Thriving Student: Daniel Lopez

In 2012, Daniel came out of graduate school with a Masters degree in Operatic Performance. His dream role: Tony in West Side Story.

Unfortunately, in the years that followed, Daniel found that making a living as a young singer was not easy. He was consistently being hired for gigs, but the money was minimal. He was babysitting to make ends meet.

“It was like indentured servitude — you can’t possibly have an ordinary existence,” he says.

Daniel reached his breaking point when he was offered his dream role as Tony in West Side Story. But the offer was terrible. “For 6 weeks of work I’d be paid $500 total plus housing and breakfast. I just couldn’t accept it.”

In addition, Daniel wanted more than just to get paid. He wanted to get better — to take vocal lessons and improve so that he could get more of the kinds of roles he really wanted. (And do less of the not so rewarding stuff, things like dressing up as a goat for children’s shows at school and theatres. (Not exactly what he went to graduate school for.)

The problem: voice lessons with a quality teacher in New York City are expensive.

Daniel knew he needed another kind of job to fund his work, and improve his skills.

He thought personal training might be an option. Daniel had used fitness and nutrition to transform his own body, helping him become more desirable as a performer. His experience and knowledge in fitness had also enabled him to help friends and family members improve their bodies and health too. He found it rewarding to help people reach their health and fitness goals, and wondered if a training job could help him to pursue both of his passions.

So, he got his certification and took a job at a major gym chain — but without giving up on his dream.

“People would find out that I was training and they’d say, ‘oh, are you still singing?’. And I would say, ‘I’m not singing now. But I will be’.”

But would crushing it in the gym mean giving up on his dreams?

Daniel quickly discovered that he was good at getting and training clients. He was making good money, he developed strong relationships with clients, helping them to achieve remarkable results, and he was a mentor for young trainers at his club.

But things weren’t quite right. The gym management pressured him to spend more and more time in the gym, to increase his sales and client roster. He felt pressure to increase the already overwhelming quantity sessions performed, as opposed to sustaining or improving the quality of his service.

After a while, Daniel realized that all this time in the gym wasn’t helping his singing career. In fact, the better he did as a trainer, the more he felt removed from his singing. When the roles did come, he didn’t have the flexibility to accept them. And the long, demanding hours only kept growing, leaving no time for vocal lessons – ironically enough, given that affording lessons was a large part of why he’d started training in the first place – or to practice.

He had a choice to make. “Either I stay at the big box gym or I don’t. I would have made $100k this year. But I also would have been miserable.”

Then Daniel found the Online Training Academy.

“I thought, hey — maybe there is way that I could do this.”

He’d had been giving thought to online training but didn’t know how to make it happen. With the Academy, he finally had a roadmap.

“I knew it wouldn’t happen overnight,” he says. But he put in the work, implemented what he learned in the Online Trainer Academy and worked on improving his singing skills at the same time.

And then it happened.

He landed the role of Tony — this time, with a different company, and a better offer.

“When I got the role of Tony — the exhilaration of that! That dream role, the one I’d had to turn down because of the money, I could do it now. I thought, ‘I can do this, and I can still work, training clients online’.”

From there, Daniel went from “feeling hopeless to crushing it.” Success keeps building, both with his online training company and his singing career. He’s getting more rewarding performing opportunities – both artistically and financially – than ever before. And he’s excited about all the people he’s helping with his online training company.

“There was no magic pill,” says Daniel. “I had to work to get to the success. But all the time and money I’ve spent have been worth it. Now it feels like everything is coming together.”