About
I build the systems, so you can coach.
I’m Mike Montefusco. Twenty years a trainer, six years in the back room of hundreds of Trainerize businesses, and now coaching again myself. I help online coaches set up AI that sounds like them and handles the admin they never signed up for.
How I got here
Trainer first. Still a trainer.
I did not start in fitness. In my early twenties I was a licensed stockbroker in New York. After that I sold cars. Both taught me how to talk to people, and both made it obvious I would rather be in a gym.
So I became a trainer. I worked up to Master Trainer, and in 2011 I opened Raw Fitness, a personal training studio in the Greater Charlotte area. Over ten years we logged more than 25,000 training hours, our clients lost over 10,000 pounds on InBody scans, and I developed dozens of trainers along the way. For three of those years I was also the strength coach for a US Soccer Development Academy club. More than 100 of those players went on to NCAA Division I programs, and four turned pro.
Running a studio means admin, and the admin was eating us. I started automating in 2015. Then in 2017, my wife and I lost our daughter. She was stillborn. My wife was my admin at the gym, and after we lost our daughter she hated going to that job. I hated seeing her like that. So I got very serious about taking admin off human plates.
That pulled me into web development, and in 2020 I founded Fitness Marketing Machine. Over the next six years we worked with more than 400 Trainerize coaches. I also made mistakes. To keep up with demand I hired other automators, and the more I spent, the more work I ended up doing. Nobody will ever understand your business the way you do, and it always takes too long to explain it to someone else.
Then AI got good, and I had a realization: sooner or later, none of you would need an agency like mine. You would just talk to Claude. So I had a choice. Wait to be figured out, or go back to the thing I missed. I chose coaching. And I decided to hand coaches the keys to the kingdom on my way back. If everyone is going to work this out eventually, I would rather you got there first, with me.
What I believe
AI should amplify you, not replace you.
AI should sound like you
Generic is the enemy. If a client can tell a machine wrote it, it is not done yet.
You should not need a developer
If you can explain how you coach, you can build this. My job is to strip out the technical nonsense between you and the result.
Your clients should get more of you
Every hour the system takes off your plate goes back into coaching. That is the whole point of doing this.
I coach the way I would want to be coached
My faith shapes how I do this: honest, patient, nobody left behind. If something is not a fit for you, I will say so.
20 years
NASM certified
400+
Trainerize coaches served
$100M+
combined revenue a year
Right now
What I’m doing now
I run a small team plus a crew of AI agents, and everything I recommend is something I run my own coaching business on.
Coaching
Coaching clients again
Mike Montefusco Fitness is back, and I build every system behind it with Claude. I also work with coaches two ways: one-to-one AI systems coaching, and Business-in-a-Box, built with you.
YouTube
Claude for Trainerize Coaches
A new video every week. Real builds, minus the developer nonsense, with notes you can come back to. Watch the series.
Free guide
Claude for Trainerize Coaches: the complete guide
83 pages. The words you need before the tools make sense, every cheat sheet from the videos, and the skills that do the work for you. Get the guide.
Community
A free community for coaches
A place to share what you are building, ask questions, and not do this alone. It is opening now. Come in.
Ready when you are.
There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. Book a call and we’ll find your first step. Not ready yet? Start with the guide.