Photo Courtesy of Potentia Coaching
Potentia Coaching, an online fat-loss coaching business run from the UK by Charlie Sleight and Freya Larter, has taken on 206 clients in four years of trading, and most of them do not live in Britain. The founders say the bulk of the client base is now British women living as expats in the United Arab Emirates, a market the company reached without opening premises, hiring locally, or registering an office there.
The customer pool it is drawing from is large. Roughly 240,000 British nationals were in the UAE at the start of this year, according to figures reported by the Financial Times, making the British community the largest Western expatriate group in the country. The local fitness sector built to serve them is sizeable too. Ken Research values the UAE fitness services market at $1.42 billion in 2025, and the 2025 UAE Health and Fitness Industry Report, produced by Dubai Active Industry and Qantara Sports, counts about 1,344 registered gyms and fitness facilities across the country. The same report found that 41% of those facilities offer no ladies-only provision.
Potentia competes with none of them on floor space. It has no gym and no equipment. What it sells is a plan, a coach, and a weekly check-in, delivered over the phone and online, and that model has been growing faster than the physical one. Wellness Creatives, which publishes an annual fitness industry report, puts the global online fitness market at $33.4 billion in 2025, up from about $6 billion before the pandemic.
Two founders, five coaches, one customer
Potentia is a small operation. Sleight and Larter run it with a team of five coaches, and the founders say turnover has passed £500,000 at the current rate of growth. The company was built for women from the start, and the founders describe that as a deliberate commercial choice rather than a marketing line.
The programme is designed around the working weeks of its clients. Plans are built to move with work, childcare, and travel, and the coaching works around family meals rather than requiring separate food, so a client can eat what she is already cooking for her household. Clients check in with a coach every week, and when a busy stretch knocks a plan off course the coach adjusts it rather than restarting it. The founders say that adjustment is what separates a client who quits in the second week from one who is still going in the sixth month.
What the clients say on the record
Potentia holds a 4.7 out of 5 rating from 28 reviews on Trustpilot, where its listed contact location is the UAE. The reviews describe the same trade the founders describe. Client Gina Groom credits her coach, Charlie, with building something that “adapts the plan around my lifestyle” instead of asking her to fit her life around it. Elle Ryan writes about finally feeling comfortable in her clothes and credits her coach with “real lifestyle changes” rather than a quick fix. Other reviewers describe rebuilding a steadier relationship with food after years of starting over. Potentia has also recorded video testimonials with former clients.
Twenty-eight reviews is a small sample. The founders say most new clients arrive through referrals from women who have finished a programme, which would be consistent with a business that has grown to 206 clients on a team of seven without a physical presence in its main market.
The arithmetic of a narrow market
Two hundred and six clients over four years is a modest number against a gym chain, and the founders do not pretend otherwise. The case they make is that a narrow brief produces a better product. When a coaching business knows exactly who it serves, its advice gets specific, and the right client recognises herself in it. Potentia does not offer rapid transformation or claim to fix every goal for everybody. It offers steady fat loss for women who want it to last, without cutting out the foods they eat with their families.
Whether that holds as the company grows is the open question. The founders say they want to keep the ratio of coaches to clients low enough that the weekly check-in stays a real conversation rather than a template. That limits how fast the business can scale, and they appear to have accepted the trade.
For now, the measurable facts are these: a UK company, seven people, four years, 206 clients, most of them in a country its founders do not live in, and a review profile that says the same thing the founders say. The next test is whether the next 206 come from the same place.
