3 Strategic Business Moves All Personal Trainers Should Implement

There is definitely no shortage of personal trainers out there today. Anyone can Google “personal training” or “personal trainers” and find more names than what’s on Santa’s naughty list. That being said, not all personal trainers are worth their rates, and we can save that conversation for another time. 

The topic at hand today is FOR personal trainers. If you’re looking for a personal trainer and stumbled upon this piece, you have the wrong article — but I’d be more than happy to have you stick around and give this article a ride (these same strategies can be implemented into any profession).

Being that personal trainers ONLY get paid when they finish a session with clients, the three strategic business moves listed below can help personal trainers (like yourself) make more money than you’d know what to do with (just remember who wrote this article when you become a millionaire and toss a few bucks my way for the advice — let’s consider it a “consulting fee”).

Let’s dive into the meat and potatoes of the topic and do some heavy lifting with your personal training business.

3 Strategic Business Moves Personal Trainers Should Implement 

The three business moves below are going to be your lifeline and are what can help separate your business from all the other personal trainers out there. It should go without saying, though, that you need to be a knowledgeable trainer in order to keep your clients and get them the results they desire, but once you have that skill set, the below is going to be the icing on the cake. Let’s dive right in.

1. Do something every day to keep the pipeline full

The downfall of most personal trainers is that they don’t have enough clients. What they tend to do is find themselves on one side of the fence most of the time until they realize what they are doing, and then they hop over to the other side. Essentially, they are on a seesaw going back and forth rather than being smooth and steady when it comes to scaling their business.

On one side, personal trainers are so entrenched in their work that they don’t focus on getting new clients. When they are done training clients for the week, THEN they look for more clients. You’ll catch more fish if you have more lines in the water. You’re cutting yourself short when you don’t focus on growing your business on a daily basis. 

Then, on the other side of the fence, you have people who are so focused on growing their business that they block out entire days to try and sign up new clients when a good portion of that time could be spent training clients. It’s a constant back and forth battle.

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What personal trainers need to do every day is to engage in something that helps them fill their pipeline. You never want to have an empty pipeline. A full pipeline is what drives your business and allows you to grow. This can be something like cold calling. Following up with prospects. Networking with corporations to work a deal for their employees. Creating content that drives traffic to your website. Or engaging with people or groups on social media, to name a few.

2.  Specialize in something

A mistake I see many personal trainers make is attempting to be a Jack of all trades but a master of none. If you can get great at one area of training (such as weight loss or bodybuilding), you can very quickly become known as the “go-to” trainer.

Now, one caveat to this is to know your market. If you do in-person training and the demographic locally is older women, specializing in bodybuilding is probably not going to go so well. So, you need to be aware of who your target client is and make sure it aligns with your business and location.

These days, online personal trainers are popping up everywhere. If you go to their website, you’ll find a list of services a mile long — you’d swear somewhere on that list it says they’ll come to clean your house. Now, if you know anything about SEO and attempting to rank well in the SERPs, such a business model is going to be extremely hard to rank for on the first page because it’s so competitive.

But, if you were to specialize in something, your chances of ranking increase, which means you’ll get more eyeballs on your business. The more eyeballs on your business, the greater your opportunity to gain new clients and grow your business.

3. Tie your work in with your results

You may be scratching your head on this one, so let me explain. The power of word of mouth referrals is incredibly important when it comes to building your business. The job of personal trainers is to get their clients results. If you can get them results, people will take notice and therefore recommend your services. Tie in their transformation with your business. 

Personal trainers are doing it all the time, but not to the extent I want you to take things. When you look at personal trainers who post transformations (before and after photos), they mostly post a starting weight and body fat percentage and then the final transformation numbers (maybe they don’t share the numbers at all?). While that method can be impressive, it doesn’t tell the story. People want to relate to others’ experiences.

I want you to tell their story. Obviously, you need to get the consent of your client first before you go airing potentially personal information, but if they agree, you want to hook people.

Here’s an example. Frank is 287 pounds at 47% body fat and is diabetic. He uses a high dose of insulin every day. His doctor said he’s a ticking timebomb if he doesn’t change his eating habits as well as getting more physically active. He hires you to help. Not only did you get his weight down into the normal range for his age and height, but you were also able to get his insulin dose reduced to the point where he only uses a fraction of what he once did. His doctor mentions that if he keeps progressing, he could potentially get off insulin altogether. Now THAT’S a transformation story.

You want to evoke emotion in people. Looking at pictures is great, but telling a story is where people can truly relate. 

When personal trainers can share stories that potential clients can relate to and say, “They started at the same place I’m currently at – that could be me,” it motivates them. It works much better than simply posting photos and numbers.

Implement these strategic business moves and watch what happens to your business. As mentioned before, there’s a ton of personal trainers out there. How are you going to differentiate yourself? These three tips we just covered can help you propel your business.

BONUS!

Here’s a bonus strategic business move all personal trainers should implement. You’re almost foolish if you don’t leverage this strategy and tip.

If you want to increase your revenue other than the typical fashion of going out and getting more clients, consider add-on sales. What’s that? Think of things you can sell to your clients that will increase your overall revenue. This could be branded merch and swag that helps advertise your personal training business (nothing beats a walking billboard for your brand), or an even better would be supplements.

When clients come in for their training session, you can hook them up with a sample of something like Evogen Nutrition EVP-3D or EVP Xtreme. Post-workout, help them kickstart the recovery process with a sample of Evogen Nutrition IsoJect. However, one of the most important things they should start with is a good multi formula such as Evogen Nutrition Evovite elite physique multivitamin powder. From there, when they tell you they love the products, tell them they can purchase them from. Have a shelf stocked with your favorite Evogen Nutrition products and sell them to make a profit. 

Or, if you prefer, you can sell single servings each time they come in, where they would pay you for a scoop of a pre-workout and then pay you again for a scoop of protein powder after their workouts. Will this make you rich? No, but you will definitely see a nice bump in your business’ revenue.

Give these strategic moves all personal trainers should implement a try and see how quickly your business can grow!