A sure sign that you are hiding behind perfection is when you find yourself saying things like, “I’m just waiting for this to happen before I launch my website” or “I’ve got a bit more work to do on my programme or product before I start promoting it” or I’ve got to do one more training course before I start working with clients.”

It’s very easy to justify the intention to get things “just right” before you get out there and start doing it. Maybe it’s your website or a new programme; maybe it’s your newsletter, an article or your free sign up sessions.

But behind this desire for perfection is fear; fear of not being good enough, fear of making a mistake or getting it wrong, fear of rejection or ridicule. And at the heart of that fear is ultimately a fear of failing and of what the implications of failure are for you.

Perfection is an illusion, it doesn’t really exist. In the end, striving for perfection is an excuse which allows you to put off actually getting out there and giving things a go.

You could argue that seeking and waiting for perfection is a selfish aim because it is more about you than it is about the people you are here to serve. Whilst you hide away working towards this elusive perfection who is helping your clients?

And it assumes that people are looking for perfection but they rarely are. Instead your clients are looking for something that works for them, that connects with them and makes sense in some way. It’s not perfect – it’s simply just right for them. Very often when you persue perfection, you do it through your own eyes rather than through those of your client. But of course in a profession like personal training it’s your clilents who matter. It has to be just right for them.

It’s time to step up and to step into the person you need to become in order to achieve the things you really want for yourself and your business.  Striving for perfection is futile simply because no sooner than you say “That’s perfect” you’ll spot a way to improve it or you’ll find a mistake.

Many people will never get out there and consequently will never succeed in building a great business because things are never just perfect and the fear they have will always be too much to bear. Expect the best of yourself, sure. Make a commitment to continue to learn and improve what you’re doing, absolutely. But all any of us can do at any moment in time is the best we can with where we are and with what we’ve got.

The only way to get anywhere near perfection isn’t to hold on to your ideas, programmes and websites so tightly but to share theses things, get them out there and say “Here’s something I’ve created for you – see what you think.” This way you’ll learn, you’ll get feedback and you can use that to continuously improve what you do.

If you know you have the perfectionist in you then here my top tips for stepping out of that trap.

1. Define what “perfect” is for you. Very often, when I ask this question, personal trainers can’t answer this because they haven’t really thought about it. Instead it’s just a sense so it needs to feel right or look or sound right. So get clear on what this really means so that you can be clear when it’s good enough.

2. Work out what your real fear is. When you take an honest look at why you are waiting for perfection, chances are you’ll spot the fears you are hiding behind and addressing these means you can push on forwards.

3. Stop thinking about yourself and start focusing on your clients and the benefit to them of getting your website launched or your programme out there or whatever it is you are trying to get perfect.

4. Focus on providing value for your clients. If your service or your programme or your website will help your clients and be of value to them in some way, then it’s “perfect”

5. Ask yourself this – Do you expect perfection from all those around you? Most of the time, the answer to this question is no so why do we expect it of ourselves? People simply aren’t perfect and that includes you but that doesn’t make you or what you have to offer any less valuable.

6. Reward yourself for getting out there. Instead of waiting to give yourself a pat on the back for achieving perfection, reward yourself for taking action and for  completing your book or promoting that programme or selling your service.

Training Opportunity Coming Soon

If you’re looking for ways to step up and grow yourself and your PT business then check out my latest Webinar Training called ‘Step Up For Clients And Cash’ where I’ll be working with you to identify the fastest route to the clients and the money in your business as it is today.

http://www.myperfectptbusiness.com/stepupforcashandclients

What money did you make in the last 12 months?

What did you do to generate that income?

What are your income targets for the next 12 months?

What will you do to achieve your new income targets?

Before I go any further I want to be clear that I know it’s not all about the money for you. I’ve never met a fit pro who got involved in the Fitness Industry for the sake of the money. I understand that you want to do what you love and make a difference through the work you do. That’s really great and the truth is there are millions of people who think just like you as indeed I do too.

However, in order to continue to do what you love and to make a difference to the people you serve, you have to be able to make it pay. That is why the money matters. Doing what you love and earning well are not mutually exclusive things although many fit pros speak of them as though they are. “I’m not in it for the money” is something I hear very often.

Unfortunately, unless you learn how to generate a sufficient income from doing what you love; out of serving the people you are here to serve, you won’t be able to make a difference to others or to survive yourself. You’re not going to do your best work if you’re struggling to make ends meet all the time.

But if you want to grow your income you need to start valuing money. You have to start paying attention to the money and start managing it in a way that allows it to grow. You have to care about it to the extent that you learn how to generate it and where it goes when you’ve got it.

For me it’s about finding ways to use the gift you have along with the skills and knowledge you’ve learned to provide valuable service to the people you want to work with.

One of the real challenges for fitness professionals and personal trainers is how to earn the income you need and want without running yourself ragged. How do you go about getting the clients and the income you want in a way that suits you?

My little gift to you is this simple financial planning tool to help you start thinking about and focusing on your income goals for the year ahead. Contained within this simple plan is a message about the kind of business you can create for yourself where you can avoid the 24/7 work life and do it in a way that suits you perfectly.

Download “Starting Your Financial Plan” by clicking here

Enjoy working on your business and I look forward to connecting with you in 2010.

In this third part I now want to take this discussion to a far more practical level and I want to show you how the systems you use in your business can completely transform not only the way you feel about sales but transform those all important results you get too – i.e. your ability to convert your marketing and sales efforts into clients and cash. If there was a way to attract clients rather than chase them and a way for sales to happen naturally and easily – wouldn’t that be great?

Well I want you to hold that thought because it is possible. There are a number of factors that make this possible and I’m going to share a few of those with you now.

One BIG Mistake

First I want to point out the biggest mistake that makes the experience of selling difficult – the mistake that makes sales feel awkward and uncomfortable. That big mistake is operating a one step sales process. A one step sales process is where you’re expecting strangers to become high paying clients in one step. It’s where you’re operating with the expectation that strangers will invest in your fabulous new programme or product after one conversation, one communication, or after one free pt session.

The reason this is a mistake is because of these principles – principles based on human nature and human behaviour.

4 Principles To Influence Your Approach To Selling

• People buy from people they feel they know, like and trust

So complete strangers are highly unlikely to like and trust you after just one meeting or one promotion and are therefore highly unlikely to feel confident about investing with you.

• People don’t trust you until you demonstrate that you are worthy of trust.

Listing your qualifications is not the answer to building trust and credibility. It’s about demonstrating your ability to help people like them achieve the result or transformation they really want. Trust is often built over time.

• Your customers decide when it’s time to buy – not you – you just create the opportunities to buy.

One of the fears you might have about selling is not wanting to make people do something they don’t want to do – a fear of being pushy. At the same time many PTs operate from the belief that they have control over when and whether a person buys. But just think about yourself. Who decides when you invest in something? The person selling or you? It’s you – every time. You make that ultimate decision and nobody can make you buy can they? All they can do is show you an opportunity and if it ticks your boxes you go for it.

• People are looking for a relevant and valuable offer tailored specifically for them.

This has always been true but never more important than it is in today’s world where the volume of products, programmes, offers and opportunities is completely overwhelming. Generic programmes, generic offers simply get lost in the noise. They don’t stand out and they don’t connect with anyone. If you can tailor your solution and your offer to fit your target market like a glove, your business will be able to stand out and your sales will start to take off.

If you take on board these basic principles, what does it mean for your business?

The answer is to design your business with these principles in mind.

Stop selling to strangers and start building relationships

Rather than always trying to sell to strangers, start to develop a variety of systems and processes within your business that allow you to build relationships over time with the right people for your programmes and services – your target market. This can be achieved very effectively by creating valuable content for your target market in the form of articles, ebooks, audio and videos and it can also be achieved by getting in front of your target market by speaking and networking.

Offer more than one investment opportunity

Build in opportunities for those people to invest in your programmes and products at the level they are ready for which is usually closely related to the degree of trust and credibility you’ve built up with them. In those early days of connecting with you, your customers may not be ready for 1-1 but they might ready to invest in something smaller. Sometimes people just aren’t ready but they might well be in the future if you stay connected and provide the opportunities.

This approach and these principles will make a difference to how you go about your free pt sessions too.  When it comes to using free PT sessions as a method for getting new clients on board, there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about them. I’m all for offering free sessions provided that you can convert the majority of them into paying clients. What I hear over and over again is that PTs are doing maybe 5 or 6 sessions before they get 1 client on board. This surely isn’t a great use of your precious time because it’s tiring, frustrating and not an exciting prospect for the years ahead of you.

How much more confident and comfortable would you be in your sales conversations if you knew that your programmes and services were designed to solve a specific problem for a specific group of people and you could guarantee results?

I have no problem having sales conversations with personal trainers about my various programmes because I am 100% confident that my solution will enable you to build a business that generates more clients and more income more easily and enable you to design your business so that it fits around your ideal lifestyle. But if I didn’t know who my clients would be from one day to the next, and if I didn’t have a tried and proven solution, I know I wouldn’t be half as willing to get out there and sell.

However, more importantly, I’ve now developed some systems within my business that mean that I don’t need to do any hard sales or cold calling or convincing because for the most part I’m not communicating with complete strangers. My VIP programme clients tend to bubble to the surface on their own, when they are ready. But this doesn’t mean sitting back and waiting. You still need to create the opportunities, have the sales conversations in one way or another.

But there are more ways to systemise sales too. By systemise I simply mean finding a way to make the way your sales happen reliably and consistently.

Take the “Hope” out of your marketing and sales

This is about taking the “hope” out of your marketing and sales. When you carry out some marketing for your business do you hope you’ll get results or can you guarantee it? When you deliver a free pt session do you hope that the person will sign up or do you know that you have a system that means the likelihood of that person signing up is very high and that you will get a positive result? When you launch a new product or programme – do you stick up a sales page and then hope that people will buy? Or do you create a system that means you can guarantee to fill your programme?

None of these things happen overnight of course. I don’t care what anyone says – a whole lot of work has gone on before any massive “overnight” success takes place. There’s work to do and systems to learn. But if you want to create that situation where sales happen naturally, easily and reliably, then I strongly urge you to start investigating your options.

By combining a healthy mindset and attitude towards sales, by shifting your beliefs and judgements about sales so that you are thinking differently about it and by developing systems in your business that move people from stranger to client in ways that feel authentic and natural, then you might just start to enjoy selling. And who knows the impact that could have on your business, your income and your life!

And I’m not going to dress it up and call it anything else like some may try to do. Sales is sales and I think you’re all big enough to deal with that.

In the first article I argued that sales is all part of the service; that it’s part of your role in serving your customers. If you say you hate sales, then you’re kind of saying that you hate serving your customers because it implies that they will not gain any benefit or value by investing in what you have to offer.

If you missed that article you can find it by visiting my blog page. The article is called “Hate Sales And Selling?”

Surely if you know that your customers will experience some kind of transformation by working with you or by investing in your products and programmes, then you are doing them a big disservice if you don’t create opportunities for them to work with you. And you need to help them through their resistance to investing because we all know that there are times when we know we need and want to invest in professional support or training but for any number of reasons we don’t take that big leap and actually do it.

I certainly know that I couldn’t sell my own products and programmes successfully if I wasn’t 100% confident that what I was offering was of the highest quality and even more importantly that it transformed my clients businesses – that it delivered results.

So now we’ve got the “I hate Sales” line out of the way I want to look at another one that I hear very often too.

“I’m no good at sales”

Have you ever said that? Do you believe that about yourself?

I hear lots of personal trainers explaining their lack of clients with the argument that they are not the “sales type”. The truth is there is no real sales type.

Sure if you watch The Apprentice there are definitely some interesting characters who thrive on selling to strangers and are proud of their sales prowess. So yes there are some people, some personalities who are confident and effective when it comes to what I would call the “hard sell” situations. Those situations where you have one chance to make a sale. But the reality is that most sales situations aren’t like this. As personal trainers, you’re not running round the streets of London trying to sell PT products to complete strangers. (Although I know some PTs are, in their own way, trying to do this)

There is an art to sales if you want it to happen more easily and naturally but it’s got little to do with the type of person you are. Selling isn’t a talent so much as a process that needs to be learnt and consistently followed. Selling is all about communicating accurately with your prospective clients in a consistent and structured way.

First of all, I want to point out that you have been heavily involved in selling pretty much since the day you were born. You already know far more about it and have more skill and ability than you think. Nearly every communication we take part in is an attempt to persuade someone to do or not do something.

Young children achieve what they want by sheer persistence at times. My seven year old is great at sales these days. She knows exactly how to go about convincing me that doing something, going somewhere or buying something is a good idea, not just for her but for me! And she’s great at follow up too if I didn’t say yes the first time. She doesn’t give up easily.

If you’re in a relationship now or if you’re married, then you did a pretty good job of promoting and selling yourself to your partner! When’ s the last time you persuaded someone to do something you wanted to do, like go and see a specific film or go to a particular restaurant, or go to a particular holiday destination? If you have children, then you’ll know that you are constantly selling to them too.

Within these everyday life experiences are the keys to successful sales.

The quality of the relationship

If you are always trying to sell your services to people who are basically strangers – people with whom you’ve not built a good relationship where they’ve got to know you, like you and trust that you can do a good job – then you’ve got your work cut out and your sales conversations will feel awkward and like hard work.

Understanding, connecting and appealing to needs, wants and values

If you don’t understand the real needs, wants and values of your customers, then it’s likely that your marketing messages and attempts to communicate and build relationships will fall on deaf ears. This will make sales unlikely to happen.

This is why the most successful PTs out there are often those who have selected a proper target market and niche for themselves rather than trying to appeal to everyone or a very broad market.

Persistence and follow up

If you give up after the first attempt, if all you send out is one email, if all you do is ask once, you’re not only letting your clients down but you are leaving the majority of sales (and cash) on the table for your competitors to collect.

You must have heard it before, that the average person needs to see or hear a marketing or sales message a minimum of 7 times before they even notice it. Sure, some take note first time but this is a minority. So if you give up after one communication or if you take a no to mean no never, then you’re not doing your job.

I’ve had a number of my clients thank me for my persistence. I remember one PT saying to me “Thanks for being such a nag Yvette – I would never have got off my backside and done anything otherwise and nothing would have changed in my business.” I know for a fact that some of the programmes I’ve invested in myself happened after hearing about it many times and perhaps on the tenth time I was ready to do it. Or I signed up at the last minute because of that very last email I received.

Good marketing and sales is about professionally helping other people to buy what they want and need through educating. You are putting yourself, your business, your services, in front of the right people (Your Target Market) so they get to know you and what you do, get to like you and what you do, and get to trust that you can deliver what they are looking for.

You are not telling people what to do. You aren’t bugging them. (If they feel bugged by you, then they simply aren’t the right people for your business and for what you help people do.)

Rather you are asking questions that help them to come to the right decision for them. Selling is simply the process of finding out what an individual wants and desires, identifying their greatest pains and challenges, and helping them to see how your services will provide solutions and give them exactly what they are looking for.

It’s about creating a process or a system that enables you to communicate effectively and consistently. For me, the secret to successful sales is finding a way to do it that feels authentic and genuine. This is why I say there isn’t a “sales type” exactly.

Before great sales comes great marketing. They are very closely connected but they are separate activities. In part three of this little article series I’m going to show you how the way you design your PT business can either help or hinder your sales and how to make sales happen easily and comfortably rather than feeling like an uphill battle and awkward.

Take Action – The PT Business Gym Challenge

Take this little quiz and rate yourself out of 10 to see where you might need to do some work to improve your sales results.

If you rate yourself 1 it means that this is not you at all right now

If you rate yourself a 10 it means that this is completely you right now

I have a clearly defined target market

I know exactly who my ideal clients are

I know what my clients needs, wants and values are and I know what they want from me

I have a solution that gets outrageous results for my clients every time

I build good relationships with my clients before I try to sell them anything

I don’t try to sell to strangers (as a rule)

I believe in my product or service 100% and in its value.

I put the needs of my clients above my fears and concerns about selling

I have created sales systems and processes in my business that I carry out consistently

I am persistent in my sales communications and I don’t give up easily

I’m not the sales type

I’m no good at selling

I hate sales conversations

I want to find ways to not have to sell

Most of us have said something like this at one time or another and I want to challenge this mindset and get you thinking differently because this unhealthy relationship with sales is likely to be holding you back from achieving the results you want in your business.

I’m going to cover it in three parts and the first is all about service.

Personal trainers always tell me that they care about their clients; that they are passionate about helping their clients to change their lives, transform their health and fitness. Not only that but most PTs will invest significantly in developing their skills and knowledge to become the best they can at what they do so they can get the best results with their clients.

I don’t doubt this to be true for a moment and I imagine this is true for you too.

Who are your clients?

So tell me something – at what point does a client become a client? At what point does this service begin?

Think about it and think about when, in your mind, you truly believe and behave as though someone is your client and as though you are in service to your client?  Does service begin when they pay; when they become a paying client? Is it when they do a free session with you? Do they have to pay you for you to care and for you to be able to help them?

Of course not. Service doesn’t begin with payment. Service begins the very first time you connect, be that face to face or online, be that through an article, in a workshop, or on your website.  If you care about your clients, you care about them regardless of whether they are paying you or not. You care when you send them your newsletter, when you send them your latest training videos and when you deliver a free session or consultation.

But when you say you hate selling, the caring goes out of the window because it becomes all about you. It becomes all about how you feel about sales and sales conversations. It becomes about your feelings of discomfort, your unease, your fear of rejection and so on. It’s all about you.

And this sudden mind shift from caring and serving to avoiding and disliking has a massive impact on your ability to do the best for your clients.

The sales conversations you have are a critical part of the way you serve your clients because unless you can help your clients to make that decision to invest in the solution you offer to solve their problem, they will walk away with nothing.

When they walk away with nothing, you leave them without the support, help and solutions that you know you can offer and you know will make a difference to them.

Sales is Love!

Is that a little too strong? Maybe but sales is and can be a caring part of what you do as a personal trainer. Your sales conversations can be the difference between your clients achieving their dreams and goals and not, so it’s your duty to find a way of thinking about it and doing it that works for you and works for your clients.

Stop loathing sales, stop avoiding it. Instead, start to think of it and see it as part of the service, part of caring about the quality of the future of your clients.

The PT Business Gym Challenge.

Answer this…If you no longer hated sales, what would you do differently? How would you behave differently? What might you say that you don’t say now?

In Part Two I’m going to show you how to design your business so that the sales happens easily and naturally.  I’m also going to be covering this in my next FREE Webinar on the 16th October – check it out here

No doubt some people would be stunned, others might laugh at you and assume that you’re joking. Some people might get cross with you for doing something so reckless and risky, and some may congratulate you and wish you the best of British! Most would probably think you’re just full of it and wouldn’t believe a word.

This is not dissimilar to the range of reactions I got when I announced five years ago that I was going to leave my job and go into business for myself as a coach. It certainly felt like a mountain at the start. But here I am with a lovely little business that works well for me and with plenty of potential and room to grow over years to come.

It’s a shame that these are the responses you often get from the people around you but if you’re going to have a breakthrough in your PT business, then it’s exactly this kind of bold action that’s needed. The price for big ideas is sometimes ridicule and disbelief but if you really want to make a difference, I suggest you get used to it and get over it. Sure you might end up looking foolish from time to time, and yes, there is always the possibility of failure.

But just imagine the view from the top of that mountain!

It’s breathtaking and it’s a moment you’ll remember forever. You may change lives; maybe even change the world in some small way!

Mountains can be conquered. It happens all the time and there are things you can do to increase your chances of reaching the summit safely.

A route and a plan, an experienced guide, the right equipment, the right preparation, the right support.

You would never embark on a climb up Mount Everest without any of these things. If you did you really would be foolish.

Apply these principles to your big PT business so that the actions you take are calculated and measured and you can greatly increase your chances of overcoming the difficulties and reaching your business summit.

So what is your Big, Bodacious, Scary Breakthrough Idea? Those ideas that could launch you and your business into another dimension?

Take Note: If your idea doesn’t evoke a whole range of reactions and make those around you laugh, cry, shake their heads or at least raise an eyebrow, think again. You might want to go for a bigger mountain.

If you want to experience a breakthrough in your PT business and are looking for an injection of ideas and inspiration, then the PT Business Breakthrough TeleSummit is the event for you. Check it out here: www.ptbusinessbreakthroughsummit.com

Discover your own Mount Everest!

When I ask Personal Trainers about the one thing they feel they need help with to grow their business, a very common answer is “the marketing”. Without a doubt marketing seems to cause many of us to break out in a cold sweat and to keep pushing it further down the to do list.

But right there lies the problem which is the way we think about marketing which is as this great big thing that needs to be done. I too used to dread the marketing and I too used to have it on my list of things to get done, like it was something I could do in one go, cross it off and breathe a sigh of relief.

But guess what? It isn’t a thing that can be done and crossed off your list. It’s a fundamental and intrinsic part of any business – any successful business that is. Over the years of listening to some really cool business experts talk and teach their different views and approaches to marketing and investing in several superb coaching programmes that included great marketing systems and strategies, I discovered that marketing could be fun.

In my own PT business programmes I teach the steps to building the foundations for great marketing. I believe that for your marketing to work, and for marketing to be enjoyable and easy to do, it needs to be built into your business. And the steps I teach in building your marketing foundation include:

The Marketing Process and Principles

Marketing Messages

The Marketing Platform

The Marketing Mindset

Marketing Action Plans

Every step has its challenges of course but there is a step that proves to be one of the hardest to take and that is step 6!

Step 6 is about getting out there and actually implementing your hard work. Each of those other steps is about preparing; about getting things ready. But there comes that point when you’re all set to go and that’s where things can come to an abrupt halt.

You’ve understood the marketing process, developed your powerful marketing messages, created a solid platform for your marketing, developed your marketing materials, selected the strategies you want to use, worked on your marketing mindset and even written a marketing action plan.

But now you have to actually get out there and start doing it – start speaking to people, start networking, start writing and getting your articles published. You need to start connecting with the right people, start building relationships, follow through on your connections and so on and so on.

Even with a plan it seems that there can still be a great deal of resistance to actually implementing your plans. Why is this resistance so common?

It’s harder than we thought and takes up more time than we expected.

As I said, there’s a tendency to think of marketing as these little promotional activities we can do quickly, a quick leaflet drop, a quick email, a workshop. There are some very unrealistic expectations around how marketing works and how easy it is to get spectacular results.

Marketing takes time, effort and commitment to be successful and you need to develop the art to creating realistic and detailed plans based on strategies or systems that others have used successfully in the past. If you just make it up as you go along, you’re unlikely to get the results you want. And this further compounds that belief that marketing is no fun.

If you’ve got a fabulous programme or product that you’ve invested time and effort in creating for your target market, then you have to put the same time and effort into learning and implementing an effective marketing and sales strategy. Otherwise all of that effort is wasted, you make no money and all of those people who could really benefit from your programme have to struggle on without it.

If you don’t know what you’re doing with your marketing, then make the decision now to learn. Go and find someone who knows how to market and sell successfully and learn from them.

We’re waiting until everything is perfect.

This is a mindset thing because you have a belief that there will come a time when things are perfect – when you feel completely confident and certain that you’ll get the results you want. This is often accompanied by a fear of rejection; a fear of what people might think of you and of what you’ve done. There’s a fear that it won’t be good enough.

The truth is that there is never perfection. No matter how much you prepare, no matter how good you are, there’s always room for considerable improvement so get used to that and get it out there, imperfections and all.

The truth is that you can’t wait to feel confident or certain before you take action because the only way your confidence and certainty will grow is by taking action. You have to do the thing you fear before that fear goes away, not the other way around.

The truth is, and this is perhaps the most important one for you to take on board, that people aren’t looking for perfection from you. They are looking for valuable information and support. So guess what? Perfection is irrelevant. There will always be some who don’t want what you have to offer. There will always be some people who don’t like what you do. Dare I say, there will be people who don’t really warm to you at all and that’s ok. That’s how it is. Why on earth would we expect everyone we meet in life to like us or love what we do? It’s a crazy notion.

I suggest you adopt the Chelsea Mindset of SW3 – Some Will, Some Won’t, So what!

The important thing is that you’re clear about who you are targeting with your marketing. If you know who your ideal clients are and you design your marketing for them, then they’ll be interested, they’ll listen and they’ll respond.

One thing I know for sure is that marketing only works easily once you’ve built that all important foundation for your business. If you don’t have some of the basics in place for your business and your marketing, then at best you’ll get poor results and at worst you’ll get nothing. If your marketing isn’t working for you right now, then it doesn’t mean you’re no good at it. It simply means that some key ingredients are missing.

If you find your marketing efforts are falling on deaf ears right now then I would, if I were a betting gal, put money on the chances that you haven’t defined your niche market yet. If you’re creating your marketing to appeal to everyone or a very broad group of people, you’ve set yourself a very hard if not impossible task.

“I tried it once – it didn’t work”

Marketing is an art and it does take a few goes to get spectacular results. Even if you invest in a marketing programme and follow it step by step, you won’t necessarily immediately get the results you aspire to achieve. But don’t give up so easily because once you’ve discovered a system that works, your job is to refine it, tweak it, learn where it worked and where it didn’t and try it again and your results will improve until they exceed your expectations.

The personal trainers out there who are succeeding with their marketing aren’t doing so because they were born great marketers. They didn’t get those results overnight. They worked on their marketing, they tried it out, they went back to the drawing board and developed it, and got out there again and again and again.

When you’re determined to achieve something great with your business and you’re committed to making a difference to the people you serve through your business, then you can’t give up the first time something doesn’t work.

The bottom line is this – Stop searching for overnight success. Instead get committed to the long term success of your business and of your marketing and start working on it regularly and consistently. Stop waiting for perfection, stop waiting until you feel that everything is just right and get out there. There are people who need your support so do what you need to do to reach them so that you can help them and build the business you want too.

And I agree – this is absolutely true, beyond any doubt, that you can’t beat the experience of working directly with a professional – With You. It’s more powerful and more effective for numerous and obvious reasons. But this is totally missing the point and merely highlights the lack of understanding there is surrounding the role and value of products beyond 1-1 and group training.

The question is then, if working 1-1 with you is the most valuable experience your clients can have, then why do most personal trainers charge peanuts for it?

I could focus on reasons such as undervaluing yourself, undervaluing your skills and knowledge, market forces or just simply following the crowd when it comes to pricing.

Whilst these are all common reasons for keeping the prices for your 1-1 time low, I’m going to focus on something else here which is the fact that the traditional business model used by most personal trainers is flawed. It’s flawed because it relies almost solely on trading your time for money, and usually your 1-1 time. And that’s problematic because you hit that great big ceiling on your income and on the potential of your business very quickly. It’s also a problem because if a 1-1 service is the only service you offer, it tends to limit what you can charge.

And why does the money matter? Because unless you can make a good income from your PT career, you won’t be in it for long and you won’t achieve the lifestyle that enables you to do all the things that really matter to you.

Products aren’t meant to just replace people. They are there to serve a very valuable purpose in your fitness business. I’m going to give you 4 of the big benefits of developing your own products and programmes beyond face to face training.

So here they are…

1. Not everyone is ready to buy
When a potential customer meets you for the first time it is highly probable that they will not invest with you immediately. Why? Because they probably don’t really know you yet and they don’t necessarily like or trust you yet either. But they also may not be ready to invest in 1-1 training. They are just not in that place yet because they haven’t really thought about it and because very often things aren’t painful enough yet.
Offering alternative options to your customers; other ways in which they can learn about and work on something, enables them to invest at the level that they are ready for at that time.

Trust and credibility are built over time, not overnight. Developing valuable products is one of the ways to build trust and credibility with your customers so that when they are ready to step up and make a real commitment to achieving the transformation they want, they will invest with you and will be happy to pay a premium for it.

2. Position your 1-1 time as your premium service
The truth is that most of your 1-1 clients don’t appreciate the value of having you there beside them (if you’re doing a great job). They take it for granted because the market is flooded with trainers all offering virtually the same thing at roughly the same price. For many people, they will only really learn to value the experience of working with you in a 1-1 situation if they have tried to overcome their problems in other ways first.

By developing a range of ways in which you take your customers through a transformation and achieve a specific result, and by structuring your business so that people can easily see the different options, be that from reading your book to your D.I.Y programme, to your V.I.P 1-1 bells and whistles programme, it makes it very obvious that the experience of working with you is the best option – which you all know is true right?

3. The monetary value you place on your time can increase
Example: If your book is £10 and your 30 Day online programme is £97 and your home study kit is £500, how much is your 1-1 programme? There is no right answer here. It’s simply that you have now positioned your 1-1 option as the premium option. It might not be 1-1. It might be a retreat, a small group training programme or something else but the key ingredient is you and specifically direct access to you, your time and your expertise.

And if you’re thinking “My clients won’t be able to afford to pay any more” or “I don’t do it for the money” or “I don’t want to be greedy” or anything like that, then it’s possible that you need to work on your mindset around money and wealth because it could be holding you back. Not only holding you back but holding your clients back too but that’s a discussion for another day.

4. The opportunity to develop additional income streams
Anyone who’s been there and done it knows that relying on 1-1 sessions as a PT is exhausting and limiting. No matter how much you love what you do, there is a limit to how many 1-1 training sessions you can do. Most personal trainers and fitness professionals recoil at the idea of delivering endless 1-1 sessions, day in, day out for the rest of their working life. How many 60+ personal trainers do you know? And no they haven’t all retired early on great pensions. They either quit or changed careers a long time ago.

Not only can products be a way of providing real value to your clients but it’s a way to build in additional income streams to your business which tackles PT burnout and the financial struggles in one stroke. It’s about building a business that’s sustainable, not only financially but physically.

The Bottom Line…
Products can’t replace the experience and value of working with you face to face but that doesn’t mean they have no place in your business or no value for your clients.

Finding ways to package your skills and knowledge in more ways than 1-1 is one of the keys to unlocking the true potential of your PT business and to building a career that you can enjoy and thrive in for many years to come.

The guys on my 90 Days To Launch Your Perfect PT Business Bootcamp know this and are well on the way to developing their own awesome programmes that they can package in any number of ways beyond 1-1. They are building a real business for themselves.

So to anyone who is feeling put out by the trend towards delivering health and fitness services and programmes via products beyond 1-1 training, I say this; Instead of feeling that way, see it as an opportunity and use it as a means of elevating what you do to a whole new level. It’s not just a way to free up your time but it makes it possible for you to reach and help more people transform their lives. Now that’s got to be a good thing!

R E S I L I E N C E

Resilience is the ability to “bounce back” after a shock or a fall. Without this quality, you are destined to fail as a PT or at best you will struggle and fall way short of ever fulfilling your potential.

The statistics for the industry continue to make uncomfortable reading with the numbers of new PTs quitting after a couple of short years still very high.

The very nature of the PT profession and the challenge of building a successful business are filled with obstacles, knock backs, rejection, frustrations, risks, big learning curves and mistakes. And if you really want to build a successful career and a business for yourself as a PT you have to be prepared to experience all of these things.

It is so easy to get thrown by the smallest of events. Maybe you ask for something and you get a “no”. You send out an email and you get no response. You spend weeks planning your latest bootcamp or workshop and nobody turns up. You spend hours with a new client and they cancel. You deliver a great teleseminar and forget to record it. You follow all of the instructions but the technology still won’t do what you want. You send a launch email out and the website you want to promote crashes for no obvious reason. You get criticism for your work or for something you said or wrote.

I’ve experienced many of the above and many, many more along my business journey. All of these little problems can leave you feeling pretty exasperated; leave you feeling like throwing your hands in the air and shouting “Why me?” “What’s the point?” It can leave you feeling ready to throw in the towel.

Now I’m pretty sure there isn’t a single successful business owner out there who hasn’t at some point felt or said this on more than one occasion. But, the big difference between success and failure is what you do next because every time something goes wrong or something is tough you have a simple choice to make.

Either you can give up, quit and go and do something else, something easier and you can give up on your dreams.

Or you can learn, move on and get on with it.

That’s Resilience

If you have problems and challenges now by doing the same old thing or by doing nothing, just wait until you take that leap and make the decision to go for your dreams and you start working on it! The obstacles come thick and fast when you’re moving forwards and making progress.

I always remember something one of my very first mentors said to me which was basically if you’re not making any mistakes, then you’re not trying hard enough. You’re staying in your comfort zone and that won’t take you very far. So you have to find a way to get comfortable with being uncomfortable and with making mistakes.

How do you develop your resilience?

• Change your mindset

It needs a mind shift to develop that resilience that’s required to keep you pushing through the obstacles.

A Life Without Problems?

People tend to think there should be or will be a time when they will be problem-free. The problem is thinking and wanting a life without problems. Let’s be clear right now – there is no such thing. There will always be problems and challenges. These are what make us grow and these are what help us to achieve great things.

When you achieve a successfully growing business, the problems don’t disappear. You simply get different problems and you get better at solving them.

Accept that problems are just a part of life and a part of the journey towards achieving your most important and meaningful goals dreams. Accept this and you can focus on the bigger picture and finding the solutions to keep moving onwards and upwards.

• Make a REAL decision

Have you made a real decision yet?

In business there is an 80:20 rule (not an exact science but it’s apparent) 20% of the personal trainers will get 80% of the results – results being a successful, thriving business. So what’s the decision you have to make? Are you going to be in that top 20%? Are you willing to do what it takes to succeed? Yes or No? It’s a decision that you need to make.

• Find people who inspire you

Surround yourself with great mentors and professionals so that you have somewhere to go when you get stuck. And you get to know how they think and how they work so that when you face an obstacle, instead of asking “Why Me?” you can ask “What would she/he do?”

• Get a coach

Without question, the process of building your version of the perfect business will at times be like that emotional rollercoaster ride. Your marketing strategy works, you feel elated. If it doesn’t, you feel depressed. Things work and don’t work all the time and it’s a challenge to try and keep on an even keel. Having someone there who can help you to quickly regain your focus, workout the solutions and plan and take the next steps is a valuable resource that can develop your resilience and increase the speed of your progress.

• Invest in a high price programme

There is nothing like putting your money where your mouth is to motivate you to get results. The more painful the investment is for you, the more likely you are to get maximum results. The times I make the fastest and most significant progress in my business and the times I develop the most and demonstrate the most resilience is when I’ve invested in a high price mentoring, coaching or training programme where the cost has been a stretch for me, giving me maximum incentive and motivation to get the results I want.

Summary

Resilience is just about your ability to bounce back each time something doesn’t work or each time you hit an obstacle. The greater your resilience, the faster your progress, the greater your results.

The PT Business Gym Challenge

#1 – How resilient are you right now?

Take a look at recent examples in your business where things haven’t worked or haven’t gone as you would have liked. What was your reaction? What did you do? Did you learn and try again? Did you give up and move on to something else?

Are you avoiding doing something in your business either because you’ve struggled with it in the past or because you are just worried about getting it wrong or about making a mistake?

#2 – Make a decision today.

Are you going to be in that top % of successful personal trainers, running their own perfect business? Yes or No?

If you said yes, then know that from now on you’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen. You will bounce back no matter what and do you know something else? You might even find you enjoy the journey.

I don’t care what you think about The Biggest Loser, the training methods or the cash incentive or the trainers or Davina McCall. It’s not important. Before I explain my enthusiasm, and I know that you might be thinking I’m crazy to like this programme but please bear with me here – I want to put it into the context of the topic I’m talking about today.

You see, when I have conversations with personal trainers, and we look at what you guys are delivering, the huge amount of knowledge you have, the time and energy you invest in your clients and then we look at what you get in return for that effort – there’s no doubt in my mind that the biggest loser in your business right now is YOU! You’re not getting the rewards or the recognition you deserve and you’re not achieving your dreams.

So where does The Biggest Loser come in to play? I’ll tell you.

We all know that when it comes to what the vast majority of people want when they invest in gym memberships and personal training – the motivation at the top of the list is weight loss. As a result, there are hundreds of businesses and service professionals, including PTs operating in the weight loss market. But there’s one thing you have to do if you’re going to compete in the weight loss market, and it’s even more important if you’re going to be in a position to build yourself a successful business as a PT.

That thing is to DEFINE YOUR TARGET MARKET.

Those of you who know me and have listened to my seminars or read my book and previous articles will not be surprised. You might be saying “Here we go again” because it’s probably one of the topics I end up discussing with personal trainers more than any other. Why? Because it’s undoubtedly one of the keys to achieving a successful business in today’s PT market and yet it’s the step that the majority of PTs find so difficult to take.

And it’s here that The Biggest Loser provided a great insight. The programme provided an example of a group of people, all of whom had something in common, that being that they wanted to lose weight. But within this group of people there were some very distinct individuals with very specific motivations and reasons for wanting to lose weight. And that’s what’s important for you.

To give you a few examples…

• There was a lovely young guy who’d been overweight for years since early childhood and what he wanted was to end the years of bullying he had suffered so that he could actually start living his life.

• There were several people in the group who were parents of young children and they were in fear of dying before their children reached their teens, never mind seeing them grow up and get married.

• There were some who wanted to get their life back as their weight was now preventing them from living a full life.

• And there was a man who wanted to lose weight so that he would have the confidence to get out there and meet the love of his life before it was too late.

These are all great examples of target markets within the weight loss market that could hold the key to you being able to build up a successful business. Sure, all these people wanted to lose weight but they’re not the same. Sure a TV programme, offering big cash prize incentives, can attract all kinds of people with lots of weight to lose, regardless of their motivation. But you’re not a big TV programme and you’re probably not offering £25k as a prize to the client who loses the most weight! When you’re building up your own small business the last thing you want is everyone who wants to lose weight. You need to attract a specific group of people because this allows you to achieve those business essentials like becoming an expert, become the “go to” professional, developing products and programmes tailored to your market and so on.

As an aside – this prize incentive is worth thinking about though. It could be a cash prize but it could be something else which would be of great value to your clients. Again if you have a well defined target market you’ll know exactly what would appeal to and motivate them. So, what kind of programme would you need to run, charging what price, to how many clients, in order to be able to give away an awesome prize to the person with the best results? Could be fun to think about?

Now, not only did The Biggest Loser provide a valuable insight into different target markets in weight loss but over the weeks it also provided an invaluable insight into the challenges and obstacles that these different people faced. Again, the challenges, the things that get in the way and the things that will make them quit are all quite different.

This kind of information is like gold dust for your business because if you understand the kinds of obstacles that come up for people in a particular target market, you can design your programme to tackle those obstacles head on in away that your competitors can’t and don’t.

Understanding your target market in this way equips you with the information you need to design the perfect programme or products for them.  It arms you with the exact content you need to communicate, connect with and market to your target audience successfully. Business owners pay top dollar for this kind of information about their target customers and programmes like The Biggest Loser are giving it away for free.

So there you are! That’s what I got from watching some of The Biggest Loser this year.

I know you might not be in the weight loss market but the principles still apply and there will be other sources of great ideas and information in other TV programmes, online, in books, in magazines and so on.

Don’t be the biggest loser in your own PT business. You are a personal trainer but you are also a business owner and that means looking at things differently. Stop focusing only on the practicalities of what you do as a personal trainer and start thinking about your business. The only way you’ll ever be able to really help people out there and bring about big transformations in people’s lives is by working on your business.

The PT Business Gym Challenge

Define Your Target Market – what’s their biggest problem and why do they need to solve it now?