Schedule You and Pay Yourself First
The million-dollar question is how do I grow my business when I am the business? It’s not only fitness professionals, but speakers, trainers (for corporations), coaches (life, career)… that share this problem. If you dive into business with urgency to make the rent at home and work and pay the electric bill at home and work you can easily end up working away exchanging an hour for a dollar.
Then at some point you’re out of time. There are a few managerial jobs that allow you to settle in and work shift to shift and go home but as you know with fitness that’s not how most of us get started. You take clients when clients want to come. There’s a little rush to that accepting and signing a new client. They want YOU! You got a new paying customer!
Then the reality sets in that for six months you’re meeting them at a time that cut out your lunch, or shortchanged your time to have breakfast with the kids, or _____________________. It may not happen for years. Then you’re describing your business as doing great, but you have no time, no freedom and you’re recovering in your time off to go and do it again tomorrow or on Monday.
Let’s regroup.
I often share a meme that says… no matter how long you’ve been going down the wrong path… turn around. It’s still wrong. It’s not going to suddenly get you where you’re going. You’re still going in the wrong direction even if you feel like you’re making progress.
If you don’t love getting up in the morning AND going home at night it’s time to change. If you want to grow and stretch yourself it’s time – and it’s a FABULOUS time to take advantage of what’s going on in the world.
People want convenience. Live streaming video. Exercise at home. Even if you do own a thriving fitness center some people just don’t want to have to come in, shower, chat and socialize, they want to get it done and the recent research on the short amount of time you really need to exercise is going to make people question WHY they need you! If you teach me how to do it or I can learn it on YouTube… then I don’t need you – I just need a few square feet and 15 minutes at home.
You need to arrange time to podcast, blog, develop programs that make you unique and an EXPERIENCE for your customers. It’s the only way you’re going to survive into the future. The box, the stale bootcamps, the everybody-needs-to-do-a-turkish-get-up is going to be GONE. But relationships, and one stop shops won’t.
I don’t mean pick up your dry cleaning and get a sauna at the same place you workout. I mean get support for your nutrition, and get stress-relief, get educated about choices outside the gym, get a community of health-minded friends. THAT is what people want.
Membership sites, coaching communities, support from waking to bedtime is what people want. Right now if you are only the exercise coach and the nutrition natzi you’re missing a great deal of opportunity to both help people more and increase revenue.
To do it? You have to drop some of your contact hours. Stop dreaming and go into action.
Identify how you want to grow your reach and support with customers. Then decrease temporarily your income in order to grow exponentially in the future.
Someone else is already working on it. Will you be in this new market space? It’s changing faster than some of the industry boxes and the opportunity is great. The customer knows their trainer could be around the world just as easily as they could be around the corner.