Creating A Successful Personal Training Business Part 5: Getting Started
Getting Started
Education
To achieve success in any skill you must develop a level of adequacy that shows you can perform the duties at an acceptable level. There are a couple of principles needed for success as a personal trainer. You may not need to get a degree in Applied Physiology to become a trainer if you can master the application of skills needed on the certifying exams. I have seen trainers without degrees succeed, and I have seen trainers with degrees flounder. When you come to know the underlying principles, you can infer how the resulting system will play out and use those to develop mastery. These are the skills important to personal training:
Critical Thinking
Science
i) Physiological Sciences
ii)Physics
iii)Chemistry
iv)Psychology
v) Communication
vi) Nutrition
Business
i) Finance
ii)Marketing
iii)Sales
iv) Value Delivery
v) Value Creation
Scientific Thought
Science was developed to help humans better understand the world. Contrary to current popular thought, it is not closed-minded and restrictive. Science teaches you how to conduct experiments that point you in the right direction. All science helps you do is:
1) Question, “Can I can become a successful personal trainer”
2) Research, “Let me read Jesse’s book and see”
3) Create a hypothesis, “I think I can become a successful trainer”
4) Experiment through trial and error “I am having success here, but not there”
5) Analyze your experience, “Here is how I’m having success”
6) Conclusion, “I became a successful personal trainer!”
When you practice these skills you are truly the master of your own destiny. Without any help from others, you can answer your own questions with the help of your own personal guiding north star.
Saying this, you must still understand physiology, chemistry, physics, communications, and psychology on a broad, big picture level. The effectiveness of your typical school routine of memorizing, regurgitating, testing, and forgetting will not be valuable skills here. As the book “Range” points out, these are skills of the past. Dynamic jobs of the future, like personal training, requires the ability to problem solve using abstract information. There are no neat and tidy tests with multiple choice answers when working with humans. You must understand the principles and infer answers from them.
If you choose to forgo a degree, obtain a test from the NSCA, ACSM, or NASM and work backward. If you are considering a degree or an advanced degree, keep in mind the “return on investment.” If you are going to go into $50,000 of debt that is paid off over 20 years, you must be absolutely confident that the degree will be absolutely vital. In most cases, it isn’t. Get a test and reverse engineer it. Learning only what is vital and valuable. College debt can be a major liability that can enslave and overleverage you for a large majority of your life. Do not take this proposition lightly.
Business
Business isn’t rocket science; it can actually be quite intuitive. As pointed out in the book, “The Personal MBA”, the business serves a quick and easy purpose:
Provides something of value
That people want or need
At a price they’re willing to pay
That satisfies their needs and expectations
That Brings in enough profit to sustain the business
You do this by:
Value Creation- Figuring out what people need or want, then creating it
Marketing - Attracted attention and making demand for the product
Sales - Turning Prospective customers into paying customer
Value Delivery - Giving your customers what you promised and ensuring they’re satisfied
Finances - Bringing in enough money to continue operating and make it worth your while
Personal Training as a business would be classified as a service business. As outlined in, “The personal MBA”, a service business involves helping or assisting someone in exchange for a fee. To create value you must provide some sort of benefit to the customer. To do this:
Have employees capable of a skill or ability other people require but can’t, won’t, or don’t want to themselves.
Ensure that the service is provided with consistently high quality.
Attract and retain paying customers.
Service jobs can pay very well, especially if the skills are hard to develop. Mind you, personal training has an 80% attrition rate within two years - it’s safe to say PT is a challenging job. The large downside is the difficulty in scaling and growing with employees. It is very hard to duplicate the way you interact with a client and your time is limited. There are only so many hours in a day that you can train and businesses should be made with scale in mind as outlined in “The E-Myth”. If this balance is not struck, you may find the juice is not worth the squeeze. Burnout is all too common in personal training, even after the difficulty of achieving mastery and a thriving practice.
Just like in the sciences; internalize these five fundamental principles, and if you are confused on how to implement them, work backward!
Practicing
Now that you have the mental models for success it’s time to develop the physical skill sets. First and foremost, you must exercise yourself. While it is not imperative to be a bodybuilder or even buff, you must walk the walk. Would you take advice from a psychologist who has never struggled? A trust fund life coach? Then you probably wouldn’t take advice from an inactive personal trainer. Although don’t go too far to the other side and become the fitness influencer who knows nothing about training but has been blessed with good genetics. There is no authenticity, reputation, or expertise involved with that. It should almost qualify as a scam.
You can start off by offering your services, probably for free, to friends and family.
Contact 3-5 close acquaintances who you think may be interested and ask them if you can train them. I started remotely with a nutrition and training program. 2 months later I had a couple of people who were markedly more fit than when they started. My hypothesis was tested and proved to be correct, I could be a personal trainer - I could provide value.
If you’re feeling really gumptious you can start your entrepreneurial journey now by creating an effective marketing campaign and scaling your process.
During this time you also need to be observing and watching how trainers train others and also training people in person yourself. You need to do this for enough hours that when you get hired you are confident in your skills to ace the practical portion of the interview. The amount of hours doesn’t matter if you can confidently pass the practical and train a stranger well under pressure.
