Daily Drive Sessions - Online Fitness Business #1 Trap: Online Coaching OR E-book - Which First?

How to avoid the #1 trap that ends up making 95% of face to face personal trainers looking to go online FAIL! Avoid this mistake and you'll be on the right path to being successful online & building the freedom based business you deserve.

 

Hi there, this is Chris Lynton from TribeFit.co and welcome to today’s Daily Drive session. Today I wanted to take you through a pretty important thing, something that has been asked the last couple of weeks from a couple of different people that I’ve spoken to, who are personal trainers, fitness experts, gurus, looking to take their business online, looking to escape the daily PT grind of having to live close to the gym, work crazy hours at the gym, early mornings, late nights, going up through the lunch period and also having to work weekends.

In essence, the life of the personal trainer at a gym. you have to work around everyone else’s life or work life and head to only hours mainly when people, you know, before their working day, after their working day, or at lunch time. Or, on the weekend as well. As a result, you end up working pretty strange hours, and you have to fit your lifestyle around everyone else’s schedule and lifestyle.

So, as a PT, working those hours, working those long hours and not really having control of your lifestyle. The number one thing we hear from personal trainers is, “You know, I’ve done that for a couple of years. I enjoyed it, I made some money, I’ve worked pretty hard, but unfortunately, I’m not really enjoying the process. I’m not enjoying working those weird hours; I want to have a bit more control over my life, my lifestyle, and I want to be able to travel and go places while working and still earn money, go on holidays, etc.”

So the number one thing most personal trainers say when they get to that stage in their life is, “How can I go online? How can I sell products online? How can I coach people online so that I can work from wherever I want, whatever time? I want to have a bit more freedom, be able to travel, still get paid and have a very awesome lifestyle at the same time”.

For most people, there’re two ways you can go. There’s creating a hands-off, totally leverageable program or product where, in essence, it’s a generic product for anyone. You put it online and hope that people will buy it. It will fit a certain person's needs, and in essence, they pay you, they download it, whether it’s a monthly subscription, an eBook format, an online video program format, or anything like that. In essence, an information product where you do something once, it’s generic, and you can try to sell it to hundreds, thousands, millions of times. Hopefully, and you hardly need to service the people at all.

On the other end of the spectrum is what we term mentoring or coaching online. And in essence what that means is people come to you, and you are going to develop a custom solution for their problem, for their needs, and what they're wanting, and you help them and coach them through the process, mentor them through the process, over a period of time towards the goal that they're looking for. You support them, you give them motivation if they need to ask questions to tweak the program or anything like that, and you’re there for them to do that. You can do that all online. You can do that from your phone, your laptop, and unfortunately, some people when they get into that path, they set it up in the wrong way that, in essence, all you end up doing is working more, getting thousands of emails, texts, etc. Yes you get the freedom of not having to work near a gym, live near the gym you work in, you can work the hours you want, but you still don’t have the pure freedom of what you're looking for.

So, clearly there are two very different paths, as one’s a product, and what we term as the other one being the online service. People always say, “What’s the best one to start with?” And through all the testing we’ve done, we’ve done it hundreds of times with different people, different markets, different sizes, different ways, different times, and when you're looking to get out of that face-to-face PT grind, hands down the first and the best format to go for is the online mentoring or coaching over the product, the eBook, the programming, etc.

The reason for that is, is your primary goal is to get more time in your life. Your primary goal is to replace, or ideally, make some more income and have that consistent throughout the year, but then not have to work as many hours, not have to be waiting around in the gym “hanging out” with clients when they come for 45 minutes and maybe they're just on the treadmill and you're just standing there watching the TV or talking to them. That’s all wasted time.

So you can, if set up correctly, in the coaching and mentoring format, you can earn the exact same amount, or more, and work half the time and have the freedom about being able to work wherever you want and whenever you want as well, whenever suits you, if you set it up correctly. There are certain ways of doing it. If that’s something you're looking into I definitely would suggest getting in touch and we could specifically go through your specific situation and work out exactly for you how best to do that.

But, by far, it’s the number one way to go. The reason being, if set up correctly, you can get people to pay you, up to, we’ve got people that are paying up to 100 bucks a week for this online coaching, programming, mentoring format. And if you set it up correctly, it can be very hands-off, it’s not much work, and if you can, for example, get people paying you 80, 90, 100 dollars per week, all you need is 24 clients, approximately, to earn 100 grand a year.

Everyone’s like, “Oh you know, how can I get online? I want to earn $100,000 a year as a starting goal.” All you need is 24 clients. 24 is not many if done correctly, and if you’ve set it up correctly that you don’t get held down for all the service of it, 24 clients, that’s your 100,000 and you’ll work half the time that you're currently working.

Once you have that in place and you’ve got the income coming in, and you’ve got the freedom, you’ve got the time, and you’ve also had some experience in the space, that’s when you go to launch a more hands-off product. But you want to give people both solutions, that way you can earn your $100,000, or more if you're wanting to work a couple more hours in that coaching/mentoring format.

Then, you launch the hands-off format. And what you want to do is have both not cannibalising each other. So you can be earning 100-150 in your coaching/mentoring side of things, and then once you launch the hands-off, more generic platform, which is usually a lower price point. If you position it and package it correctly, you’ll get people. You will not cannibalise your mentoring/coaching business, you’ll still be able to earn that 100-150, but now you have that hands-off product.

One that is a cheaper price point and it will attract different people to it so you're not cannibalising the two. You still can earn that 100-150, but then what you're doing is what we refer to it is like layering a cake, you're adding that second layer, that second income layer, which is the hands-off format. And it’s no more work, and then for some people, some people are doing 50-100, we’ve even got people doing up to $200,000 grand a month on the hands-off format.

So, when laid together and done correctly, one gives you the steady flow income and the freedom, the leverage, and the time to focus on your business, whereas if you're in the gym, and time and time again when we see people try to launch a product or a program, a more generic one online, but they're still training crazy hours in the gym. They do it badly, they don’t have the focus, they don’t have the time, they don’t have the energy, and as a result they launch it and they have no idea who the customer is, they have no idea what the positioning should be for it, and they don’t have the freedom and time to really focus on it and make it work. And low and behold they launch it, and they hear crickets. It doesn’t succeed, and then they go back to the gym and just keep grinding it out and thinking, “Oh I failed. It can’t work. Why are so many other people having success and I can’t do it”.

It comes down to the way you tackled it and the amount of focus, energy, and also knowing how to do it. You’ll learn through the process of the coaching/mentoring, there’s no better way to learn more about your customer rather than taking customers online hearing what their goals, their needs, their wants are, servicing people in that format, and then going to a more hands-off format. Once you’ve got it all dialled in, you’ve got cash coming in the door, you’ve got free time, and you’re spending more time on your online business, you're much more focused on it.

So, just a recap. If you're a PT, you're stuck at the gym, you're not enjoying it anymore, you used to enjoy it, but you're looking to get a bit more freedom, hopefully earn a little bit more, and you’ve got that target of earning 100 or even a bit more than $100k a year, make sure you tackle the online coaching/mentoring format first. If you need help with packaging it up and knowing how to be able to charge those high price points I was talking about before, get in touch.

But all you necessarily need is 24 clients. 24 clients are nothing. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a thousand Facebook fans, Instagram fans, or whatnot, or you’ve got 300,000, 24 is nothing. It’s absolutely nothing.

So it’s very, very easy to do if done in the right way and if packaged up in the right way. It’ll be hands-off, you’ll work half the amount of time you're currently working, you’ll probably earn more than you're currently earning, and then you’ll be able to focus, learn more about your customers, and then be able to layer on that second layer of the more hands-off format. And that’s when you get to the levels where you, like the other people that you probably hear of, that are earning 200, 300, 400, 500 grand a year.

We’ve got some that are earning much bigger numbers, but I won’t go through them because they won’t sound realistic for where you're at the moment. But that’s when you start earning the big bucks, that’s when you get the freedom, you're working half the amount of time, and you're being able to build your business rather than just training people one on one, face to face, and building someone else’s business.

So hopefully that helps. If you're at that stage where you're deciding to try to go online, be successful online, and you don’t know which path to go down, trust me, go with the path I was talking about earlier, and if you want to know how to make sure you get in contact anyway. That’s it from me today, I’m off to a business meeting with a large corporate health and fitness business that we work with, and we help grow their business, and I’m just about to get there now, so, hopefully, you’ve taken some good information from today’s video and I’ll be in touch soon. Bye for now.