The world knows about Michelle Bridges’s fortune – the fitness star entered BRW’s rich women list in 2015 with a net worth of $53 million – but her success is a product of decades of work both on and off camera.
That work ethic was on display on Friday when she took to the stage at Business Chicks’ 9 to Thrive event in Melbourne and made everyone do 10 squats (“I am not joking!” she shouted happily at the audience) before sitting down to explain exactly how she built her brand, leveraged The Biggest Loser and balanced it all with a family.
Bridges was clear on one thing: she doesn’t take no for an answer. “Not in an arrogant way,” she was keen to tell the crowd, but there’s something about her business sense that has shaped her vision of a ‘fitness community’ into a multimillion-dollar empire.
Keep showing up
The Biggest Loser might have launched Bridges into mainstream media, but her first fitness segments appeared on Nine’s morning show with Kerri-Anne Kennerley – a gig she gained through hounding the television host for months. Kennerley was taking one of Bridges’ fitness classes at a Sydney club and Bridges saw this as the perfect opportunity to pitch herself as a fitness presenter for a TV audience.
“I would chase her around ad nauseum, showing up in the weirdest places, in the change rooms,” Bridges says.
“[Kerri-Anne] would say, ‘Michelle, you’re doing my head in’.”
But it worked. Nine gave Bridges the opportunity to film five segments on spec, then they booked her a recurring spot, even back-paying her for the test episodes. It was the first of many steps in the entrepreneur’s broadcast media career, all thanks to the pursuit of the star of the show.
Know your worth
“There have been plenty of times where I’ve felt like, ‘no, no, this is going to happen, you just aren’t with me on this yet, let me spell it out’,” Bridges told the crowd.
This drive to get her way has been useful even after joining the Biggest Loser team as a trainer, where the pitches that flowed Bridges’s way didn’t always have her financial interests at heart.
“I was on holiday in Bali when my agent called,” she explained, “and said, there’s a media outlet company that want you to write for them – I think I secretly wanted to be like Sarah Jessica Parker and have my own column. They said ‘they don’t want to pay you’.”
At the time, Bridges had six bestselling fitness books on the market.
“It might have been that I’d had too many margaritas around the pool, but I pulled out my computer and said to my agent, ‘I’ll call you back, send me the brief’. I wrote three articles, copyrighted them and rang her back and said ‘send them this and tell them that’s what they’re not going to get,’” Bridges recounted.
It worked – the cheekiness secured her a writing deal on her terms.
“I knew I could do it, and I just wanted to show them what they could possibly miss out on,” she said.
Escape the ego, focus on the brief
Bridges has now written 13 bestselling fitness books but she said convincing editors that she was bankable proved an incredible struggle.
“I’d started writing this book off the back end of The Biggest Loser,” she explained, “and I thought it was going to be an absolute cracker”. However, publishers had a different idea, telling Bridges time and again that the health and fitness “thing” had been done.
The experience was a lesson in leaving your ego behind in the name of getting a task completed. Bridges now always goes back to review a brief if she is told no, regrouping and trying again. To get her debut title on shelves, she submitted work to publishers seven times at a stage in her career when her public persona was well established.
“I don’t mean I don’t take no for an answer in an arrogant way. There have been many instances when I’ve gone back for a second bite of the cherry,” she said.
