Anthony Trucks on the work behind lasting performance
Anthony Trucks is a keynote speaker and identity transformation expert who helps individuals and teams build identity, discipline and resilience through speaking, coaching, consulting and workshops. In this conversation, Trucks explains how sharing a message brought in customers, what a struggling gym taught him, and why solving a real problem matters more than chasing another business hack.
A useful business starts with a real customer problem, but a solution alone is not enough. People need to hear about it, and the person delivering it needs the discipline to keep following through.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I spent my early years in foster care, from age three until I was adopted at fourteen. In high school I set a goal of making the varsity football team, and that work led to a full-ride scholarship to the University of Oregon and a career in the NFL, until a shoulder injury ended it. After football I opened a gym, and while my business struggled and my marriage fell apart, I spent a stretch of time on a couch staring at a brown wall and asking myself hard questions about who I had become. What I came to find is that every stage of my life where I went from struggle to success required me to do things in the background that nobody celebrated me for. It was the hardest work I have done, and it gave me pride and allowed me to achieve success. I built the business by realizing this, codifying it, and helping other people climb out of the same kinds of holes I had been in.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
My first customers came from me sharing my views, my beliefs, and my message with the world, out of a desire to help other people navigate the pitfalls I had gone through. That work helped me build a clear value proposition and a solution that people love. New clients still come from me proactively sharing myself with the world to get traction and start conversations, from relationships, and from spending money on advertising to bring people in. That is how any big business grows: you create awareness and then move people forward to work with you. A lot of it comes from people seeing the foundation of my early years of work.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision that changed my direction came nine months into my gym business, when I was close to bankruptcy with about $4,000 to my name. I spent that last $4,000 on a coach who charged $6,000, knowing I would end up even more broke if it failed. Things doubled within a week, and four months later I had quadrupled my income. The mistake that taught me the most was opening that gym with a kinesiology degree and no idea how to run a business, which ended with a landlord handing me an eviction notice after three months of unpaid rent. That experience showed me that the right guidance multiplies the effort you already bring.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
The biggest change I have watched is how easy getting information has become. Anyone can find a course or an AI answer in seconds, and plenty of ambitious people hold every tool available and still stall because they have never built the identity that can run those tools. Who you are with what you know decides the outcome, and very few people commit to Dark Work at the depth, consistency, and obsession level required to make information make them successful. My work answers that with daily Dark Work reps that build the identity underneath the strategy. I also built my own Dark Work platform that brings community and live coaching together with habit tracking, which moved my whole business off rented space on platforms like Kajabi and Go High Level.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
First, find the problem you can provide a solution to, then figure out the solution, and then work out how to productize it. Too many people make things nobody needs and then wonder why no one works with them, so solve a real problem and make sure the vehicle you use to solve it is the one people want. After that, be obsessively committed to being a magnet to the world: ask how you bring people into this and how you draw them in, because some people build the solution and then hide it behind a rock. Making the world aware that you exist and that you can help is your holy charge and your duty. Ignore the search for one more hack or piece of information, since a person with every tool and no identity to run them builds nothing. Harvey Mackay put it well: the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.
Thank you to Anthony Trucks and the team at Anthony Trucks for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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