Brian Lund spent 15 years as a stock broker before he ever thought about running his own business. Here’s how coaching friends for free on the side turned into walking away from the finance sector for good.
Today, Brian Lund runs Body Boost by Brian, an negócio de coaching on-line that’s worked with close to a thousand people. He built it with no business background or tech skills, just a willingness to help whoever asked, and later, the nerve to bet on it full-time.
Five years ago, none of that existed yet. There was just a stockbroker in his late 30s who wasn’t looking to start a company at all. He shared his success story with us as part of our MemberPress Founder series on YouTube.
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Behind the Desk
Brian spent 15 years as a stockbroker – Series 7, Series 63, all the licenses, tenured at Morgan Stanley. It also meant eight, nine, sometimes ten hours a day at a desk.
In his late 30s, a health scare pushed him to make some changes, and he ended up hiring a coach of his own to help him get there.
That experience is what got him hooked on the changes he was making, and on coaching itself.
Watching someone else guide him through a process showed him what it actually took to help a person get results. And he wanted to be that person for others.
From Free Advice to a Side Hustle
About five months into working with his own coach, “These seeds just were planted in my mind,” he says. “Okay, I want to coach. I want to do this.”
He didn’t quit anything yet. He just started saying yes when people asked.
Coworkers and friends noticed the change and wanted to know what he’d done. So he offered to walk them through it for free.
It didn’t stay small for long. “I got to the point where I was actually working with quite a few people for free,” he says. “I’m doing my stockbroker stuff in the daytime, I’m moonlighting coaching people. I’m busy now.”
Working for free while raising four kids stopped being sustainable, so he started charging. It was still part-time, still with a full-time job at Morgan Stanley during the day.
He calls that stretch one of the most important phases of his development as a coach, because getting himself results and getting someone else results turned out to be two completely different skills.
“I really developed myself as a coach during this period,” he says, “understanding what it takes to actually get people through their roadblocks.”
Eventually the part-time client load maxed him out. Then came the day that changed his math entirely: he made more money coaching in a single day than he’d ever made in a day at Morgan Stanley.
“I was like, okay, I can do this,” he says. “If I really push hard at this, I could do this full-time.”
Making the Switch to Full Time
Believing he could do it and actually doing it were two different things. Brian had a mortgage, four kids, and a wife who’d never worked outside the home. The entire financial picture rested on him.
“It was nerve-wracking, gut-wrenching,” he says. “I was tenured at Morgan Stanley. I had all my licenses, I had everything.”
He wrote his letter of resignation at night. In his exit interview, his boss told him he was forfeiting his licenses to go become a fitness coach, and laughed at him.
“There was still a lot of fear,” Brian admits. Some months as a part-time coach had been great; others made him grateful he still had his day job as a backstop. But he’d already seen the proof, and he’d already built the belief.
The moment he remembers most clearly is walking down the Morgan Stanley stairwell for the last time, box of his things in hand. “I’m never going back,” he told himself. “I’m doing it. I’m doing it.”
That night, he sat his two oldest sons down in the kitchen. He’d spent years telling them that discipline changes your life, that they could do anything they set their minds to.
Now he was quitting his job to prove it. “It’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is,” he told them. “It’s time for me to show, not just talk.”
Looking back, he says that conversation did as much to keep him committed as anything else. “I can’t recant those words. I can’t go back on my own words.”
He didn’t ease into it, either. “I went straight balls to the wall,” he says. “I don’t have this job I’m doing full-time anymore, I’m going to crush it.”
Building It One Iteration at a Time
The early growth wasn’t glamorous. Before his page generated any real traffic, Brian was in his own Instagram DMs, reaching out to anyone who engaged with his stories and offering to help them set goals.
“It was grueling,” he says. “I just don’t enjoy doing DMs.” He kept at it until inbound interest took over.
His website has gone through several rebuilds, the current version is his third, and he’s the first to say he’s not a tech person.
What does show up in his copywriting is a lineage he picked up in his early 20s, well before finance, when a friend running a side hustle introduced him to direct-response marketers like Dan Kennedy. “It’s served me well in writing my captions,” Brian says, “in a way that gets an emotional response from your audience.”
Brian’s long since passed approaching a thousand clients now. “I need to make some changes,” he says, “but I haven’t, because it just works.”
Much of his early client base came from word of mouth. As people he’d worked with saw changes and friends started asking them how, the answer was usually some version of “just talk to my coach.”
A handful of strong early client stories became the foundation his social following eventually built on, people who’d been watching for months finally reaching out once they’d seen enough proof.
Running the business now means managing a couple hundred clients at once, which he says he could never do by hand.
Every client gets a plan built around their own schedule and life rather than a one-size-fits-all program, plus regular check-ins and a weekly call to review the week and plan the next one.
It all runs through a system he built himself. “There’s no way I’d be able to manage this without that,” he says. “It basically allowed me to scale.”
What He’d Tell You
Brian sums up the whole journey (finance career, side hustle, resignation letter and all) in one line:
“Self-belief is built through repetition of doing the hard things. When you believe at a high level in yourself and what you’re capable of, you’ll go try all kinds of cool stuff and live the life of your dreams.”
He’s not looking to slow down. His stated goal now is to reach the largest number of people in the deepest way possible, and he’s already working on a next iteration of the business, though he says it’s still a ways off, and he’s not in a rush to leave version one behind.
You can find him as Body Boost by Brian at bodyboostbybrian.com, or search Brian Thomas Lund on any platform.
Quer aprender com mais empreendedores como esse? Inscreva-se no nosso canal do YouTube pelo resto da nossa Série “Fundadores de Empresas”, onde conversamos com donos de negócios online para saber como eles começaram, o que está dando certo e o que aprenderam ao longo do caminho.
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