the passion for coaching that I have today. Now a Certified Nutrition Coach and Body Composition Expert, I love helping clients accelerate their learning and results by leaning on me for education and accountability, empowering them to take full control of their health and body for the rest of their lives.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

The fitness industry can be confusing at best and full of misinformation at worst, so my biggest accomplishment is helping others cut through the noise, massively upgrade their health and fitness knowledge, and implement lifelong behavioral change in just a few months of working together—after years of trying to navigate an otherwise complicated, contradictory world of information. I am personally invested in each client, whether they are strength training for the first time and realizing how building muscle frees them from focusing on the scale or attaining a healthy weight for the first time without a restrictive diet, or training for an event or competition with the proper nutrition to fuel their performance and recovery.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

Every individual is unique in some way, from their hormones to their metabolism to their athleticism to their dieting history, as well as their sleep, stress, and movement habits. My challenge is to synthesize all of the highly effective nutrition and health information based on universal principles and applying to each person's unique situation. One of the values of personalized one-on-one coaching is that we can quickly adapt and make adjustments for these unique needs.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Reach out to people in your network early and often who are willing to try your product in exchange for feedback, so you can validate the product itself as well as your underlying systems and processes. Don't wait to get everything "perfect" before you find your first client. These same loyal followers will become your first testimonials!
  2. Practice what you preach. As a health and fitness professional, I must "use" my own product—which is maintaining my own optimal health and following the same principles and practices that I teach others. As the face of your business, you'll want to be at least as invested in your product or service as your clients are so that you feel the same frustrations that lead to improvement and growth.
  3. Always be experimenting—with your systems, your pricing, your email scripts, your sales process, and on and on. Continue iterating and refining everything you do to give clients an absolutely stellar, superior VIP experience so that the product or service sells itself and price isn't even a question. Make your product irresistible and always overdeliver!

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.witsandweights.com/
Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/groups/witsandweights
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/witsandweights/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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