As the story has it, one day I headed to the opposite side of the globe – the Flipside. I arrived in Korea February 16th, 2005 and thought I’d do a year, then leave. I was wrong. I stayed, launched my first company, Flipside Fitness, and then opened Korea's largest boxing club, Hulk's Boxing (now called Hulk's Club).

After 11.5yrs in Korea, I then picked up one day and returned to Toronto, Canada. But then I left again.

Now I live in the Philippines where I am the CEO and head coach of Empowered Clubhouse, the Philippines' first and only boxing clubhouse exclusively just for women. I also am the founder of the Lil' Sistas Project, CEO and designer of Slay Gear and Baa Baa Black Sheep .Ph.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

A Plate Full of Busy-Body Me Things... Thursday, May 23


These days I've been spending hours at the juice bar at Hulk's, typing away and looking up things on the Internet.  It's not all fun and games though and though I have managed to upkeep this homepage, I must admit that most of my homepage entries are written when I'm either in the bathroom or in the car.  It's only the editing and formatting that I actually do on the computer, usually late in the evening when I have a break in between training members.  

I've got a lot on my plate, always have and perhaps always will, but lately I seem to have an excessive amount.  Here's what is on my plate...

The Fab Gals Gab June issue
Despite having several columnist who write select parts of the magazine, I still carry a bit portion or the writing.  I’ve got 26+ sections/articles still to write up.  I’m somewhat hesitant as to whether I want to continue this magazine actually or make a Hulk magazine instead.  The feedback I get from the magazine is quite low considering our high number of members in Flipside Fitness and I question whether or not the effort put in is worth the final product.  The plan though, at least for this upcoming issue, is to print a couple copies of it and have it on display at Hulk’s for all our Hulk members to enjoy. 

Monkey Bar and other equipment
The one downfall with going with a ‘little guy’ business is that because he’s a one-man company the work we’ve given him can only be done as fast as he goes.  What started off as us simply getting him to make a custom cable machine has evolved into us going with him for all our weight training equipment, from kettle bells to a custom squat machine.  However, in addition to having to wait on his jobs to be completed, the other week we got into an argument with him when he doubled his initial quoted price.  It’s been a week-long argument and we threatened to scrap the whole purchase all together, despite him already having started on him.  Today we finally settled things with him and he’s coming in Monday with the rest of our equipment and to install our monkey bars and other piece of equipment.

Bathroom construction
I refused to rehire the previous crew that did our change/locker room renovations on account that they tried to cut the corners with their work and when I called them out on it they turned to my father-in-law to side with them.  Sorry boys, but you just lost a big job I now have.  This means we had to interview and get quotes from other reno crews regarding the bathrooms.  We need a wall made for our guys-only shower and our private single shower room for the women needs to be constructed in the bathroom.  It’s been like pulling teeth, painful planning this out, but we finally hired a crew and they’ll be doing all this next Monday.

Promo Pics and Inside Pics
With us being focused in 10 Magazine, they sent a photographer to Hulk’s to take a series of photos.  The photos are awesome, no question about it, but part of the deal the photographer has with 10 Magazine is that we can’t use any of them until the end of May (while the issue is still on the stands).  However, with our Grand Opening Party being June 2nd and us being already open for a soft opening, we’re eagerly needing to get our hands on these photos.  We really need to get them printed and up, not only on our boxing club walls but also outside on the banners we want to get made or ‘playing cards’ as Koreans call them. 

Grand Opening Party and After Party
With us coming to the end of our soft-opening, we’re busy now thinking about what to plan for our grand opening party.  Unlike a regular business whose grand opening party marks the very first day of business, we wanted to build up a bit of a membership before we threw an opening party.  Originally we were going to host a traditional Korean opening party but then we ditched that idea.  It’ll be a pretty laid back party of food and mingling but we’ve also decided to have some draw prizes, make the announcement for our Hulk Out Photo Contest and have a sparring match.  The sparring match will be either between Snickers and Black Skinny or Snickers and Panty Boy Jr.  I’m leaning more towards Panty Boy Jr. because I like his badboy style of fighting plus he’s able to come in more to train for it, meaning he’d give Snickers definitely a run for his money on this sparring match!

Spare Room
Where we currently shelf our boxing gloves for our members, we’ve yet to decide on what exactly to do with it and now we’re contemplating taking the whole glass wall off.  Smashing the glass is one thing but the difficult thing would be figuring out how to remove the metal casing it sits in that’s installed right into the floor.
 
Boxing License
This is our biggest stress – figuring out how to get the rights of our boxing licenses. Often when you switch coaches you ‘buy out’, meaning you give your former coach money so that you sign on to another coach.  Every year your professional boxing license gets renewed by your coach but I’m not too sure if Junior Mint renewed mine and Snickers.  Snickers once switched coaches but we didn’t do a ‘buy out’ because we fired him after he so foolishly handed KBC Snickers’ Super Light Champion belt which wasn’t right for him to do let alone respectable of KBC to accept it but that’s a WHOLE other issue.  Snickers isn’t necessarily interested in fighting professionally any more, the whole issue with having to fire his former coach is still a sensitive issue, but I very much am.  I’ve been offered a fight in China and have still yet to tell my promoter if I’m going to take it because it means approaching Junior Mint about my boxing license.  I anticipate approaching him about the rights to my license to be extremely uncomfortable and potentially nasty considering an insiders’ scoop our fellow Cheonan boxing clubs are threatening to go to the authorities regarding, particularly immigration.

Life outside of Hulk’s
In addition to all the behind-the-scenes at Hulk’s, there is then the fact that we do have a life outside of the club.  It’s not a very active one but it’s still there.  We’re struggling with training Pacquiao and we’re busy trying to squeeze in some time to do renovations on our house.  My day usually starts at 10am.  I work from 2pm to midnight but many of our members train late so I’ve been leaving around 12:30am-1am and then they want to take us out for a bite to eat and social time.  This means I get home around 2am and hit the sack around 3am.  Any down time I manage to get basically consists of me either cleaning the house or devoting all that limited time to my other two pups – Balboa and Pacquiao.  And there is of course the errands we try to fit in before work – errands for the club like picking up light bulbs or other supplies – so then my free time is cut down even more.   Saturday is technically our day off but it’s spent at the club because of the high volume of passing byers in the streets with the movie theater outside our club door.  This weekend I’ve hosted a Flipside Fitness event on Saturday and also for next Saturday too.  Saturdays are our days off of training work but have now been designated our networking work days.  I’m definitely not complaining, I love my job, but I’m definitely lacking in relaxing time.   

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