About BuildWithPros

The shop didn't start as a business plan. It started with a conversation.

Shawn Ray met Michael Mikkelsen from Denmark at the Arnold Sports Festival in Birmingham in 2022. What stood out immediately was not Michael's background in business. It was how he thought about the gym and the people in it.

The conversation moved quickly because both men were already thinking about the same things. Serious athletes getting pulled into constant change, gimmicks, and short timelines. The noise that rewards attention over consistency. They had both watched the same shift up close: how much more fragile the younger generation has become, coming up in a world of constant comparison, where the pressure arrives earlier and the standard they measure themselves against often isn't even real.

Shawn Ray

Shawn Ray spent decades at the highest level of the sport. Thirteen times on the Mr. Olympia stage. An IFBB Hall of Famer. A career built across multiple decades, through injuries, through industry changes, through everything the sport throws at you.

That kind of time inside the sport builds a body of knowledge that goes far beyond training. It is the perspective that only comes from doing the work for that long, making the wrong calls, learning what actually holds up, and watching the difference between what looks good for a season and what carries someone through a career. That is the view he brings to BuildWithPros.

Michael Mikkelsen

Michael Mikkelsen has spent over forty years as a serious gym goer. Never a competitor, but always a student of the environment. Over those decades he watched how trends shifted, how the culture changed, and how the people inside it responded. He developed a deep interest in human behavior, specifically how the discipline and structure built inside a gym can transfer directly into every other area of life. Relationships. Family. Partnerships. Work. The systems that shape who you become over time.

He has also seen the darker side of that world. He lost two close friends to substances, people he never expected to lose that way. That experience gave him a lasting respect for what gym culture gets right when it stays grounded, and a clear view of what goes wrong when it chases shortcuts.

How BuildWithPros works

Together, Shawn Ray and Michael Mikkelsen established the BuildWithPros platform to give that knowledge a home. Michael handles the infrastructure, the operations, and the commercial side. The content and products are Shawn's: his videos, audiobooks, PDF guides, and writing, though some of it Shawn and Michael have shaped together along the way. His perspective is built from a career most athletes only read about.

BuildWithPros operates alongside shawnrayofficial.com, Shawn Ray's main platform for media and commentary. The shop is where the practical work lives.

The guiding principle

The guiding principle of BuildWithPros comes directly from Shawn Ray:

"Knowledge is the difference between training and progress." — Shawn Ray

Anyone can train hard. Few know how to turn that work into progress that lasts. That gap is not closed by more effort or better motivation. It is closed by knowledge. The kind that comes from decades of doing the work, making the wrong calls, and learning what actually holds up over time.

BuildWithPros was built for athletes who already know how to work. When progress slows, effort is rarely the problem. Judgment is. This is the phase where small choices start shaping the next year, and where clarity matters more than hype.