‘We’re basically teaching you how to keep in touch with your body’s needs,’ says Gina Livy who pitched her idea, successfully, on Dragon’s Den
It’s usually in the grocery store where Gina Livy feels the pain of her past collide with her current success.
Having built up a business with an accumulated revenue of $30 million over the past five years, she remembers clearly back to when she was raising her four kids in the Musselman’s Lake area and life fell apart. Her husband at the time got sick, they had to close their studio, couldn’t make rent, the family van was repossessed, and she took a waitressing job at a sports bar in Newmarket.
Now, her weight loss program, the Livy Method, has tens of thousands of followers in 55 countries, she employs a staff of 43 and she has recently been named among Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100 Award winners by the Women’s Executive Network (WXN) for the second time.
“I can go to the grocery store and I don’t have to think about how I am going to pay the bills and for a long time that was not always the case,” says Livy, a mother of four. “And that’s probably my favourite thing.
“Every time I go to the grocery store, that’s something that sticks with me.”
Livy, who is now 52, remarried and with children now aged 25, 22, 20 and 18, has long been a successful entrepreneur in the making. But, like many, the road to get there presented many twists, bumps and potholes.
She became active in the exercise space in high school when she came across an energetic aerobic class at her local YMCA and so wanted to be part of that. From there she became an instructor and personal trainer.
She continued working her way through the gym while she went to university.
“I also gained 100-something pounds,” she says.
The mystery was that she wasn’t necessarily overeating and she was teaching some serious aerobics classes.
Those extra pounds started disappearing after she met her first husband, a chef.
“It seemed like the more I ate, the more weight I lost,” adding that she realized she was getting more sleep, something she didn’t have a lot of when going to university.
She began researching her experience and learning about how food breaks down in the body. When the weight started disappearing, people in the gym approached her for support.
She continued her fitness regime and helping others with weight control while working in television in Barrie and then Toronto, which included hosting a longtime Newmarket cable television show about health, fitness and weight loss.
She extended her weight loss program to Facebook users, developing the foundation for the remote business she launched during the pandemic. Her current husband, who has an MBA, quit his job with Amazon and, as a 50-50 partner, helped scale it.
She now runs a 91-day program three times per year. She had 29,000 people sign up for the last session, charging $80 per person.
Subscribers follow the program through an app. It’s supported through a daily podcast that often features topic experts and specialists. There’s an interactive Facebook page and there are books that subscribers can follow.
“It’s all about following a basic food plan and there’s a lot of flexibility in that,” she says. “We’re basically teaching you how to keep in touch with your body’s needs.
“It’s not the losing that people have a hard time with… it’s about having sustainable lifestyle changes.”
Livy attributes the growth of her business primarily to referrals but there is now a concerted marketing effort to support the weight loss and maintenance programs.
Livy is interested in continuing to build her business, by re-investing profits to perhaps developing products and services geared for women in her age group, although she hasn’t yet decided what that will look like.
And she’s been in conversations with investors. Last year she and her husband, Tony An, appeared on the CBC television program Dragon’s Den seeking $250,000 for 3.5 per cent of their business. They ultimately accepted an offer from investors Michele Romanow and Manjit Minhas of $500,000 for eight per cent of the company. No deal has yet been finalized.
Livy, meanwhile, is now living a comfortable life, living in a comfortable home in Newmarket, driving her first new car and enjoying taking trips as she continues to scale her company.