How this entrepreneur and mum managed to create her own fitness empire in 18 months

Adala Bolto is an incredible up and coming entrepreneur who is based in Sydney. A mum of two girls, Adala realised her dream to launch her own female fitness franchise in her late thirties with not only results in mind, but the experience.

Adala started out as a stay at home mum, marrying young and having her kids young. After gaining 16 kilos after her two pregnancies, Adala’s friend started taking her with her to the gym and she quickly fell in love with it. Not only did she start to see results, but she loved being in the environment with other motivated women. Adala decided to make fitness part of her life by becoming a group fitness instructor, then a manager of a gym, then a franchisee before she came up with the concept for ZADI.

ZADI launched in 2018 with two studios in Sydney, one in Surry Hills and one in Neutral Bay. Adala secured investment in 2020 and now has 10 more studios due to launch this year. Here are some of her learnings from the experience.

Create a concept and a strong brand identity

Given that ZADI Training is a franchise model, it is really important for us to have a strong brand identity as being obvious about who you are and you are not will make it a lot easier for your franchises to launch and be recognisable.

From the start, ZADI was always going to be a female fitness franchise that was backed by science, tailored for women and had the experience in mind, and these days people will often stay for the experience. We spent the first year finessing our messaging, concept, user experience and technology and getting our PR and marketing up and running. Once we were confident that we had a solid concept and offering, that is when we started looking to expand.

If you are looking for investors, make sure you align yourself with people who believe in your vision

Investors can be challenging as sometimes they give you the freedom to create and action your concept, other times they are more like a handbrake stopping your from taking the next step. We have found some amazing investors but we did have to say no to a few along the way as they didn’t align with our vision and values. While it is hard to turn down money, I don’t regret it for a second as the team we are working with now is a great fit

Hire well

When hiring staff, experience is important, but ensuring that someone aligns with your company values is so important, perhaps even more important than experience. If you bring on someone with an attitude that you don’t want in your environment, you will have more chance of everyone being unhappy, so hire the best people where you can and train them up to do the job you need them to do. It is important that you team get along and work well together so if you can see that someone may bring down morale, don’t hire them just because they have a good resume.

Same goes with unhappy staff, if someone wants to leave let them. You don’t want negative energy around the rest of your team.

Motivate your team

It is important to note that not everyone will respond to the same communication style or the same incentives so take the time to listen to your staff and try to understand them. Im not saying you need to have 1 hour meetings with each of them a week, but try to see what motivates them and what doesn’t work so that your incentives are more meaningful to them

Clients

When it comes to clients there are a few things to consider. The first one is make sure you take care of them as your best marketing is likely to be word of mouth. Why? Because it is more likely that anyone who comes with an existing client will already understand what you are about and will be excited about your offering.

The next is to ask them for feedback. We send regular survey monkeys to ask them things like if they are happy with the timetable, music, workouts etc

One more note to finish on, I will rarely try to chase to keep clients. If someone is a bit aggressive towards me or my team, we let them go as it is not a good attitude for us to be around or other clients to be around. Also if someone wants to take time off, let them. If you allow them to feel free to come and go as they please they are more likely to come back when they are ready and be more motivated than ever