Episode 5 – The One With John Romaniello

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In this episode Brett interviews his US buddy and fitness expert John Romaniello.

John Romaniello, one of the most highly regarded experts in the fitness industry, has written for a myriad of publications, ranging from Men’s Health to Fast Company, and has been John romaniello fiit featured as an expert on a number of television programs, including Good Morning America.

Romaniello is an angel investor in addition to his writing, and serves as an advisor to nearly a dozen fitness and tech companies. He’s also the author of the New York Times bestseller, Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha.

John is also the head fitness advisor to Fitness and all round legend – Arnold Swarzneggar.

  • In this episode we talk about everything from our MASSIVE night out in VEGAS (WARNING – funny story)
  • To how John produced an online marketing launch that reached $460k in sales in only 3 days.
  • John also explains the origin story on how he became a fitness advisor to quite possibly the most noted figure in the fitness industry – the Governator.
  • We also talk about how to start your very own ONLINE COACHING Business, where the industry is heading and LOADS MORE.

Enjoy

 

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The One With The Brookanator

Transcript of EPISODE 3:

Brett: Welcome to Professionals to another Fiit Professional Podcast. Today, I am very very excited to be speaking to this friend of mine from the other side of the world. It is currently night time for him and it is early morning for me. So, very very excited to be talking to this gentleman who I will introduce to you in a moment. First of all just a quick recap if you haven’t listened to any of the past episodes of Fiit Professional Podcast – what you can simply do is you can actually go to the I-tunes and type in FiiT Professional – F II T – so that’s FiiT with two Is and basically they will bring out the Fiit Professional Podcast and you can subscribe to that and what will happen is every time we upload a webisode you get that uploaded to your file immediately so you will never missing out on these awesome interviews. So, lets get started straight into it today and the gentleman I am going to be speaking to is John Romaniello and John Romaniello, just to give you a bit of a background – he is one of the most highly regarded experts in the fitness industry. He has written a myriad of publications ranging from Men’s Health to Fast Company and has been featured as an expert on a number of television programs, including Good Morning America ! John Romaniello is an angel investor, in addition to his writing and serves as an advisor to nearly a dozen fitness and tech companies. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha. So John Romaniello, welcome aboard buddy !

John: Thank you so much for having me and thank you for that very kind intro directly from my Amazon buyer.

Brett: Yeah…just on that …just on that John Roman … I noticed that you have missed out on a couple of things that I thought you would have on there.. as a fitness advisor now,  we will get into this a little bit more in the episode but you are fitness advisor to the one and only Arnold Schwarzenegger.

John: Yes…yeah …I am… I am one with my collaborating {inaudible} team.  We are the heads of Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s fitness advisory board, which is just weird. So Arnold was actually kind enough to write the foreword for our book which is great. So it’s extremely cool to get to work with him and it is really what we do for him is essentially find and manage content on the website which is we also design some workouts which he himself has done and it’s nice that Arnold has occasionally will do workout that I have to….so that’s fun.

Brett: Yeah yeah that’s brilliant…must be funny, growing up and watching out on the big screen and all of a sudden you are writing for his website.

John: Yes but you know it’s been a fun filled journey. Every now and again I have a moment where I really look back and sort of like go over things and it’s all very strange that these things have happened in this particular order but we all feel very good.

Brett: That’s brilliant buddy. So John I guess getting stuck straight into this, let’s just paint a little bit picture of how we met and so forth and I guess you probably got a different story to me because there was some alcohol in the midst of everything. So we met in Vegas. I went over to Vegas to basically mastermind with the world’s leading internet entrepreneurs and John was actually speaking at this event and then as every event there’s an after party so we went to uh..then actually you might be able to tell me on this.. what was the name of the Club Festival. Its called…

John: Ah….I want to say we went to EXCESS which is … it’s the wheel-in hotel ……not sure why we wandered there but that feels great

Brett: I have been telling this story without being able to actually give the address but that shows how good the story is. Basically John {inaudible} me met there – at the event – and I guess we kicked it off at Excess…how was the night out? I haven’t been able to find out the aftermath of that…but it was spot ready

John: You want that …real …you want like the half or the full story …because this can be real bad…

Brett: We want the full story mate.

John:  Oh..Jesus..all right …So when you last saw me… or when I last remember seeing you we were talking to a couple of girls and then I remember like sort of walking back towards the table where our group was and then I don’t remember anything…at one point I remember falling down back at the table and then all I have is flashes…I .. have this flash where I am walking out of the club and then I have a flash and then it’s a black and then a flash I am in a taxiline and then its like five minutes blackness and then it’s a flash line in the taxi and then it’s a flash two, you don’t have to tell the boys this and then I am standing in front of the elevator vomiting bokshoy into a garbage can….and we had..it’s bad..not a problem and so there was this girl from the event who I was flirting with or whatever and we had sort of like hooked up the night before. So she has been very maternal and sort of like took responsibility for me and so her and my buddy Alex …. got me up to my room and then I remember trying to undress myself….I was trying to take off my shoes but I couldn’t find my feet and…..which happens sometimes …you are drunk…. you couldn’t lose your feet…and so eventually you know she says she will help me with my shoes and she followed up with “Many hands make light work” and I looked at her and I said “That’s a proverb” and then I fell over backwards and passed out and I did not wake up until the next morning. When I woke up…I was at the foot of the bed…like a scrolled up ball like a dog and in my underwear which was like bright red diesel creeps …and I made my way to the bathroom and proceeded to vomit and I just went back and forth from the bed to the bathroom and kept vomiting and I could end the story there but you said you wanted the full version…so then I like I am done vomiting for a while and this girl so there she had slept in my room ……and she began to rub my arm but not in a maternal way ….more in sort of a … you know like… this is going to happen kind of way …. I mean I just like I told you there is nothing in the world I wanted to do last than have sex…I didn’t know her that well….I didn’t want to say that I didn’t want to like I mean it’s a really ..we wanted poking up because I didn’t want to be impolite ….she did take care of me when I was drunk and it would be rude.  So rather than sort of her being up and I was like in the middle of really the worst sexual performance of my life and I had to stop in the middle to go drop again…and then

Brett: hahaha (laughter)

John:  It was so bad….….and I am blabbering ….l like I swear its not you ….its not you…sic….and she says I know I know….and so anyway eventually she and the other buddy of mine got me to the airport…I .. I had..I…I showered soda and well…I just catching my flight barely and I sweating out straight tequila on the plane…everyone around me must have hated me ….And I started to feel a little bit better about halfway through the flight and I made it home without vomiting again ….so that was good. So that’s the story…

Brett: I …I guess just to give people a little bit of background of what could have been a magic interview .to that …I ..I actually….I guess it is one of those things you know when an Aussie meets an American “I had to do everything” Aussie like him as we would take up to the bar and a delay if it was we had a {inaudible} instead of water we had a shot of tequila, a Yagabond and then a chaser. A quick fact… which is …not what you are thinking…the quick fact… is Madorie and Baileys….so it was two shots and a good Yagabond and not only that I believe there was a few bottles of tequila and vodka at the table but that’s now a great memory and that was a great way to meet you on that level …and …I think it was something funny that I picked up there just goes back to the type of person you are ….as drunk as you were …as strong as you were you still picked up that.. this mystery woman …still a pervert…which you know …for that lovely …..hilarious ..(laughter)

John: Do you remember that I you know I had like affairs thrown up {inaudible}….this is like on the floor of the hotel room… holding onto the carpet to keep from falling off the wall …it was bad….it was bad.

Brett:  All right mate … thank you very much for that …I am sharing a story I am sure everyone can relate to them…have had nights like that.  So, I guess let’s get stuck straight into John Roman and a bit more of a background to give the viewers a bit of a heads up because you are heavily involved in online internet marketing and like you say you got a number of different products and services that you purchase and one of those I guess would be your flagship product would be your online coaching.  So, I guess do you need to say anything else that you do you would like to be on it to share before you give into a question-what I would really like to know is what was your a…ha moment when you decided or realized that the internet really was a tool that you could utilize to invest your knowledge?

John:  Sure…I have been writing on the internet for I guess 13 years now and my first article was published on a body building website called T-Nation which most of you listeners know back when I was about 20 years old in 2002 and I didn’t have like a website or anything to trap traffic…so I was just like popular on T-Nation for whatever that’s worth. And I thought about setting up a website…. A few times of the year’s …never really did and at some point my buddy Joe Mannen, who is a big guy in the marketing world…at this point he wasn’t …he wasn’t wanted to get involved in my marketing ….and he just told me a little bit about it and it so to sound as – too good to be true and so good luck to all of you over there and then a couple of months later he launches for his product and he did like 300,000 dollars in gross revenue in like 3 days. {inaudible}….you got me!

Brett:  (laughter)

John:  So, that was the only haha moment where I saw what was possible because Joe had demonstrated and then I started looking into it and I saw what other people are doing and I really saw how there were many people who were making money who I didn’t think were particularly special in any real way ….not feeling bad about anyone particularly but you know I just thought he is not doing anything that I cant do better and once I saw through those people I decided to sort of jump in with both feet and thats really what happened …I decided to keep the treatment that was working out for a book at that point and really just developed it into a product so it became my key final phase fat loss …my first key product and when we launched that I was fortunate enough to beat Joe’s record and we did 460,000 {inaudible} in 3 days.  So it was pretty big and we just kept building from that.

Brett:  Fantastic…Those results would make a majority of the people shit in their pants really go well…coming from…. I guess if you are not familiar with the internet and the rich that they can have is that might right their  …is just living profound …it is possible that maybe you may not want to be out.  You may not want 460 K in 3 days.  Whether you are doing 10K – 30K you know this is still a really good opportunity.  I guess in a month or two of that ….to get to that…I guess awesome achievement of 460 K in 3 days, what was one of your biggest businesses lessons that you got through because obviously you know you didn’t just create something straight away and over the night it was success, you know …you must have gone through with someone … some good lessons along the way.

John:  Sure…what I mean I think the most valuable thing is take care of your affiliates you know that’s really all about businesses you understand in the affiliate marketing world I build.  On affiliates, so you just need to always be willing to go the extra mile, make things easy for people.  I remember in my first launch….it was sort of challenging because you know so many people had demands on my time and I didn’t want to be rude in any way.  So I was always being very prominent and I guess I didn’t understand initially just how much people depend on you to help them sell your product.  So you know I think I did a bunch of interviews and wrote articles for people so I expected  now I will double the products I just got to send emails to make money but I wound up writing thousands upon thousands of words and sort of fulfill other people’s blogs during that time and that was really a helpful  lesson..it helped me in all of my other launches and then for my book launch – the hard cover books – here comes the seller we sort of you know that lesson came in handy and it was really important as a matter of fact my coop and I in the week that the book came out we were on something like.. I don’t know .. 23 podcasts, 20 articles and 19 different publications around.  So, we were like everywhere and because I knew the value of that of having other people sell your stuff.  So, that was I would say the big lesson that I learnt during that launch that really helped this.  Helping other people sell your product.

Brett:  Fantastic. I guess if you could afford to give the listeners there now currently who don’t have enough information products you know that they want to get into internet marketing it and you know reap the rewards that has to offer, what would be your first bit of advice be for these type of people?  Maybe someone who has already got a product and is just not selling any of it …what would you do …your advice be then?

John:  Well…too bad for them…you know first if you don’t have a product you need to create a great product …you know that …we cant just create some need to a fabulous product because everyone else’s is a fabulous product you need to find something that people either haven’t seen before or will be interested in seeing it and having a different perspective is really important and so that’s the first.  From there if you already have a product I would say hold conferences, meet people, network, because again affiliates should know – that they are going to sell your product fully and all of them being pull people are far more interested in doing business with people they know than people they never met and so you know so many of my affiliate relationships have been a common bond by just virtue of holding conferences in knowing people and that’s why we are doing this podcast right?  I mean how many podcasts you think I did last two weeks….its astronomical….the amount of ofcourse I get through interviews – that’s again not to be  {inaudible}…..which is how it is at this point. And I said yes to you because we met, we had drunk together and I like you and that’s how it is.  So, I am not going to give interviews to just anyone because I don’t o …I will be doing f#$@$ interviews all day. So yeah….so I would say that’s the most important thing …if any of you are not selling because your affiliate networks isn’t powerful enough and to make that….. to fix that you know is pretty easy.

Brett:  Yeah…a bit of tequila and a good night out..

John:  Yeah…you could

Brett:  Another important I tell you I just really want to hold my head on that point day because I am the massive advocate on you know getting out there and doing something that might make you uncomfortable to myself I guess I have to fly all the way from Australia to Vegas which is not that bad of a task…thank you about it …I took {inaudible} faith out of that meeting alone and he took great guys and got some really good relationships which is you know he had met whether something inspires or doesn’t inspire from it I think it’s got to be something in the industry you need to the networking is a key thing and that’s something I know you do very very well.  And I guess just on that talking about how to look after your affiliates and so forth and I know in one of your last launches ..you did something different and a bit unique than what you generally see with people with affiliate programs because I guess there was a standard approach almost affiliate marketing correct?

John:  Yeah….absolutely

Brett:  And then what you did I guess was put that on the head and you made your approach a little bit different.  Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

John:  What specifically are you talking about?

Brett:  So, in regards to I guess how you got your affiliates to mail more, prices, etc.

John:   What I sort of saw….I am an affiliate as well so I promote other people’s products and the commissions are not you know you get 75% if you naturally did your own product and that’s really awesome.  But there are bonuses and everyone makes bonus cash that you get you win first place in the affiliate contest ….sometimes you get 2000 or even 3000 dollars which is cool…everybody likes competition ….everyone likes to be competent or feel like being competitive and have a chance to win right.  So, the affiliate contest is one of the primary ways that we get people to promote. But we run into this issue wherein lot of people with small affiliates, they cant possibly compete with the larger ones.  There is no way that someone with a list of 3000 people is going to be able to compete with Mike here who has massive emails.  And so what I saw happening is that was the same like 5 to 8 guys who are always wanting the affiliate ….and they didn’t even have to mail that many times to do it.  And so what I did was recreated a tiered affiliate contest where there was a tier-one for guys who had big lists and then two for guys who had a little bit smaller……no wonder we went down to six tiers based on either the size of your list or your performance with previous launches and that way you are only competing with people who were roughly as capable of winning as you could and so you know for the first year it was a $5000 first prize and for the 5th tier it was still a 1000 and so rather than having to scrounge like crazy for a chance to take eighth place overall and maybe make 250 dollars, now you said you are just competing against five other guys in your level you have a chance to win a 1000, 500, or whatever it is or all the different levels in between and really help people. So,  I think that… it needed more fun for everybody because now you are just competing with these five guys instead of giants and everyone thought like it was a bit more fair.  So I think that really helps

Brett:  Because I love that method and the approach to that because you can take that and utilize it in any form of business really like for people who are listening to this and they are not online now is maybe sitting and all this isn’t for me but you could actually tape what you have just said and are really recommended on just for one that they last 3-4 minutes and listen to this again and look at how you can introduce that into your procure order business, how you can run your affiliate contest and your iron gym or you are going to studio or you are going to boot camp. So, really good information here, John. Thanks for sharing that.  So John, I guess that one of your flagship services I can say is online coaching where you actually work with people from all over the world writing them highly and highly expert driven workouts…nothing of that makes sense really.  Anyways, that’s today….I hardly expect written workouts where you will be now able to I guess collect an income from servicing other people from all over the world.  Can you explain a little bit more on the online coaching and so forth?

John:  Sure.  Essentially the online personal training and what I do is a is have a comprehensive assessment form.  It’s about six pages long – about 7-8 {inaudible}  leads ….What I collect from the internet is just this one information that I would collect from someone in person and from there I sort of have the enough information about them to design one-on-one program and this covers their training …so I get them 3 to 5 workouts that they rotate over the course of the months….I take care of their nutrition in terms of their calories and macro-nutrient break down and then I give them a list of recommended fruits that helps them sort of build their needs and the goal is really to teach people how to be self-sufficient rather than giving people a corn-chip free fabricated meals. I hope people learn how rather than tell them what to eat….you know.  And it is very successful.  We have thousands of people go through the program in the past five years.  It’s really fantastic.  I have really enjoyed it.  You know because it’s low-priced program…. I try giving work between 350 to 400 but maybe that was $250 during the sale….but that’s still reasonable.  When I was training in the New York city if you wanted to train with me you had to be willing to pay 250 an hour and you had to be 8 minutes away …that’s the average travel time in a gym in the Europe city.  So, now, you know obviously that’s a very very specific point tell you beyond.  Not only it is sort of space locational but it’s pretty high priced program.  To get people train for 4-5 times a month it can be pricy. So now, because it’s lower overall and you could work with different clients. So, working with Brooke Shields…how was it {inaudible} exclusively I have been able to work with young guys who can spare 300 a month but they could not spare 300 an hour and it has been really cool.

Brett:   Fantastic.  To suggest on that and to someone who is wanting to obviously get into that I guess I know what really needs to go into the back end of it but to share with our listeners is what are the key things you need to get to set up and understand but first of all you can just start….right now to work out to people what would you say your key points are?

John:  There are ……breaking the body fat is really important.  But other things really sort of include their experience, what type of training they have been doing for the past several months, if they have food allergies, if they have an injuries, this is really important…there level of proficiency, there is exercises like some one’s never come with that {inaudible}  I am not going to program that in…I will find a different place to allow for the hinge…..also its stuff like that…So, I mean those are the big rules…..

Brett:  So I guess in regards to the business side of it someone wanting to get set up…things such as I guess they need to create an exercise library right, they can’t just what if the one of the client doesn’t understand what RDO was.  So, how do you structure that into your workouts – into your programs.

John:  Well you know the way it is set up it is really just that I am able to tell based on the assessment what exercise they do and they don’t and under the ones that I think they could run on their own I send them the video that has a tutorial and exercise their mind and that allows them to learn it. So they are never done. I don’t think I have worked with anyone who has never done push-ups before.  You know if they have never done…if they become {inaudible}  but haven’t done RDOs I think you haven’t mastered the movements. So, I just sort of teach them how to do it…coaching however I can and then remember to work it into the program.  So thankfully you know because of the way the program is set up,  I don’t really run to…I turn off beginner clients.  Most of my clients are intermediate I would say.  So it is sort of self brigades.

Brett:  So I guess if you have not tried and exercised the library of myriad of exercises imagined…what sort of work is involved to get an online coaching business set up?

John:  The hardest thing is recreating your templates and documents.  You don’t want to have to recreate new PDF’s or forms. So, it is sort of at least the structure videos in place.  The protraction –  you have to do that, you have to create a way to give them assessment, you have to create you know you deliver….how you can deliver and how you can charge so for me I just take over people’s Pay-Pal.  It’s a wrong thing to do that.  How are you going to promote it?   You have to have a funnel that gets people in….so all of those things.  I lot of this to the proprietor so I can’t talk too much about how I did it.  But, what I will say is that those are the finer things again. Your funnel how to get people in, your marketing, your follow up marketing and templates….the way they do away the content where there is presentable and sort of permissive.

Brett:  I guess coming back to the I will thing if you know……tried in the system, and just sitting down backing up…if we look to that as a cross journey of how they can do firstly get in front of you and then how that every step is going to be delivered from there.  So, cool mate.  So moving on to a bit of a through a curve ball on you. Now another question for you, if you were given 1000 dollars and a Macbook Pro and that’s all we had and of course knowledge you have got what would you do?  If you had to start again….

John:  If I had to start over 1000 dollars of budget and Macbook Pro and I have my knowledge …. but I don’t…I have my mails right?

Brett:  That’s right….you now have no contacts.

John:  Okay…well..the first thing I would do is reach out to editors and try to get published on websites that had high traffic and so to bring people back to my site that’s free .. hopefully or actually be making money there.  I will also try to get published in big magazines like Men’s House, Men’s Fitness.  From there, I will certainly be creating content for my own website and republishing content that I wrote for other websites and at the same time trying to build my Facebook column.  Once I start writing, you get to feed people in, I would develop income for my coaching program that I charge maybe 200$ a month and trying to get people on that to generate more income.  Once my budget is a little larger, I will be making maybe 1000 to 3000 dollars a month, I will create a product and I will have enough money that I could wind up and develop a very low priced point product maybe 999 to get people into the habit of buying from me.  I would give it fully 100 percent on it to get them to promote. I would even ask them to just put up a link through Facebook or I could write a bloggers forum, etc.   just get affiliates across into promoting for you and get people accustomed to buying from those who have been a big thanks and eventually maybe I will work up to a bigger product.  But the very next product 999 is probably works up.

Brett:  Perfect.  A good point ….that is you are going to give away 100% of your income.  For the people there listening who are don’t probably fully understanding why would you want to give away 100% of your 995…

John:  Well…because everyone is trying to make his efforts right?  How much money you really need for the affiliates getting 75%

Brett:  (laughter)

John:  You know you may add at best to make 250 sell and then minus quick entries….so this should be a sign of good faith and listen my focus might just work one to one with this…I will give you a 100%…it’s like they know they are not making any more money. To make $9 instead of $7 isn’t changing their lives but if they are big affiliates it’s a nice thing…they still know you mean business

Brett:  Yeah …And not only that…I guess the fact that you have been a big part in front of their large audience so you less can grow exponentially

John:  Exactly, if I am a big affiliate, I am thinking this ten dollar product, if I market it well, maybe I can sell a 1000 copies- that’s ten grand….now all of a sudden the …that extra 25% starts to mean a lot…right….so now its a difference of making 20…..uh 10,000 dollars that is 7500 you know….. its a nice difference.

Brett:   Yeah…thats a lot…that’s correct…so I guess again to the listeners there thinking you know how can you utilize this into your floor business, you know it is the same old thing what are you willing to give up in the front to get at the end…so I am I am a big believer in that.

John:  So that $1000 would go in building an empire. So good on you.

Brett:   (laughter) ….You passed

John:  Yeah

Brett:   So a question for you then…Where do you see this fitness industry heading …being so prolific in the industry…like where do you see it heading in the next 25 years?

John:  One I think online things will probably continue  …the markets could get more saturated but the people there will also rise to the top….I think that you have a lot of people who are very very very good trainers highly regarded in the industry who are not good at marketing and then you will be able to search and get people who will be marketing for them. marketing all that and they will really be going to crush it you know and from there, I mean I think…… in person you are going to see something like cross linking continue to do well…and you will see very very high priced point gyms do well and very very low priced point gyms do well but everyone in the middle is going to get crushed you know you try to. If there is a 10 dollar a month gym in your area and there is a 150 dollar a month gym in your area and you will try to do 60 you are going to get crushed.  Because people you know want posh services or they want to save money.

Brett:  I agreed that totally…and you can see that happening right now…You know here’s the reason we have opened up our FIIT Chick Transformations locations so we currently got 30 locations around Australia of about female only boot camp programs so you know that it’s definitely we are seeing the energies shift from one-on-one sole training to the group format as well and definitely online.  So, definitely agree with you on that one. So John I guess it is.   In one of my past episodes I talk about five keys to running a successful fitness business.  Now I just want to run you through the five keys and I just wanted to talk to one of those that pop out for you the most. So, in any particular order, we have got  – Be Genuine, we have got  –  create and run a range Community,   Produce Results, Create Multiple Services and Have a Purpose.  So out of those five…which ones succeed the most and can you elaborate on?

John:  I think creating community is really …probably the one that has been..if not necessarily the most effective in terms of bringing in money certainly the most fulfilling. You know I am very fortunate to say that I have a really active subscriber base…you know the people who comment on my blogs and who share them …you know I got ….can’t say right now actually ….I have got 18,800 fans on my Facebook page which is not a huge Facebook page by any stretch. There are people who have 50000 that has been still mine people online and those 50000 have got you know 11000 followers on Twitter but what I will say is that these people are engaged and that’s awesome.  I mean you know I care about their results…I would want to know what they are doing they want to know what I am doing you know when I post about fitness shit they enjoy it but when I post about stuff from my life they care and you know a big community like that caring about people and getting people care about you and then most importantly getting people who care about each other…that’s …. that’s the key right because if you have a 1000 raving fans instead of 10000 or 20 or 50 or 100,000 people feel informed about you, those people will always support your path.

Brett: Perfect….Love that..….I couldn’t agree with you more….You know its… its not about….its not about the size….its how you use it in our end ….whether that’s manliness or Facebook fan page  …you know gives something…they are really proud with our companies….you know we have got a 130,000 Facebook fans and its a very active page and I couldn’t agree of you more the training raving community …this means you know when you have got products and services they are going to love what you…. what you are bringing out and they kind of want to share a mindset you know.  So I guess leading onto that you know having a New York Times bestselling book you know obviously having raving fans and creating a community has been a big advantage to yourself on the success of the book so lets chat a little about the book.   Firstly, if you just want to give us and the audience a bit of overview about the book and in the end explain why you even wrote it and what do they look out into today.  That sort of things.

John:  Sure… again the book is called Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha…..A Real World Guide to an unreal life…it’s a fitness and lifestyle book for men who are looking to become best version of themselves by first mastering the physicality and then using the skills there to improve other aspects of their body…so for us that’s a really really serious thing.  The reason that we wrote the book is because we want people to experience some of the success of read experience.  Because what I believe is that it is sort of impossible to go through a physical transformation but also going through a mental and emotional is it…it gives you all of this confidence that really allows you to bring those skill sets either to your business life or to your personal life and I think that whether you go through a physical transformation or spiritual one or a financial one you will come out on the other side feeling like a better and more powerful person who can offset change in the world and that’s really important you know being about a sort of empowers you around the world…how we…how we you know …leave a mark ….that is sort….that is sort of the main purpose of the book…we want to help people become the best version of themselves physically so that they can best serve the world within whatever way they seek that.

Brett:  So that’s brilliant and then huge congratulations on that ….very very well done. So, if just for the listeners out there where can I get a copy of this book?

John:  Well, if you are in Australia its kind of hard to get your hands on it.  Can you guys order through Amazon.co.uk …you can?

Brett:  Ummm…I am not sure to be honest….I have ordered mine yesterday.. but probably should call Customer Help…. but I haven’t received yet… but it’s another story.

Yes…so here is the problem we have with Australia.  We actually had about 300 books shipped back to us.  So really really firstly expensive endavour.  We had to pay to send them firstly and then now we have got to pay to send them again.   Might be 30 dollars a book.  So it is getting pretty pricy and but what we are trying to do for the next book and it is obvious that we are still sending the books …it’s a pain in the butt…you know we just wish that we could get them here faster but you know we have one-two sent back yesterday from Abu Dhabi …you know sometimes you know not getting through customs….sometimes we get it back…whatever it is….we will get them to people as quickly as we can.  But for people who can order the book on Amazon in their respective countries that is the fastest cheapest easiest way and it is just getting it across borders and on our site engineeringthealpha.com.

Brett:  Fantastic. So, let’s stick to the book for a little bit.  Why do you even …I guess….what what led you to writing this book?  Why write a book….why have the book…just that one?

John:  Why …I mean …because I love books.  You know I really believe that knowledge is important.  You know lot of people think actions speak louder than words. I think that’s bullshit..you know I think that if you are aware of the power of words one thing to write a book is sort of in it and I have always been a writer first before anything else. And I have always wanted to publish a book because you know if you consider yourself a writer….you consider yourself an author…then you stand in the ranks of a great men and that’s always been really sort of a…not just inspired but really aspirational to me and its always been important to me on personal levels have my mom being able to walk into Barnes and Noble and see my book on the shelf.  That’s really cool to me rather than just having e-books and things like that. I think its value there …I think that it’s a qualifier and I think that people who have published traditional books and, in particular, people who have written bestsellers are perceived differently than people who have just written e-books you know it’s very different.

Brett: That’s true…I wholly recommend everyone listening to this coverage and getting hands on the copy because if you see how John writes, he is definitely got an innate ability when it comes to that and something that I just wanted to touch on John’s website he can get around in Fitnesssystems.com and just just the one line is an example on one of his short times which says- I have all sorts of bad shits that you should buy…it’ll make your life better. But you know mate it’s something that 90% of people will be too scared to one- write that because they feel that you know “Hey what would people think about that” sort of stuff but I guess that goes back to you know looking at the five keys to success …you know you are definitely genuine, you produce results…you know you have created your own community and we have talked about having multiple services now in regards to you know the fifth one of having a purpose, what do you believe is John Romaniello’s purpose or why you are on this earth man?

John:  I mean.… I haven’t really figured that out yet.  I think that I mean it’s really true…I think that my purpose is to help as many people as possible and I think that I am doing that right now through fitness but I think that there are other ways I can do it….I don’t know …I mean…..the only thing I am doing important work is anything ….any of us is important is you know …Is Richard Brandson important?  Is building Aeroplanes and launching racket labels important?  Genuinely how do we try to find change?  How do we try to find our legas?  Is it the money we make or the monuments that are built in our honor …the way that we push the world forward like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs….I mean maybe ….but I think that ….you know one of my favorite stories is this one I heard when I was at a concert at summer camp.  There is this big storm and all of the star fish are washed up on the shore.  There is an old man walking down the beach.  I am sorry there is a young man walking down the beach and he sees an old man picking up starfish one by one and throwing them back into the ocean.  And the beach is littered with them…so there is thousands upon thousands of them and so he calls after him and the guy is not turning around and he falls and is walking over and so finally, you know he gets to the old man who is just picking up starfish and throwing them in and picking up starfish and throwing them in and the young man says – “What are you doing?  You can’t save them all. You can’t possibly make a difference” and the old man reaches down, he picks up a starfish and throws it in the ocean and he says “To that one, I just did”.  And I think being able to change one person’s life even if it’s in some innocuous way like helping them get six-pack abs and feel better about themselves or helping them make more money and be able to provide their full family…or helping them find the thing that makes them feel better that allows them to help the world.  Whatever way I can do that is how I want to do that because at the end of it all you know maybe my name will be remembered for 100 or 200 years but that’s not really going to matter… there is not going to be any monuments built in my honor or statues of me anywhere but what there will be in this lifetime is a bunch of people who can look at me and say that I helped and I think that’s truly the best us normal folks can ask for.

Brett:  Hmmmm….That’s awesome..I loved the starfish story is so many so many take away lessons in that that you know should everyone can gravitate to serve.  I guess in regards to that.    John….what’s in store for you moving forward in the next five years…where are we heading…what’s …what’s in store?

John:  Ummm…I have got another book in the works….I mean I will be starting two books….we are also working on the second one now “People Women” and beyond that I have been approached with some TV deals.  So, we are sort of like sorting through all of that and trying to figure out if there is an opportunity there.  So, that …that sounds very interesting to me and something I always wanted to be part of.  So, I think that’s a very strong possibility in the next five years.

Brett:  Are you going on the bachelor…

John:  I didn’t understand….

Brett:  On the bachelor….(laughter)

John:  I am sorry

Brett:  Hey…Are you going on the Bachelor?

John:  No ..No….No..there has been a couple of production companies who have been interested in developing a show around me.  As it happens, I am no longer a bachelor.  I don’t know if you have heard I am getting married.

Brett:  Yeah….I have I have.  So Congratulations on that as she must be a good one.

John: Yeah….she is the best one…she is amazing!

Brett:  Excellent.  Love it.  Actually buddy I have articles and I believe about..you are talking about being engaged and how it sort of changed you etc.. levels ridicules ……

John:  Ah…ah…something else

Brett:  So, I guess then John…couple of great luck …..I mean we still got a few minutes left they say and there is a couple of things that I would like to check with you about is with one of them is the Arnold Schwarzenegger thing…I know its hush for a starry episode but how does someone end up being a fitness advisor for Arnold Schwarzenegger …what…what were your key title wise on that journey?

John:  Well you know what…the weird thing is the internet is small or is it big and you never really know who is listening and the way that it happened was sort of organic.  One day I got an email from a young guy named Daniel who said,” Hey man, is it okay if I ask you some fitness questions by email.  I know you will kill me…its on Facebook and Twitter but they are kind of a public job and I don’t want to put my business out there…is that cool?”  I said – “Sure man, yeah…absolutely”….you know….normal con…and so he went back and forth to answer his questions you know what and as you write…so you know a couple of exchanges which was no longer over a period of couple…over a period of two weeks…I got curious …so I googled him and what came up was the Wikepedia page for Body Man and Body Man is US political jargon for a politician’s closest personal aide.  And this guy’s name is Daniel Ketchell and listed under notable Body Men was Daniel Ketchell, the special assistant to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  I was like ohhh…that’s cool…this guy is going to get a little special attention…and so you know now I know my you know what you are knowing and his emails get moved to the top of the queue kind of thing….and …we just sort of built this relationship.  Eventually, he signed up for my online coaching program and you know he used to do really well and Arnold started to seeing him make progress because he…that’s his job…he travels all over the world with Arnold you know, writes his speeches, everything, all that stuff or helps on his speeches I guess and it was really cool and so you know one day he mentions to me that Arnold has been like jumping in on his workouts with him which is really cool and so that Arnold will be doing workouts that I myself wrote …it is kind of superior feeling…really awesome.  Anyway once Arnold gets out of office, he decides he wants to get back into fitness-somehow or the other and he decided he wanted to re launch his website with fitness content.  So I helped a little bit there and when he did launch I wrote the first peer stardom and that’s really how it all happened and from there I just sort of happened writing for him for a long time and helping other people write to them and finding content and eventually we decided to form an advisory board of people who write consistent and that’s sort of how it happened……that’s how we came over fortunately as fitness adviser.

Brett:  That’s awesome…that just goes to show you know it’s a sad thing if you don’t know who you are talking to and you don’t know who you can meet and the opportunities that are out there you know …most people don’t think you have engaged probably yourself….you know you probably never thought.. one day I am going to be a fitness advisor to Arnold so….you know that’s pretty cool.  Pretty cool …why on…I would to….I guess….get in front of someone like that and provide such a great service because …that cannot be big extremely helpful for your profile as well moving forward.

John:  Certainly …yeah…its I mean its just fun…its really cool ..it’s a nice thing to say and it’s nice thing to feel.

Brett:  Another curve ball for you….if money was not an option……okay you have unlimited money…what would you be doing…what would your day look like.

John:  If money was not an objective…what would I be doing?  I mean…should be gymming it…my life is not fun and different since let’s say my…. my income has doubled a few times and my life has not been really all that different and so, for me, it’s just – I would still be writing.  Maybe I would be working on different books with other things but no matter what I would just be writing all the time.  That’s the main thing.

Brett:  Cool….How about travel Australia in the midst of John Romaniello?

John:  Yeah man …I fucking travel a lot..I am really sick of travelling

Brett:  (laughter)

John:  I would wait to do less business travel and a tiny bit more personal travel which honestly I have been a road wire for like three and half years now…I mean there have been months where I am home maybe 10 days…but I am getting married…my fiancée and I just kind of like hanging out…I would really love it if I get three months where I did not travel but to me it will be really exciting.

Brett: (laughter) The opposite of publicly nice people but I totally understand but I guess again the whole travel thing just goes back to what you have needed to do to become a successful as you have been so I guess it’s just part of the journey isn’t it?

John: Yeah…that’s the whole thing ….just figuring out what you like….what you want to do.

Brett:  So John…..we got like five minutes or so left here.   I just want to put it out to you and you are always never short of a great story. So, is there any good words of wisdom anything that you think you will be able to share with our listeners that they could relate to and in some sort help them become more successful in their fitness business and laugh in general as well…

John:  Yeah…I think the most important thing is to sort of find a mentor and to eventually be a mentor. I think it’s really important sort of step in your process to go through all of those different phases of your education really really …Mentoring has been really invaluable to me and I really can’t say enough about the people who helped me but it also has been satisfying in a completely different way to have helped other people and to become a mentor and a coach and I think that sort of nature of things..the cycle that you go through…may not be great things and then you want to pass them forward because once you sort of achieve a high level of success and must you find a new coach you wont go anywhere, but that must be a common coach you won’t ever appreciate what it is to be one and o think that’s just a stupid valuable experience to have.  So, having coaches is really the No.1 piece in buy-or-sell.  That’s really credible stuff.

Brett:  Fantastic….it’s quite funny you say that the other day {inaudible} he said you have to learn to teach.  So, whenever you are learning anything learn it as if you got to be teaching it and sharing with the others so I really loved that quote.  So I guess speaking of quotes you know what is your favorite quote and why?

John:  My favorite quote….. good one…I think it’s from a book called “Snow Crash” by a man named Neal Stephenson.   The quote says until a man is about 25 years old, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. So I think that for me …it is that quote is really about sort of like appreciating your youth and that leads me to think about appreciating the various appreciating the right time of your lifestyle rim you are in and this is really an exciting time for me….I am moving across the country..to California …you know I found this unbelievable woman whom I am going to marry but it’s scary it’s a lot of crazy things.  When I was younger I didn’t appreciate how young I was….how beautiful that was…and I was also actually recently in Louisiana, New Orleans, with a bunch of buddies of mine for one of our friends bachelor party who is getting married as well and you know we would just sit around talking it’s like …its crazy to think that when we were twenty three and we got to hangout all the time and how much time we spent together – we don’t have {inaudible} – we don’t have AC and every single Friday night we all drank our mind out….it’s crazy….but we didn’t take the time to appreciate how fleeting that was.  In a lot of ways, my early twenties were like the best time of my life.  You get to hangout with your friends all the time.  Now, we all have serious girlfriends or wives or fiancées, I never get to see them. And looking back nostalgically helps me sort of appreciate what I have with my fiance and what I have with my stepson…Isaac. You know I think about the fact that he is around all the time and that’s probably hard for him to be in with his parents all the time and that will be….it’s certainly …it can be stressful to deal with a child….but there is going to be a time when he doesn’t want to hang out with us at all and there is going to be a time when you know he goes away to college or he moves out and we are just not going to see him as much.  And you don’t appreciate those things while they happen.  So, I would say the main thing is to just appreciate where you are.  Take a moment and appreciate everyone.

Brett:  Yeah cool..I am into that..you got me thinking there…that’s fantastic. So, look John, I am going to leave it on that because I am always someone who loves leaving on a happy note.  So, brother mate, thank you once again for jumping on board and then sharing your wisdom and look, I am definitely going to get you on another episode coming up where we can talk more technical side of training because a lot of trainers like that and you have definitely got some different strategies and so forth in that area.  So I guess just to finish off in regards to where can people have find out more about John Romaniello, and where would like to find out more about you buddy.

John: Well…just my fitness stuff might be in my main website which is romanfitnesssystems.com and then if you are interested in more like business and personal stuff – johnromaniello.com as well and ofcourse the website to the book is engineeringthealpha.com.

Brett: If you can’t find all of that just google John Romaniello.

John:  That’s the other one…all of those things will come up.

Brett:  Fantastic…….again thank you very much.  Hope you have a fantastic night there….you probably reaching on to big time probably and I am about to get started in the day so great chatting to you and look forward to speaking to you very soon and no doubt I will be catching up at the end of the year or early next year in order to the US again….so might be great to catch up with you again and ..

John: I am done…thanks for the time now…talk to you soon…bye bye

Brett:  Excellent….See you brother

 

Episode 4 – The One With Paul Timms (Industry Transformer)

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In this episode Brett interviews Industry Expert Paul Timms.

Paul was the creator and CEO of the Australian Institute of Personal Trainers. This business now has over 100 campuses nationally turning over $10 million per annum.

Paul Timms is also a highly sought after professional keynote speaker, and has delivered presentations to over 100,000 people in Australia and Internationally.

Brett & Paul discuss where the Fitness Industry is heading – this may shock you.

Paul also provides his insights into how to run a successful fitness business. Note that Paul only works with clients in the 20 million + per year field.

This is a MUST Listen.

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The One With Paul Timms (Industry Transformer)

Transcript of EPISODE 4:

Introduction

Okay welcome fitness professionals to another fantastic Fit Professional podcast today I have a special treat I’m going to be talking to a special guest a guy that I have known for a few years in the fitness industry. Throat clear…(Excuse me) In a moment I’m I’ll get him to introduce himself, but before we do I just want to paint a little bit of a picture and let you know some of the accolades that this man has achieved in the industry today. The person I’m going to be talking to you about is Paul Timms whom you may have heard or not heard about him, but after today you’re definitely going to want to find out more. Fortunes is one of Australia’s top business coaches known best for his incredible ability to discover and successfully implement strategies that will transform any business. Paul has been featured on TV, radio, those kinds of things you name it, and he has also worked with big companies such as Rio Pinto, VHT, Air New Zealand, LJ Hooker, and a list a mile long. Before starting this extraordinary experience as a scientist where he developed the latest, sharpest ability, the research…understand, and discover what works and more formerly just an image of perfection.

Paul has trained for these skills in developing countries first regional chain of personal training studios, and went on to be the finalist in franchises of the year award in Queensland and personal trainer of the year. Paul then went onto share his secrets with the entire industry and created the Australian Institute for Personal Training which his business now has over one hundred campuses nationally, and it’s turning over a ten million dollar per-annum. During his time Paul developed dozens of transformational and exponentially profitable business models which worked exact precision to appease with extraordinary results. Paul then used these models very successfully as a coach and quickly became known as the, “Killer Strategy Guide” that can transform any business. Now, is the CEO of the Australian Institute of Fitness Ass, Paul is offering a coaching model that is fit to revolutionize the business industry in Australia, and in turn businesses and business coaches that he works with. Paul is also a highly sort after professional tenure speaker, and delivers presentations to over a hundred thousand people in Australia and internationally and regularly speaks to influential organizations such as the Australian Institute of Management, Charter Professional Accountants of Australia.

When he isn’t speaking, coaching, transforming businesses, wearing a Super Man cape, Paul is financial property investor with twenty-six properties that he built with profits from his businesses. He lives in a stunning waterfront dream home and enjoys a completely decorative lifestyle dedicated to making a huge difference using his talent from businesses. Paul is President of the aspiring Australian movement “A Fast Process” which is inspiring Australians to achieve their greatest potential in life in their community whilst creating money for their their favorite charity. So, Paul that was an extremely awesome bio to actually read myself it’s an extremely inspiring accolade that you have achieved there, and I’m really looking forward to today to discuss these more in depth, so to get started Paul is there anything personal that we missed out of it other than…?

Paul:  No I think you have covered everything it sounds like somebody else been read like that, but it’s an amazing the journey that started from really just going from been a corporate employee from those early years in my professional career and then deciding to step into the  fitness industry. If I look back over the last fourteen years and then realized what started as a very simple goal has turned to quite a large business you know.

Brett:  Yeah, that’s an amazing and the thing that I have picked up there is where it started from you know because you don’t just acquire twenty-six properties and multiple businesses over night, so  it all means we start somewhere. When did Fortunes enter the fitness industry so to speak?

Paul:  Like a lot of people I was working in a job that and I quite enjoyed myself, and I was a complete fitness fanatic you know I loved the fitness and had always wanted that. I didn’t realize you could actually make money from been a fitness person it was a really unusual concept back in the ‘90s to actually make a living of been in the fitness industry. Having spent four years at Uni to learn about been a scientist to decide that I want to start my own business, so I basically went off and did a fitness course…back in those days it was called “Fitness Leader” it was a two week course, so I took two weeks of my job and went on holiday and basically did this course over my holiday for that year. It was really just for my own personal knowledge in the beginning that was in 1996, fast forward to 1999 I was growing increasingly interested in the idea of running my own business, and decided that something like, fitness would – if I could just earn enough money to live off of it I would be very happy. My goal, it sounds funny now, but my goal was to earn four hundred dollars a week from been a fitness person that was my big goal, and give up my day job and do that for a living.

Brett:  Yeah, that’s great mate a couple great things what I look at their when I talk to anyone who is a personal…I’ve always looked for key points and what I picked up there was you actually went on your own back you know, so you actually had a job – and a lot of people out there listening to this will be able to relate to that, and they may be sitting in their job right now wanting to be in the fitness industry, but just can’t get out there because you know the old quote, “Just Don’t Have time,” but you personally went out in your school holidays and you went an actually did a course needed to get into the industry.

Paul:  Yeah, and I had no idea I just really…I guess as a scientist you are always researching you know, so I did the course and for three years I did part time you know as a hobby, it was truly a hobby.

Brett:  Yep.

Paul:   The point where I used to do aerobics classes and I would never invoice the gym I would feel dirty and it wasn’t right. I loved it so much how could I possibly invoice for this work, so it was really just a passionate hobby it was never something that was going to provide me with a full time income, but as I started to learn more about corporate culture and the limitations of that I got more interested in how to actually make a living just doing something that I enjoyed. It wasn’t about making six or seven figures it was just, “Can I live of fitness” and that was my initial goal in 1999, so yeah it’s a good point.

Brett:  Sure, so when you actually…I’d be interested to know when you got your four hundred dollars a week goal what happened then? Yeah you retired your done what’s was going on for you then?

Paul:  Well interestingly enough I got to four hundred dollars a week pretty quickly as you can imagine, so I’ve got a bit of a cough my apologies to the listeners. We can’t catch it through the phone or the ear piece so we will be okay. What happened was in the year 2000 I kicked of the personal training full time and the first week I had about three or four clients and was charging twenty-five dollars an hour, because a person in this industry said to me that is what you need to charge because they’d been in the industry for twenty years and that’s what they charged. I quickly realized that when I looked at my colleagues their limiting beliefs into their own personal work was my compass, so when I started charging thirty-five dollars an hour I actually lost that friendship, because they felt that I was punching them away which is really interesting. As soon as I started making two or three hundred dollars a week I then went you know I really want to be my own employer, and went about recruiting my first staff member.

That took me a few goes, but in May of that year my first staff member happened to be this exercise psychologist who was completely intimidating back at that time, but he knew more about exercise than I did. He had fewer strides and less desire to be in business, so he was happy to work for me, so I effectively traded in all my clients and gave them all to him. By the first month of that business which was June we turned over ten thousand dollars in the first month, so I learnt a lesson in basically handing over my clients, and supporting him to be full time, and as a result I was freed up to actually go out there and market, and sell the personal trainers tended to all the personal trainers full time.

Brett:  Yeah, that’s fantastic you know a couple of things I get out of that one is, and it can be quite intimidating for people and I’m glad you mentioned you don’t always need the sharpest sword in the shed, as long as it’s the tool that continually knocks down the walls, and we relate that to when you actually brought on the first trainer you happened to omit you know the trainer was actually better than you at actual training which can be an intimidating thing for many people.

At the end of the day I guess if you look at people like, Richard Branson he’s definitely not the smartest guy that you’d ever meet, but he knows how to use smart people, better people for a position, so that’s a great lesson here for everyone as well. I guess Paul in regards to that let’s keep continuing you on your journey, because I think it’s very valuable you know any big ah, ha,  likeable moments that you have had that you think would be beneficial for our listeners.

Paul:  In that phase I think I guess a lot of people actually want to get out there and the first step is to how do your charge for your time. The thing that really worked for was having a printed piece of paper that listed all of my prices on it so I could just give it to the client and let them decide, and also making sure the products were listed as been programs not as been my time, so I didn’t sell an hour of personal training I sold motivation plus rapid results; those were two choices you had. The second thing was if you’re going to be a business owner release your role is to get leads and new clients on board, because most employees want clients and a business owner has to provide the avenues for people to get clients. That is what I did very well in the early days.

Brett:  Great, so in regards to…I’m picking up another valuable point where you mentioned not charging, u know.. having a price list…I like to refer to it as a menu I use that analogy in a restaurant you have got different menus and the customer will choose what is best for them at that time. Why wouldn’t you just have it listed as price? What is the importance of exactly writing down a name of a program?

Paul:  I researched the weight loss industry because I could see back in the early days the weight loss industry was really charging premium prices for support. And I looked at Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers and others like that, and I realized that what we are selling is we are selling results to clients part one, and in fact we place a high value on the number of minutes that we spend with the client. The client would actually spend less time with the trainer and get better results, so by selling the outcome rather than selling the time spent means I could charge higher amount of money for my time. I hope that makes sense…I think it’s a pretty cool lesson and back in those days people were selling – you could either do an hour session or half hour session, and do a ten pack or twelve pack or something like that, so literally your selling time which you are really losing weight. Plus the other thing Brett is that when you ever want to go on holiday you have literally sold your time to that client then you can’t go on holiday.

By selling a program and including sessions as part of the program then you have to like have to lift the lid as well.

Brett:  Yeah, great, great one, yeah you know that alone is worked to our suggestion now fitness as well definitely an important thing because you know we have a product called the “Bikini Body Shapeup Program” and you know it’s very results driven in regards to well, it’s sort of tells you what it is, you’re going to get a bikini body the gold body by the end of it, so yeah it’s extremely important and it’s great to see that you were doing that back many years ago you had already implemented those strategies. I guess if we fast forwarded to today’s fitness industry you know there is still many trainers and there could be people listening to this right now still trying to sell impact, so maybe you could just elaborate a little bit on you know if someone is listening to this and they are still selling ten packs time and time again let’s sort of hammer the point home why they should change their programs.

Paul:  As a scientist if you learn about primary and secondary data, so for example I’m giving you information that I leant in my life, because in my bone not in your bones because you haven’t done what I have done, so advocate this to do a survey, so if you know a hundred people what is your number one health and fitness goals? You actually mutually write down the answer from each persona and what they said. Then the next question to ask them is why is it important to you? You will find the data leap out of the pages they are very common things of what people want, and then if you test the following two strategies. So, for example I have done a survey of hundred people and I’ve found that sixty-seven people – so the number one health problem they had is to lose weight, and why that’s important to them is because they want to get into a bikini in summer, okay that’s the results.

Then tested clothes I tested this approach in first instances asked them would you like to pay for ten personal training sessions at eight buck an hour just ask them that question and see what they say. The second approach is say to the person if I told you have weight loss and I could guarantee you’d have a better body for a bikini in twelve weeks would you be interested in working with me on my Bikini Body Shapeup Program for twelve weeks, and results would be just stunningly clear. You know what they want is the outcome they don’t care about how you get there. If a book or a motivational speaker, or health retreat says that  you can go away for twelve weeks and come out with a bikini body or they will pay for it.

Brett:  Yeah, that’s right fantastic I think we’ve made the point clear there now you know you people listening you can go and test that theory or you can take our advise on that and run with that and go and change your programs immediately and test it out with your new prospects that come through your door your be pleasantly surprised. Paul I’m always interested when I’m talking to professional people you know what do you believe if we were to say what are three key things that you believe has been catalyst to your success to date?

Paul: okay!!  I think the first thing is to follow your passion and my passion is people. I’m passionate about helping people that is number one, so whatever I have done in my life is around the passion to make a difference to people that is the first thing be passionate. The second thing is to get the knowledge required, so my favorite quote is “Necessity if the Mother of Invention” and this was a quote by Winston Churchill in the Second World War. He was talking about whatever problems we have we have to create a solution to solve them. If you find that you have a passion to help people, but don’t have the knowledge required go get the knowledge first just as simply. If you have no passion, no context there is any reason to learn, and I leant in the early days, and even now the biggest challenge for me is the client asking questions that I don’t know the answer to, and I love it because I go and research the answer and get back to them. That has lead me to a lot of self development and a lot of courses to make sure I can close that gap.

The third point is to definitely surround yourself with the right people, and that means I guess first you have to be someone who is worth hanging around with. If you have a bad attitude and your really kind of in the wrong place, because people won’t hang with you, and I’ve certainly found to myself when I was desperately trying to find people that could give me knowledge I found it was harder to get my friends of since I’ve been somebody who is really making a difference and investing in my own knowledge the caliber of people I surround myself with is top notch. To give you an example I have friends that own airlines, multi-millionaires, a friend of mine has got a child with special needs and he’s a very passionate father and he’s also somebody who speaks professionally and earns over ten thousand dollars an hour. He is a great guy and he is somebody I regard as a close friend and mentor, so I don’t really have a great deal of room in my life to people that drag me down, and as a result my children and myself we are exposed to high level people, so very, very important to have the right people in your life.

Brett:  Yeah, couldn’t agree more with you on that you know the personal education, professional education, and personal development is the key thing that you know I have yet to meet a successful person who hasn’t been through that type of journey and classes, and you know one of the top things to have in their life, so I definitely agree with that one. In regards to business most businesses I guess you would say there is always a time throughout that course business, and you can pick anyone of yours – what do you believe is one of your biggest business lesson?

Paul:  Yeah, good question I’d actually, I was thinking about this because you gave me a list of things that you might like to ask, and this is one of the ones I found a bit challenging. But, to put it simply I think I think about meeting myself with a business coach these days, and the first

question I ask a potential business coaching client or business coach is, who is going to buy your business? And, it’s quite confronting because also I’m talking to people that haven’t even started their business yet, so I ask them who is going to buy your business? The point there is that people won’t buy your business if it’s not leveraged it’s not profitable and not systematized, and so by asking yourself the question who is going to buy my business before you start your create a much more sustainable and attractive business. You may not necessarily sell it in the end however; you might recruit a general Manager to make that business for you because it’s actually making profit. If your business is actually making good profits you pay good wages which means that you get a good caliber of people, and this is one of the hardest things to start a business is trying to recruit talented people to work for you which is virtually impossible until you have the cash flow coming through to do that.

Brett:  Yeah, that’s definitely right I totally agree with you on that one as well mate I guess it could be very confronting especially when you’re starting in this industry like you said, because again, they just want your first few clients, right, you’re not thinking about geez I’m not ready to sell it yet – let’s look at the importance of that and why do you believe it’s extremely important to go into with that end in mind type of attitude?

Paul:  Well, because if I ask people the question, “Why do you want to start a business?” they will say things like, “Because I want to work for myself, because I want to sack the boss, because I love fitness” and that is all wonderful, but to be successful in business your business needs to make a profit and if your business if making profit after your wages you have something to sell. I find for the first four years of my business I wasn’t obviously making a profit I was just interested in working for myself. The first business that I set up was really quite competitive I couldn’t sell it because it was so reliant upon me. My second business that I built and sold for quite a large sum of money was one that was built with the end in mind, so do you really think you’re going to be running this business when your eight-five? Maybe you do, but the point is if something happens and you have an illness or you just lose interest you want to expand yourself you have to be able to sell the business. I already find that most people who ask themselves those questions would do their business very differently. You do the things that make profit you do the things that work, and all those great things that you love that don’t necessarily make profit you leave those off to the side.

Brett:  Yeah great, and just another point to add to that as well is because what tends to happen you know myself coaching hundreds of personal trainers the key thing that I always found is I’d always ask them…you might be able to talk to this. I’d say, “Show me your sales price and let me have a look at it” and their reply to that if often not heavy, yeah, it definitely comes back to systems and procedures you know like the importance of that.

Paul:  Yeah.

Brett:  Have you had much experience I guess or anything you can elaborate on in regards to systems and why that is important?

Paul:  Well, when I…

Brett:  Even if you are a solo personal trainer we want to try and tap that mind set right of, “Hey whether I am going to be a solo trainer or not” and I still need to do X, Y, Z.

Paul:    Yeah, well you need have systemize..we need to have a business investor who is going to buy your business the ideal investment for them is a business that runs without the owner been present that is the best business possible, and most of the business goal is to have more freedom, more spare time, so you need to have well established marketing tips, and program that reliably generate a new client you need to have a good sound product that delivers what the client wants, and you have to have a really good system, so that every task in the business you have documented process in the system. If you get those three things you will be able to sell your business and interestingly they are the three most important things to have made your life easier in business.

Brett:  Definitely, so I guess it’s about that there moment if you’re not currently you know systematizing and creating procedures in your business you know I really, really encourage you to start doing that. You know I’ve been in this industry for fifteen, twenty years and they still don’t have a documented system. The great power of that as well as like, you said, if you go on holiday you know you can pass your system, so you can talk about McDonald’s for example they only reason they can sixteen year olds running the place is because they’re got books, manuals that tell you step-by-step exactly what needs to happen, so what we are not saying is don’t go down right now and create every system in your business, but as you go through your and your fine tuning your sales process write down the steps that you go through you know write out your own course, write down what are the key questions you need to ask every person that comes and sits down in front of you very, very important there. I guess Paul…I’m actually interested in what got you into the realm of both running and creating Australian Personal Trainers, so just a quick recap in Australian Institute of Personal Trainers one of the leading campuses in regards to qualified personal trainers if you could give us a little bit of run down on what got you to transfer in that area?

Paul:  Yeah, sure what is happening was we franchised our business by then and we had a big demand for personal training, and we just couldn’t get personal trainers into our business that were trained in our philosophy, so in the mid 2000, we found that the students that had come out of an RTO or wherever they’d be indoctrinated with the philosophy that RTOs…not saying that they are wrong it’s just that it wasn’t the same culture that we had. We didn’t have to ,When we employed somebody we had to I guess indoctrinate or create that culture with that person and sometimes they would be a really great trainer, but they had different beliefs in how things should be done and that came from the RTOs. We found it very frustrating that we couldn’t really get staff that were ready to go, and I went down to work around and ran a workshop for two days, and I found that he was in exactly the same place that he just couldn’t get the right sort of staff who had the right behavior and attitudes we wanted to employ, and it lead me to say to him, this was basically in 2006 I said, “I’ll come back here with an idea and solution on that” and I went back and I had a think about it and thought you know I’ve developed all these for people in business, but this is my own business and I want to make it available to everybody.

It lead me to actually just taking the labels of all my procedure in business that I developed over the years, and giving it to the person the model that was my franchise at no cost, and then giving him the step-by-step approach of how to train somebody to be a personal trainer. So, I did that for him and it wasn’t thinking this was going to be a large business at the time it was really just a one of thing. Then I decided to speak to the gym owner and found they had the same problem they just couldn’t get the sort of staff they wanted. So, yeah basically we created a model where we empowered the – it was interesting because our customer at the time was specifically the employer not the personal trainer, so we took on the culture internally. We wanted to provide the employer with staff, and that made a huge difference, because at the time people were coming out of the course been told, “Go and start their own business from day one” and that is the reason they would end up in the gym working for somebody else, so we went about creating that model. Because we had a number of people ready for that we just grew very, very quickly, and yeah that was in 2006, and by 2010 we were doing thousands of students a year and the as you say is history.

Brett:   Yeah, it’s great to see you can have such a profound difference in the industry not only starting from actually training the general public to then training people to train the general public, so it’s a great line of effective. I guess you have recently stepped away from Australian Personal Trainer and now – you tell us what’s getting Paul passionate now what are you working on?

Paul:   Well, I was going to say with regards to the growth of our PT it was basically because I went out and asked the students or potential students the ones that kept asking the hundred questions I asked them, “What do they really want before they ever enrolled in the course what do you really want?” and overwhelming 95% of them said, “I want to get a job” so they’d ring

you up to ask about a course and what they really wanted was a job, so that was the key difference – we didn’t make entrepreneurs of them we made personal trainers of them. Now, days I’ve, in the last few years I’ve worked with the Australian Sheila’s Life Coaches which was a start up institute, and we potentially started built and sold that business in twelve months. I’ve helped other people in other sectors, weight loss industry, horticulture industry, and other industries help them transform their industry through education. I’ve worked with numerous…I guess larger companies I mean in the fitness industry we regard someone doing in years been quite a large player in other industries significantly more zeros involved and my typical client now is large, I guess a medium size organization with a turnover of twenty million dollars, and around a hundred staff, so it’s quite a different kettle of fish.

I don’t know why but what I have realized is that the one thing that really makes the difference to performance in coaching, and in the fitness industry that’s the case, so as a personal trainer I found it wasn’t necessarily exercise it was how accountable were they held between visits that painted the biggest  differenence. I’ve discovered that I’m extremely passionate about the power of coaching and I’ve spent myself over a hundred thousand dollars on coaching over the last five years or so. Now, I’ve established the Australian Institute of Business Coaches and this is extremely exciting because we have an industry with a lot of passionate people, but no standardized training and largely people in business coaching sector are lone wolves, so they don’t really share or use information with each other, so I’m really enjoying a bit of cross- fertilization cross-pollination as business coaches.

Brett:  Just a…why do you think that is because I’ve said day in and day out people not wanting to share certain strategies because they are scared or whatever the reason been you know like, I guess we put on this podcast, and you know we are sharing anything that needs to be shared. But why do you think people have that type of mind set?

Paul:  I know for myself because I’ve felt that way at time as well I’ve felt like, I don’t want to share my knowledge and then be squirreling away my own learning, and it really comes down to necessity. There are times when I’m afraid of losing clients or losing revenue and it just comes from a scarcity mentality from the fitness industry we have got you know about twenty men Australian, and around ten of those men are overweight, so we take it as a huge amount of personal trainers to kind of fill that need. In the business sector we have got three million small businesses in Australia, and around two and a half thousand business coaches. Really, I believe that every business owner needs a business coach, but not everybody see’s it that way they are more concerned with getting their twenty clients or ten clients and sticking to their own. I think it just comes down to scarcity I think that is the main thing.

Brett:  Yeah, sure I guess on that you know there are some people out there who because I guess what we have said a few times today, and in the past episodes you know we are all advocates on coaching. What do you believe if you were to give someone advice listening to this, what are the key things you look for in a coach, because there are fair few coaches out there you know what do you look for in a coach if you’re a personal trainer?

Paul:  Yeah, in personal trainer the first thing…once again, if you don’t know what results you want it’s very hard to get a coach just like, a client who doesn’t know what their weight loss goal is, or health goal, so it’s really actually hard for a trainer to help. The first thing would be for you personally as a personal trainer to know where you want to be in three years time all right number one. Number two is to, when you work with a coach be really clear with that coach about the results you want to get not just information, but I want to grow my business by three times only working twenty hours a week, and I want to have five weeks off a year and I want to earn two hundred thousand dollar like, in my pocket. The more clarity, and that coach is a good coach will actually take those results been important to them a business coach who is suffering from self doubt will explain to you how I can’t get results how…it’s not about the results it’s about the journey, blah, blah, blah, blah all right. If your business coach starts talking about the fact that they will learn, grow, and develop, but it’s not the bottom line move on.

The third thing I would look it is where they have been trained, and what results they have in the past do they have a track record working with people like me. I always look for a coach that has worked with larger businesses than me, so my last business coach typically you know each client was twenty million dollars turnover plus, so I was his smallest client which suited me I’d rather be the smallest client of a coach than a larger client of a coach. Identifying all those skills is learning from a larger organization in my little enterprise.

Brett:  Yeah, great Paul all valuable insight there and definitely great and if you’re out looking for a coach you know there is no real rocket science behind you know it. What you can do is just reach out to someone you know and just actually send them an email to try and get through to them and let them know where you are currently at.

Paul:  I didn’t mention one more thing I think it’s a fairly specialized area, so if you can get a coach who has got some results within your you know if you went to a business coach with you know a dog washing company, and a lawn mowing company, and a video store you know you have to spend a long time explaining to them what your business is, so it is good to have a person that’s worked with your current business.

Brett:  Yeah, fantastic I couldn’t agree more. Paul if you were to give us an over view like, what’s the key thing? What is working for you right now that would be valuable for others to know about?

Paul:  Right now, the number one thing is been disciplined, have a good memory, so it’s disciplined, so I’ve got lots of business movies…just discipline. I’ve got my product it’s taken me two years to work out what it is, and now it’s about saying, “No” to shoddy objects or shoddy ideas, and I’ve got a thing called a “Parking Lot” which is actually a bookcase in my office with folders and folders of business ideas and things that I have, and they live on the parking lot, because I can’t do all those things; I have to do one thing at a time. Right now, I’ve got the Australian Institute of Business Coaches and we are in the start up phase I know its early days and we have been around for six months, and we need to go hard and fast and think about a cool business in the next twelve months. There are so many people coming up to me with opportunities and ideas and things that I could do. I should actually kind of ignore them to some point and just focus on my core business, so it takes discipline.

Brett:  That’s a really a valuable point and I’d like to talk a little bit more really it’s never going to be shortage of a bright shining object now, I mean I need to continue with this myself because I myself come up with a new idea every ten minutes I think. What are the key things you look at? Let’s say you’re a personal trainer and have just taken on your advice to be disciplined and not take on any other projects how do you know when to take on another project? What is it that will make you say, “Hold on a minute I’ve actually got limit this” what are they key things?

Paul:  It is…ummmm….Great question Brett you clearly are a coach because you drive some really powerful questions. It comes down to the scoreboard for each month it comes down to the scoreboard, so each month it comes down to a set of four or five numbers that I have, and that automatically comes down to the result the business is produces, so if the numbers aren’t right then I’m going to get my ass kicked, so I’ve got a business coach and, why I’d try and pull a couple because a couple of things I’ve been trying the fact comes down to the performance of the business, so that the only way I take this is be accountable there is no other way, and accountable weekly accountable monthly. I have got two coaches I’ve got one coach that sees me kind of weekly, so that person is very, very good at you know, weekly action what doing part of the business, the action taken taken, and the second person I have he’s actually not a coach they’re actually a business advisor and I can’t go to meetings without my profit loss and balance sheet they won’t talk to me without a printout of my loss and balance sheet. I’ve been doing wonderful things like, comparing actual versus budget which…you know all they look at is the numbers they don’t care about the amazing year that I have had they just care about their local counsel type person they are not an account they are actually different from that, but they only care about the biggest industry, so I just had a hard time finding a person who can be inspired and motivated and encouraging, and the same person is quite non-colleague, and dry and you know – I hate been mean, because there is no…You know I love the first meeting it’s like, all positive and great work, but the second meeting sucks they don’t care about anything, but profit and loss.

Brett:  They’re definitely entrepreneurs.

Paul:  The second meeting is you are sort of this person that will be reviewing my figures, so someone is buying my business the second person is the sort of person they engage to come and view the business to see whether it’s worthwhile, and I’ve already got that person involved, and yeah they don’t smile they just basically go, “A, huh, a hum, right,” so I find them both really valuable, and I need to have both in place though to make cheese.

Brett:  Look I’ve picked up a few things out of that and if we were to  look at it in comparison you know professional athletes need more than one coach.

Paul:  Yeah.

Brett:  You know they have got their coach their special conditioning coach, nutrition coach you know similar to someone in the person training industry you know. If you’re not a qualified nutritionist and you’re not too sure on what food your client should be eating then you need to outsource it to a professional nutritionist.

Paul:  I guess as a professional athlete you have a reality check which is lifetime, so if you lose you get silver you lost, so the second structure is – there is no finish line in business it’s always ongoing, so I had a very, very focused monthly game that I win there is no like, I a almost got there…it’s like, either I actually compete or I fail you know, so it’s not necessarily if I can feel the accountability and I do as I say, I have a number of people that are specialist that I engage in consultants to do things for me, and I think that a personal trainer needs to have a consultants that help them within areas of their business. The challenge is making enough money to pay all of these different people for all the advice.

Brett:  Yeah, that’s right.

Paul:  Your business coaches your weekly business coach and it goes back to having somebody who has been there and done it. If you engage in a business coach into a personal training business you sort of getting a lot how to do stuff advise on a weekly basis, so perhaps that is why we see a lot of entrepreneurs with turnover less than say two fifty replying on business coaching feeding on their stomach, because I know it can happen to the [inaudible 0:42:42.6] tools because they are coaching more with the coach, and also a bit of advisor and mentor as well.

Brett:  Yeah, sure that’s a great point as well Paul. I guess now sitting there are people talking about coaching and so forth and deciding whether to hammer to the nome, but I mean the importance of it is extremely vital. If someone is sitting there and going, “Well I don’t have enough capital raised or money to get started with a coach” what type of advice would you give them in regard – maybe you could give us a couple of your favorite books.

Paul:  Absolutely, number one my personal favorite a client weighs in and they weigh a hundred and thirty kilos and they say they want to lose weight, and they say I can’t afford a personal trainer… well what would just say. The same thing in regards you want results you have to spend the money, so some ways of getting I guess – you can get a advice that’s a nothing out there, but having a coach and somebody that cares about your results you have to put some money in their pocket to have them really engage with your business otherwise it’s just not worth it. I would suggest if you have no money like, if you’re really low on cash getting into a membership program or a group coaching program is the first step would certainly help. You can probably get something you know sort of one hundred dollars to five hundred dollars a month, and as an individual or group coaching context. You have to provide you have to take the advice of whether to make more money, so the last coaching guy that I employed was four and a half thousand dollars a day, so I had to take on that I create at least three thousand dollars a month extra revenue from his coaching and I did it.

If you’re in that sort of, basically if you want to aggressively grow your business doing a one-on-one coach it would be a good idea as well to say you’re looking at probably between I’d say fifteen hundred two and a half thousand dollars a month until you get a coach that is worth the investment.

Brett:  Yeah, I hundred percent agree, so I guess if there is someone out there and they just want to get started in regards to information what type of – what are a couple of your favorite books that will be able to get people started you know in that digital price tag.

Paul:  I think the first one you can read is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People that is a good book to read by Stephen Covey the next one would be Purple Cow by Seth Godin, and that book is about heading out from the crowd which is really important at the moment in the fitness industry and its quiet different, and the third one would be…I think it’s Stephen Phaidon it’s a book called It’s Not How Good You Are It’s How Good You Want To Be and it’s got it’s got running ostriches and I love that book it’s short ten years late you know, but I think those three books are, if you really implemented those three books all the knowledge you need is in those three books as far as how to do it, so a good place to start.

Brett:  Yeah, great fantastic I’ve read all of those books and I couldn’t agree more. Another one I’ve add in there is The Emish by…I forgot mate who wrote that one?

Paul:  Russell Gansett I guess The Emish was the book of the generation X, you know that’s what we all read and know days it’s The 4-Hour Workweek which is the book of this generation. I guess I would probably…both of those books should come as a warning that actually you have to do a lot of extraordinary large amount of work. Most authors write books to sell books, so just those two books that’s great, but the fact is your going to have to be a technician, manager, and entrepreneur in varying degrees in your journey. You can try to start from day one without actually having to have an understanding of your product then you are going to be floored in the fitness industry, because the personal trainer I work is a personal that actually knows what they are doing and not just a business entrepreneur, so those books are definitely ones that I recommend, but I’d recommend them after the three if I had my way.

Brett:  Yeah, and lot’s of them right I mean how about just get all five of them.

Paul:  ahhh!!! Loads of stuff to read…

Brett:  So, I guess Paul a couple of questions that I just want to finish off on. Where do you see the fitness industry heading over the next five years?

Paul:  The fitness industry, there is actually a study of market research that show tools that plot the course of various industries in Australia, mining, childcare, and things like that. The fitness industry is actually in maturity at the moment it’s matured, so what that means is there are established players in competition etc, and it’s whole concept of been declined over the next five years, so we are going to see a gradual decline in the fitness industry as we know it. The drive of that decline will be things like online programs, and you’ve already seen programs like, Michelle Bridges program making a big impact on people. Online programs making a big impact so it’s not bad news it’s just what it is that we need to be really sharp about what value we create for our customers, so I think you will see personal trainers of the future been really clear about focusing on the weight loss, and body transformation and not about fitness. You are going to see additional niche markets opening up, so at the moment you know ten years ago the “The Firm” was the only provider of women’s only fitness, isn’t that amazing ten years ago only one.

Brett:  Yeah.

Paul:   Now, I take a peek everywhere and in 24-Hour Fitness you know for a very short time that was exclusively one provider and now there are a number of providers doing that. I think we are going to see a return of the value of personal trainers and how a personal trainer can make the difference between results or not, and the key is to be able to leverage your time through group coaching. I say the word coaching as opposed to fitness I think the lower level personal trainers will just focus on sessions for most of their clients, and the high level personal trainers will be almost like, the big guy you go to for the complex problems and they coordinate everything the client needs from exercise, nutrition, and mind set shifting.

Brett:  I guess it’s similar to what we have created with Fit, and now Fit-Chick location programs as we want to create a community something where someone can come in and you can help them on many aspects versus they just turn up, and that’s it…see you next week type of thing,

so yeah, I couldn’t agree more with that as well. If you’re sitting and you heard Paul say, “The fitness industry is going to be on the decline” and that’s just not his opinion that’s based on you know Paul been a scientist he looked at the fitness stats on this…

Paul:  I continued a report actually Brett I will email you the industry report.

Brett:  Yeah great, actually I’ll put a little gap underneath this podcast, and share it with everyone it will be great. I guess the point I was making on this there is no time like, the present to stand out from the crowd you know an how you operate differently from every other personal trainer that’s generally qualified. Don’t be alarmed by that you know the fitness industry people aren’t going to all get in shape over night there are always going to be people to train. I guess if we were to finish off on the last question there is something I like to ask people in the fitness industry if there is one thing about the fitness industry that you could change what would it be and why?

Paul:  One thing I would change would be that personal to redefine is how personal trainers see themselves, so I would think about – my mum is in her sixties and she has a crook back, and I think who could I refer her to a personal trainer knowing that that personal trainer is going to do a good job, and at the moment I couldn’t I’d have to make sure I really checked into that personal trainers approach, so basically I don’t think we have the problem right now, because probably we don’t have the trust in the community or the allied health profession like, GPs an doctors, so I think we have a lot of work to do in professionalizing things. I still see people doing ridiculous exercises with clients and just plain dumb things, so I think the hardest thing about the industry is there is no standard approach to how we train our clients, but there could be a standard philosophy how we respect our clients.

Brett:  I completely agree, and what would be the first step to make that happen?

Paul:  Lead by example, I’m engaged in and have a number of events running which are about developing leaders in the fitness industry and if you influence…I’m influencing the leaders just to tone and culture the personal trainers they influence, so I’m working with leaders and getting alignment on how they see personal training evolving, and deliberately going about changing the way it’s perceived.

Brett:  Yeah, fantastic Paul, but look we have a couple of minutes on the clock to go and I just want to finish up and get with anything else you want to add or any final messages to give our clients how they can go out there and you know mirror their clients, and what are the goals they want to actually achieve themselves. What sort of advice would you give them?

Paul:  I think if you sit down like, wherever you are in this podcast and sit done and just get a piece of white paper and just draw up that vision for where you want to be in three years time. What is your life going to look like and what is your business going to look like in three years time? I think it’s a teaching just really visualizing where you want to be in three years, and then second to that would be think about somebody who is effectively living that life that you really admire, and approach that person to, and say, “I really admire what you have done and would it be okay if you could mentor me?” to achieve what you have achieved. One thing you know about successful people is they are very generous, and if you approach people with the right intentions and that is to…I would say yes to anybody that is just looking to make money, because they want to buy a new car that does not inspire me at all. But, if I see somebody that actually wants to change the world then I will do anything I can to help them because effectively they are making a difference to the world I’ll make a difference as well. I think the confidence to approach somebody that has been there and done it, and you really respect you will find they will give you some time or at least give you some advice and help you along the way as well.

Brett:  Fantastic lead on questions Paul to finish off for our listeners out there who like what you said and they want to find out more about Paul Timms where can they go to, or can they reach out…give us some information?

Paul:  The easiest way to get a hold of me is to Google Paul Timms and so I have got a website called PaulTimms.com, facebook/PaulTimms I use that quite a lot as well, and I’ve got a system of attracting the right people in my life, so I run every  four months huh..every three months I run a leadership summit. It cost ninety-seven dollars it’s fairly cheap, but if you would come to that event – we are only talking about leadership skills it’s all about to be an inspiring speaker, how to run events, and how to make a difference, so if people come to that event I really take notice of them because they have already told me that they are somebody that cares about leadership. I think the easiest way to get a hold of me is to connect online, but also come to one of those events they are happening all around the place. My next one is in Brisbane, but they are happening all the time, so come along and meet me and bring me one thing that is a problem for you at the moment and what I always do is with people is say to them, “What is one thing that is a problem right now in business that you’d like help with?” I have a personal commitment to answering that question. I do that with my audience and I do that with people I meet, and I’m more than happy to do that for anybody that actually wants to get in touch with me to, to answer any personal questions your having about how to get to where you want to get to.

Brett:  Perfect, there you go guys there is an opportunity right there find Paul on facebook he’s on facebook.com/PaulTimms, that’s Timms with two MMs as well or of course you can Google him.

Paul:  Just Google me.

Brett:  And who will see what else pops up…I might get my SEOs thing now up to try and dig some stuff up.

Paul: I’m sure you will you got really!! I know how you people think.

Brett:  All right Paul look personally thank again, mate for taking the time out of your day I know it’s very valuable, and I know speaking on behalf of everyone listening that they got some valuable insight out of today fishing and what pops up here is we are definitely going to get you back on in a later session where we can actually talk about speaking because we never really got t talk about that today and I know it’s a specialty in your field and something your extremely passionate about, so we look forward to having you back on board. Okay, you enjoy the rest of your day and I’ll talk to you soon.

Paul:  Thank you Brett. Bye.

Episode 2 – Facebook Strategies

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In this episode Brett discusses the Facebook strategies that he used to build a fan page of over 185k fans.

  • You will discover what to post, how to post it and why to post.
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  • How you can become your local EXPERT and loads more…

 

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Facebook Strategies

Transcript of EPISODE 2:

Hello, Brett Campbell here, and welcome for tuning into the second episode of the fit professional Podcast. Now, if you’re lucky enough or unlucky enough depends how you want to put it to come in on the second episode without hearing the first episode I would highly recommend you go back to episode number one and have a quick listen. It’s a thirty minute presentation where I just basically talk to you about the setup of this whole Podcast series that I’m going to be running that is going to inevitably going to teach personal trainers how to run a successful business, and how to generate more leads and of course more income.

Now the last Podcast number one was I talked about five key components that I believe need to have for this industry. I actually had a fair few emails back from our listeners talking about that and also sharing their stories. I’m going to be looking at sharing those in upcoming episodes because I think it would be very, very powerful for everyone to be able to hear. But, today what we are going to be talking about well, I was sitting here and thinking about what could I talk about like, I mentioned in the previous Podcast where there is, so many topics you know it’s not about having the you know the choice of what we are going to talk about it’s just a matter of what are we going to get stuck into today.

Again, I think due to the fact the first Podcast most people who did listen to it you know actually emailed in, and commented on what they would like to hear about next, so straight out the overwhelming response was Facebook, that does not surprise me in the least because at the end of the day Facebook book is a huge catalyst for many, many fitness businesses. Not, only fitness businesses, but businesses in general out there because it can allow you to do these two things. One is it can allow you to grow rapidly you can – back in five years ago your fitness business you would never be able to get the traction you can like, you can today. Then secondly is to be able to put yourself out there to a larger audience, so you know back in the old days, when I say old days you know I’m really only talking two or three years ago it would be a matter of you know having to go…excuse me the old coffee repeating on me there. Back in the old days like I was saying you had to go out and you’d be doing fly drops, and going to shops, businesses, and trying to get referral business that way. Although those methods work and they are fantastic methods working there used in the right context know you can utilize Facebook and online marketing to really to your message out to a wider audience and very, very, fast, so let’s get stuck into today.

I’m going to be talking to you predominately about Facebook now, and I must admit first of all before we get started as I could literally talk about Facebook for five days straight and still not really cover everything there really is to know about Facebook itself. So what I’m going to do today is I’m going to give you a little bit of an over view of Facebook itself. You’re probably sitting there already going, “Oh I already know that I just want to know how to generate ads or what is the secret to getting more clients” and that can certainly happen and we are going to cover that. You wouldn’t believe this, but my phone was just started ringing through my headset and I got clearly distracted, so there is a good lesson right there you know, make sure you turn off everything when you’re doing a Podcast or something of the likes. I shut down Skype I shut down my emails I shut down Message, but I didn’t shut down my phone, and didn’t turn it off. Anyhow as I was talking I was talking about Facebook…now what we are going to be looking at today the outcomes of this Podcast is I wanted to show you really how you can leverage Facebook and build a successful PT business. Now, I see a lot of people out there with Facebook pages and they are doing all right they have a few thousand likes, you know at the end of the day it’s good, but I want to show you how I was able to generate over I believe up to about hundred and twenty thousand fans now and over a hundred-eighty thousand email contacts, and I want to show you how I was able to do that and leverage Facebook. I want to be able to have you leave this Podcast really understanding the true power that you actually have with Facebook. I also want to show you what to avoid on Facebook, and of course strategies that I probably you should be implementing immediately that will help you get clients at absolutely no cost, so this is free marketing. I don’t know a personal trainer or business owner out there that does not want to know any free marketing. Of course I want to be a provider of the most up to date info that you can get hands-on, so let’s look at some stats first of all. Now you probably have seen something similar to this out there you know, buts it’s really good to lay the platform of Facebook you know.

In 2012 there were eight-hundred and fifty million active users now where else in the world can you open yourself up to that many people. There is over one-hundred billion connections, they talk about Six Degrees of separation it’s no longer it’s probably down to two or three. We just need to really understand, now that is probably not rocket science to you, you probably already knew there is a heap of users right, but let’s look at some more I guess you would say some fascinating stats. Now, over sixty-two percent of marketers say that social media has become very important in their business in six months. What we are seen here is we are seeing sixty-two percent of the people marketers business owners saying that, “This is becoming an integral part of their business” but I also want to show you that could actually lead you to attract – now what if Facebook was to shut down tomorrow what are you going to do? That is a question you would ask yourself if your building a business base from Facebook what are you doing to do, and I’m going to tell you how our strategy or plan B, what we would do tomorrow if Facebook shut down, because we would be okay there is no issue with that.

Would we be unhappy yeah we definitely would be, but you know what at he end of the day we will be okay and we will be able to move forward. Seventy-five percent increase over the last three years for the number of business that say Facebook say Facebook is actually critical, so when we say critical now, critical basically means that they need Facebook for their business to grow. Eighty percent of the social network users prefer to connect brands through Facebook, so it’s quite interesting you know, so let’s look at companies like – some fascinating brands out there, let’s look at Redbull right, or the Voice let’s look at the Voice that’s a great example right now. In Australia here we have the Voice going on which is the singing competition, now they have created social media interaction, so you have to go in and actually vote for people via Facebook. You can also jump into Facebook and have comments, and you will notice now every single reality TV show is hanging out in the bottom corner you know like, Twitter feeds of what people are saying as the shows actually going on. You know if you had seen that ten years ago that wouldn’t just be possible you know you sitting in your lounge room and you want to make a comment about one of the contestants, and you make that pops up on the TV for the viewing audience to see now that’s just absolutely staggering.

I must say just to give myself a bit of a disclaimer here I am recovering from a bit of a cold, so pull out the violins for me, but I do apologize if I’m coughing a fair bit here, but again, the thing for me was I could of waited another week to do this Podcast, but I really wanted to get this information out to you as I have, so much to share. A record breaking seven-hundred and fifty million photos were uploaded last New Year’s over the weekend, so seven-hundred and fifty million photos that are just unbelievable. Every twenty minutes on Facebook there is over one point three million tagged photos, there is over one point eight-million status updates like, that is unbelievable. Have a think how many comments do you think were made every twenty minutes on Facebook, over ten million comments like, “Yo dude what if you could just get a small segment or a small part of that you know not even a percent, a point zero, zero, zero of a percent” you know it just goes to show you how you can really get your message out to more people just in your community.

You may be a trainer and your sitting there going there and just going, “Well, I want to just work with my community. I don’t have aspirations to build a big thing like we do here at Fit International” so we have got our fit check program with our licensees all around Australia and that is because we market to ladies all around Australia. Do we market to ladies in our local area? Of course we do, we have our headquarter Boot Camp on the Gold Coast and that is where we started from that’s where it started, so we wanted to become the local experts, so we based our marketing targeted to locals. It does not matter where you want to market to people, but you just really need to take the message from this been the audience is far bigger than you even think. I wanted to touch on three critical points that you really need to know about Facebook. Facebook is not a platform made for you to sell, okay that’s very, very important. Even though you will be doing and you will be up to selling from your Facebook page which we do of course – however you need to know that Facebook is not made for that. People do not go onto Facebook to purchase a service or product they go on to interact, scroll through other people’s new feeds, other people’s photos, stalk their ex’s you know try, and find a new partner, yeah Facebook is made for that, so we really need to understand where our customers are at when they are actually seeing our particular messages we are putting out there. Although you can sell and I would recommend you do that you need to understand that people aren’t necessarily there for that. That is where is comes back to how your marketing is positioned to get them to interact or act with whatever it is your offering, so when you see ads or sponsored stores come through the news feed you’ll know this is called interruption marketing. Interruption marketing is an amazing thing if you don’t know about it, every day we are exposed to at least three to five thousand of advertising a day and that is an accumulation of TV, radio, billboards, your mobile phone, and that has probably doubled now that we have Facebook news feeds coming through. I think it’s around fifteen to twenty percent of your news feed will be filled with sponsored ads now. Whether you like it or not that is just how it works, so if you are one of those people that get really upset and you see someone’s post and you go jump on their post and go, “Get out of my news feed” you know really come on you just need to really deal with that and understand that you know Facebook provider is a free platform, but it also needs to make money.

What I’d like to get stuck into now is I really want to show you  how we have been able to generate over a hundred and twenty thousand fans on our Facebook page, and to do that obviously you need to have a fan page. There are differences between a personal profile, a fan page, and a group okay if you don’t know that then get on Facebook and have a bit of a play with it, but for the people that don’t I’ll give you a little bit of an overview. A fan page is your main page that can have unlimited people like it, some people call it a “like” page, but it is called a “fan” page. This is integral to your business so you need to have a fan page and it needs to be called whatever your business is called. Don’t create a, disconnect between a customer by calling your page something different than what it is that they are actually getting there, okay. For an example ours is called Fit-Checks, so obviously it resonates with Fit-Checks now, if we called it “Fit-Guys” and then we come over there and market it to females on it then it’s not really going to be the connection, so really make sure that what you’re offering is what you’re offering. Why I say that is there is pages that talk about…you’ll see them people just make them up for fun like, sports videos or the biggest hits in the world or something like that, and then all of a sudden your see videos that aren’t even to do with sports. What that does is creates a, disconnect because you are offering one thing and providing another. Basically when you’re setting up your fan page you need to really follow the golden rules of when it comes to building relationships.

Now, when you build relationships it’s always give first to receive you know you’re not going to walk down the street and walk up to the hottest looking person and ask them to marry you. The chances of them saying yes would be extremely slim; why well because it’s they don’t know you. What we need to do their first is we need to give first to receive; okay and you do that by offering some sort of lead generating tool. Now, that could be a report that you have written. It could be a free work out that you have got. I tell you this phone does not seem to stop I do apologize here, but I thought I’d turned it off – there we go turn it off, how annoying is that hey. I can tell you it’s quite funny we are just talking about that right now is we are talking about interruption marketing and what that was just now, was interruption. Now, obviously it wasn’t marketing it was actually one of employees giving me a call, but what that is that just took me away from what I was currently doing and that is what Facebook is currently about. A person coming on to look at the pages and scroll through and then be taken away by something that attracts them and that could be your lead generating tool. That whole thing of give first to receive, so you need to have something valuable that is going to solve someone’s problem. Then obviously set that up you can set that up with your fan pages there are many different tools you can use. You can set up free fan gates as they are called which is the – you know you get that set up and you get them to click like on your fan page and they can enter the details to receive the free gift, report, which we will talk about in further episodes in depth on how you can actually really create that, and what tools, and exactly what you need to do. For this particular case we are just going to leave it at that. So, you need to create something that is tangible that you can give away and they are going to go, “Wow this is great.”

What we want to do there is then build a community you’re going to build the trust and you are going to become the experts. You will set them up on your email data base, and you are going to send them great content. So you will send them great content – I recommend every week, some people whoever out there is still only doing like a monthly newsletter and that’s all you send your clients your prospects then that is not enough okay you need to be a least touching base with these people every week. Think about it like this, who you know that you only talk to once a month versus someone you talk to every week, now whose relationship is stronger. Well, I the general tense it is the person you talk to every week. Now, obviously there is going to be some variables there, but you know you get where I’m going with this the more contact you have with someone the more appealing they are going to be whatever product or service that you may bring it, so you want to do that and set up the group fan page.

Now, what has been a catalyst for our company and again, I’m more than happy to share all of these strategies with you is to create the community you know you need to create a community where you can then educate and motivate. Now, a great marketer that I’ve learned a lot from his name is Dean Jackson he’s from the United States, he actually talks about the whole thing of educating, and motivating prospects to raise their hands is he says it is. You will want your prospects to say, “Look I want to know more or how do I find out more about achieving my goals?” you really want to make sure that you can create a community web where people can do that. Now, we have a Facebook community with around thirteen thousand members now, this could be done via Facebook or outside of Facebook it’s entirely up to you. Personally I think Facebook has already got the platform and strategy set for you, and that is what we call a “Private Group” so you want to set up a private group. Inside the private group you can upload files, photos, you can create events a whole swag of things that you can do.  A little bird told me that there are some really cool things coming out with Facebook in the groups very soon, so I’ll be very excited to give that a beta test, and I’ll talk to you a little bit more about how you can actually get involved with beta testing for Facebook – how you can actually get to trial a lot of their things first before it actually goes out to the markets, so that’s a really cool thing. I’ll keep that up my sleeve till the end of the episode actually because if you cut out now and you don’t listen well you will miss out.

What I have just done there from a marketing strategy is I have now provided you with a platform where you can actually…with an option for you to obviously – at the end of this episode you’re going to get something extremely valuable, but now I’ve kept you listening that’s the whole point I want you to listen to this episode because I know what we are going to be talking about and revealing over whoever long this episode goes for it’s going to be valuable. What I have done is I’ve dangled a big carrot for you, so you stick on and you don’t fast-forward to the end of this episode because I might not reveal it right at the end, okay. Okay, anyway I’ll move forward, so you want to create a group okay this product group and each one is going to motivate these prospects. There are three options you can have a secret group, private groups, or an open group, personally I would suggest having a closed group basically what that means is people can’t see in the group, but people can see who is in the group, so go with that one. The great thing about having groups is you can create surveys within inside your group you know within minutes, so we have created surveys within side our group and it would be fair to say that thirteen thousand people that provides a really good platform of feedback. Now, of course thirteen thousand people don’t participate in it you may only get two or three hundred people participate in that survey, but you can see that the data that we can provide from that companies would pay millions of dollars for this type of data, because they know how hard it actually to do a survey. The census goes around in your mail box and some people decide to fill it out or not. Imagine having the Facebook group that you could just go bang and in twenty minutes you have just gathered, so much data. The great thing about it is it will save you time and a lot of money, because – ask people want they want it’s amazing you know don’t build something that you want for them build something that they want.

The great thing about this is having a group is you’re going to create rating fans, you’re going to get people who really love your products and services if of course you deliver on it. In the first episode we talked about creating your products…sweet so, this is a great avenue for you to be able to have people be exposed to your products and services which you know is an amazing thing. What we need to look at is the difference between email marketing and Facebook now, email marketing you cannot email someone every day well, you can sorry I’ll take that back it’s probably not advisable to email someone every single day unless you have got really good content to provide every day. People take their email as a personal thing okay, so let’s look at that compared to Facebook you could post to Facebook five to ten times a day and people aren’t going to get resentful or pissed off with you because your hammering it, because that is what Facebook is for that’s what Facebook is about it’s a community it’s an area where you people just go on – eight percent of the time people just post [expletive] on there, but you know I’ve got to put my hand up and sometimes say sometimes you know, sometimes I see some of that silly **** and I’m like well, “That’s quite funny” the purpose of what I’m trying to make here is that having Facebook as a group or anything even a fan page is far superior when it comes to how many points of opportunity you get to market your product of service to them okay, so people expect to see a lot of posts.

You can also find within the group – not only are you creating a community of people now, let’s look at this for a minute you could just create a local community group. Let’s say you had two or three hundred people in that group and only twenty, thirty, or forty people actually train with you what will happen is those twenty, thirty, or forty people will start talking about it. They will talk about your products, service whatever it is your offering and then all of a sudden you have just got an open pool to another hundred and seventy or however many people there left in your group that will put up there hand and go, “What is this your talking about?” oh, yeah, “Have you not tried Jim Bobs personal trainer or Jim Bobs Boot Camp have you not tried a Fit-Check Boot Camp before come down and try one out.” What is happening there is your community is building your business for you as well, so you are actually leveraging your time, energy, through others which is great, because when you build raving fans they will do the marketing for your business for you.

For example we have multiple different work-out systems that we have and what we will notice is someone will go or one of the Fit-Checks will post I the group and they will go, “Hey I just wanted to see if anyone has tried the bikini body program yet?” and all of a sudden in minutes someone will go, “Yeah, bang I did it. I loved it. I lost this many kilos, it’s great, get it” and then they are like, okay I’m sold, so what that is again, creating the community which will create leverage and that is why Apple is so successful okay, Apple leverage everywhere. I’m such a raving fan of Apple I would promote Apple products to anyone because I think they are awesome…I think they are amazing, and anyone who is an Apple fan would know this right now. If you’re sitting there and you’re an Apple fan you probably just touched your iPhone or iPod you know you just gave your iMac a bit of a rub or something like that. Okay, we aren’t that weird, but you know it’s a totally different thing you know people that use HPs and Windows operating software it’s a completely different scenario you know it’s almost got to that point where people who use Macs are just, so anti Windows devices it’s unbelievable that can actually have such a hold over a person.

I wanted to revel to you one of my, and I’ve reveled this to all of my coaching clients that start up a Facebook you need to have rules okay, this is number one. We operate what I would say, and from feedback we have from our ladies is we operate the number one Facebook female, motivations, whatever health, fitness, private forum with the numbers in the world. I don’t know any other group that operates as well and as professional as we do. There are many groups out there that are larger, but what we are getting is people going in and just going stirring [expletive] and just causing trouble and turning it into more of a drama filled type of thing rather than a safe community feel for your customers and prospects, so you need to have rules guys you need to set up rules. Easy is type into Word doc and upload them to the files okay and just continually remind them. Again, these things that I’m talking about we are going to go more in depth, rules alone we could spend a whole session on that and we will spend a session on that exactly what to have and why have it etc. But, once again, I just want to give you more of an overview here, but I’m sure you are already getting things popping off. Try to refrain from going to do that right now you know we have a lot more to come.

Before you do anything though and this is really integral, and it’s really important that we discuss this because what I find is a lot of personal trainers want to be everything to everyone and unfortunately team you cannot be everything to everyone you need to choose a target market. You need to choose a target market be specific, so let’s look at Proctor and Gamble as a company. You may not even know Proctor and Gamble, but they have over twenty one billion dollar companies, and they produce products such as cleaning products. For example is you have got like let’s say Napisan right now I probably should do a bit more due diligence on this, but I can’t when I guarantee it’s Nap San, but what they do is they have one company that will produce a product that is made to get white out of white okay, and then they have another product which will get your colored clothing or colored washing – I don’t really do too much of the washing side of it in my relationship, but it’s the first time when on your lips really, so look bear with me then. Bare with me then the process of Proctor and Gamble is a twenty-one billion dollar company, so for an example let’s look at our company Fit International we have got Fit-Checks okay, so that is a unique market, so we target the nineteen to thirty-five year old females who want to lose a bit of weight and get in shape, and more importantly what I have the confidence, and the motivation to get out there and really enjoy their life. It’s not always even about the look it’s about been how to provide that community and support. So, support and motivation are the two biggest things I’ve leant that the female market you know really, really cling onto. Hence the reason why our group is so successful, because of their awesome amount of motivation and so forth that is provided not only by us, but by the thousands of other girls in there. There are some really intelligent girls in there who share some really great wisdom and stories, and it’s just a fantastic thing to be part of. Another example, so we have got a Fit-Moms coming out, so Fit-Moms is another complete target market, so we are going to be targeting moms or new moms that want to get fit again, and have the support and motivation.

We are also going to be bringing out a fit executive, so we have a corporate program we are going to be bringing out. We have got fit guys, we have fit kids, and we have fit brides, so we have a plethora of products that we are going to be rolling out to all of our licensees. Now, the key behind that is if we try to market to everyone as just fit we are going to be talking too many different languages – an example of that is you talk to guys differently than you would talk, you‘d talk to an eighteen to thirty-five year old male who wants to pack on muscle differently than to a female who is eighteen to thirty-five and wants to get lean and sexy. You talk in different languages and what I mean by that is you use different words, so we’d be talking about rock, hard, solid muscle you know ripped, six pack abs, if you were talking to guys, right? If you’re talking to females you’d be talking about lean, toned stomach, sexy, those type of words, so you can so that it has a really, really big impact on how you are targeting.

You need to ask yourself do they fit your actual model on Facebook. Now, if you’re actually trying to target sixty to seventy-five year old retirees who want to do rehab then Facebook is probably not your target market you know. You really need to look at does your target market utilize Facebook, and in the market research that I have done I can tell you for a fact that the eighteen to nineteen to you know thirty-five, forty-five year old female definitely utilize Facebook. I’ve seen some stats the other day, but there was an overwhelming in the positives of females actually reading their iPhones or there Smart-phones and jumping on Facebook before they even get out every morning. That is a staggering thing in itself and we will be talking about some really serious marketing strategies that you can actually implement around that. For example imagine someone waking up in the morning and the first thing they read is a post from you that is through the news feed that is totally captivating where they are at that particular moment you know like, in an example might be, “Don’t want to get out of bed” you imagine that when you wake up in the morning and your reading that post through your new feed that says, “Don’t want to get out of bed” imagine been having to get out of bed and having two times more energy than you would any other day, “Click here” so that there is a purely targeted add, and purely targeted message that would – we talked about it earlier Interruption Marketing, okay.

Let’s look at just providing a quick strategy now, if you on the treadmill or if you’re walking or at dinner with your partner like, I have said this isn’t the first episode, so make sure you are talking back to her or talking back to him – get out a pen and paper I want you to write these down or if not listen back. I want to show you three tips to finding actually your next sales proposition which is your USP your target market, so you really need to find your target market. Now, I mentioned a few before, some other examples you know you have your beta testers, “Post-pregnancy” “Sports specifics” “Brides to be” “Brides who want to be” “Single mums” “Single guys” you know corporate, etc, etc, there is no shortage of target market you just need to make sure that the target market you are going for is a target market that you have passion for, and you have a lot of interest in actually perusing, because that my friends I can tell you will provide you with, so much more enjoyment in your role than trying to target a market you’re not happy with you know.

You want to find your target market then you need to look at what are the fears, frustrations, and desires of your customers, okay, so you need to look at what are the three biggest problems that they have? Let’s choose, “Brides to be” so we will talk about brides to be – the biggest frustrations they have they don’t have time they are trying to organize a wedding and they are still working on the side, and the next problem will be money, so money can be quite demanding at that time because the average for an Australian wedding is around fifty thousand dollars. Another problem maybe hey it’s winter right now, but I’m getting married in summer and it’s raining outside and you know I don’t know what to do, it’s cold that type of thing, so you need to really get in the head of your target market.

Then you want to write down how you can actually solve those problems, okay, so if you were to look at how you could solve those problems, how could you solve time? Well, you could create some type of program that had shorter work out. Maybe you did a twenty-five thirty minute work-out system or product or Boot Camp or one-on-one sessions – what that would do obviously would bring down costs, and if cost was still too much pair them up with a partner or get them to train with a friend or train all the wedding party you know get a private group or just add them to your current Boot Camp location as it is, and if winter and rain is the problem well, find an indoor location, find those things that are going to solve their problem because that my friends is going to be really where it all starts from. Let’s do a real quick recap, so you need to create your target market and you need to talk to them in one voice okay. Don’t set up your fan page and try and target everyone it’s just not going to work as well as it would I don’t care if you have to have ten different fan pages that’s just what needs to happen. For us we have Fit-Check, Fit-Guys you know Fit-Brides fit everything that we are doing we are targeting each target market separately. I hammer that point home, so much because I’ve read marketing sessions for the last couple of years and the biggest moment for people is this is the take-away you need to talk to your target market in a different voice, and before you can find that voice you need to know what is going through their heads. Find out the three biggest problems like, I just mentioned and then write down how you believe you can solve them. All right so, again, what we just talked about there that is another whole episode on its own guys, so if you’re not hundred percent sure on that still just go back through and listen to that part again because it’s very, very vital information.

I want to move on now to some Facebook ninja tactics, now this is what I want to call it. Now, I’m going to basically tell you right now that the key things that we do with our fan pages and the things I advise other people to do with their fan pages is that will boost fans inevitably boost sales for you. Let’s get stuck into it now, there is a thing called Air-Drake in Facebook now, Air-Drake is basically – you could call it Facebook ranker or you could call it post-rank or whatever you want to, but let’s just call it Air-Drake at the moment. Basically Air-Drake equals affinity plus weight, plus time decay okay, so affinity plus weight, plus time decay, so let’s break that down affinity equals basically how many times an actual fan interacts with your post, okay. The weight of your post is basically how many times – sorry take a step back, how often a fan interacts, so that is the affinity, so what that means is, let’s say you like a page today and you go back and you like the posts they put up next week and the week after, what that does is that is how many times you actually interact with someone’s fan page. That has a really big mark I guess on the Air-Drake and how successful your posts and pages will be, so the weight is the like, shares, and comments.

I actually went through some of my posts the other day and took down twelve posts, and looked at the reach that they had versus the shares, likes, comments and I actually found some staggering information, and I’ll share that with you in a moment as well. But, the great thing about I guess having over a hundred thousand fans you can actually find this information and you can really be able to see the patterns forming. That is the thing guys no one knows exactly what to do, how to do it on Facebook you know, everyone out there who says they are a Facebook marketing genius – really for me is I want to know what have they done on Facebook and what are they currently doing on Facebook, because that’s how you know someone is actually up with they play. I say this because what I’m talking about right now is what we are actually doing, so be aware out there when someone says to you, “I do this you should do that you should try this” look at where that actually comes from and who told them, “A friend told me” okay who told the friend type of thing you need to find out the sources and see what people are actually sharing with you is right.

We have affinity, plus weight, plus time decay, so the time decay equals a combination basically of the affinity and the weight plus your own comments, so this is another thing you need to be actively commenting on your fan page as well. All right so let’s look at Air-Drake strategies we will call them, and how you can utilize these right now on your Facebook fan pages. A big one is we really want to use attention grabbing words in your post, so for example earlier when I mentioned imagine waking up and seeing a headline that says, “Don’t want to get up” so that type of attention grabbing headline, and you put that in capital letters, “DON’T WANT TO GET UP” you know and other things such as, “Breaking news or attention ladies, attention people or attention personal trainers” you will notice in our Podcast ads I always say, “Attention personal trainers” you can start with asking questions, “Do you know anyone from…dah, dah, dah, do you know any highly motivated personal trainer who are looking for a business opportunity?” That attention grabbing headline is exactly what you need to grab someone’s attention, right? You could also ask going into filling in the blank questions that’s always good you know you want to encourage your users to submit any of their ideas or their opinion, because at the end of the day we are all very opinionated whether you like, it or not whether you are someone how just acts on your opinion or you just sit there and you’re a secretive opinionated. We all want to provide opinions, so fill in the blank questions is always great you know you can go like, “What is your favorite training song? What is your favorite food or if there was only one food in the world what would it be?” and you will get people that will reply. What that does is if we go back to the Air-Drake it will provide you with weight in regards to people commenting. The more times that people comment on different posts that is where we look at the affinity, remember that guys.

Other things you can ask your fans for help solving an issue now, people love to give their opinion not only just on what they think, but if people know they can solve or help solve a problem people love to do that, so that is a really good strategy to utilize. Another key component is you must make sure that you always comment back to your users who comment on your page okay, now what this is, is your fan page, we are using this analogy, your fan page is your living room your inviting people into your living room to come and have a conversation with you. You would not invite someone into your living room and they ask you a question and you continue on watching TV unless of course it was your favorite TV show I totally understand that. But, you need to understand it in that context, it’s not just your fan page – you have to remember someone has reached out to you in some way, shape or form, now, that are a connection whether you like it or not they are trying to form a connection. I know it could be simple as a like, comment, or share, but you need to look at the deeper psychology behind all of that again, that itself is another whole session, and look I can’t really wait to share that either.

Another strategy is you could ask questions that start with, “Do you agree or do you disagree with the biggest looser show” and then also say, “What’s your opinion on it?” so that your actually asking them to interact with you post, but your actually asking them to start a dialogue because what will happen is someone will make a comment and there is always someone who goes, “Hey Jim Bob I don’t agree with your comment” if you going to start that you will begin to start the dialogue it’s great. Another way on that was you can always, we would put up some motivational images and I’d go, “Who agrees?” click like if you agree, and then you can also put an ad, “What are some of your favorite motivational images?” again, you’re not only getting them to comment your getting them to like, okay. When I show you and go through our stats that I pulled out the other day you will notice why we really want them to do that. You can use single code of action, okay so, basically we will have posts that say, “Get your free meal plan and access to our VIP group here” and then we put up a good relevant engaging picture and we also put the URL in the posts as well.

I want to go through some more examples of posts that you can actually use in a moment. You can make certain special days for your fans, so you know you could have fan day Friday or fan day Tuesday or whatever, and basically give away prizes on those certain days. That works really well and it creates a buzz for your page not only that it creates a buzz for people turning up to your page. Now, I can tell you this because – you have a favorite TV program or anything whatever it is you have to wait till eight-thirty Friday night or eight-thirty Tuesday night to tune in and watch it, so if you had something that people knew what was going to happen on a regular basis to tune on then they would be more likely to jump on and listen and come onto your page. You could ask relevant trivia questions so that is another one, and give away prizes for the right answers so that is always good as well educating and motivating remember. I’m going to run through half a dozen different forms of posts here and I call them viral posts. A viral post is, basically the purpose of this post is for it to go viral and what I mean by viral is people to share a comment and like it. Now, I have an example of a post, you can’t see obviously – I’ll put a link on our fan page and you’ll be able to go to our fan page and see what we are talking about here with different posts under this Podcast. If you listen to it through iTunes you will have to go to Facebook.com/fiitchicks and you’ll be able to see our page. There are a couple of key elements basically to getting the thing going viral or a post getting viral, and it simply comes down to the image. The image first of all is the key component because sometimes you will get people to share the image and they don’t even read the words, so that is where imagery comes into Facebook posts, extremely, extremely you know beneficial. I see so many people posting stuff on their fan pages and even on their private pages with no images, people scroll through fan pages and new feed and they stop when it comes to either a video or image or something like that. See yourself next time when you are doing it you’ll see yourself and you’ll go, “Wow I actually do that” so you want to create – put a great image on there that you know will get shared. Not only that you want to put your link to your freebie that you are giving away on there because not only is that posted image been shared, but that link is been shared around by everyone as well. I have a post here that I’m looking at, at the moment that has about six and a half thousand likes, three hundred comments and eight hundred and seventy share it’s been seen by over three hundred thousand people. Now, that means three hundred thousand people have seen that image and our link and our message we have on it, so you really want to look at that as an option.

There are interactive posts okay, so I talked about that a little bit, but it’s more about trying to ask questions and then get them to reply. Again, you need to use interactive images, so in this particular one we have – when it comes to clean healthy eating what is your favorite creation or invention? We thought this one was pretty awesome we have a link that says, “For more free recipes hit two” it’s got a URL and it’s also got an image of you may have seen it, it’s capsicums cut, and we have eggs that were made in between the capsicums – the majority of these comments people will go, “Wow that’s cool” I never thought of that. Not only are we getting people commenting, but we are getting people sharing and getting people liking okay.

All right so moving on to encouragement posts, encouragement posts basically is when you put up quotes or posts or words of wisdom I guess you would call it that will get the most likes and shares words of wisdom. Now, you may lack on the commenting because a lot of the times when you put up these types of posts you are not really going to engage too much in comments you will get a lot of people going, “I love this, this is awesome. That is an awesome quote well put” unless you put something in the actual title that says, “What do you think of this quote or what do you think of this image. Comment below” then that will generate more comments okay. That is just another variation in way you can really generate share, each ranking and all that type of stuff, but most of the entire most powerful thing that you are really going to get is proof, testimonial images that is key. You need to put up testimonial images, but not only that you need to put the testimonial images up with the inspirational story behind it. Now, images are great, but people love to read the story behind it because the story will bring the connection from the actual person on the page to the person sitting there reading it very, very important, and of course as much proof as you can don’t stop ever putting up proof on your page. Now, that is a bit of a mouthful like I said, that right there is something I could spend a day on talking to you about, and over time in the coming Podcast I’m going to really delve in deep into these. I want you to comment below on the posts and let me know what you’re thinking about this stuff, because the more interaction we get from yourselves the more cool stuff I want to share with you and more frequently as well, so let me know what you’re thinking so far. Now, I want to show you, this is I guess totally of par here, but it’s a strategy that is your not currently doing on your own personal profile then I really want you to do it now. In your personal profile you will be able to see an area that says, “Works AT” so it’s your top left-hand – it’s under your profile picture you want to go to Work AT, now you want to work your fan page into that because what it will do is it will create that spin-off from your friends or on your personal profile page will be able to go in and click it that is a way how you can get free fans. Hey, you may only get an extra twenty or thirty couple hundred fans from it, but it is still a strategy, so under your profile page make sure you have Works AT and have your fan page in there.

Now, I wanted to take you through a basic process on how I was able to generate twelve thousand six hundred new contracts, that’s right twelve thousand six hundred new contacts within twenty-four hours. I don’t personally know anyone else who has done that in the fitness industry, and even in the fitness internet marketing industry been able to generate that many leads without the help of affiliate marketing. We are talking about purely what we did ourselves to generate this. I talked to you earlier in the session about opportunities about how Facebook can it can be beta testers and so on and, so forth. Obviously it’s not as easy as, “Hey I want to be a beta tester” but there are certain things that you can do. What we were able to do is we were able to become a beta tester I guess you would say for the offer – now you know that Facebook has this office again, this is a total another session I’ll be running on creating an offer because there are, so many good things in this that you take-away from it. We created an offer and all it was, was our free give-away that we were leading with at the start you know how I talk about, “Find the carrot” give away something of value that people can take.
What we did was we had an offer and for us it was our meal plan and basically Facebook – when we first started this right, Facebook would beta test the offer and the only down side to that was they hadn’t had an online version, so they actually only had a location version, so you had to actually be a physical address. What I did I went in the back and changed our fan page to a physical location which had to give me an address and then create the offer. Now, Facebook at the time were only making these offers available for people to go into a local business you know and say like, buy a cup cake and get your second cup cake free or something like that, that was the purpose of the offer. I created an online offer and I guess you would say I almost hacked the system okay, but I’ll just say that because it sounds really cool, but basically all I did was put some links in certain places and it ended up working out right. But, there was a down side to it, so we created an offer and were giving away a free meal plan, and the results of that we hundred and ten thousand people claim it. Now, not every person actually opted on that as you can tell we got over fifty-four thousand likes on that page, but this is the staggering thing our posts was seen by over five million people five million people seeing that offer.

Now, the thing with this is that this was not set up for an online version, now you can go and create an offer and you can actually put in a URL and direct someone there it’s far more…I guess you would say structured now for anyone to do it, so if you haven’t currently done it I suggest you go in and click on the offer part, and you can do it you don’t need to be a local business. So we did that we offered the meal plan and that is how we generated over twelve thousand email contacts over night literally it went overnight I was just so taken back by it. But what it did for me was really open my eyes and this is when I realized Facebook has got an abundance of people out there who we can help and assist, and that is where I guess you could say Fit International, and Fit-Chicks and everything aspired from. I guess the underlying lesson there is that I tried to create something that actually wasn’t available to be created all right, so I took a leaf out of my own book and said, “You know what let’s find a way to make that happen” while so, I did that I was able to capitalize. Now, Facebook emailed me a couple of days later and they to, they got some feedback from me and they took a bit of an interview process, so it’s out there somewhere in Facebook world…not sure what they have done with it yet, but they really wanted to test that, and that was one of the catalyst – the representative that I was talking to said they hadn’t seen anyone use it like this and capitalize over a hundred and ten thousand claims. The funny thing was because they were quite concerned because they thought how you are going to be able to service that at your local facility. Well we didn’t have a local facility they were coming to because it was all delivered online. The downside to that was, I’ll tell you a quick story was we actually had a- couple of girls – if you’re listening we are really apologetic about this, but you really should of read the instructions that we had there. What happened was a couple of girls from Brisbane actually drove down to our facility to pick up their free meal plan that we were giving away and of course we weren’t there it was at our training facility, and they came down during the weekend and we got a message saying, “We’ve came down to pick it up we are really excited to get it” from my perspective I was like, “Holy crap someone actually drove down from Brisbane which is like an hour and ten minute drive to where we are to actually pick up this free gift” now I’ll look at the psychology behind that and go that is amazing you know they took at least two to three hours out of there day they had twenty dollars worth of petrol to come down and then obviously they had to buy food. If you look at it as a whole they were extremely interested in what we had to offer, so that is where a few ah, ha’s went for me. We also had someone from Perth email or mail us that offer they printed out the offer and sent it to us. Little did they know as soon as we let them know about it we said, “Look it actually says directly in the offer that you need to claim it online” so you know other than those few little hick ups it went relatively quite well, so there we were with an instant twelve and a half thousand people to add to our data base. Again, guys the lesson behind that is I took a stab at something, and now you are able to do it online and I really suggest you go and have a look at the Facebook offer because that is one way that is so powerful. The other reason Facebook is so powerful is because of all the statistics you can actually look at. We can look at right now if I was to look at our Facebook statistics I can tell you that ninety-eight percent of our fans are females and they are aged eighteen to – well the majority are aged eighteen to forty-four. From the age bracket twenty-five to thirty-five we have got forty percent females, so we can even tell that X amount are from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Gold Coast, Adelaide you name it, and that my friends is the most powerful, powerful information you can get your hands on that is extremely invaluable.

I realized the time here and I’m just checking along, how we have been going. We are coming up to the hour actually, so we have been going for quite a while. I told you we can talk about this stuff forever, but I really want to…just finishing on a couple of more tips on how you can really maximize Facebook, and then what we will do is we may carry on with Facebook next week or we might bring up a new topic or we may even do deep into one of the topics. I really want to leave that up to you and get some feedback from you as well, but just some tips to finish off with Facebook is, posting on your profile now, I get asked how many times you need to post your profile and what’s good and what’s bad? I can tell you what we have done and what we do is we would post anywhere from five to nine times a day. Now, people might go, “Oh that’s too much” but you know how long am I going to sit at my computer all day and do that you know I’ll be sitting there all day just posting.

Well my friends there is software out there called Postfrom.com or Whosweet.com and it allows you to schedule posts for free. Now, you can schedule up to ten posts a day for free, so that’s a pretty cool system you sit there at the end of the night and schedule your posts for the day, they are strategically written remember and you’re away. Make sure you are tagging every single one of your clients that are going to be training with tagging and checking and it’s extremely, extremely valuable in the overall end of your online success. Of course there are Facebook ads, but I won’t even start talking about that because that’s going to be a whole lot of a cost to listen that. We can basically reveal to you how we have mastered and been able to get ads, clicks down as low as two-cents a click. We have actually have had one campaign that was running at one-cent a click which lasted for about seven days which was unbelievable we ended up with something like, forty-thousand clicks or something like that. You work out forty-thousand on one-cent you know you’re not talking that many one hundred and forty bucks if my math is done correctly…could be wrong maybe. Someone out there who is a mathematician will be sitting there going, “Brett you got that way wrong” but look again, forty thousand clicks at one-cent is pretty good, and I don’t know too many people out there who can get clicks that cheap. The only reason I’ve been able to do that is because of what I’ve told you today literally I’ve held nothing back I’ve told you what we need to have in the posts, and what you need to be doing to cause the interaction, bring interaction together and it’s a very exciting platform to work from. There was a couple of things I just need to mention before we leave because I said at the start it’s, “What you need to avoid” you need to avoid getting caught in the Facebook bubble don’t feel trapped to your Facebook page okay, don’t reply back to someone every second they email you or message you on Facebook. Set specific times of the day when you are going to reply every morning an afternoon do that, and remember that Facebook is basically a vehicle just like you drive your car you need to drive Facebook okay, and the key thing is don’t be left behind. Facebook changes regularly and you need to be up to date with it.

Now, I’m not saying you need to spend all your time and energy been an expert, but even just listening to these Podcasts makes you far more advanced and in a different league than the person who is not, so keep up to date with that and that’s it that’s all I have got for you. I’m running into a time constraint her so I really wanted to give you as much information as I can within the hour and would love to hear your feedback and what you think of the episode, and really look forward to sharing more with you.  On a regular basis we are going to get this Podcast happening on a weekly basis, so coming up I have some great stuff to share myself I’ve also got some really great interviews coming up with some really high level fitness business owners. Keep your ears peeled and I look forward to sharing with you in the next episode thanks and good night, and good bye, good night, good day, good morning wherever you are listening to it…just rock on.

Episode 1 – The Intro & 5 Key Components EVERY FiiT Pro Needs For A Successful Fitness Business

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In this episode Brett reveals exactly how this FREE recourse for Fitness professional will work.

He also discusses his 5 Key Components to running a Successful fitness business.

Component #4 would be hard to beat.

Let us know what you thought, leave a comment below.

Regards
Brett

 

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5 Keys To A Successful Fitness Business

Transcript of EPISODE 1:

From the desk of Brett CampbellWhat you are about to read is the transcript that goes along with the 1st ever episode of the Fiit Professional Podcast.

You can listen here – http://bit.ly/12aublz

Hello and welcome to the first episode of the Professional Business and Development Podcast.

Let me introduce myself – My name is Brett Campbell and I am the creator of Fiit International PTY as well as My Fitness Website PTY.

These are two companies that are in the Fitness Industry and they are really designed to not only help the general public achieve their health and fitness goals, but they also cater to the Fitness Professionals.

So that’s you right now, the person who is actually listening to this Podcast. Firstly I have a few things that I must openly admit to before we get started;This Podcast is completely free, I am not planning or ever planning to sell this to anyone because I believe at this stage in my career I really want to be able to give back to the Fitness Industry.

Now I will go into that in a bit more detail in a moment. I want to tell you my story – just to get you a little bit excited about what you’re going to be listening to over the coming weeks and months.

We are going to be covering topics that are going to literally propel your business from where it currently is, to where it actually could be.

Here is an example – we are going to be talking about different strategies on how you can market your business and how you can generate more clients.

This is because at the end of the day Personal Trainers and Fitness Professionals have concerns and frustrations when they are running their own Fitness Business.I know because I have experienced this and have been in that position myself.

I know exactly what the frustrations and concerns are when it comes to running your own Fitness Business. Whether you have been in the industry for a little over a few weeks, or you have been in the industry for years.

I DO know and understand that getting clients is one of the hardest possible challenges, and if you don’t have a system behind it, then it makes it all the more difficult.

So, I am going to be revealing to you how we have been able to generate over 100 thousand Facebook fans. Even better than that, over 180 thousand Email contacts in the last 14 months.

I want to point out that I say this because it is something I have been heavily involved with and working extremely vigilant on for the last 14 months.

I am extremely excited to be able to share with you the strategies I use, and can share with you right now. Here I am putting my hand up, I am not one of those Personal Trainer mentors or gurus.

I do not believe in feeding you a little bit of information and then leave you hanging and wondering what your next step is going to be. I will not do that. I am literally going to be telling you the exact steps on how we do it in our current companies.

Now that’s really exciting news and something I want to share with you. There is going to be nothing held back, We are going to be talking about how you can have websites that run on auto-pilot, which enables you to generate clients.

We are going to talk to you about how you can take the sales out of selling. So for a lot of Trainers that don’t like selling to people, we are going to show you strategies and systems that you can utilise into your current Fitness Business.

This will take the fear of any selling out and we will also teach you strategies on how to overcome the most common objections. Such as; ‘I don’t have the money’ or ‘I don’t have the time to train’.

We are going to give you solutions that you will be able to implement effective immediately. That’s going to be my goal. In each podcast and in each session that you listen to, there’s going to be some strategy that I want you to be able to take away.

Now I don’t just want you to take them away, I want you to put them to good use literally!

I am going to reveal strategies that have enabled us to build a seven figure a year fitness company.

Again I don’t say that to impress you, I say it to impress upon you, the fact that what I am going to be delivering over the up coming weeks and months, is real life strategies that you can implement immediately.Now the problem is a lot of people will be listening to this podcast, and you may be running on a treadmill, you may be sitting on a chair in your office and thinking that’s a great idea Brett – I will get to that soon.

But the thing is, most people don’t. I will throw out a percentage and I would be safe to say that 90% of people do not implement what they hear or learn.

That’s why there are so many seminars and courses out there for people. This is so they can return back to year after year, because they haven’t implemented what they first learned.

I want to make a deal with you; if I go out of my way to provide you with all these tools and techniques to run a successful Fitness Business, then I want you to do something for me in return.

I want you to be able to make a comment under each of these podcasts and let me know that you’ve implemented it and actually given it a go. Then I want to know what your results were, because that’s what really excites me. OK, so that’s the deal I want you to make with me.

If I am going to provide you with all this great quality information then I hope in return that you will actually go and implement it, now I think that is a pretty fair deal.

On top of that, we are going to be talking about effective time management techniques. Having the technique of being able to utilise time management enables me to run not one, but two different companies.

So as you can imagine if I had not developed skills in time management it would of produced a bit of a downfall. I can share this knowledge with a lot of people and with the strategies and tools that I have been utilising over the last 4 years in my company.

I want to share those with you because it’s simply amazing when you can actually be successful in setting yourself a schedule and set yourself a routine that will enable you to get 3, 4 or 5 times the amount of productivity of work completed than you normally would.

I want to teach you how to build relationships with other businesses because that can be imperative for the success of your business.

I want to teach you how to set up seminars yourself and become the go to expert in your area.I want to teach you how to leverage social media, (social media is a massive platform) which you already know, and I want to teach you how to leverage that properly.

Unfortunately there are many people out there that are “so called experts” in social media.

To be perfectly honest this does my head in – If someone suggests that they have expertise within that particular field, wouldn’t that mean that they have had ample experience in that field to be an expert? My definition of an expert is someone who has actually had experience with Social Media and is still currently doing this successfully.

Not someone who has read a blog post on how to do it, that’s not what an expert is in my opinion.

Especially if we are talking terms of Facebook, you need to be engulfed in Facebook pretty much as a full time participant in order to be up with every change that they are doing.

That’s something that I want to be able to show you, so you do not have to read a thousand different blogs out there on what peoples thoughts are about a particular subject.

So just to touch on points; you know we have over 100 thousand Facebook fans, you know what that does for us? That allows us to be able to correlate real time statics on what actually does work and what doesn’t work.

The other day I broke it down that we have got 8 different Facebook posts that we have put up there, and it was actually quite staggering to go through the amount of shares, likes and comments etc. links or no links and find out what actually does work and what is getting our message out there further.

This is actually pretty surprising and it really did surprise me. It just goes to show you all the tests and measures we will teach you, and how to test and measure certain aspects of your business.

We will also teach you how to create information products, so if that’s something you’re interested in learning about, we can cover that as well.

We have several different products which we have on offer now, and that people are already after or using. There are people also who are not in our local area, that are interested in our products.

So, I want to show you and introduce you to the world of online marketing and how you can get your message out there to more than just your public awareness.

I can to teach you how to generate return on investment within your marketing.

A lot of people don’t know what return on investment really means. Obviously to the people that do its about being able to generate a higher return for the money you have invested.

So if you put in one dollar and you get two dollars back, well that’s a great 100% return on investment right there. I also can to teach you how to become super efficient, and basically I want to take you through the journey on how to run a successful fitness business.

So over the coming weeks and months, I am going to be not only providing awesome content to you, I am going to be interviewing some of the leading professionals.

Whether it will be an actual Fitness Professional in relation to technical training. We don’t want to neglect that side of the business because that’s also really important.

We are going to be teaching you some really great technical components and we will also be going to interview nutritional experts.

So be prepared for tangents, yes I am going to be going off on tangents. That’s because I’m sitting here right now, looking out of the second story office window, which over looks the lake.

Now that to me is absolutely amazing! I am able to sit here right now and I’m offering you a free service.

Can you tell in my voice I am extremely excited to get this out to you? Hence the reason I am probably talking a little bit fast. However, I am sure you are smart and are able to keep up with me.

Interviewing experts – there it is! So we are going to be interviewing other Fitness Business experts, people who have had success in this area.

First I am going to interview a really good friend of mine who actually runs a Fitness Franchise with over 300 franchisees within his actual company.

We are going to learn secrets on how he has been able to generate thousands and thousands of leads via the Internet. This will include teaching you those methods and strategies. So it is not just from myself, but from other experts as well.

Because it is one of my beliefs that it’s great to be able to share knowledge and learn other bits and pieces from within a range of professional areas.

So look today what I am going to be doing is set the foundation for the up – coming episodes, and take you through what I believe are the 5 key components to a successful Fitness Business.

I could literally make a list of probably 200 or maybe 300 different things that I believe are a key component to having a successful business, but what I’ve done I’ve written down 5 of the key components that come to mind quickly.

I am really big on whenever I do things like this; I do not over think it.

That’s also another strategy that we will cover. What can happen is when you over think things, it can lead to sitting literally for two hours and come up with many ideas. Which is how I am going to structure this pod cast.

When there are 5 top key components that I can give you right now.

This will stop you from getting confused and overwhelmed and will help you keep positive in moving forward and then press record on this pod cast.

So here I am, I have just jumped in I have written down 5 key elements. I am sure that these 5 key components, that I am about to reveal shortly, you will agree with me that they are all an extremely important aspect.

So first thing we are going to talk about is, creating a community. That’s because for me creating a community has been a catalyst of our success.

I am also going to talk to you about another key component that you need and that is to be able to produce results.

So whatever the product or service you choose, and perhaps your a one on one personal trainer and maybe considering running a ‘boot camp’ business. You could also be possibly providing semi – private training sessions.

We are going to talk about different modalities like that.

Obviously at the end of the day you need to make sure your products and or services are producing results.

Another key component, which I believe is definitely up there, is providing multiple services.

Now you would look at this as your product suit. I are going to talk about that a little bit more in detail shortly. That right there is a key component on how you can start steering away from trading time for money.

At the end of the day if you have to turn up for the transaction or appointment time like you turn up for your one on one training session, you won’t get paid while you’re there.

We want to look at avenues on how you can bypass that. Then another key component is being genuine. Not only being a genuine person, but also a genuine business owner.

I see it far too often with people out there who are not genuine business owners and this really upsets me.

Finally we’ve got to have a purpose, now this is critical and this would be in the top 5 of any listing you have.

You need to have a purpose. What is the purpose of actually doing what you’re doing?

I have always been going to do a bonus. This bonus step jumped out to me as well and this key component is “getting professional help”. We will talk about that in a moment.

Build A Raving Community

Let’s go back to key component number one; creating a community. Now there are a few things that you really need to touch upon hear. When you’re creating communities this needs to be a safe, supportive and beneficial environment for your target market.

It needs to be based on educational marketing. Now I say this because everyone wants to be involved in something.

An example of this is – I have just started playing Wednesday night pub poker again. We used to play a fair bit back in the day, so it’s relatively none competitive meaning that it’s not risking a whole lot of money. It’s a great, safe and supportive environment for me and it allows me to get out.

So at the end of the day, the main purpose behind it is the comradery you get when you meet new people. It allows you to be a part of something and it’s the same crowd that plays every Wednesday.

Once again that’s what I am talking about with community. In the fitness industry, we need to look at it and base it on captured marketing.

If you’re familiar with what we do, then you will know that we have a company called ‘Fiit International’.

Fiit International is basically our flagship program we call Fiit Chick Transformation. Our Facebook fan page is called ‘Fiit Chicks’ http://facebook.com/fiitchicks and the catalysts.

This has been built based upon educational marketing. This is so we can create community based people who want to become a part of it.

We provide support to them and we educate them. Now there is a difference between marketing and educational marketing.

Education based marketing is being able to provide people with a solution to their problems.

That’s what I am doing right here, this is called educational marketing. So hear you are listening to this, while I am providing you and going to be providing you an amazing amount of business tips and strategies that you can simply take and utilise straight into your business.

Like I said to you, I’m not going to be selling this or anything. However, what may happen, being totally honest and transparent is, down the track you may have listened to one, two, three or even ten hundred episodes. It is then you may realise that you have been educated so much from this that you will want to know what’s next.

Then you may take out some offer or anything that we may provide to you, and if you don’t that’s fine as well. If you did, then that is what I’m talking about, educational based marketing.

So everything I teach you and everything I do, you will really need to pay attention. Because if you were to educate your prospects on how to eat healthy, and guide them on what to eat, plus include some great exercises they need to do. Then the key part there is they all start coming to you and you will be the go to person, who will be the trusted professional for their query.

Now we all know those types of people, whether you acknowledge it or not. You will have people who you go to for a specific question.

If you have a mate who is a mechanic, and your car is playing up, then your going to go to him. You see him as the go to expert when it comes to car repairs.

This is the same thing with fitness. This is where you want to be the number one person when it comes to fitness for your prospects. So in order to be the number one person, you need to create a safe community and provide them with ongoing educational based marketing.

Produce Results

Secondly you need to produce results, this just goes without saying. Or your business will not be around for long if you’re not producing results for people.

The key thing there is whether you’re looking at running a boot camp business, and for some reason or another none of your clients are producing results – Then you would need to look at your particular programming on what you are delivering.

Now obviously you will need to take into account that not everyone is going to get results, which is unfortunate.

You could have the best program out there, and someone can purchase it and they won’t get successful results.

An example is one of our workout systems. Now I know that our workout systems yield results as long as it is being followed correctly.

We’ve have proof of this – because we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of girls go through and do the program and provided us with testimonials to let us know about their results.

Of course there is a small minority, actually 2% of people who purchase our work out products say that it doesn’t work. Or who have tried it. They generally will send an Email after a few weeks saying, “I have tried your system” and it has only been 9 days, she says, “I am not seeing the results I want”.

I mean there’s always going to be some people that are not going to achieve the results, however, you need to make sure that the product or service your offering is actually going to produce results.

Now you’re not going to sell a 10 minute PT session are you? At the end of the day you really are not going to get any results from that, so again part of common sense comes into play.

I’ve just had a drink of water – you see you could not do that on a paid pod cast. Ok back to it!

Provide Multiple Services – Your Product Suite

Providing multiple services. Now this is what you would call your products suite.

If you look at Fiit International as a company, we provide Fiit Transformations, which are our locations and our training program.

We have Fiit Retreats. Yes, we run Fitness Retreats overseas in Bali and we are looking at other destinations around the world.

We provide Fiit Supplements to our customers who can purchase our own supplements from our Fiit brand.

We also provide Fiit Online Products. So as you can clearly see we provide a whole series of online products and services that we have currently on offer.Fiit Professionals, well that’s our flagship program for our

Fitness Professionals and Personal Trainers who want to run their very own Fiit Chick location.

Fiit Online Clothing is also one of our products and also Fiit Clothing which we are producing our own Fiit brand of clothing, work out clothing etc.

We also have Fiit Equipment; this is where we offer Fiit Equipment, whether it is to a Personal Trainer or the general public. So you can clearly see we’ve created a small board of our own products.

We also have our own Applications, there is online software and the reason being is because when you’ve got multiple products services out there people again will be very happy and enjoy the convenience of purchasing and using them all.

If we look at Apple; now, when I changed over to Apple I bought an Apple Mac book that was my first Apple purchase. The next thing I purchased was the iPhone, as I found these products of good quality and banding.

After that I went to the iPad then another iPad, then another iMac and even bought another Mac book pro. So looking at that scenario:

When someone is happy with a particular company and their products and services, they will repeatedly use those products and that company.

So as an example; if Apple were to develop a new iTV, I would ultimately purchase that Apple iTV. The reason why is because I know that every product that they have previously produced has been of exceptional quality.

The same thing also applies with your fitness business.

You know if you where introducing one on one Personal Training; and then all of a sudden you introduce Yoga; then perhaps you introduce nutritional classes; and then say you introduce some merchandise; and maybe even introduce some coaching etc.;

The reason being is, once people like your service and they know that you have a great product and have been successful at producing results, just like our last key component. Then they will be happy to spend their money with you and will keep coming back, and that is just how it works.

If you look at yourself and look what you do, and where you go and where you shop and so forth, it shows that by providing multiple services is a huge component.Now in the coming podcast we are going to be delving deep into particular product suits and how they can compliment your particular business, so we will create an exact product suit that you can utilise.

Be Genuine

Going onto the next key component is being genuine you need to look at this, so that it’s not all about the dollars.

Don’t let the dollars blind you of your real purpose. As Personal Trainers we can command a lot of money.

Let’s be totally honest, when I was actively doing one to one personal training, the last client I was training, I was charging $220.00 per session at that time.

There is a whole system behind that, I didn’t just one day wake up and I’m going to charge that $220.00 – The key thing there is that you can charge a large amount of money for a service, especially for someone who may have only completed a 12-week course, or even 12 months.

For Instance, look at lawyers, they can charge large amounts of money, however, the key thing is not to let that blind side you.

On the flip side of that, you still need to be totally open and honest and have a great relationship with money, because at the end of the day we are all in this industry for the life style.

We want to help people of course, but we really want to make sure that we can provide for our family, the lifestyle that we want to provide for them. In order to do that, I am going to say it, “you actually need money”.

Ok yes you need money to actually do that stuff, and the key component here is you can be in this industry, you can be genuine, and you can still earn a lot of money to do the things that you want.

Its not all about the money – but it can certainly help

Now there’s going to be people listening to this, and going, ‘well I just want to help people’, don’t get me wrong that’s exactly why I am in the industry.

Have A REAL PURPOSE

If we go onto the next key component it’s having a purpose. Why are you really doing this? That just goes with the whole thing of being genuine.

We’ve created what we call Fiit Foundation; now this is a charity that we and of course myself is extremely passionate about. I have this burning desire to be able to help sick children. I am not quite sure where that’s stemmed from. I just know that I really want to be helping sick children.

I also want to be helping females, hence the reason why myself has created a female only (at this present time) community. Because we want to help women get back to that, and provide a safe atmosphere.

I have personally had friends that have gone through breast cancer. So we want to help the Breast Cancer Foundation, which is why we are doing what we are doing.

Write down on a piece of paper what is your purpose, why are you actually doing this?

My purpose is to be able to (as I mentioned), dedicate my time and energy to the Fiit Foundation, that’s it.

In order for that to happen I need to make sure that the company is continually growing. That means we need the money and cash flows to be coming through, which also helps to support not only our employees, our charities and so forth, that we are running and that’s where I see myself.

I want to spend all my time working on the Foundation and giving back to people who are less fortunate, because that there really gets me excited.

So I don’t want to hammer the point home about money, and earning money etc., but we really need to be open to that and just be totally honest with ourselves, and to anyone that says they don’t want to earn that sort of money. I would say right there to you that it is bullshit, you do want to earn money, but that’s a by-product of what you really want to be doing.

So if I wanted to help 10 thousand sick kids, we are going to need a lot of money to do that and the money unfortunately its not going to come from the money tree. That my mum always said was out the back yard many years ago. I am still looking for it and have always hoped to find it.

So have a purpose and understand why you really want to do it.

Another reason is I want to help females.

To be honest I grew up in a broken family. I guess you would call it a split family. My parents split up, so it was the girls and I; my Mother, 2 sisters and I at the time. After that I then took it upon myself to be the man of the house even though I was 6 years old.

I took it upon myself then, and I am still taking it upon myself now to be and play that position in our family.

That’s something that really, really gets me going and gives me the energy to sit here and talk to you and deliver all these messages.

So you can also go out there and deliver your purpose to the world?

The final key component the bonus one, I was talking about the catalysts again of success. This is not only mine but any of the key people that I surround myself amongst. In order to be successful in any industry, you need to get professional guided help.

Now it’s that simple; if you’re sick where do you go? You would go to the doctors. If you want to be a good football player, you go to a good football coach.

If you want to learn to be an ironman you go and learn from an ironman, or someone who had trained many successful ironmen.

If you want to lose weight you would see a personal trainer. If you want to be successful in business and be able to live a life style that you want and a purpose that you really have, then you need to get professional help it’s as simple as that.

I see it far to often in my background of coaching one to one personal trainers and I have been doing that for the last 3 years.

I see that as a key component so many people don’t want to get professional help because it might cost too much or it’s too much of an investment. But you really need to ask yourself; can you not afford to not get it?

In the last 4 years alone I have spent over 180 thousand dollars on my education. I know to a lot of people that is just unfathomable. And you probably couldn’t totally comprehend that sort of outlay but I see it as a personal investment. Now that’s the exact amount and I am not going to sugar coat anything, it’s not easy.It is not easy to go out there and build up a big business, but I’ll tell you what, its extremely possible if you just give it a shot.

So I am looking at this right now, I have delivered those 5 key components and I really want to sit here and just keep talking.

I want to talk about it more and provide you with more strategies. I also want to leave you with this – because I think there are a couple of really good points that you can take from this.

So lets recap the 5 key components

You need to create a community; find out where you want to train and serve, whom do you want to serve?

You want to produce results; so you want to create a system behind that which is going to produce results. To produce your results you may need more than one service or product.

That’s where we go onto our next one of providing multiple services; what are the services you want to provide?

Be genuine so remember that’s a simple one be genuine, and have a purpose. And of course get help.

Now listening to this podcast right now, I would classify this as you getting professional help. The great thing about it is, your not paying for it.

So what I really recommend you do; is take what I am about to deliver in these following episodes, put them into your business and really see the possibilities that you have out there.

So I am going to leave you with this and if you want to find out more you know you can visit us at our Facebook fan page Fiit Chicks; or you can visit us at one of our websites http://fiitinternational.com.au you can check out our products and services that we offer; and hey, you may get some ideas from that and it might spark some thing you know.

Look I’m more than happy and open for you to check that out and look at it so keep an eye out in your Email in box for coming episodes, because they are going to be coming very soon and I am going to be delivering them fairly frequently.

Again if you can put up with the unedited shoot from the hip type of style that I am producing here, then look, I would love to have you along on this journey it’s going to be an amazing journey.

Not only just for you but for both of us, because I am a big believer in not only teaching the methods, you need to practice what you preach.

So by teaching this to you it’s going to bring out a whole lot of things for me that is going to be really exciting as well.

So until then have a fantastic day I really look forward to hearing from you and I will talk to you soon.

Regards
Brett

To find our more about Brett Campbell, Fiit International PTY and what we can offer:

Like us on Facebook:Fiit Chicks – https://www.facebook.com/fiitchicks

Fiit International – https://www.facebook.com/fiit2012

I love Being A Personal Trainer – https://www.facebook.com/ilovebeingapersonaltrainer

And VISIT one of our Many Websites:http://fiitprofessional.com.au – this is a must visit for all Fitness Professionals.

http://podcast.fiitprofessional.com.au – FREE business resource for Fitness Professionals.