One Northern Ireland founder is solving the problem the coaching industry refuses to name.
Every Sunday, tens of thousands of online fitness coaches sit down to do work that has nothing to do with coaching. They open spreadsheets, read check-in forms, calculate macros, cross-reference three weeks of client data, and write personalized responses, one by one, for every client on their roster. For a coach carrying forty clients, that process can consume an entire day. It is skilled, necessary, and completely unsustainable. Stephen Cheevers watched it happen to hundreds of coaches over nearly a decade of working inside the industry, and he refused to accept that nobody had built a better solution. In 2026, he built one himself.
The Problem Nobody Was Naming
The global online fitness market is projected to exceed $250 billion by 2030. Behind that number are tens of thousands of working coaches, the majority running lean, founder-led businesses with no operations team, no admin support, and no infrastructure designed for scale. Most of them are genuinely skilled practitioners. Most of them also quietly plateau, not because their coaching is poor, but because their time runs out long before their ambition does.
“The coaches I have worked with for years are not struggling because they lack skill,” Cheevers says. “They are struggling because they are buried. Every week, hours of their time disappear into admin work that has nothing to do with coaching, and nobody has built anything to fix it. I got tired of watching talented people cap their businesses at thirty clients not because they could not coach more, but because the paperwork could not scale.”
Cheevers is not an outside observer offering a diagnosis. He is a practitioner with over a decade of sales experience and three years of proprietary coaching methodology, developed through The Coaches’ Mentorship, his previous business development programme. That operation personally mentored more than 500 coaches and served over 2,000 customers across the fitness, health, and performance industries in the UK, Ireland, and internationally. The methodology he built during those years, covering sales psychology, high-ticket closing, client retention, and business operations, forms the intellectual foundation of everything Coaches’ Closers builds today.
From Methodology to Machine
Coaches’ Closers launched in 2026 under the Trojan Horse Sales umbrella, the Northern Ireland-based sales training and consultancy firm Cheevers leads. Where Trojan Horse Sales built its reputation on teaching coaches to sell with authority, empathy, and structure, Coaches’ Closers takes that philosophy into the operational layer of a coaching business, identifying the bottlenecks that prevent scale and removing them through purpose-built AI technology.
The company’s first product, PULSE, is the clearest expression of that mission. PULSE is an AI-powered check-in intelligence platform built specifically for online fitness coaches. It integrates with a coach’s existing workflow, collecting weekly client check-in data through a branded form, processing it through an AI engine trained on elite physique coaching methodology, and delivering a fully formatted analysis, adjustment recommendations, and a ready-to-send draft response to the coach’s inbox in under thirty seconds.
“PULSE is not a chatbot,” Cheevers says. “It is not a prompt you copy and paste into ChatGPT. It is a coaching intelligence system, built on the same methodology elite physique coaches use to produce real results, that reads a client’s weekly data, applies the right logic, and hands the coach a ready-to-send response in under thirty seconds. The coach still makes every decision. They just do not have to do every calculation.”
What Makes PULSE Different
The distinction between PULSE and every other tool a coach might reach for comes down to what the system actually knows. Generic AI tools produce plausible-sounding responses. PULSE applies coaching logic: it checks compliance before adjusting calories, accounts for menstrual cycle water retention before flagging apparent fat gain, and recognises when a client has been in a sustained deficit long enough to warrant a diet break. That methodology did not come from research papers. It came from hundreds of coaching conversations with real practitioners.
“The thing that makes PULSE different is what it knows,” Cheevers explains. “It knows to check compliance before it touches calories. It knows the difference between week four water retention and genuine fat gain in a female client. It knows when a client has been in a deficit long enough that a diet break is the smartest move, even if the scale is still moving. That is not generic AI. That is years of coaching methodology encoded into a system that applies it consistently for every client, every week, without exception.”
Established coaching platforms such as TrueCoach, PT Distinction, and My PT Hub organise the coach-client relationship effectively. None of them analyse the data they collect. PULSE operates as the intelligence layer above those platforms, turning collected check-in data into actionable, coach-approved responses without replacing the infrastructure coaches already use.
A Vision Built for the Decade Ahead
PULSE is the first product in a planned suite of AI Agents designed to address every major operational bottleneck a coaching business faces: sales, marketing, delivery, and operations. The launch of PULSE is the beginning of that roadmap.
“PULSE is the first AI Agent we have built. It will not be the last,” Cheevers says. “The coaching industry has an admin problem, a sales problem, and a marketing problem, and all three are solvable with the right intelligence installed in the right places. That is what Coaches’ Closers is building: an AI infrastructure layer for coaching businesses that want to scale without hiring a team of ten people to do it.”
Built without external funding, from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and launched into a global market by a founder with genuine skin in the game, Coaches’ Closers represents a category of company that is increasingly rare in the AI space: a product built to solve a problem its creator personally witnessed, not to attract investment or capture a trend.
“We are in beta right now and the early feedback has been exactly what I hoped for,” Cheevers says. “Coaches who were sceptical about AI producing responses their clients cannot distinguish from something they wrote themselves. That is the bar. Not ‘good for AI.’ Just good. Full stop.”
Give Your Coaching Business Its Hours Back
If you are an online fitness coach spending your Sundays processing check-ins instead of building your business, PULSE was built specifically for you. Book a free fifteen-minute live demo at Coaches’ Closers to see the system process a real check-in in real time, and find out how coaches are reviewing and approving an entire client roster in the time it used to take to respond to one.
Explore More About Coaches’ Closers
Readers interested in learning more about Coaches’ Closers and PULSE can follow the company on Coaches’ Closers, Instagram, and Facebook.
