Just Did It

It was a personal Armageddon for Heather Hackett in 1999 when she hit 190 pounds on the scale.

Hackett was 5 feet 5 inches and 19 years old back then. “I had a sister and a mother who both looked like Barbie dolls,” says Hackett. “And I was always the hunky and chunky one.”

The 190-pound weigh in tipped Hackett over. She slowly turned around a lifetime of poor nutrition and next to no exercise. In doing so, Hackett lost 45 pounds and kept it off — even though she says good eating and exercise habits remain a daily struggle.

A healthy lifestyle commitment served another purpose for Hackett: She turned it into a business, Sarasota-based I Train Your Kids.

The business is a place where parents and children receive guidance on how to incorporate healthy eating and active lifestyles into their lives. The company, which Hackett started in 2009, isn't the only byproduct of Hackett's life-changing commitment to being healthy.

It also marks a triumph in Hackett's decade-long quest to start her own business. It was a vision she nibbled at and tinkered with through a series of jobs she calls “miserable,” from teaching business and computers to high school students in Ohio to working as a corporate trainer for a luxury homebuilder.

“This was something I continued to work on, but it was always a dream,” says Hackett. “It wasn't a reality.”

Hackett, 31, says she made it a reality by working nights and weekends on everything from business cards to a five-year business plan. “Every day was little baby steps,” says Hackett.

She went into the business full-time in 2009. Her motto was to promote healthy lifestyles, not merely diets. To that end, Hackett now offers a combination of fitness and workout sessions with dinner preparation classes and nutrition principles.

The food side includes cooking classes, where the menu might be a veggie pizza or chicken parmesan from a rotisserie chicken. Hackett will also do pantry and fridge raids, where she painstakingly goes over what a family keeps and eats.

The exercise classes range from kickboxing for older children to hip-hop dancing to family boot camps. Hackett teaches classes at the Bath & Racquet Fitness Club in Sarasota, where she trades a percentage of revenues for space. She uses a kitchen there for cooking classes.

An overarching challenge has been to market I Train Your Kids as a necessity, not a luxury, in the recession. Hackett combats that through a heavy schedule of networking, both the in-person kind and social media kind. Hackett recently launched an invitation-only networking group for small business owners in Sarasota.

Hackett declines to discuss revenues or the total number of families she works with at I Train Your Kids, although she says the client base has grown consistently. Hackett has bold plans for both the business and the concept of promoting healthy lifestyles in families and children.

That includes possibly franchising the business and writing a book on the topic.

“My vision is big,” Hackett says. “I don't want to make a living off (some) kids. I want to do it off a lot of kids.”