Session #014 - Three Ways to Grow Your Personal Training Business

Show notes:

The 3 ways to grow your business is a concept from Jay Abraham. Who, if you didn’t know, is a marketing genius. I’ll put a link to his stuff. He has an amazing amount of free content on his site you can check out.

Now, I listen to podcasts everyday and early on, in all this, I discovered an amazing podcast with Jay Abraham where in 2 episodes I found out about how good his work is and my mind was blown!

He helped me realise that there are no 100% set in stone rules and quite often thinking differently and outside the box will really benefit you.

He talks all the time about taking ideas, systems and methods from one industry and applying it to another which is so simple. But it’s the simple things that are so genius as it’s what people always overlook. While most of the time, people are trying to be overly clever and end up over complicating things.

If I can find it I’ll link to the podcast which shows how his mind works and the type of things that are possible in business I’ll add it in the show notes.

Anyway, one of his big concepts, of which there are many, is the 3 ways to grow a business.

And I wanted to go over this and give an example of what you can do that is specific to personal trainers.

So here they are as a list before we get into each one separately.

Let’s go through these one by one.

So the first one is to increase the number of customers. Which is pretty self explanatory.

If you have 5 clients paying you 20k per month that equals 100000 rupees or 1L per month. If you increase that to 10 clients paying you 20k per month that is going to double your business.

So your business has grown!

Pretty straight forward right?

Well, it is easier said than done. To increase your business this way you will need great marketing, systems and processes to make those changes. You can’t just flick a switch and make it happen and have more clients.

But how to get there is for another day and another session as it is outside the scope of this one.

The thing is this as well, this can only go so far with adding more and more clients if you’re an in-person, offline trainer since there are only so many hours in the day. You will reach a limit pretty quickly.

So, let’s say you're now at your maximum amount of clients that you can handle. What can you do to grow your business?

Well, you can try and find ways to be able to take on even more customers or clients. Maybe by starting and growing a team of trainers to help services these new clients and keep growing by increasing customers.

But the other option you have is to increase the transaction size, which is number 2 on the list.

And the easiest way to do this is to raise your prices.

Now, if your calendar is always full, then, you know, the basic rule of supply and demand is as good a reason as any to make that jump.

You may get a couple of clients drop off due to the price increase, but it will free up slots for others that see the value in what you offer.

The level that you are earning shouldn’t drop or if it does it shouldn’t drop by much as the losses from clients that stop training with you is made up by the clients that stayed, still see value and are paying more.

As you fill up those empty slots on your calendar, you will then be growing your business to more that what it was before.

But keep in mind that increasing your price isn’t the only way to increase the transaction size.

You have upsells, packages and bundles and a whole lot more.

So an upsell is when you have a client purchase something that is more expensive or additional to what they originally wanted.

So for personal trainers, a great upsell is to take a client that wants to buy 2 sessions a week of training to take 3 sessions a week of training. This makes the purchase, or the transaction size much higher than before.

Some trainers might sell their training and nutrition separately so by bundling these together for a new client you will have 2 services instead of one, which also means a higher price, increasing the transaction size.

Can you think of more ways that you can increase the transaction size for your client or potential clients based on what you currently offer?

Now, the 3rd way to grow your business is to increase the buying frequency. That is to have people buy from you more often.

Now, it’s funny in some ways that people always try to sell clients on longer term agreements when it is actually earning you less money. But I do understand why, so I wanted to go over this to explain.

So, let’s take a gym membership as that is also something that we can all relate to.

So many gyms will always try to sell a potential member an annual membership. Now, the reason they do this, either knowingly or unknowingly, is because they should know that an annual membership price is greater than the lifetime value of a member.

Lifetime value or LTV is the average amount of money a client or member is worth over a certain period of time. Which is the average time a member stays a member at the gym.

So if your average client stays for 3 months and is worth on average 20k over those 3 months, it makes sense that you sell an annual membership for 30k, because you have had a payment of more than your average 20K.

However, if you have really good retention, then selling single months works out better. If your gym charges even 3k per month, over 12 months, that will come to 36K, which is much higher than both. Assuming costs remain the same.

But, that means that you have a great retention rate, which means your average member actually stays for longer than the 3 months we mentioned earlier.

In an ideal world, each client would pay a monthly rate and stay for a really long time, with lots of renewals. So the lifetime value is really high. That would earn the business the most money.

So, it’s a balance at the end of the day.

But whatever way you go, for a personal trainer, the best way to keep the buying frequency high is to make sure that your clients are turning up consistently for their sessions.

The more they turn up, the better their results, the more they enjoy it, so the more they come. It also means that because they are getting results and enjoying things, they renew at the earliest possible opportunity and they will stay for longer.

Therefore, they are increasing or maximising the frequency of payments, the average lifetime of a client and also the value you get from each client

Oh and in addition to all of this, they will tell their friends and family, giving you testimonials and referrals and helping you grow your business that way by increasing the number of clients you have.

You see how these are all linked and how one can benefit from the other?

I told you Jay Abraham is a genius!

So, now you know. The only 3 ways to grow your business and ways to use it as a personal trainer.

Links:

Jay Abraham Resources

The Tony Robbins Podcast with Jay Abraham - Part 1 & Part 2