Guest Post by Jeff Sherman
It was March 2009, the first of my 5 Fitness Business Summits… I knew absolutely nothing about marketing at the time. The guys on stage were talking up boot camps and by the time they were finished I found myself in the back of the room signing up to be a charter member of Fit Body Boot Camp. By far the best decision I have made in my Fitness Business career.
I actually didn’t like the idea of owning a boot camp at first. I had my personal training studio for 7 years already… I used to think the trainers that taught boot camps did so because they weren’t good enough to sell one on one training… Man was I wrong. After doing the math and seeing how much I could earn and how little I would have to work and how many more people I could help, I was in.
So much so that after running the boot camp for a little over 6 months, I closed my one on one business down. It was actually holding me back from growing my boot camp business. It was costing me more time and making me way less money.
Getting my clients results had little to do with the workouts. I never promoted my business in a “we have the best workouts in town” kind of way. I just focused on getting my clients the results they wanted and everything else kind of just fell in place. I would get tons of social proof to use in my marketing, my clients never left and all of their friends would join after seeing the results they would get.Like I said before, back then I knew nothing about marketing, but what I did know was how to get my clients results.
Since I had a little stigma about boot camps in the beginning, I was determined not to run mine like a group fitness class and more like group personal training. By the way, I love boot camps now or whatever you want to call large group personal training.
The question I get asked a lot is “how do you get your clients such good results… especially if it has little to do with the workouts?” Now don’t get me wrong, the workouts are important, but I am assuming we are all professionals and you know how to give a great workout.
What I found is, to build a successful fitness business, you need to get your clients to take their goals more seriously, hold them accountable to their goals, and build a strong community of like-minded people.w to give a great workout.
If you can do that, you will easily build a successful fitness business in no time.
Do you remember your very first client? I do. In fact, she is still in my program today, 13 years later. Her son was getting married in three months and she wanted to lose 35 lbs. I promised her she could do it by then.
The pressure was on, I had to get her to meet her goal no matter what. If I didn’t, I would have been a fraud.
I called her every week. I would stay late and go over nutrition with her. I would fit in extra workouts if we needed to. If she had to change her schedule at the last minute I would find a way to make it work. I was willing to do whatever it took to help her reach her goal.
And three months later she had lost a total of 37lbs and had the happiest day of her life! She told me that she had never felt better and that she was never going quit. At the time I didn’t think much of it, but now that it’s been 13 years and she is still in my program even though I haven’t taught in over two years.
Now imagine what kind of results your clients would get if you treated them the same way you treated your first client. Your clients would get life changing transformations, refer all of their friends and never leave your program.
The problem is that as we grow our businesses it gets harder and harder to give each client that amount of attention. So, what I did was come up with systems to make sure that we could give personal attention to all our clients, no matter how many we had.
We sit down with each new member and go over their goals and have them choose a deadline to reach those goals. Then, we guarantee they will never have more then a bad week.
The way we do this is by having mandatory weigh in’s. We do it on Mondays. We call them Motivational Mondays. In the beginning, we would keep track of everyone’s goals, weight and body fat on spread sheets and keep them in a portable file box.
They would come in on Monday and weigh in and then record it on their paper in the file box. On Tuesday, my assistant would come in and go through all the papers to see who weighed in and who didn’t and also who weighed in but didn’t get a good result.
She would then follow up with each client that didn’t weigh in or weighed in and didn’t get a good result and set up a follow up consultation. This worked great in the beginning until we started getting a lot of clients. It then became hard for her to get it all done in the same week.
That’s why I developed the Fit Clients Software, and that is what we use today. It does the entire job for me, except for actually calling your clients and setting up the follow up consultations.
We still have our Motivational Mondays, except now our clients log their results in the Fit Clients Terminal. Fit Clients will follow up for me by email to anyone that misses their weigh in or weighs in but gets a bad result. It also send me a report so my assistant knows exactly who to follow up with by phone.
It will also collect their pictures for me and I can use the templates to easily create before and after pictures to post on Facebook or my website.
It also runs transformation contest and challenges automatically for me, which builds a ton of excitement in my program and helps build a strong community.
This was my main strategy that helped take my boot camp from $0-$300k in just 3 years. It helped me differentiate myself from all the other programs out there and, as Bedros likes to say, made me “a category of one” or “The only loaf on the shelf”.
Try out the Fit Clients Software and see what it can do for your business. It’s only $19.99 per month and we also have a 30 day, 100% Money Back Guarantee.
There are some really awesome bonuses as well. We have a done for you email sequence to help you get your first transformation contest up and running, along with a few other video presentations to help you grow your business.
Try it out and let me know what you think.
Committed to your success,
Jeff Sherman
www.fitclients.com