I have over 40 years of practical experience in the health, exercise & fitness profession and have been building & running gyms in Guernsey for just about 25 years. BodyWorks is currently in its 3rd incarnation. The present version was opened for business on 15 October, 2012. However, BodyWorks as a business has been running non-stop 24/7 in one form or another since 1993. It has been nurtured & developed from the original 1200sq. ft. reconverted WWI Army barracks to it's present state-housed on the 1st floor of the Newlands Bldg. in the Lowlands Ind. Est.Through sheer determination, innovation, and dedication to excellence BODYWORKS has become one of the premier centres of training & fitness in the Channel Islands.If you look closely, long & hard enough for a common thread that stitches together an individual's life, you can usually find it. In my particular case, it started with hunger. Over time that hunger morphed into a concept, the concept grew into a vision and I've been labouring to give that vision some modicum of flesh & bone ever since.Walking down this present corridor of my life, I suppose that I would describe myself as the kind of entrepreneur whose main function it is to produce goods of a particular nature and quality, and the resources that are generated from this and other related ventures are used as a lubricant to enable these processes to thrive and progress.So, making the money provides some breathing space and allows things to run more smoothly. But this of course is not really why you chose to do it in the first place, nor is it why you continue to do it now.

As the Managing Director of BodyWorks, I am Jack-Of-All-Trades, basically http://bodyworksfc.com/2014/12/23/alex/

Island Fitness was my first business in Guernsey and I was its only employee. It comprised 3 tiny rooms stacked one on top of the other and was located on the corner of Mill Street & Burnt Lane in the rather scenic Old Part of Town. There was a nunnery just a little further up Burnt Lane and you would often see a nun or two scurrying by on their missions.This section of St. Peter Port was ideal for retail business startups at the time (before the internet became as ubiquitous & as easily accessible as it is today) because the rents were quite low. But a business had to have some sort of dynamic pull to lure punters through its doors, as the foot traffic in that part of town is notoriously hard to come by.The idea to get noticed and gain credibility at the time was to restart my amateur bodybuilding career (I hadn't competed for a 4-5 year period prior to this) and I went about doing just that on a local and national level for the next 5 years or so, collecting a reasonable number of trophies along the way.