She built multi-million-dollar boxing gyms backed by Anthony Joshua

^{Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it resonates with you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means knowing ourselves first.}

Happy Thursday, founders,

The first episode of our documentary-podcast is finally here!!

My first guest is Olia Sardarova, who built multi-million-dollar boxing gyms backed by Anthony Joshua. Olia left Russia at 15, walked away from banking, and turned her Imperial College MBA dissertation into BXR, a high-end boxing gym everyone told her couldn't work. Today, NBA and NFL athletes train there when they're in London, but what stayed with me from our conversation was how she handles the moments when things go wrong.

When Covid hit, BXR had just signed for a second site. "We had to start from scratch and we had to survive with no money, with no income," she told me, and yet while around 5,000 UK gyms shut down, hers came out the other side and is now growing 30% year on year.

She's just as deliberate about who she builds with, choosing landlords almost as carefully as the space itself, and she treats rejection with a lightness I found disarming: "Sometimes no is only the beginning… make it fun for yourself to find out how you make it a yes.

Listening to Olia is the easy part; working out what her story means for your own business is harder, which is why we made a companion workbook for this episode.

We built a Business Psychology playbook that turns 11 principles from our conversation into questions about you, from the psychology of getting back up after a knockdown to the practical side of revenue, landlords and real numbers.

As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.

Until next week,
Lavena

P.S. If you want to get a founder feature about your own story, reply to this email. If you’d like to reach our newsletter audience (founders, creators, and marketers), click the button below.

If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.

Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the creator economy, e-commerce marketing, and Human resources.