Founder and CEO of The Fitness Directory | Leader | Personal Trainer | Therapist | Coach | Athlete
The Disconnect That Costs Millions
Fitness operators lose revenue every single day because a class instructor or fitness professional calls in sick at the last minute. The morning scramble begins with frantic phone calls, unreturned text messages, and a rising sense of panic. Meanwhile, thousands of highly qualified fitness professionals sit idle, waiting for work that never reaches them. The disconnect is not a lack of available supply in the market. The barrier is visibility, trust, and speed. Carla Nokes saw this operational gap firsthand and decided to build the infrastructure required to close it permanently.
The Operator Solving Her Own Problem
Carla Nokes is the Founder and CEO of The Fitness Directory, an on-demand recruitment platform modernising how gyms and fitness professionals connect. She is replacing manual phone calls and outdated spreadsheets with a scalable marketplace that matches vetted talent with immediate operator demand. Carla is not a technology outsider guessing at market needs from a distance. She is an industry veteran solving the exact operational failure she lived through for over a decade.
From The Court To The Gym Floor
Before she built software, she built a career as an athlete. Carla began her professional life as a competitive tennis player. The courts demanded a specific kind of mental endurance and a relentless focus on execution. She learned early that success is rarely instantaneous, requiring a deep commitment to the process over the immediate prize.
“Progress comes from being willing to keep showing up when results aren’t immediate,” Carla says. That elite athletic background forged a resilience that translates directly into the grueling reality of building a technology startup from the ground up.
An injury forced Carla to move into the broader fitness sector. She worked as a personal trainer, a sports massage therapist, a college lecturer, and a coach. She saw the industry from every conceivable angle, absorbing the structural flaws of the business. She experienced the frustration of trying to piece together a reliable income as an independent professional. She also watched operators struggle to maintain their schedules when staff inevitably fell through.
The realisation hit her, that the entire system was fundamentally broken. An operator needing short-term cover had to contact multiple professionals individually, wait for responses, check qualifications, and hope someone was available. It was a manual, inefficient scramble that cost time and damaged member trust. Carla understood the people, the economics, and the culture behind this failure. She knew the talent pool was deep, but the infrastructure connecting that talent to the facilities was entirely missing. That realization became the catalyst for a much larger ambition.
Building The Infrastructure Layer
This led to the creation of The Fitness Directory. Operating out of Surrey, Carla is building the foundations of an Uber-style marketplace for fitness recruitment, designed to connect fitness operators with reliable, vetted professionals on demand. Rather than rushing to launch, the focus has been on building a robust and verified supply network first, ensuring the infrastructure is in place before scaling operator adoption.
The Fitness Directory has already built a database of more than 3,000 fitness professionals and is developing a 100-gym pilot programme ahead of launch. Carla is focused on creating the infrastructure layer for the fitness workforce, while establishing partnerships with martial arts franchises and exploring international recruitment opportunities. The ambition is not simply to create another recruitment platform, but to build a reliable workforce infrastructure that can scale across the fitness industry. But before that scale can be achieved, the placement process must be built around absolute reliability.
“Quality and trust cannot be compromised for speed,” Carla says. She ensures every professional is appropriately qualified and verified before they ever appear on an operator’s screen for a potential match.
This verification process eliminates the biggest bottleneck in the industry today. Operators no longer have to guess if a last-minute replacement is actually certified to teach a specific class. The platform handles the vetting, allowing gyms to fill shifts rapidly without risking their reputation or member safety. It is a system built on strong unit economics and defensible network effects that grow stronger with every successful placement.
“The talent already exists within the industry, the challenge is making that talent discoverable, trusted and available at the moment an operator needs it,” Carla explains. Success will be determined by the quality of the match, the feedback from both sides, and the likelihood of repeat usage.
When a gym needs short-term cover, they will no longer have to rely on a desperate text message chain. They will be able to open The Fitness Directory and access a curated, ready-to-work network of verified professionals. The platform strips the friction out of the process, saving operators hours of administrative panic while giving professionals the flexibility and visibility they crave. Carla is turning a historic industry headache into a streamlined, predictable operational standard.
Connecting The Pieces
The Fitness Directory is being built around a simple belief: the fitness industry does not need more talent; it needs a better way to connect the talent that already exists with the facilities that need it. Ahead of launch, Carla Nokes is working to create a digital infrastructure that can help reduce the disruption caused by last-minute staff shortages, while giving fitness professionals greater access to flexible opportunities.
At the heart of the platform is the ethos of “collaboration over competition.” Rather than fitness professionals competing for limited opportunities or gyms struggling to find reliable cover, The Fitness Directory aims to connect the industry and create a more collaborative workforce ecosystem. By bringing operators and professionals together through one platform, the goal is to make recruitment faster, more accessible and more reliable, while creating greater opportunities for everyone involved.
The launch will mark the beginning of that vision: taking a fragmented, largely manual process and building a connected digital solution designed around trust, speed and collaboration.
Carla Nokes is the Founder and CEO of The Fitness Directory based in Surrey, United Kingdom. She builds the infrastructure that connects verified fitness professionals with operators on demand. To connect with Carla or learn more, visit her LinkedIn profile.
