Business Ignition Workshop – What Did You Learn?
Always meet new challenges head on!
Man what a weekend, first rafting down the Kicking Horse on Saturday with Apline Rafting and then spending the day with North America’s top fitness marketer Bedros Keuilian at my Personal Trainer Business Ignition Workshop in Calgary.
38 of Canada’s soon to be top fitness experts were drenched with nearly 8 hours of super valuable content ranging from getting going as a solo trainer, to expanding to operate your own studio, to every dirty little trade secret used by the world’s top internet marketers to dominate the search engines, out position, out perform, and out earn just about anyone in your path.
I’ve been coaching with Bedros for over 3 years; I’m part of his elite seven figure mastermind group. It was an honour to speak alongside him for the second time but it’s truly amazing how many new ideas and how much I learn still every single time I hear him speak.
Bedros Keuilian comes to Canada.
My favourite parts are still always the list building and conversion tactics, your list is so critical to rapid physical growth. For those of you that weren’t there this weekend I will share something with you that only my elite coaching clients have known or talked about to this point that was shared this weekend.
A little while ago working with one of my elite coaching clients we discovered something. Recipes are powerful list builders. By posting a simple classified with a catch title and the instruction to simply reply to the ad he has been growing his email list by as much as a 100 new contacts a week. By using ongoing contacts you can quickly grow a big list of warm prospects in as little as 30 days. A list of 500 people can easily produce a $100,000+ income for a personal trainer. So far he’s taken a list of a couple hundred to nearly a thousand in roughly 60 days.
Here’s a sample of what your ad might look like:
Mouth Water, Good For You, Chocolate Muffins
Everyone has a sweet tooth, satisfy yours while still getting in great shape. Simply reply to this ad with your name and email and I will send you this recipe and others like it for free. Recipes provided by (your area)’s top personal trainers.
This can be run on electronic classifieds; it could even be run in print. It has been one of our absolute best list building, high converting classifieds.
What were some of the “big” items you learned this weekend? If there’s enough interest I may make the workshop video available. Leave your comments let me know the big take away items for you and if you’d like to get your hands on the workshop video.
The Conversion Pitch
Yes Star Wars is my favorite all time movie!
If you’ve been reading Profitable Personal Trainer at all you know that the fitness marketing strategies I like to employ the most are the ones that revolve around giving over the top value to your prospects. It’s not rocket science, its simple rapport, invest in people and they in turn will invest in you. As Zig Zigler so profoundly says, “the more you help others get what they want the more likely you will get what you want.”
Now it is that simple, and yet it isn’t. If you’ve been planning re-packaged short term free programs to massively attract new leads, if you’ve been offering up blockbuster high value trial packages so it’s a no brainer for people to try your services, don’t forget you still have to ask them or present them with an offer to continue. In other words at some point you still have to sell.
High value marketing systems will continually allow you to create a steady influx of new prospects and will rapidly position you as the good guy expert in your community. But without a conversion plan you will only see about 10-15% of your clients turn over into loyal paying clients with little to no effort.
Each time you execute a high value free program (like a 21 day rapid fat loss bootcamp) at just over the half way mark you should be converting clients. Now here’s the easy steps to making sure 80-90% of your people stay:
1) Make sure your service is over the top, they have to absolutely love what they are doing when they are training with you. (duh)
2) Make sure they get results. Give them all your best stuff and go the extra mile with accountability to ensure rapid results do happen. (duh #2)
3) Present them an irresistible offer. Discount their first month, offer them extra bonuses that cost you nothing. (An Infrared Sauna works so wonderful for this, in Red Deer a sauna drop-in cost like $15, but 10 sessions in the sauna costs me about $1.00 worth of power.) Free bonuses from professional partners. The e-book you recently wrote. The 100 healthy recipes you compiled from all across the internet. It doesn’t take much to really crank up the value.
4) Present everything to them with emotion.
Mrs. Jones you came to me 50 lbs overweight, you are on high blood pressure medication and type II diabetes runs in your family. It’s been just 2 weeks and you have already dropped 11 lbs, and just last week I noticed you were able to complete 40 squats and on day 1 you could only do 2. You mentioned you are sleeping better and your clothes are getting loose. I know you’re not yet done your trial but I am so proud of your results I wanted to give you this…(insert high value offer). There is no pressure at all to continue but man your results are going so good, I really want to see you lose that 50lbs in no time, don’t you agree things are going well?
How can she really say no? The only likely objection might be a financial one which means either the value you are providing isn’t high enough or she can’t afford it.
5) The secret weapon, the downsell. – Some clients may genuinely not be able to afford your most typical program, so offer them something for $97 a month. Even if it’s a nutritional meeting once a week, or a couple of bootcamps and a follow up call. The point is if they’re getting results and having fun they will continue but they are not going to tell you how much they are willing to pay.
Bottom line is you have to close, I see too many trainers lately applying some of the great fitness marketing strategies that have been listed here but they are not booking the sales consults to convert their leads to paying clients. Your goal has to be at least 1 new sales appointment per day.
Your Own Personal Training Studio – The Grass is Greener Part 3
In 2007 One-to-1 Fitness came to be, 2000 square feet, every penny we had to our names on the line and nothing but hopes, dreams and healthy dose of fear for the future. What a ride it has been, from 3 trainers and no staff, barely 100 appointments a week to now 11 trainers, 2 support staff, 2 massage therapists and routinely over 500 appointments a week in double the space. Last year I am proud to say we were a strong finalist for the local chamber awards for Small Business of the Year.
The question on your mind might be would I recommend opening your own studio to everyone? That’s an easy answer, no.
I wouldn’t change for a moment any decision we have made (even though there are plenty we could have done better or done without.) the experience we’ve gained at every step has been invaluable and will shape multiple new opportunities in the future.
The main advantages of owning your own studio are:
1) Leverage – You may now hopefully leverage your time and the time of others to produce bigger results, higher volume leading to greater sales and a very predictable income.
2) Flexibility – If you focus on building a proper business plan and work to systemize your business throughout you enjoy the flexibility of being away when you wish, possibly for extended periods, or being able to leave on a moment’s notice always knowing your clients will be taken care of.
3) Assets – All the money you have tied up in equipment, your regular volume of sales (if you use EFT) will provide value to financial institutions allowing you to continue to grow fast than you could without.
4) Income Potential – Within a system you now have the opportunity to earn significantly more income. To a degree your income potential is only limited by your ability to push the business forward but this potential also comes with a price, sometimes worry and responsibility.
5) Something Saleable – And of course the big goal for any business owner, someday being able to sell your product to someone else and finally enjoy the fruits of your labours monetarily.
Now before you go sign the lease on your studio location and open up shop don’t forget to review the potential obstacles in your way.
1) You are the last to eat – Heaven forbid business or the economy takes a down turn. As an employer you now have a responsibility to your staff all their needs must often be met before your own.
2) Does risk bother you? – Expect to sign general security agreements that tie every asset you own to the business, are you prepared to risk your home and every asset you own on your new venture?
3) Start up costs – Even a successful business will often owe its owners or shareholders a significant amount of money for years. Are you comfortable with the idea of tying up tens of thousands of dollars in your new venture?
4) Your success will be limited by the strength of your team. – Unfortunately your vision or opinion may not always be shared by others. Yes you are the boss but you can’t force anybody to do anything. Company culture is more important than you will ever know and not entirely in your control. How will you balance the social structure of a growing team?
5) You are the owner, manager, trainer, boss, crook, janitor, chief marketer, systems analyst, and nearly any other role, title or comment you can imagine. As soon as you apply director to your name you are the one that ever aspect of your business must matter the most to. To how clean your sinks and toilets are to when the vacuuming was last done, to how you will track and outpace rising employee costs (EI, CPP, holiday pay etc, on average every dollar you pay an employee will cost you 15-20 cents more. How money do you currently earn each month? Apply that math for a moment.), to customer service and quality control. Be prepared to make late night journeys for when the alarm goes off or the roof decides to leak, plan on dealing with any unhappy customer when someone makes a mistake, and be prepared to receive the least amount of appreciation.
Hmmm, after looking at just some of the aspects of the good and the bad how do you feel about the idea of owning your own personal training studio?
If you are now wondering, would Cabel do it all over again? The answer is a resounding yes, there are still far many more days I wake up excited about the potential before me than there are days I cringe in the corner in fear. Just be prepared for both!
Why I Think You Should Use WordPress
Whether you are a personal trainer or not you may find this post helpful when it comes to setting up your first website.
Just about every hosting company out there offers some kind of simple tool to quickly build an attractive website and maybe even have it operational in the next 60 minutes. Though I am not intensely familiar with all of these basic HTML editors I can tell you that their ease of use may seem appealing but over the long term they will require far more knowledge and time commitment to produce a website that works the way you want it to.
The problem with the HTML editors is they are not made to provide easy optimization for the less tech savvy individual. If you understand the ins and outs of website coding and optimization you can easily overcome this but I would still argue that WordPress will handle it easier, faster, and better. If you are not familiar with the term Search Engine Optimization understand that an optimized website will be more likely to be found on the first search page and will typically drive visitors to your website that you didn’t send there by word of mouth.
Personal trainer websites should be on wordpress in my opinion.
Using WordPress makes adding new pages and items to your website nearly as easy as writing an email. Visually it can be reconfigured with drag and drop widgets and only the smallest amount of direct HTML knowledge is really required.
Now when you combine WordPress with a number of powerful plugins it really goes to work for you. Starting with All in One SEO Pack you will be given the opportunity to give each new post a search engine crawler friendly keyword title, description and even a list of specific key words. Additionally you can also configure a number of options like to create meta tags from your post tags for instance. Meta tags are placed specifically for the search engine crawlers to read, identify and categorize your website and its content. None of these happen with a website builder included in most host packages unless you do it all manually.
Other plugins like SEO Images and SEO smart links will create automatic keyword links within your content, allow you to apply keyword titles to your images and so on. All these little things will likely go unnoticed to you for a time but you will see the effect they soon have in your site rank and its ability to generate traffic (ie. Potential customers) to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are thousands of plugins available and not just for better ranking but also for time saving features like posting video content as well as all kinds of elements to utilize social networking to its fullest.
In my opinion WordPress is far superior if your goal is to build a website that brings you customers rather than one you like the look of but nobody ever sees.
Personal Training Inside a Public Gym – The Grass is Greener Part 2
This scenario can take on many forms. In many ways the in the gym trainer may have the greatest opportunity to organize and grow their business in just about any direction. Initially most trainers will become employees of the gym. In this scenario they will dictate your hours, your dress, possibly how you run your programming, your session rates, your wage (or portion of the session rate) and if you sell they will likely dictate how you sell and how much you sell it for.
The business within a business model can be the most flexible with the least risk, though there is one drawback...control
Of all the training scenarios, you can count on this employee position being the lowest per hour rate. Now the lower rate is really not as bad as many may seem to think as essentially think of it like the income tax we all pay to cover the costs of the social programs we enjoy. In the world of the employee personal trainer the portion of the session rate retained by your employer affords you things like the following: in house marketing and lead attraction, all overhead and expenses to stock, maintain and clean the training areas, often liability insurance, independent sales that are hopefully better at closing clients than you are, operational systems, payment and debt collection and maybe even appointment booking. If you are a solo trainer trying to do all of this on your own you likely have some measure of appreciation as to how nice it might be to be able to rely on others to handle these items for you. The downside to being an employee is your employer of course would like to make as much profit as possible which also means it’s going to be the most difficult for you to drastically increase your earning potential in a short period of time.
Now the big advantage I see to working inside of a gym is for the entrepreneurial trainer. Within a franchise this is likely difficult to impossible, but in an independent gym after establishing yourself as an employee it’s time to talk to your employer. You may be able to negotiate a position where any clients you attract through your own marketing you can retain a much higher percentage of session rates. Most employers understand that quality people may not stay long term and this is a position where working for your own gain will also benefit them, far more than if you were to open your own business. Or you may try to negotiate control of the whole personal training department so you move to begin developing and managing the systems of that end of the business providing the business owner with a steady predictable income stream with little effort or risk. These situations provide varying amount of risk to yourself but also substantial reward to the business owner. In this situation you would have many of the benefits (and headaches) of having your own studio without the huge opening costs or fixed overhead of your own brick and mortar location. The business within a business model is likely one of the lowest risk and highest reward scenarios for any personal trainer, the one factor you may find too limiting is you are still operating within someone else’s environment and for the most part they will dictate how you run your business which can be a real challenge if you don’t see entirely eye to eye. Next week I will complete this series with my own experiences of running your own stand a lone training studio.
10 Ways to Get More Clients Right Now!
Based on the emails I’ve been getting I know I have a lot of brand new trainers reading my blog each week. That’s awesome because I still remember just how tough it was to get going with my personal training business and all the basic mistakes I made then. If you need more clients here are my top 10 ways as a new or experienced trainer that you can get more clients right now:
1) Be the trainer that everyone wants to hire. This may sound silly but to be honest one of the biggest problems we’ve had hiring trainers in our facility is they don’t come with the energetic personality you need to be super successful on your own. Each day has to be fun, your primary job is to be uplifting to the people around you and inspire them to commit to the practical magic you teach them.
2) Consistently ask for referrals, and offer referral rewards. This business is based on service and good service produces great word of mouth advertising. Be sure to subtly remind your clients that you really appreciate referrals or offer a referral contest 2-3 times per year.
3) Run real value free trial programs. Make people an offer they can’t refuse, commit to giving them 2 weeks for free or for $1. Show people really value and over deliver your enthusiasm and personality to build a raving fan base. These people become paying customers and bring others.
4) Use the Human Billboard program I learned from my good friend Steve Hochman. Offer people a free trial program and ask them to invite their friends, for each paying customer they refer give them more free training time. What could be better than free personal training after all?
5) Repackage your programs into short term rapid solutions for immediate problems. Ie. The 21 day Summer Tummy Solution. Use Kijiji and Facebook advertising to attract new targeted leads to these short term programs.
6) If you are currently training clients, call your old clients and create a special offer just for them. Don’t wait for them to call you, show genuine interest and get in touch. We’ve signed up over 30 clients in the last 30 days with 2 special packages just for previous clients.
7) Get out in the community schedule at least 1-2 speaker sessions a month for any office with more than 10 employees, a service club, a charitable organization, or anywhere you can find 10 or more people.
8) Immediately position yourself as a community expert, contact at least 2-3 complimentary type businesses each week. Offer to add the manager or key employee into one of your group programs. Provide a nice discount for remaining employees and over deliver. Hairstylists talk to 10-20 people a day wouldn’t you like them to be talking about you?
9) Use list builders on Kijiji and Facebook every week to grow your list and apply 2-step marketing methods to your list 1-2 times per month.
10) Use lead boxes in high traffic areas to increase your list even faster and improve response to 2-step marketing emails.
If you made it a priority to totally commit to applying even 4-6 of these points on an ongoing basis there is absolutely no reason you can’t be booked solid as a personal trainer in the next 30-60 days.
Basics of SEO Content
If you are a personal trainer your website is a key piece of fitness marketing strategy. But I’ve said that a million times. How you develop your website is also critical for effective personal trainer marketing. But then I’ve also said that numerous times. What I have not shown you so specifically yet is exactly how to optimize your content for your website.
Below is a sample of basic keyword optimization for each new article you post. Each new article should provide quality information and value as this is what attracts your readers. Now by ensuring you use your strong keywords strategically placed each new piece of value added content becomes another spoke in your fitness marketing wheel. Remember people come looking for answers, not prices, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help ensure they find your answers. If you are looking for a first page Google listing adding multiple optimized pages for each keyword will be a big step in the right direction.
The above is a headline and opening paragraph of an article written by one of my coaching clients for his developing website. I modified it by added and highlighting the keywords in the format I recommend.
The basics of optimizing your article:
- Include primary keywords in your title.
- Use your keywords again in the first sentence and again before the end of the first paragraph.
- Ideal density would be 3-6% for your keywords in the entire article. (I personally don’t worry about writing my articles this way as I will outsource this kind of optimization for my studio website.)
Your Marketing Calendar
People are interesting creatures, like cats and children we all have an innate curiosity and the need to wonder and celebrate. In a previous coaching group I had a chance to meet with ultra successful Canadian Fitness Internet Marketer Craig Ballantyne. I didn’t know what to make of Craig at first; he comes across as a pretty ultra serious guy. It didn’t take me long though to realize though he’s not only a great guy he’s super passionate about business and totally brilliant. One of the things he talked about that afternoon was your Marketing Calendar.
If you haven’t caught on by now a contact list is critically important for your fitness business, or any business for that matter. The second thing is you need to be in regular contact with them, well that’s all fine but what the heck do you talk about this week?
Craig had a brilliant idea, pick yourself up a calendar today and start to write all the birthdays for you, your family, colleagues, friends, favourite superstars, your pets, your anniversaries etc. Its funny these all become great reasons to unveil your next crazy hair brained idea to your list.
It sounds ridiculous, but remember that innate curiosity, as people we all live vicariously through each other. You don’t need to look any further than Facebook to see how wrapped up we are in each others lives.
The marketing calendar becomes a fun way to bridge the gap between content, sincerity and offer to the prospects on your mailing list.
How to get your old clients back
After over 19 years in the fitness industry personally I’ve had somewhere around 3000 one-on-one personal training clients. Sadly you will learn as I have that for most of your clients, even the ones that are really successful with the best of intentions, they will one day need you again. Now if you’ve provided a great experience they may remember you again, that is if a savy marketer doesn’t get to them first.
Your current and previous clients are what are known in sales as your “lowest hanging fruit.” Whether it’s now or in the past you have earned their trust and hopefully have a much stronger rapport than you would a complete stranger. Because of that rapport they are twice as likely to repeat buy from you than a brand new customer will be.
If you want a sure fire high conversion method of filling your training schedule today, call your old clients. However you need to have a solid high value offer to go with your call.
This is just one of many strategies my elite coaching clients use. Could a mentor help your business?
Here’s what we did that netted us a 75-85% conversion bringing our old clients back.
Our three year anniversary at One-to-1 Fitness was May 27; we used the idea of this celebratory day to encourage our old clients to come see us again. Rather than the normal celebratory drivel that costs you lot’s of money and gets you nothing we decided to instead invest in great people. I had my sales manager go through our old client files and pick out a whole pile of people he remembered, the ones he had the strongest rapport with. After looking at their previous goals we called them to “check up” on how they were doing maintaining their goals. Since most people slowly slip back we offered a solution, we gave them 2 weeks of training on us in our spiffy new small group training program. What’s important is we showed we genuinely cared because we contacted them and took the time to see what was important to them, we offered them something of high value, and created the appeal of a different experience than they previously had with us.
All of these people only previously knew us for our great one-on-one services. Now they had a select and limited opportunity to be part of a program that was a pile of fun in a small group setting and totally obligation free, they couldn’t lose; why not come and see some familiar faces? Of course we hyped all the new renos and such to, that never hurts. The best part is if you just provide the same killer service all the time, this program sells itself!
Bonus: The Insurance Policy
As always marketing is really about customer value, how you can provide over the top value and still find a way to make a little profit. For our conversion of this program we just sweetened the deal, gave everyone a nice short term price break (call it a signing bonus) and we used all the value adds from our partner businesses. (Each client received something like $500 in free bonuses, so much so it becomes a no brainer.)
Provide value, everyone wins! In summary remember these components:
- Always genuinely care, call and see how people are doing.
- Offer them something high value and have a reason for you offer, ours was our anniversary.
- Make the offer limited and provide scarcity, in our case we only had so many spots to fill and they were starting on a certain date. Push people to take immediate action.
- Don’t blow it by trying to convert too soon, provide real value.
- Have a high value conversion offer, make it a no brainer.
How to get everything you want as a personal trainer
I’d like to share a couple little tidbits of success from this week if you don’t mind. If you were at the Business Ignition Workshop you heard all about how to use a free weight loss program to rapidly launch your fitness business. Well this week two of my coaching clients nailed it big time. One of them explained how they recruited 40 new people for their results bootcamp and the other had over 65 training inquiries within 48 hours leaving their job to pursue their fitness business full time.
Given this is a free weight loss program you may not be impressed you might think it is easy to recruit people if you are willing to train them for free, and in a sense you would be right. Now on the other side of this equation I have had some people from the workshop contact me with questions as to why their programs weren’t working, in every single case they had try to cut corners somehow whether it was shortening the program, eliminating components of the offer or some other element, you can’t cut corners, but do you understand why?
Times are tough; people are tighter with their money than ever. The only way you are going to get them to give you their precious dollars is to make them feel like they would be silly not to and to make them feel as though they owe it to you, it’s this second point that my coaching clients really understand.
You see most personal trainers are starving, broke and barely hanging on so every new client is a must sell situation. Clients pick up on this, they can detect desperation like a dog can smell fear, it’s a sure fire way to go broke in no time.
Now the smart trainer understands the Law of Reciprocity. You must always go with a giving hand and be willing to give in a way none of your competitors are. When it comes to a free weight loss program pull out all the stops, always give them all your best stuff and never worry about anything in return. If you execute this fully then it’s a simple conversion process. How much does it cost will become how do I make sure I get a spot? Seriously the higher the quality of service you give people in an extended trial program you will never have to worry about selling them anything, they will sell themselves. Zig Zigler says, “Help enough people get what they want and you will get what you want.”
In an extended trial you earn massive amounts of trust because people get to see the value and experience it for themselves before they ever commit to anything, if they find value in what you do why wouldn’t they stay? Just think of this approach as an aggressive deferred payment plan.
Now the second aspect of getting everything you want as a personal trainer is a little different. Let me ask you, have you asked your clients to write out their goals for you? Probably, but now let me ask you, why have you not written out your own goals? Very few people actually write down their goals. As a trainer if you have not written your own goals for this year, month and week then I can guarantee you are not holding your clients accountable fully to theirs. This accountability is one of your primary roles as a trainer, trust me it’s not to count reps. A funny thing happens when you write down your goals, believe it or not they will come true whether you think you are actively pursuing them or not you simply will. Trust me.
YES! Contact me today to schedule a FREE no obligation consultation and trial workout.