Meet Jada Mcguin, Ms, Mha

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jada Mcguin, Ms, Mha. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Jada, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

My resilience comes from facing many challenges personally and professionally, and always managing to land on my feet, in a better position. My journey with my business has been so tumultuous. Being diagnosed with a chronic medical condition is what led me to take up personal training. This condition severely affected my physical, mental, and emotional health. I lost about 30 pounds in 6 weeks, and my grades dropped severely, so much so that I withdrew from school for an entire semester. After minimal relief from medical intervention, I focused on regaining my physical strength in hopes of turning my health around. Being a Kinesiology major, I used what I already knew, and what I was learning to nurse myself back to health. It was by no means easy or quick. It took roughly a year to begin to feel like myself. As a means of accountability, I used Instagram to document my journey. Shortly after that, I gained an overwhelming amount of support and interest from other people. It was around the Fall of 2018 when I started formally training. I gained a lot of clientele quickly. I was presented with an opportunity to train on campus as a personal trainer and also an opportunity to train with a local group trainer. By the Fall of 2019, I had graduated from LSU, accepted into a master’s program, and was fully self-employed as a personal and group trainer. Unfortunately, Spring 2020 was the beginning of the Pandemic, so naturally the business I’d built was completely halted, as gyms were one of the first businesses to shut down and one of the last to re-open. Though my business had been fully operational for 2 years prior, I was not offered any economic relief, which made re-opening even harder. I managed to withstand the pandemic and slowly regain business by late summer 2020. It was a struggle, but I was able to manage. By the end of 2020, I was back at capacity. Group and personal training were both doing fantastic. 2021 started as my best year yet. I was extremely profitable and almost finished with my master’s program. I was doing so well, that I moved into my own 4000 sq ft facility. My business was 100% self-funded with no help from any grants, bank loans, or fundraising. It was all the money I had made and saved. I signed my lease in May of 2021 and in June of 2021, I lost 50% of my clientele. There was no specific reason, except the economy had begun to start feeling the economic impact of the pandemic. Being a business in the health and wellness industry in south Louisiana, gym memberships are considered luxuries and are typically some of the first things to go when people are looking to cut things out of the budget. As the summer crept on, my business was failing. At the end of the year, I had graduated from my master’s program and began applying for jobs, as I knew I could no longer afford to be self-employed. Unfortunately in February 2022, just 10 months after having signed the lease, I had to tell my landlord that my rent would be late. From February to May, traffic in the gym was non-existent. In May 2022, I arranged with my landlord to buy myself out of my lease. It was the hardest and most uncomfortable thing I ever had to do. All the work I had done, all of the photo shoots, marketing campaigns, and guest appearances to try and get my brand out there, had failed. Luckily for me, I was able to move into another training facility to continue to try and make my business thrive. By June of 2022, I had invested over $100,000 of my own money in my business and made $0 profit. I owed my landlord roughly $27,000 for breaking my lease early. Fast forward to now, and the economy has worsened, making it harder for businesses like mine to thrive. Gyms that had been in the area for decades closed. All of my other gym owner friends had either partnered with someone else or gone back into the workforce full-time. Seeing the shift of the economy as a whole has been scary, but implementing more affordable options like app-based training and programs has allowed me to keep my brand alive.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I feel the most exciting thing about what I do is that I work in healthcare as well as the commercial fitness and wellness industry, and I have a personal testimony of how fitness brought me back to 100% health. My brand is built on my having that personal and professional connection with fitness. My brand supports a holistic approach to health. I offer personal and semi-private training, virtual training, on-demand programs, and lifestyle and accountability coaching. To stay on trend with the industry, I recently unveiled the FITT HOUSE app, available in the Apple and Google Play stores, where all of these features are available. Within the FITT HOUSE app, clients can track their body stats, upload and track their meals, and have access to their training schedules, and online programs.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I think the three most important are endurance, willingness to learn, and honesty. I say endurance because the road to and through self-employment is a marathon. It is not a get-rich-quick method. It takes endurance and stamina to keep going. I mean here I am almost $130,000 and 3 degrees later, and I am just starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I say willingness to learn because there is so much about entrepreneurship that I didn’t know. There was so much about finance and accounting that I didn’t know. There is so much about marketing that I didn’t know, but the most important is that there are so many resources that I didn’t know about that would have been a complete game changer. The last important quality is honesty. Honesty with yourself, your employees, and any other stakeholders involved. Of all the qualities I possess, I believe my honesty with my business is what has allowed me to last this long. My advice to those early on is to learn as much as you can, listen as much as you can, and not give up. Learning and listening keep you sharp, keep the naivety minimal, and allow potential mentors and those in the position you are trying to get to, to take you seriously.

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?

The number one obstacle to my business and many others is financing. Creating so much debt so early on, stunts the growth of a business. Having invested everything I had at 22 years old, and having to take 4 years to rebuild that loss has been the main obstacle for FITT HOUSE. Since I am still self-financed, I had to consider what it costs to live as well as what it costs to run the business. My main method of resolution is to buckle down and focus on becoming debt-free. I recently paid off the remaining balance of the gym lease, and have begun paying off credit card debt, which once paid, will free up a large amount of the business cash flow. As of now, I set a goal of small wins. I’m pushing the online programs right now. Setting the goal to sell 5 a week. I have body weight and gym-based, weight loss and strength training programs available.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fitthousebr.com
• Instagram: @fitthousebatonrouge
• Facebook: fitthousebatonrouge
• Linkedin: Jada McGuin
• Twitter: @fitthousebr