As I have progressed through my working life, running a fitness business has become progressively easier for me. Like some of you may be doing right now, I tried everything and anything to get new clients and grow my business. That was always the big focus – must get new clients.
Today I want to explain to you something that I call my “PT Business Blueprint”. Admittedly, the name needs a bit of work but it essentially explains the concept. I have used this blueprint extensively throughout my own business and I teach it to all of my private coaching clients. The aim is to show that there are five aspects of your business that you can work on to make more money; not just the traditional “get more clients” method. Let me explain…
Each aspect of the blueprint is heavily inter-related to the other so it is important to start at the start and work your way down. The first stage of the PT business blueprint is to:
1) Develop Leads
Holy crap, I thought you would never guess. Yes, it is true. Your personal training business is not going to function unless you develop a range of ways for people to discover your business. As I mentioned before, this step is normally the one and only that many trainers focus on. You must remember that this is only one step of the process.
I must also mention the developing lead’s exactly that – developing LEADS. A lead is someone who has shown an interest in your service but it not a converted client. So the question on everyone’s lips is how the hell do we develop enough leads to feed our little business – mmmm, good question.
For me, the internet is KING. Get a good site, register it for Google local business (FREE), register your business for every on-line directory available (FREE), set up a basis Google adwords campaign and optimise your site’s pages for your keywords (eg: personal training and your town) – also free. If you don’t know how to do this, find someone who does because you only have to do it once and then you have a virtual shop-front that can get you 1000’s of visitors a month.
For those of you without a site; give away free sessions, set up a bunch of referral strategies, offer something special to all of your local businesses, give a business card out to every person you speak to, put a sign on your car, set up some drop boxes, run a competition, do some public speaking. Leads come to those who have the guts to go out and work for them (or you get yourself a smokin’ website). But a combination of the two is probably the best.
But once we have the leads we need to…..
2) Convert Them To Paying Clients
This is the beautiful part of the blueprint that can really make or break a business. What happens if you are getting 50 enquiries a week through your lead sources but only 1 of them is converting into a paying client? Lots of head shaking, that’s what.
You work hard to get your leads and you now need to dissect your conversion process. Look at and evaluate your email responses, your phone responses, your next action (are you trying to sign them up over the phone, book a comp session etc.). This aspect of your business is very open to a test and measure process because many businesses and many business owners have different skills at converting leads to clients.
If you are not yet a ninja at making sales yet, be prepared to offer up a complimentary session. Let your action instead of your words do the talking and you will find your conversion rates will definitely improve.
If you have a website, converting shoppers to buyers is a different kettle of fish. People like to see and hear lots of social proof (other people using your service) so make sure that you have some before and after photos of your clients, video testimonials and lots of written testimonials. Make sure that you use people in your target demographic as your leads want to see people just like them doing great things in your business. I will dedicate an entire post to this topic in future weeks.
The ability of selling personal training to leads is one that you will become more comfortable with over time and the only thing I can say is, until then, keep practicing and use free sessions as your friend. Let your service make the sale. The investment will definitely pay off and giving away something for nothing is a great way to start a relationship.
So once they joined as paying clients, you must now focus on…
3) Retain Your Current Clients
Now there is nothing more frustrating in your personal training business than when you are working your butt off to bring new leads into your business and convert them into new clients, but you have taken too much attention away from your current clients and they are starting to leave.
You feel like you can’t get them in the front door quick enough to cover the ones leaving the back door. So, it is VITALLY important to ensure that you have a balanced attention on your client base as they the foundations of your business. Simple right?
How do you do this?
Well, there is the obvious answer of providing exceptionally good service and getting great results with your clients. That goes without saying and I am assuming that you are all doing that anyway. Now, you could tell consistently good jokes but not everyone is funny so that may not work.
What does work is making your client base fell like its own little community. Outside of your normal training times, run a group event like a small fun run or a bike ride where all of your clients can interact together. After the activity, host a barbeque lunch and introduce all of your clients to each other.
Make your clients feel part of your group; your business; your team. Some businesses hold group assessments, have adventure weekends away, some have movie nights and go out for dinner. There are plenty of options to make your clients feel special (and loyal) to you.
Just don’t forget to provide exceptionally good service J
4) Increase The Average Dollar Spend of Your Clients
So now we are working our way through the PT business blueprint and we have developed our leads, converted as many as we could and retained them as clients. Most people would be very happy with this scenario and would down tools at this stage.
But not us!
At this stage, we now do a little exercise that tells us how much each of our clients spends in our business per month. It’s really easy, just take your monthly personal training income (say $10,000) and then divide it by the number of clients you have (65) and you have the average amount each of your clients spend in your business ($154 per month). Now that you know this amount, it is your job to increase this figure on a monthly basis.
So not only do we focus on getting more leads, converting more into clients, retain more as loyal followers, but we also focus on getting them to spend more money in your business – we now have four of the five steps in place.
How do you get your current clients to spend more money in your business?
- Up sell extra sessions at assessment time when results are bad
- Up sell extra sessions at assessment time when results are good
- Over a once-a-week indoor group training session for all your clients
- Offer a kids fitness group after school
- Start selling supplements or heart rate monitors
- Up sell every wife you have into a coupe session to beat up their husband
- Up sell extra session for an upcoming special event (wedding, races, summer)
- Run a 6 week boot camp
So you can see that your up-selling ability is only limited to your imagination and your conscious effort. This is an aspect of business that MANY people overlook. People in your business stay in your business because they love your business. They are VERY easy to sell to – build it and they will come.
So, just for a laugh lets look at the changes; if you could increase the average dollar spend of your 65 clients by $50 per month how much would that impact your turnover?
An extra $3260 per month or $39,120 per year….
Probably worth having putting some time into
5: Increasing Your Profit Margin
So we have developed our leads, converted them, retained them, increased their spending – what could possibly be left to increase the revenue of your business? Profit margins.
Your profit margin is the remaining percentage of your turnover that you have left in your business each month after all expenses have been deducted. A good profit margin in a personal training business is between 30-40%, so a good habit to establish at the end of each month is to work out your margins. Because it’s hard to improve what you don’t know…
Increasing your profit margin can come from a variety of means because all you are trying to do is put more money in your pocket at the end of the month. So you could look at the income side of things and make simple changes like a 5% price rise every 6 months – that will quickly get your margin to where it should be.
Or you can look at the other end of the scale – your expenses. Reducing your costs by any number of ways can also be surprisingly beneficial for your margin. Things like:
- Changing suppliers
- Getting new phone plans
- Exploring different location options
- Changing banks
They all add up to increasing your margin a little bit at a time. This is definitely the cream on the cake but it is an area where small changes can make a big difference in your business.
So to summarize your PT Business Blueprint, here are the FIVE areas that you need to address in your business to ensure that you make the most out of what you have.
- Lead Generation
- Client Conversion
- Retention of Clients
- Increasing Average Dollar Sale
- Increasing Your Profit Margin
When you can develop a few systemised strategies that work well for each aspect of the blueprint, you will then have yourself a smashing personal training business. This can be achieved by testing and measuring everything you do and if it works it stays and if it doesn’t, it goes. Eventually (depending on how fast you work), you will have a completely systemised personal training business in your hot little hands.
I will be breaking down each aspect of this blueprint in more detail throughout the blog so stay tuned.
Cheers
Rick
