Growing Your Personal Training Business

Have you seen the “experts” offering to sell you hundreds of ways to grow your personal training business? The shear volume of ways to market your personal training business may have you asking: What do I do first? What methods are best for me? What are the most cost effective and efficient things to do first? Here is how to clear it up. The simple truth is there are only three ways to grow your personal training business. 1. Increase the number of new clients. rn2. Increase the number of months you retain your clients. rn3. Increase how much your clients spend each month. This is extremely valuable to know and understand. This made all the difference when we learned it to the success of our personal training businesses. rnIf you think this is obvious and not worth your time, please stick with me for a little bit. There are some hidden gems in these three statements. Every type of marketing and growth effort in your personal training business is attempting to grow one of these three simple categories. And one of these categories takes loads more money and time to grow your personal training business. Almost all personal trainers put 90% of their money and time into #1, trying to get new clients. Mostly through expensive advertising. Guess what? Across all industries studies have shown it takes five to six times as much money to get a new customer or client as it does to get an existing customer to return again (or remain a client). For our goal of growing your personal training business, this is a ground breaking fact! Why? It means you can put much more of your money and effort back into your existing clients, creating valuable services for them, like a monthly newsletter, and specials. This gives energy to the business cycle of you taking caring for your clients in exceptional ways, and them doing it back for you. Are you thinking, "But I need more clients"? Do you know what the very best way to get new clients is? Client referrals. How do you get client referrals? By putting lots of energy into your existing clients. Happy existing clients tell other people. And even if you only have a small client base to start, this is still true and a great way to get more. But don't worry, we will also show you ways of getting new clients with other methods. So, it is best to put most of your fitness marketing money and efforts, at least 60%, into marketing that helps #2 (increase client retention). What about using personal training business growth category #3, increasing how much your clients spend each month? There are several ways to have this happen that your clients will appreciate. • Give them the opportunity to work with you more often. • Create service add-ons. For instance, offer nutritional coaching at an additional cost. • Offer more specialized offerings like golf conditioning. • Offer products that your clients are likely to purchase somewhere else that you may already be recommending. Like multi-vitamins, meal replacements, foam rollers, etc. Products you really believe in that you know help your clients. • Offer tanning or massage therapy. Focusing on #3 helps you move away from just relying on front end for money. You make more, and provide more for your clients at your personal training business, without having to just get more clients. OK. Now what is so amazing about knowing these three categories? Growing in three ways at once instead of just getting new clients, actually increases your ability to grow in an exponential way. Let's say you want to grow your personal training business 20% this year by getting new clients. If you don't have many clients, that won't be very hard or expensive. But if you have a good number of clients, a 20% increase is generally more difficult and expensive. Now let's say that instead, you only try to increase your new clients by a tiny 10%. That is really easy for anyone. rnAnd, you work at getting your existing clients to say 10% longer. That is also pretty darn easy. And, you bring in a product or two, and also add some peripheral services, and you manage to increase the average monthly value of each client by 10%. Now, all together, you have increased your business 30%. See how much easier that is. Believe me, growing this way, in little ways in each area takes a lot of pressure off of being a fitness marketing wizard. And it is actually pretty easy to have a lot more growth than that with this method. Look what happens with just a 10% increase across the board. Based on 20 clients @ $200 /mo. For 12 months. Year one: $48,000rnYear two: $62,920 That is an increase of almost $15,000 in revenue with only an increase of 2 clients! When you develop this type of fitness marketing knowledge, some of the fears and pressure of competition relax. Because your personal training business is not trying to get as many new clients as it used to. Your clients will love you because you treat them so well.