IAM2167 – Fitness Consultant Offers Reliable Diet and Training Consultation to Fitness Enthusiasts

Nick Shaw is the co-founder of RP Strength, a multi-million dollar health and fitness company that has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of clients around the world. His story and the story of RP have appeared in Forbes feature story, which chronicled RP's strength rise from a small business into an influential tech company with an industry-leading app available through the App Store and also Google Play Store.

Nick has also helped coach numerous world-class athletes, including CrossFit Games champions, international medalists in weightlifting, UFC fighters, Navy SEALs, and Olympians. He shares valuable insights into his approach to learning and continuous improvement. He emphasizes the importance of hiring people who complement your skills and being open to learning from various sources.

The conversation highlights the importance of creating a high-performing team and the positive impact it has on the company and its people.

Youtube: Renaissance Periodization
Website: RP Strength
LinkedIn: Nick Shaw
Instagram: nick.shaw.rp

Check out our CEO Hack Buzz Newsletter–our premium newsletter with hacks and nuggets to level up your organization. Sign up HERE. 

I AM CEO Handbook Volume 3 is HERE and it's FREE. Get your copy here: http://cbnation.co/iamceo3. Get the 100+ things that you can learn from 1600 business podcasts we recorded. Hear Gresh's story, learn the 16 business pillars from the podcast, find out about CBNation Architects and why you might be one and so much more. Did we mention it was FREE? Download it today!

Transcription:

The full transcription is only available to CBNation Library Members. Sign up today!

Nick Shaw 00:00

Is going to be some colorful language, but people really like it because it's really, really authentic and it really is. It's funny. You get to learn, it's engaging. And when people want to learn about fitness, if you can get that engagement in there, get some laughs and you're having fun, you're learning something too. It just helps it stick around more. And then people really appreciate that. And they're like, you can do all this stuff for free. I wonder what else these guys have to offer.

Intro 00:22

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:50

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Nick Shaw. Nick, excited to have you on the show.

Nick Shaw 00:57

Hey, thanks so much for having me on, man. I really appreciate it.

Gresham Harkless 00:58

Yes, absolutely. I appreciate you and all the awesome things that you're doing. And of course, before we jumped into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Nick so you can hear about all the awesome things he's been working on. And Nick is the co-founder of RP Strength, a multi-million dollar health and fitness company that has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of clients around the world. His story and the story of RP have appeared in Forbes feature story, which chronicled RP's strength rise from a small business into an influential tech company with an industry-leading app available through the App Store and also Google Play Store.

Nick has also helped coach numerous world-class athletes, including CrossFit Games champions, international medalists in weightlifting, UFC fighters, Navy SEALs, and Olympians. Nick and his team at RP have sold hundreds of thousands of books over the years, ranging from nutrition, training, recovery, and creating healthy habits. And one of the things that I absolutely love when I was preparing for this is I read a little bit more about some of the 7 foundational habits he has in his fit for success book and includes grit, work ethic, and continuous learning. I think those are all things that we can learn. I'm sure in health, of course, but of course in all aspects of life. And he had a phenomenal story. I'm super excited to delve in a little bit deeper.

Everything that happened during COVID was definitely challenging, but at the same time was very inspirational on his mentality and him and his wife and how they approach that. So Nick, excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Nick Shaw 02:22

Yeah, let's rock and roll.

[restrict paid=”true”]

Gresham Harkless 02:24

Let's make it happen then. So to kick everything off, let's rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more on how you got started. What I call your CEO story.

Nick Shaw 02:30

Yeah, I've always been into fitness since I was probably a teenager. And so I wanted to be involved in like fitness/sports. And so I actually went to school at the University of Michigan, studying Kinesiology. Didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. Maybe thought I'd be an athletic director, combining sports and business a little bit. Lo and behold, my junior year, I met who later was the co-founder of RP with me, convinced me to get into more serious lifting and man, we just clicked pretty much from day 1. We both graduated from Michigan. We were personal trainers in New York City for, I don't know, a year or so.

Myself a little bit longer than that. He went to go get a PhD in sport physiology. I stuck around and was training people in person. And we thought this was, oh man, 10, 11 years ago, something like that. We thought, hey, why not? Why not take what we're doing here? I'm doing stuff in person. He's studying, working with some people online. Why don't we just combine that, join forces? And that was actually how RP started. We never dreamed it would go into something that would impact literally millions of people. We love fitness. We love coaching people and that's where it started. And fast forward, what, 10, 11, 12 years later, it's pretty wild to think about.

Gresham Harkless 03:36

Yeah, absolutely. It's so interesting to hear that journey goes. And sometimes when you look back, you think, does that person like have that vision idea of this is where they're going to be? But even if you sometimes do have a certain vision, life, business, industries, transformation, all of these things happen that ends up taking down another path.

Nick Shaw 03:54

Oh, totally. Yeah. We thought we'd just coach people and quickly early on, we thought we had pretty good like methodology around what we were doing and no one had really solved or scaled the one-on-one coaching model at fitness. And so we started thinking because like I was a personal trainer, just I didn't love it. Man, you got to work it. It'd be on your feet all day long. It's a really hard, grueling job. I was like, how do you scale this? How do you do something a little bit different? Online coaching was that sort of next evolution. But even then when you're coaching people, you're still limited.

You can only coach so many people if you want to do a good job, that is. You can try to do a bunch more, but the client suffers at the end of the day. So we're like, we know what we're going to do with people. We know there's sort of a logical structure at everything that we're doing. Is there a way that we can scale this and whether it's through digital products or whether it's maybe through apps someday? And so we didn't have any money or not. We were completely bootstrapped. And so what we did was we decided, hey, let's just build out a digital product that mirrors this process that we did when we were working with somebody.

And that was in 2015, almost 10 years ago. I caught on a few months after we launched them, people started using them. They were a lot cheaper than one-on-one coaching. And so that was the beginning of us sort of quote unquote solving the coaching model. And then digital products are pretty high margin. So in the back-end, we just kept reinvesting that back-end, working on building out some apps. Here we are. We've got a diet coach app and we've got a hypertrophy training app as well. So we've got nutrition and training both covered them.

Gresham Harkless 05:17

Nice. I absolutely love that. And I love that question. It sounds like such a small question, but I feel like the question is everything, especially for entrepreneurial people. Is there a way? Is there a better way? Can we build a better master? Just those questions and having the willingness to try to figure that out. Because I think so many times we get mired and stuck in this. That's just how the way is. That's how the way the world is. That's how business is. But it sounds like that didn't stop you guys.

Nick Shaw 05:39

Yeah, we just it was a lean startup model where we didn't really have to invest a ton into it because we were just making Excel files. That's literally what we started selling. They later became slightly prettier PDFs and eventually obviously became the apps. And so we were able to iterate and change quicker. But yeah, it was like, let's just try this out because worst case, I don't know, no one buys them. What would it have really cost us? Not a whole lot of resources.

And some of our time, weekend or a week or so, there were time, but luckily they did catch on and that sort of led us down the automation path of doing some stuff on that front. And then the whole time, just with the longer vision of, we gotta make this into an app someday, but we're spending this hour on pocket. So we're okay taking it nice and slow to hopefully do a little bit better over time.

Gresham Harkless 06:22

Yes, absolutely. I love that. I wanted to drill down a little bit more. I know you talked a little bit upon like how you're serving your clients. The customers would love to hear more there and how you're making that impact with your products, the books, all of the awesome things.

Nick Shaw 06:34

Yeah, yeah, totally. So our main products are RP Diet Coach App, which helps people on their nutrition front. And this is people that, so all of our products are at RP Strength. We're most well known if you're already in fitness. If you're a brand new beginner, you might have a little bit of a harder time because our apps are designed for intermediates even up to advanced. So RP Diet Coaching app is one, and then the other one is our RP Hypertrophy app and what sort of makes RP special. I would say that we are now positioned as the world's leading experts on hypertrophy training. It seems like a fancy word, but hypertrophy is just another word for muscle growth.

So if you're someone that wants to gain more muscle, get leaner, change your body composition, we are the place to go. And that is largely not because of myself, but because of my colleague, Dr. Mike, he is a celebrity in the fitness space now. He has helped blow our YouTube channel up. Shoot, I know when we're recording this, but I know what you said when this will come live. So we'll probably be at like 2 million YouTube subscribers by the time this comes out. And this has just really opened the doors for so many new people to come in and listen to Dr. Mike and man, they love it because he's funny. And funny enough, before we got started today, I was like, hey, is that okay if I swear?

Because if you ever listen to any of our YouTube stuff, I always want to tell people, I'm like, you got to be okay, it's not going to be exactly PC, is it going to be some colorful language? But people really like it because it's really, really authentic. And it really is, it's funny, you get to learn, it's engaging. And when people want to learn about fitness, if you can get that engagement in there, get some laughs, man, you're having fun, you're learning something too, it just helps us stick around more. And then people really appreciate that. And they're like, you can do all this stuff for free. I wonder what else these guys have to offer. And then we've got some apps behind that. We also have one-on-one coaching, but those are sort of our flagship products, the two apps.

Gresham Harkless 08:17

Yeah, I absolutely love that. Yeah, I appreciate you warning me just because I need to put the earmuffs or anything on. Yeah, why not? You're definitely good to go. There you go. And do you feel like that's part of that secret sauce? I almost feel like you being able to understand that human part and being able to, of course, be able to create phenomenal app and books and all these things. So of course, huge, but being able to tap into that and keep plugged in on that human part, whether it be your YouTube channel or all those aspects, do you feel like that's part of what sets you all apart?

Nick Shaw 08:45

Yeah, for sure. I'm not going to sit here and beg, oh, it's all me doing this on my buddies, got the gift of the gab. I like to call it. And people just really appreciate that. And when the family really started unleashing that and really pouring a lot of resources, time and effort and energy behind the scenes to helping that excel just and things really caught on and because we positioned ourselves as really the go-to place for hyper-sphere training it was this emergence of this growing exploding YouTube community along with this brand new app and it's just like this very good product market fit and receive all sorts of sign a year later, because we launched it a little over a year ago, that it's just completely revolutionized everything about RP. It's really, really cool to see.

And so now it's all about like, all right, we know we've got this. How can we get back? How can we do even more? Got all this free content. Are there ways maybe we can help give some money into research labs in fitness space. They're doing things around what we're interested and then something really cool, we're setting up a nonprofit where we can start to then give out scholarships for kids that are going to school to study kinesiology. It's like this kind of positive feedback loop where the more the YouTube channel grows and the more the apps do well, then we start feeding back more and more. We start bringing these educators and stuff onto the channel and they can help give out more education and all this. And it's just people really, really appreciate that. It's just, man, it's so cool to see.

Gresham Harkless 10:07

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit and you might've touched on this, but it's what I like to call a CEO hack. So it could be like an Apple book or even a habit that you have. What's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Nick Shaw 10:18

Oh, man, probably just the learning mindset of… and I think this ties really well into fitness. And so my life is fitness, and it always has been, and I'm super grateful for that. But in the world of fitness, There's never really a point where you're content. There's always something more you can do. You can always get a little bit faster. You can get a little bit stronger. You can maybe lose a little fat, gain a little bit of muscle. There's always whatever workout, whatever numbers you hit, there's always some way to improve it. Or you completely clip the script and you go from aiming for strength into endurance, like something like that. So there's some way to get better.

And when you take that mindset, you start to apply to business, because we were talking earlier a year ago, I would not have been on this podcast, because I have nothing to add. But I really sought out, all right, what are the ways I can get better? What are some things that I can go and do?” And so I took a bunch of marketing certifications and courses trying to learn, like, how does all this stuff really work? And the way I think or how I go about things is I can't just read one book on a subject. I actually have to get, I don't know, 5 or 6 different ones from different authors.

And I'll read all of those and then I'll look for the common overlapping trends and themes, and that's when I go, okay, these people that don't really have anything to do with one another are saying these couple of things. There's a cop. That's the truth. That's where I'm gonna start. And so that's what I did. And then even more recently, it was more like, all right, how do you really change and improve your company culture? And so I dove deep into a ton of podcasts and I'm in the Visage group, actually similar to what you're doing here with you're creating a community of people and you're sharing a bunch of content information. So Visage is more or less the same thing, but it's a group of CEOs who meet in person.

And I got to watch these guys because we get to go to their offices and their facilities where they're interacting with all their people. And I got to see it firsthand. And I'm like, wow, there's really something to this. What can I start taking away from these guys that are more successful than I am? And so I started doing that, started to play that, and coupled with all the reading outside of that, it started to get a little bit better understanding of, oh, okay, this is maybe how things work. And it reinforced my own confidence because a couple years ago I wouldn't have had that confidence that really lead my own company but I really believe this this is the way to go and now I do so now I have no issues with it so when people come and they whatever they got issues they're talking to me about stuff I'm like I'm cool we're not gonna set on stuff anymore let's just let's get it out there and you know let's talk about it Let's find out a solution to it.

Gresham Harkless 12:37

Nice. I love that. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a little bit more of a CEO nugget. So you might have already touched on this could be a word of wisdom or piece of advice, but I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client or if you happen to a time machine, what might you tell them?

Nick Shaw 12:50

It really fits in perfectly with what we were just talking about. Especially if you're just starting out your soul or newer, you can't possibly know everything yourself. So don't be afraid to go and hire someone, let them come in and do their thing and kind of just get out of the way more or less because you can't know everything as one person. So you probably have some skills and some strengths. So bring some people in, they're going to compliment you to do some of the stuff you're not so good at.

And then you try to focus more on the things that you are good at. And sometimes that's hard. I get it. It's hard to let go and all that. But the sooner you can realize that, the sooner you're probably going to get to that next point. Whatever that is you're trying to go, you're trying to grow your company. Again, it's a hard lesson to learn. It's really hard to do early on. I get it. Been there before. But the sooner you can realize that, man, that's the hack in my opinion.

Gresham Harkless 13:33

Yeah, that ends up being such a huge thing by being able to do that in so many different aspects. I also want to ask you now one of my absolute favorite questions, the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And our goal is to have different quote unquote CEOs on the show, so Nick, we're just being a CEO.

Nick Shaw 13:46

Man, it means I'm in charge of a lot of people's livelihoods. And it's not something that I take lightly. It's my job to make sure that the company gets better. And yeah, I'll probably benefit as a result. But man, when you're part of a really good, high performing team, which I'm very confident that I am now a part of that, you want to do well, not just for yourself, but because there's other people that are involved.

And I don't know if I would have had that same answer a few years ago if you had asked me, but again, I feel very, very confident in saying that now. I'm CEO. I'm in charge of all these people's livelihood and I take that incredibly, incredibly serious. And the better I can get, probably the better the company is going to get, the better those people are also going to do. And that's a really amazing feeling when you can create something really powerful with some other cool people.

Gresham Harkless 14:35

Yeah, it is a being a really phenomenal thing when it's not either or it's both and better. You get to improve while the organization improves, while the people in the organization improves and that abundant mentality focus is a being a phenomenal place to be.

Nick Shaw 14:47

Hell yeah man, that's, I couldn't agree more.

Gresham Harkless 14:51

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Nick, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. Of course, how best people can find out about the books, the apps, all the awesome things.

Nick Shaw 15:07

Yeah, totally. So number one's going to be, go on YouTube, search Renaissance Periodization. I know I can barely spell it as well. If you want a little bit easier way, search Dr. Mike bodybuilding, something's probably going to pop up like that. Check it out. Phenomenal place to learn tons and tons and tons about anything sort of fitness, nutrition, training related. Entrepreneurs, hey, if you don't have your health, you've got nothing. So you got to start there. That's the foundation. And beyond that, it's just rpstrength.com or hey, if you like the podcast and then want to reach out to my own Instagram is at nick.shaw.rp. That's probably the best place to get in touch with me.

Gresham Harkless 15:45

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, Nick. Of course, to make it even easier, even with the spelling and everything, we're going to have the links and information in the show notes as well too, so you can click through and find all the awesome things that you all are working on. But I truly appreciate you for all the awesome things you're doing to make an impact. I say so often again that we forget about that human part. And that human part is not just one aspect of the way that we're marketing or the way that we're talking with our team. It's in every aspect of the business. So the more that we dial into that, the more that we pay attention to that, the more we can make an impact and have that win, win, win, win, win in so many different aspects of life. So appreciate you so much for knowing that my friend and I hope you have a phenomenal.

Nick Shaw 16:21

Thanks so much for having me on man. Really appreciate it.

Gresham Harkless 16:23

It was a phenomenal conversation. Thank you.

Outro 16:24

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CBNation and Blue16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at blues16media.com. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

[/restrict]