By Stefan Ianev
Building a successful PT business doesn’t necessarily require you to build some elaborate funnel scheme or spend $5-10k on a fancy website.
Many of the students that we privately mentor aren’t experts at marketing and a lot of them don’t even have a website, yet all their books are full, and some of them even have waiting lists.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you are an expert at marking if you aren’t able to deliver a world class service and help your clients transform their lives, because even if you can get people in the door, you won’t be able to retain them.
Now, if you are an expert in your field, and you have what it takes to help potential clients transform their lives, we want to take a moment to share 5 simple tips that you can use to grow your PT business.
You might not need a fancy website or a funnel, but you need a medium for sharing high quality, high value information with your prospective clients, where they can reach out and contact you. This may include Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube.
High quality, high value information doesn’t mean putting up selfies of yourself, posting up your competition or photoshoot photos, or showing vids of yourself hitting new PRs.
Yes, we’ve all been guilty of that at times as we want to show others that we walk the talk. There is nothing wrong with putting up the odd selfie or a video of a PB, but the majority of the time you should be sharing informative content aimed at educating your prospects and sharing success stories of your past clients that they can relate to.
Challengers have become extremely popular these days, and although we are not very fond of radical transformation approaches that are highly unsustainable, we can’t deny that running challenges gets people in the door.
Oftentimes, individuals that do part take in challenges whether online or face-to-face do end up converting to longer term clients because after the challenge is over, they require further assistance in losing more weight or maintaining the weight loss.
Many times, our clients, especially females will refer clients our way by boasting about us to their friends or on social media. Sometime this alone can be enough to keep your books full without even going out and actively prospecting for new clients.
However, sometimes we are leaving money on the table by not actively asking our clients for referrals. You see, just because a client hasn’t referred someone to you doesn’t mean they aren’t happy with your services.
Maybe they just couldn’t think of anyone or thought you were too busy to take on new clients. By asking your clients “Is there anyone in your circle that you can think of that can benefit from results such as yourself?” it gets them proactively thinking about it, and many times they do end up thinking of someone.
Just imagine if each of your existing clients referred you just one new client, you would literally double your business overnight.
Prospecting on the gym floor might be a little old school but it still works, and it shouldn’t be discarded. If you work at a commercial gym, by being friendly and approachable and making yourself well known around the gym floor, you will be the first person members turn to when they require assistance.
Prospecting on the gym floor is a long-term game and you need to be patient. You should offer people assistance without expecting anything in return, just like when you are proving high value content online.
When people are ready, they will come to you and approach you, and at that point you should book them in for a complementary consult to discuss their goals further and present them with your coaching options.
One of our early mentors, the late Charles Poliquin used to have a saying “Learn more to earn more”. Every time you invest in yourself, you should increase your rates because you are in essence able to deliver more value to your clients.
But something else very important also happens when you invest in yourself – your self-worth goes up and you become more comfortable charging higher rates. In fact, the amount that you will comfortably charge is directly proportional to yourself worth.
For example, if you invest no more than few hundred dollars a year in yourself, then that is the most you will be comfortable charging your clients.
However, if you invest thousands of dollars in upskilling yourself each year, you will have no reservations about charging premium rates because you know you are worth it!
