How to ensure your fitness business thrives during the first year

It's all rainbows and butterflies at first. The excitement of opening your fitness studio.

The thrill of being your boss and building a business that will serve you and your clients.

Unfortunately, like most trainers who make a choice to leap into entrepreneurship, we didn’t go to for business.

You got into the fitness industry to help people and inspire change.

Many great trainers end up frustrated with their business, working 60-70 hours a week. Not seeing their family and end up resenting their business.

Some end up leaving the industry.

Your skill set for program design, programming and assessments can not solely be how you build your business.

Lead generation. Marketing. Sales and running your business are foundational to having a growing year one in business.  

However, before we get into trenches of lead generation/marketing and sales, we need to get REAL on where we are in business today.

Below are four questions that will help you set the framework on where you want to be reversed engineered back to where you are today.

4 Questions you MUST ask yourself to help you get REAL on where you are in your business:

1. What do you need to learn to overcome what may be stopping you?

2. Where are you now? How many clients do you have? How much in revenue do you have? etc.

Where do you want to be? Three months? Six months? One year?

3. Why do you want to do this? Go deep here. WHY DO YOU WANT TO DO THIS?

4. What could stop you?

Now that you’ve got a clear idea where you want to be and where you are today its time to talk about lead generation.

What is your system for lead generation(marketing)? How are you creating awareness about your business and more importantly are you documenting the process?

Here is a list of 6 other lead-generation methods you can use that don't rely on Facebook...

1. Guest Speaking

Get as many speaking engagements as possible - in front of your target audience.

2. Hold your seminars and workshops, free to the public.

Talk about nutrition, fat loss, etc.

3. Be the local media expert

Send articles to local newspapers and be the resident expert

4. Plastic Gift Cards

Get Plastic gift cards made instead of business cards - put a $50 value on them, and people can redeem them for training or give them as gifts

5 Charity events

Hold charity events weekly and have the charity organization help market you out to their lists and media connections.  Make this FUN! Food, the DJ, put on a show.

6. Referral competitions

Do great referral contests, offer clients iPads, or HD TVs, iPhones, etc. as prizes for getting X number of successful referrals

Ask EACH of your top 5-10 clients, directly, for an introduction to someone who may be a potential client.

You can use this simple script:

"Hey _________, it's (your name) from (your business). How are you doing today?

That's great. Hey, I'm just calling you because I'm looking to enroll some new clients, and I wanted to come to you first to see if you know anyone who'd like to get the same results and experience you're getting? Whom do you know that would like to get a (free trial) on your behalf?"

Take a couple of phone numbers and give those people a call on behalf of the client.

Leads are coming in.

The word is getting out, and now you need to begin to track your numbers and create your sales system.

Successful businesses don’t guess. The facts aka the numbers will allow you to make educated decisions in regards to your business.

Tracking your numbers on a daily, weekly, monthly basis will help you identify gaps in your business before they become bigger issues and will allow you to move the business forward.

KPI's (Key Performance Indicators)

1) Total # of Leads per week?

2) Where did they come from?

3) How many desk dates/ assessments scheduled? Daily? Weekly?

4)If the didn't make the appointment, why?

5)Total # of sign-ups this week?

6)How many didn't sign-up?

7)Why didn't they sign-up?

8)How many showed?

9)Total # of active clients?

10) Total # of clients lost?

11) Leads->Sched (%)-> Showed(%)-> Enrolled(%)

A simple system for this is creating an excel spreadsheet and giving each metric a box at the top for you to track.

It’s not always fun setting things up so that you can get these numbers but it’s well worth it once you have it.

There is beauty in the mundane and as trivial as it may seem to set up a lead/marketing system and tracking your numbers, the beauty comes from knowing how your business is doing with the factual information.

Just pick one from each system, make it a priority to get it in place this month and add a new one each month and soon you will have them all in place.