Meet Carla
is the founder of The Fitness Directory, a platform designed to connect gyms with fitness professionals in a faster and more flexible way. Based in Addlestone, she built the business after years of working within the fitness industry herself, combining her experience as a competitive athlete and personal trainer with a growing understanding of the challenges facing both gyms and trainers.
Learning to Begin Again
Long before she became a founder, Carla Nokes understood discipline through sport. Tennis shaped the rhythm of her life from an early age. Training schedules, performance pressure, setbacks, and repetition became familiar territory while most people her age were still figuring out what they enjoyed. Her world revolved around competition and improvement. The structure of elite sport gave her focus, but it also gave her identity.
For years, tennis was not simply something she did. It was the direction her life moved in.
Then injury interrupted everything.
The experience forced her into unfamiliar territory, not only professionally but emotionally. Athletes often build their sense of self around movement, routine, and progression. When that suddenly disappears, the silence can feel disorienting. Carla found herself having to rethink the future she had imagined for herself and decide what came next without the certainty she had always relied on.
What initially looked like a setback slowly became a transition point.
While recovering, she stepped into the fitness industry as a personal trainer. At first, it was practical. It kept her connected to movement and performance while she rebuilt her life after sport. But the deeper she moved into the industry, the more she began noticing the gaps hidden beneath the surface.
Gyms struggled to find reliable staff at short notice. Trainers dealt with inconsistent schedules and unstable opportunities. Recruitment processes felt outdated and disconnected from the pace of modern fitness businesses. The people working hardest within the industry were often navigating unnecessary friction simply to keep things running.
She was not looking at the industry from the outside. She was living inside it every day.
That closeness gave her perspective that could not be learned from a boardroom or business course. She understood the pressure trainers felt because she had experienced it herself. She understood the operational stress gyms faced because she saw it happening in real time around her.
Over time, frustration turned into curiosity. Curiosity slowly turned into vision.
The Holiday That Changed Everything
In 2019, while on holiday in Thailand, Carla found herself thinking beyond the day to day demands of gym work. Distance often creates clarity, and for the first time she allowed herself to step back and ask a bigger question about the future of the industry.
The idea for The Fitness Directory began there.
What started as a simple observation evolved into something much larger. Carla imagined a platform that could simplify recruitment within fitness while also creating more flexibility and opportunity for professionals. Instead of relying on outdated systems or rushed staffing solutions, gyms could connect directly with qualified people quickly and efficiently. Trainers, meanwhile, could gain greater control over their schedules and careers.
The idea stayed with her after she returned home.
Many people experience moments of inspiration, but turning an idea into something functional requires a different kind of commitment. Carla was stepping into unfamiliar territory. She had experience in fitness, not technology startups. She had spent years performing within structured environments where coaches, systems, and expectations already existed. Entrepreneurship offered none of that certainty.
Everything had to be learned in real time.
“The transition from athlete to entrepreneur was a big one,” she explains. “In sport, you have structure, coaching, and a clear path. In business, especially when you’re self funded, you have to figure everything out yourself.”
Building the company demanded more than vision. It required resilience during uncertainty, patience during slow progress, and the willingness to continue without guarantees. Like many founders building from scratch, Carla faced the quiet realities people rarely see from the outside. Financial pressure became part of daily life. Decisions carried weight because responsibility rested entirely on her shoulders.
Yet the mindset developed through years of sport quietly prepared her for this phase of life.
Athletes understand repetition. They understand showing up even when results are not immediate. They understand how progress is often invisible until suddenly it is not. Carla brought those lessons into business with her.
Instead of relying on motivation, she leaned on routine and discipline. Instead of waiting for confidence, she developed it through action.
That approach became foundational not only to how she worked, but to how she led.
Building Something Grounded in Reality
The Fitness Directory did not emerge from abstract business theory. It came from lived experience inside an industry that needed modernisation.
As Carla developed the platform, she focused less on creating hype and more on solving practical problems. Gyms often operate beyond traditional working hours, with many running late into the evening or around the clock. Staffing issues can affect operations immediately, yet recruitment processes frequently move too slowly to meet that reality.
The platform was designed to respond to the pace of modern fitness businesses rather than forcing businesses to adapt to outdated systems.
At the same time, Carla remained focused on the people behind the industry. Fitness professionals often juggle unstable schedules while trying to build sustainable careers. The flexibility many people assume exists within fitness work can sometimes come at the expense of consistency and security.
The Fitness Directory aims to create a system where both sides benefit. Gyms gain access to qualified professionals more efficiently, while trainers gain visibility, flexibility, and greater control over how they work.
For Carla, that balance matters deeply because she understands both perspectives personally.
“What drives me now is impact and building something that actually solves a real problem,” she says. “I’ve been on the other side, working in gyms, dealing with inconsistent opportunities, so I know how frustrating it can be.”
That understanding gives her leadership a grounded quality. She speaks less about disruption for the sake of attention and more about building something genuinely useful. Her focus stays rooted in function, trust, and long term value.
As the business has grown, so has her role within it. Moving from trainer to founder required an entirely different level of visibility and responsibility. She had to learn how to pitch ideas, navigate partnerships, make strategic decisions, and lead with confidence while still evolving herself.
There is often pressure on founders to appear certain at all times, but Carla speaks openly about learning through experience rather than pretending to have every answer from the beginning. That honesty shapes the culture she wants to create around her work.
She values consistency, accountability, and transparency over complicated messaging or inflated promises. In many ways, her leadership style mirrors the mindset developed through years in sport. Success is not built through occasional moments of intensity. It is built through repeated effort over time.
Redefining Success Beyond Achievement
One of the most striking aspects of Carla’s journey is how her understanding of success has evolved.
In competitive sport, success is often measurable and immediate. Results are displayed publicly through rankings, scores, and outcomes. Business, however, introduced a more nuanced definition. Progress became slower, less visible, and often more internal.
For Carla, success is no longer tied only to achievement. It is connected to impact, growth, and sustainability.
She speaks about freedom not in terms of escape, but in terms of possibility. The ability to continue evolving, creating, and opening opportunities for others matters more to her than external status.
That perspective shapes the future she envisions for The Fitness Directory.
Her ambitions for the platform extend far beyond recruitment alone. She sees the company becoming a broader ecosystem within the fitness industry, incorporating qualifications, events, partnerships, and apparel while continuing to strengthen its network of gyms and professionals.
There is also interest in expanding into physical gym spaces, creating deeper integration between the platform and the environments it serves. Yet despite these larger ambitions, the central purpose remains consistent. The goal is still to improve how the fitness industry functions for the people working within it every day.
Alongside the growth of the business, Carla is also exploring her own voice more publicly. She hopes to continue building her personal brand and eventually publish an autobiography reflecting on the journey from athlete to entrepreneur.
That desire seems less connected to self promotion and more connected to honesty. Her story carries lessons about reinvention, resilience, and the reality of building something without a clear roadmap. By sharing that experience openly, she hopes others might feel more confident beginning their own journeys before they feel completely ready.
The Quiet Strength of Consistency
There is a calm practicality in the way Carla approaches life and work. She does not romanticise entrepreneurship, nor does she frame setbacks as dramatic turning points designed to inspire applause. Instead, she speaks about progress in grounded terms.
Small actions repeated consistently.
Learning through experience.
Showing up even when motivation fades.
Those ideas may sound simple, but they reflect a deeper understanding of growth that many people only develop after navigating uncertainty themselves.
Her background in tennis taught her that discipline often matters more than emotion. In business, that lesson became even more important. Founding a company requires long periods of invisible work, persistence during slow momentum, and the ability to keep moving forward without immediate validation.
Carla approaches those realities with honesty rather than performance.
She also understands the importance of balance in sustaining long term growth. Structure remains important in her daily life, whether through training, work routines, or intentionally creating space away from constant pressure. Without that separation, burnout becomes inevitable.
The discipline that once shaped her as an athlete now helps sustain her as a founder, but it has evolved into something softer and more self aware. It is no longer solely about pushing harder. It is about building steadily.
That steadiness appears throughout her work, her leadership style, and the future she is creating.
Building the Future One Step at a Time
The fitness industry continues to evolve rapidly, shaped by changing work patterns, digital platforms, and shifting expectations around flexibility. Carla believes recruitment within the industry needs to evolve alongside it.
Her vision for The Fitness Directory reflects that understanding. She wants the platform to become the place gyms naturally turn to when they need reliable professionals and the place trainers trust to access meaningful opportunities. More importantly, she wants the system itself to feel fairer, faster, and more accessible for everyone involved.
There is ambition in that vision, but there is also patience.
Carla understands that building something lasting rarely happens quickly. Sustainable growth comes through consistency, adaptation, and long term thinking. Those values continue to guide her decisions as the company expands.
Looking back, it is clear that the injury which once disrupted her future also opened the door to a different kind of purpose. What initially felt like loss became redirection. The discipline learned through sport found a new outlet in entrepreneurship, and the challenges she experienced within the fitness industry became the foundation for meaningful change.
Her story is not one of overnight transformation. It is a story about evolution.
About learning to begin again.
About building confidence through action.
About trusting that a setback can become the beginning of something entirely different.
Today, Carla Nokes is still building. Not only a company, but a future shaped by resilience, clarity, and the belief that practical solutions can genuinely improve people’s lives. In an industry often driven by appearances, her work remains focused on something far more lasting: creating opportunities that help people move forward.
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