Mia St-Aubin knows a thing or two about rising out of the ashes.
On Nov. 1, she and her husband will cut the ribbon on SwingFit Golf & Fitness Centre, a company she helped build after losing a decade’s worth of her work during the pandemic.
And that wasn’t the first time she’d faced insurmountable challenges head on. The company she shut down due to the COVID crisis, MoveCamp Canada, was itself started during one of the darkest periods of her life.
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Zaahra Mehsen was three years into a biology degree at a local university when she realized she wanted to take a different path. “I realized that it’s not my thing,”
St-Aubin grew up in an outdoorsy family in the small northern Ontario city of Elliot Lake, where she spent her time hiking, swimming and playing “every sport under the sun.” She ran track and field in high school and, after a stint at Laurentian University in Sudbury, went on to run varsity at the University of Ottawa.
After graduating, she took a trip to Thailand, where she met a Montreal-based personal trainer. It was the first time she’d turned to fitness as a potential professional avenue.
“I started doing my certificates to become a personal trainer in Thailand,” she said. “Then I started working at a corporate gym in Ottawa and just grinded like that. It is not an easy career. You’re working from 6 a.m. to eight o’clock at night. I was on the Canadian paranational team as a guide runner. So I would work 12 hours a day, training three hours a day minimum.”
Then things started to fall apart.
On top of her packed schedule, her relationship ended and she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
While navigating these challenges, living in her best friend’s basement, the entrepreneurial wheels started turning.
“I was scrolling through Facebook having lunch one day and I saw these photos of Parliament Hill yoga coming up and I was like, ‘How come there’s never been a workout on the Hill?’” she said. “I was teaching classes at the time and I thought, what the heck.”
She reached out to a woman she’d met at a business conference a few weeks earlier and pitched the idea that would become MoveCamp Canada.
For almost a decade, the not-for-profit organization hosted free fitness sessions every Thursday at noon on Parliament Hill during the summer, eventually launching more chapters in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver.
For St-Aubin, it became a full-time gig, growing to include partnerships with wellness brands, year-round events, a conference and private corporate programs. The organization worked with more than 50 coaches across the country. At its peak, there were as many as 100 participants at each weekly session.
“It was incredible,” she said. “Our tagline was ‘Move in a way that makes sense for you.’ You come up on the Hill and we’re like, if you want to do burpees, it’s your funeral, but if you want to stand on the spot or walk around, this is your 45 minutes; whatever makes sense for you. We’re just here to encourage you to move. It was just a beautiful thing.”
The organization St-Aubin spent years building was proof to herself of her own resiliency and ability to overcome.
Then the pandemic hit.
“We pivoted pretty quickly, much like everybody else,” said St-Aubin. “We thought, why not online? And at first, our online attendance was crazy, because everyone was at home. I was like, okay, it’s not too bad. And we maintained it for a few years. There were pockets where we were able to go outside and we took advantage of that.”
But a few years in, things devolved again.
St-Aubin’s mother was diagnosed with leukemia and she took a step back from work to take care of her. But for the organization, a new wave of cases and another lockdown knocked things off their tentative footing.
“I started to see a shift in our attendance,” she said. “I literally would get phone calls, one by one from our partners, because their marketing budgets got cut. We were the first thing that got cut because they could no longer see the experiential part. How are we showcasing their products when we’re barely in front of people anymore?”
As funding disappeared, MoveCamp had to let people go. But the nail in the coffin was when in-person sessions started running in front of City Hall and only six or seven people were showing up.
“I had spent three years saving what I had built,” said St-Aubin. “I stopped paying myself for an entire year to keep staff on and it just finally, completely burned out. I was absolutely at my rock bottom, totally exhausted. I wasn’t taking care of myself. So I had a decision to make. It wasn’t fun for me anymore.”
It wasn’t easy, taking apart the company she’d spent years putting together. In addition to months of administrative work, she said it was difficult breaking the news to her team.
“That was probably one of the hardest things,” she said. “I felt so much guilt and responsibility for taking something away from them that they had put just as much effort and blood, sweat and tears into. A lot of explaining why I didn’t want to do it anymore and a lot of undoing. Shutting down a corporation like that takes years of work.”
Teeing up for a new chapter
After shutting down MoveCamp, St-Aubin said she had to focus on herself.
“It was very, very difficult, but knowing that I needed to go through it so I could go into my cocoon, so I could come out and expand into this next version of myself. So as hard as it was, I just knew that I needed to do it, however long it took,” she said. “There was a lot of unravelling.”
While she unravelled, the opposite was happening for her husband, Evan Bett, whom she’d married during that same time period.
An entrepreneur, Bett found the pandemic to be an unexpected boon for his business, SwingFit Golf, which provided lessons, clinics and performance conditioning for golfers around the city.
“It was wild. He was growing and growing and growing and then, during the pandemic, everyone and their dog took up golf,” said St-Aubin. “So here I am, things breaking down, and he has the opposite problem, where things are growing so much and it’s just him and a couple instructors.”
That’s where St-Aubin came in.
“I was sitting at my desk one day, still going through the motions, and he came up to me and was like, ‘I can’t watch you do this anymore. Why don’t we go for lunch and have a business meeting?’” she said. “And he said, ‘I’m wondering if you would be open to taking on an operations role, because I know you’re better at it and I need help.’”
Bett’s holistic approach to wellness and training resonated with her own principles and St-Aubin decided to join the company full time. She took on the role of chief operating officer, helping to manage the organization and keep up with the influx of interest.
The company has since scaled up and next month will open its first location, SwingFit Golf & Fitness Centre, on Canotek Road in the city’s east end.
In addition to being a one-stop-shop for golfers, it will offer curated fitness classes and personal training, a callback to MoveCamp’s original message of moving in a way that makes sense for you.
“In the simplest terms, it’s an opportunity for me to continue my teaching,” St-Aubin said. “We’re running classes that use those same methods that MoveCamp did. We’re bringing that into the centre, bringing those teachings to our instructors, and imparting that same wisdom on our members. (We want) our members to come to our space and create a lifestyle that’s sustainable.”
As the location gets off the ground, St-Aubin knows there are bound to be challenges.
“I am so happy to say with confidence that I feel like I finally found my spark again,” she said. “And it’s not because life went the way that I thought it was going to. It’s because I think we’ve made the best out of the situation that the world handed us. And even though this isn’t how I thought it would go, I can see the potential of it being so much better than I ever thought.”
And, of course, she said it isn’t always easy working side-by-side with your spouse, but she thinks they’ve figured it out.
“It can be a rocky road,” she said. “We’re both so strong-minded and we’re both so stubborn. It took us a year to find our stride, but once we did – if I can toot our own horn – I think we make a really good team.”
