Being a self employed personal trainer can be the best job in the world, you get to help people totally transform their lives: health, body shape, fitness, and confidence. You can also earn a very healthy living (between 40-100k per year!). That said, it’s highly competitive, and not only do you have to be a good personal trainer, BUT an equally good businessman/woman. 

4 Essential Business Tips For Self Employed Personal Trainers…

#1 Professional 

If you want to attract the right type of client(s), one’s who are reliable, get results, pay on time, etc, then you’ve got to be professional. Far too many trainers are unprofessional: wearing tank tops, posting topless selfies on Instagram – these personal trainers, have a bigger ego than Madonna! lol! This may help you attract a very niche clientele (usually narcissistic people just like the trainer! lol!) BUT it will scare off 90% of general members of the public! Not a good move. 

Instead, it’s important to speak well, use good English,  and wear a professional uniform with your business logo on it. You should also be polite, friendly and approachable. You can still be authoritative and command respect, BUT in a professional manor. 

#2 Referrals

This is arguably the best way to get clients, and should be one of your main ways of attracting new customers. If you do a good job with clients i.e. get them results, and provide a 5 star service, then you will get tons of referrals. Whilst FB and Insta ads can be a great way to get new leads, there’s no better compliment…than word of mouth referrals. Ideally you want between 1-4 new client referrals a month. 

The best way to get referrals is to do a good job, BUT after that, you can ask clients…

“hey X, I’m really enjoying our personal training sessions together. Do you have any friends and family members that you think could benefit too? If so would you mind recommend me to them when the opportunity presents itself?”

Obviously you can word things the way you like, but this is a good example. I used this with a client of mine 3 years ago, and at one point I was training 5 people thanks to his referrals – I trained his mum, dad, sister, brother in law, and one of his friends. Put in other terms… that’s an income of around 2k per month, from just 5 referred clients. Not bad hey? 

#3 Scaleability

After you get a full dairy, what’s next? If you’re a good personal trainer you’ll have a full diary in no time, then what do you do? You probably don’t want to be personal training at 60 years old? Or even 50 for that matter! I love it, BUT I’d like to be retired by then! lol!. 

I’ve said this before in many of my blogs for personal trainers BUT in my opinion you cannot do more than 30 high quality PT sessions per week, any more than 30 and the quality starts to drop. So once you do 30 sessions per week, you can either stay there, or look for new ways to grow your business. 

The best ways to do this are:

• Hire another personal trainer 
• Create digital products – like ebooks, online courses, etc 
• Semi private group personal training – train more people per session
• Online personal training 

It’s important to have a future plan for your business, and how it will look in the next 5-10 years. 

#4 Upgrading 

To stay ahead of the competition, you’ve got to keep upgrading. You should stay hungry, it’s important to keep investing time into personal development: reading business books, attending courses, listening to podcasts – check out my 5 recommended podcasts for personal trainers – remember “your business grows as you grow!”. 

As well as upgrading yourself, you should also upgrade your business. Buying new equipment, moving into a bigger, and better facility, creating more resources to help your clients i.e. Facebook groups, recipe books, content, etc, etc. 

Every year your business should be better than it was the year before, don’t let things go stale, otherwise your business will stall, and others will overtake you, stay hungry, stay focused, stay driven. 

The Ultimate Guide To Building Your Personal Training Business…

If you want more help with your personal training business, then I’d highly recommend picking up my ebook – The Ultimate Guide To Building Your Personal Training Business – I share all of my tips, secrets and business strategies. Swipe up your copy of the book here. It will totally transform your business and take your results, and income to the next level!

Thanks for reading,

Nick 🙂