Creating A Succesful Personal Training Business Step 8: Treating Personal Training As A Career
Personal Happiness and Business Efficiency
Most trainers will be ecstatic to receive or sell their first client. You will look up to the busy trainers with a twinkle in your eye only wanting, dreaming, and hoping to become as successful as them someday. If you implement these systems, and with enough time and effort, you will become one of those trainers. Trust the process.
Unfortunately, the systems that can lead to your success early on may not be sustainable in the long term. If you continue down that path you may find yourself burnt out! Some qualities you may embody as a new personal trainer are:
1.Waking up at 4 am and getting home at 10 pm. While split shifts may be imperative to the building of your business, use it wisely! Pay close attention to your physical and psychological well-being. 18 hour days are not sustainable, I don’t care how much you love your job. It will catch up to you.
Strategically use split shifts to:
i) Build your client base
ii) Market your services
iii) Attain mastery of in-person training
iv) Force your clients to conform to a typical 6-8 hour workday say 5 am to 1 pm or 3pm to 9pm.
2. Pessimism, sales performance is directly related to levels of optimism. Just because some people do not want your services does not mean you are a bad person. Does everyone enjoy the same flavor of ice cream? No, so do not let rejection turn you pessimistic. Optimism will not only allow you to gain more clients, but it will also help you live a more fulfilling life.
3. After getting your baseline of consistent clients, let’s say 10 hours a week; up your pricing by 15% and continue doing so every 5 hours. Now you will probably hit a point where your product will no longer be financially viable but don’t sell yourself short. The book “Influence” talks about the value of having an expensive product. I’ve seen trainers with $200 hourly price tags. How close can you get to that price point and still have a large client base? Do you want to be chasing big fish or little fish? How many hours can you really train a week?
Personal Finance
You should choose a place to work where you will not only get paid by being on the floor but also net more than the national average per personal training session. Considering most box gyms will bonus at 20 personal training sessions per week, you can consider 20 hours a week of training to be full time.
While the young trainer may be excessively motivated by money, how much do you really need to be happy?
I think a good place to start is having a savings rate of 50%. This way you have a nice security blanket for the consistent ups and downs that personal training supplies.
Whether that comes from training 2 hours a week or 20, figure out what works for you.
