It took me about 2 years to fill my personal training diary. I worked my butt off for 2 years straight, taking on anybody and everybody! BUT then when I reached full capacity – I thought… what’s next? I then looked for ways to scale my personal training business…

Fully Booked Up

For most personal trainers you are going to be fully booked up at 30 sessions per week. Whilst you can do more PT sessions (I used to do 60 sessions per week!) I believe that any more than 30 sessions and the level of service will drop. Being a personal trainer is tiring and more than 30 sessions per week will see you fatigue quickly, burn out, and you will eventually lose clients. Trust me I’ve been there…done that… got the t-shirt. You need to find other ways to expand – without doing more sessions.  

Once you’re fully booked up you may want to stay that way, there’s nothing wrong with this, as long as you are happy. That said for those personal trainers out there who want to take your personal training business to the next level there are lots of ways to expand…

How To Scale Your Personal Training Business | 4 Ways To Expand…

#1 Hire Another Trainer 

Once you’ve become fully booked up you could take on another trainer – this is especially good if you have your own facility and want to help more people/make more money. 

You could have the trainer either work for your business and employ them, or you could allow them to be self employed BUT then you take a commission. You could also charge them for rent, it’s up to you.  

How I recommend doing it…

For example if you are getting your other trainer clients…then it’s not unreasonable to ask for a 50% cut. With bigger gym facilities you may need to take a bigger cut (it depends on your overheads). 

Imagine you take on another personal trainer and get them fully booked up within 3-6 months. Then lets say your other trainer charges £50 per session and you take 50% (£25 per session). If you got your other trainer doing 30 sessions per week that would mean you’d get an extra £750 per week (or £39,000 per year!).

Then if this works you could hire another personal trainer and keep scaling up your business.

#2 Group Personal Training 

There’s a glass ceiling as to what you can charge as a one to one personal trainer. This depends on multiple factors i.e. your area, training facilities, level of expertise, level of demand, etc. Regardless of how posh your area is, or how experienced you are… you are still going to hit a glass ceiling at some point – people won’t pay £10k for a personal training session (not to my knowledge anyhow!). 

That said a good way to scale and earn more money per hour is to do group personal training. Let’s say for example you charge £50 per personal training session, you could instead offer small group personal training. You win because you charge more per hour, your customer wins because they pay less per hour e.g.  

• 1-1 session – £50
• 2 people in a session £60 (£30 per person)
• 3 people in a session £75 (£25 per person) 
• 4 people in a session £80 (£20 per person) 

If you got 4 people in a session that would mean you’d make an extra £30 per hour compared to your 1-1 personal training rate.

#3 Fitness Blogging

If you have a fitness website and a blog to share your content it can be a great way to increase your turnover, for example you could link to other fitness sites, add guest blog posts (which are paid for by companies), and you could also do affiliate marketing, where you advertise products and then take a commission. If your fitness blog is big enough you could potentially make thousands of pounds per month. To get into this I’d recommend reading up on SEO, and start to blog regularly, at least once per week. 

If you want to learn more about making money from your health and fitness blog then I’d recommend checking out my e-book – The Ultimate Guide To Building Your Personal Training Business – the e-book teaches you everything you need to know to build up a successful personal training business.

#4 E-Books

Creating a digital product like an ‘e-book’ is a great way to increase your passive income stream. Once you’ve designed your e-book you can sell and scale very quickly. For example a couple of years ago I designed an e-book called The 28 Day Keto Challenge – a fat loss guide. Since that time I’ve sold thousands of copies via my fitness blog and through e-mail marketing campaigns.

To buy the book I sell it on my fitness blog for £10. Thanks to this product I’ve made thousands of pounds in extra income. I also have other e-books such as The Ultimate Guide To Building Your Personal Training Business and Recipe Books which I sell via my blog. It’s really helped me to reach a wider audience and increase my yearly turnover. 

Thanks for reading, if you found this post helpful please comment below or e-mail me at: nick@lepfitness.co.uk

Nick 🙂