A few years back I put together an e-book, Fitness Riches, where a number of the more successful fitness pros in the industry shared some of their secrets to success.

One of the two chapters I contributed to the book was how Nick and I created our Personal Training Money Machine – a personal training business inside someone else’s health club.

At the time it was a pretty revolutionary business model – but over the past 5-6 years a lot has changed in the industry so I wanted to give you my updates – so read on.

In the first part of the chapter I discussed some key principles and concepts that would serve as the foundation for our business. Here’s what I wrote:

1. It had to have a low start up cost. I had little money, a less than impressive credit score and no “angel investor.”
2. It had to cater to a “thirsty crowd.” I came across this phrase reading something by Mark Joyner, but every sales and marketing person conveyed the same message. There had to be demand.
3. I had to make it easy for the prospect to buy. In the part of the country where I live (Kentucky), if you ask someone to pay you upfront for $1500 worth of personal training sessions, you’ve narrowed your potential clientele to about .01% of the population.
4. There had to be some security. I’d had enough of the living paycheck to paycheck when I coached. I was done with having to worry about if I’d have enough money next week or next month to pay my bills. I needed to have what the gym called a receivables base.
5. I had to be able to leverage someone else’s time. I’d figured this out growing up. My dad owned his own business and if he took a vacation, so did his income. Working from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. was fine at the time, but what about when I was 50? I had to create a system where I could leverage other trainers.
6. The business had to have a “back end.” I saw the training department that I was a district manager for squander the obvious “back end opportunity” of having over 800 clients at their disposal. No way was I going to miss the obvious chance to make more form each client.
7. Client Satisfaction was paramount. Most fitness businesses I saw were far more concerned with getting new members or clients than they were with over-delivering to their existing ones. Everything I read or experienced told me this was exactly the opposite of what I needed to do. Client satisfaction would lead to retention, referrals and back-end sales.

Those were the variables that I felt we had to build our personal training business around. I understood that there were plenty of other models that worked, but for us to achieve the financial and lifestyle goals that we had started this whole process for while beginning in our then current financial situation the business had to be built around these concepts.

Our solution at the time (2004) looked like this:

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