The Heart of Primal Mobility: Our Journey, Our Values

“How did you build Primal up so quickly? It seems like you guys came out of nowhere!”

I was recently asked this while being interviewed on a podcast about growing a coaching business.

Now, I’ll always take this as a compliment, but it just makes me chuckle.

It’s funny how, when something grows and starts to gain attention, many will often undermine the strenuous labor that was involved to get it to that place.

Like an iceberg, it’s common to only see what is at face value.

Well, I’ll tell you, Primal Mobility’s founding story is a rocky one, but it’s always been a heart-driven company.

For today, I want to step back from the usual chat on biomechanics, load management, and mobility training and bring you through the Primal Mobility journey from where we began to where we plan to go.

We’re a company that values relationships and human connection above all else, and although we’re 6.5 years into the game (at the time of this writing), we’re only just getting started.

Today I want to talk to you about the Primal brand vision, our passion-driven inception, and our commitments to you as we continue to grow.

Let’s start at where it all began!

Origin Story: The Birth of Primal Mobility

Here’s a story about how getting ghosted by a pro football athlete was the catalyst to Primal Mobility’s inception. 

In December 2017, I finally got my fifth mobility/flexibility-related certification and started to recognize that this was not only a massive passion of mine but also a niche that I wanted to specialize in for the rest of my life.

After receiving my L3 in Fascial Stretch Therapy from the Stretch To Win Institute, I realized that I was the only one in my city with that level of accreditation at the time.

Boom, this is a perfect chance for me to stand out. After all, I could never find my business groove as a personal trainer anyway, and it always felt like I was… “missing something” with the traditional fitness approach that I was taking. 

I had a wicked vision.

I was personally going to get into the NHL as a stretch therapist and bring these epic flexibility results to my hometown team.

I was ready to go big, but I had a decent problem that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to overcome…no one knew what the hell fascial stretch therapy even was…

“Facial stretch therapy…you seriously get people on the table and stretch their face??”

Oh man…the amount of roasting I received from everyone around me was rough in the beginning.

How was I going to get this out there when no one knew what it was and wouldn’t give it the time of day? I knew I had to get resourceful.

That’s when the hustle and grind really started.

I knew that if I just got enough athletes on my table to feel the immediate benefits of my services, I’d start to get recognized, and then the vision would be inevitable.

So I started offering free stretching to any and every athlete I could get my hands on.

I would work 12-hour days at local CrossFit competitions, getting over 100 athletes on my table for 3-minute mini-sessions. I would also offer any and every college athlete free sessions in exchange for a social media shoutout. 

I would even travel to Crossfit affiliates in other cities to do free “stretch marathons,” as I would call them…12 hours worth of 30-minute sessions for their athletes.

Over a 6 month period, I had accumulated over 1000 hours of stretching athletes on my table.

It’s hard to fathom how much work that really takes. At the time, it didn’t feel like a massive sacrifice, but looking back, I doubt that I would be able to do that all over again.

Well, throughout this period of time, I started to get recognized in a big way. 

I started finding my way into the circle of athletes who were playing for the Ottawa Senators.

The local CFL football team (the Ottawa Redblacks..they’re a big deal around here) started to get wind of what I was doing as well, and their quarterback and other star players started reaching out to get on my table.

IT WAS WORKING!

Then, I got a DM on Instagram.

“Hey man, I’m a wide receiver for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. I saw that you were doing flexibility work with a ton of the guys in Ottawa and they’re loving the results. I’m not in town, but think you could write me up a mobility program?”

Oh damn…a program? This is all new to me. Where would I even begin with something like this? I know how I could structure it to be effective, but how could I deliver it?

So, I got on the phone with him and told him that I would need to film a library of exercises, build out the infrastructure, and find a way to deliver him the program, but I was open to it.

Once we had that conversation, he told me he was in and that he would call me the following day to set up the payment situation…

Well, I never heard back from him again… GHOSTED

The funny thing is, at first, this ate away at my confidence, but then it set fire to an entirely new idea that I couldn’t take my mind off of.

I had never considered the fact that I could do this type of work remotely, and not have to work my body so hard to move these massive 250 lbs football guys around on the table, often without eating for 8+ hours.

Oh man, the vision was starting to transform now. Now, I could see an entirely new direction for my career—one that gave me far more freedom of schedule and didn’t have me physically grinding in the same way.

“Fu*k it..I’m all in”

From that moment, I began the process of putting it all together.

By September of 2018, I had fired all my in-person clients and decided to dive all into online mobility coaching.

The first week I launched Primal Mobility online, I gained 4 new clients.

“4 clients in the first week…this is going to be EASY!!”

Well, 4 months later, I still hadn’t gotten any clients and was down to 3.

I was making $300/month, which didn’t even cover half of my car payment.

“What have I done? I’m going to have to get a job at Walmart. Things were going so well; how could I sabotage myself like this?!”

I thought days on end with athletes on the table was hard…well, weeks of financial stress-fueled sleepless nights were way rougher.

My son, Ashton, had just turned 1 year old, my wife was rooting me on but getting concerned with my mental health, and it started to put massive pressure on our relationship.

I had to figure this thing out, or else I was done.

One thing I knew well was the grind of leveraging other people to “infiltrate” their communities as a means to get recognized.

So, I tried the same approach. My own version of influencer marketing…

I offered my services to multiple different athletes who had a huge social media following.

After a few weeks of 0 traction with that approach, I decided to try it one last time with a smaller account.

His name was Greg, he had 3k followers on instagram, but he was a Crossfit affiliate owner.

Screw it; figured I'd give it a shot and see what happened.

Well, turns out Greg had a ton of local connections that were immensely powerful.

Within 8 weeks, I had reached 30 clients and finally started to feel relief.

This is going to work…

And that is where it all began. This is truly the bottom of the iceberg for Primal Mobility, but the funny thing is, this is only a quarter of it. The journey that followed before actually making any traction in the Crossfit industry, before any of the games athletes, before any of the collaborations and sponsorships, continued to be daunting.

But we did and continue to make it happen.

Those times were incredibly rough on me and my family. It was 15 months of doing nothing but working.

It’s funny, I still remember the agony we went through, but I still would never change it for a thing.

They say that overcoming adversity molds you into the person you were always meant to be.

Primal wouldn’t be what it is today, and I wouldn’t be who I am today, without those times. I needed that grind to value true work ethic and appreciate the journey.

Not to mention, those 1000+ hours of athletes on the table gave me a perspective and experience that I’m confident has made me an outlier in the industry.

I got to personally feel how each and every major joint moves on hundreds of different bodies from a dozen different sports backgrounds.

That experience brings a level of awareness and understanding that is SO hard to get from anywhere else. 

I needed that to get to the point where I could educate other coaches on how they can set themselves apart in the industry as mobility specialists.

I can still close my eyes and feel how the scapula glides across the ribcage on a 300-lb lineman with healthy shoulders, compared to a 115-lb female Crossfit athlete with countless previous shoulder injuries.

These are the times that shaped me as a CEO. They rooted my passion and purpose and guided my mission with Primal Mobility.

I hope I never forget this story because it acts as the invisible trophy hanging on my mantle.

Our Commitment to You

Value statements always feel corny…

“Strive for excellence”...” respect for the individual”...” service to the customer”.

They’re all important, but they mean nothing unless you can get everyone in the organization to really digest them and make it part of who they are as a person.

For us at Primal Mobility, one of the main values we live by in our internal communication daily is “people over money.”

To us, this means that we will always choose to do the right thing for the person, rather than chase a paycheck.

At surface level, that sounds cool and all…

But below that is a driver for great work.

To us, people over money doesn’t simply mean not taking someone in as a client or student if they would benefit more elsewhere.

But below that, lies a commitment to an incredibly high standard for what we do.

We are devoted to producing the world’s best mobility-related resources for coaches and athletes to master their craft.

The Primal Mobility mission is to elevate those around us and help them become the best versions of themselves.

We do this by guiding coaches to separate themselves from the industry average and elevate their skills and careers through specialization in movement and mobility training.

And helping athletes overcome the pain that has been holding them back from unleashing their inner beasts on the barbell.

This is our commitment to success.

If you don’t win, we don’t win.

Plain and simple.

The Future of Primal Mobility

From the rocky beginnings to the top of the mountain that we’re trekking toward.

We have always aspired for massive impact.

After serving more than 6,000 athletes, we have found the most effective and efficient approach to achieving real results.

This is exactly why we are leaning heavily into education for coaches.

We have a catalog of courses that are on the cue, but we are dedicated to making the Primal Mobility Certification the world's greatest mobility educational resource on the planet.

We want our students to continue to graduate from the PMC feeling like they’ve just bypassed years in university and understand movement better than 99% of the other coaches in the industry.

We will never stop chasing excellence in our educational products. We want to help you stand out in your career and become the go-to expert that other coaches look up to and that clients seek out.

If you’re ready to elevate your career as a CrossFit coach, we would love to have you join our community of students in the Primal Mobility Certification course.

Not ready to dive in and specialize yet?

No problem, start here!