Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast · Louis Grenier | Marketing & Branding

A CEO’s Guide to Building a No-BS Personal Brand (& Reviving a Dying Business)

·44 min·2 clips

Jonathan says his wife’s cancer diagnosis hit while payroll and severance were already tightening the company.

1. Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast centers on Jonathan Goodman and PTDC, the Personal Training Development Center, as they rebuild a business after a major internal reset. 2. Host Louis Grenier speaks with Jonathan Goodman, PTDC’s CEO and founder, because Goodman built the company, wrote 11 books, and led the turnaround himself. 3. The episode asks what happens when a founder stops trying to make a faceless brand do everything and starts putting the founder back at the center. 4. Jonathan says he rented a 17th century cottage in rural Ireland with Rob, Laura, and Vicky for a YouTube project where he “ripped everything apart” in two days. 5. He says PTDC started in 2011 as a blog, with him publishing articles on Tuesdays and Thursdays while personal training 10 to 12 hours a day in Toronto. 6. He says the site grew to more than 1,500 free articles, 17 million unique visitors, and about 4 million visitors a year at its peak. 7. Jonathan says he began monetizing with affiliate promotions in 2011, then ran his first seminar in 2012 and sold DVDs through Vervante. 8. He says 137 13-minute phone calls with personal trainers led him to a sentence about helping them make “$500 to $1,500 more a month.” 9. He says that research led to a beta group of 24 people, 22 finishers, and a course first called 1K Extra. 10. He says 1K Extra later evolved into the Online Trainer Academy in 2016, after working with a Yale course developer and a PhD in distance learning design. 11. Jonathan says the business had a 5,600-sale week in March 2020 with no advertising when the COVID-19 shutdowns made online fitness suddenly urgent. 12. He says the team then chased scaling books like Scaling Up and EOS, hired expensive executives, and paid salaries of $150,000 to $200,000 for people from big companies. 13. He says those hires were “the right people” in “the wrong seats” because PTDC needed a small, nimble company where everyone watched revenue and product quality. 14. Jonathan says the last working session exposed how disconnected the team was from results, and Louis says the call ended with the head of marketing, general manager, and creative director swearing at each other on Zoom. 15. He says the company tried to grow by making more courses, but the math showed they would need a hundredfold increase in customers for the plan to work. 16. Jonathan says the original model worked because the business built a community first, listened to what trainers said they needed, and then created the product. 17. The episode moves in a conversational, corrective style, with Louis pushing for specifics and Jonathan answering with blunt examples, numbers, and self-criticism. 18. Jonathan’s tone shifts from candid and profane to reflective, especially when he describes ego, payroll pressure, and the need to create “space to breathe.” 19. Anyone building a founder-led service, course, or media business would likely get value from this episode. 20. People looking for generic startup theory or polished corporate scaling advice may skip it.

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