EXERCISING THE DREAM

How Andrew Simmons got Vision Personal Training up and running.

A personal vision has driven Andrew Simmons’ business life, and today the Vision Personal Training franchise is shaping up nicely.

As a teenager, Andrew Simmons was always on the go, training most mornings and afternoons – swimming, athletics and water polo in summer; rugby in winter. “It is just what I did,” he says.

School for him was about sport, yet his best subjects were maths and economics, which led him to a job in chartered accounting. “I hated it,” he says, “but I wanted a job so I kept with it and studied part time. It took me a couple of years to realise I wouldn’t be good at it. I realised it wasn’t the life I wanted.”

In a turnaround that was abrupt but made perfect sense given his preferences, Simmons then studied for an exercise science degree.

When he started out on his new career, it was on a small scale as a personal trainer in a local gym in an old cinema complex. He was hungry to learn more though, and became the national trainer for the now renowned Les Mills program.

“I fell in love with the idea of a straightforward, strong workout rather than complex aerobics, which was really a dance class of manoeuvres. What it taught me is the importance of systems and structures, and a choreographed program.

“I realised I could teach trainers the same way the instructors taught the movements. I saw the success of this approach.”

MORE OF THE SAME

Simmons had a chance to expand into the UK, but discovered it would have been more of the same with personal trainers vying for the same clients, promoting one technique above another and inevitably leading to confusion, he says.

“The lemon detox, the Atkins diet, the Hollywood diet… people were getting frustrated.

There is a big opportunity to have systems appropriate to personal trainers like a gym, so I started to write programs.”

Personal training was still a young concept when he started in the 1990s, but he found common ground with a friend and the two set up their own businesses after running a 12-week transformation challenge pitting their clients against each other.

It did not take Simmons long to realise there was profit potential for professional, organised personal trainers in a sector