The 7 Essential Ingredients of A Six-Figure Fitness Business
By Eric Ruth
There are some fitness professionals who are content with a $30,000 fitness business income. This article isn’t for them.
I’m writing this for fitness professionals who will not settle for anything less than $100,000 per year, or more, from their fitness business.
It takes the same amount of work to earn $100K as it does to earn $30K. The difference is the type of work. You can work hard for $30K or you can work smart for $100+K. Your choice. If you prefer to work smart, then here are the 7 essential ingredients to a six-figure fitness business.
I’ll give them to you in order, because each one builds on the next. They’re cumulative, synergistic and compounding. Meaning as you add each subsequent ingredient, they work together to geometrically increase the effectiveness of the entire process. Like a snowball rolling downhill, your business rapidly gains mass, momentum and market penetration when all ingredients are utilized.
Tip: Be sure to pay close attention to #6 where I hand you a powerful and easy to use synergistic referral system.
Essential Six-Figure Fitness Business Ingredient #1:
Specialize For Expert Positioning
You’ve probably heard it dozens of times before (there’s a reason for that), but this time you need to ruminate on it: if you’re all things to all people, you’re nothing to no one.
Financially successful fitness professionals specialize. Specialization is the best way to gain expert positioning and command high fees. When folks think of Phil Kaplan, they don’t think "personal trainer," they think "body transformation specialist." When people think of Juan Carlos Santana, they don’t think "personal trainer," they think " functional training and human performance specialist."
You’re not going to ask your family doctor to perform triple bypass surgery, right? Surgeons make a whole heck of a lot more money than do family doctors.v
There are hundreds or categories (niches) in which you can specialize. Some are better than others. The smart fitness professional goes where the money is. Fitness Together personal training studios are the cream of the crop because of their business model: high-end, nicely appointed, private personal training studios catering to high-end, high-paying baby boomers. It just makes sense.
Your specialization, how you position yourself in the marketplace will determine, more so than anything else, your ability to command high fees. Why train diet junkies for $25/hour when you can train time-crunched CEOs for $100/hr? Diet junkies are harder to land as clients, harder to keep as clients, less inclined to comply with your instruction and coaching, more inclined to cancel or default, the list goes on. Life’s too short for that brain damage.
The message you put out into the marketplace dictates your positioning. If you’re making a generic weight loss presentation at the weekly Weight Watchers meeting you’ll be perceived as a generalist (family doctor) and attract a lower quality, lower paying prospect. If you’re making a presentation about how to improve your fitness to win the spring tennis tournament at your local country club, you’ll be perceived as a specialist (surgeon) and attract a higher quality, higher paying prospect.
Be a surgeon, not a family doctor.
Essential Six-Figure Fitness Business Ingredient #2:
Turbo Charge Your Visibility Marketing
The next step in the marketing process is to generate visibility with public speaking, writing, targeted networking, online marketing, joint ventures, strategic alliances, publicity, advertising and direct mail letters and postcards. But most folks only do one or two of these activities, and neglect the most crucial element. They do things to generate visibility, but then wonder why their efforts aren’t bringing in more clients. The ‘secret’ is to turbo charge your visibility marketing with lead capture and follow-up.
If you’re not proactively marketing your business, you’re abdicating your first responsibility as a business owner. Legendary business expert, Peter Drucker, explains that the purpose of a business is to get and keep customers. The " get " part is about marketing. The "keep" part is about delivering value. You can’t keep a client until you get him first. Marketing comes first. Generating visibility for your business is marketing. Adding lead generation to your visibility generation is smart marketing.
Because of the highly personal and active (the client has to put forth effort to realize results) nature of services provided by fitness professionals, the majority of your new clients will come to you only after they get to know you, like you and trust you. The "sales cycle" is generally longer than in a product-oriented business, or a passive service-oriented business (like massage or beauty, for example). The exception to this is referrals, which are simply leveraging the trust of someone else.
So for someone to avail themselves of your services, they must know of your existence (you have to be visible), they must want what you offer (your positioning has to attract them), they must be "captured"into your marketing funnel (lead generation), then you’ve got to build the relationship through education-based follow-up marketing and close the deal.
Essential Six-Figure Fitness Business Ingredient #3:
Follow-Up And Educate
This is the most critical component to your attraction marketing plan. Consistent follow-up with education-based marketing (i.e. it educates and sells) will at least double your prospect-to-sale conversion. What that means, for example, is if you were to give a presentation to 20 people and get two new clients immediately from the gig, but do nothing to capture leads, follow-up and continue to educate and sell to the other 18 folks, after you’ve already invested your time, effort and money to position yourself as the expert in their eyes, you are leaving at least two more clients (and their entire lifetime value to you) sitting on the table. You’re walking away from a 100% increase in business – rather than getting four clients, you are only getting two.
Two clients may not seem like much, but if you leave this much business sitting on the table after each visibility marketing activity, your market penetration is 100% less than what it could and should be.
Education-based drip marketing to your own lead-generated house list of prospects (your "herd") who have already been exposed to you as a result of your visibility marketing will (at least) double your business. It is the ultimate marketing ‘secret.’
Essential Six-Figure Fitness Business Ingredient #4:
Use An Effective Sales Process
Way too many business owners rely on their instincts rather than an effective sales process...at the most crucial time in business: buying time. The rubber meets the road when the prospect sits down in front of you. If you’re not trained and prepared to lead the prospect through a process that consistently (goal is 80%) gets the sale, you’re not approaching your business responsibly.
Each and every selling event is vitally important. If you correctly implement ingredients 1-3 from this article, the sale will be almost automatic because the prospect is pre-qualified and pre-disposed. But even then, you never want to just wing it.
Phil Kaplan’s NAVAQA influence and persuasion system is the best I’ve seen at isolating the real pain and getting the prospect to " yes." But it’s not the only one. In fact, if you just force yourself to develop the skill of asking probing questions, you will dramatically improve your conversion. But there needs to be a structure, a process you lead each and every prospect through to ensure consistency. Selling is a numbers game. But get the numbers working for you, not against you.
Essential Six-Figure Fitness Business Ingredient #5:
Strategically Over-Deliver
I say " strategically " because it’s planned. Just like your sales process, your fulfillment process must include a structured plan. A new client welcome packet with a nice gift like a shapeskin towel www.shapeskin.com or some other relatively low-cost, high perceived value, exclusive gift goes a long, long way towards cementing the relationship, overcoming buyer’s remorse and getting the client to say WOW!
A new client "stick" letter series campaign is another way to over-deliver. Five or six letters, one delivered every ten days, each including an explanation of a valuable component of your fitness training system and methodology, not only helps overcome compliance problems and improves results, it truly impresses the client with your knowledge and professionalism.
Give to get. The more you give, the more you’ll get.
Essential Six-Figure Fitness Business Ingredient #6:
Implement A Systematic Referral Strategy
Take the pressure off your external marketing by focusing equal (sometimes more, depending on the maturity of your business) energy and efforts on your internal marketing. Each new client relationship must be leveraged to generate additional clients.
There are dozens of ways to stimulate referrals from your existing clients. Here’s one example. Compile the five or six stick letters you’ve written (see #5) into a little manual and flesh them out some more, possibly including diagrams of exercises and maybe a few recipes. Read the manual (not the recipes, of course) into a recording device and burn it to a CD. Have the manual and CD professionally packaged to represent your business image. www.Dicobe.com will reproduce and professionally package for you inexpensively, even in very small lots.
Give the CD and manual to your clients along with five stamped postcards addressed to you. The postcards offer your manual and CD free of charge. Anyone interested just fills out their name and address and pops the pre-paid postcard in the mail. Put some tracking device on the postcards (could be as simple as handwriting your client’s initials in the corner) and then ask your clients to give the postcards to their friends and associates who might be interested in the information on your CD and in your manual. Each postcard you receive in the mail is a hot, referred prospect. And because you have a tracking device on the postcard, you know which client did the referring so you can recognize and reward for the referral (crucial positive reinforcement).
All you have to do now is fulfill with your manual and CD (and an offer for your services). Even though these are very high quality leads, not all will convert to clients immediately, right? So be sure to plug the unconverted referrals into your education-based follow-up marketing system to maximize your conversion over time. That’s smart marketing.
Essential Six-Figure Fitness Business Ingredient #7:
Extend The Stimulus Zone
Sometimes I’d rather watch a movie than read a book. Sometimes I’d rather listen to the radio in my car instead of listening to an educational CD. The interesting (and scary) thing is that the more often those " sometimes" occur, the harder it is to get back on track.
It’s like when you take too much time off from working out, it becomes harder to get back into the routine. I know for certain that I’m sharper, more focused, more motivated, perform better and enjoy my work more when I’m in the stimulus zone: when I’m constantly feeding my brain with information.
Same goes for exercise. The more of it I do, the better I feel, the better I look, the better I perform. Learning, like exercise, stimulates great feelings of empowerment in all of us. Extend that stimulus zone as much as possible. Breakdowns will occur, but you need to recognize them and take corrective action quickly. The longer you can extend your stimulus zone, the more productive and fulfilled you’ll be. Feed your brain with educational (particularly business-related) information.
© Copyright 2007 Eric Ruth & Fitness Marketing Systems
All Rights Reserved
