‘Feel sick’: Moment fitness influencer lost $120,000

It is everyone’s worst nightmare to lose a considerable amount of money, but for Soph Allen, it came true and left her feeling sick.

Soph Allen was in the middle of building her fitness empire when she lost $120,000 in a failed business plan.

The 34-year-old is one of Australia’s leading fitness influencers, with more than 400,000 Instagram followers she describes herself as someone who “helps women build lifelong results”.

In 2020, when huge swathes of the country were confined to their homes due to Covid lockdowns, Ms Allen wanted to find another way to reach her followers.

She decided to invest in creating an app that would allow her to help people on their fitness journeys from their phones.

In a vulnerable moment, Ms Allen explained online that it didn’t come to fruition, but she lost “so much money” because the technology is so expensive.

She explained how she lost so much money. Picture: Instagram/sopheallen

The business investment just didn’t pay-off. Picture: Instagram/sopheallen

She explained that even before she realised the investment would not pay off, it was a big deal to put that much money towards something.

Even though the upfront cost was staggering, she was determined to make it work because she thought it would be pivotal in helping her business grow.

“I was paying thousands of dollars of invoices each month,” she told news.com.au.

“As a small business, it’s a significant amount of money and hugely impacts cash flow, so you’d hope that it pays off; in my case, it didn’t,” she said.

The silver lining was that because the payments weren’t a lump sum, she was able to manage her cash flow more easily.

“I also make money as a content creator to support me, of course there are things I would have done with that money to help grow the business, like hiring more people, increasing our marketing spend, or building an app that actually got to market,” she said.

She has over 400,000 followers. Picture: Instagram/sopheallen

The plan was to expand her business. Picture: Instagram/sopheallen

Ms Allen said that, in retrospect, she felt like she was “ignorant and naive” when investing in technology.

It was uncharted territory and not something people talk about.

“It is an area that isn’t spoken about very much and everyone is very cagey about these type of things,” she said.

Ms Allen explained that people in her industry aren’t keen to share who their developers or manufactures are for competition purposes.

It made it a risky move because she had no experience and didn’t know the “right terminology” or processes.

In retrospect, she admitted that she probably didn’t have “accurate expectations” but she could only learn through experience.

When it didn’t work out, she was gutted. She could only take comfort in the fact that even though she’d made a poor investment, her business as a whole was still profitable, and she could recover from it.

“The loss made me feel sick and it’s impossible not to imagine what you could have done with that money.,” she said.

“Sure, it provides an important lesson, but as a small business that money could have been used for so many different things. I try not to dwell on it.”

In retrospect she wished she’d trusted her instincts more. Picture: Instagram/sopheallen

What stung the most was that it wasn’t like she launched the app and it just didn’t work out. She invested the $120,000 and didn’t end up with a finished product that she could use and is still working out what she’ll do with the coding she did get from the experience.

Ms Allen also plan years in advance, so when that didn’t come to fruition, she had to rejig everything and lean on other parts of her company to market.

“I not only lost $120,000 but I lost the time I invested and the time taken away from focusing on the current app I do have,” she said.

“I doubled down on my efforts in Train With Soph to increase profitability as I was navigating the fallout.”

The biggest lesson she’s learned through the whole thing is to trust her own instincts and to be proactive when ‘things don’t feel right,” she advised.