Inspirational quotes pop up on Facebook feeds every day. Some elicit positivity worth pausing to digest, others have a bland flavour of hollow words.

When Reece Kawalla posts, people take notice. 

The Albion Park man has a following. His words have meaning because, as cliched as it sounds, he practises what he preaches.

A self-confessed ‘’little bit of a brainiac’’, he quit university just six months shy of his double major degree. He was knocking down distinction averages without much effort but still threw in the towel.

He could have stuck it out, got his piece of paper to say he was highly educated, but that would get in the way of his dream. Every hour counted. It wasn’t one of those pipe dreams, but one  that was achievable with hard work, day in, day out.

Not once has the 25-year-old regretted his decision. He now has his own company, with two stores in the Illawarra and an ever-growing reach of customers across the country thanks to the internet and his relentless determination to succeed.

‘’I set myself ridiculous targets all the time,’’ Reece explains. ‘’I push for a ridiculous target and see where I land.

‘’My goal was 30 stores by 35 so if in 10 years time I can have 15, then that’s gonna be better than me being happy with two stores.’’

Every morning the Team Flex owner writes his list of goals - reminds himself why he doesn’t go out much, doesn’t spend money on luxuries and never really takes a holiday or a day off.

‘’I spend money on supplements and Lisa (his partner of three years),’’ he jokes. ‘’I don’t buy clothes, I put money back into the business.

‘’My parents taught me the value of a dollar and how much work it took to earn a dollar, it’s the way I was brought up. People of my generation feel entitled. If I didn’t have a job I’d scrub toilets. No job is demeaning. You start at the bottom and work your way up.

‘’Today, kids think they deserve to be on an 80k salary because they have a piece of paper. That’s not how it works.

Right from school I understood you need experience to get a job and that’s why I did it.’’

At 19 years old, Reece was buying protein for himself and his gym mates to save on shipping costs.

He was not a bodybuilding gym junkie type, rather a talented state-level soccer player who needed the gym for recuperation after a knee injury.

‘’I got to know a bunch of bodybuilders who were training for comps at the time, and I started being the one that would organise online orders with all my mates just to save on postage,’’ he said.

‘’I would collect everyone’s money and orders and like a poor uni student I thought I could make a bit here, why aren’t I leveraging off this opportunity?

‘’So I worked out how I could make a bit extra and still get it cheaper for my mates. I had an ABN from my work in the building industry so I used that to get an account.

Every dollar he made he put straight back in to more stock. Reece turned a room in his mum’s house into a makeshift supplement store.

‘’That’s how I met Lisa my partner. Her friend said ‘let’s go get some supplements from that store at Albion Park’.

‘’They went up and down the street and thought where is it? There is no store. They pulled up outside my house and Lisa thought I was a drug dealer,’’ he jokes.

The girls ventured inside, purchased their protein powder and the rest is history.

It was tough going at first. Suppliers were reluctant to get involved with a little-known 20-something budding entrepreneur with no shop front or online store.

‘’Everyone I approached just hung up the phone after they found out where I was.’’ 

’’Eventually I got onto a couple of nice reps and they said I needed a bricks and mortar store or an online shop.’’

Being more a ‘’people person’’ with limited knowledge of online marketing, Reece opted for the bricks and mortar.

‘’I’d already built up contacts, I got a good deal on a premises right next door to the gym at Albion Park so everything pushed me in that direction,’’ he said.

‘’Everybody told me a shop in Albion Park was going to flop but I was just confident I could make it work off the contacts I had locally. I’d never had any experience in running a shop, I didn’t know what products to stock, I didn’t know what systems to use.

The first three months he relied on pen and paper and an excel spreadsheet. People would enter the store and ask for prices on products.

‘’I would go to the computer and pretend that I was using a point of sale system. All I was doing was putting data into a spreadsheet back then.’’

For those first few months Reece, then 21, didn’t take a wage for himself. 

He worked a second job at night and on weekends.  His dedication to his dream paid off and by the time he turned 22, he had opened his second store at Woonona.

But with his university deferment period about to lapse it was decision time. 

‘’I tried to do it one day a week while running both the stores. Then I thought ‘what’s the point of this?’ 

‘’If I put effort into this and not enough into the shops, then I’m gonna lose the shops’. My passion was my business. So I just quit and that decision took a hell of a lot of stress off me.’’

The calculated risk paid off. 

But like any successful businessman, the 25-year-old isn’t sitting back marveling at his own success, he is focused on what’s left to do.  

By 30 he wants to be financially free but working because he wants to.

‘’I’ll be that guy at 75 still going to the office,’’ he said. ‘’My mates say to me ‘you are living to work’, but I’d rather put in five or 10 years now than battle for the next 50.

‘’I woke up at 4am this morning and I was in the shop because there’s stuff to do, things coming up that get me out of bed every day.’’

Team Flex Australia is much more than a store for bodybuilders, with a growing online customer base of athletes and everyday mums and dads.

‘’At this stage I want to open a couple more shops in the next few years,’’ Reece says.

‘’Stores are difficult though, with people and overheads and rent. I  will only open if I find the right person. It’s not the Team Flex name that brings people in it’s the person behind the counter. Until I find the right people I wouldn’t even bother throwing money at it.’’

And now he has a second baby to nurture – a new company called Superior Threads which sees him venturing into the world of gym fashions and custom manufacturing of new clothing labels for clients.

‘’Whether in business or life if you want something to succeed you need to give it 100 per cent every single day,’’ he says. ‘’I put myself in a position two years ago where I gambled everything I had and had no other choice but to work or lose it all.

‘’Sometimes being backed up against a wall gives you the momentum to get over it.’’