12 Ways to Create Your Ultimate Fitness Business

One of the fastest, easiest and most economical ways to start a personal training or boot camp business is to start offering free Saturday workouts to the entire community.

I first did this with my personal training business. Later I did it with my boot camp business here in Chino Hills. Worked awesome for both businesses.

Here’s how…

1. I bought about 100 yellow and black yard signs, the kind that politicians put out on streets. The signs read like this: “FREE Fitness Boot Camp. Saturdays at 8:00AM Butterfield Ranch Park. www.CHBootCamp.com

2. I also bought a quarter page ad in the local magazine that reaches the homes here and ran a similar ad that offered free fitness boot camps each Saturday at 8AM at Butterfield Ranch Park and my website.

Now, people who saw my ad or yard sign would go to my website and on my site they’d see a banner that said “register for your free Saturday boot camp”. This was pretty much like an opt in.

With in four weeks my email list had grown to 540 local residents and my Saturday boot camps had anywhere from 25-40 people per camp.

What’s even cool is that the local media caught on and came out and took pictures, wrote up a story about my boot camp and put it in the local paper. That got me credibility, third party validation and helped grow my list more.

After the four weeks of free Saturday boot camps I was ready to launch my paid for weekday boot camp and it was easy to do becuase for the past four weeks I had over delivered value with the free Saturday boot camps and I had built a decent size email list which I was able to make offers to.

For me, that was a pretty darn good return on investment. I spent about $300 on the yard signs and $240 on the quarter page ad and that got me close to 20 new clients at $299/month within the first week of promoting my paid for camps.

The point I’m making here is that starting a fitness business is not rocket science. Sometimes we get so involved in the details that we over think the proccess and don’t do the obvious, the basics, the stuff that works.

We try to make everything complicated, and wait for perfection when really success comes to those who take imperfect action.

Now, I gotta tell you one thing about building the ultimate fitness business… Do what’s “factory installed” for you - FOLLOW YOUR PASSION.

In other words, if you want to do one on one training becuase that’s what you’re passionate about then do it. If group training or boot camps are your passion then do those. If you wake up in the morning and can’t want to train stay at home moms, business executives, athletes, the majorly obese, or whoever - but for craps sake, do what you’re PASSIONATE about. Do what’s factory installed
for you.

So assuming you know what you’re most passionate about, what’s in line with your values, and what you’d spring out of bed for in the the morning, let me tell you how to get that business to ultimate success, give it legs, and get it to serve YOUR lifestyle.

Don’t be fooled… ALL BUSINESSES AT SOME POINT WILL EITHER SELL OR SHUT DOWN, unless you plan on teaching a boot camp till your 78 years old, at some point you’re either going to sell your business or shut it down.

Unfortunately most businesses fail to build “legs” and end up shutting down becuase there’s no exit plan in place.

(By LEGS I mean making your business attractive for a potential buyer by dialing in systems, operations, marketing, sales and retention tactics and showing the potential buyer that the business will survive AND in fact thrive without you).

Here are 12 ways to build the ultimate fitness business:

# 1. Be a value adder in life. Always exceeds people’s expectations. It’s the little things, the details, that people rememeber you by and talk about long after leaving your facility. Send puff up text messages to your clients, give them props on their facebook wall for putting in so much effort during their workout, send them hand written thank you card, gift cards to Starbucks or the movies,
or a flower arrangement to every client’s place of work.

And do all this without expectation. Show REAL appreciation. Do it becuase it feels good to do and not becuase you want something from them.

Like Zig Ziglar says: help enough people get what they want, and you’ll get what you want.

# 2. Sell once and never sell again. If you’re not using EFT (electronic fund transfer) or auto debit in your fitness business then you’re really gonna hate life when you have to go and resign and re-sell the same people over and over again every 4-6 weeks. Plus, no EFT means no legs. Who’s gonna buy your business from you if you don’t have PREDICTABLE money scheduled to come in each month? You can learn more about setting up EFT by reading this blog post I did.

# 3. Sell the big programs first. It’s just as easy to sell a 12 month commitment as it is to sell a month to month program if you know how to structure an offer the right way.

You get the peace of mind of reliable income and your clients gets to commit to a program that gets them results AND teaches them to make it a lifestyle. PLUS clients who commit to 12 month programs are three times more likely to stay with you for multiple years.

# 4. Don’t chase your dreams… chase your goals. Start your business off by setting goals for yourself. How many new members do you want within the first 30, 60, 90, and 120 days? What are you gonna do to get them?

How much do you want to earn each month? How much of that do you want to take home? What do you have to do to make that happen?

Are you going to phase yourself out and get a trainer to run your camp so you can work ON your business and not IN it?

How are you going to find the right trainer? How much should you pay them? How will you phase them out? How long after opening do you plan to do that?

Set yourself specific goals and put a deadline on them. And like my buddy Craig Ballantyne says: CUT ALL YOUR DEADLINES IN HALF.

# 5. Have multiple poles in the water all all times so you never run out of leads and prospects. Here’s just a short list of marketing systems you should have deployed:

== Offline Marketing ==

Human billboards
Lead boxes
Body fat table
Direct mail
Print ads
Charity drives
Free Saturday camps
Bring a friend week
21 day rapid fat loss promo
14 day fat furnace
6 week transformation programs
Small group seminars
Grocery store tours
Client referral systems
Plastic gift cards
Past client reactivation system

== Online Marketing ==

Facebook ads
Craigs list posts
Deal of the day sites promotions (these have given many Fit Body Boot Camp owners 250 or more clients in a single day)
Search Engine Optimization
Direct response websites
Squeeze pages
Email marketing
Pay per click ads
Endorsed email mailing by local businesses

# 6. Don’t be a bottom feeder. The number one solution I see most trainers turn to when business is slow is to lower their prices. One trainer posted right here on this blog “So how is my boot camp going to compete with the gyms that charge $49/month?” My reply way: “Are you really completing with gyms, that’s the level of value that you feel you deliver? Are you seriously telling me that you can’t find 42 people to pay you $197/month?

That’s all you need, 42 people to give you $197/month and you have yourself a six figure business.

Look, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want tire kickers in my camps. I don’t want people stressing over money and who can or can’t make their payment next month. I want action takers… folks who have the time, money, and BURNING DESIRE to want to lose fat and get in shape. And we both know the more a client pays the more they pay attention and get results.

# 7. Don’t be an order taker… be a CLOSER. I can teach you a thousand ways to get people to call you, email you, and ask you about your boot camp… all of that is MARKETING.

But if you don’t know SELLING, if you can’t close them and convert those leads into paying clients then you’re gonna always struggle to get clients. If you don’t have a selling script and system that’s predictable and proven to sell then you are gonna struggle NO MATTER how many leads you can get in front of you.

# 8. Be a kick ass client keeper. Hey, what’s the point of all the marketing and selling in the world if you can’t retain a client?

Imagine having this giant bathtub and three really big faucets pouring water into it… that water is money or clients.

… but there’s one BIG problem…

YOUR BATHTUB HAS FOUR REALLY BIG DRAINS and they’re sucking all the water out of it faster than you can pour. Pretty shitty, right?

You have a retention problem. And even though you want to blame the economy… the problem is probably YOU.

Here are the three best tactics to retaining your clients.

1. Give them results. It doesn’t matter how much they like you, and how highly they think of you. They signed up for one reason and that’s to lose weight and keep it off. If you don’t deliver MEASURABLE and QUANTIFIABLE results then they’re out!

2. Give them LOVE. Most people these days don’t get appreciation, love, attention, and enthusiasm in their life. They don’t get at the the job, they don’t get it from the spouse or kids, and they don’t even get it from themselves.

Come with love, passion and enthusiasm and deliver the energy!

3. Come with the coolness. Be cool and treat your clients to a movie from time to time. Or give them a $15 Starbucks or health food store gift card. Or throw a client appreciation party.

DON’T YOU LIKE BEING APPRECIATED?

Mail them a hand written note. Send them a personalized text message. Call them at their job and puff them up. But be consistent when you do this stuff. a random call and a set of movie tickets four months later is not gonna get you the results you want.

Just be cool.

# 9. Decompress often. Life’s not about working. We work becuase we want to live a certain type of lifestyle or freedom, but sometimes you get lost in all the stuff to do and end up a slave to your job or business. Get out for the weekend, go away, clear your head and get back into it with a new sense of clarity.

# 10. Reward yourself. Having big goals is awesome. But you gotta set smaller “milestone” goals too, goals that you can reach and reward yourself for by doing something cool. And then when we hit that big goal – get yourself that prize. Savor the moment and THEN set the next big goal to achieve.

# 11. The OLD way of making money is no longer the RIGHT way. You don’t have to trade time for dollars anymore. Leverage your business by using systems and people to make money even while you’re on vacation. If you don’t have a high converting website that can easily be found on search engines and can proccess orders online – get one. If you’re your best employee then get a trainer to deliver the training so you can have time to sleep in, go on vacation, hang with your family and even get sick and not have to go and train people.

Forget about linear income or trading time for dollars. Think leverage. That’s REAL SECURITY.

# 12. Ruthlessly manage your time. Dan Kennedy was spot on when he said that. Today more than ever there are way too many distractions that can
literally kill your productivity. Work off lists. Learn to say “No thanks” more often. Stop it with the shiny object syndrome, and only focus on YOUR five percent - outsource the trivial 95% to others. You can learn more about my “5% Rule” from this blog post.

Let me know if you find this post helpful by commenting in the box below =)