Copyright 2006 The Fitness Consulting Group
Here are five simple strategies that any personal trainer can adapt to their business and almost instantly increase their profits:
1. Raise Your Prices. This is the most simple, yet overlooked strategy for increasing your income. If you perform 30 sessions per week and raise your prices by just five dollars per session, you’ve increased your yearly income by $7800. Not a bad improvement considering that you didn’t have to do anything else differently. Most of your clients won’t even bat an eye at this increase and the one’s that have a problem with a small price increase will almost always be your “headache clients.” Simply move on and you’ll soon replace them (if there are any) with a new client happy to pay your fee.
2. Have a “back-end.” The lifetime value of a client is the total amount of money that a client spends with you during the duration of the time you do business together. Most trainers limit this number to the amount that each client spends on personal training sessions. Since your clients undoubtedly view you as their fitness resource so don’t make them look elsewhere when they need to purchase supplements, foam rollers, nutritional coaching or anything else that would be complimentary to your personal training services. You’re helping your clients achieve better results, ensuring that they make the right choices when making fitness-related purchases and increasing your profits as well.
3. Practice “takeaway selling.” Most personal trainers’ approach to sales is to tell the prospective client how much they (the trainers) can do for the prospect and then close by almost begging the prospect to become a client. Unfortunately, this approach de-values the trainers’ services and gives the prospect all the power. Simply turn the table on the prospect. Tell the prospect that you are only accepting a very limited number of clients and then proceed to tell the prospect what will be expected of them should they be “fortunate” enough to be accepted as a client. Explain that they will have to be a “walking billboard” for your business and they will be expected to refer people who fit the mold of the client that you want to work with. You’ll be amazed by how many prospects literally beg you to take them on as clients.
4. The power of leverage. This is probably my favorite strategy. You can leverage other trainers by hiring them to train clients for you or “farming out” some of the clients you acquire and charging a “finder’s fee.” You can leverage your time by providing only semi-private training instead of the traditional one-on-one that forces you to trade your time for one clients money. You can leverage your knowledge by creating an information product that you can sell to your client or online. You can leverage your clients by having the “back end” I previously mentioned. Remember, you don’t always have to trade your time for one client’s money.
5. Institute an automated payment system. It works in health clubs, why not in personal training? Simply set your clients up on 4 or 6 month automated payment plans that are directly drafted from their checking account or credit card. This lets prospects know that you are only interested in taking on clients that are committed (that “takeaway selling” approach again) to getting results and it prevents you from being a bill collector. You’ll also get great piece of mind knowing what your receivables base is for the next few months.
These are just five of many strategies that you can use to make your personal training business more profitable. Go back through them and think of ways that you can implement at least a couple of these strategies into your business. Remember, if you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll continue to get what you’ve always gotten.