Service vs Product - Which Will Make You Broke & The Secret Gives You More Time As An Online Trainer | Coach

Today, we're going to be talking about a very specific and important thing. I'm going to be talking about products, the difference between products and services, and depending on which you deliver and how you deliver it, one will keep you or make you broke long-term. And the other is something that is not going to allow you to have the successes you want as well.

But there is a secret mix, a secret blend, that if you do this specific thing, it'll allow you to have more impact, it'll allow you to have more income, earn more income, and it'll allow you to have more freedom. And ultimately, that's what it's all about, right? Like helping more clients, impacting more lives, and at the same time, getting the income that you deserve, and you want to be able to help yourself, your family, your community, whatever it might be.

And also have a bit of a life, like have a bit of freedom, not be chained to the gym or chained to your computer or chained to your phone 24/7. Not being able to sleep, having anxiety and stress breakdowns, because you've got people relying on you 24/7 to be able to respond to them, or train with them, or be there in person, or whatever it might be.

That is a model that is broken. You need to have one that allows you to have mammoth impact, have capacity to get mammoth income. And at the same time have leverage and freedom, right? And allow systems and the packaging to do I guess, the heavy lifting for you so that your clients get amazing results. But you don't have to be awake 24/7, holding your phone, waiting for a message. Or you don't have to be chained in the gym all day and never see your family, or never have any recreation time, never have any downtime.

And inevitably, you burn yourself out. And burning yourself out is not good for you. It's not good for your family, it's not good for those around you in your close circle. It's also not good for your clients, right? Because if you're burnt out or you're getting close to burning out, you're not going to be able to give your clients the best of you. You're not going to be able to give them the best service. And you're not going to be able to get them results. And they're going to leave you, right? So inevitably you need to set it up this way, or you're going to set yourself up to be broke for life and have limited or little impact, and very limited freedom as well.

Now, product and services, this is something that was taught to me by a mentor of mine many, many years ago. I didn't quite understand it straight away, but the more and more I've been in business and the more and more, I guess I've tested and tried different things, that it's become in my head, such a critical thing to understand. And that's why I want to teach you about this today.

Now, products and services. What is a product? What is a service? Why are they good? Why are they bad? And what is this special blend, a special mix that will set you up for success, income, impact, and freedom.

Now, first and foremost, a product is something that is literally like off the shelf, right? Something that you can start out of a computer, a machine, a factory. Like a product for example, is a phone. A product for example, is a glass bottle. A product for example, is a pen. It is something that literally people purchase the unit. And it can be made in multiple millions. And they purchase this, they don't purchase time of yours. So if you're selling a product, someone gives you money for this. You hand it over and that's the exchange. That's the end of it.

A service on the other hand is something where you're selling your time, right? You're selling your time to do something. Rather than selling something, you're selling your time to do something. And services are like mowing the lawn. Services are like personal training, and services are like painting houses, childcare, whatever. Building beach houses like this one here, whatever it might be, right? That is what a service is.

And as you can see, you can only, if you are a person who mows the lawn, you can only mow one lawn at a time. So you find a client and say, "Hey Chris, can you mow my lawns?" You go, you get the mower out, you mow the lawns. Once you're finished, you can go to the next person and mow their lawns, and mow their lawns and mow lawns. You cannot mow multiple lawns. You cannot mow a hundred lawns at the same time. It's impossible, right? You can't mow more than two lawns at a time.

So your capacity to service clients like your volume of clients is limited by you, by your time. And your capacity to earn, you can only have one client within a window of time, right? It's just like personal training. We've all experienced that, or coaching or whatever it might be that you do, you can only have one client at a time. You can have one unit of impact because you're working with that one person. And you can only have one unit of income. And we talked about before, income, impact, freedom.

Well, let me tell you, you can only have one unit of impact because you're working with one person, one unit of income, because you can only work with that one person to get paid for that hour or whatever it might be. And you are limited in your freedom because you need to be there and give up your hour to get paid and deliver that service, right?

So let's do it on a bigger scale. And you all know this, if you've got ... You could sell a hundred pens, a hundred products today, but you could not service a hundred clients if you were training them an hour, each session, right? You couldn't service a hundred clients, but you could sell a hundred pens, right? Why? Because one is based on your time, it's restricted around you. And the other one is totally leveraged, right? Product, service.

Now, ultimate that you could ever service, if you were selling one-hour blocks of training to individual people, for example, if you're a personal training. The most you could ever earn in that model and the most amount of impact you could ever have would be 24, because you have 24 hours in a day, right? If you're selling hour blocks. So you could only earn 24 units, you could only impact 24 clients. And let me tell you, you wouldn't be able to sleep. You wouldn't be able to eat. You would have absolutely no freedom whatsoever. And that's the max, that's the absolute max. And more than likely you do that for two days and probably end up having a heart attack. So that's not even the max, that's not even the reality.

Now, the problem with products, right? Products, they're very dime a dozen. They have very little price elasticity. So they're all about mass production, and discounting, right? And it is a very difficult space to be profitable in. You can give a million people a pen. You can have more impact if by giving them a pen, if that's the impact they want, but there's very, very low profitability in it. It's very difficult. You need to have big machinery. You need to have huge investments and so on and so forth.

But it is more leveraged. Now, you might be thinking Chris, what about like group training? If I'm a personal trainer, rather than training people one-on-one, all right, cool. Now you're moving towards what's called a productized service. You've got a product like a pen. You got a service like one-on-one personal training. Somewhere in the pendulum between the two is what's called a productized service.

And a productized service is a mix between a product and a service, it is not exactly a product. It's like a product attached with a component of service. It's not 100% product. It's not 100% service. It's a mix of the two. And depending on what you do and how you do it, there're different pros and cons of the two.

Now a service you can charge higher prices for, a product is a lower-priced component. A product has more leverage and freedom and allows you to scale. A service has less freedom. It has more profitability, but it doesn't allow you to scale, right? And so like a group training is what's called a product or service because you can't, if you have 30 people, you can't service each individual in a hour block, if you're doing it in a group setting. So you have to set it up like a templated sort of way that suits the group. Doesn't suit the individual because you can't tailor it with 30 people.

And then these sorts of things are what's like an F45 session, for example. You're probably all familiar with that. You go in and they've got a workout-of-the-day or whatever it might be, or a session they're going to do. And it follows this plan and it does whatever. And you go around like, that's the product. And the service is you're there, you're talking to people, you're helping them. You're motivating them, whatever it might be. And that allows you to have impact to like 30 people, you get paid by 30 people, and have more freedom because it's a productized service.

Now, what's better, moving into the online space right? Now, there are way too many people that move into the online space and they're like, sell Zoom workouts. Or they sell live one-on-one sessions just over Zoom or Skype or whatever it might be. And that is still a service. The ultimate, remember to get the biggest amount of impact, because you can service as many clients as possible, get as much income as you need and have as much freedom as you want, is a productized service online.

Why? Because it allows you to give a product that has massive leverage, and have systems do heavy lifting for you and have scale and have bigger capacity to have more clients and more impact and more income. But it is also still a service so that you are able to customise it for them so that they get the results they want. And you're able to charge higher prices.

Now, an online training programme like an e-book, that's a product. Online training programme like an app, that's like five dollars a week, that's a product, right? Complete one-on-one over Zoom, you've got one client and you're sitting there, doing pushups with them or whatever it might be, that's a service, right? The ultimate is somewhere in-between where you have the service productized. You have some components of it that fit the masses, but then you have a service customised component of it that allows you to charge higher prices, get them results that they want, they need. And still allow the systems to do the heavy lifting for you.

So you can have an unlimited amount of clients, unlimited amount of income. And at the same time, have the freedom that you need to have to be able to recharge, do things outside of like your business, your work. And of course have friends, family and enjoy life, right? So the sweet spot between the two, product and service, is a productized service. You need to be there.

Now, what I ask you to do today is sit down, think about it. It's like I said, I didn't completely understand it when I got it explained to me the first time. And it's something I want you to keep top of mind, and you want to think more and more, how can I, if I'm offering a service right now, how can I productize my service a little bit more? You don't have to go totally all the way. Each day, if you productize it a little bit more, a little bit more, you will have more capacity to get and service more clients. You have more capacity to grow your income. And you have more capacity to have more freedom.

Now, if you want to take a leap and a jump, rather than productizing your service, and you want to do it the right way and all that sort of stuff, it's something that I've had to do in my online fitness business, my online coaching business. Literally, I can just give them to you, all of the templates, all of the structure so you can plug-and-play, and know that you're moving on the right direction. You're delivering it in the right direction. It's been battle tested, so on and so forth. If that's of interest and you want to leap frog the journey, then shout out, [email protected], trifit.co. Or send me a PM, Chris on Facebook. You can check out our website, www.trifit.co. Either way, if that's of interest, shout out.

But hopefully today, this has made sense. And I really want this to resonate with you and have this top of mind, not just over the next day or two, like this is something you need to keep for life. Like if you ever moved in any format, any offering that you're going to do in the future, you do not want to sell a 100% service in whatever way, face-to-face, online, whatever it might be. You're going to think about how can I productize this a little bit more and how can I sell a productized service?

You don't want to sell a product. You don't want to sell a service. Both of them have massive negatives, right? Products don't get clients' results. And that's no good. And you will get haggled for discounts because you are a dime a dozen, like anyone can develop a product. There's no customization. There's no uniqueness to it. So you'll be seen as like everyone else out there. And the only difference is price. And that is not something you want to compete on. The service on the other hand, yes, it's unique, it's individual, but it has a cap of impact, income and freedom. So you don't want to be there either. Otherwise, you'd be chained down and not getting what you need.

So, hopefully that makes sense. Reach out, if you've got any questions. Or like I said, if you want to leap frog, and literally get my templates and plug them into your business, and know you're moving in the right direction and move faster without making mistakes, [email protected] shout out, be happy to chat about that. And we'll go from there. That's it for me today. Bye for now.