Self Employed Personal Trainer: 3 business concepts you need to know about

As a personal trainer you may have learnt about business managements. This is a short article compiling a few business concepts that I believe are critical to any businesses. They are specifically useful to any Self Employed Personal Trainer. And could very much help you make more money while reducing your stress level.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Many of you have heard about a CRM. Here is the definition offered by wikipedia:

“Customer relationship management (CRM) is one of many different approaches that allow a company to manage and analyse its own interactions with its past, current and potential customers It uses data analysis about customers’ history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.^“

This is extremely important because your relationship with your clients is eventually what makes them reach their goal. And ultimately, keeps your business alive. There are thousands of great pages defining what a good CRM consists of. But eventually, it’s about centralizing and having a quick access to all your client’s information and the interactions that you guys have. In concrete terms, a CRM for personal trainer is a system that helps you keep track of your client’s goals, informations, PT sessions, discussions and so on.

You are probably doing that one way or another as a Self Employed Personal Trainer. But I invite you to revisit your system and think about what information you often miss or would be great to add so your clients feel closer to you and best followed & motivated.

 

Business Continuity Planning

We will rely on wikipedia once more to explain this concept

“Business continuity planning (or business continuity and resiliency planning) is the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company… An organization’s resistance to failure is “the ability … to withstand changes in its environment and still function”. Often called resilience, it is a capability that enables organizations to either endure environmental changes without having to permanently adapt, or the organization is forced to adapt a new way of working that better suits the new environmental conditions”

In short, it’s about ensuring your business (and you as a Self Employed Personal Trainer) will have most chances to survive environmental changes. Environmental changes can be massive things like the COVID-19 crisis. But they can also be minor and usual things like summer holidays, Christmas holidays etc..

So what do businesses do, and what can you do to plan for environmental changes?

 

Diversification Strategy

This one is straight forward… Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Business around the world all try to be as diversified as possible. So that a major change in the environment will only partly affect them. A major event or environmental change mainly impact a group of people and not another.

For example an earthquake or major storm tragedy in one region would mainly affect the people in that region. So you may want to have customers in several regions.
Certain holidays may cause your clientele to train less and for a period of time. Which in turn may impact their motivation and prevent them from reaching their Goals. Since Holidays are often tied to religions, you may want to have clients with different religions to ensure you have constant revenue.
Gyms may change their policy regarding external personal trainers; so you may want to train at several gyms, or have. your own.

There are so many things that can change and happen. And as many things or more that can be done about it before it happens. A good diversification strategy takes into account the likelihood of events happening, the impact it can have, and the potential revenue increase that it can bring to the business.

 

Things we recommend you to do

With those business concepts understood, many of you will realize that some easy steps can be taken for a stronger business. Here is short list:

Track all of your clients’ information in one system

• Goals, Health info, lifestyle info …
• Every single session and
• Order payments etc

Diversify your clientele

• Geographically
• Based on Jobs

`Diversify you training locations

• Different Gyms
• Outdoors vs indoor

Plan for events that are likely to impact you

• Loosing your notebook, phone etc
• Major environmental changes
• Holidays

I hope that this will give you make your business stronger as Self Employed Personal Trainer.  Comment this post if you have ideas and systems that work for you; so other PTs can benefit from it. And don’t forget to see how JustTrain helps you better manager your business.