How this phoenix rose from the ashes and launched a new business after her first literally burnt to the ground

For Laura Moore, the worst day of her life became her ultimate turning point. When her Vision Personal Training gym burnt down in 2015, she felt as though she had lost everything, but it was this nightmare event that led her to start her own performance and health coaching business – Uppy.

After taking a job at Vision in Bondi Junction, Laura quickly became one of the top trainers in the studio and it wasn’t long before she became manager of the business. During this time she became the first person ever to be awarded Most Valuable Player throughout the entire international Vision network. When the perfect site came up in Maroubra, Laura knew it was time to fulfil her long-term goal of owning her own gym and she bought into the franchise. She converted an old video store into a fully equipped personal training studio and built a solid team of trainers and loyal clients. “I would open the studio at 5am and be there until at least 10pm. In fact, often I would sleep on a swag in my office! All of this hard work was beginning to pay off until I got a call from my head trainer one Friday afternoon to tell me there’d been a ‘big bang and some smoke’,” says Laura.

Laura’s business had burnt to the ground. Although she settled into a temporary space, getting her business back to the point it had been was taking a huge emotional toll and no longer made commercial sense. She started the difficult task of negotiating her way out of her franchise agreement. “For 7 months I felt like a daddy long legs who’d had its legs pulled off one by one. To the general public I was a trooper but behind closed doors I was a broken woman. I experienced weight gain, periods of extreme fatigue, bloating, low mood and anxiety. My body was giving up on me. Although I was shutting down the business because it had literally burnt down, I felt like a failure and I realised that I’d reached my lowest point,” says Laura.

“I saw countless health professionals and spent a small fortune trying to seek the answers, but eventually I realised that nothing was going to stick unless I sorted my head out. My obsession with being the best led me to work much harder than I needed to and beat myself up when I didn’t achieve perfection. My body was in a constant state of stress and eventually it pushed back. Until that point I had always believed that to be healthy you just needed to eat better and move more – how wrong I was! It wasn’t until I truly appreciated the mind/body connection that my body began to restore itself.”

Laura’s subsequent journey of discovery gave her a deep insight into working through body issues, unrelenting standards, perfectionism, self-sabotage, over-working and trauma. Having married this with her learnings, observations and experiences as a health coach, personal trainer, business owner, corporate worker and woman, she now has a unique perspective on all of the factors that can affect performance and health, and the strategies needed to overcome them.

“I started to realise that everywhere I looked people around me, particularly women, were suffering from similar issues to varying degrees. It was like I could physically see all of the invisible restraints holding them back, but ironically it was themselves holding the reigns.” It was this realisation that led Laura to create her business, Uppy. “Uppy is a product of my own journey. The reason I am able to give support and guidance to these women is because I have been there. During my market research, I found that while there is support out there for driven women to develop professionally there was a distinct lack of support on a personal level. My market doesn’t need help in climbing the career ladder; they need help once they get there and are dealing with unrealistic ideals and a perfectionist outlook.”

The Uppy program focuses on the five major areas that make up every woman’s life and unlocks the full potential of each one, allowing women to achieve more, enjoy more and live more. It includes personalised plans with clearly defined outcomes, two 90 minute sit downs per month, unlimited access to Laura via email, phone or Skype and quarterly strategy sessions. Laura will connect the dots between what’s going on inside the body and outside, and ensure the two work efficiently together.

Laura is a qualified NLP Practitioner and personal trainer with a Cert 3 & 4 in fitness. She also holds a Business Diploma and Bachelor’s Degree.

For more information, please visit www.uppy.com.au