In a world where the hustle and bustle of daily life often leave little room for personal health and fitness, Marc Zimmermann has carved a niche with EFFEKT, an online concierge-style personal training service tailored for the busy professional. Understanding the unique challenges faced by individuals who juggle demanding careers with personal commitments, EFFEKT offers a seamless blend of technology and personal coaching, ensuring that health and fitness are not compromised.
Marc's journey from a professional athlete to an entrepreneur is a testament to his resilience and passion for fitness. Transitioning from the disciplined world of professional sports into the entrepreneurial landscape, he found his calling in helping others achieve their health and fitness goals. The realization that his experience and expertise could serve a broader audience led to the birth of EFFEKT, a platform that combines personalized workout plans, real-time coaching, and accountability checks, all through an accessible app designed for those constantly on the move.
Hi, Marc! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us who you serve, how you serve them, and the impact that your business and work makes.
EFFEKT is an online concierge-style personal training service for busy professionals. Most of our clients have impressive careers and have busy schedules between work, life, family, and travel, and so we take all the guesswork out of their health and fitness routines through a combination of our app, our accountability, and most importantly, our personal touch from our team of 1-on-1 coaches.
There are a lot of options when it comes to working out these days with a lot of apps in the marketplace, gyms and personal trainers in people's locales, and the more high-end regimes like F45, but our service deeply serves and delivers results for high-achieving professionals who are always on the go. They simply wake up, open up the app to find their daily workout that's been assigned just for them, and have realtime messaging with their personal coach along the way, in addition to weekly accountability and check-in calls to keep them on track and answer their questions.
Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.
Well, I was a professional soccer player in Germany for many years, so professional sports and training was my life. After my career ended, I traveled the world and built up my business as a personal trainer, so I think I was so busy that I never had time to think like a business owner! I guess it was when I moved to Hawaii and opened up an in-person training community that did high-intensity workouts every day surrounded by the most beautiful landscape in the world that it hit me that I had built a real business with fans who showed up every day and who became a true community.
Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.
When my professional soccer career ended, I realized how much of my work and habits and schedule were tied to my career. When I thought about what was next for me, I realized that all I ever knew was training and high-performance, so I started out in a gym helping other people build the right habits and discipline to change their own lives.
Working in that gym and realizing that training was only one aspect of being a trainer, but the rest required a mastery of sales and marketing and communication and client retention made me realize that I was already on the path to building my own thing, so one day I decided to swap my shirt from wearing the gym's logo to just helping people that I found anywhere and everywhere!
Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?
It might sound a little basic, but honestly ThriveCart has been a big game-changer for my business. As I've transitioned EFFEKT to entirely online, ThriveCart has helped our team efficiently launch new products and services while creating a seamless checkout experience for customers, and I'm most grateful because it means I never have to think about billing again! The system handles all of my transactions, renewals, notifications, and invoices, and it gives me a really clear overall picture of my business's health. I can quickly see my revenue numbers, my projections based on historical data, and upcoming renewals and cashflow at a glance.
We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.
Many years ago I invested in an expensive training program that taught you how to start an online business with webinars. Well, it didn't exactly turn out great for me. I invested a lot in it and realized how complicated all the tech tools were and how much I didn't know about copywriting, conversion optimization, and all these other digital marketing skills, so I completely stopped pursuing the online business route.
When the pandemic hit in 2020 and I couldn't service my clients in-person in Los Angeles anymore, I was forced to figure out a new path, and that major disruption forced me to take the online avenues more seriously. It turns out that it was a blessing in disguise because I was able to hire a team, invest in launching an app that incorporates my training methodology and custom workouts for my clients, and we've now fully transitioned EFFEKT to being an online solution for our clients while still maintaining that personal touch. It's become a really great combination of technology and that personal human touch!
What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?
Honestly, all I've ever known in my life is hard work and hustle, so when I launched my first online program (Ripped30) I did something that wasn't very pretty but was very EFFEKTive: I individually messaged every contact I had on WhatsApp and Facebook to personally tell them about my new program!
It wasn't a scalable strategy, but without an email list at the time it was my quickest line of communication to my warmest audience, and it's what fueled a $30K+ launch within our first week and helped Ripped30 to positively impact so many people around the world. It ended up being an amazing first audience of my past clients, current clients, friends, acquaintances, and just about anybody I've ever personally connected with, and it also gave us some amazing success stories as people lost weight, gained muscle, and got into the best shape of their lives in just 30 days!
What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?
It's going to be hard. Way harder than you imagine. Not because the strategies involved in growing a business are inherently difficult, but more because it requires a lot of discipline, patience, and mental resilience along the way. It's pretty much guaranteed that things won't work out the first time, and maybe not even the second, third, or tenth times. But if you quit, then you're guaranteed to never make it. It's only the ones who power through the difficult moments, who retain their faith and optimism, and who push past all the obstacles until they succeed that make it.
