The Profitable Personal Trainer Workshop – April 2011

What a weekend!

Well if you missed out on Saturday’s Profitable Personal Trainer Workshop I wanted to give you a recap.

Bedros Keuilian is one of the world's leading fitness marketing experts and has been my personal coach for over 3 years.

We were very fortunate to have North America’s top fitness business coach Bedros Keuilian in Calgary; not only an extreme privilege but the guy barely made it, for some reason Canadian Immigration seemed to think the information he was bringing was so valuable that it was barely legal! (Well no not really but he always has some rather amusing experience at the border and secondary inspection. 🙂

So here’s how it went…

We started off with something critically important to you, your business and your clients…recognition.

Throughout the day 4 of my superstar coaching clients were recognized for their successes over these last months. Humairah & Faraz have learned so much about sales and client attraction it’s crazy, Chas has continued to streamline her facility from the depths of a monthly burn rate to reaching profitability, Tim has paid of 10s of thousands of dollars in debt in just month and Sean basically went from zero to nearly $100,000 in program sales in just 4 months, talk about action takers! (And silly me forgot to make sure we got pictures to save the moment, perhaps the individuals mentioned will proudly provide some with their award. J)

Bedros Keuilian killing it at Cabel's Profitable Personal Trainer Workshop

On to content…I started off by sharing the 5 key things that trainers need to understand and do in order to quickly reach the 6 figure mark and beyond, this applies whether you’ve been in the industry for years or were certified last weekend.

1) Don’t be afraid to fail, simply keep taking action!

• This means imperfect action is better than waiting too long to make it perfect.
• This means don’t screw around because you are afraid which leads you to being “busy” and kills action and all momentum.
• This means be 110% committed to your business but any new idea only needs to be 70% ready to put it into action, the best place to see and fix the problems is when they arise not sitting around guessing what they might be.
• This means success loves speed, outsource where possible so you can be doing more things

2) Identify “Your Most Likely Customer”

• This means completely describe them with a word picture as completely detailed as possible. And by that I mean try to explain exactly what you seen to your best friend if you drove by your customer standing in their own backyard watering their lawn. What type of clothing, what they enjoy, and every possible detail. Your marketing, promotions, everything needs to appear where your prospects frequent and in language that will both appeal and make sense to them. This is the basis of grassroots marketing and how you make a limited to no marketing dollars maximize their efforts.

3) Build a list and they will come.

• Seminars and strategic alliances with local businesses work amazingly well to quickly build a list and a reputation offline.
• Kijiji, Craigslist, Facebook and Adwords dominate for cost effectively finding new customers in your area, experimenting with these mediums can lead to quick and massive success.
• Leverage technology, use email software and the ability to schedule content delivery in advance to chunk tasks and make your day more efficient.

4) The More you give the more you get.

• This was the biggest take away in the 5 basics. After many years I didn’t get it either but there is one thing that has proved true over and over again, the most profitable and successful fitness professionals are the ones that get busy the fastest. The easiest way to get busy is to train people for free. Think about it your biggest immediate obstacle is no one knows you or your ability (and you may even doubt yourself) but even with that if you offerred 5-10 sessions free most people are likely to accept. You now have 5-10 opportunities to show them how great you are and why they should pay to continue, I think there is a far better chance in communicating this message in a free session than there is in a printed ad, a radio campaign or other generic marketing medium, don’t you agree? The bonus is that the people around you that suddenly see that you are really busy naturally assume you must be good at what you do because you suddenly were busy over night.

5) Nothing matters if you don’t take action.

• I know sounds repetitive but most people leave a seminar like this so inspired to wind up the next day feeling so overwelmed they don’t know where to begin, this point of fear (essentially or old same limiting mindset) prevents them from taking any action at all. So here’s what you need to do, go through your notes if you were there or pick 1-2 things from this article if you weren’t and write it on a small piece of paper. Make that your top tasks to start tomorrow, it’s only 2 things not much you can procrastinate on or avoid you must begin with one or the other. If you simply did this every day just imagine how many great things you could accomplish.

Next Bedros took over and really knocked it out of the park with helping you to understand and shift your mindset. Even though him and I have spent a great deal of time talking about these things and I’d even heard this content before for some reason this time it really hit me differently. The underlying message is that we will at some point always revert to our “scarcity mindset” or whatever that starting point is that proves to be the toughest obstacle when it comes to reaching our goals and dreams. It’s important to find away to continually develop your mindset of “abundance” by surrounding yourself with people you wish to emulate while limiting your exposure to people and situations that would have you return to your “scarcity mindset.”

If this all sounds like gibberish to you, you need to check out the audio/book Bedros highly recommended; Psycho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. (Trust me it is captivatingly interesting and will change your life.

Once afternoon hit we took things in a more serious direction, I gave everyone a look at the in depth systems behind our million dollar training studio. How we manage everything from recruitment to compensation, automatic billing, planned and controlled growth, client retention, trainer retention evaluation, sales, marketing and so much more. The best part I explained how we can analyze the performance of our business in 10 minutes or less from anywhere in the world and then coach our team as needed.

I noticed a number of people experiencing the signs of mass writing cramp as they tried to document each detail, though for some this lead to confusion it illustrated the importance of defined systems as you grow and that the ceiling of your growth will only be dictated by the systems you apply.

To wrap up the day Bedros took everyone through his specialty, the path of ascension and how we go about attracting prospects and leads and the exact steps to convert them to paying clients. Not just scripts, tactics and ideas were shared but the exact breakdown and mechanics of building a full sales format system

I think all attendees would agree that it was impossible to have been at the Profitable Personal Trainer Workshop and NOT taken at least one thing away that could potential double, triple or massively blow up their business.

You guys are so awesome, what an amazing day I appreciate you all so much! Look forward to more, I’m currently looking to schedule 1-2 more live workshops before the end of 2011.