If you’re a newly certified personal trainer, let us be one of the first to offer you our sincerest congratulations!
You’ve thumbed through and studied hundreds upon hundreds of pages, learned all you could, and passed your personal trainer examination with flying colors.
Now that you’re certified, that means the hard part is over, right?
Well, not necessarily. While it’s an incredible feat to receive your personal training certification, you’ll need to invest a lot of time, energy, and thoughtfulness into your new business.
It’s not enough to just have your certification, you’ll need to set goals, make decisions, and execute various ideas to create, run, and maintain a successful personal training business.
It can be tough to establish where to start once the certification is in your hands, and while it might be confusing, we’ve laid out a few different tips to help you begin your personal training business journey.
Check out some of our advice below
Make Important Determinations Early On
Now that you’re certified, you can begin to develop your personal training business.
Much of how you run your business is going to be based upon a few, important decisions that you make early in your career, so it’s vital that you begin answering some of the tough questions right away.
When considering your business, you’ll need to determine a few concrete logistics.
For example, do you plan to run your personal training business from your home or aim to be hired at a gym? Will you partner with other personal trainers and pay for your own space? Will you rent or buy a place on your own? It’s also vital to decide your hours – will you be flexible? Will you be full-time? Part-time?
There are important decisions to be made about the type of services you hope to offer, too.
Will you specialize your services or offer a general fitness program? Will you customize programs specific to your clients? Will you offer group sessions or focus on a one-on-one type of program? Will you focus on a specific category of clients, such as older folks, a specific sport, or young children?
Laying out all the logistical details before you begin building your business is important, so you can provide a consistent business plan for your clients.
BUILD UP YOUR CLIENTELE
Once you’ve decided on a few of your basic details and you’re prepared to look for clients, you’ll need to begin strategizing on how you plan to market yourself and build up your client base.
Here are a few suggestions:
Have Your Contact Information Set Up
This is incredibly important.
You’ll need to ensure that you have your business’s social media, website, and business card information all set up before you look to bring in clients.
It’s hard enough to get a client interested in your work, now imagine hooking in a potentially interested client and not being able to provide them with any professional contact information?
This will be your first building block in getting clients to contact you with questions, session requests, or concerns.
Marketing
It’s not enough to just give your business card to people anymore, you need to come up with some creative marketing to set yourself apart from the pack.
We suggest crafting an intuitive, interesting digital marketing campaign with your social media and website, but to go even further, try new, exciting things like putting together a consistent, monthly email campaign.
You can send your clients, and anyone who signs up for your newsletter, with helpful tricks, new healthy trends, and any other important, free info that you might find helpful.
This will certainly set you apart from other trainers who don’t spend the time putting together newsletters for their clients.
Another marketing effort would be to promote and run a free trial class or a mini session for people who are tentative or hesitant about signing up for your program.
While it might not be lucrative to offer potential clients an entire session, you could set up group classes for a few people, or mini, shortened sessions as an introduction to how you run your programs.
Creating fun, themed 6-8-week challenges with a limited number of discounted spots could be a fun way to market your services as well.
If you offer a group class, this not only will increase your income per hour (as you’ll have a few clients with you all at once), it’s also a good guarantee to get word-of-mouth reviews
Networking
Getting to know people is going to be the key to building up your business.
Whether this means inside your facility or outside, you’ll need to make sure you’re meeting new people, joining local business networking groups, attending Chamber of Commerce meetup events, and getting together with people from your industry.
Social events are great spaces to meet new people from your industry as well as potential future clients!
Attend as many networking events as you can, bring your contact information, and be prepared to talk about your business!
Stay Up-to-Date and Focused on Your Clients (and Don’t Forget About Yourself)
Building up your personal training business is going to be an exciting, but arduous, process. While it’s important to dedicate a ton of time to building up your business, make sure you’re not forgetting the entire point of your business – to better your clients.
Don’t let the grind of building your business get to you – you need to remember that your clients come first, not the money they’re paying you or how much notoriety your business is gaining.
Ensure that while you’re gradually growing your business, you’re focusing on each client, their goals, their progress, and their struggles.
After all, the attention you give your clients, as well as their progress (which, is a direct result of how attentive you are) will be what brings in new clients.
Ensure that you’re staying focused on them, but also staying up-to-date on new fitness fads, trends, and ideas – this way, you’ll be able to have thoughtful discussions with your clients about what could work for them versus health trends they should avoid.
You don’t want to neglect yourself, either.
Aside from the blatant fact that your well-being is primarily important for your health, as a personal trainer, you’re a walking billboard for your business.
It’s important to keep your appearance healthy and well-maintained so that people will have full confidence in training with you.
