Fitness and Business

1. Tell us about you & Ranieri & Co.

My name is Rob Ranieri, Capricorn, Year of the Dragon. Kidding!

I’ve been in Australia for over 8 years, and if you couldn’t tell from my obnoxious accent, I’m from the States. New York in particular. When I arrived in Melbourne, I had no job prospects and couldn’t even pronounce MEL-BORN correctly, but eventually I found a role at a small social media agency as I built a book of freelance clients and could go out on my own. While out on my own, I was granted stints at OMD Australia and later TRIBE, growing my skill set in programmatic advertising and influencer marketing, which I could bring back to my own clients. 

Then, coming up on two years ago, Wondery, who was the world’s largest independent podcast publisher at the time, started expanding their international efforts. So my co-founder and I started this podcast business, Ranieri & Co., and fought to represent Wondery here in Australia, New Zealand. At the most basic level, that means we represent the ad space in those podcasts and sell them to brands. There are many iterations of that: brands could want further integration into those series or want branded content of their own, which we can produce for them. And finally, Ranieri & Co. will be releasing its own series in the near future.

 

2. How did COVID impact you, both in terms of business and your fitness regime?

We’ll start with my fitness regime: here in Melbourne, we went through an extensive lockdown that spanned months, so there was absolutely an adjustment. I bought two resistance bands and my co-founder lent me some kettle bells, so I just started doing all these new workouts. It was great, because it was a much needed change for my body and I used the time as a chance to take a break from pre workout, which I at times take far too much of. 

 

Now in terms of business, Covid was terrifying. We watched as our sales pipeline dried up. Car companies pulled their audio budget because no one could actually visit a showroom or lot. That said, we saw audience numbers grow and incredible series being released: Guru, Bunga Bunga, Even the Rich... So we had to use that cliche word: we had to pivot. We looked for brands that were doing well during Covid, a bank that offered small business loans that desperately needed them because of the pandemic. A coffee pod company that delivers straight to your door, so everyone wanting cafe quality coffee and was missing their local cafe because of lockdown restrictions, could create a little bit of that at home.

 

I’m someone who’s read enough Tim Ferriss, listened to enough inspiring podcasts, to know change and adaptability is important. Knowing that doesn’t make it easy though. We do things a certain way and become good at them over time and things we’re good at or do consistently become a part of our identity. It’s hard to just give up on those parts of ourselves. But we really do have to learn to embrace change. It’s how we improve as people. 

 

There’s a great conversation between Brene Brown and Tim Ferriss that I find really relevant. They talk about this struggle between constantly bettering themselves and also loving themselves for who they are. If you love yourself for who you are, you don’t need to change and you accept yourself wholeheartedly, but it’s also good to strive for better and sometimes our environments, as we saw with Covid, force us to change. It’s a fine balance and I’m not sure I’ve figured it out yet. 

 

3. What does your average day look like in terms of training and nutrition?

Well recently I’ve been doing a little intermittent fasting as everyone around me has been praising its benefits. I hate it because I love eating. And it means less eating. That said, I’ve seen results that include weight loss and more energy through my working day.

In terms of diet, I really like to juice. I always have to explain what that means because it sounds like I’m injecting myself with steroids. “I’m on the juice, mate.” Hah, I just realised as I got older I wasn’t necessarily getting all the nutrients I needed in my diet, so I make a juice of kale, cucumber, ginger, apple, lemon, and celery. I’m not vegan or vegetarian, but I know or bodies really aren’t built to eat meat. Otherwise we’d be able to process it raw and wouldn’t need to cook it. And we’d have longer fangs like most meat-eating animals. But I’m an italian boy from New York, so sopressata, prosciutto and red wine aren’t ever going to be completely out of the picture, so the juicing is a nice way to find a bit of balance. These days I try to cut back on the red meat a bit as that’s what the scientists say are the hardest meats for our body to process. What I’m trying to tell you is I often resort to a mushroom pizza. 

In terms of training, I go to the gym on a daily basis, usually for about two hours in the evening.

 

4. So many would say they are too tired and lack energy to get to the gym. What drives you to make it a priority?

I love this question because there are a few aspects to it. The first thing that helped me make the gym a priority was realising I have more energy in the evenings and prefer going to the gym then. If the gym is going to be a part of my life, I might as well find the aspects I like more and work with that. 

What I also like about this question is different people have different priorities and it’s important to remember that. I own a business and in some regards it’s like my child. I have foregone paying myself in the early days to keep money in the business and make sure it carried on. Other people have real children they sacrifice for. We only have so much time, and health is a very real priority, but maybe looking like an influencer is not. So that means a very different level of priority and commitment. Realising you want to have a healthy heart rate is not the same as trying to get down to single digit body fat. For some people balance is important, and for some people it’s not. Are you just trying to get back in the door 3 days a week or do double sessions and compete in a few months time. Just that bit of awareness and realising that about yourself can help you prioritise appropriately, which I think makes things a little easier.

Also, if you lack energy, and I may get crap for saying this, have some preworkout. Or a coffee.

 

5. Tell us about a time that your dedication to fitness helped you get through a tough period

The first year of Ranieri & Co. was hell. Soon after we incorporated, my partner of seven years decided to break up with me via text message while interstate. That’s hard enough as it is, but I was here on a partner visa, so I immediately had to worry about how I would stay in the country and find a new place to live while balancing a new business. Over that year, I was molested, we were hit with a pandemic, I lost family back home and I couldn’t even go to the funeral because of the pandemic. I was also robbed. It was just relentless and I was so, so far from family.

I fell into a lot of not-so-healthy habits during that time. Did things I’m not necessarily proud of. That said, I slowly realised that I was making things harder for myself, and temporary escapes only brought me back to harsher realities. This came to a head during Christmas of 2020. And so I went back to hitting the gym hard and took a lot of time for myself over the holiday break. Long walks in nature, sometimes two gym sessions a day, re-incorporated meditation into my life. The gym was where I could find some balance again.

To give a bit more context, when I was young I was trying out for a soccer team. Because they were tryouts and there were no jerseys yet, they had us play shirts and skins. I was shirtless and another little kid said “you’re kinda fat.” It wasn’t some awful psychological scar, but I started doing push ups and crunches in my room after that. When I was twelve I asked for my first set of weights for Christmas. Even as a freelancer, I worked at Fitness First on the side to have a steady fortnightly paycheck. The gym and fitness have been in my life for a very long time, so when I say that it helped me through a rough period, it was actually returning to something that has very consistently been there for me. And there’s a comfort in that.

There was also an important change I made that sits outside of fitness and has more to do with wellbeing. There were a lot of frivolous people in my life for a long time. When I went through that tough time, I really took stock of the people who are consistently there, who I intrinsically trust. A friend of mine said “people who if I got drunk, they would make sure I was safe.” And so I stopped wasting my time on people who don’t fall in that category. It’s not that I’m not open to new people in my life, it’s just I spent a lot of time on people who wanted free social media help while setting up their business, never to offer compensation. Or other “friends” who would just disappear for long stretches of time after I showed up for them over and over and over again. I don’t really like to waste time on those people. That said, the people I do love and trust mean the world to me and they very much helped me get through the tougher times. 

 

6. What advice can you give people looking to improve their health and fitness but are struggling to get started?

I know sometimes I can feel overwhelmed to get back to the gym. I think social media, and Instagram in particular, puts incredible pressure on how we see ourselves aesthetically. Women have been dealing with this for years, but now young boys are pressured to look like they’ve been working out for 30 years, but have the face of a 16 year old, but not a 16 year old who has acne, one with flawless skin like Naomi Campbell. And if you’re not blessed with her melanin, then you better get in the sun or find a spray tan to contrast your super white, bleached teeth. And anime hair. You need to both have mass and be shredded at the same time. The closest we have to this is Jeff Seid, but we all know he was created in a MyProtein lab to sell more amino acids.

 

That aesthetic is so far away for most of us to attain, but that’s the image we’re constantly fed in association with fitness. And so I think two things here are important to keep in mind. The first is that comparison is the thief of all joy. It’s good to have some inspiration and motivation, but if you’re feeling overwhelmed, maybe it’s time to just focus on yourself for a bit. Set your own goals that can be broken down into mini-achievable goals with steps to get there. Those struggling to get started are probably feeling overwhelmed, but it’s easy to overcome that when you focus your vision. And that focus should probably just be on yourself.

 

The second thing to keep in mind is it’s perfectly okay to ask for help. I have been going to the gym for a long time and a few years back I was having a lot of trouble targeting my back. I was constantly overcompensating with my arms and just wasn’t seeing results, so I used a personal trainer on back days. He had expertise I didn’t, and it made a huge difference. Asking for help can take a lot of forms: maybe it’s getting advice from someone more knowledgeable, or maybe it’s asking the Google machine to help find some answers and do some research. Maybe it’s asking someone to hold you accountable. 

 

There’s a great quote from Joan Rivers. She said, “"I wish I could tell you it gets better, but it doesn't get better. YOU get better.” Lately I think about that a lot and I mention it now because if everything just got better, we wouldn’t need help. There’d be fewer moments of vulnerability and we would be self sufficient because, well, it all got better. But I found life didn’t quite work out that way. And that doesn’t mean hope is lost. Quite the contrary. You try to rise to the occasion and YOU get better. But that process includes other people and other skill sets. That’s part of why humans have societies and communities, so we can exchange and help each other. We’re obsessed with becoming the independent human who don’t need no man. And maybe you don’t need a literal man, but I’ve found I’ve certainly relied on my fellow man.