The title to this thread seems like a no-brainer. Duh, of course PT is a business. Yet, it’s only been in the last few weeks, after signing up for a PT business course (which I’ll be doing in February — for now I’m just working my way through a bunch of extra material I’ve acquired from the course providers) that I’ve actually been getting what that means. That being the case, a lot of help successful trainers have tried giving me in the past that wasn’t actually helpful at the time is suddenly making sense — advice which is largely true and good, but requires some foundational stuff underneath it first before it can be applicable. The thing that’s really hitting me is how much of this foundational stuff I already knew in theory, but had never internalised or connected to PT.

One of the really big things that’s sticking out to me right now is the need to have a niche market. Some trainers in the past have helped me with the idea of niches before, but the advice I’ve previously received for PT has had niches the wrong way around. Here are some examples of niches gone backwards: “I’m strength trainer;” “I’m a hypertrophy trainer;” “I’m a Pilates trainer;” “I’m a plyometrics trainer;” etc. These are niches in a sense, but these are niche features about you the trainer. This is only vaguely helpful, because the niches you need to be clear about from a business and marketing standpoint are the niches that will make up your clients. So, let’s say you’re a Pilates trainer. That’s great. Who are the potential customers of a Pilates trainer? That’s what you need to be asking yourself. Be specific. Think gender, age, location, social class, stage of life, etc. Put a couple traits together that really narrow things down. “Women” is not a niche, women is half the population. “Fat loss” is not a niche, it’s 90% of people who have ever bought a gym membership. “Stay-at-home mums” is a niche. “Young upper class brides” is a niche. “Middle-aged folks who’ve recently been diagnosed with Type II Diabetes and need to get it under control if they want to live to see their kids graduate” is a niche.

If you look at a lot of the wannabe trainers/spambots who post their “10 Fast Weight Loss Tips” posts, do they have a clear niche? Unless people who trust Nigerian princes constitute a real target market, not really. If you look at the average PT in the average gym, do they have a clear niche? Nope. About 1 in 10 will have some feature that makes them stand out from the pack, but in my experience, even they typically fail to set aside a specific niche to really focus on. Now, what have we noticed about the average spambot-style trainers here? If you’re like me, you don’t take them very seriously, and if you were to consider taking their advice, you’d expect a very average level of value. Without a clear niche, you end up trying to reach many audiences, and pretty much miss all of them. With a clear niche, you can identify who it is you’re trying to reach, and focus on them specifically. They may be 1 in 1,000, but hey, in a city with 1,000,000 residents, that’s 1,000 potential clients — more than you’ll ever need. With a clear niche, you can think: “Who is my target audience? What do they do? Where do they go to hang out? How do they spend their time and money? Who are they doing business with before they do business with me?” Now, magically, you know who to write your ads for, who to customise your business cards for, who to design your website for, and what businesses to cross-market with (eg where to put up business cards, fliers and posters).

Or, you know, you can do what I always did, and what the wannabes/spambots here do, and what most PTs do in most gyms, which is to have no clear niche, target no one specifically (or attempt to target everyone and look like you don’t relate properly with anyone), and be on the highway to Brokeville. Remember, it’s normal for the PTs who are starting up now to have left the industry within 2 years. I used to think that it had something to do with PTs being broadly lazy or the industry being messed up and corrupt, but let’s be real. The average PT doesn’t really think of their business as a business: they think of it as a job with odd hours, and they treat it as such. They don’t try to raise their own business, they just do what the group around them is doing. The group around them is mostly going to fail (only about 20% of trainers are still in business after 2 years) or quit when they realise that they have no social life, they resent their job, they’re bored, and they’re financially no better off than if they were working a comfortable 9-5 desk job.

It’s taken me 5 years for this all to start clicking, and I haven’t properly implemented it yet — I’m going through a second pre-school right now, if you will, where I’m rapidly learning, re-learning and unlearning a lot, and it will take some time before I’m ready to put this thinking into practice. Right now my business senses are like the average client on their first day learning to squat for the first time: shoddy, grotesque and all over the place, but vaguely following the movement they should be. So it’ll be some time before I can report back and say that all this stuff I’m saying is legit. Part of me is just really excited about what I’m thinking through right now, and bursting to talk about it…but I’m especially keen to share it with PTs, because I think most of us need a good swift blow to the head to knock some sense into us and remind us that personal training is in fact a business.