He left a building site with £3,000. Now he’s in 40 countries.

Callum Webb grew up on a council estate in Liverpool, left school with no qualifications, and spent his first ten years working on a building site. At 25 he had £3,000 in a drawer. He spent every penny of it on a personal training course. Today he is co-founder of POW8R – the number one live stream and on-demand fitness app, featured in Vogue and GQ, with members across the globe.

In episode two of Football for Breakfast, Jim Johnson sits down with Callum in the greasy spoon café to talk about football, fitness and what they have in common. The answer, it turns out, is everything.

Where it started

Callum’s earliest football memory is sitting on a stanchion on the old standing Kop as a four or five year old with his grandad – a memory that shaped not just his love of football but his understanding of community, belonging and what it means to be part of something bigger than yourself.

From there the conversation moves through the treble season, the 2001 FA Cup final, and the week in 2005 where Callum scored a free kick at Anfield for Cardinal Lennon on the Monday night and watched Liverpool win the Champions League in Istanbul on the Wednesday. He brings a ticket stub to the table. It isn’t his. His parents accidentally burned his memorabilia when he moved out. So he called his grandad.

The moment everything changed

At 25, Callum looked around the building site and knew it wasn’t the life he was signing himself up for. He googled personal training courses at 11pm, found one for £2,999, and spent everything he had. Three months in he made the decision to coach female clients only – a niche move that felt risky and turned out to be the making of him.

He went into online coaching before Covid, watched thousands of people show up to his free Instagram classes during lockdown, and walked away from a six figure coaching business to launch POW8R with zero members on day one.

Building ever since

Jim puts it to him halfway through: you left the building site, but you’ve been building ever since. Callum hadn’t thought of it that way before.

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Football for Breakfast is presented by OSS Security. New episode every Tuesday morning.