At a recent mastermind meeting with some of my mentorship clients I was listening carefully as each detailed their situation. With this particular group most people were in the early stages of their career with young businesses. In many ways this is the most difficult stage, it’s seemingly difficult to get a big rock rolling, but when you do…

On Sunday I began thinking to myself of days gone by, when I was really struggling. At times I felt like I was never going to make it, in fact I was so broke on multiple occasions I tried to leave the industry three different times. I’d get down and out thinking it was impossible to earn a decent living doing what I loved to do, then I’d find the determination in a new plan only to fail again.

I’ve come to realize, and see it being repeated in many fitness professional (and truly entrepreneurs in general) that we seemed to overlook the simple details or don’t break it down to simple enough steps that just like many of our clients we become frustrated and ultimately fail.

Anyways, back to Sunday at the mastermind, as these thoughts and revelations dominated my mind and moved on to where I am now and the whirlwind of growth that has occurred in the last five years something dawned on me, something I wish I had thought of many years ago. Immediately I asked everyone to give me their attention to try a little exercise. (In many ways the thanks for the inspiration for this goes out to Craig Balantyne and his mathematical formula for success, which ironically I’m currently flying to go see as part of a mastermind I participate in.)

If you have any clients at all first I want you to calculate or consider what is the average amount of money each client spends with you each month and the amount of hours you contribute to provide that service. If you don’t have any clients currently the following information will likely serve as an example. I’m finding world wide whatever your currency is the average cost for personal training seems to be universally set around the $1/minute or $60/hr. Let’s consider that our most popular program at One-to-1 is 3 X week for 30 minutes or about 12 sessions a month or 6 hours of service, on average worldwide this will cost approximately $360.

Now I ask you, what is the first big landmark for you for total revenue? For most people I find it’s $100,000 to start but you can choose any number you choose.

Let me ask you a simple question, would you be willing to work 1 year of your life if I could guarantee you would generate $100,000 or more in revenue as a personal trainer for ever year after? If the answer is yes read on, if the answer is no than ask yourself how many months am I willing to commit to reach this goal?

If you, like most, would be willing to contribute the next 12 months to reaching your first landmark of $100,000 in personal training revenue than I’m excited to show you just how easy that can be.

$100,000 / 12 = $8,333/mth / $360 (client’s average spend price) = 23 clients paying you $360/mth will produce $100,000 in total revenue over 12 months. (The great news is once you exceed 23 you’re well on your way to much larger amounts of revenue.

Now since we have 12 months to reach our goal look how easy this becomes, this means that you only need to find 2 new clients each month to pay you $360/mth to be easily on track to reach your goal.

I can tell you from experience that almost any good trainer will convert half or more of all clients that come to them interested in their services, so this means you only need to meet 1 person a week that has an interest in reaching a fitness goal.

Do you think in 40 hours you could meet enough people to find 1 person that would be interested in hearing about your services? By now most of you should be thinking this sounds pretty easy.

I’d like to go further and ensure it really is easy.

Would you be willing to use Google to look up a meet-up group or other networking group in your area, attend a meeting this week and introduce yourself at the meeting as a trainer looking to provide a free assessment and training session to anyone interested?

Would you be willing to offer the same free assessment and training sessions as a free bonus to any network marketer to give to any of their new customers?

Will you take the time to write a short classified for Kijiji or Criagslist detailing your services and offer to give anyone interest a trial package of sessions or a money back guarantee if they try your services?

Will you take the time to contact friends on Facebook and ask them for referrals with similar trial offers?

Will you take the time to approach local businesses to offer to spend an hour with their staff and teach them valuable techniques for improving posture or improving nutritional habits?

Do you think you could meet just one person a week that would like to talk about reaching their fitness goals? Remember you only need half of them to take an interest in your services.

By now you should be thinking that meeting one person a week is so easy that you’re excited to consider what would happen if you met 3-4 instead. Anyone can do it, there are dozens of other great strategies equally as easy that can allow to generate even more prospects. Three of my top ones are explained in detail and available in my 3D Client Attraction product.

What are you waiting for? If you want to be a profitable personal trainer you will be!

This is the wrong approach, in fact applying that data to the equation is the final step, the validation that you have in fact identified your audience and they do in fact reside within your immediate reach.

Last night while unwinding from the whirlwind workshop weekend (I get so jacked up with all the mutual inspiration that I always find it difficult to unwind to sleep the night after) my wife’s cellphone rings…it’s an automated phone call from one of the electoral candidates.

The message was heavily scripted, clearly prompted, lacked any form of emotion and blatantly said I should “not trust” specific candidates. That was the focal point of the message that ultimately became my focal point of the message, except instead of identifying with the caller and his plea it lead me to immediate mistrust the caller.

Clearly a marketing message gone wrong. I suspect I was not the caller’s target audience, I believe he was trying to shop for support from a still older audience but forgive me if you happen to disagree but I think this message will have been even more wrong for that older audience.

Let me explain.

If I was marketing to people of 50+ years of age I would think the following:

1)   They like or prefer to read message and evaluate the information to make a decision such as in a medium like a newspaper.

2)   Visual messages on television would likely to be effective as long as they meet the basic criteria of a relationship: genuine emotion, passion driven, sympathetic to the needs of the group whom the speaker is wishing to connect with.

3)   A spoken message could be effective met with the same criteria as a visual, interaction with a real individual likely to be extremely effective.

4)   I anticipate this group of people to be slightly resistant to technology.

5)   I would expect this group to have a high barrier of mistrust to which sympathetic language and genuine transference of emotion will be critical to overcome.

6)   I would also expect this segment to have some of the best overall understanding of the various political platforms so blatantly telling them to act a certain way without validation of why is likely going to be a major disconnect.

I think you can easily see why an automated, non-emotion, scripted phone call with the focal point of “not trusting” another candidate is likely to back fire. Could you imagine paying thousands of dollars for a campaign that not only perhaps doesn’t work but cripples your potential outcome?

This is why as a successful fitness professional it’s critical you identify your most likely customer. Close your eyes, picture them in your head and describe them to a fault.

What do they look like?

How old are they?

What are their interests?

What are their dislikes?

What are their potential problems or challenges?

What places do they frequent?

What items or services do they use?

Who do they associate with?

Drill down every detail even to the point of giving them a name, it’s so much more than just knowing if a certain segment of people are immediately accessible to you. Every communication you have with your audience you must be writing to ‘them’ using the language that makes sense for that relationship.

Just this weekend I asked, “if you were writing a letter to your member of parliament and your sweetheart would you use the same language?”

Obviously not, so are you using the right language to communicate with your desired audience?

The Business Pyramid represents the only three ways you can make more money in your fitness business.

You can…

1)   Get more clients.

2)   Charge each client more.

3)   Sell current and previous clients more products and services.

Almost every fitness professional I’ve ever met, and myself included, becomes distracted with the idea of continually attracting new clients. In fact I’m sure you’ve thought of at least 5 different promotions, ideas or strategies in just the last 30 days that you might use to attract new clients.

Going a step further just doing a quick google search for “how-to get more personal training clients” yields oodles of results.

Though it is important to continually attract new personal training clients one of the biggest points of failure is that most fitness professionals are always creating new strategies to achieve this. Instead, far more effective is choose 2-3 strategies and perfect them. If fitness challenges work for you, keep running them, choose different lengths, package them differently but basically execute the same series of steps each time. If short term programs or trials work for you, keep using them, but perfect the same series of steps with different names and packages and keep running them. You get the idea, creating is good, and it’s good to be continually creating but often we get locked in creation and never perfect anything.

As a consumer I know you appreciate value and service, well the best value and service comes from practice makes perfect. This is also why even as a solo personal trainer it’s critical you begin documenting processes, making an operations manual because the more things you do the same each time the better your client experience, the more perceived value you create and the bonus is it even lowers your cost of doing business.

The next time you’re thinking of ways of attracting more personal training clients stop and think back to all the things you’ve done in the past. Look for ones that exceeded your expectation, revisit them, improve on the steps and run them again. In the last 12 weeks 6 emails and two different fitness challenges has helped our studio attract more than 60 new clients. This alone would almost be enough to start a brand new, full-scale facility like hours in a new market from scratch. By comparison the first fitness challenge we ran yielded like 30 people that quickly fell off to like 10 because we weren’t good at it. Don’t reinvent the wheel just improve it.

The next way to increase revenue is to increase your rates. I don’t know about you but this has been the toughest one for me, knowing when and feeling comfortable enough to raise your rates.

This is where your creativity can really go to work. Look at the service you provide, break it into components and apply the same concept of improving the wheel. There are always areas that you can continue to improve what you offer. Maybe it’s creating a new client resource (like a video exercise archive), maybe it’s how you handle billing logistics, maybe it’s a component of service that you offer (like assuming the role of coach over trainer and learning to evaluate and address different learning styles.) With each component of your business if you break it down into core components you will soon find yourself perfecting patterns of application, developing new tools and resources and ultimately providing more value. It’s at this point that it will be easy to raise your rates as you are truly providing a better product and people will thank you for it.

As you pick apart your services you may find it makes sense to break different aspects of your service off into new standalone products. Some of your clients will want this new service along with their old; you’ve just effectively increased your revenue with your warmest audience.

Here’s where this whole thing comes full circle or why it must be a pyramid or closed geometric shape. At some point in your fitness career your clients are going to move on. They may just need a change; perhaps they’ve reached their goals or have out grown your current service offerings. Out of the hundreds of fitness professionals I’ve met few have had any defined ideas on how to get these old clients to come back, in stead we spend thousands of dollars finding new ones. I know this to be true as I have boxes of old clients and I’ve been asking and asking looking for that perfect process to bring them back.

The answer is simple, talk to them, stay in touch. I’m now convinced that predictable outcomes are the only way to run a successful business. We used defined strategies to meet new potential clients; once we’ve met our prospect we make a point to get to know them by sharing content and contacting them directly. Why did it take so long for us to decide to do this with our old customers? This I don’t know but learn from me in this regard, designate hours each month to send postcards and call your old clients, see how they are doing, offer them high value trials or old rates just like you might do with a new prospect.

It’s tried and true there is nothing more predictable than getting on the phone and talking to people, if you’ve read my recent posts you know how important it is to have defined targets and strategies that ensure you meet them. This is exactly what I will be talking about at my coming www.ProfitablePersonalTrainerLive.com workshop.

These last couple years depending on where you are in the world have been especially difficult for many fitness professionals. Unpredictable economic conditions have produced cash flow and revenue problems for many. I’ve received a lot of questions lately about how I continue to reach and exceed my revenue targets; my answer is always the same plan backwards.

I’m going to walk you through this process the same way I’m looking at future facilities.

In my mind the goal for a new facility will be to reach $500,000 total revenue in 18 months or less. This means simply I need to reach $28,000 reoccurring revenue/month.  If it takes me 3 months of aggressive promotion to get near to this that number rises to $33,000/month to reach my 18 month goal.

The average cost of personal training in my area is around $1/minute or $60/hr. we’ll use these numbers for this illustration. Most of my clients train an average of 3 30 minute sessions/week, or an average cost of $360/month in this example.

$28000 / $360 = 92 clients. I have 90 days to find 92 clients or simply 31 clients per month, or 1 day.

What is your average closing ratio of new prospects? Meaning how many people that inquire become paying clients? My program manager regularly maintains 75% to 85% even with aggressive trial offers and promotions for continual lead generation.

For this example let’s use 60%, very attainable for a new trainer.

So to reach my 31 client target I will need to meet with 52 prospects each month, or 13/week.

When you set consultations or sales appointments how many show up? We find consistently in our area it’s at least 80%, usually more. So assuming the same is true in your area that means I need to set 63 appointments this month or 16 appointments per week.

This is your most important task, ask yourself how am I going to set 16 appointments per week? What means of promotion can I use that will allow me to talk to 16 new people about what I do?

When you become razor focused on this one objective (or break it down even further to 2 a day) you’ll be surprised at how much easier this becomes.

Ask your clients for referrals, use email promotion, use facebook ads, online classifieds, direct mail, door hangers, flyers, trade shows, run aggressive trial offers and short term fitness challenges, all you need is to be able to 2 people a day.

If you want to know what I do check out www.3dclientattraction.com these are the exact strategies that we’ve been using to hit our targets.

In just 90 days I could be easily on track to reach $500,000 in total revenue from scratch in 18 months or less. Having worked backwards is there any reason you couldn’t continue to apply this process and easily exceed that goal?

It’s so easy to be distracted by your emotions with all the unexpected things you must face each day. Take a minute, focus think about what you really want and then plan backwards, once you understand the baby steps it’s much easier than you think. Doesn’t this sound a lot like the same things you probably tell your training clients?

Only 3 people had a badge this long for attendance, contribution and achievement, you could say I'm a wiley veteran.

Like every other year the Fitness Business Summit was over the top in 2012.

If you’re like me you may have times where you’re feeling burnt out, tired, like it’s hard to focus and get shit done. If it means rolling pennies, turning in bottles to go to events like this you should. The raw energizing inspiration is invigorating, you will stretch your vision, rekindle passion for your business and come back believing far more is possible than you ever believed before.

This single event has been an evolution for me, I’m proud to call Bedros my mentor and friend, it’s pretty neat to take the stage each year and talk about our successes and even more neat to see all the new people talking about their successes.

The content is always fantastic. From basic understanding of there are only 3 ways to grow your fitness business:

1)   Get more clients.

2)   Raise your prices.

3)   Sell each customer more things.

More than a dozen strategies were walked through this weekend for getting more clients. From using appreciation tools like thank you cards and coffee shop gift cards as a mechanism for stimulating referrals to SEO strategies for organic leads to using the boy band post card to bring old customers back.

Pricing discussions always revolve around EFT and if you’re not using it you’re seriously leaving your business in a precarious situation. Then there is the discussion of bundling services and how you can easily create items of extra value with services like FreeConferenceCall.com or a simple FlipCam.

If all of this get’s your head spinning maybe answering these questions will help. They came from an excellent presentation by Craig Ballantyne on getting started with your first info product. Ever been to a conference where the presenter buys everyone in the room a beer? Like I said a conference like none other.

Fitness Business Summit is truly a different kind of conference, expected anything.

Ask yourself:

1)   What do I do better than everyone else?

2)   What are my best qualities, skills and characteristics?

3)   What do I know better than everyone else?

4)   Who are my raving fans?

5)   What is my ‘Magic Time’? (Magic time is those couple hours a day that we all have where our mind is the sharpest and we just get far more done in a short period of time. Craig says it’s critical to identify, utilize and viciously protect this time.)

These questions can be a real game changer in your business, you see as fitness professionals we all get caught up in being good technical trainers. We wait for people interested in our services to inquire. Truth is there are only a handful of those customers that every fitness professional is fighting for. There is a much bigger audience that wants to look and feel better about themselves but haven’t even considered using something like personal training, and the best news is there’s no one fighting for them.

Take the answers from the above questions and really focus on them. Everything you write, all the ads you create should be centered around identifying with those answers. This is how you create your brand image and your customers will love you for it.

Jay Abraham was amazing, he stretched your vision well beyond where many of us reside today. Hanging out with 8 time Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman was pretty cool also. All in all the event was amazing but the absolute best part was just being around so many like-minded individuals. I was so motivated I created my lead box marketing product Saturday afternoon and put it up for sale late Saturday night. You will find those are the kinds of odd miracles that happen when you attend these kinds of events. I can’t wait for Profitable Personal Trainer Live next month to experience this kind of thrill and inspiration again. Not to mention to be able to monopolize Bedros at an event with only 100 people as opposed to 400 people is going to be a serious competitive advantage. Where are you in your business and where are you going?

An absolute income is one that you will continually trade time for dollars for. This is fine, considering that your passion has now lead to an income and therefore the time you trade is something you enjoy doing; however, to be truly successful you need to be able to separate yourself from a business model and have it continue to generate your income. By separating yourself from this income stream you are now free to consider additional populations and repeat your successful model, or you are now free to relax and enjoy additional things in life outside of business.

A relative income is such that little to no work is involved in order to maintain an income. This can be established and accomplished in a number of ways including, but not limited to, hiring additional individuals to train according to your principles while taking a percentage of the income generated as a bonus to yourself for hiring and teaching the individuals these principles. As well, generating a series of manuals or possibly an ebook that allows for little to no overhead costs while still generating an income for individuals looking too educate themselves on your expertise.

Time is the only limited commodity. There are limitless amounts of money in the world; however, money does not buy you time. Make time for yourself and let your success be defined as the achievement of an ideal lifestyle and not the most riches.

At the end of the day the worst thing that can happen is failure. Period. And as soon as you determine the worst case scenario and ways to avoid it then you have not only defined your fear but have generated ways to stay away from it. Keep failing! Fail better. Learn from mistakes, and keep moving forward.

Define your passion. Let it drive you. Riches will follow suit.

Joshua K. Neufeld

www.Neufitness.ca

One of the many gaps I still see in the education for fitness professionals is in the actual mechanics and systems of running a business. The last five years have been a whirlwind, it’s hard to believe that our training studio has even been open that long. What’s more bizarre is thinking back five years to the countless hours painting and getting ready to open. Though we had a business plan that was all we really had. We didn’t have an elaborate marketing plan, in fact our whole opening strategy was an ‘opening soon’ ad on the radio, a small mailing list, and our network of past clients, friends and family.

Fast forwarding a few years I can’t even imagine a day going by without having an operations manual to turn to, many documents that ensure a consistent measure of service for our clients and an understanding of and frequent review of KPIs or Key Performance Indicators.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in my opinion are a critical component to the long term health, predictability and success of your business. As you know we’re all emotional creatures and many of the decisions we make in life are greatly influenced by our emotions. In my short time as an entrepreneur I can tell you that every day is a rollercoaster of emotion based on the many things that occur, from victories and client successes, major breakthroughs, praise in the community as we’ve won awards, to an unhappy customer, uncollectible accounts, staffing issues and relationships, and the list goes on. You can’t afford to make the major decisions in your business solely on emotion, it’s critical you have a list of KPIs that are quick and easy to review, that eliminate as much erroneous information as possible, that are easy to understand, and that you are comfortable reviewing often.

Some of the KPIs we track in our business are: session/usage volumes, prospect generation, lead conversion, EFT growth/decline and cash flow planning.

Cash flow planning has always been one of the most confusing to me and I think depending on who you talk to it can be referred to in many forms. I know what is now my cash flow plan has taken the form of: expense tracking, budgeting, a simplified income statement and ultimately now what I’m pretty sure is an actual cash flow statement.

When it comes to cash flow planning I consider the following four things primarily:

1)   Revenue Sources – Depending on the products and services you offer you may have multiple sources of revenue. Within our studio we only have two currently: services and merchandise.  (Don’t confuse yourself by thinking that each service you may offer is a different revenue stream. For the purpose of a KPI you want to simplify and minimize the amount of additional information to be able to look at the raw performance.)

2)   Fixed Costs – Your fixed costs are all the obvious things like a lease, utilities, and consistent monthly expenses. They are an expense whether you do business or not and they don’t fluctuate greatly based on the volume of business that you do. At first it may seem confusing but things like front desk employees and even class instructors are fixed expenses if their wage isn’t fluctuating by the number of customers. (ex. Instructor costs the same if there is 1 participant or 20 and you have a consistent class schedule.)

3)   Variable Costs – The only real cost I consider to be a variable cost is the wage/session paid to my trainers. Because the revenue they generate versus the wage they earn is completely dependent upon how many sessions of service they provide this cost may fluctuate significantly.

4)   Service/session Volume – The final consideration for my cash flow plan is another of our KPIs, total session volume. Total session volume helps me

Once you’ve organized and have separated and organized your revenue streams and expenses this historical data can really aid you in the acquisition of your crystal ball. For instance if you look back over a year of historical data in the areas described above you will likely notice peaks and valleys. Though each year is different you’re going to find the general pattern of your business, an example would be higher revenues in January with the New Year’s Resolution craze. Each year forward you might begin planning for these ebbs and flows with an increased marketing campaign frequency or tighter spending to ensure the long term health of your business.

There is also a number of interesting pieces of information you can extrapolate. By dividing your service volume by total revenue you can find out approximately what each visit by a customer is worth to you, this helps you plan for and predict revenues or growth based on volume. You could then divide total fixed costs by your total volume to understand what the average customer interaction costs you whether it’s a consultation to a training session. This can be useful when considering pricing strategies or promotional pricing.

There is a number of other ways this information can be used, the more you work with it the more you will find it can give you an instant snapshot of the health of your business and a glimpse of the future.

I highly recommend identifying the KPIs of your business and finding simple ways to track, evaluate and separate them from all the erroneous information that many forms of club management software provide. This is one of the many things  I focus on and teach within the context of the Profitable Personal Trainer mentorship program.

A short time ago one of my coaching clients was doing something really cool with Facebook that I wanted to share with you. This works especially well for fitness boot camps and group personal training. (Additionally check out my update at the end that can make this work for pretty much any program you offer.)

By now you may have heard of the “human billboard” concept or offering deep discounts to people that can generate referrals for you. Today we’re going to take that a step further with Facebook. We all know just about everyone has a Facebook account, and if they are one of the rare few that don’t, it’s only a matter of time. What my coaching client is doing is having clients “tag” his studio in comments. Each time someone tags his facility in a comment it will also show on his studio fanpage, this makes it easy to hold your foot soldiers accountable.

So how does this help you? Well on average most people have 200 or more friends on Facebook, every time they make a comment that comment get’s shown multiple times on all of their friends news feeds. The more interaction with those impressions the more times it’s shown, it’s that simple. You can quickly see how you can suddenly have a third party endorsement or viral marketing span across 100s of people in a very short time because they’re all on Facebook way too often. (To further validate this the statistics of four fanpage show that with less than 1000 fans our social reach in our community is extending into the tens of thousands on a weekly basis, we are reaching an insane amount of local people on a weekly basis just with our fanpage, imagine how much further you can go if people are tagging and talking about you.)

Now you don’t have to do this for billboards, it’s easy to run challenges, ask people to tag your studio or you in comments, set a goal like the first person to comment on such a day wins a prize…you know what they say early bird get’s the worm. Or the first person to make 3 unique comments, it could be anything really.

Important things to remember:

• Posts don’t need to be (and likely shouldn’t be) sales oriented.
• The best posts are just legitimate comments, like “My workout @PersonalTrainingRedDeer was amazing today!” or even better, “My trainer @PersonalTrainingRedDeer weighed me today, I’ve lost 20lbs!”
• Facebook is about natural conversation, don’t encourage spamming people will just ignore it.

(TIP: If you don’t know how to set your page username go to www.facebook.com/username.)

A little tip that can go a long way for generating massive referrals and creating your tribe, the ideas are endless from referral contests, referral rewards, fan building and much much more. Use your imagination….in fact in the spirit of Facebook here is my latest update.

At One-to-1 we have a very defined marketing funnel. We religiously track our new leads and specifically what we’re offering to people and how many are buying. At any given time I can tell you how many people inquired, were booked, purchased and what they purchased for any month in the last couple years.

If you don’t have a similar system you will want to read this post.

I can now see the patterns of the ebb flow of our business each year. This has allowed me to design and develop promotion and awareness campaigns that allow us to keep leading our market. One of the things that I think is critically important is having a plan for ensuring you meet or exceed what you did the previous year. For instance let’s say last year in February you had 30 new people inquire about your services, and 20 signed up or bought something. But this year it’s already the 15^th of February and only 8 people have inquired, what are you going to do?

Ok I'm not actually suggesting you punch your clients.

Here’s a facebook idea to solve this problem. If you have a fanpage (and if you don’t you will have your personal profile which you should be ‘friending’ your clients) if you edit page and review the insights you will see a graph of how many people like, visit your page, etc. On the right side there is a link that allows you to ‘view likes’ or see all your fans.

Click on a fan, you end up on their personal profile, and ultimately quite often can even see their friends and ultimately navigate to a number of their local friends where you could post on their wall…

“Hey it’s Cabel from One-to-1 Fitness, a facebook friend of yours is a fan of ours, we’ve selected you for our BFF friend of a fan award. We have a special (prize/program) just for you, please contact us at ________ to claim before (5-7 day expiry/dedline.)”

The response at first may be low, but be diligent, I bet with copy and past you could do a few hundred of these in an hour, I’m guessing math wise 1-4% should ultimately respond, meaning you could calculate roughly how many people you need to contact to generate your missing inquiries. Your only cost, a couple hours or hours of your assistant.

There are numerous ways you can use or improve this, you can direct them to a private link and explain exactly what you have for them, sweeten the deal with an instant gift of content or videos (give them something of real value, expect nothing in return.) The law of reciprocity will assist you.

You could also post on your fans walls about the ‘BFF Referral Award’ and since they’re a fan any of their friends receive special treatment or a special offer for a very short period of time. (Scarcity is essential.)

This is just one of a number of simple business building ideas I’ll be sharing in express detail at the upcoming www.ProfitablePersonalTrainerLive.com workshop.

I’d love to hear what you think or your results if you use any of these strategies.

It’s been amazing to watch Joshua grow, he’s really a product of his environment as I’ve always aimed to share what I’m learning with our whole team in an effort to see each of them grow in this industry, yet I’d hardly take credit for what he has achieved.

I wanted to share this with you simply because no matter where you are now, unless your career or business is exactly what you want it to be, you can quickly grow more than you thought imaginable just as I’ve seen Joshua grow over these last couple years. Beyond your passion understanding your niche is the next critical step.

____________________

After establishing what it is you want in life, it is important to find a way to leverage that passion so that you can continue to do it for as long as you so choose. The great thing about passion is the motivation to be better always exists; however, it is also important to stay mindful of your lifestyle and the types of things you still need to account for (ie. Mortgage, family, bills…etc.). Therefore, after defining your passion it is important to establish the types of things you wish to keep in the remainder of your life, more specifically the amount of cash-flow you need to continue your lifestyle.

What do you need to make your world go around?

After establishing some absolute numbers for income, break it down further on a quarterly, monthly, and evenly weekly basis as to how much you really need to generate to allow for your lifestyle to continue while pursuing your passion. Dependent upon your situation it may be necessary at this point to control some variables in your life according to the amount of income you can generate in a given location. As well, be mindful of the fact that you ALWAYS get out of situations what you put into them. So when pursuing your passion, do so whole-heartedly.

In the fitness industry passion is plentiful, but developing a niche to leverage can be difficult. Consider populations that are unaccounted for and begin to develop ways that you can cater specifically to them and how you can convince these individuals that the service you offer is worth the dollars they earn. At the end of the day any true fitness professional would agree that all individuals (without exception) can benefit from the effects of proper training and nutritional coaching. Therefore, step outside the box and explore populations that have been overlooked by the rest of the industry and by your competitors!

It’s no secret that weight loss is always going to dominate the fitness industry, and given the latest trends in childhood obesity and the poor activity and nutritional habits of the majority of North Americans this is not going to change. But in business sometimes it is better to be a big fish in a small pond, than the opposite. Rather, by stepping away from the “norm” of weight loss clients and going after special populations with more specific needs you will soon establish yourself as a given expert in your “pond” and will leverage your income in a way that most “dime-a-dozen” trainers simply cannot.

The idea is not necessarily to be better, but rather to be different! When walking into a gym for the first time a middle-aged individual will have a hard time determining which trainer will suit them best and in turn your chances of landing that client are slim. BUT! If you can establish yourself as an expert in a given field, and masterfully market yourself to those individuals then you will have successfully established not only a niche clientele but also a definitive and secure place for yourself inside the industry.

Joshua K. Neufeld, Neufitness.ca