It has been your belief in me that made me
be-lieve in myself, and your support that helped me
achieve my dreams. I hope I was able to bring
as much value to your lives as you have to mine.
simplest form. It’s a business that can allow you to achieve
what millions work hard for but never find: a path to enjoyable,
stress-free work and an adventurous life.
Not everything you’re about to read is politically correct
or socially acceptable; it’s all real-world information, culled
from my experiences in this field, from speaking to the world’s
best trainers, and many more trainers that you’ll never hear or
read about but that are truly living what’s called the fitness
life-style. I’ve separated the real from the rhetoric, and what’s left
are the essentials to creating a career of respect, high salary and
a limitless future.
An untold amount of effort and time went into the development
of the information in this book, not to mention the six months it
took to write it. Please respect that and do not wrongfully
dis-tribute this book or use it improperly. Thank you for your
pur-chase and I look forward to meeting you and hearing your story.
Sincerely,
Kaiser Serajuddin
Copyright ©2010 This work is legally copyrighted in the State of New York . It is meant for use by the sole owner or those licensed by GoHard Fitness Inc. for possession of this book. Any wrongful copying or distribution of this book will be met by full penalty of law. This book may not be re-sold or distributed by any other party other than GoHard Fitness Inc.
23 32 48 55 106 118 135 181
W
ith this book I’d like to take the opportunity to introduce a new term to you: THE TOP-LEVEL TRAIERTop Level Training isn’t a new type of training; rather, it’s an enhanced definition of Personal Training. That’s because if you’re not a Top Level Trainer, you’re ac-tually not a trainer at all. You’re just passing through the fitness industry for a short time and just like the wooly mammoth, you’ll soon be extinct..
TLTs are the trainers with the highest incomes and the highest job satisfaction. They don’t go through career burn-out; instead their skills and knowledge grow month by month and year by year. When new opportunities open up in the health and fitness industry, they’re the ones ready to fill them. They eventually gain such a high level of skill, success, and perspective that they grow into other seg-ments of the fitness sector, and eventually to wide recognition and tremendous success.
If we were to do a comparison of Top-Level Trainers versus non-TLTs, it would look like this:
TLT: Gets all the best clients.
non-TLT: Trains people that don’t inspire them.
TLT: Gets tons of referrals and never has to market. non-TLT: Cares more about making sales than changing lives.
TLT: Earns a high income.
non-TLT: Will soon be in a different, less desirable, less respected field.
TLT: Has a thriving training practice. non-TLT: Earns a very uncertain salary.
TLT: Moves on to expert status in the field.
non-TLT: Experiences career burn-out after a few years.
TLT: Lives the fitness lifestyle, full of excitement and lots of leisure time. non-TLT: Doesn’t practice what they preach.
Which one are you?
Which one would you rather be?
This manual will help you to understand what the top of the training industry looks like, and most importantly, give you a detailed plan of how to get there. I myself have been on both sides of the spectrum. When I first started as a trainer, it wasn’t long before I was beaten down by the profession; it became a bad job in-stead of a career I was passionate about.
didn’t understand the profession. Being motivated has nothing to do with it; it’s rules are completely different from every other profession out there. Unfortu-nately, it took me years and the experience of training thousands of clients before I figure out the truth: that this isn’t a typical career. For that reason, many of the strategies you would use to get ahead in typical career will actually backfire and blow up in your face when if you’re a Personal Trainer
I now realize how it should be done; that there are simple systems, habits, and mind-sets that go into being a personal trainer that are more than just about sweat and dumbbells. Once you grasp these ideas, this job actually turns into both one of the most rewarding and at the same time easiest professions in the world.
First I’d like to commend you for being serious about your career and pick-ing up THE SIX-FIGURE TRAINER PROGRAM. You’ll find it immeasurably more valuable to your career than any other book or DVD you’ve seen or read on personal training or general business for that matter.
More importantly, it’s the most practical. Books and certifications on per-sonal training are designed just to maintain the status quo and teach you the basics of how to train. They don’t tell you anything about the “real world” of personal training – how to get high level clients, charge top dollar, work fewer hours, live a vibrant lifestyle, and have tons of clients that keep coming back and refer you to others. These are the most important lessons to learn, but they aren’t available anywhere else. The majority of trainers will give up on this great profession and move on to other fields before they ever learn them.
But in this program, I’ll show you what it’s really like to make it. Here you’re going to learn the real field-tested information on how to succeed in this business, but on your terms; how to have the kind of training practice you want, and how to actually create an appealing lifestyle for yourself. In society today we are what we do, and for that reason this book is about way more than just starting or improving at a job – it’s about realizing your vision and creating a life.
I
can unequivocally say that Personal Training is the world’s greatest profes-sion. It brings together some unbelievable characteristics that make this the case.• It’s easy to get started • It’s easy to do
• It pays a high income
For anyone that decides to enter this field, you’re uniquely positioned to get started in something special. Who else do you know talks about their job like that? I have no problem doing it, and it’s without any hype. On top of that, I’d also call Personal Training the world’s last great profession, for a few reasons:
• Personal Training is completely unregulated - it’s ungoverned by
arbi-trary standards or red tape.
trainer and a person, not the school you went to.
• People are paying you to make them exercise - how that turned into a
lucrative, multi-million dollar field permanently ingrained into our culture, I have no idea.
• It’s the most highly consumed and at the same time also the highest
paying wellness field - more so than massage, acupuncture, or chiropractic services. You only need a few clients to earn a very high income.
• You set your own hours - want to work mornings, evenings, or go on
vaca-tion several times a year? This is your job.
• It’s in a rapidly expanding field - the health and wellness industry is
be-ing hailed as the next trillion dollar industry. Personal Trainbe-ing is your start in this field, and your road to continued success and a very high income.
• It’s in a subject that is actually fun to participate in and learn about - I
mean there are people that go to the gym every day and study health and fitness that aren’t Personal Trainers!
The truth is that everyone needs to work out, and millions of people do; we’re just the only ones that get to make money at it!
J
im Collins in his book Good to Great talks about the signs that you’re in the perfect profession for you: it’s when you’ve been enjoying what you’re doing so much, and making so much money at it, that at any moment you’re afraid that “the powers that be” will find out and come busting through the doors and shut you down; you think any day you’ll be found-out and it will all be taken away from you; you have to pinch yourself at how much fun and how easy your job is.That’s exactly how I’ve felt for years now as a Personal Trainer. I’ve had such an amazing lifestyle doing something that comes so naturally to me, I actu-ally feel guilty. I’ll show you how to get the same feeling.
The problem with a lot of personal trainers is they think that they don’t de-serve to be this lucky or get this kind of respect. They actually fight it and end-up making the profession unnecessarily hard. They spend millions every year on un-necessary certifications that won’t improve the end training experience of their clients and won’t bring any additional money into their pockets. They choose to train in neighborhoods or gyms where they’ll never earn a high income or have a real future; they just continue to bang their heads against the wall day after day for years on end. And they don’t set themselves up to move forward in this career; they view hourly training as their last stop, not knowing there are other options out there for them.
But it can be different – unlike any other major field in the world, all it takes to get to the top of this one is the decision to do it; there are no other outside boundaries.
Completely Untouched
A
s you probably already know, Personal Trainers are respected as highly skilled professionals. Just like any other professional, you’re considered to possess a cer-tain body of knowledge and skill that people pay you to benefit from. But unlike other professions, there still isn’t any mandatory college degree for Personal Trainers; there’s no designated number of hours you need to serve as an intern; no number of credits you need to accumulate. Of the wide number of major certifi-cations that you can get in Personal Training, all with different requirements and differences in difficulty, the amount of studying and actual tested material is about what you’ll find on just one major exam in a difficult college class. In any other profession, you’ll have to taken dozens of such tests before you can start your ca-reer; here, you’ve got to take just one - hardly a barrier to entry in any way.And here’s a little secret: you really don’t need a certification at all to get started! Although from a legal perspective it’s not recommended (in case you’re sued), you will not be arrested or convicted of malpractice for not having a certifi-cation. That’s not true of chiropractors, dieticians, acupuncturists, and almost
any health and wellness profession. And Personal Trainers very often charge more than any of those other professionals! It’s really unbelievable when you think about it. For that reason, I refer to this field as completely untouched.
While some people consider this lack of regulation as opening up the road to quacks, it’s actual quite the opposite. It hearkens back to a different time and place in history, when mastery and success in a profession was not based on the number of degrees you had, but on your actual skill and your real ability to achieve results and change lives. That’s the beauty of Personal Training, and the reason why I call it the last great profession. This may change one day, but for now it is still an open field for anyone to get started, establish themselves, and move on to even greater success.
While a new client may want to know about your credentials and certifica-tion before they start training with you, this will hardly be their deciding factor. They just want to know that you’re certified, for I guess the same reason they want to know that any professional is basically qualified. But what they’ll really judge you on is you – about how you present yourself, your belief in yourself and your work, and how you’re clients talk about you when you’re not around. For those of you who are used to just showing up and earning a paycheck, this can be a little scary - but it’s also very thrilling.
Entitlement
T
he mistake many Personal Trainers make, and like I’ve said I was guilty of this as well, is that they see this field like just any other. They’re trying to rack up the most certifications and learn the most funky new techniques, even though they know these have little practical application. These trainers usually go looking for a “job” at a health-club, where they end up overworked and underpaid. They punch a clock, are stuck in one place all day, and just like the millions of other liv-ing dead in our society, they work all year for a 2 week (un-paid in this case) va-cation; this isn’t for me and it’s certainly not for you.But it’s not their fault; in our society we’re taught to believe that success can’t be achieved with ease; we’re told we have to suffer for it. This is one of the major mental barriers that we all need to overcome in pursuing our goals: you can and deserve to live a better life and succeed without the back-breaking effort or hardship that’s come to typify the condition of most people in the Western World.
If you grew up in typical household, you probably don’t feel like you de-serve to have it so easy. Watching my parents wake-up every day at 6 AM and come home exhausted, I started to feel that this is the way life was supposed to be. If your upbringing was similar, you also watched your parents consumed by their work, losing touch with their own lives and interests. As you enter adulthood, you begin to believe this is normal. This world-view is reinforced through the media and popular culture; the idea that you’ve got to go to school for many years, and after that get started in a career where you’ll be overworked and under-paid for several more years after that. You’re also led to believe that you have to work for a jerk-wad boss and look forward to your 2 week vacation every year. If you work especially hard and are really successful, you might even get a promo-tion, where you can work even more hours and hopefully make a little more pay. And if you’re really lucky, one day when you’re old and overweight, you’ll be able to make enough money to live comfortably and retire a few years early; but at this point your youth has passed you by and all you have to show for it are a bunch of possessions, but no real life experiences.
Your first step on the road to success is to realize that this isn’t how it has to be; that you can take a completely different road.
• You can work in field that’s completely flexible. • You can do work you love.
• You don’t have to go to college for years on end.
• You don’t have to begin your career working for a very poor salary. • You can be your won boss without starting your own business.
If you can’t believe all of this, you’re doomed from the beginning - you’ve got to be able to visualize the lifestyle you want and the freedom you want. Once you do, you’ll be able to take steps to make it your reality, and make corrections
whenever your path falls off of your vision.
That’s the first lesson I want you to learn: to have that feeling of entitle-ment. No matter who you are or what you’re earning now, you too deserve to make a lot of money doing something you love, the freedom of not having some-one telling you what to do, and an outstanding career with a world of potential. You deserve all of these things, and the field of Personal Training is going to give them to you!
Earning Potential
D
espite what you hear in the media about David Beckham’s contract or what the kid from Facebook is worth, making a comfortable living in the world today is tough. The median income of a gradate from Stanford law school is $150,000 dollars. This is after they’ve gone to college for at least 7 years, with a few more years of work experience mixed in there. And remember, they’re working 60+ hours a week at their first job after graduation.Owning your own business is very much the same. Michael Gerber calls it the E-Myth, in his book by the same name. It’s the entrepreneurial myth of high pay and lots of free time, which eventually turns into terrible hours and career burn-out. What Gerber describes in excruciating detail is how most people start their businesses thinking that it will give them more free time and freedom, but they actually become slaves to their business and are never able to enjoy the elu-sive success that was initially their goal. Considering all this, he questions the motivation of someone evening starting a business in the first place.
Being an independent Personal Trainer on the other hand can be completely different; you can be your own small business without the all the hassle of actu-ally owning a business. In this arrangement you get all the benefits of being your own boss without all of the headaches. And the self-esteem and knowledge you get from being your own boss is a benefit that can’t be measured. It’s true that you’re clients pay you’re bills, but during your training sessions it’s you telling them what to do.
Besides this sense of freedom and confidence, there are even more benefits to stepping up and seeking the type of life you want. When you stand up for yourself and look to get what you deserve, you end up much happier and fulfilled as a result. And best part of all, you also end up a better person that contributes positively to our world. Make that commitment to yourself that you’re going to get what you deserve, and the rest of this program will show you how to do it.
W
e’ve taken the time to define what Top-Level Training is by now. You know that it’s the brand of Personal Training that ensures success and a high income. Before we can get into the details of how to become a Top-Level Trainer, we need to get into a more fundamental concept and ask ourselves an even more basic question:WHAT IS PERSOAL TRAIIG?
Is Personal Training about the motivation we give our clients? Is it about getting them to workout? Is it the workouts themselves? Is it the new exercises, tech-niques, or knowledge we convey to them? Is it about the results we help them get? What are we selling exactly?
Those are all aspects of Personal Training, but let’s not lose the forest for the trees. There’s one overarching definition that encompasses and supersedes all others:
Personal training is the actual sensory and physical ex-perience the client feels from being in your presence for one hour.
That’s what a training session is, and this is what you’re selling. Depending on how this session “feels” will determine your success, your referrals, and your in-come. With every training session, ask yourself this:
► Did your client feel good?
► Like they were with a professional?
► Like they grew during this session?
► Were they inspired?
► Were there limits pushed?
► Are they looking forward to the next session?
► Did they have a good time?
►Are they dying to tell someone else how it went?
You’ve got to begin to view your product from all these different angles. The mistake most trainers make is they think the workout is the product. They think all the client cares about is the workout, and if you can just give them a better workout you can one-day charge $100 an hour.
As “professionals”, we begin to think of what we do in logical terms - but remember personal training is different from other professions; as I mentioned, it’s the best one. We’ve got to look beyond the logical and think of it also in emo-tional terms. We need to think about the feelings our client gets: prestige,
motiva-can elicit that the lower level trainer motiva-can’t. This is how you dominate your mar-ket, get booked solid, and charge top dollar.
Most trainers try to raise their income by acquiring more certifications, but what they don’t realize is these certifications don’t do anything to help this “feel”; they’re just an attempt to cover up the weaknesses. Expert status in Personal
Training is based on a wide range of criteria only one of which is your credentials. There is no MD degree in personal training, where the client knows that you
sweated for 8 + years. Instead, clients use many different and varying criteria to judge your competency level for themselves.
The trainers that try to stand just on the strength of their certifications or even college degrees often face a harsh reality; this isn’t a “degreed’ profession. In my opinion, degreed jobs in today’s society are a cop-out; they make you toil and pay your dues up front through rigorous education, with the promise that you can coast for the rest of your life and never have to work on yourself again. I’m sure many of us would like to earn the income of our physicians, but would you ever want to look like him or have his personal life? I doubt it.
The medical profession is an example of the old success model; if a per-sonal trainer ever decides to coast and not work on themselves and their image, or sit back on their credentials to get them clients, they’ll be out of business very soon, or not get into any sort of business to begin with.
If you aren’t inspired by what you do, who’s going to want to train with you? They’re paying for your inspiration, because as it stands now, they’re not inspired to work-out enough on their own.
A trainer may think the client is paying for only the service, ie. the workout or weight loss program; this trainer may dress poorly; he/she may not care about growing their knowledge; they may not plan the clients workout in advance or spend any time thinking of something new to challenge the client’s body. You’ll find trainers like this in major health-clubs. They’ve gotten bored with the job and bored of themselves. These types of trainers are undoubtedly just passing through; they’re not going to be in this field for long.
But find me a successful career trainer, and I’ll show you someone com-pletely different. They’re a pleasure to be around – they exude physical health be-cause unbelievably, they’re passionate about fitness. They’re passionate about life as well, and usually have some interesting story to relate to their clients,
which their clients enjoy because they’re usually overworked career people them-selves. They view their trainer as a trusted friend and usually develop a close re-lationship with them.
This trainer is confident and in control; they can competently answer their clients questions; they’re tentative and focused in on their client; they look good, like a true professional, dressed the way you would expect a top fitness consultant to dress; they’re taking notes and actively involved with their client; when not ac-tually working out, you will see them and their client smiling and you may peri-odically here some laughter burst out during the session (it’s obvious they’re hav-ing fun over there); the trainer looks clean and is well groomed (you can imagine that they smell good too). This relationship appears to have many dimensions - they look like good friends, like a mentor and student, like a therapist and patient; you can imagine this trainer having an enjoyable lifestyle, good friends and posi-tive habits.
Were you able to see this training session in your mind? Could you visual-ize the trainer? Could you see what was going on? I have a feeling you could; on top of that, I have feeling you imagined yourself in the picture as the trainer. What you saw was yourself at your best.
Professional Service
P
robably the best way to describe training is as a professional service. Both those words, professional and service, carry equal weight in the term; you need to keep each word in mind and live up to them both. However, many trainers think about themselves in only one of these terms; they short change their success right there. It’s the perfect and equal combination of these two ideas that defines Per-sonal Training. Learning to balance the two is what separates it from any other profession.This book is equally focused on both of these topics. It pays attention to both who you are and the image you’re conveying, down to the nuts and bolts of the training session itself. The training session is the experience – it’s the
prod-crease your in-session quality.
Being a service professional is one of the best places for someone to start their career. You get to sell a product that requires no overhead, just your imagi-nation and intelligence. Some of the greatest success stories in business history have started in the service professions. There’s nowhere else that you can gain the experience and interpersonal skills that you can here.
What are the advantages of service?
• Elimination of ego – our ego is one of the main things that holds us
back in our lives. It’s like our protective blanket, and we tend to avoid anything that will hurt or damage our ego. But being in a service pro-fession increases your level of internal validation; it causes you to find value within yourself, not look to the outside world to determine your value. This is a personal quality vital for any kind of success.
• You don’t need any raw materials, stock, or inventory when you begin;
it’s just you. Therefore, the value of a training session is an intangible thing and takes on a largely psychic dimension. Personal trainers charge anywhere from $20 to $1,000 a session, but there’s never a physical product they sell, unlike a $5,000 Hyundai and a $350,000 Maybach, which have many obvious physical differences (although the Maybach’s price is still largely psychic value).
So where do the do the differences in value of a training session come from? That part’s up to you. As a service profession, Personal Training will teach you that – it’ll teach you about the intrinsic value of a product or service. You’ll learn to tap into the mind of a consumer and find out what triggers their perception of value. This ability gives you an immeasurable business advantage over other tradition-ally educated professionals, who depend more on their symbols of value than ac-tual value.
If you play your cards right and learn to master all the aspects of good ser-vice, you can earn a high income without ever creating or selling a physical
prod-uct in any way. What you’re doing is creating value out of thin air; it’s a magical ability that once you’ve mastered, will make anything else you ever do seem easy by comparison.
A
t my barbershop recently I observed an interesting phenomenon. All the bar-bers there will cut the hair of anybody that walks in the door. Every new cus-tomer is an adventure in haircutting for them, and I think that’s what holds them to $12 per haircut and such long hours – it’s the lack of specialization.Health-club trainers are the same way; they’ll train anyone that walks in the door. For that reason, most of them probably earn much less than my barber. They train whoever they’re assigned, and it could be someone different every hour. They think this allows them to see more clients and add to their incomes, but what it really does is hold them back and leads to their failure.
In medicine, we know that the doctors that earn the most money are the specialists. But specialization in training doesn’t require an additional degree, or any other particular differentiating strength, at least not initially.
All it takes is a decision.
Once you’ve made this decision about what to make your specialty, it then
comes the focus of all your future work. It guides the knowledge you accumulate and the clients you take-on. It becomes the basis of your success image, how you describe your job to others, and all of your promotions and marketing. Needless to say, it’s a pretty important decision to make.
It’s also essential for your job satisfaction and well-being. If you don’t spe-cialize, you’ll find your job-satisfaction begin to diminish. We all need growth in order to be happy, and you’ll find mastery hard to achieve if you don’t specialize. This then makes it hard to move on to anything greater in the future. Just like any professional, your career and personal success are closely aligned. Therefore, it’s not only important for your happiness, but also one of the most crucial things you do for your success as well. You’ll either burn-out or find your training practice die-out one day unless you make this choice early on.
My Search For A Specialty
W
hen I first started as a Personal Trainer at a major health-club, I was expected to train anyone that was thrown at me. With just a general understanding of over-all fitness, me and over-all the other trainers were expected to be able to troubleshoot the problems of every potential client. The only mastery the management in those positions was looking to instill in their employees was sales. Indeed, the trainers you’ll find in most health clubs, even the best, are a miserable group of journey-man trainers moving from one place and one career to another.After leaving my job as a health-club trainer and creating my independent practice, I unfortunately still continued to generalize. Among my client roster was an 84 year old woman, a schizophrenic, and a 12 year old boy. Weight-loss? Sports Performance? Body-building? I was expected to know it all! However, this kind of diversity didn’t give me the opportunity to specialize. Since I didn’t consistently do one type of training, my ability to deliver an outstanding product to my clients was limited. At this time in my career, I had a high level of client turn-over and couldn’t figure out why. Although I had the thrill of being on my own, I was miserable: I didn’t like what I was doing or who I was training. In
fact, I was actually looking to move out of Personal Training and find other work because I was so unhappy with it.
This also created a lot of confusion from my potential clients. They could-n’t understand or identify what I stood for and what problems I was skilled at solving. This is a trap I’m sure many trainers have fallen into. This just high-lights the importance of finding a specialty. Here are a few more benefits.
• Reduces your marketing costs - allows you to focus all of your
mar-keting and advertising on a smaller group of potential clients
• Keeps you training the people you want to train - people that you
en-joy spending time with, that bring you pleasure beyond just your train-ing salary.
• Increases your level of expertise - you don’t have to spend your time
studying information from every possible subject; you can instead concentrate on just one area
• Improves your mastery - create the necessary routine and repetition to
achieve mastery.
• Competitive advantage - when you’re a specialist, you can slowly
ac-cumulate more knowledge in your niche than anyone else. It makes it harder for new trainers to serve your same client base.
• Creates the foundation - when you have an area of focus, it puts you in
position to the leader of the business, and no longer the trainer, which sets the stage for you to eventually hand over the training work to oth-ers.
Choosing Your Specialty
B
esides it’s importance, choosing your specialty is also one of the most fun things you can do. It’ll force you to find yourself, and analyze what you enjoy teaching as well as partaking in the most. In some ways, you can turn your areaof highest interest or your hobby into your specialty.
For me, choosing a specialty was built simply around the most obvious set of standards – my own training regimen and goals. I simply looked to attract peo-ple that shared my particular workout goals, and were willing to train at my level of intensity. This narrowed the list down to people that were already in shape, that were younger so they could handle the intensity, and were looking to achieve outstanding, well-balanced bodies. This specialty limited the total pool from which I could draw clients; for example, I could no longer train children or senior citizens. But at the same time it created a small group of clients that I was best suited to train. When these clients met me or came in contact with me, they knew right away that I was the right trainer for them.
To put it in words, this is how I would describe my new specialty:
Creating lean, attractive bodies in the shortest time possible through intense training and a results focus.
Although not those exact words, this specialty was apparent in all of my market-ing materials and in how I described my services to other people. And I backed it up big time - from their very first session, my clients knew that they were getting exactly what they signed up for: complete focus on achieving their best possible bodies with the absolute minimum in wasted time and effort.
Inherent in this new self-image were a few new rules:
• I would no longer be training children.
• I would no longer be training senior citizen.
• I would no longer be training individuals with tremendous pre-existing
conditions that prevented them from engaging in intense exercise.
Although this initially forced me turn away several new people that were seeking my help, it was well worth it. Not only did it improve my work enjoyment and make my job much easier, it also helped me to see exactly the type of people that I most wanted to train: young, fit, and healthy people. It might seem like I took the lazy route, choosing what I did most easily as my specialty and the people I
wanted to be around as my clients. But that’s just the type of synergy that this profession allows us, so it’s to your benefit to take advantage of it.
In instituting this system I did come across an interesting dilemma.
Through my exclusive training agreement with a health club I was partnered with, I had many people asking for training that didn’t fit at all into my niche. But, turning away all of these people wouldn’t be fair to the health-club’s owner, who was looking for the best possible service for all of his members. Rather than com-promise my standards, I hired two more personal trainers in order to handle these special populations for me. They trained the children, obese, and complete nov-ices, and allowed me to focus on my specialty. This set-up allowed me to offer my training services to a wide range of people without creating a confusing image in the mind of potential clients.
Creating Your Own Specialty
I
n your quest to chose a specialty, you need to ask yourself a few questions:• What are you naturally good at?
• What will yield a fairly large clientele?
• What specialties will you be able to carry further into different areas as
your career expands?
You don’t need to be the best in the world at your specialty: you aren’t trying to reach a global market with millions of customers. You just need to create an
im-age of excellence and trust in your particular market and situation. For that reason you aren’t really limited at all and have the freedom to do what you want; just think about the work that will be simultaneously the most fun and profitable for you to tackle.
This could fall around many different areas:
• Sports you like
• Modes of exercise you engage in
• Special Populations you have an interest in • Your own specific skills
• Your own particular fitness goals
Here are some examples of potential specialties for you to chose from:
Senior Citizens
If you are looking for a very non-demanding client group, you have specialized work or education credentials, or just have a love for older people, specializing in training seniors may be good for you. For those that find this population a good fit, there are many potential benefits:
• They have a lot of free time to devote to their training • Many are looking to train for the rest of their lives • Many have lots of money
• They aren’t too demanding for results, just looking for an improved
quality of life.
If being around senior citizens is meaningful to you, this could prove to be an ex-cellent TLT niche that can easily grow to be a highly lucrative career path. The aging baby boomer population and the increased life expectancies through medi-cal science will make this a very large market and will only continue to grow. If you can properly explain the value of your expertise and credentials, you should be able to charge higher rates than traditional trainers. Just make sure that you seek the affluent segments of the elderly population; it’s unethical to take money
from seniors that don’t have it.
Children
On the opposite end are children, the fastest growing part of the obese population. Many of us just find it rewarding to be around children. They are very easy to work with from a training design stand point; the only thing that matters is lots of fun and activity to them. And your market is assured, because if there’s one thing that parents are willing to spend money on, it’s their children.
If your practice is designed around weight loss for kids, you’ll have to keep an eye on results. In this type of practice the results may actually be more de-pendent on your coaching of the parents in choosing the right foods for the child and encouraging them to participate in sports. This greater contact with the parent is also important because for all purposes the parent is your real client - keeping them happy is the key.
Parents are also very competitive when it comes to the performance of their children at sports. This creates another huge marketing opportunity to children as well. In general small group training and camps centered around making children faster, stronger, and more competent in their sports is an area with room for tre-mendous growth. The national training chain CATS focuses on just this: plyomet-ric exercises for young people that will improve their sports performance. On a smaller scale, this is also a strong basis to begin a Personal Training practice as well.
The child training market is huge and at this point still largely untapped. Of all the training markets, this one in has the most potential for growth.
Super-Models
This is the specialty of Personal Trainer David Kirsch in New York. How’s that for loving your work?
As an exercise, let’s consider how you would you go about making this your specialty. The truth is, if you made this your specialty people would simply believe you - they’d have no reason not to. You could just put this information on all of your materials - whenever you sought a joint venture or told people what
time to think about what types of goals models might have and devise a precise routine and set of exercise to help achieve them. But does this sound conceiv-able? Of course it does - that’s the beauty of this profession. The only barrier to what you cad do is the decision.
The list of potential specialties is endless. In the marketing chapters we’re going to discuss in greater detail how to integrate your chosen niche into the grain of your training and your marketing message.
In terms of the prerequisite skills to choose a niche, I can understand why some trainers may have a dilemma. If you’re starting out right now, you may not have any skills or well-developed interests. That’s okay; this process may take some time.
Until then, my specialty is one that every trainer can relate to and use for themselves. As you’ll remember, my training specialty is body-composition im-provement: helping people gain more muscle while losing fat and creating a bet-ter, more appealing body. Not coincidentally, this is probably the most popular reason why anyone seeks Personal Training in the first place. Feel free to borrow mine until you fully explore your interests and craft your own.
Creating My Specialty
F
or me, my fitness goal has always been to look my best. Although I’ve always loved to train and trained frequently, I could never add muscle to my body effec-tively, didn’t have a balanced physique (with all the muscle groups the same size relative to each other), and didn’t have a mid-section I was happy with. It was only after I became a Personal Trainer that I began thinking critically about my body and became determined to get it to a high level. Through learning and lots of effort, I was able to eventually solve these problems; as a result of all the infor-mation I gained over this process, I was then able to make physique improvement my specialty. I became the guy that could help you get that beach-ready body.I know physique improvement is a specialty for many trainers, but how many really make it the focus of everything they do? For me my specialty deter-mines:
• The clients I choose.
• The training techniques I implement. • The way I dress.
• My marketing materials.
Because of the techniques I use, I can’t train people that are grossly overweight or have physical impediments. I’m forced to turn away more people than I take on; but it allows me to achieve great results and satisfaction among my small group of clientele; this in-turn creates even greater demand for my training.
For everyone else, your specialty may be different. But as Personal Train-ers, I’ll make a rough estimate and say that about 80% of us are doing the same thing: helping people look better through exercise. These could be through losing weight, increasing muscle, or both.
T
he training services your provide and the clients you see make up what’s called your training practice. Setting up your training practice properly is what keeps you from slaving at the major health-clubs, and instead allows you train who, when, and where you want.When you look at other Top-Level Trainers you’ll notice a few interesting things. You’ll notice they have businesses, without any defined shape. The types of services they give their clients also have multiple forms. They might meet some of their clients in a private studio, some in the clients home, some outdoors, and some clients may be organized into small boot-camps and trained at once. In-dependent training at the highest level is wide-open to however you want to do it. This however doesn’t mean it’s disorganized: it just means that the schedule and earning structure are built to serve the trainer. You need to take these restric-tions off of your own ideas of practice design as well. You can set it up any way you want and combine several different structures until you find the mix that helps you get the practice you want.
What we’re going to do is explore the different opportunities available to trainers and how to get each one started. As you can imagine, this is a very deep subject that I could write an entire book about. I’ve formed profitable relation-ships of all types with many different businesses over the years and could write volumes on everything that went into setting up and securing those deals. For the purpose of this book, I’m going to break down the most important points that went into each arrangement and how you can set them up for yourself.
Training in Luxury Condominiums
o matter what your neighborhood or part of the country or world you live in, there are definitely many luxury residences in your area. These are buildings or complexes that are home to large numbers of wealthy people, and usually provide them many different services on-site for their convenience.In almost all cases, these buildings have health-clubs; the interesting fact however is that very few of them actually have on-staff Personal Trainers.
Health-club management is a very complex task and for that reason most of these buildings don’t go to the trouble of hiring and managing a staff of trainers. That makes them a ripe field for any trainer who can penetrate this market. It’s really an unbelievable situation when you think about it: a built in population of quali-fied clients, no gym fees, and the convenience of being able to see multiple people in one location.
Getting In
For many of you, you’ll find that as you launch an aggressive marketing cam-paign, you may get into one of these residences by accident. So many people in major cities live in places like this that through your general marketing and adver-tising, you’re sure to find clients who want you to train them at their private resi-dence. The key is that once you’ve penetrated this environment, it’s now your job
to grow your influence and contacts in it.
Once you’re in, you can prospect and network through your existing cli-ents, other members you meet, and the gym staff. All you need is a few clients in a location like this; once you’ve got them, you’ll be looked at as a resident spe-cialist. You’ll be able to make an excellent living for years just from retaining ex-isting clients and converting the trickle of new clients and referrals that come your way into new clients. This type of set-up is also ideal to administer the Super-Trainer System with an assistant trainer, which we’ll discuss in later chapter.
Actively Recruiting Locations
If you aren’t introduced into one of these luxury residencies by a client, then you’ll have to actively recruit them. This process is slightly more difficult, but doable and very worthwhile. What you’ll need to do is set-up a meeting between you and the most senior member of the sports and leisure staff. In this meeting you can first tell them about your experience and qualifications. Get this person excited about you and what you have to offer. After that give them tons of your business cards and brochures.
The most important thing to remember in dealing with someone in this type of situation is what’s in it for them to help you. In general, this type of manager is usually overworked in dealing with member questions and complaints. The point you want to emphasize is that you’re here to serve their member’s needs. You’ll be able to make life much easier for them by showing people that don’t know how to exercise how to use the gym more effectively. If this gym charges for member-ship, let them know that you’ll be causing people to utilize the gym more fre-quently, which will lead to even more re-signs. Let them also know they can use you as a selling point to people that are on the fence about joining the gym, wor-ried that they won’t know what to do. Make these the key points of your meeting with the health-club manager and they should understand that this can be a win for both of you.
Creating “Bird-Dogs”
When dealing with the employees of the gym, people like receptionists and such, you can emphasize a different set of benefits. These people are usually just young
people working for minimum wage: all they care about is making money. For them, you can create a policy where you give them a kick-back for every new cli-ent they bring you. The key here is being subtle - it’s easy to offend someone, no matter how much they make, if you make it sound like your bribing them or giv-ing them a hand-out. I have a certain way I like to create these types of “bird-dogs”, as they’re referred to in consulting.
The first thing I do is attach a page to my website describing my referral policy. I usually have this page look like an open letter, and I talk in detail about how much I appreciate the effort my affiliates make in referring me to our fellow clients. For this effort, I tell them I can give them a referral fee, and you fill-in whatever you want right there; I myself have offered as much as $200 for refer-rals. If you inform the receptionist about this policy in a friendly and respectful manner, they’ll take it seriously and will actually promote you to gym members quite aggressively. I’ve had these types of arrangements work for me extremely well in the past, giving me more clients than I could handle. Make sure you can actually convert these new prospects into sales, something we discuss in detail in the Sales chapters, and make sure you pay your affiliates promptly as well. The first time they get a big check from you, they’ll be even more happy to tell every member about what an excellent trainer you are.
F
inding the right residential setting for you to train out of may take some time and research. You’ll first need to locate these buildings in your area, find out there phone numbers, and do a little detective work on the phone to find out if they allow outside trainers and who’s in charge. But the effort is very much worthwhile. I’ve seen trainers build an entire practice off of just one of these set-tings, where they work 4-6 hours a day for five days a week, all in one place with absolutely no overhead or marketing costs. I’ve met trainers that have been able maintain this business model for 10 years or more, and even rented an apartment in the same luxury building as their clients so they could live on location; does it get any easier than that?!Teaming With Other Health Professionals
F
rom what you learned about creating “bird-dogs” in the last section, it’s only natural to extend this type of relationship to other people that are in a position to bring you a strong flow of qualified leads. This naturally extends to other Health Professionals. They have two things in common with you: they are around people that actively consume health and fitness services, and just like you, they’re look-ing to grow their businesses.But it’s not all roses; you’re probably aware that health professionals have been in the business of cross referrals forever. You probably have a few such ar-rangements yourself, and in that case you probably also know that these relation-ships don’t bring-in too many qualified prospects. What we want to do is change that.
The key is to put some stronger bait on the hook. In terms of stronger bait, we’re referring to offering them a very strong cash incentive to bring you clients. Follow the same technique I mentioned earlier; make a hidden page on your web-site that you will e-mail as a link to your affiliates. Again, on this page describe how much you appreciate the confidence these professionals are showing in you by recommending you to their clients, and mention respectfully how you are will-ing to reward them for the risk they take to their reputation in dowill-ing so. Most people won’t have a problem or feel cheap by accepting this money. Just make sure that you properly qualify the prospect before you take them on - don’t just sign-up any client that comes your way. You don’t want to pay-out for people that you don’t end up retaining long-term and that aren’t valuable to the growth and success of your training practice.
You may find it interesting that we send back cash in our joint ventures with other professionals; isn’t sending back referrals enough? In the case of Per-sonal Training that doesn't work and here’s why: by the nature of our business we have a different type and volume of clients. Because each client uses our services so much, as much as three times a week, we end up seeing a smaller volume of clients than say a masseuse or nutritionist, whose clients may come to see them once every few months, so they need a high volume of clients to remain viable. If they’re successful at what they do, they’ll have many more clients than you and
the relationship of trading referrals won’t be in their favor. That’s why these rela-tionships rarely go anywhere for Personal Trainers - they’re completely one-sided and don’t serve the other professional at all. By giving a large cash reward, we make it worthwhile for the other professional to mention us to their clients. They’ll realize that in the small amount of time it takes to mention you or hand-out your business card to a customer, they can earn a few hundred dollars: a very worthwhile return on investment.
How much should you offer as a finding fee in a joint venture agreement? That depends on how much you charge. In my case, I have a very easy way of figuring this out. In the sales sections, I discuss how we bring new customers in to the sales funnel using the three-session introductory package. Well what I do is make my finding fee the exact price of the intro-pack; depending on what I charge in those first three session, that’s what I’ll give. Most recently, that turned into $200 (I was charging $199) for every referral. This made some of my affiliates highly motivated and created that situation that every trainer and training business hopes for: a waiting list of clients.
Business Referral Groups
As a side note, joining your local chapter of BNI may be a good idea, as long as it’s one of their stronger chapters. They meet every two weeks for one hour, usu-ally at 7am, and pass out referrals among each other. I personusu-ally don’t like wak-ing up that early, so I only went early in my career and then stopped. There are usually a few chapters open in every area, so before you join find one that is al-ready strong or that’s growing and has motivated members. Once you’re
ac-cepted, make sure you’re an active contributor and do your best to bring the other members referrals. Also, list each of them as a partner on a separate page on your website, and add them to your circle of regular contacts. You don’t have to be-come best friends with people that you don’t have much in common with, but it’s a good idea to learn how to contribute value to others; not only your clients but you’re fellow professionals. When it all boils down to it, your income will be de-termined by your ability to contribute value to other people. The advantage to you is that many of these BNI members are high earning professionals, and they know many more people like themselves. This can quickly turn into a good re-source for gaining strong prospects for you.
Referral and networking groups are especially valuable once you’ve elimi-nated yourself from the day to day training activities. Once you are the business leader and have your employees doing all of the training (which is what you’re working for) you can spend your time constantly looking for these types of refer-ral arrangements.
Staying in Contact
O
nce these many relationships with gym employees and other professionals are formed, that’s not the end of the story. You have to nurture them, or they’ll never bear you any fruit. You need to stay in constant contact with every new affiliate you gain.• Send them emails keeping them up to date on what’s happening in your
business.
• Subscribe them to your blog even if they don’t ask for it. • Send them holiday greeting cards.
• Invite them to big parties that you, your friends, or other clients might
be throwing.
You want them to keep you in the back of their mind, so that when the right time comes, they’ll say “Hey, I know a Personal Trainer that can help you!”. Most ser-vice professionals will be able to bring you at least 1 to 2 qualified, high-level cli-ents a year. Doesn’t sound like much? Remember, a high-level client is worth as much as $10,000 a year or more to you. But these types of relationships take only about 3-4 hours to create and maintain a year: that’s a tremendous return on in-vestment of your time. If you get really good at this, you’ll eventually have so many prospects, many of which will be potential high value clients, that you won’t be able to serve them all. At this point, you may want to raise your rates even higher to further qualify your prospects, use the Super-Trainer System to help you serve your clients, or even evaluate the possibility of opening your own
training studio (less expensive than you think). I personally employed these tech-niques for a while and once I achieved a strong “float” of existing clients and re-ferrals through these clients, I stopped all marketing of this kind. If I didn’t I would have just been turning away too many people or making my practice un-necessarily complicated. In my case, I was looking to live a more mobile lifestyle and not be tied down to a training studio, but if you have a family or own prop-erty, opening a training studio may be the right thing for you.
Teaming With a Private Gym
T
eaming with a private gym is probably my favorite model; it’s the one where I gained the most experience and learned from the most. I always feel that personal training is more than just a profession for us - it’s also a vehicle for us to grow, to learn about ourselves, and to reach our full potential. In a health club, you’ll get many, many chances to practice your sales techniques, have interactions with many different types of people, and deal with the social pressure of a public envi-ronment. Your skills in interacting with a wide range of people is one of your rate-limiting steps to success. Once you learn this and get things going, you can then create a snowball effect that will take your sales and earnings to a very high level. I learned a lot from this arrangement and probably owe all of mysuccess to it.Set-Up
What does it mean to have an arrangement with a private gym? It means making an exclusive training deal with a gym that is privately owned. The big chain gyms like Bally’s have there own staff trainers and of course don’t allow outside trainers to work in there under an circumstances. However, any other non-chain gym is up for grabs for a private training agreement. This goes for the big fran-chises like Gold’s and Powerhouse, large chain gyms with dozens of locations like Dolphin Fitness Clubs, to small private gyms owned by a couple of friends or
family members. I’ve personally made successful exclusive training agreements with all of these locations I just listed, and none of them were difficult to negoti-ate or implement at all.
A Word About Corporate Health-Clubs
Big corporations like Bally’s, Equinox, and Town Sport International (which run the New York Sports Club and Washington Sports Club Locations) look at Per-sonal Training as a major source of revenue. A key to their business model is not only selling memberships, but also up-sales to existing members, which is where Personal Training comes in. They have a huge sales dimension to their training, and it shows when dealing with their trainers. They usually roam the gym floor like used car salesman, trying to make introductory appointments or getting leads and looking for sales to meet their monthly quota.
However, this system is terribly flawed; once you’ve made a sale, you now have to train the person on an hourly basis for the next few months. Imagine a used car salesman not only having to sell the car, but also having to teach each customer to drive for 3 hours week. That’s what makes one of these training posi-tions one of the worst uses of time for a Personal Trainer. They often turn into over 50 hours a week, only half of which is actually spent training clients. The rest of the time is mostly unpaid and spent looking for new clients And in those actual training hours, you’re clients will be paying top dollar while you’ll be mak-ing as little as one third of the trainmak-ing fees.
Many trainers are seduced, from the size and glittering appearance of these corporate gyms, that they’re a good place to pursue their training careers, but these gyms are really just major corporations, and they view Personal Training as just another sellable commodity. The day that you look at your career this way, you’re finished.
Private Training Arrangement
A much better arrangement is to make a deal with a private gym. These include the franchise health-clubs, private chains, and the mom-and-pop gyms. you can usually negotiate a much better percentage agreement, have much more freedom, and charge whatever you want in these locations. You’ll essentially have
com-plete freedom over your practice, which is exactly what we want.
And making these deals is surprisingly easy; that’s because it’s always an interesting group of people that decide to open gyms like this. Surprisingly,
they’re not always cut out to for the nuts and bolts of all the aspects of health club management, especially Personal Training. Training isn’t like any other service, and that’s why no matter how smart or competent these health-club owners may be, they can never really grasp all the nuances of running a training department. Sure, selling memberships and smoothies is easy – you can use the same sales model as any other commodity or food product. But selling a private consulting service is a completely different proposition. What you’ll find is most private health club operators have long since given up on depending on Personal Training as a major revenue earner. They just offer it as an afterthought, either through in-dependent trainers or a gym employee.
This is where a Top-Level Trainer comes in. Showing these health club owners what’s possible with their training offerings is a way that you can negoti-ate a great deal for yourself. Even the independent trainers that these gyms hire are really bad; they’re usually big time losers that got certified 10 years ago and work about 5 hours a week for the lowest rates in the industry. With the tools you learn in this book you should be able to make a compelling offer to the gym
owner and easily blow out any competitors you may encounter.
The only thing to consider here is the percentage agreement with the health-club owner. To put it simply, you should seek an 80:20 breakdown, and at worst a 75:25 arrangement. Because you’ll have some overhead costs in terms of promo-tional materials and other expenses, you shouldn’t agree to anything less than that. Also you should seek use of office space to work and conduct client consultations out of. This is in no way asking too much when you consider the fact that the gym owner earns a pure 20-25% profit on all training sold and gets the added prestige of having a trainer like you training out of their facility.
T
raveling to homes can eat up a lot more time than other training arrangements, but it’s also a more personal service that can end up paying you more too. The type of person who wants a trainer to train them in their home is either too busy to go to the gym, or just afraid to do it. In either case, they’ll be willing to pay more for the added convenience of having a Personal Trainer come to them.No matter how your training practice is set-up, in-home training should al-ways be an optional service you provide. You’ll be astounded how many people actually have a phobia of going to gyms but still want the help of a trainer.
Through your normal dealings with clients and referrals you will almost certainly come across people that want you train them on location.
There are also a few ways you can actively recruit these types of clients. Advertising is one of them, but not the best. For an independent trainer without a studio, advertising is a very blunt tool to find clients. However, this is one of the only ways to reach and awaken the in-home training market and has worked well for me in the past. Of course, the best way would be Web Marketing, which is discussed in detail in that chapter.
You’ll find in-home training to be fun and easy, but you still have to stay sharp and on your game. In these situations, it’s even more important to pay close attention to your image and how you present yourself professionally, because when you meet somebody on their turf they naturally have the power. In the training relationship, you want to be able to maintain the balance of power in your favor at all times. This will allow you to establish a lengthy relationship with this client that will bring you a high income over that time. Even though you’re going to see the person in their home, you still need to dress as if you were prospecting for clients in a crowded gym. If you let your image slip, you’ll eventually have the client begin to take advantage of you - they’ll start canceling more sessions, asking for concessions on price, and eventually lose interest and stop training with you. It’s completely up to you to keep the momentum in this relationship.
Naturally, when your training business matures, in home training will be one thing that you won’t do anymore, and may be something that you still have as part of your business that’s administered by your employees. It’s up to you to de-cide whether it stays one of the products and services your business provides. But when getting started, in-home training can be a good money-maker.
The Home Studio
I
f you’re a home owner, setting up a home-office is another possibility. This situation will take skill to implement correctly, but will prove to be the most con-venient and comfortable of all. Gunnar Peterson in fact runs his training practice out of his home, and if it works for him it should work for you!If you own a home, there are several benefits to creating a training studio there. As you’ll remember from the earlier chapters, it’s the relationship with the customer that trumps all else. Well, you can’t get any more personal than having someone come to your house. It also gives you a few huge psychological edges:
• You’ll never have any competitors; this gives you tremendous
domi-nance in your clients mind.
• There’s a certain respect you get when you allow someone into your
home; they feel like a guest and are more appreciative of everything you do for them.
• Even though training from home saves you time and cuts your
over-head, you can still charge premium rates.
The one problem you need to watch out for in your Home Studio is allowing the personal dynamic to take-over the training dynamic. All the benefits of the in-home system will actually becomes negative if you’re level of professionalism drops in this setting. This means you can’t look like you just rolled out of bed, have personal items lying around, or act like this is a social visit and not a training session. Also, you want to make a clear distinction between your gym and the rest of your home, and not allow your clients to generally hang around the rest of your home too much (you can of course do this on occasion, during parties, and other events). Maintaining strict, Top-Level Trainer professionalism is absolutely key; if you do, you can get the double benefit of both having an extremely
con-venient training practice and having the potential to charge higher rates at the same time.
Setting-Up Your Home Gym
The main mistake people make with a home gym is that they skimp on looks. The home-gym can be in your basement, but it can’t look like the basement gym of a teenager. It must look like a full-blown commercial space with a few personal touches - think Equinox meets Applebee’s. The reason for this is that everything you do must scream “highest level possible”; if not, the TLT system crumbles. As independent trainers, we don’t need to do much to maintain our practices, but any-thing we do must be top-notch.
Whatever the space you’re using, it must be well constructed; for that rea-son the smaller the space, the more cost effective it will be to construct. If you have a full basement, you may want to insert a false wall to reduce the square footage. Even a converted garage can be suitable if the inside is furnished prop-erly. The good news is it will cost less than two thousand dollars to set-up a home training studio. In terms of decor of the room, all you need are finished walls and a ceiling with nice lighting, and wall mirrors on at least two of the four walls.
In terms of equipment, you don’t need to buy commercial machines and weights, the costs of which are astronomical. All you need is the best quality home-gym equipment that you can find at any big sporting good super-store. Just make sure all the equipment matches and doesn’t leave the room over-cluttered. For cardiovascular needs, you can just buy a Spinning bike (many are available second hand for good prices on Craigslist and eBay). You should definitely have decorations like posters and pictures, but make sure they are nicely mounted and framed. You’ll also need a source of music, but just a simple boom-box will do the job.
Warning
One thing you might want to keep in mind is that in this setting, there’s the small but real risk of someone claiming sexually harassment. It’s unfortunate, but in to-day’s society you’re guilty until proven innocent when it comes to an accusation like this; even if you’re innocent, you still will never be able to totally restore
your reputation. For this reason, you might want to consider a simple surveillance system.
To protect myself when I’m alone with someone that I don’t know well, I’ve brought along a small digital recorder and secretly kept it on during the ses-sion. The laws in my state allow recording of conversations if one of the parties is aware the conversation is being recorded. This way, if anything inappropriate is said or a false claim is made, you have evidence. Once you get to know someone well you can use your own judgment about trusting this person and not have to use the recorder anymore.
Drawbacks
The only other drawback to this system is reaching new clients. If you’ve already built up your client base before you set-up your home gym, you can just move your clients to your home gym; you’ll inevitably have a few that can’t do it but if the others were traveling to see you anyway, they shouldn’t have a problem with it.
But if you’re starting from scratch with a home gym, finding clients could be a problem. Internet advertising would be the best way to go in this case and that’s fully covered in the chapter on Web Marketing.
Outdoor Training
W
hen considering all the things that go into excellent session design, training outdoors gives you many possibilities. If you live in a climate that’s warm all year round (or even if you don’t), marketing yourself as an outdoor trainer can be just what you need to set you apart and get you noticed by potential clients.Every summer in New York, I convert much of my marketing to emphasize the fact that I provide outdoor workouts. If you’re a trainer that doesn’t have a home gym or location to train out of, you can do the same. This is one way turn a weakness into a strength.
