Fit Business Insider

In Part 1 we covered offering 3, 6 and 12 Month Programs, using EFT Billing and having Multiple Streams Of Income…now for the encore!

Do This: Target a Niche (or Two)

Not That: Try To Be All Things To All People

Specialists are more financially successful that generalists.  Let me give you an example – in medicine a Family Practitioner earns on average about $145,000 per year while a Cardiologist earns $342,000 per year on average (According to the American Academy of Family Physicians).

That’s over twice as much for those of you match challenged folks

Read the rest…

With the popularity of the Eat This, Not That series of books, I thought I might apply the same premise to the personal training industry for a post.

With Eat This, Not That, the idea is pretty simple – trade something less supportive if your goals for something more supportive.

Same thing applies here.

Do This: Offer 3, 6 and 12 Month Programs

Not That: Sell By The Session
Read the rest…

In the last few days I had a couple of successful fitness pros in for private coaching sessions.

One of the fitness pros, Chase Karnes is a young guy that just recently graduated from college while the other, Billy Corbett, is one of the more accomplished guys in the industry having been at this for over 20 years.

Both of them are already very successful.  Chase trained the whole time he was in college and has a schedule completely full with clients.  Even though he just graduated in May, from a financial standpoint he does better than most people that have been doing this for a long time.

Billy has trained everyone from CEO’s of billion dollar companies to NBA All-Stars.  He’s one of the top Lacrosse performance experts in the world.  He’s been successful by any way you can measure success in our industry.

Read the rest…

Craigslist, lead boxes, direct mail…TV, radio, newspaper…public speaking, door hangers, gift cards.

They all work – and they all fail.

It depends on how you use them.

If you want to get them most from your marketing efforts, here are three tips that will lead you to prosperity.
Read the rest…

I was reading an interview with one of the best coaches in the industry, Jason Ferruggia the other day and he talked about the importance of setting Personal Records instead of the minutia that most people get caught up in when trying to get results.

Then I read an article from Elite FTS CEO Dave Tate about the value proposition of his business and it’s ‘We help people break personal records.’

They’re both spot on – the focus of training should be PRs.

You’re either getting better or you’re just killing time.

And business is exactly the same.

Read the rest…

If you’re like most people (me included) you’re going to write down some goals for the upcoming year. Myself – I’ll be writing down business, family, heath / fitness and personal goals and then mapping out a plan to achieve all of them – or at least most of them;) Here are the business goals I recommend that you have: 1. Income Goals – How much will you make in 2010?  Really, there are 3 income goals to consider:

1. Gross Business Income
2. Net Business Income
3. Personal Income

Not only should you be identifying how much money you want your business to make, but also how much of that money you want to keep (and ‘all of it’ isn’t a goal – it’s a dream.) So identify how much you need to gross per month considering your expenses, taxes and margins in order to generate the personal income you’re striving for. Read the rest…

Right now we’re embarking on several new business ventures, some of which are existing businesses that we’re getting involved with to take them to the next level.

Here are a few thoughts I use to develop the plan to grow our businesses:

1.     What attracted our clients in the first place?

Sometimes you start with a really good marketing strategy but change it over time. You might have abandoned something that really worked without realizing it. Sometimes businesses plateau often comes down to the business stopping to provide the value they once did.
Read the rest…

Some people prefer to run their businesses far away from their customers or clients.

They opt for as little contact with others as they can get away with.

While I understand that some people prefer their privacy, I have always felt like relationships were at the core of the best businesses.

And relationships are my favorite part of our businesses.

I prefer live meetings over phone calls.

I prefer phone calls over email.

That’s just me.

But even as much as I treasure relationships, I’m far from perfect when it comes from cultivating the ones I have and building new ones.

But I do make a sincere effort and I look for ways to keep improving at it.

Here’s a strategy I think will benefit you as you build your network – give everyone in your phonebook an A, B, C, D, or F.

Read the rest…

So last Wednesday I was traveling to Louisville for a Mastermind meeting with Pat, Nick and Jim.  I had my laptop with me, and it’s a MacBook Pro.  I had made the switch from PC to Mac a couple of years ago, and was so glad I did.  When I got off the plane, Pat’s wife Holly was there to pick me up.  We were going to pick up Tyler from school and then shoot some video workouts at Pat and Holly’s house.

Holly has an adapter that allows you to plug in your laptop to the cigarette lighter in the car.  Well when I plugged my laptop in and turned it on, the screen remained black.  Not good.  When we got to Pat and Holly’s house, we tried all sorts of things – resets and taking the battery out, and nothing worked.  Looks like I had a major problem with my computer.

Read the rest…

Something I learned back in my coaching days was that to be successful you either needed to be better or be different.

The ‘easy’ answer is to be better, but in reality it isn’t always so easy.

If someone is more established or has a bigger marketing budget they may be perceived as better.

And like it or not – for consumers, perception is reality for the most part.

My preference is to think beyond the obvious. To not settle for easy answers and not allow conventional wisdom to blind you.

Be willing to stray from the norm.

Forever, the status quo in the personal training world was:

• Train clients one-on-one.
• Sessions are an hour long.
• Client pay by the session or buy packages of sessions.
• Personal training was almost exclusively for the affluent.

Read the rest…