Founder Story

Nathan James’s fitness journey began in secret. A self-described “scrawny kid”, Nathan would sneak into the garage of his suburban Newcastle home at the age of 12, slide a Bruce Lee movie into the VHS player and watch it as he completed a makeshift workout: discarded bricks as hand weights and water bottles balancing on a broom handle doubling as a barbell. 

In those early days, exercise gave Nathan a healthy outlet for his pent-up pre-teen energy. As his fitness regimen – and his equipment – evolved and matured, it gave him more: physical strength, emotional wellbeing, a career, purpose, life lessons and, most importantly, a community. It also led him to establish Fitness Cartel Health Clubs, one of Australia’s most exciting and rapidly expanding chains of fitness and wellness centres. He has opened 19 Fitness Cartel clubs and three affiliated Merse Wellness Spas across Australia and New Zealand since 2020 with ambitious plans to open 41 more clubs by 2030. 

While fitness is Nathan’s purpose and passion – he estimates he has owned and operated more than 30 fitness-related businesses in the past two decades, from gyms to sports nutrition stores – his career started in real estate. By day, he brokered deals between buyers and sellers, while after hours, he studied to become a fitness trainer. The lure of the gym ultimately proved too enticing and he used his sales experience to secure a job selling gym memberships at Genesis Health + Fitness. Nathan saw it as a foot in the door to personal training, but his obvious passion for fitness, the benefits of exercise and the power of building a supportive community saw him rise to gym manager before he eventually invested his savings to open a Genesis gym in Coffs Harbour. After almost four years – during which time the club became one of Genesis’s most profitable – he sold his stake to become a partner in World Gym Australia. 

Here, Nathan combined his shrewd real estate skills with his innate understanding of fitness clubs to identify expansion opportunities for World Gym Australia, growing the company’s footprint to 30 locations. While the business partnership ended acrimoniously, it gave Nathan the determination and opportunity to build a brand-new business from the ground up.  

In establishing Fitness Cartel Health Clubs, he went back to his unassuming beginnings and used those clear benefits from his own fitness journey to carefully build his brand: physical strength, emotional wellbeing, purpose, community. They are motivational drivers that resonate, with Fitness Cartel welcoming a growing community of 60,000 like-minded members and employing a team of 1,000 passionate fitness professionals. For all his achievements, those early days spent looking up to Bruce Lee are never too far from his focus: “I’ve got four children now. I want to prove to my kids that I can do this. I want to be a good role model for them.”