Muscle Fitness Muscle & Fitness UK - April 2018 | Page 10

F RO M T H E
CEO
By Nick Orton
very expensive and not available
to the public. My design was light-
weight and cheap to produce but
would provide a visual deterrent and
a degree of security, which at worst
would slow the thief down. I got
everything done but suffered the
same wave of negativity, dismissal
and setback. I gave up on it. A few
years later and they were being sold
in Halfords.
Start something,
take action!
S
o many times in my life
I’ve had people tell me
‘it won’t work’, ‘it’s not a
good idea’, ‘very risky’ etc…
it still happens today.
You shouldn’t take much notice of
comments like those, yet most people
don’t follow their dreams because
they let others talk them out of it.
When I was just 14 years old, I had an
idea to start delivering pet food door
to door. In those days, you could only
buy from shops and in cans. We had
three dogs and a cat in our little
terrace house and carrying a weeks
worth of food for them back from
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MUSCLE & FITNESS / APRIL 2018
the shops was heavy work. It made
sense to me to start a delivery service
(nobody did that then), but I was only
14. I told friends (who all thought it was
stupid), and after more knockbacks
I ditched the idea. A year later Pets at
Home started…
At age 17, I had my own car (funded by
my carpet cleaning business), looking
back, the accessories that I added
(spoiler, skirts, fogs, spots) were
ridiculous, but I still loved it. I wanted
to make sure that it wouldn’t get
stolen. At that time, car crime was
very high. I drew up a design for a
wheel clamp. They existed but were
These were hard lessons and I learnt
from them - I never gave up on
anything that I really believed in since
then. Eleven years ago, BodyPower,
the company I now run, was just a
concept, which I was very confident
about and it formed part of my first
really big deal. In 2008, I sold my trade
show businesses to a private equity
firm, to form a company called Closer
Still Media. Part of the sale included
the concept called BodyPower. The
guys behind the deal were big hitters,
highly experienced and they told me
(after the sale) that they did not
believe in the idea and had in fact
commissioned a report by industry
experts, to ascertain if the concept
(the show) would work – I looked at the
report and it summarised that the
market was too small and that it
would not work. The opinion
was shared by a team of experts.
Fortunately, I had been astute enough
to include in the small print of the sale
deal a clause which meant that if the
buyers decided not to continue with
my concept, that I could ‘take it back’,
and that is exactly what I did. Those
hard early lessons had shown me
that if you truly beli eve in something,
you should do it.
Ten years later and I can say that if
you have a dream, then don’t let
others talk you out of it… BodyPower is
a global success from a business point
of view but most importantly for me, it
has helped huge amounts of people.
Our 10th Anniversary show
takes place at the NEC 11th – 13th May.
I hope to see you there.