Tell Us About Your Personal Training Business

May 2, 2014 by No Comments

My own answers:

What setting/s do you work in? eg Gym, studio, outdoors, client’s home, online

I train my clients in a PT studio. In my spare time, I’m also setting up material and systems to eventually open up online training.

Do you prefer 1:1, small groups or large groups?

Definitely 1:1. Large groups make coaching really freakin’ difficult for me and drive my stress levels through the roof.

What are your specialty area/s?

Strength training for performance and physique.

Do you scale your services to cater for different price ranges?

In my face:to:face training, I offer different session durations, session frequencies, and 1:1 or small group training. These variables mean that a single client could pay as little as $25/wk or as much as $200+.

I’m developing a 3-tier stratification for online training, with the bottom tier shaping up to be about $50/month, middle tier about $200, and upper tier is currently looking to be about $500/month, although by the time I launch these, I may decide to adjust the services provided so that this is even higher.

What has been your greatest success as a trainer?

I don’t have a single story that stands out above the rest as the greatest success, but here are a few examples that have really encouraged me as a trainer:

– Female client, aged 24, goes from skinny-fat to toned in 2 months. This carried a lot more emotional meaning to her than just gaining a level of hotness.
– Male client, aged 27, had been working out on PT programs for 3 years before he met me. At the end of our first 10-pack of sessions, he told me that he’d gained more in the last 3 months training with me than he had in the entire 3 years beforehand.
– Female client, aged 30, goes from having never done a full squat before to loading her bodyweight onto a barbell and squatting it, overcoming the fear of barbells that every female client seems to have starting out, in 2 months of training.
– Male client, aged 30, goes from deadlifting 40kg to 130kg in 3 weeks.

What has been your greatest hurdle?

My biggest hurdles have always been internal. A natural social butterfly I ain’t. A natural salesman I ain’t. A natural leader I ain’t. A lot of the advice I’ve received along the way to help overcome these hurdles has been pretty much useless, too, such as “just be confident,” which is like telling someone who can’t read that they’ll be alright if they “just be a PhD graduate.” It’s taken years to overcome some of my internal restraints, and I’ve got plenty more that I’m still grappling with, that still restrain my business development. One of the big things I’m working on this year is rewriting my internal monologue when it comes to money, by making a point of identifying things I take for granted and placing a real value on them, so that I have a basis upon which to confidently set prices and ask people to pay those prices.