Episode 20: Kris Cochrane on Building a Team of 30 Trainers

Transcript of EPISODE 20:

Introduction: Podcast background music plays

Host Brett Campbell: Hello and welcome to Fit Professionals Podcast; the number one podcast for fitness professionals looking to build a fitness business. If you are at the local end, want the knowledge, or have more free time then you come to the right place; visit podcast.fitprofessional.com better you today. Break in between start of interview

Host Brett Campbell: Hello fit professional I am your host Brett Campbell and back today with a very good friend of mine and an extreme genius in his field. Kris Cochrane welcome to the show brother. Break while awaiting interviewee response

Kris Cochrane: Thanks for having me, nice.

Brett Campbell: Excellent, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule this morning. I know you got a lot of things going on which we are going to talk about today. Opening another location; which is exciting. So what I’ll do is I will give or run a little bit of a brief background on how we met. Feel free to fill in the blanks because a you know my memory can rag me sometimes. But a Kris and I met a little bit over three years ago. We ah we met Kris came to us a business seminar that we were running and we noticed that overtime when you see people and you just get a feeling about the particular person you know that they are going to do something great. You don’t know what it is but you get that feeling that people are going to do something great. And Kris was one of these people so yeah Kris at the time was a one on one personal trainer.

Brett Campbell (Cont): yeah doing well, had, you know had his clients booked up and he was in a bit of a position where he wanted to take the next step and ah someone like myself who definitely has that entrepreneurial feeling as well and saw him, I knew exactly where Kris was at his stage. So I personally worked with Kris for about 12 months here helping him get on track and give him a little bit of extra guidance in the industry and I guess if we fast forward to now Kris is he is a leader in the industry hands down he is the top guy.

Like I said back three years ago when you see someone you know that they are destined for something. This guy would turn up the business days with a bowl of cereal in his front seat of his car and he would have his lunch packed and you could just see the dedication and I would said if he had as much dedication to how good he looks he and he put that into his business and he go go places. So Kris is now up to ten locations nationally around Australia with teams of personal trainers running out of these locations and I’ll get Kris to tell you more about that. But a mate it’s an honor to a to a one be a part of your journey and to see where you are hitting today and also to see above the horizon where you are going to be hitting. So that’s a brief background on how we met, I’d like to a for you to listeners to learn about who is Kris Cochrane and where did this guy come from.

Kris Kochrane: Many thanks to the ah very humbling introduction and I am really glad to be a part of this and a you are obviously killing it at the moment so and a its funny how you are so instrumental into the whole rapid journey. Yet, you were obviously my first business coach working with business coaching and properly tracking me well and there is a time where yea I was just I was just a young lad who was on the gym floor working 50 hours a week personal training and I was almost completely burnt out you know. I got a really bobbly head personality and I love helping people and I really love being a personal trainer and I love sharing with results with as many people as I could and I did work my ass off and I guess I had a fanatic work ethic and not only discipline but I found my focus was really spread and I didn’t know where to put all these work practice into so I guess ultimately it just end up being gain more and more and more wants you know and it got me up to doing stupid amounts of hours in the gym and then my back end stuff, programming, doing your business stuff you sought as your marketing (hear sounds of Cochrane clearing his throat in between interview) uh with uh you know I am not sure if you remember mate but there was a time where I had an idea there is a local 24 hour gym down the road and I was looking at some sort of sign from God as to how to get me off this gym floor. I may have lost a couple months of sessions I had on the gym floor I was in this tug of war in my head it was like I was in that session with that person but I wasn’t there because I was thinking about how the hell did I get so sucked into working for long term and I kind of had this little thought as I was in this 24 hour gym that was happening down the road it was new town fitness and I would say that it was out of business for a couple of months and I hadn’t really taken action on it at the time. I was being coached by you at the time and we were having a chat and I really got into this situation¼.and I didn’t know where I was going and you were just telling me well why don’t you just send them an email and so alright I well alright and so I said wait a minute can I have a talk. So at the end of this talk I send the email to the email address that’s on the website to Anytime Fitness that I was looking into and tried and chat to and boom that was a start to a beautiful and healthy business because you got your personal training out the way now. Because what ended up happening was I got a meeting with the owner who had just been a couple of months left from opening her first gym she was an accountant and if I notice the push now for her was that gyms are not all about making people it’s all about investing. Its fitness people who are all about making money not all about managing personal finance. Know what makes a gym and what works so she was sort of scratching her head and she had problems, she just advertised for a lot for personal trainers. What we care about is people who do not understand anything about management and personal trainers and she didn’t know what to look for, what to charge, and what I want and the name was like a blessing in disguise so a low and behold I found that huge gap in the market and so that’s my wrap and mate thank you for that. Cause I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that little that pep talk up.

Brett Campbell: Yea excellent manager, you know I just got goose bumps because I remember that conversation because there was something that I identified with myself that I actually identified within you might as well was that you are also a great trainer and you know your shit when it comes to training and getting people in shape and like like myself if I could get anyone put them on the gym floor talk them through a killer routine and make sure they are getting their results. But what one thing I identified and rang true to myself and I seen it in you was that you weren’t a personal trainer you were destined to be a business owner, an entrepreneur, a visionary who leads other people and people out there could actually be listening and saying yeah I actually sort of feel the same way. .because if we look at,  I am not sure if you heard of Dan Sullivan but Kris Dan Sullivan world renown entrepreneurial coach who you know coached the most millionaire entrepreneurs in the world. Basically he talks about consequent unique ability and your unique ability that I found was with yourself is that you are a leader and you were destined to be able to lead people to a particular place and that’s what I found within myself well also I love training and I still love training people we would be doing the industry and you would be doing your trainers now which your October 30 trainers you would be doing them a disservice if you weren’t doing what you are doing now so my colleague remember that the good listener I think any one listening is that all it took was for you to take some action and send out an email. What literally and that was the opening of the door that has now started the rapid empire as we call it so, yea my Excellency so a couple of things that I picked up Kris was yeah and because I know you really well was you struggled to gain focus. Your not going to like to that very well myself but someone like yourself who always something going to be there, there is always going to be a new opportunity. What would you say to just tame the base and remain focused on the particular task?

Kris Kochrane: Wow yeah, look really right question. We are in a war somewhat sometimes like myself yeah I am not sure if I am A.D.D. I am just really. You got the always in school I was always distracted easily distracted I was always off playing ping pong and in school I was always trying to actually see yeah always I really found it hard to concentrate and the average time it takes the average person to get into focus  24 minutes, 24 minutes to actually get focused on the task and if you get interrupted you get another 24 minutes to actually get back in that zone and yeah if that’s the average person it will actually take me about 67 minutes to get into my focus zone. So I really found that working with a couple of the my mentors Jason Edge he coached me into a bit of meditation and and on and off I find that when I meditate I practice a bit of mindfulness in which I try to be in the moment without trying to think about the future also with a task I find I can you know get myself focused and throw myself together. I also find case on habits if I’m in around my place on habits such as a 4:30 am wake up and it will happen for a lot and when I am in a bad space I find if I am wake at 4:30 am in the morning and I get sad around work I get bit of my goal setting and my vision and focus on what it is that I want out of life what fortunes I need to have to get that. I at least about as half as much on talk and all of these announcements plus its much as I need to speak and just things that I need to focus on like I am gonna go read a book and go get a goal book and and I look at that every day and yeah trying to get up at the same time 4:30 am in the morning I just know that I am not stopping me from doing that yeah and trying to get all the distorts out of for the day. I am not getting emails I am not getting phone calls, yeah so really it’s a mixture of things but I think it’s just a big thing to capital K your habits, capital K tackle a couple of things tackle a couple of habits that you know you want to do for yourself but yea also focus on your goals and what it is you want and do what you need to do to get fit.

Brett Campbell: Yeah excellent, and you mentioned Jason Edge, Jason is a good friend of the show, great mate of ours he has been on a few episodes here as well where we just about talked about everything so but yeah great great guy. You talked about Keystone habits elaborate a little bit on that for the person who is not really sure what keystone habits is.

Kris Kochrane: yea, well keystone habits is yeah if you are, well let’s just talk about (audio interruption occurs for two seconds and not able to hear the speaker). Ways to motivate yourself about fixing your life but keystone habits is a habit like as if your life is a domino effect. For example someone who is disciplined with a lot of fruitful things kind of like the same as mine but I know my sales manager he makes his bed every morning which he never uses to do. He makes his bed and makes sure he has a clean room. If you are talking about around the clock you know something is a mess. For example if I know that I don’t get up on time and if you don’t have breakfast some days  and  you  have  breakfast  some  days  don’t.  It’s  about  building the habit to ensure they get up at the same time without pressing the snooze button and build the same habit that helps them feel that they are in control. Other things that I will feel more impaired to eat breakfast I may probably feel more motivation to train and eat because the rest of it they set themselves up properly if you just focus on one thing these capital K different of things like for me it’s getting up at 4: 30 am. If I am getting up out of bed at 4: 30 I feel  like I am in more control I feel like I am accomplishing one thing. If I don’t, If I press the snooze button or have a sleep in I feel as though I am starting from behind and everything will seem to fall. Now does that make sense? This whole capital K of habit is really it’s a yeah extremely interesting and it talks a lot about a lot of keystone habits. So I am a huge believer in capital K a few keystone habits can change a shit load in someone else’s life. You don’t have to focus on 20 different things like if you are going drink more protein, if you are going to go train 5 days a week, if you are going to get out of bed same time, if you know what you have to do, and then you just do a couple of those things consistently, you tend to be in a bit of space. Is that make sense?

Brett Campbell: Yeah that makes sense, I guess what I want to do is I want to put out a challenge to anyone listening you probably got something in your life right now that is either holding you back or confusing you a little bit. But what I want to do is I want you to think of a habit that you either want to break or a habit that you want to create and I want you to that and I want you to sit with this task for 14 days, 14 days and maybe it’s make your bid if that’s something that you never done before. Go through the moment and make your bid every morning and see what it actually does to you mentally and how it makes you think what the carry over effect of that is what is the carry over effect for everything that you do. Then once you get proof, you can then keep creating other habits that just becomes easier and easier. This is like generating leads on line, we are generating leads into your business once you get that first client from online you already know that this thing is possible and you can just generate more and more. So set the challenge 14 days I want to hear from you if you’ve a broken a habit or you created a new one. So Kris let’s get into some juicy information here for any personal trainer fitness professional out there who is wanting to be more than just the one on one trainer training where their training own clients and that’s it, I want us to to give a listeners a bit of a background on what were the key things that first of all enabled you to start having trainers working for you and your rapid PT business?

Kris Kochrane: Ok, I guess you gotta be a leader. You know it is a funny thing you don’t want to fully detract from one thing but being a manager I never managed anything and here as I was in my first job interview you know the rapid position which was the first one it was coming up within months when I was getting ready to recruit and when I sat there in front of this person, this new trainer she was just fresh out she was just booking it with me and I didn’t feel like a business owner because I didn’t know what it was like. So obviously I wasn’t quick to be huge leader I found myself asking her and I said its going to be good us she said it’s the money and I said and this is this but a leader is someone who to first lead you must lead yourself I talked about those keystone habits before. You really need to get your shit sorted first and be at ease and confident in yourself and before you can have any influence you must believe in yourself. But as fitness professionals you should be someone who is leading people every day anyway because you are leading many other people to change a life so exceptionally we need leaders in society. So I always say number one always lead yourself to be someone to follow and number two you must also have a vision. Have a dream, have a vision and have someone you know get excited about it. When you tell someone your vision, yeah my visions is am happy with that. If a if we just had a world of fat people with no winning smiles we will all get pissed off about that. I know a lot of people that are overweight and the way that they treat their body they got to be miserable. 80% of people they are going to be wearing frowns and you know just as much as I do that energy is so contagious. So if 80% of the people are going to be miserable than you are going to affect 19% so now 90% of everyone in the world is going to be miserable. So I call it the world of zombie apocalypse. Yea every person we save from being that overweight or obese another person we don’t have to fight against in the zombie world. I guess you better call it you got to have a vision, you got to have a dream you got to have something that inspires others to be more. Because the day they go on to getting up out of bed to try and then training. Trying to just get up out of bed at 430 everyday, just trying that one person. But if you are getting out of bed at 430 every morning because that training that one person is a stick and stone to your way is going to leave a dent and stone in your legacy and that makes you want to get out of bed. So as I said you know November last year I had to google one of the CEO, I actually did. He was kind enough to tell me that. I try to give a common example that you are on the saddle you are giving a speech and you are riding the flag then you are the first in on that horse riding into the sunset and now you got all these people following you because you just helped them bond to that vision. Because most people need something to believe and they need to know that what they are doing to make a difference. If you can show them that path then you got the saddle you are way ahead of the game. Does that make sense? Franchise, I remember speaking about the downfall of franchise because you are working rapid and I said what’s going to help, what is the demographic, are we going to be successful or whatever? A Franchise is really hard it’s hard to have your vision it’s. Franchise it’s hard to have your own vision its kind of like a dent in the universe you have to have that vision and that strain and you have to have a to have 10 million impaired but exhausted smiles by 2030 which is impairing an exhausted as far as money is concerned. and the reasons is that you know, today’s society is on a one way track to adding that the world of people will be overweight or obese by 2025 which is fine I why a strong why, why why? I don’t want a zombie apocalypse and A zombie apocalypse is going to be screwy for everyone.

Brett Campbell: Yea, I love the way you put that and even gained bring some perspective back to me that factor and this why and I, and I really hope you are listening to us to really grasp the power of that because it like you said Kris energy is contagious and if you got someone who is walking around unhappy I mean and you can see it. I was walking into the gym myself I was walking out pumped, happy, and also tried some brand new workout that we have been testing that we are going to bring out real soon. So I was pumped happy walking out of the gym and someone was walking in and she just looked miserable and she looked unhappy and I was like good morning, and instantly by me just going good morning she started to look really happy state she probably thought I was on drugs but I was really happy to see her it changed her state instantly and it put a smile on her face and she carried on. But can you imagine you know one unhappy person walking unhappy and another person is contagious of that and I really love what you just said and I can agree more on having your mission. Mission for Fiit chicks is to kind of motivate one million females by 2020 on how to live a healthy active fulfilled life. The funny thing is most people think is just mission is hoorah hoorah type of thing. The amount of people that actually by into the mission that we create and trying it out there as well we got a franchise business as well. Trainers out there as well now that we got to Franchise and trainers are actually thinking that the vision is stronger so if you don’t have one right now get one. So, Kris I guess because you have a lot of information because you have some experience with hiring and finding trainers to join your team and I like mentioned over 30 trainers where is the best place to start or where would you recommendations be for someone that is just looking for their first trainer.

Kris Kochrane:  Good question. What’s your business overall who are you targeting? So, I would work out who your customer is actually going to be, who you have on sales. And who do we have to try to complete the task. You made the right person do the job and you want to first ensure you get the staff members someone who is a trainer first and go with all the qualifications. Until then I looked qualifications for four and a half years, but I want to say exactly my values embodies in this person so culture is the first one and its someone who I really want to spend time around, is this person going to be reliable and someone who is worthy of me spending enough time to educate them in helping with the longevity of the company first. We go with culture, longevity, and reputation. Be different but always be disciplined, but so we recruit people on those values. And then we go well let’s also have a look at their qualifications and then if they are actually a trainer then you don’t have to spend a lot of time to go to teach that one person. Yeah there is just certain rules we have to make before we you know like basic so we can’t train them from the ground up. Yeah you can train on certain number of things last I am not going to stick around to be someone who is going to help you build your business and let me tell you now. The difference between someone who has been in there one year or one month is going to make a difference so hire people that you know are going to stick around.

Brett Campbell: You mentioned a couple of really good points cause I just want to talk to that for one moment where all of our level trainers where and it’s not hard whether or not you are looking for trainer, an admin, or a manager or a sales team etc. You really need to identify like you mentioned there Kris the culture of what you actually want in your business and what your business values are about and do they fit with that so don’t just go straight to seek put on a 270.00 ad which may I say is another business model that’s another story. $270.00 ad to hire someone and get 100 applications and you are just now finding a needle in a hay stack. so I love that and I get some actionable points on that would be (Kris Kochrane begins to speak).

Kris Kochrane: Just on that line I saw really handy recently in an online job application in a job app I had a candidate where I would go on their application site check out their values and brought it back which one’s been the most and then find out which one would come up and it says these are the reasons because you kind of have to have some specifics or instructions on the job application. When do you plan for them to follow instructions when you expect them to tell them to follow instructions when you expect them or when you tell them and I thought that was pretty cool.

Brett Campbell: Yeah I couldn’t agree more with that and we have admin staff and we always have a three step process where they need to fill out a personality profile, and they need to fill out a cover letter and they need to send in a particular subject headline and if the subject headline is not what we told them to do we just totally just don’t even look at their application. So, there is a heap of things that you can do to like you said to look really good at the person you are looking for….so that’s really cool that , Kris let’s move into a couple of quick questions here and one of them being what.. in your journey what was the biggest moment that you had that you know you finally realized I finally cracked it or made to hit down towards.

Kris Kochrane: Yeah this comes more in the market so we, are our only business. I was a self-trainer and when I was a self-trainer I basically had a trainer and I just do my taxes whenever I can. I never actually thought that I was in business now but the day that I realized I was in business it was a rocky road. Then once I realized I was in a business I thought that maybe I should get some skills and then thought about doing a business course or something like that so when you have the experience in your business you get more and more knowledgeable and I think mine most recently was probably a year or year and half ago was realizing that I am not going to be in T company anymore I realized to achieve my goal and to spread rapid on where I needed to be I seriously bought for the g-minus that we were working for the market. We went from being a big big company to a not so telemetry company for 24 regions we got back into the service that we promote to the community around and then we got so to where we were creating a business triangle so. Probably just the three elements of smart business and how you are made to really segment off on to segment ours. One I had to tie all of my solutions to the gym owner but some emphasis around that and then a value proposition for the business owner to the gym owner and then a personal trainer. Right now you got to market as vigorous as you do today to balance. So what’s the benefits and values of being a rapid trainer and then yeah for the crowd. Well I try to be a rapid trainer what’s the difference now if you want me to work for Walt Disney industry which means trying extraordinarily a good customer experience every time but it’s probably a bit more pay job as profound as it sounds but yeah it’s probably a bit more pay job for you so.

Brett Campbell:  Mate it’s what’s profound for you and that’s all that matters so you know again you touched on three valuable points and you actually got three different markets and I can totally relate to that as well because if it is national we have the market to the personal trainer on the hunt looking for highly motivated personal trainers to become franchises we also got the consumer side to our business like we say our mission is to educate and motivate a million females. So we need to produce product services for that industry so the key to those is that each of those modalities are marketed differently. In essence you actually got three businesses inside if you want to look at it like that so a lot of a lot of things going on. So when there is a lot of things going on, generally there is a lot of a I guess and don’t like using the word values but people can relate to the words failure I like to use the word listen. So there is generally a lot of words learned in business and I know someone like yourself who takes action so fast and so frequently there is generally a lot of lessons we learned so share with us one of your biggest business lessons or that you had along on your journey so far mate.

Kris Kochrane: All I can say is hire the right people because you never settle, never hire across, that can be the biggest business lesson I have learned the hard way every time. I guess you have a spot and you need to fill it and it probably will stringer up your career. You not cannot send or doctor a list also, you can’t send the wrong person, you can’t change a person you need to hire a super human guy who is an eagle and pick people as our product and one right person is equivalent to three people. See I am a really a systems oriented type of guy and I like to hire a 12 year school boy to do the same job as a 40 year old and the physicist who can put the people down and lay down the law you know? Since it does work that way, you have to have the right system for people to be able to run. Never ever ever ever hire anything less than what your mission or position it could be in a district where you got enough back work and you cannot get the work done because you got somebody that doesn’t fit the right spot.

Brett Campbell: And not only that they can end up tarnishing your business credibility and as well you have all the motives to be the best in industry and that type of stuff and when you start expanding you got other people you know utilizing your brand and coming underneath your brand you got to make sure that my ah advocates are good at doing everything they can from their side because it’s fair to say that you can’t manage and look over the shoulders of thirty trainers every day, so tell us a little bit about how you are able to have ten locations and how does that look at the basic running of that work? What’s your set up with that?

Kris Kochrane: It’s kind of a ah community catsmite (both parties exchange laughs) where we got all these 10 locations and got contractors working in them and it’s very easy for them to sort of get off track and then send out the¼. self-manage is really hard to do so we rely on their culture. We rely on hiring a lot of people that stick to our values and then we have a really astringent culture that we try to maintain through get togethers, through our education programs, through our face book programs forum, and also then we got management structures too, that’s management, so each location will have a team leader who is a cultural flag of me basically just an extension of me in that gym to kind of maintain the integrity of that culture which is progressive disciplined and fun; and be very proactive. So as I¼I definitely think, you know, and the best how to motivate someone who survives the expectations you got of them so and we’ve got our management team ready to extradite with a little bit more running and a bit more responsibility. ..and then we got to automate to when they get paid, the percentage of the trainers, and we got a regional manager that looks after all of the managers. I mean any service industry is based on core separation it’s not as easy as writing a book and then selling all your books. You gotta work on your service and do a favor to retain a key element. Any 24 service industry if you want to get into any service industry it’s a huge operation, it’s huge. So there it’s not a real simple way to do it but you just got to break culture, if you are a people person you just got to break culture once. The best advice we have them do we just rely on our people trust them, sit with them, coach them, and manage them¼.break and someone laughing in the background.

Brett Campbell: Excellent…so, Mate I know we are sort of at the end of the episode here you your already at the gym you are going to get to a cranking into some work very shortly but before we do wrap up, a zip. So what ¼ I guess parting advice would you give to the ah¼ fitness professionals out there who are kind of in a bit of a position right now where, you know, they want to make the next step to grow their business but they are not really sure whether or not they want to?

Kris Kochrane: Yea, I would say that business isn’t for everyone and really mate that make the decision if you are prepared to ¼if you are prepared for the ride don’t give up. I had a conversation with I guy at breakfast last week and he is approaching 40 now a school teacher he was just telling me that he is trying the program so that he can go ahead and get in shape and you know I just don’t know how it’s going to take he has got a lot of body fat and he is a little overweight and it doesn’t necessarily say that he made a messy decision but a so I would really sit down and map up your life and whether or not this is the ride you want to take or whether or not you are ready to sacrifice your life I can tell you that my life worked out balance it’s a myth its really myth.

Brett Campbell:  For a work week yes more hours.

Kris Kochrane: You just have to be prepared to grow your body and make a decision but that’s probably advise if you want it bad enough you will find the why. You will always find the why. You will find someone to encourage you, a mentor, someone to coach you, you will do everything you can to make it work, if you fail most businesses fail most fail the second time that’s as good as I can give you mate.

Brett Campbell: You are saying how it is because it is so true there are so many people out there who preach the its easy its easy well it can be made easier but you still need to put out the work you know with our fit chicks transformations franchise we have made it as easy as we possibly can now for a personal trainer to run it run a successful group but you still need to put in the time and effort to actually run in the systems and the procedures and so forth so 100% agree with this mate and if you are listening to this and you are not really sure what you really want to do in the industry sit down and even ask yourself the question. Is this industry for you? Then if it is then find out great, what avenue do you want to go down because we got Kris here who is an expert on building teams of trainers working in a gym fashion working in a one on one and the total flip side of that, the total opposite side of that spectrum also our business model is based on group training. So there is also lots of business opportunities out there you just need to pick the one that you want to master put in the hard work the rewards are far worth the way and the effort that you need to put into it if you just don’t give up. Well Kris before we shew off where can everyone find you stalk you and find out more about Kris Kochrane.

Kris Kochrane: You can look online, its funny every time I look online I have a fitness page and a facebook page but if you want to go to RapidPT.com.au you will find out more about us and go to faceboook.com/rapidpersonaltraining and if you want any advice or tips its Kris@rapidpt.com.au.

Brett Campbell: Thanks Kris for that, if you are interested in personal training and you listen to this podcast I don’t often recommend too many people in the industry but if you are a PT out there and you know you are little bit worried about starting your own business right now and not sure really what to do then you want to be led by a master in the industry go check out rapid PT and you know ask Kris a question, there might be a gym opening around Euro area and you can get in and work for the rapid team and Kris will put through the team I am sure but make sure you make contact with him. By the way mate always and I will catch up to chat with you anyway and all the best with the new gym that you opened up there and have a fantastic day out there.

Kris Kochrane: Thanks and have a good night.

Brett Campbell: Awesome, so we had another fantastic episode with Kris Kochrane from Rapid Personal Training. Now I just want to give you a quick update of what we have up and coming. The 16th of May in Brisbin, The 23rd of May in Sydney, and the 30th of May in Melbourne we have the fitness business blueprint event. Now this event is only for the personal trainer who is looking to set up run their successful six figure group fitness business. If this is of interest to you, hit over to fiitacademy.com.au/events.

Brett Interviews Marketing Expert Richard Marc

Transcript of EPISODE 12:

Intro: [Music playing in the background] Hello and welcome to the Fiit Professional Podcast. The number one podcast for fitness professionals looking to build their fitness business. If you are after more clients, more income and more free time, then you have come to the right place. Visit podcast.fiitprofessional.com.au today.

Brett: Hello and welcome to another Fiit Professional podcast. Today we have another special guest joining us. This special guest, I will introduce you to him in a moment. But first of all I wanted to do a quick check in just to see if you have been listening to the past episode. Last week we had Richard Marc on from COM Marketing. Where he revealed some really cool and some interesting methods on how you can get clients with literally no money down. So go back, check out that episode.

And just a bit of a teaser, I guess in the coming future, in the coming weeks… I would say future sounds like a long time away but in the coming weeks we are going to have some really cool special guests on the calls. We got a couple of my American friends that I have been hounding for weeks since we actually started this podcast and they have agreed to jump on so they are going to be revealing some really cool information especially when it comes to web based, online type of regeneration. So we will be having that in the coming episodes but today we have got a special guest.

And this person’s name is Norman, Norm Alpeche. Norm owns Norms Maximum Fitness and he’s also a Licensee and owns the Fiit Chick Transformation Penrith Location. Norm is reaching about, what is it, 60 clients on his books at the moment and he is a kick-ass dude. So I came across Norm, it would have been probably or maybe 3 months now. Dropped us, Norm submitted some interest in regards to a Fiit Chick Location. We checked him out, seeing if he was all good , did a background check; he didn’t know that though; Did a background check .

Norm picked all the boxes and I guess the reason why I have got Norm on the pod today is for a few reasons: one is, this guy is someone that I really see and I would describe as an action packer. Now if you have listened to past episodes you will know that I am really big on action taking because at the end of the day, action taking is what leads you to results. And this guy just takes onboard anything and we are not saying ‘anything’. I mean anything in a logical way. He just implements and the results of his particular business at the moment is staying true to the fact that he just pulls the trigger and that’s what it’s all about in the Fitness Industry and in any business.

But, look, am going to pass this over to Norm now and just welcome Norm to the call. “Mate, Thanks for taking the time out today and to jump on the line and share some really cool things with our listeners.”

Norm: “No worries mate.”

Brett: “Sure.” So Norm, let’s get a brief introduction about yourself their and am sure there’s ethical things that I missed out. But I am going to hand over to you just quickly and you just give us, the listeners a brief background on how long you have been a trainer, why did you get into the industry and just a bit of a brief background there mate.

Norm: Well I have been a trainer for about three, three and a half years now. Got into the industry because I like fitness. There’s not really ‘weight loss story’ or ‘weight gain story’ for me it’s just I like doing what I do. So I turned it into some sort of income. But, what else is background? I have done all sorts of jobs and all of them were pretty shit so… but after, yeah, I did something. I really enjoy. I don’t drag myself like up out of bed and even though I do sometimes after some late nights I still enjoy it. There is nothing that I dislike about the job. So that’s; yeah; apart from that, I am me. Yeah…

Brett: “Cool mate.” So no drama there. “Great abs there by the way, you are doing really well.” So

Norm: “I’ve noticed mate.”

Brett: Just talking to Norm before the call and doing a bit of a brief rundown on what we’ll chat about and just to everyone listening out there, this is another thing that when I started out being an action takerI asked Norm if he wanted to jump on an episode and he said yes straight away and part of the call he said he was feeling nervous, but this what it’s all about, jumping in and having a go.

So Norm, I guess I have got a few questions here for you that I am interested in but let’s start with,“What’s one of your biggest lessons that you have learnt in the industry so far?” So you have been a trainer for 3 years, now give us a bit of a background on a big lesson that you have learnt along the way.

Norm: Well, when I first started I just pretty much thought I’d get in there, train people, earn lots of money, have fun. But that’s what a lot of personal trainers do these days. But I never really thought about where I wanted to be during the time which is, probably, the last only about a year. I started focusing on where I wanted to be in let’s say 12 months, 2 years and 5 years and even the regal  of retirement part of time that… So, now by doing that I have sort of moved forward in towards my business. Started working on my business rather than in ita lot more.So pretty much I got out of the crappy loophole where a lot of personal trainers end up being if they don’t sort of think forward.  “Does that make sense?”

Brett: “Yeah, like 100%.” And I totally agree with you because I guess I can put my hand up in Sunday group and go, “Well, man I do as well.” I think everyone goes through that phase sometime and the big thing that I have picked up out of that is that it took you about 2 years before you even started setting goals which is a really big insight to anyone out there listening now. If you’re listening and you are going, “Oh yeah, I actually don’t know where I want to be in 12 months or 2 years or 5 years,” then you really need to sit down and actually access where you are at because the whole thing is, “Are you going to be training clients until your 60?”

You need to…

Norm: “Hell no!”

Brett: “Yeah, that’s right!” And what can happen is you probably said to your mate or your palor something and go, “Geez hasn’t this year gone fast?”and in the moment you again then go, “Geez hasn’t the last 10 years gone fast?” If you’ve got no directionyou’ve got nowhere to head towards. So in regards to that you’ve got some goals moving forward. What sort of things are you looking to do in the industry?

Norm: Well, everyone sort of, I think a lot of personal trainers like myself, the first landmark was the whole 6 figure income. By me setting goals and sort of pushing myself forward to where I want to be that 6 figure income isn’t actually that hard to do. So now, obviously, I want to be able to sort of go on holiday even. Do what I need to do without my income stopping. So that’s where I sort of want to be. And eventually teach others how I got to where I am. So why not share the knowledge that I have learnt and they can then do good as well. As you’ve done. I know you feel good with what you do. And it’s, for a personal trainer I think it’s fun to help others so I guess it is fun to help others in other ways as well.

Brett: Yeah, totally agree again and look you’re right. I do. I do love what I do. Obviously, I am sitting here taking time out of my days, and so are you of course, but to try and instill anything that someone could be listening, they could be walking on a treadmill right now, they could be doing some pushups or you could just be sitting on the couch. Actually funny, the person will know who they are when they hear this, but I was told someone dozed off to sleep the other day with me in their ear and the first thing they woke up and thought about was something that was talked about on the podcast so that’s pretty interesting.

Norm: They reckon about your mind absorbs the last thing you hear and the first thing you hear in a day, when you wake up and you sleep

Brett: So that could be the trick but people say that they don’t have time to listen. Just put them on while you’re sleeping and that’s all done. I don’t even know where I was actually heading with that but…I think where it started was I love what am doing. You love what you’re doing and that’s what makes it easy and if you ask people, “Why do you currently love what you’re doing?”

And for me, for an example and I’ll ask you the same question, but for me it’s like I love what am doing because I’ve got a focus, I’ve got a clear goal of what we want to do. So our first goal here at Fiit International for one part of it our company is, we want to have 100 Fiit Chick Locations aroundAustralia within the first 12 months and that’s a goal we’ve got and we work to on a daily basis. We’ve got targets that we have to, each day that we know in order to achieve that goal. And it’s just really exciting being able to, like you said, to be able to help other people.

And for me I know an analogy that I have heard, I can’t even remember the person who said it. Luckily I remember the analogy though. It was, “Learn to teach.” learn it in a way that you’re going to teach it to someone. So that’s a really valuable thing that how I am able to obtain a lot of information is because anytime I see it or I am watching someone on the stage or am listening to an audio or I am seeing a video or something. I am actually watching it with the intention that I need to teach this to someone.

Whether I teach it to someone or not, it’s the fact that if am going into it with that mind set of learning it to teach, you’re going to retain so much more information. So that’s another little tip there on how you can actually retain information.

But Norm I guess the question that I have for you is, “What do you think, let’s say, two key things that every personal trainer must have in their business in order for it to be successful?”

Norm: “Two things.”  You need to have direction. Without direction you are in a loophole like I said before. And drive, you need to be a doer not just a sayer. If you don’t do anything you going to… nothing’s going to happen really. You’re going to be stuck and just thinking about all these crazy ideas and not doing anything.

Brett: So give us an example of where you get the ‘do’ versus the ‘say’, if that makes sense.

Norm: “Ok. Let’s see.” One of my greatest things ok, I hate… I did flier deliveries in the local shops. That was really out of my comfort zone because it was walking in to random shops, random people by doing it so the amount of leads and the amount of sign-ups I got within that one day was just ridiculous. I am just a normal guy walking into some random shop saying, “Hey, do you want to get fit?” pretty much and if I didn’t do that I wouldn’t have gotten X amount of clients from it. So, that’s one about doing, so yeah.

Brett: Yeah and that’s just, again another lesson to everyone out there, I mean I don’t know too many people to be honest that are actually comfortable with doing that. It’s more of a…, this will probably be a shock for some people. Personally I don’t really feel that comfortable about doing that either like when I had to back in the day of going into the shops and delivering the fliers and asking if they’d like to form a joint venture relationship with us it was actually quite confronting for me as well but like you said, you just got to pull the trigger and you just got to do it.

Because you can sit there and you can complain about not having clients or there is not enough clients around so I am just going to go back and get a full time job. Or you can actually get out thereand make yourself feel uncomfortable and then go and make it happen. So, let’s talk about getting clients in, let’s talk about a method that would be able to help our listeners out there. A method on how you’ve been able to generate so many people into your Fiit Chick Location and also your personal training business.

Norm: Well, one of the methods other than the flier drop I went to the places where sport or fitness or health was the big thing. For instance say like Boost juice, full of sugar and what-not is still sort of a health orientated place also like Lauder James who has a lot of girls there. The best one will be beauticians dock, ahhh… the beautician faces and hairdressers. Once girls get things done they love to talk so if one person’s doing training then they’ll talk about it because they are getting their little sexy body or whatever and then so forth and so on. They’ll tell their sisters, brothers, uncles, grandmothers and then before you know it everyone’s on there.

And that’s what I’ve found really rewarding for me actually. Like I saidwalking into that business was a bit height and walking into a girl beautician place being a guy was awkward enough and then walking in there and saying, “Hey, do you guys want to get fit?” But that was probably one of the best things I’ve done and competitions really but the main thing is fliers for me actually.

Brett: Yeap! And give us a couple of key things that are on your fliers that obviously would have attracted their attention. Just a couple of other points on there.

Norm: Well I sort of veered away from the fact that, about the whole “we are going to be doing crunches, pushups, boxing,” that kind of stuff because they don’t want to hear that. They want to hear what they can get as in the results. Obviously they want to hear bikini body or beach body or stuff like that and toned and like words that’s really going to appeal to them more. Because they don’t want to hear boxing, “What’s boxing to them? What’s pushups to them?” They hate that kind of crap. But they love the body. So I found that that’s one of the key things.

Guarantees! Guarantees are like, “You know what, if this guy’s guaranteed they must work.” At the end of the day it’s up to them if they… you can’t control what they do outside the training session but you can try do the best you can. But to put in a guarantee does help.

Brett: “Cool.” So, couple of key points from that I just want to touch on and this is, I see this so often. Whether you have been a trainer for years or you are just new to the industry and you don’t really understand marketing so much, it really comes back to a couple of things that Norm pointed out. There is what you would call benefits versus features. So a feature of personal training or a boot camp training there’s cardio it is high intensity interval training. People don’t want to know about high intense interval training, they want to know that it burns 9 times more fat; ok. That’s a proven fact so you want to be putting the benefit of burning 9 times more fat than boring cardio.

Boxing training. People don’t want to know about boxing training. They want to know what does boxing training deliver. It’s increased energy, its lean toned muscles, that type of stuff and you really touched on that and I can’t express enough. In fact there are so many people I see and we still get fliers in our mail box quite regularly and I look at them and I just cringe because they are doing the same old, seeing someone else’s flier in the mail box and I am going to go do my own. And that’s why I hear so much from people that fliers don’t work, fliers don’t do this. It’s that whole thing of, “it’s not going to work if it’s shit; ok.” If you designed right then it’s going to be crap.

And so an example, like we put some our Fiit Chick fliers, we got them out around; and I talked about it in our last episode; we got them around some like businesses just like you were talking about. We went to the juice shop. We went to some girls’ clothes shop as well, hairdressers and all those ones you mentioned and we went giving the opportunity to come along for free and obviously in return I would be able to get their clients and customers.

We just had people just come through from that already and you just need to look at that, are you willing to get a little bit uncomfortable for putting a bit of time and investment; a little bit of money to get some fliers printed up for the overall return of getting a client. I guess in regard to that it’s never, this is another point actually in regards to fliers I’ll just touch on before we move forward is, don’t just rely on the one drop of a flier as well. It’s really important they get that continuous circle people are being confronted with. So for example imagine like you were just doing Facebook ads or google ads right, and that person only saw your ad once. They only seen it once so when they put on the screen and seen it once and that was the only time that they ever see it.

Then they do a flier, of course there’s some differences in there but the Facebook ad is repetitive. You click on there, they go and see another friend’s page, they scroll down, “Oh, that ad is here again.” Similar thing with fliers, you want to have different kinds of contact. Don’t just rely on one flier drop  and what I would say is if you put up a set of fliers and you don’t get any result back I would be looking at changing something on the flier because you should be able to get at least one or two people reaching out to you from it. So Norm, “Do you have anything else to say on fliers? That you would like to share?”

Norm: Obviously depending on which market you are going for, the picture you use. If you are going say for the older ladies you don’t want to put the bikini body, you want to put long living, like healthy living stuff like that. If you are going for the bikini body then you want more toned girls and the body they want. And for men if you want to get older men you want to say healthy living, longer living and if you aim for the younger group then you got to put some sort of boxing image or something like that. Something really grabbing, to help them reach the body they want. That kind of image.

Some people put in big logos on them. Like, at the end of the day the logos look good to us. Not to the people that are interested in doing what they want to do.

Brett: I couldn’t agree with you more there and I guess, especially if you are starting out and you are not building a massive brand or you don’t have a big brand that people would know about most definitely don’t have the logo over power your advertising cause it’s a real mistake that you are missing out on some awesome points there mate. So question for you is, I am always interested in regards to seeing what personal trainers think about the industry and so forth. “Where do you feel the industry is heading?” Let’s say, “Wave the magic wand 2 years’ time, what do you think is going to be different if anything in the industry?”

Norm: Well, I don’t know because there’s people trying to get pumped out left, right and center and it could go online. Like I have seen a lot of online training growth. Which is such a thing as all around the world what-not or people don’t have much time so that and group training. Group training is growing massively especially in my area. First thing the client picks up, the leverage of time so if you get out there and do it know and you shine above the rest, you’d be better than the rest so therefore you will get majority of the business.I can only see two ways there. The one on one’s are still there but not as big as it used to be. I don’t think.

Brett: You are definitely going to be supplying a different market. There will always be the one on ones but at the end of the day if you are someone who wants to actually build a business versus just being a one on one personal trainer then you need to look at those other avenues that you are definitely talking about and I couldn’t agree more with the with the fact that group training is growing. It’s an amazing way to leverage your time instead of getting one person in front of you can have 20 people in front of you at the same time all paying fees but of course the time exchange for the effort put in is far greater and you can leverage yourself massively on that area.

So, let’s talk about group training for a moment. What sort of tips out there do you have for someone looking to start, I guess like yourself; you were looking to start a group training business etc.“What sort of tips do you have for anyone out there?”

Norm: Well to be honest I’ve always tried to keep it up. It’s been up and down like I couldn’t get the leverage behind it. You know, what I mean? But, “I am going to talk you up here a little bit Brett.”

Brett: “I’ll call you later.”

Norm: Ofcourse, that’s nice. Well, first of all I joined Fiit Chick and the other stuff I learnt from it was beneficiary and I mean even from your podcast and stuff like. But joining your Fiit Chick the amount of reach out you have is just phenomenal. And it was a good kick start for me for where I wanted to go towards my business. I’ll give that and it was really good so if anyone wants to save money, save time and time is a big thing, straight up speak to you.

Honestly like the reach out you’ve got is massive compared to me, 4 million times the amount or if you’re trying to grow something small, advertise the shit out of it. Put that money and all that advertising and all that time. And that’s all I can say. You can choose one or the other.

Brett: “Thanks a lot for that. I do appreciate a lot.”

Norm: “No worries mate.”

Brett: It wasn’t actually a question to try and get you to say that but am glad you did.

Norm:“No.”

Brett: Let’s say someone is listening to this and like they don’t want to take up a location with Fiit Chicks but they still want to run some group training. What do you think that a couple of key things that you feel you need to have in order to have a group training business, like yourself that’s running successfully?

Norm: Niche market. Once you do that you can target a lot better because obviously a lot of girls don’t like training with guys because they find them intimidating and there’s just  a lot of guys going, “Oh my God, check her ass out.” Chicks don’t like that. And sometimes guys go, “I don’t want to seem so soft,” so they want to do their own thing. That was probably one of the best things I have done.

“What else?” That’s my main thing to be honest. Like I told myself from the start. I did the whole shop and approach and tried marketing to everyone which it didn’t sort of grow.I saw once I sort of did the Fiit Chicks with all the girls I thought, “Holy shit this actually really works.”

Brett: It’s amazing when you have that light bulb, it goes off doesn’t it and it’s like, “Wow, your right.”And it’s like the niche market thing does work and it works because it’s proven to work time and time again and any marketer that you go to that’s good will tell you the first thing you need to do is curve out a niche market. Because I guess where we started as well many years ago, we were doing male and female boot camps and personally for me like I didn’t see that big bang that I wanted to have happened in that area so that was when we went to niche market and go, “Oh! This thing does work.”

But the great thing about that is it doesn’t mean you can only train females or you can only train males. So you just have many different categories of it. And like you said at the start it is all in the way you communicate with these people. So, again the word toned and lean and slim you are going to know that appeals to females. Where you say ripped, bulging and jacked.

Norm: “Jacked.”“Jacked bird.”

But, having a niche market let’s go into the running of the actual business here and obviously having to deal with more people but obviously you not having to work as, and I will say the word carefully, but having to work as much. Actually that is also hard. What you’re actually doing is in the time you’re not with clients you are actually working on the business, right?

Norm: Exactly right.

Brett: So let’s give us, listeners one of the key things that you feel keeps your girls coming back to train with you. Other than the extremely good looks.

Norm: Well that’s the thing you know. I like to..

Brett: “You’ll have to tell your wife.”

Norm: “She is listening to this I think. No!”

Brett: “She will listen to the recording.”“Just a shout out.”

Norm: Let’s see, well there’s two different types of ways to train people. You can be the whole grueling and yelling and smashing and what-not, and a lot of girls would feel that’s intimidating. You can motivate a lot in a different level which will push them to their maximum limit. That’s what I do. I do the whole you can step out above your roleand sort of text them and obviously the whole be their friend and not just their trainer. “How else would you be?” and I keep it fun. I am not boring and I like to mack around during the session and doing jokes as well. Obviously they do their training what-not but I make them laugh and stuff like that.

They love that kind of stuff. It makes them feel like they are not training even though they are getting a really good work out and they are all pumped up at the end. If you can veer them away from the pain and what-not but they are still getting a good training session then you are doing a good job I reckon. And hold games. Games are one of the biggest things. It keeps them on the high when they leave and that’s the last thing they remember. Getting smashed from a game. And then they will talk about that and so they keep coming.

Brett: And as all that seeps in I want to take once again, I couldn’t agree more with you in regards to, I guess looking at delivering a wild session. But a big tip that I know a lot of trainers don’t do is like you said the whole thing with, become their friend/ trainer. You don’t have to be pally and go hang out with them obviously all the time but have those extra things that if you were being trained by someone what things would you really like to have happened.

For example if you received a text midweek from your trainer and it says, “Hey, how’s it going? How are you feeling? If there’s anything I could do, just shout-out,” type of thing. That’s going to put a lot of good will into your clients’ bank account. And when I say bank account, I am talking about an emotional bank account there and it seems like that day when you’re like, “Aaw, look I just feel…” Sorry, a client might be sitting there going, “Aha, we have had enough of training.” That extra text or that extra thing could be the thing that keeps them on and keeps them continually coming back to train with you. All great things there.

I guess I may have covered this already but I want to put it to you in a different angle. What was your light bulb ‘Aha’ type of moment to go, “The fitness industry is an industry where I know I can now get settled in and do business that I want to which will then obviously give you and your wife and your family the lifestyle that you really want? So, what was your “Aha, yeah! This is the one?”

Norm: To be honest like I said before, the niche market part. The Fiit Chicks thing right, I saw that, “wait a minute when did I see that?” Right before I got married and then I sent you an email while I was on my honeymoon actually so that was my ‘Aha’ moment.

Brett: “Yeah, that’s right.”

Norm: Literally I was on my honeymoon and I thought, “I want to go back to this.” So, there is dedication to fitness right there mate, in my honeymoon.

Brett: I feel privileged to be a part of it.

Norm: But honestly that was my ‘Aha’ moment because I thought I need to fast forward, fast track my success and I need to do it now. And back then I was like, “let’s do it” and I am at where I am at now. And it fast tracked where I am today.

Brett: “Excellent!” So I guess, a couple more questions just to finish off and then I will let you back to your busy lifestyle there. Give us, I guess one lesson you have learned in regards to…, I know we’ve talked about your biggest lesson, but something you could have done differently, “Would you have and if so what was that one thing be?”

Norm: “It implies to my career?” To be honest I would have started off doing group training because I started working out of the gym and you enjoy the job.You don’t train one on one. I was like, I will go mad… ouuhhh hooo!!!. The other thing is I said I never looked forward so I wish at the start of it, 3 years I am at where I am at now. But then again, everything happens for a reason. I learn from my past. I learnt how to come back and make relations and stuff like that. And had to speak to people and how to market myself and how to sell myself. But if I could redo it over again I would really focus on group training when I first started.

Brett: Cool. And it’s quite funny and it’s because I would be feeling somewhere as well in that regard. I started off with doing one on one training, for about 40 hours a week and I was just burning the candle at both ends. I was just exhausted and thought, “Jesus, this is not why I moved to the Gold Coast for.” I wanted to have more of a lifestyle. But what I actually found was that it actually wasn’t the lifestyle that I originally thought I wanted because I actually probably work more now. I work more hours now than I would doing personal training but the difference about it is that it’s not a chore to me.

Norm: That’s right. Yeah.

Brett: The more I work doing the things that I love it actually gets me more energized by the end of the day. So when I go home at the end of the day, I won’t be stuffed, I would be like “Fuck, I just want to keep going. I am just pumped.” I know you get more active and you do, you leverage yourself by doing a group training and a bi-product of being able to leverage yourself is one you train more people, you help more people and two obviously you make more money and that’s why you are in business.

Norm: “That’s right.”
Brett: Yeah or else you’re just be running free boot camps all the time. So let’s just finish off there and go, “Where can we expect to see Norm in 12 months? What’s your action plan moving forward? Like what are the key things that you want to happen in the next 12 months to you? Just put it out to the universe”

Norm: “What’s up Universe! Alright” I just recently moved to a new location…

Brett “Ok. Sorry about that. I think you just deafened 3000 listeners.”

Norm: “Sorry guys.” I just recently moved to new suburb in my area. It’s a growing place so my aim is to be the go-to-guy of fitness and boot camps and personal training in this area. Also, I want to be able to step out of my business a lot more so I will be able to just be behind, be manager and do the marketing side of things a lot more rather than be the trainer. But in 12 months’ time I want to be…

Brett: “What would your business look like? What would it feel like?”

Norm: Well, it would feel like, I reckon I would be working a lot less on the tools i.e. personal training myself and be on the business side of things. That’s where I want to be in 12 months. I want to be able to have my own locations within Maximum Fitness or whatever and just pretty much manage people rather than train people.

Brett: And what do you think the number one thing that you need to do in order for that to have happened?

Norm: Action! A lot of it. Just keep going. But literally for me to be able to do that I need to advertise to get clients. I can’t hire 10 trainers and not have any clients for them. So mine is to build that up and that’s what I am trying to do building my area. It’s a pretty big suburb. They have got their own gym happening and if I can hit it hard now and I am pretty confident that I might even take over the area.

Brett: Excellent. Well look man, I love it and I will definitely obviously be keeping a close eye on what’s happening to yourself and moving forward and seeing where that all takes you. No doubt, I have got no doubt that you’ll make that happen of course. So I guess mate I’m probably just looking at the time here. I know we both have to jump off but is there any final words or any bit of motivation that you would give to anyone listening out there?

Norm: “Don’t think about it, just do it! Don’t fuck around.” If you’re trying to make things perfect before you try putting it out there, it’s just not going to get done. If you go out and you do what you do with what you’ve got, you’ll be a lot more better off than you waiting around to make it perfect. But that’s my best thing.

Brett: Excellent. Love it. So just to sum up then, it’s don’t fuck around. Get you shit out there.

Norm: Laughs…..

Brett: So we’ll finish on that. I love it. I’ll put it up on a billboard I think… But once again Norm, mate look appreciate you taking your time out and we will be talking very soon anyhow but to everyone else out there listening, I hope you’ve taken some good insights out of todays’ pod and once again if you are new to this podcast and you haven’t heard any other episode, head over to podcast.fiitprofessional.com.au. So that’s fiitprofessional with two ‘i’s’ so f.i.i.t. It’s a bit of a mouthful. It wasn’t a misspelling either. So head over to podcast.fiitprofessional.com.au and you get a rich stuff of the series and every time there is a new episode we will give it, send it out to you.

This is Brett Campbell signing off. Norm, thank you again buddy and I’ll talk to you very soon.

Norm: Thank you.

Brett: Bye.

Norm: Bye.

How To Run A Successful Group Training Business (live presentation)

Transcript of EPISODE 11:

Hello and welcome to the FiiT Professional podcast, the number one podcast for fitness professionals looking to build their fitness business. If you’re after more clients, more income and more free time, then you’ve come to the right place. Visit www.podcast.fiitprofessional.com.au today.

Hello FiiT Professional. Welcome to another episode of the Fiit Professional podcast. In today’s episode we have something a little bit different than usual. What you are going to be hearing, is you are going to be hearing a live recording of a webinar I just ran. We had a hundred personal trainers on the line. It was a sold out event. Sold out for free of course, just like this podcast. And you are going to hear me talk about how to run a successful group business. Now we go into so many different things, so many different avenues of business etc. We reveal a heap of great information and the feedback we got from it was absolutely amazing. The trainers loved it. We had a lot of interaction. We were interacting with each other and answering questions, and it was just an all-round kickass, badass presentation.

I want to give you the opportunity now, if you are unable to see it, we are not giving away the live presentation, but you get the next best thing which is the audio recording. So you can listen to it and enjoy. So I am going to now hand over to the host of the webinar, the wonderful Brett Campbell a.k.a. Brett and I am going to, actually in the first part of the episode just listen to how much of a goose I make myself and you will be able to get a bit of a giggle out of it so enjoy! Right, there you go, so thank you everyone. I was looking in the wrong area, so thank you very much Lee for that. We are all good to go, so everyone can hear me, that’s great. And just to give me a heads up in regards to the sound quality, is it good quality, is it echoing, what’s the feedback there. Because we want to make sure that you can stand it. Sounds fine, thank you Amanda. Sounds fine. Okay. So like I said, in a couple of minutes we are going to get started.

I am someone who likes to be on time all the time so for the hundred people that are registered today, we have a sold out event, sold out for free and look, I am really looking forward to sharing the information that I have today with you all, and I know that a lot of you will get a lot of stuff out of this. So, here we go, people are starting to come on board now. Isn’t it interesting, when you look at time management, and so forth, you know there’s the people who are always, you know, five minutes early, doesn’t matter what’s happening. The people who are always just on time, and then the people who are always just a couple of minutes late. And then of course, you get the people who just don’t show up at all! That can be the issue sometimes of having a product or service that is absolutely free, because, you know when you’ve got something, a message to deliver to people sometimes it harder to actually sell a free product than an actual product that people purchase of you.

So, look everyone who is on here today is going to get more than their value that they paid to get on here I can guarantee you that. Just a couple of things as well, today’s webinar, before I press, before I start recording this. Can everyone see my screen as well? I just want to know that everyone can see my screen. Alright, thank you Raymond you’re nice and active, I love it. Okay, and Sarah and Amanda and Nick and everyone else, excellent and Michelle. Today as you notice I want to make this a very active, a very active webinar where the more you ask, the information I am going to be able to provide and I guess almost steer this presentation in a certain direction. So I am just going to begin a recording here.

Alright, welcome everybody to the first Fiit Professional webinar that we’ll be presenting here today and if you see the screen right there, and you would have already read it and it says ‘How to set up and run a kickass group training business’. Now, just you know, again when I say show of hands here, what I’m going to get you to do it just to put a comment in the comment box. So who here wants to know how to run a kickass group training business? Yip, so there is a heap of yes’s coming through there that’s fantastic because you are definitely on the right webinar. If you weren’t, you know, if you said not to that then you definitely, it’s like waking into University. I remember when I went to University, I will tell you a little more about that but I walked into a lecture and I went to sit down and it wasn’t until five minutes, when I realised I was in the wrong room. It was a subject I had not signed up for that’s for sure. So give me just a couple of seconds here. Alright, there we go so we’ve got a fair few amount of people on here today. Like I said there was only a hundred spots open today and that was because the service that we’ve used basically only allows a hundred people. So for this particular membership we’ve got. So congratulations for being one of those one hundred. We’ve got about 60% of you on here, so that’s not a bad turn out actually. You know, I was predicting that about 50% of people wouldn’t turn up, so this is going to be very interactive and very cool if I do say so myself. So, let’s get started. So in today’s session what we’re going to cover is:

Number one. We are going to look at what a successful group training business model should look like and what your next step should be. Now I’m not here to tell you to go and do this, go and do that. All I can do is sit here and offer you I guess you’d say advice on what has worked for myself and many, many of my coaching clients of the past. Now of course, oh, we just had a bit of a technical nightmare there. So when I say when a successful group training business model. Now, success can mean many different things to different people. That is something we need to really, really make note of as well. So always keep an eye out and when I refer to certain things through this presentation, I just want to make sure that it’s congruent of where you are currently at and what you want to achieve in the industry.

So I am also going to look at how to generate an abundance of leads into your location. Now who really wants to know about that? How to generate leads coming to your e-mail inbox, this is what I’m meaning. I’m talking about reconverted leads that have gone through a process and then you receive their e-mail, you receive their phone number, you give them a call and then get them into your particular location. Now it is also important to note that I am not just talking about group personal training here or group fitness or boot camp business. You can take all of these methods that I’m about to show you, and you can implement them into your one on one training process as well, so that is very exciting.

Thirdly, what we are going to do is, we are going to look at how you can generate continually passive income streams. Now, passive income streams, to me is basically passive income that you can generate without having to turn up and deliver a service. So an example may be an information product or a work out system etc. Now, just a show of hands, who here is really interested or who feels they’ve got a good idea on a particular work out product that they can release?

Yup, so there is, there’s a few people there. ‘Not sure, but I want one’. Excellent you’re at the right place. You’ll be able to get a lot of ideas out of this one. Anyone else who feels that they’ve got an idea that could if put out there in the industry could make a massive difference to people? ‘Getting there’. Good, so we’ve got a wide range of answers there which is very exciting because when I first got on to my first passive income stream, I didn’t really know what I was doing either. I was basically having a step in the dark, and I will tell you a little more about that in a moment. But the key thing is ‘You’re here to learn, excellent’. Just another heads up, if, please understand that if I cut off and I pause for a second or two, it’s not because I’m making a mistake or I’ve walked out the room. It’s basically I’m just, I love reading the comments that people put through and, again, the reason being that is, the reason, you’re live and the great thing about being here live, and you know, hundreds of trainers actually e-mail in and ask are we going to record this? Well we are recording it but we aren’t recording it for purposes to give out. It is mainly just for training purposes. The luxury being on here live is to interact.

We are going to look at generating passive income streams. And I say continue income passive streams because you don’t want it to be a once off sale and that’s it. I’m also going to give you my number one free strategy that will literally help you pick up five new clients in the next day. Who wants to know that one? Yup, a fair few, excellent. Of course you do, who wouldn’t want to know that I am also going to show you the number one thing that I believe every single fitness business owner must have if you want your business to be around in the next twelve months. The way that the industry is changing and the way that technology is changing, you really need to keep up with the times. It’s like your grandparents who don’t have a mobile phone, they’re basically living in a whole other world almost. Which is I guess for them they’ve been brought up a certain way, but you can certainly see some of the elder generation who have adapted to the whole social media thing, and your mobile phones and so forth. It definitely gives them another spark in life.

Also we are going to, well I’m going to take you through and just give you a bit of an overhead on how I was able to generate 12,564 leads in only 24 hours. Has anyone heard that story before, okay, so that’s exciting, cool. Just to show. What I’d like to do is just put in the comment box, out of those six things that we are going to cover, what one generates or resonates the most with you right now? What one do you feel is the most important to you? Let’s see those answers come through. So yup, one and two, abundance of leads, passive income, passive income, number three, generate passive income, five new clients, what a success group training business should look like. Yup you’d hope that one as well, because that’s the main tag line for today. So that’s great. So again, we’ve got a wide variety of people with different answers so that’s fantastic. What I’d say is just keep your ears open for whatever resonates with you the most today. Basically what I’m also going to do, at the end of this presentation I’m going to reveal to you exactly how you can receive two months free premium coaching. So that’s coaching with me, how you can get into my mind and my strategies and my networks etc, on how you can really accelerate the growth in your fitness business. So that is really exciting and I look forward to giving that out to you all.

We just get stuck straight into it, and before I reveal to you those strategies I think it’s really important just so I can give you a bit of a background of me and where I’ve come from. Would that be okay? Yes? Type a yes if you’re cool with that. If not, unfortunately it’s too bad because I’m going to do it anyway. I really feel if you can understand where I’ve come from and how I’ve been able to do want I’ve been able to do in this short amount of time I think it might be able to hit home with you. Now the key, I’m not going to tell you a story here of how I was dead broke and I went to be a millionaire over night because that is definitely not my story. I guess you’d say my story started when I was sixteen and I left school. I got kicked out of high school because I talked too much. Instead of harnessing my talking abilities back when I was at school, they use to try and stop me from talking, which is quite interesting because for me a lot of my job involves speaking, so I’m sitting here speaking to you right now. Imagine if they had harnessed that back at school and I was able to become a better speaker than what I am today. I think I’m over that. School curriculum is not my favourite thing.

I left school and became an apprentice. I became an apprentice joiner, cabinet maker. I was building kitchens and so forth. Basically because I was really good at woodwork at school so I was like, yup, it seemed like the logical thing and of course my parents, back in the day course my parents back in the day basically said to me look, go get a trade because if anything happens in the economy you can always fall back on it. I can tell you this right now, to the day I will never go back and build another kitchen, but I appreciate my parents for thinking about my future. Now what I did was I basically got sick of being a cabinet maker and I decided that I wanted to be a personal trainer. So I became a personal trainer. I actually went to University to do a degree. Now, if you’re sitting there are you’re ever thinking about becoming a personal trainer, my opinion on that, don’t go do a degree. It’s such a waste of time. University for me, my experience of course was going and working from 50, 60 hours a week as a cabinet maker to then doing 4 hours, 5 hours, 6 hours a week, University, it was  I could of crammed a lot more in that time. I left University after a year.

I’m originally from New Zealand, and then I hopped on the plane and I basically moved to the Gold Coast. So I moved to the Gold Coast and I didn’t know any one, I just moved in with a guy and it just quite happened, it was quite funny, because this particular guy knew my network of friends back in New Zealand, and I knew his, but we never knew each other. So it was an interesting path. So I became a personal trainer and then I had a passion for business coaching, for coaching people. I always, and this is something that I would get you to write this down, is I would always learn to teach. Whenever you are wanting to learn anything always think of it in the mind set of ‘I’m learning this so that I can teach someone’. So every single thing that I’ve done from when I was a cabinet makers and I was learning to screw a kitchen together a cut it out and use a router, and that type of stuff. I was learning it so that I could teach someone and you know, I had an apprentice and I had a couple of apprentices who I took through cabinet making etc, because I learnt to teach. Same thing with personal training. I am sitting here on this webinar now, because it is my passion, so I’ve got a simple passion to be able to teach. And it just so happens that business is the number one thing that I like to teach. So I no longer personally get out there and train clients and trade my time for money, what I do, is I have a team of people who do that and in the same token my passion is business coaching and I could sit here all day, and I could sit here literally, you know, all day and present to you guys because it really excites me. And there more and more I talk about I t the more and more energy I get from it. So that is something that really excites me if you can’t tell.

So I became a business coach and help other personal trainers grow their fitness business. But basically, this is where the big shift happened, and where I went from being a personal trainer to a business coach. Now I realise I am actually a marketer. Can I just, anyone know who that guy is there in the picture? Not the handsome fellow on your right, the guy on your left? Does anyone know who that person is?

If you can just put their name in there, or just ‘no’. So no, okay, so this guy’s name, he is Frank Kern, and if you’re in the marketing realm, I guess he would be like the Billy Slater of rugby league, the Greg Inglis of rugby league, or the Garry Ablett of AFL. He is the guy when you want to look at marketing. So, he is responsible for the first ever, he made the first ever one million dollars online in a particular launch period and he is also responsible of making 4.3 million dollars of sales in only 63 minutes.

So this guy is a genius when it comes to marketing. Now the reason why I show this, is so, not so we get all upset about and jealous that he made 4.3 million dollars. It’s to show the fact that I did not superimpose that photo. I am not that good at photoshop. The purpose behind that is because I flew to America, I’ve flown to America several times to learn from the best people in the world. So, you know, the big thing for me, and the thing that I say to everyone that any one that I coach or mentor is, you know, surround yourself with the people who you feel, or not who you want to be, more like surround yourself with people who you would like to have achievements similar to them or better than them of course. So, Adam, its Frank Kin, K-I-N. So I became a marketer and that was the biggest cataclysmic shift that I could of had because my thought process had now turned from trainer to business owner. And look, if you guys need a reality check right now, I’m here to tell you you’re not personally trainers, you are marketers. Every single business owner or someone who calls themselves a business owner is a marketer because without getting your product out into the industry you’re not going to have sales. And if you don’t have sales you’re going to have no money. And if you don’t have money you’re going to be upset and you’re going to change industries again.

Now with the lifespan of the personal trainer only being 13 months, it’s a very scary thing, so just remember we are all marketers. So, that slide is not supposed to show like that but, look I’m also the Director of Fit International, which is the one of the, of the fastest fitness license program for personal trainers where we have over 32 current FiiT Chick licenses and locations and we have over 16 different products and services that cater to the fitness industry. You’ll see there we’ve got transformation supplements, we treat professionals, foundation equipment online, products, clothing etc. So we’ve got a whole heap of products. The reason why I show you this is because, I don’t want to be one of those people who are doing webinars and they’ve just got a great strategy on how to present information to you. Using the examples back at University, one of the tutors he literally, no one ever turned up to the classes because he would simply read from the Power Points. He had no experience, he had no results that he could prove or show anyone that basically you know and again, I guess he was doing the best he could, because he needed a job, but, I want to prove to everyone that you need to have real life results before you can share this type of stuff. It is just my opinion.

Now that there is the map of the location, like I said, that black image there has really done me a good one. But can you see here right now that this is not perfect, I’m not perfect. I use stuff that just slides up but you know what, it doesn’t really matter in the overall scheme of things. I am having a go at it, and this is something that I really want to instil and this is to really have a go, you know, see how you go with it. So, a couple of fan pages just quickly that we have which is you’ll see that we’ve got ‘Fit Chicks’ which is our largest growing brand, and the ‘I Love Being a Personal Trainer’ page. Now that’s a passion page for me to help out person trainers and you can see it’s growing slowly, well actually fast in comparison to many fan pages but in regards to our growth we’ve had with ‘Fit Chicks’ that’s only a 16 month old page and we have got 160 000 real likes, so we don’t buy likes. It is really important that we’re building our fan base and it’s really exciting. Because we are able to help a lot more people, that’s the key thing. What I would like you to type in quickly, what is your biggest frustration in the industry? What’s the biggest frustrations as a personal trainer? Who is the fastest typer?

‘Accountability’. So that was fast. Unreliable income yup, money, unreliable income, retention, misconceptions of nutrition. Great. So again, it’s the whole thing of unreliable income. What if I could teach you a strategy today that you’re not going to have to worry about the unreliable income because there’s things that you can implement into your fitness business that can really have a positive effect. And, you know, cancellations there and money so it really I guess the biggest frustration obviously fall around money. I’m not going to be someone to say, I’ve never had one of those frustrations because I certainly have a little bit of background. When I first started personal training, I got up to my clients, I had gone 40 PT hours a week and then I wanted to slowly cave, drop off cause I wanted to get into marketing and I had ended up with, I sat around 20 hours per week. I was earning pretty good money there and then all of a sudden one week I literally lost 50% of my business. That’s as you can imagine, if you lost 50% of it, it’s a real click up. So that’s where I really had to take some drastic measures and we are going to share these today. And if we have time at the end of this I really want to be able to answer your question and help you out further. So this right here, now you may not be able to see this clearly, don’t worry about it. Don’t stress out about it. It’s basically a basic mind map. NowI’ve got a far more in depth one, but this is the basic mind map of what a successful group training business should look like.

You’ll see basically in the centre it’s got the business here and it’s got heaps of other I guess you’d say the veins of what the business should look like. And this is regarding, even if you’re a one-on-one personal trainer and you’re working for yourself, or you’ve got a business or a company, you need to have a structure like this.  It’s like having a body without veins, it’s like having a car without wheels, glasses without lenses. You need to have a mind map like this. Now, let’s look at the 12 key areas that were on that map there. These are 12 key areas that I believe you must have in your fitness business and this is basically accumulated over personally coaching 100 trainers myself and hearing all the feedback hundreds and hundreds of other trainers as well. You must have goals, right, we all know that. You need to have a goal and if what I see in the questions box there is a lot of people who talk about money. Now, for me, it’s like you need to have a financial goal. What’s your first goal? Do you want 1000 dollars a week, 2000 dollars a week or do you just want 500 dollars a week? You need to have a goal on that because that all really determines how hard you really work in all the other areas.

You need to have systems. Systems are key, and we will talk about those in a moment. Every single thing is a system, if you look at Mc Donald’s, Mc Donald’s is the number one business for systems. You drive to one window, or the box, whatever it is now, and you put your order in. You drive to the next one, you pay and then you got the next window and you’re out of there. And you’re done. It’s a system. It smooth, it works the same way every time. So you need a system when you clients submit their interest for you. You need to give them a call you need to follow the same script, you need to say the same things, because you need to find out what really works. If you’re on this webinar and you’ve had a phone call from our location manager and our Head of Sales, here, Ken. He would have rang you and offered and to see if you would like our free podcasts. That’s a free podcast that I deliver every week or two, I’ll do an episode and I’ll put it out there. There is over eleven hours’ worth of content that I provide for free, and one of them I talked to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head fitness advisor, the other week I talked to a mate who has over 320 franchises so I give this for free right, so you would have got a call from Ken. Now the purpose why I’m telling you all this is because we have been able to change the conversion from  42% of people that we call to now 81%  of people who will take it up. What I’m saying if we ring 100 people, if we get hold of 100 people, 81 of them will take it up versus 42. Can you see that as an astronomical change, the reason why that changed is because we changed their system slightly, we refined and we got it better. But now we use the same thing time and time again.

Administration. You need to have administration. You need to have client payments etc all set up the same way. It needs to be a smooth transition. If you’re an administration nightmare, hire someone to do it. Hire someone for two, three, four, five, however many hours a week it’ll take you to get those jobs done. You can find people of there who will do it. I would even say, ask your clients if any of them want to have some extra hours. Thank you very much for that Sarah. Sarah just said that she has got a heap of ideas already. What I will encourage everyone actually if you do get some ‘ah huh’ moments or anything that is great, just feed my ego a bit, just so I know that this stuffs good and that you’re really interested in it. Just pop in there and say ‘Yeah, great stuff’ or whatever it is you want to say.

So, back to sales. You need to have a sales system like I talked about. You need to have price points, different type of price points. Don’t just have one option where you buy 10 pack of sessions for 60 dollars and you can use them whenever you want. That’s not how you run a business. That’s not how Mc Donald’s works so that’s not how you should work. You need to have up sales, down sales and cross sales, okay, now up sales, down sales and cross sales can really I guess not too many people know what they are. But an up sale is, an example is, let’s say that they’ve just joined with you and they’ve taken up one session per week, then you can up sale them into ‘Hey look, how would you now like to get this special, we can do three sessions per week and this discounted rate etc. A down sale is where they say that they can’t do one hour worth of personal training, but I can do thirty minutes. So it’s a take away type of selling. Cross sales is promoting other products that we’ll talk about in another moment.

Now you can actually see how each one of these key areas could be its own day spent on, and that is exactly what it generally is. I’ve spent four days working on one of these particular topics, because once you can implement it, it’s amazing what it can have in returns of effects and so forth for your business.

Marketing. You need to look at online and offline and we will look at a few of those strategies in a moment.  But marketing, like I said earlier, if you’re not in the head space that you are a marketer, you need to get into it. Because, again marketing, if you have a great marketing plan and you have a great marketing strategy, followed by great systems. The sales are going to be easy because your product and service will create themselves. It will generate sales for you. Now I don’t know about you, but that just gets me really excited because I never used to like selling. Whilst I was fairly good at it, I just never really liked asking for money and, cheers Adam. So it really is important to make sure that you’re really switched on with your marketing because again, the better it is, the less sales you do. I know for a lot of people, sales suck. People don’t like asking for money. So it’s a win-win. And customer care, look at the end of the day, if you don’t have a customer care system set in place where you’re looking after your current clients, where you’re treating them like gold, then you need to really reassess that because I can’t remember the term, but I’m going to through it out there. I think it’s seven times more, seven times harder to sell to  a brand new client than to keep your  existing one. So you really need to look at that. With regards to customer care, the number one strategy that I suggest you send out right now and you do it, is send out a thank you card. Go and get a dollar card, right. Dollar card from the post office and hand write a letter saying thank you so much for being a part of our business and we look forward to helping you further in the future. Something simple like that. Sign it off, chuck in a dollar scratchy if you want to and personally mail it to their house. Do no give it to the (meonicsession?) that’s just suicide for this particular process because, the whole process behind it is for them to receive it in their mail box. And you may be sitting there going you know I see them four times a week anyway, so why don’t I give it to them then? No. Stop. Stop. Stop. You need to start thinking like a marketer and not a personal trainer. That’s what a personal trainer would do, they’d give it to the people at the session/ But we are not doing that. We want to make sure that they get the experience because that’s what’s it’s about. It’s all about an experience. In a future webinar what I’m going to do, because this is something that really excites me is the fact that you need to look at the customers journey, you need to take them from point A to Z, and if you can create a map of that, man, the potential of your business is going to be massive.

Building a strong reliable team. At the end of the day, I can’t remember, and I’m probably committing webinar suicide trying to recall something I don’t fully understand. I can’t remember who said it, you might be able to help me out, it’s ‘Give me a leaver long enough and I’ll be able to shift the world’ now that particular saying is amazing because you can only grow so much as an individual and that’s where you need to get key people on your team to help you grow your vision. Now our goals here at Fit International is firstly, help one million females change their life by 20-20, and we do that by an application and education in health and fitness.  In order for one person to be able to achieve that is just not going to happen so fast, so we need to create a team of people who believe in our passion, believe in our passion. So we’ve just put a job application out there for another senior administration person and what I’ve seen, a common thread that comes back through is that they’re really excited about our mission. So, get people to buy into your business. That’s the exciting part. Alright, so we’ve also got personal development and growth. You’ll see here that I didn’t put the gradually buttons coming out there, it’s all there at once, so you’re probably reading ahead of me. Don’t do that, it’s naughty.

So personal development and growth. You need to, this is honestly key. Now we spent a day here at the headquarters the other week, with some of our VIP coaching members. This was one of the biggest ones that I found popped up. Because at the end of the day, you can have the best strategies, the best sales process, but if you are not there every day, and when I mean there, I mean head space. And if you can’t be there every day, if you have up and downs. You really need to look at your personal development and growth. What I mean by that is that you need to be able to, I was just about to say, to remain focused, just like I didn’t. Someone asked a question and I got distracted. Again, personal development and growth, you need to continually grow. What I mean by that, when you reach the next monetary bracket. For example say your goal is a thousand dollars. Once you’ve reached that, it’s another total mind set shift to go to the next level of two thousand or two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, until you, if you do not believe that you can earn a million dollars, I am afraid you’re not going to do it. That’s it hands down. So let’s leave personal development and growth on that one at the moment.

Passive income, you need to create passive income streams. Like I said, we’ve got multiple passive income streams which we’ve created over time. Its taken time. But you know the exciting thing is that you can generate money when you’re not actually working. You know the old saying ‘ You can make money while you sleep’. Whilst I’m not a big fan of that one now, you can literally do that, you can literally make money while you are sleeping. Passive income could mean, you’ve got supplements, let’s say you’re offering supplements you can then pass on to your clients. What we offer all our fit licenses is an opportunity to generate 25% commission on all supplements. So, they no longer have to drive around with supplements in the boots of their car like I did. They can simply use an affiliated link run by an e-commerce website that will literally be able to generate passive income. Now that is just one avenue. Now if you had clothing there as well and you had equipment and a heap of other products and service, heart rate monitors, etc, the sky is the limit. The only limitation like I said is your own self.

So, let’s have a look at creating a product sweep. You need to create product sweeps to service different areas for example we’ve got ‘Fit Chicks’, so ‘Fit Chicks’ is one of our programs that we bring in our ‘Fit Mums’, ‘Fit Kids’ etcetera. We are creating a product sweep. Now think about it for a moment, how could you do that in your business? There all it is literally, at the end of the day, the delivery method is the same right? So it’s based around, you’re going to be doing fitness training. Now, you can be sitting there saying well I do one-on-one training, well that’s fine. Just create different levels, different products, all of the different things. So we’ve got ones, the total transformation. We’ve got one that is the bikini body shape up, the bikini body kick-starter etc, so create cool names for these because it is a product sweep. You also need to look at your facility, your facility you need to make sure that you have got a good area I guess you could say, whether you’re indoor or outdoor, you need to make sure that whatever it is, if you’ve got a mat, you’ve got a facility, then you really want to pimp it out. Seriously, pimp that thing out, so when people walk in there, they seriously want to be there.

Even if they’re not training, they just go, ‘I want to go to training today because I really like the place’. You look at all these big gyms that have all these cool things and equipment. A lot of people just go in there because they like, they like the music, and they stand next to a machine and don’t bloody do anything for the session. Create a facility that is going to pimp it. If you’re in just the park, which a lot of outdoor boot camps are, create the environment that just makes the facility great. Like, I guess you’re not going to train on a busy highway next to the traffic. You’re not going to train where there are 50 other boot camps next to each other. Just create that segregated environment. If you’ve got your outdoor facility, have things like I-frames, and flags out so that everyone knows it’s you training.

Feedback. Now this is massive, so to give you a bit of a case study on something that today we’ve implemented. Basically we’ve sent out a survey today, we’ve sent out a survey to over 160 000 people. In the first half now, I just want to look at the stats there. In the first half now we had 980 people fill out the survey. Not only number one, did that thing give us an amazing feedback that we were not actually even aware of. But more importantly, we actually had a product there that we’re offering. Now this product is an awesome product. It’s helped thousand ladies all over Australia, even around the world, now we were able to generate sales from that. It was a win win. So we had passive income coming in whilst we were creating feedback. Now if you can combine any of these together it just turns it and puts it on steroids. That what I can say.

I just want to stop for a second, people are asking questions but I can’t seem to see the whole question thing, so if you give me two seconds. I need the screen made flash or something, just give me a second here. Okay, so that’s interesting. Someone wrote a really long question and it doesn’t seem to wrap under. So someone said ‘If you’re in a community hall’. Well great, if you’re in a community hall. Look we actually started working in an old fishing hall. The fishing hall had trophies up, it had dust everywhere. We just brought our own iPod’s and sounds and we used inside outside. Ask the facilities; ‘Can I put up some cool things here?’ Even ask the community if you’re that prepared take certain things with you prior to the training. If you’ve got big testimonials printed out take them with you. Stick them on the wall whilst everyone is training and simply take them off when you leave. It’s just thinking outside that box in those type areas that will really help you out there.

If we looked at time management… now time management is a massive one, because I guess it, when I stay time management I am talking about when you are spending time on your business. Planning your day, making sure you can get the most amount of things out of the day etc. An example of time management for myself, I’ve got this webinar and we finish up and just over 25 minutes or so. I’ve still got some really cool stuff still to share with you so I’m going to speed through it a little bit but after this, then I know I’ve allowed myself half-an-hour window to do what I need to do etcetera after and then I’ve got another call. I’ve given myself a deadline. I’m creating time management if I left myself an hour or an hour and a half after this particular presentation. I would find a way to milk out an hour, hour and a half. So be very diligent with your time and I’m going share with you, even in the following podcasts how to maximise your time and I actually think probably three episodes ago I did one on time management so I really recommend you get  on a listen to that.

Let’s move forward. Here is when I was talking about marketing, now again I can talk about this all day and that’s what we did, we went through a whole process of this with our VIP client’s etc. You can see here, let’s just go through some online marketing. You’ve got Facebook and there’s a heap of different offers there that you can use. There’s Google, add website optimization, there’s Pinterest, SCO which is the cheapest most readily available; process, but it is also one of the hardest. You’ve got paid ads, Youtube, Gumtree, you need to look with your marketing. You need to have a budget. It’s all about return on investment so for every one dollar you spend you need to make sure you know what you’re getting back in return.

Referrals, so you need to make sure you’re utilizing referrals in an offline strategy. Use of flyers. People who say flyers don’t work, it’s a load of crap because we use flyers and our locations use flyers and they’re getting in clients. The results work. We just put to print today 10 000 fliers, actually 20 000, so two runs on 10 000. Why? Because we know that it works. We get a return on investment on it. You know your postcards, lead boxes, news paper editorials if you’re not contacting the newspaper you are missing out/ Local schools, magazines, letterbox drops. Sign up with a friend. You can see that this is just the start of all the different avenues you can utilise. My key feedback on this thing is that you need to make sure that you’re utilising at least one of them to start off with to its strongest ability. What I mean by that, don’t do Facebook ads, and Google ads and everything else together, if you’re not using one of them proper to start off with…it’s the whole thing of jack-of-all-trades, master of none. You don’t want to fall into that trap. Let’s look at passive income streams and continuity etc here. I’ve got someone who’s typed ‘mothers groups’ I’m not too sure what you mean by that. If you could just elaborate on that.

Let’s look at passive income streams that I believe every fitness business needs to be utilising. I use the word there, continuity because continuity is key. It is recurring monthly or weekly or daily. Nutrition plans. If you’re not currently doing nutrition plans look that’s a great way, you can do it.  You can literally get people on a monthly program, they can pay you whatever the money you want to generate from it. If you’re doing a designed nutrition plan for someone on a monthly basis, you could easily charge $99 a month for it. Every four weeks you asses their nutrition, you assess their results and you sign them up for a six month program. Say, look this is a six month program, it’s not going to change overnight. It’s $99 dollars a month, it’s less than $25 a week, and can you afford $25 a week for your health and fitness? You’ll find many people can. I used to do nutrition plans, but now I don’t have the time for it. Even though like I said I was charging $199 a month for a nutrition plan and evaluation because it involved my time. If you get 10 clients on that a month, there’s $200 a month. So it is just an area that shows that you can maximise you’re earning potential.

Work out programs.  Same things as nutrition. You can create work our programs that can change on a reoccurring basis. This could be fortnightly, monthly, depending were the client is at of course. You want to make sure it meets their goals. Supplementation, is something that uses, it’s an interesting topic in the industry. Personally I don’t believe in overuse of supplementations. We have basic supplements that we recommend. That we would recommend that our clients or trains should take. No fat pills. Note of that stuff. We do protein and a couple of other key areas. You’re looking at it, for example if you’re generating 25% commission and you’re dealing with $500, $1000 worth of sales each month. When you look at it, if you’ve got 20 clients in your program and let’s say they’re all taking a basic supplement. Let’s say you’re earning $50 a month from them. There is $2000, 25% of 2000 is, that’s about, I’ve gone blank, 500 bucks. SO you can generate 500 bucks passive income reoccurring because you can get them on a ‘hey look every month I’m going to bring this in for you’. Get a set-up, direct debit and I’ll make surer that you’re taking it. There are heaps of different areas you can follow there.

Next, there are seminars you can run, seminars. That is a great way, seminars, or webinars. You can get people on a webinar. For example if I had a product today that was all about creating passive income and all that, I could offer it at the end of this presentation. Which I don’t’ have products created. But you can do that, get people on edge, educate them on a particular topic. For example right now, and I will get everyone to see it they’re all away there. Who’s seeing value so far for this presentation? Who’s thinking that they’ve got heap of good ideas that they can implement right now. Yip, cool, thank you, thank you, HELL YEAH, in caps even, that’s a good one. Better direction. Perfect and that’s what it is basically all about, being able to give great advice for nothing. In one day if we ever do business together, whether it is or it isn’t, then that’s the case, but this is another great way to get out into the community because I personally don’t know all of you. Now there are a few people on the other end that I do know personally, but what a great avenue to be able to talk and share your message with other people. Imagine being able to run a webinar and having a thousand people on it and you’re actually talking about, let’s say you’re talking about nutrition, and at the end of it you could sell a nutrition plan. That’s the real exciting thing about this, Imagine 50 people in the room. What you’re going to do is build credibility, build relationships with people because that’s exactly what it is about.

We’ve also got building your team. Sorry, I’ve just got a question here. I don’t’ feel after four years I’d be qualified to give any more information to clients. I can’t see the rest of that question unfortunately. So I can’t really make an answer. Basically it comes down to sometimes it’s the most basic information that people need, or are looking for. So if you’re sitting there thinking I could not provide a nutrition program or plan, if you’re not feeling qualified for that, then don’t do it. But you’re feeling that you’ve got enough knowledge or more knowledge than the person, clients outside of our workouts, okay, yeah. And again, talking to that question, just to reiterate ‘I don’t think that after four years that I’d be qualified enough to give others information to clients outside of workouts’. Look, you’re not the first person who has said that or has been presented that roadblock. But what I’d challenge you to say is ‘Do you know more than the person you’re trying to help”‘. If you do know more, in my opinion you could be doing them a disservice by not being about to deliver them the message. Thank you very much Adam, you’re a legend. So I’d really challenge why you’re actually coming to this answer. And this is where we go back to the personal development side right. Would it be fair to say that you know more about nutrition and supplementation than the average person out there? If you do, than that’s fantastic. Alright cool. Fantastic. I think I’ve got the right thing there. Yip, so Norman, how you doing Norman? Alright so I’m going to save that question to the end there. So we’ve got building a team. I’ve got so much here to share. I can tell you what if we had two hours for the webinar I’d roll out with it. But I know all of you are busy and you have stuff to do so we’re going to switch through it. So building a team, like I said, this couple be a team of trainers that run clients for you. You could be getting people running your groups, you could be building a team of online coaches who are taking over the online program, so if you don’t’ know much about nutrition, is there someone that you could utilise out there who you could use. Because I am sure there are people out there who are nutritional masters who are looking for work. So again, it’s about thinking outside the box.

Now this one right here is my number one strategy on how you can go get clients now and I’ll give you the real short version of the story. This is a picture here of gentlemen digging for gold. Again, don’t quote me on the exact precise story being told, but the story is about a guy back many years ago, in the gold rush days. Basically what happened he heard about the gold rush and so many people where making money. There was money everywhere, so he packed up. He had a little farm on the North side, West side of America and he moved over to the other side. Which would be the East side. It wasn’t with Snoop Dog around t that time. He moved up to the other side of the country, he sold up his farm, he bought machinery and he tried to dig for gold. He dug for years and years and years and he found hardly any gold. He didn’t strike it rich. What happened was, about 20 years later. This guy who bought this guy’s farm he walked down to the creek and he saw this sparkling thing in the lake there. He walked up to it and he picked it up and it was this little piece of gold. Now what had happened was that farm ended up being the next biggest gold mine in the United States. Now the moral of that story is that the guy sold up his own farm to move somewhere else before he dug up in his own backyard. Now on that, which I think is a pretty bloody darn good story, but on that note. You need to start with your own people. You need to start off with people you know. Start off with your friends, start off with your family members, start with your friends’ friends, your family friends. Everyone you know, you should put it out there. This is the service you provide and would they be interested in it? If they’re not, you need to say, do you know anyone else who would be interested in this. I don’t know about you but that to me is such profound thing that I know personally through the hundred clients that I’ve trained or coached do not do this. Why? Because they’re too emotionally connected that they don’t want to feel like they are begging or asking their friends or family members.

I can tell you right now. If you got back to the personal development and growth slide, you can really understand that, you’re going to be so surprised, I would be surprised if you couldn’t pick up clients tomorrow. If after this webinar you got on a phone call and rang every person you know and said this is what we’re doing and would you be interested, I guarantee it. I use to have coaching clients who I’d get on the call with and they’d go ‘Ahhh I just need some leads’, and I would go, have you dug in your own backyard yet? ‘Aah yeah, I called a few people or I Facebook a few people’. I said, no, have you actually dug up your whole backyard? Dig up your whole backyard first because you’d be surprised.

Now this is the number one thing I believe that you need to have as a personal trainer, if you want to be around the next twelve months. Why? Because like I said, technology is changing and I’m going to show you right now some really key things you’re going to need to have on a lead converting website. Now that is the key word there team, ‘lead converting’. Not a website that is a brochure that does not generate leads, that does not generate any interest at all. So very important, a lead converting website. Here is an example of one of ours. So for your ‘Fit Chick’ locations we’ve got a lead converted website. This is a proven website. This isn’t an, aah, this looks pretty I’ll put it here. At video, there is a 5 minute video. It’s an animated video that sells people on the great benefits that sells people on coming to the location. It’s got a great header up there that’s got awesome testimonials of some people. It’s got a great headline to the left there. The indoor, outdoor female only group training system, not only burns fat, makes you fitter, increases your confidence but more importantly but changing the lives of thousands of Australians, just like you. Obviously you can read that, but, just by looking at that headline. If we had to break this down and I were to do an analysis on it. I could literally spend half-an-hour on the psychology of this particular headline. But of course we don’t have half-an-hour to spend on it. But the key important take away for this guys, is that you need to have a big attention grabber headline that’s going to get them to take the next step. That’s what it is all about.

When I’m trying to sell someone on our programs here we are literally getting them to take the next step and come through and try out our program. This is an option, so we have options. You’ve got a free optional, you’ve got a $20 option. We get about a 10% conversion of people who take up the paid one. Every dollar we earn from that we just put back into our marketing, you’re going to want to create a system that’s going to funnel it. They click on the button, they then go to a web forum. Now this is something we use which is just an e-mail marketing system. There are so many out there. What I will do, is I will send everyone a link of some things that I use. You can check it out. You have the information there, the information clicks, and boom! They’re in your e-mail. Now imagine having a system working on autopilot and everything is done for you. It is just such a powerful thing. And this isn’t all done by chance. These questions are all being tested and that is the key for you. You need to test what works, and you do that by testing it against another version of it. So I’m testing, split testing one of our squeeze pages which is one of our lead generating pages and I’ve found drastic changes actually. So we, over, six different spilt tests we then went from 19% conversion rate to 42%. Now that is massive when you are talking for every hundred leads, for every hundred people hit your site, instead of having 19, you have 42. It is a pretty big conversion. So you need to test that.

Now, let’s look at the ingredients of a successful web platform okay. I apologise if the screen keeps popping out there because I am trying to move this question box. Whilst I love the questions they are sort of in my way there. The ingredients, so look, you need to have a layout, you need to have a clear distinct layout. You see there we have a header, we’ve got a video and we’ve got a big headline. Copywriting, now this is massive! Words, imagine, and this is where I say, if you have great marketing, your sales system is fairly straight forward. So if you’ve got cop words that can sell people on whatever it is that you are trying to produce or offer to them, it just makes the process so much easier. It will just increase your sales, increase your clients and you’ll be away. An easy flow through the journey needs to be easy. It can’t be too hard where they click on this and go to another page and its just all of a sudden, it’s just a nightmare. We want to make sure that the flow is really easy and they follow through on the journey. In our marketing set up, you need to have some e-mail set up so when some people come to your program and they don’t for some reason turn up or show up or they don’t take up your product at that time, that’s cool. Have some pre-constructed e-mails that will hopefully get them to take action along the line, along the way. Again, this is a whole other day on this, but this is not the purpose of this particular presentation. This particular presentation is to open your eyes to some really key things that you need.

You’ll probably look at it then, man we are running on time here, I know that a few of you probably have to go on the hour mark, and we’ve got about four minutes or so on that. You’re probably sitting going, well where to from here?  There’s so much information that you’ve shared today Brett. Thanks to everyone for their comments there, it makes my job a lot more easier when I know that people are really liking it and that they’re getting some great stuff. So where to from here for you? Well. You can do two things really. You can stay stuck doing the same thing or you can make a change for the better. Well again, like I said, if you start implementing what we’ve discussed today even sitting down and working at your own mind map, your own plan of where your particular business is and where you’d like it to go. You’re going to be a hundred times further ahead of every other personal trainer out there. With 10 000 new graduates each year, it’s only going to get busier and busier in the market and you need to know how to stand out from every other trainer. You need to create a structure, you need to create a structure, build your web platform. I’ve got another business called: myfitnesswebsite.com.au you can check out, but we are actually on the time that we’re not taking on anymore website clients at this particular time, but, that’s an option down the track if sometime in the next couple of months or so, you’re thinking about creating a web platform. Go visit that.

You also want to create passive income products, every time you get a lead through, you’ve got a low cost entry point. So let’s say you’ve got a product that was $19, when someone first found out about you it was only a $19 product. An example could be for me, if I had a $19 e-book on this particular webinar, if it was broken down into an e-book I’m sure everyone would pay $19 for it. They would pay that because it would be marketed very well and it would deliver amazing results. That is exactly what it needs to be. You need to market your business well and then you need outstanding service for people. Or basically you can check out our Fiit Chickopportunity we have for you, you may or may not already know that we are one of Australia’s fastest growing fitness license program for personal trainers. So we are the most affordable licensed fitness training program out there. I say that because I know all the other guys in the industry, and I won’t say their names, but I know the other programs out there, the franchises and the licenses etc, and there is no one who is as cost effective as us. You can join our ready established internationally recognised brand, we’ve over 160 000 Fit Chicks out there that we have in our fan base, and of course e-mails etc, we’ve got more than that. Basically you can take advantage now, take advantage of the summer rush. With the time now and the two, three weeks, next couple of months, it’s going to be definitely an opportunity for you to take advantage of it. You can have access to our numerous passive income opportunities. You can literarily sell some of the information products that we’ve have for 75% commission. You can make a lot of passive income with you having to create it yourself. You can let us build your web platform. With My Fitness Website Business, we have websites, but it is going to cost you about $4000 to get done, but imagine having that all set up for you and ready to go. It’s an exciting opportunity for people there who don’t want to sit and do all that stuff, and simply to find out more just visit the URL there. fiitprofessional.com.au we’ve got an introductory video on there which literally is 10 minutes. Check it out. If you like it, we like to take things slowly. If you like it submit your interest to find out more. All you need to do is click on the button and what will happen is you’ll fill out a bit of a form and then we will get in contact with you and answer any questions that we need to.

At the end of the day it’s a step-by-step process, but, you know what, this is what I said at the start of this presentation. I want to give you the opportunity to receive two months’ worth of free coaching. That’s how you will get into my head, into our private VIP Facebook group that you can ask me any question that you want. We want to give that to you absolutely free! Now, obviously, you’re probably saying now, ‘what’s the catch?’ The only catch is, if you submit your interest, which is obviously totally free and no obligations, and you like what you see and you go through the process and possibly take up a location, and run your very own Fiit Chick location. We will give you, and we will check it off, make sure we know where you come from. We will give you two months of free coaching to give you a kick-start, to get your location going. This is the most low cost, most effective program out there, you won’t get, and you won’t see anything like it in the industry at the moment, until someone comes in and tries to duplicate what we have done. The only catch is that, this is, this two months free coaching, plus there is a heaps of things, loads of things that we are going to give, but I just didn’t have space on this slide to honest to right about it. But that’s where you’ll get to spend time with not only myself, but with a whole group of entrepreneurs who want the same thing, to grow a great fitness business. To earn an income that they really want. And more importantly, to live the lifestyle, that’s what it is all about. You’ve got to 7pm tonight, basically just to fill out your interest form. That’s the first step, check it out, fill out your form and just say you’re from this webinar, because it is an exclusive invitation to this webinar only. If you want to take the heartache out of building your own fitness business, just head over to the website. Head over to thefiitprofessional.com.au, and take the opportunity that is there for you to just find out more.

I want to leave you, for first of all. I think I am going to stick around for a few questions here, but I want to leave you with this. It is a little quote that I just made up and I think that it is really true, and you’ve probably read it but: ‘Success comes to those who don’t wait’. You heard the saying ‘success comes to those who wait’ or ‘good things come to those who wait’. That’s a load of shit. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen. Success comes to people who don’t wait. You need to go now, don’t wait, take action! Take as much action as you need, hey, this may not be for you but when I say ‘take action’ you need to take action on some level. Whether it is going to implement your own strategy, maybe you want to go can build your own website. Whatever it is take action and do it, take action and take action. Team, that’s all I’ve got today in regards to this presentation. I know it is great to see you all sticking around to the end, that’s fantastic and thanks so much for the questions. What I will do now. I am happy to take questions. I will stick around for 10 minutes or so. If anyone has got any questions, before you shoot off to your busy schedule. Fire them out at me and I will do my very best to answer them for you. For you who don’t and have to go back to work, go visit fiitprofessional.com.au now and fill out your interest form. I guarantee you won’t find anything like this. There is obviously now obligations, an interest form is simple an interest form where you can find out more information. From there we actually send you another video that tells you more about the program and how it can really benefit it. So take up that opportunity! Anyone got any questions for me there? I’m eager to take them.

‘What’s your best strategy to keep income flying over Christmas?’ fantastic Norm. And Norm, seeing that you’re one of our fantastic location owners and various success at that actually. For those who are actually listening, Norm and his first two weeks, I believe it was, he had 32 girls in his location, he is now up to about 50 girls there in Pan Drift. He is killing it, loving it. Man, I’m going to share with you a far deeper strategy, bit for a quick question, in regards to keeping flow over Christmas. It’s about the set up into Christmas, its’ the lead into Christmas. So, we just put an advertisement out, just today that is in print that is for Christmas. So if you’re sitting there and you haven’t even thought about Christmas yet, you need to get your A into G and you need to get something in the next week or two. You want to get a new flow of people prior to Christmas which will basically continue to over Christmas. So that is the short answer Norm. Then again, we will be able to provide you with the whole strategy and exact thought to do there in the member’s area.

Thank you, Lou, so ‘How many people run…’ I’m having trouble here with these questions. Sorry, ‘How many people are in one location and how…’ Saying technical errors, technical errors everywhere. I will get there. Sorry. Get back into that one.  ‘How many people are in one location?’ well basically you can run as many locations as you want Luo, for example, we’ve got someone just up the North, North Queensland just talking up another location. We’ve got  many of our licensees look at this as an opportunity to run multitude locations and I guess you can have as many as you feel necessary. If this was me and I looked at this form a business opportunity, I would be looking at it as finding people running it for me, but you’d need to get one going first. Get it up and running, use the strategies that we have and teach, and show you. You can have as many as you like. You can have 10 of them, 20 of them. It all comes down to looking after the first one. Making sure it is up and going and making sure it’s running from there.

‘What would you say would be your equivalent to this question if you are just a sole trader?’ So, again, a lot of our licensees are sole traders. Now I’m going to presume here that you are talking about the Fiit Chick locations. If you are a sole trader you need to start somewhere. When I was a sole trader I used to have my clients and then I had a group training business on the side as well. The next progression from there would be to find a trainer to run your location whilst you can open another. Or find a trainer who can run certain sessions for you whilst you run the sessions that you want to do.

‘Do pay as you go for group training work?’ – Maureen. No it doesn’t, in my opinion I think it’s the Achilles heel for so many personal trainers because they feel that they need to give a pay as you go option. We don’t utilise that option, we use a far better option with our Fiit Chick locations that is guaranteed to have you income for a minimum of twelve weeks. Now that is what you want. You don’t want cancellations, you don’t want none of that crap. Because at the end of the day you’re running a business right. You are not running a coffee shop on the corner and you’re getting paid for as many coffees you’re selling a day. If I had a coffee shop, or if I had a coffee cart from the corner, what I would do, and I know I’m on a tangent, but there is a purpose behind it. What I’d do, I’d literally do, is I’d have a, maybe they’d purchase in a month in advance and they’d purchase a certain amount of coffees for that month and let’s say you worked it out one or two a day and they pay a certain amount. And you could give them unlimited coffee for a month. How great would that be? I know for example. Myself and a friend of mine, we go for walks early in the morning and it is a good time for us to talk business to talk anything, and we get a coffee, so we spend like $8 a day on coffee. Imagine if they gave us the opportunity if there was one coffee day each at the end of the month, let’s say we missed out a couple they’d still be up. What they are doing, they are guaranteeing income. And that is what you need to do. Pay as you go is a no for me. I don’t like that at all.

Any other questions there team? I’ve still got a fair few of you on the line which is fantastic, which means you’re obviously getting value. Just again provide some feedback if you’re still three and you’re listening in on this and its value. Because I am happy to keep on answering some questions for you.

Not seeing questions here so, oh. ‘How many sessions for group training should you run?’ That is again, another fantastic question. Well how many you should run basically comes down to you, I guess you could look at how the locations for example, there would be anywhere from three up to probably fifteen. It depends on what you want to do with your business and how many clients you want to get to. It really comes down to, again, if you go back to the first slide that we had on goals. You need to have your goal. If you want a hundred people in your program paying $50 a week. Which would give you $5000 a week. Then you really need to look at, well if I ran three sessions, would a hundred people be able to fit in there, and the answer would probably be no. So again, it is based on your goals there. That is the easier answer.

Question with group training. I’m not sure if that is a question or maybe it didn’t type through properly. Any other questions there team? I know there is a heap of you still on there. Even if it’s in the background of your computer there or you haven’t switched off yet, or maybe you are on Facebook searching some stuff. Alright here we go. ‘I live in the country, New South Wales, would the Fiit Chick still get the support from you out…’ I really need to sort this question thing out because it is only delivering me half the question which is quite frustrating for me really. I’m going to leave it up to my intuition and try and guess it. Would you get support if you were in New South Wales?Look, we are one big family, and that is how we’ve created Fiit Chick. We don’t want to leave anyone on their own. We all work together and try help each other all achieve on result. Ultimately that one result is to help one million females firstly. and even if in the country New South Wales you had 10, 20, 30 people out there that you’re still helping, you’re return of course, is still going to be massive in regards to your business. Could you dominate your whole particular area and I’d say most definitely. You just need to look at how many people actually living in your area and are they for the demographic that you are trying for. For example, jump in Google, say how many people age this to this live in, actually just do, Google, how many people live in and put your town and it will bring it up and it will give you a census of there is 50 something percent of females. It then gives you a graphic breakdown of income, and that type of stuff. Obviously those types are results are a few years old but it gives you a good overview. We’ve got a great little location down in Foster, which is a town, a country town, and there is going to be one up in North Queensland, which is a country town. So definitely it can certainly work. I think that the best thing is to have a chat and we base everything around if it’s a good fit or not. Pardon the pun.

Next one, ‘I give protein and various supplements after workouts for free’. It’s a great idea Dale. Unfortunately cut out after that. So again I have to make up the rest of the question. I provide protein and various supplements rafter workouts or free. I’d like to give you some. Is that what you said? Basically again, it could be a built in thing for your packages as well. Instead of paying $69 a week make it $79 a week and they’ll get a protein shake after the session. Again, that’s agreat idea. Good to see that you’re on the ball there. Always good to hear new ideas, thanks.

‘Can we get links to new businesses?’ what I will do, I will highly suggest that you head over to the fiit professional page and actually go /podcasts and you’ll be able to go and see some other links but I will create a document with some of the things I’ve talked about today that you are going to get access to.

Anna so 45 000 people listen to MPT so you could definitely dominate. I dare say, in a city of 45 000, there would be half of those if not a little bit more females and only 10 PT’s. That’s the power of being part of a brand being pretty well known. The reason why I believe that Fiit Chicks is extremely successful. Because it is a community and we’ve followed all the methods that you need to, to generate a successful brand so to speak. So you look at Apple, Apple people buy stuff and they don’t even know what it is. So the next iPhone sold out in pre-order before people even know it changes, because you are creating a good brand. I think that is imperative. I’m not saying that you should use our brand at all; it’s just a great leg up and assistant in that area. I definitely encourage you if you want to create your own, get out there and do it. Because once you’ve created a great brand you’ll be able to help so many more people. But the only thing that I would say on that, if you’re not prepared to put in hours and hours of work, have many failures, many successes then don’t go and do it. I only say that from my own experience and if you are not willing to invest your time and energy and course money into it. It is going to be hard to build your brand.

Excuse me. So okay, good on you Dale, you’ve written it in two questions so can read the whole thing. This is smart. ‘With the $10 class rate, would it work better the other way around. Free sessions with $10 supplement afterwards?’ I wouldn’t do that because you need to position something as the bonus. You need to make them feel like they’re getting a supplement for free. Personally in  my perspective, because if you’re giving away free sessions then they’ll probably be like I’m not going to turn up to this session or I’m not going to worry about getting it. So definitely position things as a bonus. The more bonuses you can give away to people the more value there you are going to perceive in the product. For example the webinar, if anyone who takes up the opportunity and submits interest in regards to a location and takes the next step. I’ve put out there that you’ll get two months of free coaching. Now if you had to pay for that you’d be paying $ 1680 I think it was. That is almost the initial investment you would need to become a part of it and you’re getting it for free. The reason why you do that is because you want to position something with value. So, example you could, when they sign up you could also give them a singlet or something, and maybe a pair of boxing gloves etcetera. You could just provide value that way. I hope that answered your question.

Alright team. I’m going to take three more question, as like I said I can sit here and talk all day and I know that you’ve probably got a swirling question, and I’m hoping that many of you have already gone over and submitted your interest in look at what we can provide and really assist you with, and basically take the heartache out of the back-end of building a structure for your group training program. So three more questions if anyone wants to jump in. Don’t all jump in at once. See how I always go for the big thing, normally you say I’ve got one more question, I’ll take one more. But I like three because I actually like answering questions but it looks like all the questions are out. Doesn’t look like anyone has any… Oh we’ve got one more. There we go, this is the last one. ‘Would you attach workout programs to a Facebook page or website?’ I’m not too sure how to take that question, but, excuse me, would you attach workout programs? I would definitely recommend by providing value if that makes sense. We have workout programs on our website, on our flagship website. We have articles etc. Use Facebook as a generation tool to send people to your website. That is the whole point of having a website. You need to use Facebook as the engine, and then your website would be the vehicle to help them get from A to Z. So really hope that answered the question there.

So team, like I said now I’m down to 13 minutes to do what I set in my 30 minute window. I’ve got an appointment coming up very shortly. Got a lot. Thank you very much for taking the time out and sticking around for the questions. To those people who do thank you very much, you’re great too. For those people who do want to look at the opportunity that we have I really suggest you do jump over there. Hit over to the Fiit Professional website anyhow and you will be able to see how you can get more hours of free business content absolutely free. Go and do that, I’d take it up, chuck it in your ears, listen to it and what I want to know, is send me through any achievements you have. I like sharing information, but I really like hearing about it even more when people have wins. Now that is something that is really exciting to me. So this is Brett Campbell signing off. Have a fantastic day and I will talk to you very shortly, thank you and goodbye.

The Exclusive Interview With Michael Parella

Transcript of EPISODE 10:

Hello, and welcome to the FiiT Professional podcast, the number one podcast for fitness professionals looking to build a fitness business.  If you’re after more clients, more income, and more free time, then you’ve come to the right place. Visit podcast.fiitprofessional.com.au today.

Hello FiiT professionals and welcome to another fit podcast, I’m your host Brett Campbell and today, well actually it’s not today, it could be today when you’re listening, but for me currently it’s ten fourty-one P.M.  You’re probably thinking I’m crazy sitting up, calling a podcast at this time, but the reason for that is I have a very special gust today I’ve been trying to get this bloke on the call for a long time now and of course, both of us having busy schedules. We just always couldn’t clash. But this gentleman I’ve got on the air today, I met this guy about probably three years ago and I met him in San Diego.  We were at a mastermind group together and basically we just kicked it off on a few nice cold drinks later and we began chatting and we found some real good synergy there and this guy I’m going to introduce you to in a moment, he’s someone I actually look up to in the fitness industry and regards to how he’s been able to build what he’s been able to build and we’re going to talk a little more about that, but this guy’s name is Michael Parella or Master P as I call him and this guy here when he was telling us his story in San Diego, I just thought it was absolutely inspirational and I wanted to be able to share it with everyone, especially on this podcast, so Michael, well his background is in the martial arts area. You know a few years ago he created his own martial arts studio and then he found out all about the internet and the world wide web and you know he started creating websites for the martial arts and fast forward four years and Michael now has one of the fastest and largest growing fitness franchises in the United States and in the world with three-hundred and twenty franchises in four different countries and we’re just talking before the podcast is going to be going in to six countries; they are going to Germany.

Brett: Michael, mate where do we start here?  Tell us a little bit about your background Michael, because I really like your story from where you came from and how things erupted. So handing it over to you mate.

Michael: Cool, well listen I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk to all my buddies in Australia. So like you said before we had met a few years ago and I always think it’s kind of a humble story, but it does seem to get people a little excited because I was in such a low point and if I could do it anyone can do it.  I’ve been in the martial arts industry for about thirty years as far as training myself. I’m forty-six years old and up to about 2007, I had a very, very successful martial arts school, had several at different times, I did manage to sell a few successfully.

So through a series of really just bad decisions and some, I don’t know I don’t want to say bad luck because I think you make your own luck, but some bad decisions and I got a divorce and at the time my wife was very entrenched in the facility, I also got kind of like hoodwinked by this like phony investor guy that was coming in and I was really interested in chasing the money, you know, he promised all these things and I through judgment out the window and got a little greedy I think, and I made a series of bad decisions and I drove a facility that was doing probably about fifty-thousand dollars U.S. a month within a year I drove it down to ten grand a month. Which was no easy feat, I actually ditch it off every day, so it was just awful and it was the worst of the worst and you know, if anyone knows the story like I was the guy that my one of my employees was staying with me, his mother fortunately was a hoarder. I don’t know if you have any of those hoarding shows in Australia, but they have those awful shows here. People just keep every bit of things they’ve ever purchased in their life, just the house is a mess and it’s unlivable, so his mom is a hoarder, but she hoarded food amongst all things and she had some basement freezers that you were actually expecting like “Silence of the Lambs” with all the freezers having body parts in them, but they were frozen TV dinners, expired Microwave TV dinners, that kind of thing, so you know he would bring them and that’s what we’d eat every day, so I had a rule, you know, I’d only eat them if they were two years old or less.  So 2005 was the cutoff for what I would be willing to eat, but I was just broker than broke, you know, and I don’t know the way of explaining it, but like my house was in foreclosure, my car was in risk of being repossessed, I used to park in blocks away from the house and walk four or five blocks home every night, so the repo guy wouldn’t find it and I was actually stealing electricity from neighboring businesses to keep my facility open, and it was just the most awful thing ever, I never want to go back to it, so the only successful part in that is that I have such a great fear of going back to that position that it just drives me to move forward, so.  Fast-forwarding a bit, I was going to get out of the industry and I don’t know if most people have felt this way at some point, but I was just like so beaten, I was like, “I’m done”.  I’ve been doing this for twenty something years, it was like “I can’t do it anymore”.  And I decided to research internet marketing and direct response marketing and I wasn’t satisfied with the way that, for me, the way the martial arts industry had taught me how to market, you know how to acquire and leads or build relationships with clients and, but I thought I was really smart and I was going to go out in the internet marketing space and I was going to write an e-book and become a millionaire.  Not. You know, just didn’t happen that way.  So, but in the time that I did that and I kind of being like a hermit for a few months where I was working like fourteen to sixteen hours a day no joke, in my underwear, growing a beard, not showering for two days, I was just so engulfed in internet marketing and I was so enthralled by what I was learning, I was like “there’s got to be a good way to do this”.  And what I emerged from, like hanging out in a cave for a few months, I came up with the idea to build a great direct response website that would get me leads, you know I wasn’t satisfied with what my online marketing presence was doing before and I knew this was the way that we were going to market in the future, and I know that we know that now, but I still think that this is like you have to become a wizard at marketing your brand and yourself online, so I started doing that early on, about four years ago, and it worked amazingly.

I mean, I was stuck in a business where I wasn’t getting seven or eight prospects a month within my facility and now it was within the first months of launching a new website I made I was getting nineteen to twenty, like in the first month, I got nineteen paid introductory enrollments.  So I went away from the free thirty-day type offers that so many martial arts schools and fitness centers are doing still, and you know what, it doesn’t work, there’s a myriad of reasons why that relationship is kind of tricky, you know, people don’t believe you get something for nothing, and they’re very suspect and we all know it’s a trick, you know, you try and get them in for the free thirty-days and then you kind of present them with a hopefully irresistible offer to get them started, and I just didn’t like it.  So I went with the paid introductory enrollment and it was the same time kind of like the group-on as a deal site emerged, you know about four years ago and it was widely successful, so I did that the same time, not even knowing that group-on existed or any of the deal sites at the time and it worked really well and I got more prospects in one month than I had seen in probably three months, and I think we closed sixteen of the nineteen people, like they were the last humans on earth that were going to come in to the facility.

So that worked well, it was like next month twenty six people we closed,  then it was twenty two, then it was seven people we closed, twenty nine, and we were doing great and in a few months I kind of got my facility back on its feet again were I went back from like ten grand I think we were doing the high twenties and thirties and you know, I could pay my car off and save my house and things like that, so from there I started marketing a fitness kickboxing program that I was doing for years but I just didn’t know how to brand it and market it right, and that program proved so well that I decided to license a website app. That was creating a website service where I was going to help generate online enrollment for locations throughout the country. The trick was that I decided to offer the very inexpensively but I was going to do the online marketing  and I was going to collect the introductory fee, it was like a twenty-dollar fee, you got 3 classes and it worked really well, so you know, fast forwarding we’d probably do three to four thousand of those a month right now, at the same time I started reaching out to every contact I had and everyone I knew and tell them about this wonderful service that I would guarantee for ninety days if you didn’t get at least ten online registrations I’d give you all your money back no questions asked. I think maybe I had to do that 5 times over 3 years, it worked so well, but fast forwarding now, I took a business that didn’t exist four years ago with no money and a home office and with no debt and I think that this year at the end of four years will crack the 5 million dollar mark.  So that was a big, you know, big jump from expired microwave TV dinners, and worried about my car being repossessed, so now we converted from a kickboxing license, we converted to a franchise which was the next logical step and we packed the entire system up, I currently own 3 franchises myself, so I’m the franchiser but I’m also a franchise-e of three locations, soon to be a fourth, that was I was there yesterday to close on a few leases that should be done within the next few weeks.  So I should have 6 before the year ends.  But I have 3 of them that are operational now that have been open for my original one for several years and one I opened 20 months ago and one I opened 9 months ago. We’re currently doing three-hundred new memberships a month, collectively, and that is consistently for the last seven or eight months I have one of them that I opened up not exactly cheap, they cost me about 180,000$ to open, no debt on those, I hit the breakeven points at somewhere between six and eight months and I got my entire investment month in about eighteen months, but I have one facility that’s not very big, it’s got nineteen hundred sq. feet up and down stairs, it’s currently doing about eighty five to ninety-two thousand a month, and it only cost me maybe forty-eight grand a month to run. Another one I opened up about eight months ago, it just broke seventy thousand dollars a month, it costs me somewhere in the low forties to run. So they’re doing really great and my plan is to really open up about 100 corporate units throughout this country along with building a franchise as well, and you know I had told you we’re all going to go to Germany next month. We’re going to be doing about ten locations there, we have two locations in Australia currently we’re hoping to get more there in Perth area and we’re in Canada, we’re about to go into Argentina. So it’s really exciting and almost a bit surreal, but that’s kind of like the whole story in a nutshell, what we still do is my company provides website marketing services for the martial arts industry and we really have a kind of out of the box approach of teaching people the importance of a different type of customer service experience, how we market and brand a business and the way we connect with clients or perspective clients, and there’s just so much difference, I feel like everything I learned in the first twenty years of my business was just wrong,  I literally, on like a personal level I purged every marketing book I had ever purchased prior to three years ago, I threw everything out because I thought it was just, you know, there were marketing tricks and techniques but it wasn’t like a global perspective of how I want my brand to be perceived, it was like, oh, turn your business card into a marketing tool or use a long sign, it just really wasn’t what I was looking for, it wasn’t really what the big brands, look at Nike, Harley Davidson and these brands and I wasn’t doing that and that’s kind of what every day I’m working to become more of and learn more about, does that make sense?

Brett: Yeah, mate look, 100%, and I mean I could, I could just let you keep talking and like I said earlier for hours and questions just pop up from that and I guess what I always look to is when I hear people like yourself talking about new beginnings and where it comes from and something I really took out of that was when you said you closed these people like they were the last humans on earth, so that right there is lesson, and if you’re a regular listener, that we really preach that whole thing where you treat every single customer like they’re your last one and because you know while someone like yourself, you’re doing so many memberships per month and I think you said 300 memberships per month for one of your locations.

Michael: Well that’s 300 total, so it’s about 100 per month on average at each of them.  The funny thing is, you know, and I hope this is in line with where you’re going with this, so I have 3 locations averaging 300 memberships per month and I look back like 5 or 6 years ago at the customer service experience (CSE) I would sit at the front desk and if members came in, they weren’t even important enough for me a lot of the time for me to even avert my eyes from the computer screen to them or stop whatever I was doing, I wouldn’t even acknowledge them, that’s how bad it was. I learned how to service members and I didn’t even acknowledge them when they walked in. I didn’t thank them for coming in, I didn’t thank them when they left, it was awful, the worst thing possible.

Brett: What’s the turning point, what was it that when you said you didn’t acknowledge your members, etc; what made that change for you? And what are you doing now?

Michael: I think you hit the nail on the head, I mean I was so desperate to sign up every single person I was so broke, I think what happened was I began to appreciate people when they came in because like, oh these guys are saving my car, these seven people I enrolled this week are saving my house, so it was a totally different mindset than before.  Before I didn’t give a shit whether someone came in or you didn’t come in. I was like wow. I think I was doing well when I was in a complacent stage, but like I didn’t care, I didn’t equate the success. But now in my life, I have nice things I have a nice home I have two luxury cars that are paid off, no loans on them and I really thank my clients, even just mentally every single day because I recognize that they’re responsible for me having these things, having a lifestyle where I don’t have financial worry or stress or pressure and I can enjoy myself, but I acknowledge that by doing good things for my clients, by helping them and being sincere in my motivation to help them get to wherever they need to get.  So I think that was it, just I was so appreciative to have anyone, I was going to feed my dogs, I have two labs, I had to go to the supermarket, I don’t know if you guys have those over there, but like I had to take all the change in my pocket and dump it into a machine that counts how much it is and you bring a receipt and you had to bring it from there over to the cashier, it’s like a walk of shame, you had to walk down and hand the cashier a receipt and she gives you 37$ in cash and I had to go buy dog food and it was, because I didn’t feed them expired TV dinners of course and it was like I couldn’t get any worse, I couldn’t get worse, and I think that everyone says oh you have to hit that point of desperation, and I wish I didn’t hit it, it wasn’t a fun time by any means, it’s easy to look back now, but it was really painful, but again in a long roundabout way I’m getting back to the fact that I appreciate every single person who came in because I knew that this person was going to enable me to eat tomorrow, this person was going to enable me to feed my dogs, pay my car insurance, you know save my house. And I just don’t think I’ve lost that, does that kind of answer the question I guess?

Brett: Yeah, 100%, mate and again thanks for being so open with that, so I guess what the listeners sitting at home thinking or whatever they’re doing while they’re listening to this, the big question everyone is going to have and the question that  I get quite often is how do you get all these members turning up to your facilities, so obviously it is a whole heap of tricks and strategies that you’ve learned over time, but what would be a couple of your key marketing strategies that would be most beneficial for the fitness professional and personal trainers to look at first?

Michael: Well, I think the first thing is, you need the right website to communicate to your prospects and I think when you look at your website, you get very involved with who we are and what we think everyone wants to know and I think that’s the big mistake.  You need to find out exactly what people need to do to get started with you and you have to eliminate everything on your website that’s not about that, it’s not about you and the 742 certifications you have and all the accomplishments you have done, it’s really about what’s in it for them so using and changing your website and saying, ok, first of all when I go here the person going online has the attention span of a ferret on a double espresso. So they want to know in like a millisecond what do I do, where do I go, and how do I do it, and if you’re website isn’t answering that question like in seconds, then psychologically you’re losing your clients, they may not click off your website, but they’re already in another world. So I think you have to be really clear, you have to collect a lead base on your website so you need to make sure you have an opt-in area on your website to get people in, you need to have a great series of success stories, showing people what happens when they use a product, you have to make sure your website is designed not by a 13-yr old kid with bracers in your neighbors basement, but by a company that is great graphically, because listen, aesthetics are important, aesthetics you know, you have a luxury car and you have a baseline car and aesthetics come into play, it’s the aesthetics on the car, it’s the stitching on the seats, it’s all those little details that make the difference because otherwise for all we know the engines are all the same, the chassis are all the same, the axels are all the same, if you’re not a car buff it doesn’t  matter to you, I press the gas, the car goes, so it’s all the other features that make it special. You have to think of your website that way, you have to make sure it’s designed extremely well, you can’t look cheesy.  You have to have all the bells and whistles, but you also have to follow the rules of simplicity and making sure people get what they want as fast as they can see it, you need to make sure you have a compelling offer, you need to make sure you have an iron-clad guarantee, you don’t stand behind your product, you know, no one is going to.  So I think that has to happen, I also think you need to have a great responder, because it’s not prospects and members, its suspects, prospects, and members. Its people who are interested in buying, but maybe not people who are interested in buying right now and you have to take that opportunity as a good friend of ours says all the time you have to get them to trust you.  I think you have to get those in place to have leads, and then you have to make sure in this day and age your reputation is probably one of the most important things to manage online and you have to either subscribe to a service or diligently register yourself on every directory site for your area, build citations, things that link back to your website to get you a high page rank, you have to make sure you’re managing your online reputation and I’ll give you one or two quick tricks that work really well for us, we do those bracelets, you know the rubber bracelets that people have today where you have either your logo branded on it or your website or the name of your company and every time one of our members writes a review on either yelp or Google + we give them a bracelet as long as they show us a link, so we have been giving out about 60 or 70 of them per month in every facility. And that works really well. Another way that we help is, I ran a client contest for everyone who had purchased a website from us. I had given 500$ out to a member who, I’ll give you the link and tell you the person’s name so you can look them up online yourself, but this person got a 100 Google+ reviews inside 7 days.  And I hope he doesn’t mind me saying his name, his name is John Wai and if you do look, I know it’s in Florida, but if you do look up John Wai Kung Fu, or John Wai Plantation Florida, some as semblance of those strings. You’ll find his Google+ account and you’ll find that it’s over 100 reviews and if you look at the dates of when they happen you’ll find that it’s within a 7 day period, so here’s what happened with this.  I baited my clients because I want them to do well, with a contest that I’d give away to anyone, any school and any martial arts school who had 100 reviews or more in whatever period of time, the first one to get 100 reviews starting from this day, I gave them 500$ dollars.  What John did, which was smart, is he gave them a member appreciation party and would use the 500$ towards throwing them a party.  Within 7 days he had all the reviews.  So I wish I had thought of that idea as well, it was a great idea by John, so if you guess browse his website you’ll find that as well, so it’s how that’s so important because say if you’re a restaurant or movie theatre I mean people are looking at reviews, I mean I wouldn’t check out any movie without looking at reviews and searching for online reviews because I don’t want to waste my time with a bad meal or stuck in a 2 hour movie that’s a bomb.  Although I don’t think that fitness centers and martial arts aren’t the most mobile, because I’m not just standing in the middle of an apartment like hey where’s the nearest fitness center, let me check it out, but people are searching for, they are looking for you on yelp and Google+ to see if you’re reputable or not and if don’t manage your reputation, I mean I see clients, new clients all the time and you guys can probably do the same thing in Australia, I see people at 2 reviews, 3 reviews, and 2 of them are crappy, people are more inclined to right something crappy than good so your bad reviews are going to rack up first and if you can be the kind who gets 50, 60, 70 reviews, you are head and shoulders above everyone else.  So I think that is an important key, and you can do it as simple as making a spreadsheet, taking links of all the directories, to find them type 50 best directories in all of Australia or whatever country you’re in, and the internet will supply you with the data.  The Google gods will be kind and give you a list of them and all you do is make a directory and make sure it’s the same address and phone number/business information on every one of them and you plug all that stuff in, and every week you see if you got a review, if you didn’t get a review, how to ask your members to review, give them the links on Facebook, ask them, say hey I’m really feeling the love lately in class and I was wondering if you guys could do me a favor and tell me the thing you love best about our facility or the thing you love the best about training with us and if you would write a little giddy about it on xyz site here, I’d really appreciate it, and people don’t mind doing that, you know, if you’ve done a good job in your business and you’ve shown people that you care about them, they’re feeling very reciprocal.  The 3rd thing I think is so important today, besides your website and reviews, is using deal sites. Now, I convinced a rep on group-on 4 years ago to let me become an aggregate, which means to let me post deals on behalf on my license to franchise. Well fast forward 4 years in the states I’m group-on’s 4th largest customer and we’re the #1 fitness deal in all of the United States, I run about 6 deals per year per location and I run about 2 national deals, which means there are, you know the 290 or so of them in the United States, they’re all on one weekend or all for one week.  We are currently doing about 2 million dollars a year in total group-on sales. It’s about half for us half for group-on so that actually, you know we’re at the half million dollar mark this year, group-on is responsible for 1 million of it, which is really cool and especially now because I’ve done the work it’s kind of plug-n-play just kind of sit back and leads come in. The locations are happy because they get so many deals per year that they could never get if they got it on their own, but group-on also emailed our brand out, I think last year alone hit 24 million subscribers.  I don’t know what that would cost if I were to buy lists or something like that, also that it’s a trusted site, you know, I couldn’t pay for that, and that’s been huge for us, not just because it’s generated revenue from the sales, but it has driven lots of traffic to our websites, and that has resulted in residual sales, so I think that people sometimes look at these deal sites and think oh that’s bad, let me tell you, I teach clients how to convert between 25 and 45% of those members to come in and pay. So you’re not going to close 90% of them, but I mean you’re getting free leads, you’re getting paid to get leads and you’re getting paid for exposure, I mean there’s nothing better than that, you might say oh yeah but it’s a pain in the ass I have to sit there and this person’s not serious and, first of all, you have an opportunity there to convince these people that you’re the business to continue going to.  They didn’t buy from you, they bought from group-on or another deal site as the trusted vendor, you we’re a 3rd party and they’re giving you a shot and you have an opportunity to just knock them over with just an amazing customer service experience. And there are some people that no matter what you do they’re never going to join, and that’s ok, be cool with those people, give them a free t-shirt you know.  Make sure they say something awesome about you, as opposed to them being pissed that you tried to pressure them into a sale.  But I think that deal sites are the number one way that you can get traffic, you can’t  beat it, you know you can’t do immediate buying or paper click stuff that will ever amount to the volume that you can do through group-on and if you are, and I think group-on is pretty big in Australia as well, there’s so many deal sites over there.  But dude I mean it’s free traffic, yeah go ahead.

Brett: My question on the group-on is now, for those in Australia, and I’m not too sure what the States is like with that, what you’ll find now is there’s so many personal trainers out there or fitness businesses that are basically prostituting your services so you’ll pay, the deal may be 19$ and you’ll get 6 weeks worth of a boot camp and you’ll pay, 19$ and you’ll get 5 personal training lessons within a month of boot camp.

Michael: Well I mean, the same type of deals happen here as well.  What’s the primary question though about it?

Brett: Yeah, so what is your way around that, that makes for your deal getting taken up as opposed to the price shoppers who will go and click for the 6 week boot camp or the 6 week program, the 19$ versus the offer that you’re going to produce.  Because I guess that if you look at it, you’re offer that you’re producing on the deal that I saw it needs to be a comfortable deal on an ongoing basis right?

Michael: Well, I think that’s where the rub is, I think that in that past, and let me ask yourself the same thing, did you offer free, any type of free trial in the past? You know going back a while?

Brett: Yeah, so we actually, we run, we utilized a paid trial and also we still are utilizing a single day, we used to run that and that never worked and we got it down to, we do offer a day tryout, but we’ve moved on from people attending, but we still do dabble with that.

Michael: All right well let me give you a take on that, number one, I don’t think the free trial will ever do as well for you in the long run as a paid trial, with that being said what I’ve learned from dealing with group-on, I’ve run this year alone, I’ve run over 650 deals, so the data that I compile and that group-on shares with me, is invaluable, I’ve run 16 hundred deals in the last 4 years, so just to imagine the amount of data, and I’ve run maybe 180 thousand buys actual things people bought, so mass amount of data, so here’s what I know sessions for adults, sessions sell better than time, when it’s time, people think that I’m going to run out of it, it’s something that’s going to happen that next week anyway, so I won’t be able to go that next week it’s not a good deal anyway.  Don’t sell time, sell sessions and sell things with a long term expiration date, go for the 1 yr, you’ll get more people in and I know some people will say, well I wanted to come in earlier, ok well you know I want lots of things to happen, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen the way you want it to, so I want to get maximum amount of people coming in, so I  want to do something with number of sessions, 4 sessions, 10 sessions, 15 sessions, whatever it is, people seem to respond better to that, so that would be the number one thing you could do differently  that would set you aside from the competitors in the area.  The second part of that is, it’s like, if you can’t convince somebody, in 5 or 6 sessions to join your facility, you might as well just pack up and leave because if you try to bang people over the head, that come in from a deal site, that come in on the first day, you’re making a very big mistake.  Your first day is about first impressions, not about asking them to join, although we do ask people, we do let them know that there’s an offer like you can save 100$ off the initial startup fee by starting today, but we don’t pressure them and we only keep it limited to that one day.  We’ll allow them to do that pretty much throughout the entire trial period and it’s a no pressure thing that’s going to be very important, but you have an opportunity and I think that you should look at deal sites as equal opportunity, you are different from other people, where other competitors will try to bang them over the head the first day, you have a chance here to say hey, I’m going to show you how awesome this place is, I’m going to make it so that you never want to leave and you can’t wait to come back.  And if you keep those 2 things in mind you’ll begin to create a great experience because if you don’t have the kind of mindset to start creating great experience by knowing I want to make sure that when people leave I have to push them out the door and I want there to be a line of people out there before I open up in the morning.  If you just keep that in mind, you’ll be able to answer all the proper questions, you’ll know what I can do to make them do that, that’s not a problem, but as far as the sites go, time does not sell as well as sessions, sessions are tangible. I hand you a ticket to go somewhere, you know 5 sessions, it’s like a punch card or you know 5 individual passes like there’s something tangible, time, you know, there’s something we’re all losing, we’ll never have enough of, and we’re all running out of, so I don’t think that’s the right thing there. Did I pretty much answer the question Brett? I kind of talk sometimes…

Brett: I’m listening and I’m sure everyone else is too because there’s so many golden gyms out there and I think that it was, I guess that the main part of the question was what’s your take on other businesses.

Michael: Oh, I remember where we were, my A.D.D. was ticking in, ok. So you offer a service free, so anything paid makes it more valuable than free, so if you’re able to convert people from free, you’re going to be able to convert people from paid, but nobody will ever think that the prospects equate, oh it’s 19$ for these 4 sessions, that values them at 5$ per session, oh wow now he’s going to tell me that they’re at 15$ a session? I can’t possibly understand that, I don’t think that happens, because people are going to base the value of your service on the service.  And the facility, and the experience.  They know it’s a deal, you’re going to a restaurant for a third of the price of what it’s going to cost for dinner, they know that’s the deal but they have a very low risk way to try you out, so I don’t think like many people say, my monthly rate is 149$, how am I going to give them 6 weeks for 69$ or 6 weeks for 39$ it doesn’t equate. It’s not supposed, and don’t think that.  When you hear that and you hear people asking you for a discount and you hear people saying well, it’s only 39$ for 6 weeks or it’s 149$ well my friend is paying someone down the road 69$ that means you messed up.  When you go into a high end car dealership, a Mercedes dealership, a BMW dealership, you don’t even think of haggling on the price, you don’t even think of haggling for a discount, because you’re in a showroom that’s as posh as a Las Vegas hotel, you are being handled by a guy who’s dressed nicely, whose very accommodating, who calls you sir, or Mr. and your last name and they’re providing a certain level of high end experience for you. You feel important when you go in there, you feel respected.  Now if your facility doesn’t do those things, if you’ve got shitty fold up chairs in your lobby, if you’ve got a ratty carpet, if you’ve got dirty equipment or your stuff is all disheveled, you’re going to be discount center and then when you do a 39$ for 6 weeks, they’re going to think you’re worth that.  It’s up to you to make sure that the core of your facility and the design that the classes you actually have are kick-ass, that your customer service experience is exemplary, you need to make sure those things are in place, and that your marketing needs to be as good as all those things because that’s how they’re going to first perceive you when you’re first coming in, so you need those 4 or 5 steps to make sure that no one complains about the bugs and people look at it like they got a gift getting it for 39$ and they’re happy to pay whatever it is.  Now I think I answered it right?

Brett: I think you did mate, you got it

Michael: I’m old it takes me a while

Brett: It’s all right, so it’s just I’m aware of the timing and I know you’ve got to go and start your day off and I’ve got to go get to bed in a moment, but quick question, what have you found today to best offer, that you’ve utilized before have you changed it up, have you tested different offers with group-on or what have you found to be most successful for your business?

Michael: Well, I’ll give you a, we in July 2 years ago, we did our first split test with group-on and we actually asked them about it, and they were right at the time when I guess they were experimenting with it, and I think we were one of the first companies to actually do the split test offer. So we initially had 4 classes and they had personal trainers and training sessions. We decided to do a hop over where when you click on the offer, it now says 4 classes for 30$ or 10 classes for 50$.  Wow, the higher price offer change, was a game changer for us because for about 70% of people took the higher price offer.  That created a lot more revenue for my company but from my client’s point of view; they had an easier time converting people who had a higher investment, people who became more invested and purchased a high number of sessions seemed to convert better. Now as far as the offers, I think six weeks eight weeks is long, I don’t think adults need that long to make a decision about something, if it was concerning kid facilities I think that would be a little bit different. But I think the short term less than 10 classes, because the facility wants to make money from it, that, that’s not the reason to do it. I think sticking with the, like on the website we do 3 or 5 classes on our group-on site we do 4 to 10, and overwhelmingly the higher number either the 5 or 10 always sells more. So that’s one thing I’ve found out for sure and having a price point anywhere between 5-6 dollars a class seems to work really well.  If you’re hearing oh it’s expensive or oh I don’t know I have to think about it, you messed up, it’s nothing to do with the deal, the deal site just brought you free people. If you screw that up it’s all on you not the deal site.

Brett: Fantastic mate, and you, thanks for sharing that perfect, that’ll give a lot of people some great information.  I guess a couple of key things that I want to bring out there because I felt this way with many trainers as well in regards to people who have gone and seen out the deal and, for example, you know, their website how to collect the leads and the process from once you actually get the lead to then becoming a client, make sure that you got that all taught and….

Michael: Can I make a suggestion? The problem is with deal sites is they don’t give you the leads.  Here’s something that we’ve done, and we don’t do it all the time but we do it when we run national deals and it works very well, first of all, your website has to look like the service you’re offering, if you’re offering a cow bell class your website can’t look like a zimbra website, there has to be a consistency between your website and the deal you’re offering.  Even using the same images, same colors, don’t just go with the stock photo, don’t let them pick the photo for you they’re all going to want to write the copy for you, try to use something that connects you to the website, most websites don’t let you brand, they don’t let you put a logo anymore.  The first year with did that with group-on and then they scratched that and everyone else followed suit.  However, 83% of all people from group-on at least refer to the company’s website, make sure that group-on gets a schedule link, this is really important, so it should say in your schedule. Huge difference in sales between having it and not having it.  Make sure that your website is congruent with the deal site.  So if you have an offer that’s the group-on deal, make sure that the offer on the other site is not as good as the group-on deal, but here’s one kicker that will make a big difference. Make a popover on your website during the time that you’re running a group-on deal and say for group-on clients only, put your name and email in here to receive this free report on xyz and what you’ll do is even group-on people who do not buy, you’ll be able to leverage the traffic from the group-on site and start collecting leads that you put into your funnel and just like you said a few moments ago that the responder is going and everything else. So using that popover and it comes up 2 seconds after the website loads where they’re going to click the link from group-on.  The other way to do it is to actually give group-on a specific link where the popover only comes up using that link and if they go say if you were Australianfitness.com you’d give group-on Australianfitness.com/popover.html that would be the link and that’s where your website would come and 2 seconds later the popover would show up. So that’s the way to get the most out of the deal site. Now you average the leads over a year and you’ve got maybe 180 leads, converted 30 more or 20 more contracts throughout that year, which is not unreasonable, and if you’re average contract is 1000$ that’s a 20000$ nugget you just got per year just doing that one thing. Not increasing your work output, not spending more money, but doing one little twist, one little tweak that will make a difference online.

Brett: If you’re sitting there listening and you head’s spinning right now I really suggest you go back through this podcast and actually put it on slow-mo and write down everything that might stick out to you because honestly the..

Michael: Now I’m in New York and I’m doing my best not to speak fast, because you guys in Australia actually speak as fast as we do, but slow-mo might help, but I’m trying to slow it down guys.

Brett: Nah it’s wonderful mate, you can speak fast because the more information you share, it’s quite funny you say that because I actually would’ve been probably 2 years ago I ran a deal and I actually did it with my online workout product I was amongst the first personal trainers to work with scoup-on which is another big one over here in Australia, and ended up doing about 700 sales and getting about 1200 leads from it and those people came on to the database because we had that setup.  So I totally agree with the setting up of…

Michael: Now that’s an interesting thing you bring up I think here’s where you have to understand something about your business to understand whether or not your deals sites are the best thing ever, do you know, not on a deal site, what your average cost to sell that product was, like what was the cost to acquire a lead and what was the cost to acquire a purchase? Do you recall on that number?

Brett: Back in that day, my lead that was one of the big starts to my lead I only had like about a 300 leads in my database at that time and now obviously it’s grown substantially in that area, but the cost I wouldn’t have even known. I’ve hardly sold any of the product as it was and I guess I’ve used the deal sites just to leverage it from that angle.

Michael: Well, look at this for a second. Say you’re a fitness center and you run an advertisement in a local newspaper. And it’s 400$, let’s just imagine you get eight calls, now you have paid 50$ per call and of the 8 calls 4 of them show up, now you have paid 400$ to get those 4 to show up. And let’s say of the 4 you’re really good and you close ¾  you paid 400$ to get 3 people to sign up. It is 125$ per sign up. It’s a lot. Now you had a product, and let’s just say on average you had a 97$ info product many people would say it might cost them 15$ to 20 $ to make a sale and you might say hey great it’s an initial product it doesn’t cost much money, but it cost me 4$ to get a lead and every one of 4 leads gets me a sale, I’m selling for 100 and I’m making 84$ profit I’m doing great I’m making 4 and ½ times profit.  That’s awesome, now you were in a deal site, collected leads, now the great part about this is, so 700 people bought, you now have those customers you got paid to get those leads so you’re in negative, you didn’t pay anything and you got potential 1200 clients, because what happens is it’s not the product that you sell today, it’s the product you sell tomorrow and the next day, so what’s the lead worth in the future and the next time you sell to 700 people, guess how much you have to pay? Zero. You send out an email, you’ve got people who have gained trust in you and have bought from you once before which scientifically makes them more likely to buy from you a second time 15 times more than the 1st purchase, so then you’ve got 1200 leads doing something else that got you leads from people who didn’t buy from group-on or scoup-on, whatever it was, and now you have an opportunity to market those people for free.  No cost. So if you do your cost-analysis in your fitness center, first of all, you don’t know what your average person costs you to acquire then you need to go back to your drawing board and figure that out, but once you do know that you could say, you know, you cost me 47$ to acquire a 1 yr contract on average which, let’s just say is 1500$ but I can get, since it’s only 47$, I can get paid 20$ to get the lead and I can close 30% of them and it’s an astronomically better number.  So I think that if you think about it in that context you say, well why wouldn’t I do that don’t think about what their perceived value is of what they spent that’s not important, think about what it costs for your lead and think about it now as an opportunity for free, not only free, you got paid to get them. You know which is the part you’ve got to wrap your head around.  And you’ve always done that and I’ve always done that and now, there’s this new revolution where you’re getting paid to give you leads, it doesn’t get any better than that.

Brett: No, I definitely agree mate, it’s actually a good little wake up, for everyone out there to actually if you don’t know what it costs you to get a lead or even a client or contract you need to sit down and you need to look at numbers because when it comes down to, and I noticed you said 15 times more likely to buy after they’ve already purchased from you and that’s where it comes down to because it’s quite funny you say this because I know one person where actually bought one of those highly discounted items, it was a 47$ product the guy was selling it for 15$ and I got half of it of course, little did I know one of those people had actually gone on to purchase a product worth several hundred dollars which was quite amazing when you look back through it, the journey, little did I know when I set up  this deal that I’d be selling hundreds of dollars worth of products.

Michael: I think you hit the nail on the head, I think that giving it away for free would’ve still made sense to you.

Brett: Yeah.

Michael: I met with someone yesterday who owns Marilyn Monroe, I met with a company in New York, that owns the license to her and he shared a story with me and they own a lot of licenses actually as they’re a licensing company, they were approached by a cosmetic company that wanted to use this license and it would cost x and we’re going to do y amount of business and this company said ok we want x number of million dollars and they said, well, we’ll give you a couple hundred thousand, and they said why would we do that, well we’re going to be advertising a 20million dollar campaign advertising this.  So this guy gave this company the license for free, or close to free, and I thought this is insane, then he told me about all the deals he subsequently closed and one of them has to do with apple, and now apple is dealing with Marilyn Monroe’s image he was able to close more deals because of the advertising campaign that the cosmetics did, so it’s really cool if you think about things in that context, so it’s a little bit like blows your mind in the big picture but that’s the way you have to think, so if you gave your membership away for nothing granted they have to pay somebody for it, so there’s perceived value there for it and there’s commitment but man if you gave your stuff away like that how could you use that idea in other things? For instance if you make a product you know that you always trying to find people with big lists because you want to partner with them, but imagine you gave those guys 100% commission on whatever you felt the product was going to be and like wow that’s crazy I’m losing all my money, but no you’re acquiring maybe hundreds or thousands of potential customers for you to sell your next products or services.  Just think who you could give your stuff away to that would promote you and advertise you more and there’s so many neat things you can think of, you know how can you find a local drink manufacturer, that you can find a way to get your offer on the other side of their cap and you know you’ll agree to sell it in your facilities if they’ll agree to put this offer under all the caps or you’ll pay whatever loyalty or coupon code online, or approach a local brand of fitness wear in your facility, and something that’s your demographic, maybe a skate shop or something beachy, I know you guys have water in Australia right? So something like surfing and there was another tag put in every shirt that gave you, once you bought this it gave you two free sessions at xyz fitness center, like using things like that, using other brands to bring you leverage, like this is what I do with my franchise, I got group-on to partner with me, they fortunately paid me money to but I got them to give me brand exposure and I think that all of us no matter how big or small we are we are a brand and we always have to look at our 1200 sq. ft. fitness center or our chain of 50000 sq. ft. fitness centers we have to look at us as a brand and the internet provides you will the ability to be as big as anybody, because anybody can make a website, anybody can do lead generation, anybody can do link building, can build citations, build a reputation and can link with almost anybody. The cool thing is that anyone you know that’s in reach and whether you’re reaching out to someone that helps a life or whatever site it is, there’s ways man you got to start thinking outside of the box, and this is what I’m spending my time doing now, I mean I’m telling you all these things and I haven’t done all these things yet, but it’s a direction I’m moving in and it’s where I want o align myself with, so I can have other people benefit from my service or product but also promote it for me.  So I hope that that little story from yesterday helps a little bit, but really for me it was like wow.

Brett: Mate, I’m an advocate for that and whenever I’m talking to you about whatever it’s the whole thing of what are you willing to give up at the front to get the sale.  You know I get emails everyday from trainers going, help me, how’d you build your fan page so fast?  How’d you get so many people in your database? And it all comes back to what did I give up at the front to get there? And that’s something that I was living true to was, it’s just something that keeps me focused and holding on to, like a said a few minutes ago I know you have to keep to a schedule and we could talk all day, but I want to leave the call with any words of wisdom or any advice you’d give someone out there, and I know that you gave some earlier like businesses, and you’re a man of many analogies and so forth so give us your favorite analogy and something we can take home and give out.

Michael: Well, I think we talked earlier and I always think of business like a hand you’ve got a bunch of different fingers and each one of them is a different fastest of your business and you just don’t know when you start which direction you’re going to go in.  But as you move forward and you try to grow each one of these fingers, you’ll find which one grows the fastest, becomes the fattest, where the low hanging ones are, you can’t always know what the end is, you have to monitor all these different areas, see where your best opportunity is and then run with it, but the other part is, my first business mentor I ever had told me one thing I’ve never forgotten and it always pushes me forward and his name is Andrew Wood and his, he always said action creates opportunity and sometimes you don’t know what’s going to happen. You initiate conversation, you have lunch, I once organized a business lunch with a bunch of businesses in my community, as a way to get us all together on the same page to fortify ourselves with the commerce of the area.  The hair salon wasn’t referring people to me, I wasn’t referring people to the restaurant and from that a lot of really cool things happen, I won’t go into detail about that today, but I just took action, I didn’t know what the result was going to be but I started moving forward and it’s kind of luck ready, fire, aim. You know everyone’s kind of luck ready, aim, fire.  Sometimes you just have to shoot and see what you hit, and those are the things that really drive me forward and I try and remind myself of every day so I can make things happen because to think that you can figure it all out and I know that we’re all, listen, as business owner’s we’re a type personalities right? But as like fitness guys, we’re like triple personalities so we want to control everything.  We want to really know what’s going to happen next and what’s the next step and it’s like man, just get out there and do stuff and the other part of that for me is that done is better than perfect.  You can take time to perfect things, but if everyone who entered the fitness competition did it at the peak of their career, no one would ever enter them.  You’ve got to just do some things when you’re not ready, you’ve got to put your feet to the fire. I don’t know how it’s like in Australia, but like when you buy a house in the States, you’re never ready, you’ve just got to make a commitment and just do it you can’t always have everything in place beforehand. I think there’s too many people so fearful they wait until every condition is right, the planets have aligned, the right horoscope, just get out there and do shit man, just do think about it all day, just get out there and make something happen, and you’re going to make a lot of mistakes, you’re going to screw things up, but as it was explained to me as a young man, to guys stand on the corner, one guy asks every girl to get laid, the other guy doesn’t ask any girl to get laid, so here’s what happens, the guy who doesn’t ask any girl, he doesn’t get slapped in the face, but he doesn’t get laid, the guy who asks every girl to get laid, he gets slapped in the face a lot, but in the end he gets laid too. So if you keep that bizarre analogy in mind, that was actually told by my father, believe it or not, when I was about 15 years old, that’s it man, just get out there and do some shit man, you know, if you mess up, you mess up, make something, happen, and if you have an open mind, you talk to enough people, something cool is going to happen to you.

Brett: Man, I love it! Perfect! Words of wisdom right there.  Look mate I guess, just thanks so much for taking the time out of your day, you know it’s been great chatting to you again and we’ll have to get you on a future episode. No doubt we’re going to get some comments on this and with many questions and we’ll just if you can find time to hop off your new boat that you’ve got there that I’ve seen, well deserved…

Michael: Thanks.

Brett: Look thank you very much mate and to everyone out there listening, I really suggest you re-listen to this podcast, I’m going to do it tomorrow myself, take down some extra notes and some key things, and head over to podcast.professional.com and listen to any future episodes, you can download it on ITunes and to your mobile phone, so, Mike, thanks a lot again my friend and you have a fantastic day.

Michael: Hey it was my pleasure and if any of your clients have any questions feel free to reach out to me on Facebook if it’s something pertaining to this, you know if I can get to you I certainly will, and yeah listen it was a real pleasure…

Brett: Yeah mate and what I’m trying to do is I’m going to put your details underneath this episode in here so people will be able to find you on Facebook and also I’d like to, any other trainers out there who are interested in looking at the kickboxing franchise, it’s all at kickboxing.com and we’ll put some details there as well so you can check it out, and so hey, we’ll see you branching into Australia a lot more rapidly and yeah, looking forward to it.

Michael: Well I hope to see you down there sometime before 2014 and again thanks for the opportunity to chat with you, and the people over there and wish you guys the best of luck, and now I know it’s late for you so go get some rest and I’ll speak to you real soon.

Brett: No problems mate, thanks a lot.

Michael: Thanks Brett. All right. Bye.

Brett: Bye now.

Thanks you for listening to another episode of the FiiT Professional podcast, the number one podcast that will help fitness professionals grow their fitness business. Head over to fiitprofessional.com now to check out the number one business opportunity for fitness professionals.