Davis School of Business student Kiki Hancock is combining her business education, personal training experience and an interest in women’s health as she plans for her future
Kiki Hancock’s future business is taking shape one note at a time.
Whenever an idea pops into her head, she opens the notes app on her phone and writes it down. Potential services, features for an app, business names and any potential details she wants to remember.
At first, the notes were a collection of ideas for later. Over time, Hancock started to see how they all fit together.
“After I started doing that, I looked back at them and I realized, ‘Oh my god, I have so many ideas,’” she said. “And they’re already starting to come together.”
Those ideas started to look a lot more like a business plan.
A Red Cliff, Colorado, native, Hancock is a junior in Colorado Mesa University’s Davis School of Business and is also minoring in sport management. She hopes to eventually open a gym, and she already has a pretty good idea of what she wants it to look like.
As the idea has grown, Hancock has started using what she’s learning through the Davis School of Business, along with her experience as a personal trainer, to think through what it would take to make it work.
Fitness has been part of Hancock’s life for years. Growing up, she participated in gymnastics, track, volleyball and basketball.
Then, during her junior year of high school, she tore her ACL.
Spending nearly a year away from sports changed the way she thought about exercise. As she worked her way back, Hancock started thinking more seriously about the role fitness played in her own life and how she could use it to help others. Her curiosity eventually led her to women’s health.
Hancock started reading about how women’s experiences with exercise can change during different phases of their menstrual cycles and lives. She became interested in how fitness can affect women differently throughout pregnancy, postpartum recovery and menopause, and started thinking about how those differences could shape the workouts, classes and services a gym offers.
The more she read, the more the pieces of a business idea began to fit together. Hancock started envisioning a women-focused gym with fitness options designed around those different experiences.
She also knew how she wanted women to feel when they walked through the doors.
“I want them to feel welcomed. I want them to feel like it’s a community they want to return to,” Hancock said. “I definitely just want to create a space that they feel they’re open to bettering themselves without being judged.”
As a National Academy of Sports Medicine-certified personal trainer at CMU’s Hamilton Recreation Center, Hancock works with clients with a wide range of goals, ages and experience levels.
Some want to lose weight, others are working on stability and strength and some just want to become comfortable enough using the equipment in a gym to exercise on their own.
“A lot of people don’t know the basics, so I’ll take them through the basics and help them feel more confident coming to the gym and doing it on their own,” Hancock said.
Hancock has watched clients make steady progress over time. One client started training with her being able to complete about four push-ups. After 10 sessions, he could do eight or nine with ease.
For her, the number wasn’t as important as the feeling of watching someone become stronger and more confident along the way.
“It’s amazing,” she said. “I just love seeing the pre and post results from certain exercises, and it proves that we did do something here.”
Every client also gives Hancock more experience working with different goals and needs, something she knows will matter if she eventually runs a gym of her own.
“Being here as a trainer has definitely prepared me a lot more than I thought I’d be prepared by this point in my life,” she said.
The management classes she's taken in the Davis School of Business have also impacted the way she thinks about leadership. She has found herself applying lessons from class while working with personal training clients, especially when it comes to how people respond to coaching.
Outside the classroom, Hancock is heavily involved on campus, participating in the Entrepreneurship Club and Sport Management Club. She has even talked with business leaders and helped organize events like Maverick Madness.
She’s looking forward to taking a class most entrepreneurship students in the Davis School of Business take, which is designed to help students develop an existing business idea.
“I think that class is really going to be my turning point in getting things running a little faster,” Hancock said.
Her classwork is also introducing her to the less visible parts of owning a business, like accounting, payroll and the day-to-day skills it takes to keep everything going.
And all of it eventually finds its way back to the ideas written down on her phone. As those ideas have accumulated, she has also started asking an important question.
What makes her idea meaningful?
That’s part of the advice she has for other students who have a business idea of their own. Write everything down, but also think about the reason behind it.
“You feel really excited about it, but why?” Hancock said. “And how can your why be someone else’s why?”
Hancock hopes the answer to some people’s “why?” will eventually be found in the women who walk through the doors of her gym feeling supported, building confidence and finding a place they want to return to.