Cabel

The first thing I did today was...

The first thing I did today was…

Published by on May 2, 2011 | 4 Responses

Bedros Keuilian killing it at Cabel

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

Ok it’s Monday, it’s where the rubber hit th road. Everyone in attendance last Saturday was challenged with “Taking Massive Action” with renewed confidence, enthusiasim, knowledge and power. Now I’d like to know what was the first thing you did Monday morning? Where has your vision stretched? What do you see on the road before you and the future of your business?

Please post your comments below.

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How to Raise 1.3 Billion Dollars (True Story)

How to Raise 1.3 Billion Dollars (True Story)

Published by on April 25, 2011 | Leave a response

You can own a piece of the Maple Leafs at www.owntheleafs.ca

More real than even I believed.

www.OwnTheLeafs.ca

 

Is your own inability to wrap your mind around something so big it seems seemingly ridiculous holding you back? If you answered no to that question good for you because like my very good friend Darren Thompson you are completely fearless. You can accomplish pretty much anything without fear, doubt or any worry whatsoever. If you are like me and answered yes, maybe, or I’m not sure, than this story and life lesson is for you.

On March 13 I received the text message from Darren you see on the left, I chuckled and put my phone down and thought it was some kind of joke. Now you should understand that first off I love hockey but man…I hate the Maple Leafs. Second Darren is one of my very best friends for a few reasons, for one he’s one of those obnoxiously happy people that never ever seems to be rattled by the inconveniences that life throws at us (except maybe this one time when I received this odd voicemail with a profane slip where Darren was somewhere on Glenmore Trail in Calgary I think, I tried to save this voicemail for all prosperity in the anomaly that it was but somehow it was mysteriously deleted from my phone anyways…we now know he is at least human), him and I also connect very well by both being afflicted by something Darren’s wife has labelled, “Squirrel Disease.” You see we’re both guilty of being idea factories. We talk for 30 minutes and have no less than 3, million dollar ideas, we run constantly in many different directions constantly wishing we had an army of clones to realize them all, then laugh about it and start all over again. Though Darren is definitely the winner when it comes to radical, stretch the limits of your belief ideas, his vision has had us discussing buying private jets, chartering cruise ships (both which I might add can realistically come to fruition) and now buying an NHL franchise.

None the less, all of this history of crazy ideas between us and when I received that text message I still was like, “whatever Darren, what kind of silly joke is this? Yes I know Calgary is not likely going to make the playoffs.” I didn’t even know the Maple Leafs were for sale. Reluctantly I logged on to Facebook to click “like” on the Own the Leafs Fanpage thinking, ok whatever this silly idea is it will fizzle and die in just a couple of days.

A week later I received more text messages, Darren had now been picked up nationally, this small Leduc businessman was spanning the sports page to the front page of just about every major newspaper from coast to coast, and he’s had dozens of radio interviews, TV interviews and is now in contact with “major players” coast to coast on a pretty much daily basis. There is so much more I’ve been told in confidence that I wish I could share but let’s just say the Ontario Teacher’s Association, the current majority shareholder of the Toronto Maple Leafs is taking Darren a lot more seriously than I initially did. With little more than a crazy idea and the true belief that you can do anything he’s effectively on the road to (here’s the best part) EASILY raising over a billion dollars to allow you, me and all of Canada to own a share of our true national pastime and one of its most coveted original franchises; the Toronto Maple Leafs. Now in case your are drawing any assumptions here it’s fair to clarify that this isn’t happening because Darren is one of the wealthy who’s who that does this sort of thing because he feels like it, he didn’t have a rolodex of top contacts that would allow him to easily organize and pull this off with nothing more than a few phone calls, in fact none of this has anything to do with the operations of his normal successful business. His primary tool in this escapade was simply to recognize an emotional connection within himself and to shout at the top of his lungs to see if there was an audience that shared a similar belief. Additionally, and more importantly, he is completely free of the limiting beliefs that we all place on ourselves that lets the world, our peers or more often just our inner selves dictate what is or isn’t possible.

Own the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey club at www.owntheleafs.ca.“If you think you can or you think you can’t you are probably right,” my favourite quote by Henry Ford.

I am so thankful to be surrounded by someone as obnoxiously happy as Darren, someone who doesn’t step forward as the macho kid on the block but when you really know him you learn that he is truly fearless and believes anything is possible. If you bring even a fraction of that to your business you will accomplish anything you wish.

I am delighted to say that Darren should be in attendance this weekend with Bedros and I at the Profitable Personal Trainer Workshop and we will work to ensure he has a few minutes to share his belief stretching fearlessness with you all.

www.OwnTheLeafs.ca
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How-to Spend Your Marketing Dollars the Right Way – Part 2

How-to Spend Your Marketing Dollars the Right Way – Part 2

Published by on April 19, 2011 | Leave a response

Effective fitness marketing doesn

Effective fitness marketing doesn't require you to be a crappy car salesman.

Ok last week we talked about how we all get sucked into running awareness, branding type advertising campaigns because that’s what we’re constantly exposed to by big business. We also discussed why a low barrier of entry list building ad can be far more effective and how easy it is to measure it.

This week we’re going to talk about the other major campaign structure, and that’s the one that instantly creates sales. All of your campaigns revolve around one critical component, solving a major problem face by your most likely customer. Your marketing should reflect that. It’s not about you or the name of your business nearly as much as it is about educating, you earn their interest, trust and loyalty and they will be looking to learn who you are and remember it. Far longer than any flash in the pan branding campaign you or I could afford to do.

If you want to sell from an ad you must always provide an irresistible offer, each ad at best is a short flash in the pan. You are banking on the people seeing your ads are actually looking and ready to buy your services. On that note you have to do everything possible to move as many people to action as possible. If you previously missed it you should read this blog post:

http://www.profitablepersonaltrainer.com/2010/05/03/2-step-marketing-get-rich-by-first-giving-it-away/

The free session doesn’t cut it; the 10% discount is garbage. You have to give something today that shows so much value that I would literally be stupid and remorseful to pass it up.

Find ways to give high value trials of 2 weeks or longer, package them with value add services from strategic business relationships to up the ante even more value without costing you anything.

Now if you’re like most you are resistant or hesitant to give so much away for the fear of working for free forever. If you are afraid of this you don’t yet understand the process or you’re not very good at delivering results to you clients. If it’s the later then stop reading and pull out the classifieds, it’s time for you to get a different job.

For those of you that are afraid to give away so much service, understand it’s never free it’s a deferred payment plan. Your goal is to overwhelm your new client in their trial with tonnes of value and then provide multiple offers throughout the trial to encourage them to stay. This is far more effective than trying to sell a package in your ad for the simple reason that there are 2 primary reasons prospects don’t buy immediately:

1)      Not enough perceived value. In an ad they will judge you and your value before they ever meet you, if it’s not enough value they quickly move on. Within an extended trial you can provide multiple offers stacking the value to find the point which offers enough value for your prospect to instantly convert. Which leads to the second point.

2)      Lack of trust. The only other reason they don’t convert is that they don’t trust you yet, but within an extended trial you have an extended opportunity to win their trust and loyalty.

Tracking and evaluation of the campaign is easy, again all responses to the ad will come by phone, email or website. You can get a special number for people to call and track the number of calls versus the number of people that actually commit to the trial and then how many of those commit to a long term package. You could from that calculate your cost per lead, your ad conversion, and ultimately sales conversion down to the exact dollar to compare to the cost of the campaign. By setting up a separate email you could easily do this by email, or by using a dedicated web landing page you can go further to track how many landed on the page, inquired, signed up for the trial and then converted.

There you have it, the easy way to analyze any marketing campaign. This is just a very small fragment of the systems and analysis that can be accessed in our licensing program. If you’d like to no more check it out on the Business Essentials page.

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The Right Way to Spend Your Fitness Marketing Dollars

The Right Way to Spend Your Fitness Marketing Dollars

Published by on April 12, 2011 | Leave a response

Recently a client was asking for my feedback and opinion on a display ad that they had run previously and was up for renewal. The ad was of the typical type that most gyms and personal trainers do. Logo in the top corner, some features or services in bullets, an address, phone number, hours, tagline, but no offer.

My response was simply not to run the ad.

Here’s the thing, when we think of advertising we think of the ads that we’re exposed to. All those commercials from the major brands and franchises, naturally we associate that with our business and assume this is what we should do also. The problem, we don’t have units nationwide and our advertising budget is just slightly smaller.

From right now forward you need to shift your whole attitude when it comes to marketing. Any marketing you do is for one of two purposes

%image_alt%1)      To increase the size of your list. These ads are very low barrier of entry where you are generally giving something away in exchange for someone giving you their contact information (primarily just email is your best bet to get the biggest response.) By building your mailing list you are earning the opportunity to talk to people over and over again to establish a relationship that will lead them to you when they need your service.

Let’s compare that for a moment to the ad I mentioned my client was going to run. That ad was going to cost more than $1000. The hope is that by creating awareness it may generate new sales over the course of the year, however the problem is we will likely never really know if it worked and if we would have sold those services anyways as when someone looks and converts on a branding ad they were already actively looking for the service anyways.

By comparison if I offer you something high value in exchange for your email I can now contact you as often as wish at the push of a button and for no extra cost, I don’t have to hope you are looking for my service today. Isn’t it obvious why spending that same $1000 on advertising geared toward list building would be much more effective? Things like e-book offers, free giveaways, etc.

Now here’s the best part, a list building strategy is completely trackable. Since the ad I’ve been criticizing was a print ad let’s assume our list building program will run with a similar print ad. Instead of features and benefit the ad should provide information about a big problem your most likely customer faces, then offer a solution in terms of your free ebooks, videos, etc. Even wrap it up with high profile consumer goods like Apple products and you have a really solid giveaway that will garner tonnes of interest.

Now in that ad we can direct them to enter online, or by phone. In either case we can measure, by tracking page visits we know how many people responded to the ad, by comparing that to the number of people that entered you can learn how valuable they thought the offer was and converted. And over time as you email them you can (thanks to email software) see how many open the email and how many respond further to any offer you give them. Now with simple math you could work backwards with the cost of your ad instantly knowing if it was a good investment or not.

Now the second type of ads you should run…well you’re just going to have to wait until next week to discuss that.

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5 Critical Steps to Double Your Income

5 Critical Steps to Double Your Income

Published by on April 5, 2011 | 4 Responses

Look, I know building a successful business is hard, especially as a solo personal trainer. You have to wear a lot of hats, you have to work a lot of hours and it’s really easy to begin doubting yourself at every turn. But ask yourself this…if you could double or triple your current monthly income in the next 12 weeks can you suck it up and do it?

Last week on a coaching call one of my coaching clients told me that in the month of March he earned more income than he had at any job in his entire life. This call marked week 11 for him in my coaching program, in March he earned over $6000. That may or may not impress you but now know that 11 weeks ago he was earning only about $1000/mth, and the biggest difference of all, not only did he earn 6 times as much but thanks to business systems his monthly income is now almost guaranteed to be consistent and/or increasing.

Here are the things you need to do to achieve this also:

%image_alt%

Sometimes Milo and I take such massive action we also just need a little time to hang out. But isn't being able to take that time worth working for?

1)      Have a burning desire. Yup, you’ve heard it all before in every success book out there but it’s true. If you don’t have a burning desire, if you’re not a 10 of 10 for serious about your objective it isn’t going to happen.

2)      Take massive action. Yup, that’s the big one right there, first comes the desire, but desire without action is still useless. I know it’s easy to feel insecure, I know it’s easy to be filled with self-doubt and those things together make it really easy to procrastinate. Even when you’re not sure of what you should be doing you need to just be doing anyways. Whether it’s writing content for your website, setting up a facebook fanpage, sending emails, creating offers, organizing your budget, trying to figure out how to track retention or how to build your list any action at all will be valuable.

3)      Develop your self-image. If you’re not worth hundreds of millions of dollars today (and likely even if you are) you need to work on your self-image. Your self-image is the only thing separating you from the Bill Phillips’, the Bill Gates’ and the Mark Zuckerbergs’ of the world. If you want to be financially free you have to understand that you are worth it, that what you are doing, selling, building is worth it. If you will never be worth anything more than the value you place upon yourself. Go to www.audible.com and buy Maxwell Mallz, Psycho Cybernetics audio, it will be one of the best 30 bucks you’ve ever spent.

profitable-personal-trainer-clients

Some of my coaching clients totally get hanging out with the people they wish to emulate as they attended Bedros' Fitness Business Summit.

4)      Surround yourself with people you wish to emulate. I can’t even begin to tell you the power of surrounding yourself with people more successful than you are. If you can’t find these people hire them. Every year I spend more than my two years of college education cost to be coached and hang out with people more successful than I am, and it’s easily worth double, triple or quadruple that cost. You spend enough time around them and it not only reinforces your self-image, you not only learn shortcuts to building your business, but you simple begin to develop the characteristics of that level of success and will quickly find yourself there.

5)      Create a system. Last but most definitely not least, the solid, tangible brick and mortar to the four points above. Each course of action within your professional life needs to follow a system. Start by setting yourself a weekly schedule, set aside certain hours each week for documenting systems, for marketing and most importantly for continual sefl-education. Remain consistent. Additionally create checklist and systems for all areas of your business, begin to correlate them with simple math to quickly analyze the outcomes. Even if the checklists are vague and inaccurate at first by repeating the same steps over and over again you will refine them saving yourself time and preparing you to be able to delegate many responsibilities to other people, the key to building the business and freedom you deserve.

There you have it; those are the 5 critcal steps to getting anything you want. Don’t over think it or over complicate it, just do it!

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EzMode Fitness Marketing

Published by on March 29, 2011 | Leave a response

Email marketing is one of the most cost effective and time efficient ways to provide over the top value to exisiting clients and easily attract new ones. Especially if you are still training a lot of clients personally you should be using email marketing to really maxmize your time so you don’t fall victim to the “desperation wave”. (Watch the video, you’ll see what I mean.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrP63ySU3jE[/youtube]

There are a number of different options for email marketing software, Aweber and iContact are among the most well known and the cheapest. However inspite of the slightly higher cost there is none that remotely compare to the done-for-you, specific to fitness professionals features that FitPro Newsletter uses. You should be using FitPro Newsletter, it’s hands down one of the best products available for new or veteran fitness professionals.

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A Birthday at the Summit and Your Business Systems

A Birthday at the Summit and Your Business Systems

Published by on March 22, 2011 | Leave a response

Ok wow, that was kind of a blur, it’s Tuesday already. A five day break in California including massive motivation from the 4th annual Bedros Keuilian Fitness Business Summit.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2nkpp0O8CI[/youtube]

I was given the honour of being invited to present for the second time, this time on Sunday morning, my birthday of all days. I’d be lying if I said hundreds of fitness professionals singing happy birthday to me wasn’t cool, or that the dozens of positive comments, questions, appreciation, praise or best speaker votes didn’t make up the absolute coolest gift ever. You guys rock, thank you so very much! Truth is there just isn’t any other way I would have wanted to spend my birthday.

Profitable Personal Trainer visits the San Diego Zoo

Next to seeing the animals on safari in Africa the San Diego Zoo is one of my favorite places on earth.

I spoke about 10 of the many critical systems that have been responsible for the rapid growth and success of One-to-1 Fitness. My aim was to teach ever person in that room how they can learn to analyze and evaluate how their business is working or performing in 5 minutes or less from anywhere in the world. Additionally how they could then simply be the coach and facilitator for a whole team without ever setting foot in the door, ensuring their business works even when they don’t.

Things like:

Tracking sales and understanding and dissecting conversion stats and practices. The value of using a preformatted sales system and what makes it effective, from verbal to body language and certain cues and practices. I explained how to take all the new lead generation and marketing tactics they learned from great speakers like Bedros Keuilian, Lindsay Vastolla, Cara Eckerman, Alex Maroko, Josh Carter and Frank Kern and evaluate, track and dissect the relationship between cost per lead, click through rates, and conversion for multiple mediums. We touched on EFT billing and how using +/- tracking can quickly display the growth and health of your business and allow you to completely understand and analyze the retention rate of your business and what exactly you can do to improve it. Next we covered effective recruiting, pay per performance and the secret to minimizing turnover while maximizing team loyalty.

Me and some of my awesome fitness marketing coaching clients at Bedros Keuilian

Me and some of my awesome fitness marketing coaching clients on the red carpet at Bedros Keuilian's Fitness Business Summit.

Needless to say if you were at all curious about how we’ve achieved such rapid success with our studio or the inner workings our new licensing program no stone was left unturned.

Presently I’m overwhelmed with emails, questions and testimonials which is great because it tells me the information was both needed and highly valued. Thanks for the best birthday ever, thank you Bedros for all you do for this amazing industry it’s so awesome that you are coming to Calgary again next month for another www.ProfitablePersonalTrainerWorkshop.com.

I leave you all with a little tidbit for this week, I know how overwhelming it can be to be excited about new information only to realize that because you are overwhelmed it becomes really hard to implement. Here’s the easy way to start:

1)      Consider each thing you do today and each day forward that you will have to complete it 100 times or more. (For instance you likely shower every single morning, you probably store hang or keep your towels in the same place, you probably turn on the water, shower, use shampoo etc all in the same order. Believe it or not your whole life revolves around systems, why doesn’t your business?)

A birthday hockey game for the Profitable Personal Trainer

Being a life long Flames fan what better way to wrap up an amazing birthday then enjoying the game in Anaheim.

2)      Write down the steps to completing every task in your business, easiest is to start with the silly little ones you complete all the time. Answering the phone, taking payments, setting appointments and so on. The steps don’t have to be right they just have to be the current steps. Each time you execute that task follow the steps, as you find better ways to do it, revise, add or eliminate the steps. Now you have systems. Do the same for your marketing promotions, your training systems, your HR processes and so on. The time you invest now will save you big later and give you the edge over your competition.

If you missed out on Fitness Business Summit you still have a chance to learn about the vital systems I talked about at the www.ProfitablePersonalTrainerWorkshop.com and learn from the leader of the pack Bedros Keuilian. April 30, 2011 in Calgary, Alberta

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Fitness Business Summit Spoiler: System 4 – EFT Magic

Published by on March 15, 2011 | Leave a response

SPOILER ALERT: If you’re coming to Orange County this weekend to Bedros Keuilian’s Fitness business summit and took advantage of the fast action bonuses you’re going to hear more about this in my presentation Sunday morning. (By the way Sunday is my birthday so don’t forget to say Happy Birthday 🙂

By now you should know about and be using EFT billing in your personal training business. If your not this video is going to explain what it is and how to convert your clients ASAP. More imprtantly if you are using EFT this video will explain the simple method of tracking and analyzing your business performance, growth, retention and even show you how you can better develop your trainers to keep their clients longer. This is one of the critical systems we use at One-to-1 Fitness and a component of our licensing program. Check it out, and don’t forget to leave your comments.

By the way for a limited time you can download my whole presentation for this weekend’s Fitness Business Summit in the form to the right. (If it’s not there any more, sorry you missed it, only available until April 1, 2011.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIsR4oRBiAI[/youtube]

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