Special · Origins of Virtus: Part 1. Inception to present

Hey team, welcome to a bit of a different, bit of a special episode of the Virtus Performance Podcast. Now, it's currently, what day is it, it's the 9th of April 2020, we've been, the gym's been closed for about three weeks, currently running sessions out of the garage, we're doing most of our, most of our, we're doing all of our coaching and group training and everything online. So I figured this was a good, as good a time as any to kind of stop and reflect and have a look back at the last 10 years that I've been in the industry.

I've had a few people ask kind of how Virtus got started over the last few weeks and unless you want to get stuck into hours and hours of podcast material, I figured I'd jump on and do a bit of a video/podcast episode to kind of chat through, yeah, the last 10 years and kind of how we got to this place, ideally not being closed, but hopefully we'll get through the COVID over the next couple of weeks or months and get back into doing what we love. And I also thought it was kind of cool that I started out in a home/garage/gym kind of set up and now I've got the same set up 10 metres that way in our garage.

So kind of full circle, which is pretty cool. And I thought a few of you guys would get a little bit out of, yeah, me reminiscing a little bit and going through everything that's kind of got us to this point. So let me share my screen. I'm sitting here just enjoying a, well, let's get this video in here, too. Yeah, I'm sitting here just enjoying a bit of drops of gin and butter, bit of gin, bit of treat yourself, so get around us. All right, so the way I thought I'd kind of do this was kind of take a scroll down memory lane, scroll back through our Facebook feed.

I was going to use Instagram, but for some reason I couldn't get back to the start. So Facebook will do. For most of you who don't know, Burtis actually didn't originate or didn't become Burtis until about 2014. Early on, you can see this was my home/gym set up and it definitely didn't start like this. My home/gym set up was like a three by three metre piece of boat carpet with the $200 bench league extension combo that you got from Rebel Sport back in the day, which was also where I worked, where I applied my retail trade.

But this is eventually what it kind of grew into, this little studio/garage gym out of Piersdale back where I used to live at my parents' place, and I'm sure I'll get on it, but my parents have been an incredible support, incredible help over the last 10 years or so and I would be nowhere near the lifestyle I live now without them, so cheers to them. But Dad let me into his shed, into his precious shed and as you can see in this photo I kind of took over a little bit. Initially I was on the

right hand side of this, yeah that side, I had like a little square and then I said 'hey Dad can I move over to the corner?' and what I realised with Dad when I asked him about ways I could grow the gym, he'd say no and then two or three days later he'd come back to me and say 'alright, here's how we're going to do it'. So I learned that pretty quick. Initially I had about to here and then I asked if I could go to here but he said no further, don't go past the door, but that obviously didn't last too long.

So we had the red carpet and that was pretty much where we started. I finished my PT course in 2010, I did a Cert III, IV and Diploma of Fitness, I mostly just wanted a gap year but decided to jump into that course back when the government was giving massive subsidies so I certainly wasn't always going to be a coach, I'd gotten into exercise and sports science but a lot of students back then and probably still now, I just love sports so the dream was to play AFL when I was growing up and then when

that didn't quite work out I wasn't quite good enough, I was lucky enough to play AFL at Collingwood for six years and then I wanted to be a strength conditioning coach at an AFL club but then seeing what it was like, the actual environment, I realised that I didn't necessarily want to do an AFL club but I wanted to work out a way to be a coach back for the everyday athlete, general population which we've been lucky enough to be able to do. This whole podcast would be a waste of time if I didn't mention

Jesse who we started Burtis Together which was pretty cool to have someone in the corner, this was July 2015 so where we first started posting about Burtis, Burtis itself originated probably about six months before that I think, we won't go into too much detail around the stuff that happened before that but I was coaching at home, I was doing my exercise science degree 2011-2013, started 2014, I jumped into an exercise physiology degree, masters of exercise physiology, I think it might have been mid-2014 when Jesse and I started chatting about potentially opening a gym, we wanted

to work and eventually live in Mornington just because of the vibes, was the whole vibe of the place mostly but we chatted about it, I was doing my masters, Jesse did a bit of travelling and then it kind of got towards the end of the year where I pulled the pin on the masters but we'd done a couple of internships, at that point I'd spent some time with the strength conditioning coaches at Collingwood and we both spent some time at Woodford doing an internship which was massive in our development, I'll always be very thankful to

the guys there and Christian for giving us kind of a bit of a start and then we spent some time planning to open a gym with them that unfortunately didn't go through the way we were all hoping but it was a big learning experience for everyone and it was a pretty cool time in our lives but when the idea of Virtus came up we spent a long time sitting and thinking and planning, pretending we were working over coffees and I guess we wanted to bring the elite environments of the AFL clubs and different sporting organisations

around the world, we wanted to bring that elite environment back to the general population, I was lucky enough to grow up doing a lot of running training with a coach Mike Davis who was massive in my development, that's also where I met KP which was a very serendipitous encounter back in the day but I was lucky enough to have I guess that running base and that understanding of running mechanics and sprint mechanics and jump mechanics and we did a little bit of strength work there so that was massive in my development but I knew a

lot of the guys at football and guys I played with didn't really have much of a base behind them and to be honest my strength base was pretty similar, I didn't really have much behind me I was just lucky I was done running for a long time so it was definitely a need for it and it's something that there's still a need for it, I think we've come along in leaps and bounds as an industry over the last five or six years but there's certainly a long way to go, I started coaching out of home

in 2011, I was at Jets for about six months, started coaching out of home in 2011 but up until then like that was first year of uni when I started doing that, up until then I remember walking to the gym up on Tower Hill Road from Frank's and I doing sessions by myself and with a few of the boys, spent a bit of time in that gym with Kev Lilac before we went to football training and we had no idea what we were doing, we were just throwing shit at a wall and hoping it stuck

and I guess a couple of years on we realised that everything that we did was very inefficient and that we wanted to be able to one facilitate a place where people could come and learn how to move and how to look after their body and how to train for strength, speed, power, those kind of adaptations but also know what they're doing without us, like it's a big crew but we used to say if we get hit by a bus tomorrow we want to allow our athletes to be self-managed and capable and I think that's something

that we've stuck to pretty well over the last five or six years, before Virtus we actually ran a bunch of exercise science and nutrition courses so we'd run 12-week courses on effectively it was all the stuff we'd learned at uni and that we'd learnt along the journey in our own coaching and things like that and we basically packaged it into a 12-week course where we're like this is what we think everyone needs to know and I think we had about 70-odd students through that, unfortunately we never got paid for a bunch of them but that's

a whole other story but it was a fantastic I guess launch pad for us to one, start a performance facility out of but also to make sure that we knew what the hell we were talking about and yeah it was such an incredible time so for those that are listening at home I'm going to chuck this video up on YouTube and I'm kind of going to chat about things as they went alongside it with some photos and things like that but if you're just listening I'll try and make sure I don't talk about the photos too much.

Initially we kind of like we're still at Virtus, still at my gym at home which originally was called Build and Burn Personal Training, Dan Morasha came up with that so yeah terrible name but I ran with it for a few years and it was something I really liked at the time we wanted to obviously build strength, build muscle but also burn the fat away and I guess that was, look if we don't look back at ourselves five or six years ago and laugh then we're probably not growing enough. We had some pretty incredible people through

there, there's Jessie and Butters they were two OG Virtus or Build and Burn athletes that we quickly shifted into Virtus athletes, here's the education brand that we spent a fair bit of time growing, Girls That Lift was one of our early programs we used to run, we had a group of girls I think a couple of times a week, mum used to do it and she still trains so get around her but basically it's a very male dominated industry, the strength conditioning field and you know we've been really lucky to have some outstanding strength conditioning

coaches who are female over the last five years at Virtus, five years yeah four and a half years, we're five years in October this year which is kind of exciting but we wanted to bring some I guess Jim Newby's into the fold and teach them how to squat and deadlift and lift and press and do all those kind of things which was really cool. So Girls That Lift was one of the programs we ran early on and you'll see here that we coached a lot of our friends early on which I guess is the way

things kind of roll with most personal trainers and coaches when they get started you kind of start with your friends and then you start with the next circle out and you kind of grow up from there but very early on we were very focused on athletic development so you'll see we had a lot of motocross athletes, I think now it's Alex Morris the great man he's still training with us which is which is kind of cool. This is a photo of Butters doing a big jump on the snowboard and you'll see kind of some different photos of the gym and how we used it.

Back we're in the shed at Piercedale which was kind of cool it was some busy times some hectic times there was some cold nights I remember you know starting at 6 a.m. a lot of mornings and getting stuck in and then kind of going back to bed a couple hours later when I was when I was too cooked and then kind of doing it all in the night shift. This is one of our early girls at lift crews and yeah it's pretty cool to be able to stop and look back at this I think I had a black eye there from getting punched in the face playing footy.

This is one of our first merch runs we did actually it would have been our first merch run so something that we get around Tommy Curtis do this is something that we wanted to do we wanted to be a really strong brand as well as being really good coaches I guess the standard of coaching is something that we've always been driving but being a strong brand with a strong logo and strong representation up and down the peninsula was something that was really important to us so merchandise has been something that we've done consistently over the

last five years you know we obviously got stuck into into beanies and jumpers and all that kind of stuff and all this this is from before Virtus was actually Virtus when we're still in the shed this was from one of our first events we did education coaching in lemonade we went to we went to the Moines Peninsula Running Festival there's Cameron Elliott the great man he was one of the OG crew which I'll talk about in a second but we went to this morning to the peninsula running festival and we kind of took we made

a bit of a lemonade stand I think Jesse and his old man ended up putting it together because I am no good with power tools and neither was Jesse but I think it was probably driven by Tony but yeah we went down to there and took the merch and took the crew and I think that was about two months before we actually opened the gym which was kind of cool one of the things that all of our athletes will be aware of is our holistic wellness scale this is something that's existed for longer than Virtus

has but basically it's ten areas and and one of the words that we used early on a lot we've kind of lent it out of using it a little bit lately but the the premise for it hasn't changed is the fact we want to be a holistic performance center and you know the the strength and power and speed training is great but if we're not getting enough sleep and looking after ourselves and and managing our stress levels and looking after our food nutrition then it doesn't really matter what kind of training we're doing so that's

been something that we've been promoting for a long time and we'll continue to promote yeah it's kind of cool looking back at this a few few photos of of the crew and us playing footy and it was yeah it was it was pretty pretty crazy times to be honest like there's starting a business and and not really knowing what you're doing but having I guess some people that you look up to to be able to to one lean on we had a lot of mentors that kind of helped us through through these times and and

to have those mentors to lean on but also to have other other gyms to be able to ask questions and other coaches to be able to bounce ideas off was massive we probably skipped a lot of development as business owners early on because we just asked questions and one of the questions we we had was if you don't one of the questions one of the sayings we had was if you don't ask you don't get so we were we were pretty strong on asking questions and and asking for help when we when we needed it

one of the other sayings we had was a an imperfect plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week so we just tried a lot of things a lot of it didn't work but once you you find out what doesn't work pretty quick one of the other things we did before we actually opened the gym was we did Jesse and I and a few of the other guys we did the ride to conquer cancer so this was a this was a an event where the rides come cancer hasn't been around for

a few years I think we might have done the last one in 2015 but basically it was 100k bike ride to raise money for the Peter McCallum cancer foundation so we jumped on that pretty early we ran a fundraising event which which was I think it ran pretty well we raised like 20 odd 20 odd grand over the the whole event but it gave us a really cool insight into how how to run events and how to get get people together for a common cause and we were pretty keen on doing as much as we

could for the community around us and and yeah and that was that was a big part of it so this is a this is an og picture of our facility this was before we painted it and made it look nice and pretty yeah crazy what a color so before we actually moved into vertice it was a it was an ambulance depot so paramedic services victoria used it as a depot as a break room and all that kind of stuff and and funnily enough during this coronavirus stuff that we're going through they're actually reusing the factory

so we've gone proper full circle in a couple of different ways the home gym and and the gym's got a couple of ambulance or paramedic vehicles in there at the minute which is pretty cool the name vertice is something that people ask us a lot vertice is latin for excellence not directly it's not spot on it's a latin for excellence with con it i think the the definition something around connotations of excellence character and courage so that was the the logo and the uh they're pretty much the values that we started with and the values

that we stick to lately you guys will hear us use the use the language of our pillars our three pillars which are performance community and education but they're based off these values excellence doing your best always character doing what is right when when no one is looking and and then courage having the courage to take a leap and and leaning in and make it have a commitment to the thing that you're kind of working on so the meaning of vertice is something that a lot of people have questioned and vertices is a say is a

way of saying vertice that we've we've gotten a lot but early on was very much around living by those values and and that hasn't really changed um all it really is now is uh there's there's pillars that we center around those values um you'll see here we did a went to a couple of seminars we went to the cats to hang out with terry uh condon who we we knew through a networking event we did and just met some good people um this is an early photo of of uh jes our painter doing some doing

some painting so that was what the gym looked like og early time um obviously it changed pretty quickly from there we i wish we took more photos from from early on this is a photo from upstairs um before we built some rooms up there and then subsequently tore them down uh after three years get your permits guys um so that's going to be rebuilt hopefully at the back half of 2020 once uh once we get back into the gym um this was a an early iron edge uh kind of mock-up of what we're going to

do ended up changing a little bit from there but the gym floor is pretty much as is um which is kind of cool having those guys to help help work on that this is us painting the front of the gym um the the front was i don't know what you'd call that it's like a creamy orange i don't know my colors but we painted it white i've uh i've regretted that decision for the last five years i really want to paint it black um but you know maybe we'll do that at some point maybe that

could be a could be a lockdown task for us to uh get stuck into the outside painting of the gym um when we initially had uh oh there's maddie laugh get around him look at him looking fresh it would have been about 12 here i reckon if we load um but laughs been laughs been a constant vertice on and off for the last five years which is pretty cool this is him at pierce tail back in the day um look at him look at him what a good looking man um initially when we when we

set up vertice we had the uh we had two rooms where uh i might show you one of the videos as we go here today but we had two rooms uh there's nick mcneely one a great supporter of vertice i'd love for him to train there but um he's a bigger supporter as any but he doesn't actually train with us um but we initially had two rooms in where our current uh we called our cafe but we uh we ceased that idea to run with the cafe when we became really good mates with our friends

at common folk um but there was a wall in between we did a demo day we got real messy we knocked down a wall it was actually pretty fun i had a very good time doing that um one of the the things that we wanted to do early on at vertice was build a community build a family um and you know initially we called our initially we've been calling it that for five years we called our community the vertice family and we the family's grown significantly over the last five or six years but one of

the things that i i like to think is that everyone in there uh has a special connection to vertice and everyone's contributed to vertice in their own way um and you know i'm incredibly proud of the the community that we've been able to build and i'm incredibly excited to see what our community can do over the next few years um and i'll get to that photo i'll make that video so we before we opened vertice we did a we did a bit of a launch party um i remember we planned on getting in i think

start of start of october in 2015 uh but unfortunately as most uh best laid plans go went awry a little bit and we ended up opening uh on the i think we opened on the fifth or sixth or i might be wrong it might have been the weekend before it might have been the end of october where we opened and actually started coaching athletes um but this launch night was on the seventh of november in 2015 and i remember we were running around like crazy the few days before then to kind of to get everything

sorted and this was uh jesse and i were kind of the the founders of vertice um but sof and cam came on very early on and were there for the setup uh the setup of the of the factory and the uh the demo and the painting and the grinding and all the all the fun stuff we got to do uh while we were setting up which is you know for anyone who's going to start a business or uh anyone that has started it and or is early on early in enjoy these times because i definitely

uh when you get into the day-to-day running of a business you you miss the the chaos uh and the learning curves and the and the new experiences that you have so you know big love to these these three sof cam and jesse cam still with us which is incredible uh very loyal human and someone that i want to be working with for a long time um and yeah it's it was so much fun like we had no idea what we were doing we were we were knocking walls down we were painting we were grinding bolts

out of the wall we're doing doing crazy things like that we had no real clue what we're doing and we had a great time doing it um and you'll see you'll see there's a lot of photos of mornington here and something we wanted to really lean on was the lifestyle that we wanted to create for ourselves and for our for our vertice family um mornington mornington's a pretty incredible part of the world with great beaches and great cafes and it's a really uh big lifestyle hub and it's something that yeah i'm very proud of that

place um this is this is me me uh grinding i think there's a bolt off the wall next to the gas cylinders no the gas cylinders are gone but they are they were there lucky we moved them this is a an og picture of the uh of the turf which looks very different now it started off with a very dark dark blue there's baby wallace um turfs up so we put the turf down october 19th so i remember we had to have a couple of days off of this off the turf um but yeah we

put up 19th of october so only a couple of weeks to get sorted with our launch party um it'll be it'll be remiss of me to not pump up kp um she's been an incredible support of me and vertice since before vertice was vertice um we've been together since 2009 so she's been there for the whole slog um and this is her probably youtube and something uh now probably doing some work probably contributing as she's done massively over the last few years this is jesse and i that rides conquer cancer we did um this was

our first and only training run uh we we quite literally did this is uh in pier style near the shed these are our gravel rash t-shirts or cycling vests uh yeah this is quite literally two days i think out from the 100k ride and i'd never ridden a road bike before i'd never been on the road um this is barely a road this is more of a circuit it's 1.5 ks i think we did two laps uh to get us ready for it oh no it's 200 ks there you go rides con cancer was 200

ks uh and bit of a fun fact around that um or this there's steve roberts the great man opened infinite peninsula and we did some stuff together um which was yeah which was heaps of heaps of fun he's a great man um but yeah the rides conquer cancer was uh we ended up actually camping out the back of vertice so this is real early on we can't camped out the back of those it just happened the overnight point happened to be at the park behind vertice which was kind of cool that we had this new

factory that our whole team slept in um i remember when we when we got our iron edge delivery uh the gym did not look what it looks like now it was a mess it was equipment and wrapping and and stuff everywhere and um yeah it was uh and we hadn't put the signage or any of that stuff yet this is the 23rd of october so two weeks out from our opening um then we we did the right to conquer cancer i think might have been that weekend once we got everything set up i think we

pretty much started coaching people straight away so this might be one of our early girls at lift classes um there you go a few of those few of those girls are still still training with us which is pretty cool no big logo up in the back that came in a bit later um but we wanted the space to be somewhere where people walked in and kind of went this is cool um this picture of me in a hammock doing very little uh my nine days before the launch there you go yeah october 29. uh just

before we launched um after all the hard work was done katie dean jumped on board which was pretty cool katie uh was one of our coaches for a long time she ended up diving into exercise physiology and now is a full-fledged exercise physiologist uh and yeah katie was a massive part of the team early on it was pretty much the five of us um for the best part of a of a year or so um and then we had a few other guys jump on which i'll talk about in a moment uh when we first

started we went in and obviously things are a little different now but we went in very heavily one-on-one based um all our coaching was one-on-one um we had our we had a group training that started um pretty much when we started it was uh we called it healthy bodies uh we also had a preseason group which was massive in our first couple of years um i'll be forever grateful for those boys for for believing in us and i'm i hope that we're able to i know we were able to help your performance over those couple

of years um we also did a netball preseason program and we we did some rehab and obviously we did our education too um one of the things that i it's not that i regret it was something that we learned as we went but we were probably doing too much we had too many offerings um and we were trying yeah we're trying to do too much we should have just picked one or probably one niche to focus on uh and then um and one or two programs to push but you know early on we wanted to

push athletic development and something we did um we've definitely shifted more to the general population because we've realized um realized that everyone's an athlete and that everyone needs to be trained the same way whether you're getting ready to to front up in um high level sport or whether you're just wanting to you know chase after the kids on a weekend it doesn't really matter ever everyone should be trained the same way uh and that's you know mobility and movement motor control first uh and then strength and capacity later uh when you have the first boxes

most of you who have been to the gym or who have seen photos of the gym would notice the uh the feature walls we've got this is uh josh and josh or meatballs and brown snake early on i think it might have been the day we opened uh they were there all day painting our mural for us so cheers to those guys i'm stoked to be mates with them now they're incredible humans and we are very incredibly grateful for all the art they've done for us this is a photo from our from our opening uh

we opened we wanted to have a big party um and then yeah we've we've celebrated our birthday every year since then a little bit different albeit a little bit differently um this was uh yeah this is the first one which was which is pretty special kind of moment to look back on we had the vertice family wall uh which we opened up um is here's that here's a mural with the boys and uh if you if you're listening to it if you're listening to this chat at some point jump on because they did such an

incredible job so proud of it um one of my favorite parts of the gym one of my most favorite parts of the gym is the vertice family wall initially we got everyone to write their names on it probably because we had no money and chalk was cheap i think about two years in we changed it to polaroids so um you know i wish we'd gotten polaroids of a lot of our early crew that stops training with us for various reasons um you know moved on to bigger jobs and moved up to the city or or

anything like that but um yeah it's a pretty cool little feature wall now um the the opening party was pretty cool we had lots of friends and family there and you know if you're opening a business throw a massive launch party uh i remember that for a long time we had a bunch of legends there we did a couple of speeches we played some vertice ball it was uh it was a very cool time to be a part of vertice um and i guess yeah it kind of it kind of gave us a bit of

momentum to start the gym and then from there it was basically all systems go um what i'm going to do now is kind of break break my little chat up into kind of 12 month blocks um before i do that this is daniel raton one of my great mates now and one of our earliest athletes uh one of my favorite people in the world he embodies what it is to be a true professional um and i mean that every sense of the word you ask him to do something he'll do it he'll ask questions you'll

learn uh he won't complain he'll just head down bum up get it done and um he's yeah he's just one of my favorites um is exactly what we want athletes to be um yeah well there's some there's some pretty cool photos here um one of the things that we promoted early on was people pushing uh pushing our merchandise um and us pushing our merchandise so you know we we did a couple of competitions where people would take photos of in our merch beanies jumpers all that kind of stuff in different spots and it was really

cool to see um early on and i think we actually started started it before vertice was vertice i think bailey might have been we caught up a couple of times bailey wanted to be a coach in the middle here um and we done a few internships and we realized how beneficial internships were to our development so we'd obviously done all the education stuff we'd done a bunch of internships ourselves we've been training for a while and we'd realized how quickly we progressed as as not only coaches but people so we learned the technical aspect we

also learned the coaching aspect and learning how to be better uh leaders and business owners and um and uh i guess just simply just people uh and we learn a lot of that through the practical application of our our internships that we've done so i think before vertice even started we we'd locked in the fact that we were going to do an internship so this is our og internship crew um for the first i think three years of the business we ran these every quarter so we'd run a summer a summer autumn winter it's the

other one spring um internship and we have a bunch of students exo science students other coaches allied health staff who would be a part of the gym for 12 weeks and it's a it's a product that i'm really proud that we ran uh or an offering that we that we ran um and we're we're in the in the midst of getting it back up and running again after kind of dropping the ball with it for 12 months or so um you know early on we had a lot of time to to dedicate to our our

interns our students uh over the last year two years we've with all the day-to-day running to the business all the busy stuff we've definitely uh not spent enough time on it so that's something that we've yeah spent the last kind of six to twelve weeks putting back together all the content and now we're um we just launched our next intake before the uh the bloody covid uh got around us so um yeah that's something we're going to be really pushing down the track but yeah that first first 12 months of vertice was uh bias uh

sof katie cam and myself just pretty much just having fun um we got to hang out with you know really good friends every day um all our clients that came in were legends uh you know the the cafe looked very different to what it what it looks like now um we ran our first christmas party which you know it was only a month and a bit after we actually opened we created created a game called vertice ball which we've had world championships every year for the last couple of couple of years um it's basically a

cross between horse and uh and basketball for everyone that hasn't played it um but yeah the first first 12 months or so was just fun we tried to do as many fun things as we could we got around to the community we put up our gym rules which are still there today rule one respect the gym respect yourself respect each other that's a big one rule two there's never an excuse to avoid a warm-up rule three know everybody's name and learn everybody's story that was a big part of our community and and vertice family uh

push is we wanted everyone to know everyone not being afraid to fail um obviously important as well leave your ego on the hook it's probably the most repeated uh rule in our gym um we're not here to break barbells and and hurt people and for people to to crawl out of the gym where we exist to make people better and and that has to be reflected in what we do in the gym set girls regularly and surpass them often everyone needs to be progressing no matter what if people aren't progressing then we're not doing our

job be the hardest working person in the room self-explanatory lift heavy but respect the importance of technique so we understand the importance of of moving some weight but at the same time we need to move well before we move often um cleaning up after yourself uh the paralysis hall something we probably haven't done too much lately is give prowler punishments and become the best possible version of yourself and and it's something that the staff have embodied really well over the last five or six years and driving that and growing that's really really important for us

and yeah it's uh every individual who has been into vertice has has had a different experience in a different way um but i think one of the things that's remained consistent is just our one it's our attention to detail and the standard of coaching that we're trying to promote um but also that you know love for for fun and community avenue and aspect of it has been massive um this is i used to love taking photos of sun sunrises so this is elise uh buckin who was a big part of our mentorship early on our

internship which we called it back then um she trained with me for a good 12 months or so and then went off and started her own gym which is incredible it's it's all it's such a cool uh and rewarding uh thing just to see how our students go off and do good things in the industry um we it's really easy to complain about our industry and different industries but we wanted to make sure we were contributing to that and everyone who's done our internship has gone off and contributed to that in some way shape or

form um one of the mantras we've had since the start has been we are what we repeatedly do excellence then is not an act but a habit um the whole being excellent thing and and you know the meaning of vertice is just to do your best always it's as simple as that it's to to do what you need to do even if it's a hard decision um and and that's something that i think we've done pretty well over the last five or so years here's a here's a photo early uh early merch so bones which

is the uh the skeleton you'll see here um some idiot this is what i used to have biceps i think i don't really have them anymore i might get back to that i just do arm farm all the time um with my unicorn head um yeah we loved we loved our merch we love selling our merch and getting around it and bones is one of my favorite ones um yeah this is this is crazy looking back like this um there's the team you got cam here katie mark simpson was going to come on do some

education stuff with us but he didn't because he's a coward no he's a beautiful man um we just didn't end up running with that program um there's me looking weird as jesse and sof um and yeah we we did a lot of team stuff early on a lot of uh netball netball and football teams came in and we we'd run them through a session um and yeah our goal was just to get as many people exposed to the v as possible and um you'll see how i kind of shift how we shifted uh the v

over a couple of years um in terms of the the logo and what it not necessarily what it meant but how we um how we expanded it um and it was pretty cool it's it's cool to see some of our athletes that were in here from early days still around um this beautiful man is certainly one of them it looks like a bit of a pretzel here but he's he's much thicker now i promise um yeah so so 12 12 months in um jesse kind of moved on from the business which uh you know it

was a it was a bit of a shock at the time but it kind of allowed us both to to chase the things that we love doing and to do things we love doing um where are we we're in april so we're not even six months in but uh early on we we got ash on board ash was a was our myotherapist for a few years um ash is an incredible person and even better technician at what she does and i am forever grateful for having ash as part of alberta's family for as long as

she was uh she's now a fully fledged physio uh doing great things um she also got married so congrats ash get around her um is some more merch i have to bring those trackies back they were great um but yeah i think about so this we we actually used to run uh what we call beat your best days which was basically we wanted to run some like a combine for all of our athletes to come in and test themselves and test how how strong they were how fast they were etc etc um you know now

that we screen a lot more and there's a lot more we understand a lot more about movement uh now being you know 2020 um we've we've stopped doing these days and we don't really do any max testing anymore we do uh rm testing throughout our sessions we don't do max testing so potentially this is something we'll bring back in a different way the bet your best day was was certainly a lot of fun um here's a here's a flashback for you one of the one of the things that i am almost most proud of with

vertice uh and with our growth over the last few years is seeing being able to see not only the people grow up uh see our coaches grow up and progress as humans but also the kids um that have been part of it so for those that don't notice or don't that are listening at home or don't recognize this little little guy this is jed uh jed johnson who um you know brooke and reece started started training at vertice i think maybe about a month into into jed's existence and and we've been lucky enough to see

him grow up into a uh into a little mad dog over the last four or five years which has been pretty incredible um oh yeah that's crazy um yeah so he's been really cool this is what our uh upstairs looked like early on before we got greg involved um and i'll talk about greg in a second but if this loads there we go so we had a cool little setup upstairs um but we shifted that into a uh pilates room with brooke um and a yoga room with uh with katie first of all and then

anna um and then uh yeah then we shifted to to what being a physio room with a yoga yoga every now and again this is our second run of interns i think it's second uh yep no third run of interns uh jacob running his own business now elise running her own business um liam liam and uh campbell are doing good things coat in the coaching world don't know what tad's doing he's probably doing crazy things because he's a mad dog tomorrow's running your own business um really really cool group of people bailey came on after

the first internship as a coach i think he was around for about six uh probably 12 to 18 months um now he's an accountant so if you need a tax done get around him um yeah this is uh this is a few athletes doing good things um and i think yeah it was around this time where greg came came uh came on board um so greg uh it was kind of a pretty pretty cool little encounter that got us to the point where greg got involved but uh i like kicking the football around um i

was lucky enough to have uh a little bit of interest and i had interest initially and then i had a couple of contacts that spoke to a few clubs in darwin to potentially go play out there um to go play out there in uh over the summer because obviously they have an opposite opposite season to us um but what ended up happening was we started vertice that summer so i couldn't couldn't get up there but the uh the coach at uh st mary's ricky nolan spoke to uh spoke to me and he's kind of like

what are you looking at what do you actually do and i was like i was too busy with work because we're running a performance center he's like oh no physio i might be interested i'm like oh actually looking for a physio um and for those watching this is the vertice family wall we used to get everyone's photo in front of um there's actually a cool video somewhere uh with everyone everyone's face is kind of moving through this but a lot of cool people in here a lot of incredible humans who have been great supporters of

vertice over the time um yeah so so stoked to have these guys a part of vertice everyone who's walked through the doors has has uh contributed a part of themselves and i'll be forever grateful for that um but yeah so back to back to the phys uh mr mr greg day he gave us a call a couple of weeks later i kind of forgotten about the conversation a bit more jet spam for you um and yeah we were lucky enough to to get him to come down to the gym and um handshake agreement that he'd

be our physio and it's uh it's been a initially it was a work relationship but uh we soon realized that we resonated uh on the same same kind of wavelength with a lot of different things and it's been pretty incredible to get him involved in a massive way over the last few years and to be honest nothing's probably advanced our standard of coaching uh as the the level of education level of care the level of quality information that he's brought to us he got us involved in the fms functional movement system um screen screening tool

uh he taught us about sfma and and how parts patterns and performance are all relating together and yeah he's been massive um so shout out to the phys uh get around his website and facebook page prepare to perform uh if you haven't already he's incredible um he's also got a few podcast episodes which are up there with the best um one of the things jesse and i committed to early on and it kind of started with the right to conquer cancer um was raising money for uh people or organizations that we had an affinity to

or that we felt deserved um us our community raising money to um something that i kind of probably articulated it uh in my mind a little bit maybe like a year or two in but the way i kind of look at is everyone wants to help everyone wants to contribute to something bigger and better or yeah let's go bigger and better than themselves um and but a lot of people don't know how to do that or don't have a platform to do that so we figured with vertice that we could create a platform where that

was really uh that was a big potential um and one of the things that we that's the wrong photo this is the right photo one of the things that we decided to do early on and something i'm really proud to say that we've done it every year is raise money for this beautiful family um this is roman he looks so young here what was this 2016 so i think he's four here um rye when he was born uh was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and he's had uh a whole whole raft of problems and regressions since

then um and along with this wonderful family being among my best friends in the world um they're an incredible part of our community and people that we want to support no matter what so so our second birthday or it was actually our very first birthday our second kind of party was our birthday bash um and we did a big trivia night which we followed on that tradition for the first three years um for our birthday and we're lucky enough and i use the word lucky to have people like rye in our community to one be

able to raise money for and and have the capacity to raise money for and i'm so proud of everything that we've been able to do for them but i'm also so proud of of ryman um for you know to continue to be an inspiration to me and and everyone around him every day i love the kid more than anything and and yeah he's pretty incredible um before i cry this is samuel alquaxin he's what he's our our gym duck uh he's been through the wars over the last few years um this is our pb belt

so the pb bell is now up on the uh on the stairs that go nowhere because we pull down upstairs um and every time anyone hits pb they go ding ding ding and everyone gets around them this is the fizz the great man uh doing good things as always he used to do the good stuff on the whiteboard then he shifted to doing it on the walls in chalk uh positions patterns and power very early on um he taught us about that and it's something i'll never ever forget uh i think this might be one

of the first photos of uh of the great man mitchell row um this is this potentially was when he was doing our mentorship and internship back in back in the day before he became a coach at vertice he started with our internship which all coaches must do but mitch uh yeah mitch kind of hit the ground running early on this is him with uh jack hail one of the fastest humans in australia so get around the lads um mitchie mitchie looks uh looks about 10 years younger here so mitch i apologize for aging you 10

years in five years but um maybe shave the beard you'll you'll look a little younger um maybe i will too um but yeah this is uh this is a bit of a look into kind of 12 12 months in um this is our second beat your best day i think we're planning on doing every quarter um we ran four or five before we uh before we pulled the pin on there there's gonna be um a lot of photos to here so i'll keep scrolling but the yeah the beat your best day was pretty cool um

and then we just started you know 12 months in was kind of when we jesse and i kind of went holy shit we gotta run a real business um and then yeah jesse moved on um which was we're forever grateful for the time and energy and effort that jb put into the gym um and yeah the doing it by myself uh and i say by myself i had heaps of help lots of help um this human being one of them you can say hi if you want hola hey hello doing good things best mom in

the world except for my mom okay the top two they're up there i haven't decided which one's better uh but anyway uh when i yeah kind of took took the reins by myself it was a pretty i'm not gonna say it was a dark time it was a it was a challenging time and it's a time that i look back on now fondly when i was in the in the midst of it it was pretty pretty hard to go through it but it's something that uh i needed to do as a human as a business

owner and we need to do hard things often um and that was a big part of it um to go off the serious conversation for a second this is the fastest athlete we've ever had um one of my great mates nick likes fast cars that was fun to drive i think i took it for a drive once and it didn't crash it so play on this is pulse this is mu um he's been uh og vertice since uh 2017 um yeah 20 i kind of look at vertice a lot in chapters right like 20 before

we opened it was a whole big chapter where we were learning and and just sucking up as much information as we could the second chapter was the first 12 months with jesse and sofas part of it um when when jesse moved on i think the team was me cam katie and mitch i'm not sure when bailey finished up but it was around the same time um and then yeah the next chapter three was kind of the early 2017 through the whole of 2017 and kind of how that looked and it was kind of like okay

i got like one was figuring out how to to ride the ship and run it by myself with the help of the team of course um it was what are we going to stand for what are we going to how are we going to drive this thing um that was when we i think this was when i did my fms course a functional movement screen um for the first time so that was a big part of of the development of our gym and our coaching systems was learning that system and how we could best apply

that for our athletes um early on you know our screening tools were were primitive it was okay jumping or squat jumping or deadlift will teach you from there rather than starting from the start and figuring out what handbrakes are on for our athletes which you know i'm forever grateful that this man came into it the fold and helped us with that um the phys has been incredible teaching us about pain and how the body works um he's an incredible he's a sports physiotherapist he's an incredible strength coach in his own right um and can do

magical things with the body um this is the community getting around the run for the kids which we did which we've done most years unfortunately got called off this year but run for rya was another opportunity for us to raise money for the johnsons and and and rise uh treatment and and everything he has um and yeah the 2017 was was much about coaching people it was about growing the team um where we kind of the team got big quick um looking back it it definitely got too big too quick but um i guess my

value what i valued what i wanted to do was build a holistic performance center where each aspect of health and well-being you know whether it be um pain and rehab whether it be food nutrition uh there would be strength and power development whether it would just be health and well-being whether it be um whatever uh every aspect had someone to look after it so you know i wanted this um this big performance center where everyone worked together to to move the athlete forward in whatever uh their their thing was so brooke brooke um was our

incredible Pilates instructor still one of my best friends ever she's a legend this is maddie she was an awesome coach uh she's moved on to teaching now other maddie we had two maddies which was confusing but maddie was our uh our dietitian um incredible what she does i already spoke about ash mitchy's still around cam's still around the phys is still around and and katie um katie's now an exercise physiologist and doing very very good things um yeah it was 20a 2017 was very much about about building the team and growing the team and this

is jed doing his tax return early on most of our there was a good six months where majority of our content was jed uh which is fair get around jed ziggy johnson on instagram if you can um holy shit that's the cutest photo i've ever seen um jed won't have been here uh but yeah it was all around building the team and creating a system where people come in and get the best help possible uh big learning experience for me as a as a business owner and a leader and a coach to to go from

like my skill set at that time um like yeah i've learned a little bit about business but all of it was by trying and failing and i've failed a lot i've fucked up a lot i've made lots of mistakes uh so all my staff that i've ever had i apologize for all the shitty things uh shitty way i did things um i'm hope i hope that you know i had the best intentions um and still do um but yeah i quickly realized we kind of got too big too early um there was i love a

big team because you you've got so many different people that contribute to the goal but i guess we didn't have the uh we weren't as busy as we could have been or needed to be to kind of support everyone's income so um yeah that was that was a big big learning experience early on um but like any learning experience we take it and we we progress it and i hope that i and the other the other guys in the team um i definitely hope that i have uh have learned from those experiences um yeah we

we grew pretty quickly in 2017 um and that team got a little bit smaller in uh in 2018 and changed a little bit through 2019 and now we've got a pretty incredible team um that i'm really proud of at the minute but we had our yeah our internship kept running um the the family kept growing in different ways um it would have been let's see when this post was from but um mum jumped on uh in an admin and uh kind of facility management role in june of 2017 um mum obviously say obviously but mostly

obviously has been an incredible support of me through my whole life she raised me she did good i think um mum and dad have been incredible and uh it was a no-brainer to get her involved in the team she cares more than me some days um and i'm so proud of her for how she's grown um she kind of she looked after us kids for a long time and then uh had to learn to look after herself and be a little little more selfless or selfish um she was very selfish for a long time she

had to become a little bit more selfish which was which was really cool to see her growth over that time um there's the fizz with the puppy uh lots of dog photos we got lots and lots of dog photos um there's stabber one of our early clients and and i guess the the end of 2017 was when we launched the oh no it was mid june so it was when we learned launched the furthest performance podcast uh i don't know why we started a podcast to be honest um i like talking shit uh as you

can probably tell but basically i wanted a place where i could get the regular and i say regular in quotation marks the incredible regular people at our gym to tell their stories because i'm a big believer that everyone has their story um everyone has a the capacity to teach someone else and everyone can learn something off each other and the podcast was a platform for us to dive into what we would call regular people and the extraordinary lessons that they've had so i'm stoked that we've recorded over 100 episodes since then we've had some pretty

incredible people on some remarkable humans who do wonderful things um and yeah the podcast started mid 2017 which was pretty cool um i committed to doing an episode a week for a year um and i'm pretty proud to say that i hit that i should have committed to doing 100 in a row because i think at about 56 i started spreading them out a little bit more than i was planning this is an early picture of us with ryman uh we got mitchy it looks like he's about to cry mad dog um ryman down the

bottom stubborn pulse uh who are both now incredible mates of ours um doing good things um charlie shaw doing crazy things on a uh on a wakeboard as she does um for the pulse cast policy has been one of the biggest supporters of the of the podcast uh he he came on pretty early on and we talked about uh his journey um through a few iron mans and a few few of those kind of things and um and then he actually interviewed me i think around episode 22 or something like that um where we talked

about kind of the journey so if you want to an unabridged throw everything at the wall journey um we went a little bit more detail into everything that happened before vertice uh it's on there on your podcast app um back into our chapters uh 2018 was was another challenge in in growing the business um in spreading the message in trying to help as many people as possible we got some incredible uh i think it might have been the end of 2017 greg ran his motor control for strength uh no motor motor yeah the motor control

for rehab and performance course he's changed the name a few times since then so i apologize i got it wrong fizz um but that was an incredible course we learned a lot i think i took all these photos so terrible photography by me um but most of the team got around that we ran our second birthday bash where we were lucky enough to to raise a heap of money for for the great man ry which i'm still proud of i'm going to say that a bunch of times um and then we kind of got rolling

into running a business doing podcasts coaching people our vertice group training was kind of rolling by then 6 a.m crew um which uh i guess it's been my um my crew for a long time i kind of been starting that 6 a.m time slot for a long time gets me out of bed otherwise i'll just stay at home um i think it was mid-2017 when koop came on board the great man simon cooper you all know him uh now he's a big big big part of vertice he started off uh he was gonna do some

marketing stuff for us because he he went to a little backstory he went to uni with jesse and i early on um and then we were good mates at uni and then he went off to he moved to the uk for a couple of years which if you ask him he'll talk about it a lot so don't ask him um but he did some did some good things over there traveled with cell who's who is the backbone of that relationship if i have to be honest um but koop came back yeah around uh july i

think august of 2017 and jumped jumped on board um to be honest if koop didn't go to the uk he probably would have started vertice with us anyway so it was great to get him on board and you know he started off doing some marketing stuff and then we did some admin work and kind of jumped into coaching early on and he's been an incredible support to me um filling that kind of 2ic role a lot of especially over the last 18 months um he's his role now is is gm general manager he looks after

all the things that um i don't do properly basically uh he's he's one of the the backbones of vertice uh and i'm super proud to call him one of our best mates and to have him by my side while i do these things uh while we do these things um you know he's he's kind of the calm voice i like throwing shit at a wall and hoping it sticks he's the one that says hey let's slow it down a little bit and do it properly uh which i definitely need um but yeah this is this

is one of the photos from our second birthday bash um i think we did we've done four of them no we've done three of them the fourth one we did a vertice family dinner at common folk which is pretty cool um and it was around it was probably around um where are we it was probably around mid 2017 when we first well we went to common folk a lot we sent interns um coffee run was their main job um early on while we were teaching them things but uh yeah probably mid 2017 just after i

bought a coffee machine which is great tactical thinking we became really good friends with the guys at common folk and now yeah they're among my best friends in the world they've been an incredible support uh and i'm stoked that our business can help your business and your business can help our business and and we've been able to do some really good things together um over those last couple of years we ran our first open day in 20 where are we see we're still in 2017 i haven't even gone i reckon we're gonna skip through 2017

to 2020 pretty quick but we ran a couple of beach days which were pretty incredible um being able to take the crew down um this this would have been about the time where tommy turlak started training with his lots because there's a lot more photos um you'll notice the standard of photo goes up significantly around 2017 end of 2017 mark we were lucky enough to have tommy there's the great man uh i'm lucky enough to have this great man as a friend uh but the community is lucky enough to have to have this guy uh

a part of it um he cares too much um he also hates everything but i think he hates everything because he cares too much and he knows it um he's been an incredible sport for me for the team um for my family uh he's brought his family along and yeah one of the great men if you don't know him get around him because he's a good dude uh also part of drops of juniper which you know if you buy gin then he gets to eat i guess so get around him he's also head roaster at

common folk makes good coffees he's just a good person um christmas special which was a podcast we did a few times uh with with varying crews this might have been the first one uh we had kate worm uh an amazing human we had tommy on it we had jess ryan one of our coaches uh who's been an incredible coach over the time um recently moved on uh but is still doing incredible things and helping many people uh and the pulse obviously always doing great things and kp uh she's pretty cool i guess um but yeah

we are we teamed up with common folk to run the best on awards um which we started in 2018 they were on saturday mornings for those that don't know on saturday mornings and i'm so excited to get back for breakfast club when this whole lockdown corona nonsense is over but here's the dealio uh on saturday's we catch up as a as a crew we have a session uh 8 am saturday's and then we all walk across common folk and have breakfast and it's one of the fav my favorite parts of the week and i'm so

excited to get back into it back into the swing of things um but common folk are gracious enough to donate breakfast to one human every every week so they've been pretty incredible um yeah you just you'll see for those that are watching we did a couple of gin yogas with anna um when i met tommy he introduced me to gin uh now us and a few others have drops of juniper as a bit of a side hustle uh hopefully it's going to explode over the next couple of years to get around it but we kind

of nudged anna to hey you know what's cool yoga you know what's also cool gin do put it together gin yoga uh and there gin yoga was born uh i think we called it gin yasa anna called it gin yasa february 2018 which is pretty incredible uh to be able to run that she's ran a bunch of events since then and and raised some money for some very uh some very good causes so gin yoga was lots of fun um a couple more uh a couple more fundraisers for rye we tried to do a few

of those a year um we tried to run a snow retreat that didn't work that was a a bit of a failure but we certainly learned a lot um while we were doing that here's a photo of tessa with angus greg's dog tessa came on as a coach after she completed our internship as one of the one of the nicest humans you'll ever meet um she was a super coach and she's still coaching so get around her um yeah and i guess the talking about chapters 2018 um i think it was march march i went

away for a few months um i had a i'd had this trip planned for a little while initially planning on going to nepal to hike a big chunk of everest um i hurt my shoulder is a little sidebar i hurt my shoulder playing football i dislocated it uh the last round of the year i think or maybe second last round um if 2017 everything was kind of done and dusted look like but the fizz looked after me impeccably well over the the following couple of weeks i think 22 days later i played in our first

final uh we won that had a week off played in another final uh and then went through the grand final and managed to not have surgery or do anything and the shoulders and the wings are good now so if i didn't have the fears and his incredible um knowledge and uh shoulder skills and i probably would have missed that grand final would miss playing in a flag would miss kicking three snags around me uh i would have uh and my shoulder wouldn't be the same so um functionally you've got me back to uh probably better

than i was before so cheers to you fizz um i don't know why i was talking about that uh yeah podcast kept running we kept uh sharing good stories and basically 2018 oh yeah it's talking about going away so i uh canned the nepal trip because i've hurt my shoulder but ended up booking a south america trip for i think i went for seven weeks uh maybe a little less six weeks or so um and yeah kind of stepped out of the gym for for seven weeks which was uh for any business owner i understand

it's a bit of a challenge moving on being outside of our environment for so long but we had an incredible team that looked after the place and managed to to get away for one of the trips of the last time to uh chile peru bolivia argentina um went into brazil for a couple of days learned a little bit of spanish before i got to brazil and then got to brazil and realized i spoke portuguese so i didn't really talk to anyone for a couple of days saw iguazu falls then went to argentina and then flew

home and it was uh yeah it was an incredible trip and i'm so grateful for our community and our team and kp for allowing it to actually happen um yeah that was that was such an incredible part of my life and i'm so stoked we did that um where are we up to now so that was that was march of 2018 march and april uh and then you know 2018 kind of rolled through we we welcomed these two legends into our internship program we've got jazz birch who is a current coach at vertice and one

of the most lovely people you'll ever meet and we have charlie robbins who is he won last year's australian ninja warrior so a bit of a bit of an unsuspecting uh savage this dude he um we slowly started seeing i think he was record i think he was uh recording australian ninja warrior while he was doing the mentorship so uh he had a couple of absentee absence days from that but uh actually absolutely incredible at what he does um and it was very cool to have him involved in it there's coop doing some good things

um we ran another birthday bash in 2018 um there's a picture of me doing good things in peru and matcha pitchu and for those that haven't been get there because it's incredible um and yeah 2019 was a bit of an interesting year um i guess it every every year running business i kind of find that you realize how much more there is you don't know um i was definitely more i felt like i i feel like i was more confident as a business owner in in 20 2016 and 2017 than i was in 2018 2019

and now in 2020 i probably feel like i'm i know less but it's probably because the the scope for what i realize there is to know is more i i know um inadvertently that i'm more capable now but uh i guess it's it's a tough uh it's a tough thing to deal with you're gonna be throwing different problems you're gonna be throwing different challenges and we look at we're in 2020 now and the gym's closed um and uh yeah who knows when we're gonna be open again but at the end of the day our team

and our community and our commitment to making people better won't change so um covid as long as you've got to stay in at home we're here we're gonna hang out uh we're in no rush quicker i get to train at coach 6 am vgt and get back into breakfast clubs and give everyone hugs and high fives the better but uh we're in no rush because we can do this shit online uh hopefully now we know we can we know we can and we know our our clients and our vertice family will stick by us um

so uh i apologize if i keep scratching um mid so so we've gone through many i guess iterations and and evolutions of vertice over over 2015 or before that um when we were at piersdale um 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 was probably our biggest one um so i guess the way the business was set up we had a lot of one-on-one coaching we had some semi-private we had different levels of it and to be honest it was a bit of a shit show we had like 25 different offerings um so we worked pretty tirelessly the

first half of 2019 to get a system together that we know could take us a long time into the future um and we ended up with the the vad and va vad and vgt system which basically we realized that uh everyone most people uh want one of two things they either want um to have one-on-one direct coaching where they're told what to do every step of the way or they want to get in a part of a group in a community where they can support each other to reach their goals so um the the issue

with the one-on-one side of things is that um you know most high quality gyms will charge upwards of 80 to 100 120 bucks for a session of one-on-one coaching and most athletes most humans should be training three to five times a week and obviously i'm not great at mass but you don't have to really do the mass to understand that that's a fair chunk of coin per week you know if you spread it out 52 weeks of the year then that's a it's a big chunk of income that has to go towards training and we

wanted a a system uh a coaching system that had that same level of quality but allowed athletes to train as often as they needed to to achieve their goals so so we basically scrapped the system we had and we brought this new system into place so uh our first the first part of that system is our onboarding process which is fairly comprehensive but it's comprehensive for a reason we want to make sure that everything we're doing in the gym is making people better so we do a three session onboarding three one-on-one sessions once we've done

that people choose one of two options option one is our vad our vertice athletic development which is just our version of a semi-private model so so for example laf footballer he's programmed a program specific for his body his goals where he's at what's worked in the past what hasn't and yeah basically everything is is tailored for him and he gets to choose whether he wants to train once a week twice a week three times a week four times a week five six seven it doesn't really matter it's up to him and he's coached through those

sessions by one of our coaches the only difference that and a one-on-one model is there might be a couple of other coaches there and he'll get access to all of our coaches throughout the week so coaching standards and being the the best coaching experience possible is is one of our our goals obviously it's really hard to measure we just have to take our athletes word for it and make sure we get them results but doing that vad is our answer to that and something that we implemented in start of july 2019 and we are still

running today albeit online at the minute and vg oh that's mitch that's not vgt hey mitch um vgt which i think is this one yes is vertice group training so this is our community-based progress-based general physical preparation program it's for people who want to move better get stronger get fitter do all of the good things and have fun while doing it with it with a crew of people um vid you'll have other people training with you be running separate programs we want to create a team sport environment like that we also want to create a

team sport environment in vgt but everyone's running a similar program we obviously have progressions and regressions but as far as changes to the business go mid uh mid when were we uh 20 2019 yeah it was it when we kind of got started on that and you can see that we didn't really use facebook uh too much between then and then and now because a couple of photos later we've got our uh covered jimmy's closed photo um so on the 20 and this is a date that will go down in the history of vertice as

the first time we actually had to close uh something outside our control but as of 12 o'clock today verse forms will be closed until april 13th which is in four days which that won't be happening uh we will be in lockdown for a lot longer than that um as directions for the state government um this was a this was a hard day and i spoke about it in a podcast i won't spend too long on it now but this is a really hard day because we basically had to get our business that we'd spent four

and a half years building and plus the time beforehand and shift it to an online model in the space of a couple of hours um i am incredibly proud of the team for for for the work that went into that uh i'm incredibly proud of coup's uh attitude during it um that morning i was a bit flat i was kind of like fuck what are we gonna do i knew we'd be okay but i kind of needed koop to kick me out the ass and tell me to get moving and get doing it and he

did that um and i'm incredibly proud that we were able to do so um you know obviously a lot of our vernus family members lost jobs and lost income from that um and yeah i'm stoked to say that we were able to keep training those guys regardless whether they're paying a membership or not um since then the focus uh has been on a couple of different things i'm gonna stop sharing my screen now because we've basically gone through the last five years or so um but the yeah since then the focus has been on our

values it's been on performance it's been on getting everyone the best possible training program at home it's been on education we want to continue to make sure that everyone's moving forward with what they're doing and it's been uh focused on community pretty much above all else right now when people don't have the same uh rhythm and routine they're used to is now is when they need each other the most and when they have the inability to connect physically we need to connect socially and i think that's why uh why everyone's social media usage will go

up but i'm definitely okay with it the more zoom calls and more face time calls you can do the more connection you can have over the next couple of months the better um so i think that's it that's uh that's part one of this uh podcast series i hope i'll do my best to make sure the next couple aren't as long but thank you so much for listening for watching for being a part of vertice family and being a part of this journey it's been a pretty incredible journey so far there's been heaps of ups

heaps of down heaps of downs heaps of in-betweens but i know that uh we're gonna keep putting our head down our bum up to make sure that we get the best possible result for everyone in the vertice family uh we want everyone to be as happy as healthy and as uh and as athletically capable as they possibly can now and pretty much forever so if you're listening cheers to you if you have watched you if you've played even the smallest role uh in vertice getting from build burn shed um to what it is now uh

an ambulance depot but what it is now in in spirit uh i appreciate you more than uh i could ever ever say um thank you for being a part of it thank you for contributing um and hopefully there's a lot more where this came from that's me see you for part two but i think i'm gonna jump on with coop here's a little insight i think i'm gonna jump on with coop and we're gonna talk about the last uh last two years or so since he jumped on board and what our focus has been we're

gonna do that for part two so you get a little bit more insight into that and the team we've had uh and the ups and downs and then for part three we're gonna talk about the future of vertice which pre covid was uh we were pretty set on what our steps were uh it might delay things a little bit more from now but we're still uh committed to helping as many people as possible so have a wonderful evening have a wonderful day be amazing keep doing good things