The Six Pack Dad Tribe | Tyson Johnson

Tyson Johnson, The Six Pack Dad, interview transcript, by Alan Olsen for The American Dreams Show:

Alan Olsen: Welcome to American Dream today I’m visiting here with Tyson Johnson, Tyson welcome to today’s show.

Tyson Johnson: Thanks, Alan glad to be here.

Alan Olsen: So Tyson, for the listeners here, can you give us your background of what brought you up to where you are today? Little bit about yourself? And let’s start from college on?

Tyson Johnson: Yeah, you bet. So I went to Brigham Young University in the state of Utah, that’s where I met my wife just playing pickup volleyball on a on a Saturday morning, she showed up and we, we were we ended up being the last people on the court and kind of the rest is history. So volleyball brought us together, and we still play that together as a family now. I studied psychology in in college, knowing that I wouldn’t be a psychologist, I come from five generations of serial entrepreneurs in the Johnson family and so starting at 16, I didn’t have a window cleaning business, had that through college, and then following college, got into insurance. And did that for a big chunk of my career leading to today, where I’m now now run a territory doing contact lenses meeting with eye care offices. And we live here in St. Louis, I’m married and have three boys 13, nine and six. And I’ve always done side hustles along the way with my main corporate career, and my latest side hustle that I’ve been working on the last five years is coaching high income dads on how they can get fit and healthy as a lifestyle, not as a short term diet. So that’s what brings me to today.

Alan Olsen: Very good. Well, before we get into that, I got a couple of questions for you. So three boys, you must be very active. Are they all active in sports with community programs?

Tyson Johnson: Yeah, they are. Their probably the favorite pastime is wrestling with dad. So we do that in the family room, of course. And as a entire family. We’re into rock climbing quite a bit because it gets cold here in St. Louis. So we found indoor rock climbing in a gym is is fun. And yeah, they were trying to expand their repertoire on sports, soccer and different things. But yeah, they love fishing and outdoor stuff and sports.

Alan Olsen: Are you from the St. Louis area? What what brought you into the Midwest?

Tyson Johnson: So following college, we moved to Las Vegas, and we’re there for 11 years. And I love the people there, develop some close friendships. And then some changes were happening with my career financially. And so we started interviewing, and our in laws live in St. Louis. And we’re like, I wonder if we expand our search to St. Louis, what’ll happen and about nine months later, when we finally opened up that window, it was like, you know, 30 interviews later with different careers, if you want to go through the St. Louis, opening door number one, or do you want to go through door number one. So we are grateful it was it became a real clear change for us a year ago to move out here. And we have family and a new career and we’re enjoying life.

Alan Olsen: You know, it’s interesting as we go through the timeline of life sometimes, you know, we don’t necessarily anticipate changes, the changes come upon us. And in and so 11 years, that’s that’s a big time frame and so, so you’ve been roughly about a year into St. Louis. And new job, is this also career change, too?

Tyson Johnson: It is, I had been an insurance for the most part my whole career. And then, specifically health care practices and doctors offices. So pivoting, I stayed in the medical arena, but I’m no longer offering insurance products. I’m now doing contact lenses. And I over the last year I feel like I’ve picked up a second bachelor’s degree on the eye and I didn’t realize how much there was to know about contacts and the eye. And so that’s that’s keeping me young and keeping the mind active to get acclimated and all that. So yeah, it’s been a new career. Everything’s new.

Alan Olsen: So in the middle of this new career change, you get an inspiration to do another project. And you mentioned it before, the six pack ab Dad. Tell me about the inspiration.

Tyson Johnson: So just brief context. So in in 2004 I had come home from serving for my church doing a mission and felt like I was, I had always been into health and fitness but felt going into college that I was about 20 pounds overweight and just didn’t really like how I was feeling.

Alan Olsen: Just curious, where did you serve your mission?

Tyson Johnson: Knoxville, Tennessee. And that’s a whole nother story. But um, yeah, I just felt like I wanted to get things back on track. And so I competed in a three month program called body for life. And it was involved nutrition and exercise. And my body fat went from 20%, down to 8%, which I’ve got the before and after photos on my website, because a lot of people don’t believe me. And I just felt I’ve regained control over my health and my body, and it felt really good. So fast forward about 10 years, I started blogging about this. And here and there, my and my wife is also really active at the women’s level. And, and she and I just kind of got into nutrition, and people would ask for a bit of coaching, and thus it was born more or less. This year is a banner year for The Six Pack Dad Tribe. As I’ve gone through, I’ve wasted thousands of dollars. And I’ve had to figure out- I shouldn’t say waste, but I’ve learned the hard way who my target audience is, how do I market, do I offer one on one. So it’s a coaching program. And we do it because there’s so many working professional dads that their health and their fitness, unintentionally, oftentimes takes a backseat. And whether they’re 30, or 50, or 60, different people come to us wanting to get balanced again and take that under control. So it’s been a really meaningful side hustle that I plan to stick with, probably for the rest of my career.

Alan Olsen: You know, it’s amazing trying to launch a new business, a side business in the middle of a new career, and then balanced life with the three active boys at home. But obviously, it speaks to the fact that you do have a passion for this. But let’s just talk about the process of getting started and moving from an idea to implementation. How did you get your first customer?

Tyson Johnson: Yeah, that’s I think, anyone listening who’s entrepreneurial can relate to some form or fashion of this journey. What I started doing was reaching out to friends, and acquaintances, and I started with a very low price point initially, and just assessed interest. And I found that a lot of people that I knew, were wanting to come and so I started by generating interest and kind of validating in my mind that I had a problem that people wanted to solve that they would pay money for. And it’s kind of been an evolution. It’s actually been a five year project of mine. What started as sort of a makeshift little course and figuring out how to make a website and how do I get people to log in to this content, to a Facebook group, and then zoom calls. And it’s just kind of been an evolution of starting with help helping some friends inexpensively and then over time raising prices and getting stuff dialed in as I go.

Alan Olsen: Tyson walk us through your process, you have a group of individuals with a common interest of getting those six pack abs. And, and so when they sign up with you, what is your process?

Tyson Johnson: Yeah, great question, and, and to be fair, a lot of a lot of our clients maybe aren’t looking to go back to six pack abs, but even just some of these people, it’s been decades even since college since they were even at a healthy weight. And we’re okay with that. So whatever their goals are to be more fit and healthy as a sustainable long term lifestyle. We’ll support them in that so the first thing we do is- we have a couple tiers of membership one would be like a group membership, it’s more affordable, another would be more of a one on one level with with me and the tribe coach. So depending on what their needs and their interests are, we get them plugged into our community so that they have like a video walkie talkie The system we use Marco Polo, and dads, it’s divided into a couple different groups based on if 30 pounds or more that they’re looking to lose, or 30 pounds or less, because we find the conversation is different amongst those two groups. We get them plugged into that, where they have, they can speak freely and talk about what’s working and what they’re struggling with. We get them plugged into an online course. That’s what what I followed the last 15 years with great success and what our other members follow. So we’re all on the same page with that. And then we get them plugged in if if desired to a one on one coaching thread where our members what’s what’s a little different about what we do first is a lot of other coaching programs is- many other programs, you might get like one scheduled call a week, with whoever it is, what we believe is that people when they have questions, they want answers now, they don’t want to have to wait especially busy, professional dads. So we set it up where they they’ve got a question they they ask us and we give them an answer right away through our coaching feed. And then we have our members tracked their eating and the nutrition so that we can coach to what’s going on in their life and speak to that meaningfully. And we set up an accountability partner with them so that two people are getting coaching from us in a kind of an intimate setting. And that, that tends to create the magic in these people’s lives. They get the direction. They’ve got the the guidance, they’ve got the accountability, and the motivation hearing, here’s 20 or 30 other dads who are entrepreneurs and coos and attorneys and sales people who are busy dad, all of us are busy dads. And look, this guy just lost 20 pounds over the last three months, or this guy’s been a year and a half on the program. And this kept the 40 pounds off the whole time. So it’s things like that helps them realize I’m no exception, I can do this too.

Alan Olsen: COVID recently has come into play this last year. How has that affected your model?

Tyson Johnson: And I feel my heart goes for businesses that have been disrupted a lot. With my day job, a lot of my practices, eye care offices have been very disrupted with that. With an online business where I serve people all over the country. My business is booming. Mainly because I can support people day or night if I have a laptop and a computer connection or my mobile phone, I can run the business. A lot of dads find themselves cooped up and putting on weight and a little bit more stressed with COVID. And so as it relates to weight loss as a lifestyle, this has been a banner year, like I said, one of one of my mentors said that with difficult challenging times, also arise unique opportunities and my wife and I are just humbled and blessed to be able to do this tribe and serve people during a time of need right now.

Alan Olsen: So Tyson, when you look at the future and your model, how big do you want to be?

Tyson Johnson: Big. We’re right now about 30 people. And I’ve, I’ve had the privilege of running an organization of 200 active people in a in more of a religious setting. And I learned that I really love letting go of the reins and mentoring people and entrusting others to be leaders. And so just a couple months ago, we brought on an accountability coach, actually, who had gone through the program with great success, and shares my passion. And I said, hey, what if I start allowing you to co coach new people that I bring into the program, so that I can keep growing this and you can generate income and serve people. And that’s been a wonderfully successful pilot program. And I feel it’s very rough replicatable. So my dream over the next 20-0 years. So just be to continue expanding this pilot run where I’m essentially bringing people through the program. They demonstrate success and want to do this long term. And then allow them to start mentoring people with me as a backup and ideally have several thousand people as active participants because this goes way beyond me and the 30 dads that are in here right now. So that’s the hope and the vision

Alan Olsen: Okay, so Tyson for the listeners, if they want to get more information, how do they reach you?

Tyson Johnson: They could find me on LinkedIn. Tyson Johnson in St. Louis. I check that all the time. They could also go to my website, thesixpackdadtribe.com. And they’ll see my little mini webinar. They can get a PDF transcript if they want, this is for dads young and old who are just looking to get in shape long term and we’re tired of the fad diets so we’d love to talk

Alan Olsen: Tyson appreciate you being on today’s show.

Tyson Johnson: Thanks for having me on. It’s a pleasure.

This transcript was electronically generated and may not contain the exact words used.

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Alan Olsen, is the Host of the American Dreams Show and the Managing Partner of GROCO.com.  GROCO is a premier family office and tax advisory firm located in the San Francisco Bay area serving clients all over the world.

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