My name is Rick Watson and I have been a personal trainer for eleven years. The average lifespan of a personal trainer here in Australia is 2.2 years, so that either makes me determined, crazy or both. I’ll let you decide…
Over the past 11 years I have trained 1000’s of clients, built a heap of businesses (that have included a few of failures and a few successes) and best of all, learnt some amazing lessons. In my early days as a trainer, I just wanted to get rich. I didn’t really know why, it just seemed like a good goal to have. Success seemed to equal how much money you have in your account. I was destined for big money….
But along the way something happened.
Around about this time, I was training a group of corporate clients that were working at least 80-90 hours a week, never seeing their wives and kids, never getting time off on the weekends to enjoy their life and stressing hard about everything. BUT, they had massive bank balances.
Was this really what I wanted?
I like to surf, go camping and take time off to enjoy amazing places around Australia. I like to do yoga and meditate. Hang out with my girl and our little baby. I like to grow veggies in my garden.
Then it finally clicked.
Life is about finding happiness. Therefore the business that I create MUST be designed to deliver enough money and time for me to enjoy the things in life that make me happy. Period.
Obviously for me it is more about time than money. But happiness for you may be the new car, the holiday, the new house. But when you really think about it, whatever you need to make you happy can be provided by having a business that gives your either more money or more time (or both) than you have now.
If you can create a business that gives you what you REALLY want, it makes the hard times a lot easier. Sorting out the WHY before you even look at the HOW.
Here is a bit of a run down of how the past eleven years unfolded:
As soon as I completed my qualification as a 21 year old, I jumped straight out and registered my first company, convinced I was going to make millions. But the sad fact was that it just meant I worked long hours, trained lots of clients and didn’t really have any idea what I to run or grow a business. To make matters worse, I wasn’t even breaking even.
I was too busy dealing with my clients needs, managing my bookings, putting out spot-fires, responding to e-mails, returning phone calls, doing the never end stream of busy work and worry how in the world I was going to get new clients.
So after 2 years of pushing myself to the limit, I was completely mentally and physically exhausted and burnt-out at age 23 – quite an achievement I thought. And to add insult to injury, I sold my business for $1….ouch.
Now this experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
This was my turning point that I mentioned earlier and from then on I knew that I needed to create this thing that they called leverage in business (loads of free time and money). There is good reason that most trainers only last 2.2 years in this industry and that is because they burn themselves out and don’t leverage their time.
So I set off on a fact-finding mission. To discover the most effective personal training business model, providing the operator with a manageable business and GREAT LEVERAGE. I wanted to gather a collection of experiences that would give me a wide scope to put together a service that would meet my needs.
So over the next 8 years I:
- Worked as a personal trainer in South Beach, Miami
- Managed a personal training studio in London
- Lectured to personal trainers in Certificate 3 and 4: Fitness
- Developed a gym-based personal training business
- Hired my own business coach
- Read at least 1 book per month (religiously)
- Developed and delivered personal training course’s for trainers
- Developed a complete mobile personal training franchise system
- Operated my own PT studio for 6 years
And now I:
- Business coach personal trainers around Australia
- Run a mobile personal training business (great leverage ☺)
- Run PTBusinessInABox.com.au to bring real, free information to the people who need it the most.
I still do some personal training but instead of worrying how my clients are going to pay my bills, I don’t worry about anything. I have every afternoon, night and weekend free from bookings and I have great people in my businesses running them for me, following my systems.
But while all of the achievements in the past look good on paper, they have really just been contributing to my passion today – helping personal trainers that are going through the same things I went though achieve real business success.
Like everything else in life, it is collection of experiences that lead to certain results that we strive for. Along my journey, here are my favorite experiences that I developed (the hard way):
- I burnt out five times and had to learn how to take care of myself – properly.
- I learnt how to launch businesses many times without any $$$.
- I finally discovered that personal training is all about caring. Showing you care must be the core of your business.
- Due to necessity, I developed a number of no-money-down marketing strategies.
- I recently discovered business can be simple and really enjoyable if you let it.
- Business systems are a beautiful thing. The systems run the business and the people run the systems – and you get to go surfing, golfing, back to bed, play with the kids….whatever you want.
So it is these experiences that shape my personal training career today. Today life for me is all about free time. As I mentioned before, I came to the realisation a couple of years ago that I don’t need to take over the world to be happy. So my sole aim now for my business is to provide free time for me to spend with my partner Nikki, our new baby boy Finn. That makes me happy.
We live in a little town just near Byron Bay, Australian and love to take advantage of the awesome surf in this area. We have a big veggie patch in our backyard and a couple of chooks to delivery us fresh eggs every day. Life is simple and I now have time to enjoy it because of the leverage I have created in my business.
I now take pleasure in showing others how to create this work / life balance and still have an amazing business. If this sounds like something that you would like more of in your life, keep checking out the info on my site and if you have any question feel free to shoot me an email anytime.
