Dedicated to all my clients, past and present.

It has been your belief in me that made me believe in myself, and your support that helped me achieve my dreams. I hope I was able to bring as much value to your lives as you have to mine.

Congratulations! Youre about to learn about Personal Training in its truest, simplest form. Its a business that can allow you to achieve what millions work hard for but never find: a path to enjoyable, stress-free work and an adventurous life. Not everything youre about to read is politically correct or socially acceptable; its all real-world information, culled from my experiences in this field, from speaking to the worlds best trainers, and many more trainers that youll never hear or read about but that are truly living whats called the fitness lifestyle. Ive separated the real from the rhetoric, and whats left are the essentials to creating a career of respect, high salary and a limitless future. An untold amount of effort and time went into the development of the information in this book, not to mention the six months it took to write it. Please respect that and do not wrongfully distribute this book or use it improperly. Thank you for your purchase and I look forward to meeting you and hearing your story.

Sincerely, Kaiser Serajuddin

Copyright 2010 This work is legally copyrighted in the State of New York . It is meant for use by the sole owner or those licensed by GoHard Fitness Inc. for possession of this book. Any wrongful copying or distribution of this book will be met by full penalty of law. This book may not be re-sold or distributed by any other party other than GoHard Fitness Inc.

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Some of us will do our jobs well and some will not, but we will be judged by only one thing - the result. - Vince Lombardi

I TRODUCTIO

SIX-FIGURE TRAINER
2010

With this book Id like to take the opportunity to introduce a new term to you:
THE TOP-LEVEL TRAI ER Top Level Training isnt a new type of training; rather, its an enhanced definition of Personal Training. Thats because if youre not a Top Level Trainer, youre actually not a trainer at all. Youre just passing through the fitness industry for a short time and just like the wooly mammoth, youll soon be extinct.. TLTs are the trainers with the highest incomes and the highest job satisfaction. They dont go through career burn-out; instead their skills and knowledge grow month by month and year by year. When new opportunities open up in the health and fitness industry, theyre the ones ready to fill them. They eventually gain such a high level of skill, success, and perspective that they grow into other segments of the fitness sector, and eventually to wide recognition and tremendous success.
(Continued on page 7)

I TRODUCTIO

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If we were to do a comparison of Top-Level Trainers versus non-TLTs, it would look like this: TLT: Gets all the best clients. non-TLT: Trains people that dont inspire them. TLT: Gets tons of referrals and never has to market. non-TLT: Cares more about making sales than changing lives. TLT: Earns a high income. non-TLT: Will soon be in a different, less desirable, less respected field. TLT: Has a thriving training practice. non-TLT: Earns a very uncertain salary. TLT: Moves on to expert status in the field. non-TLT: Experiences career burn-out after a few years. TLT: Lives the fitness lifestyle, full of excitement and lots of leisure time. non-TLT: Doesnt practice what they preach.

Which one are you? Which one would you rather be?
This manual will help you to understand what the top of the training industry looks like, and most importantly, give you a detailed plan of how to get there. I myself have been on both sides of the spectrum. When I first started as a trainer, it wasnt long before I was beaten down by the profession; it became a bad job instead of a career I was passionate about. I was extremely motivated: that wasn't the problem - the problem was that I

I TRODUCTIO

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didnt understand the profession. Being motivated has nothing to do with it; its rules are completely different from every other profession out there. Unfortunately, it took me years and the experience of training thousands of clients before I figure out the truth: that this isnt a typical career. For that reason, many of the strategies you would use to get ahead in typical career will actually backfire and blow up in your face when if youre a Personal Trainer I now realize how it should be done; that there are simple systems, habits, and mind-sets that go into being a personal trainer that are more than just about sweat and dumbbells. Once you grasp these ideas, this job actually turns into both one of the most rewarding and at the same time easiest professions in the world. First Id like to commend you for being serious about your career and picking up THE SIX-FIGURE TRAINER PROGRAM. Youll find it immeasurably more valuable to your career than any other book or DVD youve seen or read on personal training or general business for that matter. More importantly, its the most practical. Books and certifications on personal training are designed just to maintain the status quo and teach you the basics of how to train. They dont tell you anything about the real world of personal training how to get high level clients, charge top dollar, work fewer hours, live a vibrant lifestyle, and have tons of clients that keep coming back and refer you to others. These are the most important lessons to learn, but they arent available anywhere else. The majority of trainers will give up on this great profession and move on to other fields before they ever learn them. But in this program, Ill show you what its really like to make it. Here youre going to learn the real field-tested information on how to succeed in this business, but on your terms; how to have the kind of training practice you want, and how to actually create an appealing lifestyle for yourself. In society today we are what we do, and for that reason this book is about way more than just starting or improving at a job its about realizing your vision and creating a life.

THE GREATEST JOB

SIX-FIGURE TRAINER
2010

I can unequivocally say that Personal Training is the worlds greatest profession. It brings together some unbelievable characteristics that make this the case.

Its easy to get started Its easy to do It pays a high income

For anyone that decides to enter this field, youre uniquely positioned to get started in something special. Who else do you know talks about their job like that? I have no problem doing it, and its without any hype. On top of that, Id also call Personal Training the worlds last great profession, for a few reasons:

Personal Training is completely unregulated - its ungoverned by arbitrary standards or red tape. Its completely democratic - youre paid for your own strengths as a

THE GREATEST JOB

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trainer and a person, not the school you went to.

People are paying you to make them exercise - how that turned into a lucrative, multi-million dollar field permanently ingrained into our culture, I have no idea. Its the most highly consumed and at the same time also the highest paying wellness field - more so than massage, acupuncture, or chiropractic services. You only need a few clients to earn a very high income. You set your own hours - want to work mornings, evenings, or go on vacation several times a year? This is your job. Its in a rapidly expanding field - the health and wellness industry is being hailed as the next trillion dollar industry. Personal Training is your start in this field, and your road to continued success and a very high income. Its in a subject that is actually fun to participate in and learn about - I mean there are people that go to the gym every day and study health and fitness that arent Personal Trainers!

The truth is that everyone needs to work out, and millions of people do; were just the only ones that get to make money at it!

Jim Collins in his book Good to Great talks about the signs that youre in the
perfect profession for you: its when youve been enjoying what youre doing so much, and making so much money at it, that at any moment youre afraid that the powers that be will find out and come busting through the doors and shut you down; you think any day youll be found-out and it will all be taken away from you; you have to pinch yourself at how much fun and how easy your job is. Thats exactly how Ive felt for years now as a Personal Trainer. Ive had such an amazing lifestyle doing something that comes so naturally to me, I actually feel guilty. Ill show you how to get the same feeling.

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The problem with a lot of personal trainers is they think that they dont deserve to be this lucky or get this kind of respect. They actually fight it and end-up making the profession unnecessarily hard. They spend millions every year on unnecessary certifications that wont improve the end training experience of their clients and wont bring any additional money into their pockets. They choose to train in neighborhoods or gyms where theyll never earn a high income or have a real future; they just continue to bang their heads against the wall day after day for years on end. And they dont set themselves up to move forward in this career; they view hourly training as their last stop, not knowing there are other options out there for them. But it can be different unlike any other major field in the world, all it takes to get to the top of this one is the decision to do it; there are no other outside boundaries.

Completely Untouched

As you probably already know, Personal Trainers are respected as highly skilled
professionals. Just like any other professional, youre considered to possess a certain body of knowledge and skill that people pay you to benefit from. But unlike other professions, there still isnt any mandatory college degree for Personal Trainers; theres no designated number of hours you need to serve as an intern; no number of credits you need to accumulate. Of the wide number of major certifications that you can get in Personal Training, all with different requirements and differences in difficulty, the amount of studying and actual tested material is about what youll find on just one major exam in a difficult college class. In any other profession, youll have to taken dozens of such tests before you can start your career; here, youve got to take just one - hardly a barrier to entry in any way. And heres a little secret: you really dont need a certification at all to get started! Although from a legal perspective its not recommended (in case youre sued), you will not be arrested or convicted of malpractice for not having a certification. Thats not true of chiropractors, dieticians, acupuncturists, and almost

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any health and wellness profession. And Personal Trainers very often charge more than any of those other professionals! Its really unbelievable when you think about it. For that reason, I refer to this field as completely untouched. While some people consider this lack of regulation as opening up the road to quacks, its actual quite the opposite. It hearkens back to a different time and place in history, when mastery and success in a profession was not based on the number of degrees you had, but on your actual skill and your real ability to achieve results and change lives. Thats the beauty of Personal Training, and the reason why I call it the last great profession. This may change one day, but for now it is still an open field for anyone to get started, establish themselves, and move on to even greater success. While a new client may want to know about your credentials and certification before they start training with you, this will hardly be their deciding factor. They just want to know that youre certified, for I guess the same reason they want to know that any professional is basically qualified. But what theyll really judge you on is you about how you present yourself, your belief in yourself and your work, and how youre clients talk about you when youre not around. For those of you who are used to just showing up and earning a paycheck, this can be a little scary - but its also very thrilling.

Entitlement

The mistake many Personal Trainers make, and like Ive said I was guilty of this
as well, is that they see this field like just any other. Theyre trying to rack up the most certifications and learn the most funky new techniques, even though they know these have little practical application. These trainers usually go looking for a job at a health-club, where they end up overworked and underpaid. They punch a clock, are stuck in one place all day, and just like the millions of other living dead in our society, they work all year for a 2 week (un-paid in this case) vacation; this isnt for me and its certainly not for you.

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But its not their fault; in our society were taught to believe that success cant be achieved with ease; were told we have to suffer for it. This is one of the major mental barriers that we all need to overcome in pursuing our goals: you can and deserve to live a better life and succeed without the back-breaking effort or hardship thats come to typify the condition of most people in the Western World. If you grew up in typical household, you probably dont feel like you deserve to have it so easy. Watching my parents wake-up every day at 6 AM and come home exhausted, I started to feel that this is the way life was supposed to be. If your upbringing was similar, you also watched your parents consumed by their work, losing touch with their own lives and interests. As you enter adulthood, you begin to believe this is normal. This world-view is reinforced through the media and popular culture; the idea that youve got to go to school for many years, and after that get started in a career where youll be overworked and underpaid for several more years after that. Youre also led to believe that you have to work for a jerk-wad boss and look forward to your 2 week vacation every year. If you work especially hard and are really successful, you might even get a promotion, where you can work even more hours and hopefully make a little more pay. And if youre really lucky, one day when youre old and overweight, youll be able to make enough money to live comfortably and retire a few years early; but at this point your youth has passed you by and all you have to show for it are a bunch of possessions, but no real life experiences. Your first step on the road to success is to realize that this isnt how it has to be; that you can take a completely different road.

You can work in field thats completely flexible. You can do work you love. You dont have to go to college for years on end. You dont have to begin your career working for a very poor salary. You can be your won boss without starting your own business.

If you cant believe all of this, youre doomed from the beginning - youve got to be able to visualize the lifestyle you want and the freedom you want. Once you do, youll be able to take steps to make it your reality, and make corrections

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whenever your path falls off of your vision. Thats the first lesson I want you to learn: to have that feeling of entitlement. No matter who you are or what youre earning now, you too deserve to make a lot of money doing something you love, the freedom of not having someone telling you what to do, and an outstanding career with a world of potential. You deserve all of these things, and the field of Personal Training is going to give them to you!

Earning Potential

Despite what you hear in the media about David Beckhams contract or what the
kid from Facebook is worth, making a comfortable living in the world today is tough. The median income of a gradate from Stanford law school is $150,000 dollars. This is after theyve gone to college for at least 7 years, with a few more years of work experience mixed in there. And remember, theyre working 60+ hours a week at their first job after graduation. Owning your own business is very much the same. Michael Gerber calls it the E-Myth, in his book by the same name. Its the entrepreneurial myth of high pay and lots of free time, which eventually turns into terrible hours and career burn-out. What Gerber describes in excruciating detail is how most people start their businesses thinking that it will give them more free time and freedom, but they actually become slaves to their business and are never able to enjoy the elusive success that was initially their goal. Considering all this, he questions the motivation of someone evening starting a business in the first place. Being an independent Personal Trainer on the other hand can be completely different; you can be your own small business without the all the hassle of actually owning a business. In this arrangement you get all the benefits of being your own boss without all of the headaches. And the self-esteem and knowledge you get from being your own boss is a benefit that cant be measured. Its true that youre clients pay youre bills, but during your training sessions its you telling them what to do.

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Besides this sense of freedom and confidence, there are even more benefits to stepping up and seeking the type of life you want. When you stand up for yourself and look to get what you deserve, you end up much happier and fulfilled as a result. And best part of all, you also end up a better person that contributes positively to our world. Make that commitment to yourself that youre going to get what you deserve, and the rest of this program will show you how to do it.

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THE DEFI ITIO

SIX-FIGURE TRAINER
2010

Weve taken the time to define what Top-Level Training is by now. You know
that its the brand of Personal Training that ensures success and a high income. Before we can get into the details of how to become a Top-Level Trainer, we need to get into a more fundamental concept and ask ourselves an even more basic question: WHAT IS PERSO AL TRAI I G? Is Personal Training about the motivation we give our clients? Is it about getting them to workout? Is it the workouts themselves? Is it the new exercises, techniques, or knowledge we convey to them? Is it about the results we help them get? What are we selling exactly? Those are all aspects of Personal Training, but lets not lose the forest for the trees. Theres one overarching definition that encompasses and supersedes all others:

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Personal training is the actual sensory and physical experience the client feels from being in your presence for one hour. Thats what a training session is, and this is what youre selling. Depending on how this session feels will determine your success, your referrals, and your income. With every training session, ask yourself this: Did your client feel good? Like they were with a professional? Like they grew during this session? Were they inspired? Were there limits pushed? Are they looking forward to the next session? Did they have a good time? Are they dying to tell someone else how it went? Youve got to begin to view your product from all these different angles. The mistake most trainers make is they think the workout is the product. They think all the client cares about is the workout, and if you can just give them a better workout you can one-day charge $100 an hour. As professionals, we begin to think of what we do in logical terms - but remember personal training is different from other professions; as I mentioned, its the best one. Weve got to look beyond the logical and think of it also in emotional terms. We need to think about the feelings our client gets: prestige, motiva-

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tion, direction, inspiration, improvement. Its these feelings which the top trainer can elicit that the lower level trainer cant. This is how you dominate your market, get booked solid, and charge top dollar. Most trainers try to raise their income by acquiring more certifications, but what they dont realize is these certifications dont do anything to help this feel; theyre just an attempt to cover up the weaknesses. Expert status in Personal Training is based on a wide range of criteria only one of which is your credentials. There is no MD degree in personal training, where the client knows that you sweated for 8 + years. Instead, clients use many different and varying criteria to judge your competency level for themselves. The trainers that try to stand just on the strength of their certifications or even college degrees often face a harsh reality; this isnt a degreed profession. In my opinion, degreed jobs in todays society are a cop-out; they make you toil and pay your dues up front through rigorous education, with the promise that you can coast for the rest of your life and never have to work on yourself again. Im sure many of us would like to earn the income of our physicians, but would you ever want to look like him or have his personal life? I doubt it. The medical profession is an example of the old success model; if a personal trainer ever decides to coast and not work on themselves and their image, or sit back on their credentials to get them clients, theyll be out of business very soon, or not get into any sort of business to begin with. If you arent inspired by what you do, whos going to want to train with you? Theyre paying for your inspiration, because as it stands now, theyre not inspired to work-out enough on their own. A trainer may think the client is paying for only the service, ie. the workout or weight loss program; this trainer may dress poorly; he/she may not care about growing their knowledge; they may not plan the clients workout in advance or spend any time thinking of something new to challenge the clients body. Youll find trainers like this in major health-clubs. Theyve gotten bored with the job and bored of themselves. These types of trainers are undoubtedly just passing through; theyre not going to be in this field for long. But find me a successful career trainer, and Ill show you someone completely different. Theyre a pleasure to be around they exude physical health because unbelievably, theyre passionate about fitness. Theyre passionate about life as well, and usually have some interesting story to relate to their clients,

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which their clients enjoy because theyre usually overworked career people themselves. They view their trainer as a trusted friend and usually develop a close relationship with them. This trainer is confident and in control; they can competently answer their clients questions; theyre tentative and focused in on their client; they look good, like a true professional, dressed the way you would expect a top fitness consultant to dress; theyre taking notes and actively involved with their client; when not actually working out, you will see them and their client smiling and you may periodically here some laughter burst out during the session (its obvious theyre having fun over there); the trainer looks clean and is well groomed (you can imagine that they smell good too). This relationship appears to have many dimensions they look like good friends, like a mentor and student, like a therapist and patient; you can imagine this trainer having an enjoyable lifestyle, good friends and positive habits. Were you able to see this training session in your mind? Could you visualize the trainer? Could you see what was going on? I have a feeling you could; on top of that, I have feeling you imagined yourself in the picture as the trainer. What you saw was yourself at your best.

Professional Service

Probably the best way to describe training is as a professional service. Both

those words, professional and service, carry equal weight in the term; you need to keep each word in mind and live up to them both. However, many trainers think about themselves in only one of these terms; they short change their success right there. Its the perfect and equal combination of these two ideas that defines Personal Training. Learning to balance the two is what separates it from any other profession. This book is equally focused on both of these topics. It pays attention to both who you are and the image youre conveying, down to the nuts and bolts of the training session itself. The training session is the experience its the prod-

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uct. To improving your training, you need to focus on all the elements that increase your in-session quality. Being a service professional is one of the best places for someone to start their career. You get to sell a product that requires no overhead, just your imagination and intelligence. Some of the greatest success stories in business history have started in the service professions. Theres nowhere else that you can gain the experience and interpersonal skills that you can here. What are the advantages of service?

Elimination of ego our ego is one of the main things that holds us back in our lives. Its like our protective blanket, and we tend to avoid anything that will hurt or damage our ego. But being in a service profession increases your level of internal validation; it causes you to find value within yourself, not look to the outside world to determine your value. This is a personal quality vital for any kind of success. You dont need any raw materials, stock, or inventory when you begin; its just you. Therefore, the value of a training session is an intangible thing and takes on a largely psychic dimension. Personal trainers charge anywhere from $20 to $1,000 a session, but theres never a physical product they sell, unlike a $5,000 Hyundai and a $350,000 Maybach, which have many obvious physical differences (although the Maybachs price is still largely psychic value).

So where do the do the differences in value of a training session come from? That parts up to you. As a service profession, Personal Training will teach you that itll teach you about the intrinsic value of a product or service. Youll learn to tap into the mind of a consumer and find out what triggers their perception of value. This ability gives you an immeasurable business advantage over other traditionally educated professionals, who depend more on their symbols of value than actual value. If you play your cards right and learn to master all the aspects of good service, you can earn a high income without ever creating or selling a physical prod-

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uct in any way. What youre doing is creating value out of thin air; its a magical ability that once youve mastered, will make anything else you ever do seem easy by comparison.

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Training gives us an outlet for suppressed energies created by stress, and thus tone the spirit just as exercise conditions the body. - Arnold Schwarzenegger

YOUR SPECIALTY

SIX-FIGURE TRAINER
2010

At my barbershop recently I observed an interesting phenomenon. All the barbers there will cut the hair of anybody that walks in the door. Every new customer is an adventure in haircutting for them, and I think thats what holds them to $12 per haircut and such long hours its the lack of specialization. Health-club trainers are the same way; theyll train anyone that walks in the door. For that reason, most of them probably earn much less than my barber. They train whoever theyre assigned, and it could be someone different every hour. They think this allows them to see more clients and add to their incomes, but what it really does is hold them back and leads to their failure. In medicine, we know that the doctors that earn the most money are the specialists. But specialization in training doesnt require an additional degree, or any other particular differentiating strength, at least not initially. All it takes is a decision. Once youve made this decision about what to make your specialty, it then be-

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comes the focus of all your future work. It guides the knowledge you accumulate and the clients you take-on. It becomes the basis of your success image, how you describe your job to others, and all of your promotions and marketing. Needless to say, its a pretty important decision to make. Its also essential for your job satisfaction and well-being. If you dont specialize, youll find your job-satisfaction begin to diminish. We all need growth in order to be happy, and youll find mastery hard to achieve if you dont specialize. This then makes it hard to move on to anything greater in the future. Just like any professional, your career and personal success are closely aligned. Therefore, its not only important for your happiness, but also one of the most crucial things you do for your success as well. Youll either burn-out or find your training practice die-out one day unless you make this choice early on.

My Search For A Specialty

When I first started as a Personal Trainer at a major health-club, I was expected

to train anyone that was thrown at me. With just a general understanding of overall fitness, me and all the other trainers were expected to be able to troubleshoot the problems of every potential client. The only mastery the management in those positions was looking to instill in their employees was sales. Indeed, the trainers youll find in most health clubs, even the best, are a miserable group of journeyman trainers moving from one place and one career to another. After leaving my job as a health-club trainer and creating my independent practice, I unfortunately still continued to generalize. Among my client roster was an 84 year old woman, a schizophrenic, and a 12 year old boy. Weight-loss? Sports Performance? Body-building? I was expected to know it all! However, this kind of diversity didnt give me the opportunity to specialize. Since I didnt consistently do one type of training, my ability to deliver an outstanding product to my clients was limited. At this time in my career, I had a high level of client turn-over and couldnt figure out why. Although I had the thrill of being on my own, I was miserable: I didnt like what I was doing or who I was training. In

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fact, I was actually looking to move out of Personal Training and find other work because I was so unhappy with it. This also created a lot of confusion from my potential clients. They couldnt understand or identify what I stood for and what problems I was skilled at solving. This is a trap Im sure many trainers have fallen into. This just highlights the importance of finding a specialty. Here are a few more benefits.

Reduces your marketing costs - allows you to focus all of your marketing and advertising on a smaller group of potential clients Keeps you training the people you want to train - people that you enjoy spending time with, that bring you pleasure beyond just your training salary. Increases your level of expertise - you dont have to spend your time studying information from every possible subject; you can instead concentrate on just one area Improves your mastery - create the necessary routine and repetition to achieve mastery. Competitive advantage - when youre a specialist, you can slowly accumulate more knowledge in your niche than anyone else. It makes it harder for new trainers to serve your same client base. Creates the foundation - when you have an area of focus, it puts you in position to the leader of the business, and no longer the trainer, which sets the stage for you to eventually hand over the training work to others.

Choosing Your Specialty

Besides its importance, choosing your specialty is also one of the most fun
things you can do. Itll force you to find yourself, and analyze what you enjoy teaching as well as partaking in the most. In some ways, you can turn your area

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of highest interest or your hobby into your specialty. For me, choosing a specialty was built simply around the most obvious set of standards my own training regimen and goals. I simply looked to attract people that shared my particular workout goals, and were willing to train at my level of intensity. This narrowed the list down to people that were already in shape, that were younger so they could handle the intensity, and were looking to achieve outstanding, well-balanced bodies. This specialty limited the total pool from which I could draw clients; for example, I could no longer train children or senior citizens. But at the same time it created a small group of clients that I was best suited to train. When these clients met me or came in contact with me, they knew right away that I was the right trainer for them. To put it in words, this is how I would describe my new specialty: Creating lean, attractive bodies in the shortest time possible through intense training and a results focus. Although not those exact words, this specialty was apparent in all of my marketing materials and in how I described my services to other people. And I backed it up big time - from their very first session, my clients knew that they were getting exactly what they signed up for: complete focus on achieving their best possible bodies with the absolute minimum in wasted time and effort. Inherent in this new self-image were a few new rules:

I would no longer be training children. I would no longer be training senior citizen. I would no longer be training individuals with tremendous pre-existing conditions that prevented them from engaging in intense exercise. I would not be helping people rehab their injuries.

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YOUR SPECIALTY

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Although this initially forced me turn away several new people that were seeking my help, it was well worth it. Not only did it improve my work enjoyment and make my job much easier, it also helped me to see exactly the type of people that I most wanted to train: young, fit, and healthy people. It might seem like I took the lazy route, choosing what I did most easily as my specialty and the people I wanted to be around as my clients. But thats just the type of synergy that this profession allows us, so its to your benefit to take advantage of it. In instituting this system I did come across an interesting dilemma. Through my exclusive training agreement with a health club I was partnered with, I had many people asking for training that didnt fit at all into my niche. But, turning away all of these people wouldnt be fair to the health-clubs owner, who was looking for the best possible service for all of his members. Rather than compromise my standards, I hired two more personal trainers in order to handle these special populations for me. They trained the children, obese, and complete novices, and allowed me to focus on my specialty. This set-up allowed me to offer my training services to a wide range of people without creating a confusing image in the mind of potential clients.

Creating Your Own Specialty

In your quest to chose a specialty, you need to ask yourself a few questions:

What are you naturally good at? What will yield a fairly large clientele? What specialties will you be able to carry further into different areas as your career expands?

You dont need to be the best in the world at your specialty: you arent trying to reach a global market with millions of customers. You just need to create an im-

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age of excellence and trust in your particular market and situation. For that reason you arent really limited at all and have the freedom to do what you want; just think about the work that will be simultaneously the most fun and profitable for you to tackle. This could fall around many different areas:

Sports you like Modes of exercise you engage in Special Populations you have an interest in Your own specific skills Your own particular fitness goals

Here are some examples of potential specialties for you to chose from: Senior Citizens If you are looking for a very non-demanding client group, you have specialized work or education credentials, or just have a love for older people, specializing in training seniors may be good for you. For those that find this population a good fit, there are many potential benefits:

They have a lot of free time to devote to their training Many are looking to train for the rest of their lives Many have lots of money They arent too demanding for results, just looking for an improved quality of life.

If being around senior citizens is meaningful to you, this could prove to be an excellent TLT niche that can easily grow to be a highly lucrative career path. The aging baby boomer population and the increased life expectancies through medical science will make this a very large market and will only continue to grow. If you can properly explain the value of your expertise and credentials, you should be able to charge higher rates than traditional trainers. Just make sure that you seek the affluent segments of the elderly population; its unethical to take money

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from seniors that dont have it. Children On the opposite end are children, the fastest growing part of the obese population. Many of us just find it rewarding to be around children. They are very easy to work with from a training design stand point; the only thing that matters is lots of fun and activity to them. And your market is assured, because if theres one thing that parents are willing to spend money on, its their children. If your practice is designed around weight loss for kids, youll have to keep an eye on results. In this type of practice the results may actually be more dependent on your coaching of the parents in choosing the right foods for the child and encouraging them to participate in sports. This greater contact with the parent is also important because for all purposes the parent is your real client - keeping them happy is the key. Parents are also very competitive when it comes to the performance of their children at sports. This creates another huge marketing opportunity to children as well. In general small group training and camps centered around making children faster, stronger, and more competent in their sports is an area with room for tremendous growth. The national training chain CATS focuses on just this: plyometric exercises for young people that will improve their sports performance. On a smaller scale, this is also a strong basis to begin a Personal Training practice as well. The child training market is huge and at this point still largely untapped. Of all the training markets, this one in has the most potential for growth. Super-Models This is the specialty of Personal Trainer David Kirsch in New York. Hows that for loving your work? As an exercise, lets consider how you would you go about making this your specialty. The truth is, if you made this your specialty people would simply believe you - theyd have no reason not to. You could just put this information on all of your materials - whenever you sought a joint venture or told people what

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you do, you could tell them this is what it is. You would have to spend a little time to think about what types of goals models might have and devise a precise routine and set of exercise to help achieve them. But does this sound conceivable? Of course it does - thats the beauty of this profession. The only barrier to what you cad do is the decision. The list of potential specialties is endless. In the marketing chapters were going to discuss in greater detail how to integrate your chosen niche into the grain of your training and your marketing message. In terms of the prerequisite skills to choose a niche, I can understand why some trainers may have a dilemma. If youre starting out right now, you may not have any skills or well-developed interests. Thats okay; this process may take some time. Until then, my specialty is one that every trainer can relate to and use for themselves. As youll remember, my training specialty is body-composition improvement: helping people gain more muscle while losing fat and creating a better, more appealing body. Not coincidentally, this is probably the most popular reason why anyone seeks Personal Training in the first place. Feel free to borrow mine until you fully explore your interests and craft your own.

Creating My Specialty

For me, my fitness goal has always been to look my best. Although Ive always
loved to train and trained frequently, I could never add muscle to my body effectively, didnt have a balanced physique (with all the muscle groups the same size relative to each other), and didnt have a mid-section I was happy with. It was only after I became a Personal Trainer that I began thinking critically about my body and became determined to get it to a high level. Through learning and lots of effort, I was able to eventually solve these problems; as a result of all the information I gained over this process, I was then able to make physique improvement my specialty. I became the guy that could help you get that beach-ready body.

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I know physique improvement is a specialty for many trainers, but how many really make it the focus of everything they do? For me my specialty determines:

The clients I choose. The training techniques I implement. The way I dress. My marketing materials.

Because of the techniques I use, I cant train people that are grossly overweight or have physical impediments. Im forced to turn away more people than I take on; but it allows me to achieve great results and satisfaction among my small group of clientele; this in-turn creates even greater demand for my training. For everyone else, your specialty may be different. But as Personal Trainers, Ill make a rough estimate and say that about 80% of us are doing the same thing: helping people look better through exercise. These could be through losing weight, increasing muscle, or both.

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The training services your provide and the clients you see make up whats called
your training practice. Setting up your training practice properly is what keeps you from slaving at the major health-clubs, and instead allows you train who, when, and where you want. When you look at other Top-Level Trainers youll notice a few interesting things. Youll notice they have businesses, without any defined shape. The types of services they give their clients also have multiple forms. They might meet some of their clients in a private studio, some in the clients home, some outdoors, and some clients may be organized into small boot-camps and trained at once. Independent training at the highest level is wide-open to however you want to do it. This however doesnt mean its disorganized: it just means that the schedule and earning structure are built to serve the trainer. You need to take these restrictions off of your own ideas of practice design as well. You can set it up any way you want and combine several different structures until you find the mix that helps you get the practice you want.

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What were going to do is explore the different opportunities available to trainers and how to get each one started. As you can imagine, this is a very deep subject that I could write an entire book about. Ive formed profitable relationships of all types with many different businesses over the years and could write volumes on everything that went into setting up and securing those deals. For the purpose of this book, Im going to break down the most important points that went into each arrangement and how you can set them up for yourself.

Training in Luxury Condominiums

o matter what your neighborhood or part of the country or world you live in, there are definitely many luxury residences in your area. These are buildings or complexes that are home to large numbers of wealthy people, and usually provide them many different services on-site for their convenience. In almost all cases, these buildings have health-clubs; the interesting fact however is that very few of them actually have on-staff Personal Trainers. Health-club management is a very complex task and for that reason most of these buildings dont go to the trouble of hiring and managing a staff of trainers. That makes them a ripe field for any trainer who can penetrate this market. Its really an unbelievable situation when you think about it: a built in population of qualified clients, no gym fees, and the convenience of being able to see multiple people in one location. Getting In For many of you, youll find that as you launch an aggressive marketing campaign, you may get into one of these residences by accident. So many people in major cities live in places like this that through your general marketing and advertising, youre sure to find clients who want you to train them at their private residence. The key is that once youve penetrated this environment, its now your job

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to grow your influence and contacts in it. Once youre in, you can prospect and network through your existing clients, other members you meet, and the gym staff. All you need is a few clients in a location like this; once youve got them, youll be looked at as a resident specialist. Youll be able to make an excellent living for years just from retaining existing clients and converting the trickle of new clients and referrals that come your way into new clients. This type of set-up is also ideal to administer the SuperTrainer System with an assistant trainer, which well discuss in later chapter. Actively Recruiting Locations If you arent introduced into one of these luxury residencies by a client, then youll have to actively recruit them. This process is slightly more difficult, but doable and very worthwhile. What youll need to do is set-up a meeting between you and the most senior member of the sports and leisure staff. In this meeting you can first tell them about your experience and qualifications. Get this person excited about you and what you have to offer. After that give them tons of your business cards and brochures. The most important thing to remember in dealing with someone in this type of situation is whats in it for them to help you. In general, this type of manager is usually overworked in dealing with member questions and complaints. The point you want to emphasize is that youre here to serve their members needs. Youll be able to make life much easier for them by showing people that dont know how to exercise how to use the gym more effectively. If this gym charges for membership, let them know that youll be causing people to utilize the gym more frequently, which will lead to even more re-signs. Let them also know they can use you as a selling point to people that are on the fence about joining the gym, worried that they wont know what to do. Make these the key points of your meeting with the health-club manager and they should understand that this can be a win for both of you. Creating Bird-Dogs When dealing with the employees of the gym, people like receptionists and such, you can emphasize a different set of benefits. These people are usually just young

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people working for minimum wage: all they care about is making money. For them, you can create a policy where you give them a kick-back for every new client they bring you. The key here is being subtle - its easy to offend someone, no matter how much they make, if you make it sound like your bribing them or giving them a hand-out. I have a certain way I like to create these types of birddogs, as theyre referred to in consulting. The first thing I do is attach a page to my website describing my referral policy. I usually have this page look like an open letter, and I talk in detail about how much I appreciate the effort my affiliates make in referring me to our fellow clients. For this effort, I tell them I can give them a referral fee, and you fill-in whatever you want right there; I myself have offered as much as $200 for referrals. If you inform the receptionist about this policy in a friendly and respectful manner, theyll take it seriously and will actually promote you to gym members quite aggressively. Ive had these types of arrangements work for me extremely well in the past, giving me more clients than I could handle. Make sure you can actually convert these new prospects into sales, something we discuss in detail in the Sales chapters, and make sure you pay your affiliates promptly as well. The first time they get a big check from you, theyll be even more happy to tell every member about what an excellent trainer you are.

Finding the right residential setting for you to train out of may take some time
and research. Youll first need to locate these buildings in your area, find out there phone numbers, and do a little detective work on the phone to find out if they allow outside trainers and whos in charge. But the effort is very much worthwhile. Ive seen trainers build an entire practice off of just one of these settings, where they work 4-6 hours a day for five days a week, all in one place with absolutely no overhead or marketing costs. Ive met trainers that have been able maintain this business model for 10 years or more, and even rented an apartment in the same luxury building as their clients so they could live on location; does it get any easier than that?!

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Teaming With Other Health Professionals

From what you learned about creating bird-dogs in the last section, its only
natural to extend this type of relationship to other people that are in a position to bring you a strong flow of qualified leads. This naturally extends to other Health Professionals. They have two things in common with you: they are around people that actively consume health and fitness services, and just like you, theyre looking to grow their businesses. But its not all roses; youre probably aware that health professionals have been in the business of cross referrals forever. You probably have a few such arrangements yourself, and in that case you probably also know that these relationships dont bring-in too many qualified prospects. What we want to do is change that. The key is to put some stronger bait on the hook. In terms of stronger bait, were referring to offering them a very strong cash incentive to bring you clients. Follow the same technique I mentioned earlier; make a hidden page on your website that you will e-mail as a link to your affiliates. Again, on this page describe how much you appreciate the confidence these professionals are showing in you by recommending you to their clients, and mention respectfully how you are willing to reward them for the risk they take to their reputation in doing so. Most people wont have a problem or feel cheap by accepting this money. Just make sure that you properly qualify the prospect before you take them on - dont just sign-up any client that comes your way. You dont want to pay-out for people that you dont end up retaining long-term and that arent valuable to the growth and success of your training practice. You may find it interesting that we send back cash in our joint ventures with other professionals; isnt sending back referrals enough? In the case of Personal Training that doesn't work and heres why: by the nature of our business we have a different type and volume of clients. Because each client uses our services so much, as much as three times a week, we end up seeing a smaller volume of clients than say a masseuse or nutritionist, whose clients may come to see them once every few months, so they need a high volume of clients to remain viable. If theyre successful at what they do, theyll have many more clients than you and

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the relationship of trading referrals wont be in their favor. Thats why these relationships rarely go anywhere for Personal Trainers - theyre completely one-sided and dont serve the other professional at all. By giving a large cash reward, we make it worthwhile for the other professional to mention us to their clients. Theyll realize that in the small amount of time it takes to mention you or handout your business card to a customer, they can earn a few hundred dollars: a very worthwhile return on investment. How much should you offer as a finding fee in a joint venture agreement? That depends on how much you charge. In my case, I have a very easy way of figuring this out. In the sales sections, I discuss how we bring new customers in to the sales funnel using the three-session introductory package. Well what I do is make my finding fee the exact price of the intro-pack; depending on what I charge in those first three session, thats what Ill give. Most recently, that turned into $200 (I was charging $199) for every referral. This made some of my affiliates highly motivated and created that situation that every trainer and training business hopes for: a waiting list of clients. Business Referral Groups As a side note, joining your local chapter of BNI may be a good idea, as long as its one of their stronger chapters. They meet every two weeks for one hour, usually at 7am, and pass out referrals among each other. I personally dont like waking up that early, so I only went early in my career and then stopped. There are usually a few chapters open in every area, so before you join find one that is already strong or thats growing and has motivated members. Once youre accepted, make sure youre an active contributor and do your best to bring the other members referrals. Also, list each of them as a partner on a separate page on your website, and add them to your circle of regular contacts. You dont have to become best friends with people that you dont have much in common with, but its a good idea to learn how to contribute value to others; not only your clients but youre fellow professionals. When it all boils down to it, your income will be determined by your ability to contribute value to other people. The advantage to you is that many of these BNI members are high earning professionals, and they know many more people like themselves. This can quickly turn into a good resource for gaining strong prospects for you.

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Referral and networking groups are especially valuable once youve eliminated yourself from the day to day training activities. Once you are the business leader and have your employees doing all of the training (which is what youre working for) you can spend your time constantly looking for these types of referral arrangements.

Staying in Contact

Once these many relationships with gym employees and other professionals are
formed, thats not the end of the story. You have to nurture them, or theyll never bear you any fruit. You need to stay in constant contact with every new affiliate you gain.

Send them emails keeping them up to date on whats happening in your business. Subscribe them to your blog even if they dont ask for it. Send them holiday greeting cards. Invite them to big parties that you, your friends, or other clients might be throwing.

You want them to keep you in the back of their mind, so that when the right time comes, theyll say Hey, I know a Personal Trainer that can help you!. Most service professionals will be able to bring you at least 1 to 2 qualified, high-level clients a year. Doesnt sound like much? Remember, a high-level client is worth as much as $10,000 a year or more to you. But these types of relationships take only about 3-4 hours to create and maintain a year: thats a tremendous return on investment of your time. If you get really good at this, youll eventually have so many prospects, many of which will be potential high value clients, that you wont be able to serve them all. At this point, you may want to raise your rates even higher to further qualify your prospects, use the Super-Trainer System to help you serve your clients, or even evaluate the possibility of opening your own

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training studio (less expensive than you think). I personally employed these techniques for a while and once I achieved a strong float of existing clients and referrals through these clients, I stopped all marketing of this kind. If I didnt I would have just been turning away too many people or making my practice unnecessarily complicated. In my case, I was looking to live a more mobile lifestyle and not be tied down to a training studio, but if you have a family or own property, opening a training studio may be the right thing for you.

Teaming With a Private Gym

Teaming with a private gym is probably my favorite model; its the one where I
gained the most experience and learned from the most. I always feel that personal training is more than just a profession for us - its also a vehicle for us to grow, to learn about ourselves, and to reach our full potential. In a health club, youll get many, many chances to practice your sales techniques, have interactions with many different types of people, and deal with the social pressure of a public environment. Your skills in interacting with a wide range of people is one of your rate-limiting steps to success. Once you learn this and get things going, you can then create a snowball effect that will take your sales and earnings to a very high level. I learned a lot from this arrangement and probably owe all of my success to it. Set-Up What does it mean to have an arrangement with a private gym? It means making an exclusive training deal with a gym that is privately owned. The big chain gyms like Ballys have there own staff trainers and of course dont allow outside trainers to work in there under an circumstances. However, any other non-chain gym is up for grabs for a private training agreement. This goes for the big franchises like Golds and Powerhouse, large chain gyms with dozens of locations like Dolphin Fitness Clubs, to small private gyms owned by a couple of friends or

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family members. Ive personally made successful exclusive training agreements with all of these locations I just listed, and none of them were difficult to negotiate or implement at all. A Word About Corporate Health-Clubs Big corporations like Ballys, Equinox, and Town Sport International (which run the New York Sports Club and Washington Sports Club Locations) look at Personal Training as a major source of revenue. A key to their business model is not only selling memberships, but also up-sales to existing members, which is where Personal Training comes in. They have a huge sales dimension to their training, and it shows when dealing with their trainers. They usually roam the gym floor like used car salesman, trying to make introductory appointments or getting leads and looking for sales to meet their monthly quota. However, this system is terribly flawed; once youve made a sale, you now have to train the person on an hourly basis for the next few months. Imagine a used car salesman not only having to sell the car, but also having to teach each customer to drive for 3 hours week. Thats what makes one of these training positions one of the worst uses of time for a Personal Trainer. They often turn into over 50 hours a week, only half of which is actually spent training clients. The rest of the time is mostly unpaid and spent looking for new clients And in those actual training hours, youre clients will be paying top dollar while youll be making as little as one third of the training fees. Many trainers are seduced, from the size and glittering appearance of these corporate gyms, that theyre a good place to pursue their training careers, but these gyms are really just major corporations, and they view Personal Training as just another sellable commodity. The day that you look at your career this way, youre finished. Private Training Arrangement A much better arrangement is to make a deal with a private gym. These include the franchise health-clubs, private chains, and the mom-and-pop gyms. you can usually negotiate a much better percentage agreement, have much more freedom, and charge whatever you want in these locations. Youll essentially have com-

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plete freedom over your practice, which is exactly what we want. And making these deals is surprisingly easy; thats because its always an interesting group of people that decide to open gyms like this. Surprisingly, theyre not always cut out to for the nuts and bolts of all the aspects of health club management, especially Personal Training. Training isnt like any other service, and thats why no matter how smart or competent these health-club owners may be, they can never really grasp all the nuances of running a training department. Sure, selling memberships and smoothies is easy you can use the same sales model as any other commodity or food product. But selling a private consulting service is a completely different proposition. What youll find is most private health club operators have long since given up on depending on Personal Training as a major revenue earner. They just offer it as an afterthought, either through independent trainers or a gym employee. This is where a Top-Level Trainer comes in. Showing these health club owners whats possible with their training offerings is a way that you can negotiate a great deal for yourself. Even the independent trainers that these gyms hire are really bad; theyre usually big time losers that got certified 10 years ago and work about 5 hours a week for the lowest rates in the industry. With the tools you learn in this book you should be able to make a compelling offer to the gym owner and easily blow out any competitors you may encounter. The only thing to consider here is the percentage agreement with the healthclub owner. To put it simply, you should seek an 80:20 breakdown, and at worst a 75:25 arrangement. Because youll have some overhead costs in terms of promotional materials and other expenses, you shouldnt agree to anything less than that. Also you should seek use of office space to work and conduct client consultations out of. This is in no way asking too much when you consider the fact that the gym owner earns a pure 20-25% profit on all training sold and gets the added prestige of having a trainer like you training out of their facility.

In-Home And On-Location Training

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Traveling to homes can eat up a lot more time than other training arrangements,
but its also a more personal service that can end up paying you more too. The type of person who wants a trainer to train them in their home is either too busy to go to the gym, or just afraid to do it. In either case, theyll be willing to pay more for the added convenience of having a Personal Trainer come to them. No matter how your training practice is set-up, in-home training should always be an optional service you provide. Youll be astounded how many people actually have a phobia of going to gyms but still want the help of a trainer. Through your normal dealings with clients and referrals you will almost certainly come across people that want you train them on location. There are also a few ways you can actively recruit these types of clients. Advertising is one of them, but not the best. For an independent trainer without a studio, advertising is a very blunt tool to find clients. However, this is one of the only ways to reach and awaken the in-home training market and has worked well for me in the past. Of course, the best way would be Web Marketing, which is discussed in detail in that chapter. Youll find in-home training to be fun and easy, but you still have to stay sharp and on your game. In these situations, its even more important to pay close attention to your image and how you present yourself professionally, because when you meet somebody on their turf they naturally have the power. In the training relationship, you want to be able to maintain the balance of power in your favor at all times. This will allow you to establish a lengthy relationship with this client that will bring you a high income over that time. Even though youre going to see the person in their home, you still need to dress as if you were prospecting for clients in a crowded gym. If you let your image slip, youll eventually have the client begin to take advantage of you - theyll start canceling more sessions, asking for concessions on price, and eventually lose interest and stop training with you. Its completely up to you to keep the momentum in this relationship. Naturally, when your training business matures, in home training will be one thing that you wont do anymore, and may be something that you still have as part of your business thats administered by your employees. Its up to you to decide whether it stays one of the products and services your business provides. But when getting started, in-home training can be a good money-maker.

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The Home Studio

If youre a home owner, setting up a home-office is another possibility. This

situation will take skill to implement correctly, but will prove to be the most convenient and comfortable of all. Gunnar Peterson in fact runs his training practice out of his home, and if it works for him it should work for you! If you own a home, there are several benefits to creating a training studio there. As youll remember from the earlier chapters, its the relationship with the customer that trumps all else. Well, you cant get any more personal than having someone come to your house. It also gives you a few huge psychological edges:

Youll never have any competitors; this gives you tremendous dominance in your clients mind. Theres a certain respect you get when you allow someone into your home; they feel like a guest and are more appreciative of everything you do for them. Even though training from home saves you time and cuts your overhead, you can still charge premium rates.

The one problem you need to watch out for in your Home Studio is allowing the personal dynamic to take-over the training dynamic. All the benefits of the inhome system will actually becomes negative if youre level of professionalism drops in this setting. This means you cant look like you just rolled out of bed, have personal items lying around, or act like this is a social visit and not a training session. Also, you want to make a clear distinction between your gym and the rest of your home, and not allow your clients to generally hang around the rest of your home too much (you can of course do this on occasion, during parties, and other events). Maintaining strict, Top-Level Trainer professionalism is absolutely key; if you do, you can get the double benefit of both having an extremely con-

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venient training practice and having the potential to charge higher rates at the same time. Setting-Up Your Home Gym The main mistake people make with a home gym is that they skimp on looks. The home-gym can be in your basement, but it cant look like the basement gym of a teenager. It must look like a full-blown commercial space with a few personal touches - think Equinox meets Applebees. The reason for this is that everything you do must scream highest level possible; if not, the TLT system crumbles. As independent trainers, we dont need to do much to maintain our practices, but anything we do must be top-notch. Whatever the space youre using, it must be well constructed; for that reason the smaller the space, the more cost effective it will be to construct. If you have a full basement, you may want to insert a false wall to reduce the square footage. Even a converted garage can be suitable if the inside is furnished properly. The good news is it will cost less than two thousand dollars to set-up a home training studio. In terms of decor of the room, all you need are finished walls and a ceiling with nice lighting, and wall mirrors on at least two of the four walls. In terms of equipment, you dont need to buy commercial machines and weights, the costs of which are astronomical. All you need is the best quality home-gym equipment that you can find at any big sporting good super-store. Just make sure all the equipment matches and doesnt leave the room over-cluttered. For cardiovascular needs, you can just buy a Spinning bike (many are available second hand for good prices on Craigslist and eBay). You should definitely have decorations like posters and pictures, but make sure they are nicely mounted and framed. Youll also need a source of music, but just a simple boom-box will do the job. Warning One thing you might want to keep in mind is that in this setting, theres the small but real risk of someone claiming sexually harassment. Its unfortunate, but in todays society youre guilty until proven innocent when it comes to an accusation like this; even if youre innocent, you still will never be able to totally restore

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your reputation. For this reason, you might want to consider a simple surveillance system. To protect myself when Im alone with someone that I dont know well, Ive brought along a small digital recorder and secretly kept it on during the session. The laws in my state allow recording of conversations if one of the parties is aware the conversation is being recorded. This way, if anything inappropriate is said or a false claim is made, you have evidence. Once you get to know someone well you can use your own judgment about trusting this person and not have to use the recorder anymore. Drawbacks The only other drawback to this system is reaching new clients. If youve already built up your client base before you set-up your home gym, you can just move your clients to your home gym; youll inevitably have a few that cant do it but if the others were traveling to see you anyway, they shouldnt have a problem with it. But if youre starting from scratch with a home gym, finding clients could be a problem. Internet advertising would be the best way to go in this case and thats fully covered in the chapter on Web Marketing.

Outdoor Training

When considering all the things that go into excellent session design, training
outdoors gives you many possibilities. If you live in a climate thats warm all year round (or even if you dont), marketing yourself as an outdoor trainer can be just what you need to set you apart and get you noticed by potential clients. Every summer in New York, I convert much of my marketing to emphasize the fact that I provide outdoor workouts. If youre a trainer that doesnt have a home gym or location to train out of, you can do the same. This is one way turn a weakness into a strength. Many of the same rules apply to outdoor training as to in-home training.

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Its important to remember that when youre on your own, youre the entire package. If you come with a high level of focus and standards, youll create the aura of training at a top-notch training facility and can charge the same prices, even if youre training in a local playground.

Teaming With A Yoga Center Or Private Facility

While talking about the ways to set-up a Training Practice, Im sure you can see
a trend developing here. One of the major concerns you have is not just what you do or how you do it, but where youre going to train. Most of the issues with your practice are location: how you look for clients and even the techniques you use and the market you chose to serve are dictated by where youll be training. Although I and many other trainers have forged great careers training out of different gyms and at our clients home, having a home base gives you the advantage of managing your schedule more tightly and giving clients that dont have a convenient location to train out of a place to go. Ive had situations where either through word of mouth or through my marketing, Ive had ideal, highly motivated prospects but simply couldnt train them because of the lack of a consistent location to train out of. In that search for a home, another option we have is to share the offices of a business that already provides health related services. This arrangement can serve two purposes: one is to give you a place to conduct training sessions, and the other is to have a built-in stream of referrals coming from the existing business. The types of businesses to target for this form of arrangement are massage centers, yoga studios, physical therapy centers, as well as sports-rehabilitation centers. One thing to keep in mind is how payment will work in these settings. In most cases it will be a percentage or flat fee that you pay out to the facility. Whatever it is, plan out beforehand how much money will be collected, divided, and how sessions will be scheduled. Youll need to think out every single possible scenario in detail before you have your meeting with the facility owner in order to

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get the situation working in your favor. I had a positive arrangement of this kind with a massage studio in northern Queens, New York, in an affluent area called Bayside. I created it to diversify my areas of training in that particular neighborhood. I had a mix of on-location clients at the luxury condominiums, a few in-home training clients, and a few that I trained out of the spacious yoga studio adjoining the massage facility. This provided a very good mix for me because no location was more than half a mile from any other, making my drive between locations very short. It also gave me a large pool out of which to refine my client list, giving my training practice a structure that worked perfectly for me.

Health-Club Trainer

As youve probably figured out, I dont advocate working for a health-club as a

way of being a Top-Level Trainer. At its best, health-club training should be looked at as a way to start earning an immediate income and gaining some experience and nothing more. Armed with the information in this book, you should be able to jump right to the top of your health-club setting in under a month. Thats assuming you can keep your mind above the mediocrity of the other trainers around you, especially the ones that have been slaving there for years. Theyll try to bring you down and discourage you, or give you low-level advice on how to get clients and close sales. Your training manager in this environment may also do the same - hell simply be a sales manager and try to push you to make more and bigger sales. Youre priority should instead be your image, your credibility, and the quality of your training. Give value and have high quality interactions with any prospect and potential sale that comes your way, and give tremendous value to your existing clients. Youll soon see your client load swell, and you can then bide your time as you begin to take the steps toward setting up and marketing your independent practice.

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If youre not motivated by your clients, youll eventually get tired of working
with them: this is an unavoidable fact in the world of consulting. Much of our success and happiness is determined by our clients; we need them as much as they need us. Without the right clients, youll eventually experience career burn-out. In other careers, you can always deal with a certain amount of dissatisfaction because of the regular pay-checks, or the structured environment. In Personal Training, your own passion needs to be the driving force. If this is missing, youll never be able to get the right clients, keep them, and contribute the value youll need to succeed. However, if you do pay attention to this part of the job and take the time to chose the right clients, youll find the job almost effortless; itll be lots of fun, and tremendously rewarding. A clients value is not in the paycheck they represent to you now; its what they mean to you in the future. Its their ability to enjoy problem free usage of your product (training sessions) which will lead to future re-signs and their ability to grow your practice through referrals. This is the value of any new client: to keep your sales funnel full and ensure the future viability of your business.

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With such an important role being played by our clients, it makes sense that we cant just accept everyone; we have to be picky in who we chose to work with. Michael Port calls this the Red Velvet Rope Policy in his book, Book Yourself Solid. We talk a bit about this screening process in other chapters. For that reason, weve created an introductory session package of only three sessions that allows us to try them out as clients before we commit to them (hows that for rolereversal!) But what are we screening for? Thats what were going to discuss now. The screening process begins in their first phone call. In that call we can evaluate all the criteria that goes into making this person a good client. While Ill wait until we begin the three session package to allow most of our interaction to occur, this first conversation can give me a lot of information. I can find out if they have any pre-existing conditions, or just whether or not their goals fit in with my specialty. My mission is to become a meaningful part in the lives of my clients, to coach them into achieving world-class bodies and high levels of fitness. But the truth is I cant do this with everyone. Id rather avoid beginning a training agreement with someone that I cant complete it with; I feel that a client can actually end up worse off than when they started with me if our training arrangement cant run its full course.

For most trainers, their only selection criteria is whether the customer is willing
to pay, ie theyll train anyone willing to pay them. This reasoning doesnt work because willingness to pay has nothing to do with ability to pay; when someone wants something, theyre almost always able to pay for it. Although I look to market to primarily higher earning markets, I dont only train rich people. I prefer this segment mainly because theyre the ones that are in the best position to benefit from my services, but I get clients from every earning level. Ill use one client I had, a gorgeous single young lady who trained religiously with me for almost a year until I had to eventually drop her as a client because I was changing the location of my training. Although, her training sessions used up a lot of her pay-check, investing in her looks is something she was more than willing to do worth. She would rave almost every training session about how worth it she felt it was, how much she got from it, and she was an excellent source

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of referrals for me as well. I had another young lady similar to the last example but who earned even less, at a job where she likely earned less than $15 an hour. That means she had to work more than half a day to afford one of my training session at that time. However, through the techniques youve learned in this book I structured my training sessions to be more than worth their price. In her busy life, her training sessions where like a visit to a top spa, where she was taken care of, tended too with expert hands, and made to feel like a celebrity or million dollar client. She always walked in with a relaxed demeanor, relished ever bit of the challenge of the training, and stayed around to soak up the atmosphere and chat if I had time afterwards. For her, training was one of her great pleasures and well worth the huge relative investment she made in it. Another woman I trained, a young professional, was in the process of beginning her career. She also didnt earn much at the time, but was smart enough to realize that taking care of her body now was of dire importance. Shed spent years in graduate school completely neglecting her body, and now had a job with a huge workload that still gave her little time to take care of herself. The investment she made in the training sessions was an investment in her most important asset, her own body. She paid more for her training than she did for even her own rent, but in importance, it was probably a better investment. In only 2 hours a week, over the course of a few months she was able to achieve consistent progress and reverse much of the effects from her years of neglect.

Willingness To Pay Vs. Ability To Pay

This all comes back to the concept we discuss in Sales of willingness to pay vs.
ability to pay. Although I suggest that you go after the markets that give your training practice the greatest chance of success, the three cases above show that these arent the only client groups to draw from. Ive trained in every type of neighborhood and marketed to every economic sector and have found that the

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ability and willingness to pay are two separate things. Most people think that when a client objects to price, this means they cant afford it. But after Ive gotten people that live in housing projects to commit to long-term, full-priced training packages, Ive realized there are hardly any customers that are unable to pay for training. Instead, its really that they dont have a willingness to pay; based on what youve shown them so far, they arent willing to pay your prices; you havent created enough values in their eyes. As you gain more experience and begin to implement the techniques in this book, you wont have many customers that are unwilling to pay any more. In spite of this, it still makes sense to choose your clients from the higher income groups. This just makes the probability of finding someone that has the disposable income to invest in a trainer much greater.

The First Phone Call

So what am I screening for in that first phone call with a new prospect? The discussion in the first meeting or phone call will follow what is outlined in the sales discussion in the chapter Sales:Part I. In that section you learn its the prospect that does most of the talking in this conversation. While, theyre talking, here are some of the things Im looking for:

Willingness to delay the price discussion until after theyve tried the three session intro package. Whether their goals fit into my specialty. Whether their pre-existing conditions will prohibit them from the group of exercises which I find most effective in achieving results. Whether their training location works for me.

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What time they want to train Im a very late riser and dont train anyone before 10 AM, ever.

Thats really it Im not screening for exact scheduling times, buying sensitivity, or a personality match at this time, just whether or not it makes sense to proceed with the three session introductory package.

Screening During The First Three Sessions

The three session intro-pack gives us all the time we need to determine whether
or not the prospect will make a good client for us. The first criteria I look for is whether they fall into my specialty. As I discussed in that chapter, having a specialty makes my job much easier and more satisfying. I can start to see the similarities between client cases, specialize my knowledge, and become a more effective trainer. Rather than build monotony, its actually quite the opposite: it builds mastery and gives me an edge that no one can beat. It allows me to take the focus off the actual training, which Ive gotten very good at, and extend it to other parts of the client experience during the training session, which weve explained are more important than the actual training. In terms of personality, I noticed that I liked to train driven people. Having a bit of ADHD myself, I get bored with people that are boring and are internally unmotivated. I have the most fun with people that are demanding and want results, and willing to work hard for them. This type of person is also most likely driven in other areas of their life, and I love to learn from people like this. And now that Im the business leader in my organization and dont do the training myself, I still see it as important to clearly specify what type of people my business is best suited for. They say that every organization holds on to the habits of the leader, so my attitude toward training and my original rules for the types of clients that I trained have endured.

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This ideal of type of client is described by my slogan: Top-Level Training for ew Yorks Elite. Its a pretty bold and pretentious statement but it think it describes my business and my clients perfectly. A bold slogan like this Im sure does put-off some people, but since Im always screening, that doesnt bother me. Its only the small percentage of people that I want to train who are not put off by the slogan. They consider themselves elite and arent shy to admit it at all. Ive never heard a single comment or negative statement from any of my existing client about the slogan. Quite the opposite, the more you take your training seriously, the more serious your clients get about their results and their training as well. Youre the leader it all starts with you. Selecting your clients are among the hard things you need to make in your career as a Personal Trainer. Saying no to people may be difficult, but its something youre going to have to learn how to do. No one else is going to take care of you; no one else is going to make sure youre happy, motivated, and growing in this field; its entirely up to you.

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Since your training session is the actual product youre selling, paying attention
to how its designed is one of your most important tasks. The goal of any trainer that wants to retain a consistent client base is to understand and learn how to design extraordinary sessions. Once youve done this, you can refine the process and eventually have your sessions be some of the most excellent on the market. When you can spit out high-quality sessions effortlessly, youll see youre earnings unleashed and your practice start to grow rapidly. Just like any job, this one can become repetitive; but in Personal Training thats a good thing. Its at this point that you can gain mastery, which should be the goal of any professional. When you understand every nuance of how to do your job, you can begin to improve its quality and eventually move up to a leadership role. Training follows a different learning curve than other fields the job gets remarkably easier as time goes on. But as the job gets easier, your salary will also increase. Unlike most other professions where an increase in pay is usually accompanied by more work and responsibility, with Personal Training its the oppo-

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site: an increase in salary will actually occur when the job is at its easiest.

The Illusion of Change

If you use common sense, you may think that results are whats most important
to the client and thats what theyre paying for; after all its the reason they called you in the first place, isnt it? But believe it or not, this is actually a far secondary concern; the higher priority is the feeling that theyre achieving results. This idea was explained well by consulting guru Jeffrey Lant: Advisors provide the illusion of change without the reality. What does that mean? The session must feel good the actual experience of the session itself must be worth the money, irrespective of any end result the client is going for. If they dont like it while theyre doing it, theyre unlikely to wait it out for any particular result.

The Pre-Planned Session

The key to delivering best-in-field quality workouts to your clients every time
comes down to one simple secret: plan your workouts beforehand. All you need to do is play the workout out in your head before the session, taking into account your clients previous workout and the bigger picture of their goals and future progress. I know what some of you are thinking, I dont want to spend any extra time on my clients than I already do. Do you think it takes too long to plan a session in advance? Well then find me a better use of your time toward getting and keeping clients. Finding new clients? Now that takes a long time; even with the best marketing practices, acquiring new high-level clients that you actually

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like to train is time-consuming. Once you have one such client, you have to bind them to you with hoops of steel. You have to make Personal Training an indispensable part of their lives: something they cant live without. They could lose their job, have a child on the way, or just have experienced $30,000 in water damage to their house, but the last thing they should ever want to give up is their training sessions. Delivering a top-notch session every time will ensure that. When you can do that consistently youll never have to go looking for clients theyll find you. If I had to point to one thing that has led to the quality of my training sessions more than any other, its the fact that I plan my sessions in advance. The training session is too valuable and too costly to have to worry about what youre doing while youre with the client; you need all of this figured out beforehand so that when you meet your client, your mind is clear to focus on other things. When you have a client locked-in to a 60 session package, or youre making $15-20 per training session, pre-planning a session may seem unnecessary. But when youve positioned yourself as a premier expert in the field and youre charging top-dollar, it becomes essential. When youre actually in your training session, you have a lot of things to think about. Youre in charge of the clients entire training experience, and as we mentioned, thats where the value of the session comes from. Minute by minute, you need to be tuned-in to the what theyre doing and feeling; that doesnt leave you any time to wing the session. If or when youre a TLT Im sure youll have at least 10 clients if youre utilizing some advanced techniques like the Super-Trainer System, you may have 20 or more. And when your business has matured further, the number of clients will grow much larger than that, and most or all of the clients wont be directly trained by you. Remembering what your client did last session, what body-parts theyre working today, and creating an interesting, challenging workout are not things you can figure out after they arrive. If you do, the quality of your sessions will naturally drop, and what you can charge for the session will drop too. If you want to get to the level of $100 training sessions, this is a base you need to cover. You dont want to be in a session trying to remember what the client did last time, or asking them what they did or what they want to work. Theyve hired you to be in charge of all of that, and theyll lose respect for you if youre not on top of it.

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What are some of the things you need to think about when pre-planning the session? The way I like to think about it is as if my client is screaming a few questions at me; whenever you go into a training session remember to answer these questions: 1. Show me something new! One of the main advantages of having a Personal Trainer is the variety you can get from the sessions. Part of the reason your client has hired you is to relieve some off the boredom of exercise. In addition, theyre looking to experience something a little different and new every time. Besides that, variety is one of the best ways to make the body adapt and achieve results. This point is so important I actually have Show Me Something New written at the top of each of my training sheets, right next to the workout plan, to remind me to include some new elements to each workout. At the same time, you dont want to swap out the entire routine every time you train them you just want to mix-up some aspects to keep it fresh. Its also a subtle reminder to your client that theres no way they could get anything close to the same workout without you. 2. What are my goals this session? Another important thing to remember are the clients goals during each training session. Each workout needs to be structured around these goals, for two reasons. 1. You cant expect to achieve the result your client is looking for without keeping their goals firmly in mind every training session. Achieving real results quickly is one of the best forms marketing, besides being your job. 2. You may occasionally choose to reinforce the purpose of the exercises to your client during the workout. If your client knows that every workout is somehow getting them a little closer to their goal, it will lead to even more client satisfaction, irrespective of the actual result (remember what we said about the illusion of change).

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Bouncing

Bouncing is term I introduced into Personal Training because of the effect it has
on contributing added value to training sessions and increasing client satisfaction. The concept is very simple: moving your client to multiple locations. What this does is create the impression that more was achieved and more activity was performed during the session. Theyll also feel like they did more things and trained for longer period of time than they actually did. Keeping multiple bounces in mind is how Ive been able to hook clients on my services for such a long time. The essence of bouncing is going to at least three locations during the session. If you dont think this makes a difference, try it a few times in your next few sessions and notice whether your client has a different feeling about the workout. Changing locations is almost like hitting the reset button on the workout: it creates a subconscious feeling of starting over. This will alleviate boredom and monotony in your own mind, and have your client feel a renewed burst of energy every time you start a new group of activities after a venue change. By venue change, Im referring to a very simple change. Some locations in a gym to execute a bounce are:

Cardio and treadmill area - performing intervals, exercises involving cardio equipment, or mixing cardio and weight training Aerobics area - performing matt based, boxing, or dynamic training Outside - sprinting or dynamic exercises Staircase - performing lunges or stair climbing

While it may seem simple to just move around, keeping this consciously in mind and building it into every session will definitely add value. If you can charge $5 more per session just because youre the trainer that moves people around more, is it worth it? The bounce is actually built-in to my training sheet as well. I have three locations always set-up and firmly in mind as to where to take the client during the training session. These areas shouldnt require too much set-up - remember your priority is to create client enjoyment during the training session, so the workout

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should always flow.

Other Key Points

Pre-Existing Conditions Its very important to remember each clients pre-existing conditions and contraindications. What exercises can or cant they do. Nothing is more frustrating than having your trainer constantly forget what you can and cant do. We need to keep these in mind when designing their training sessions. Pace and Intensity With a training session, its not only the exercises you do but how you do them. Youve always got to keep the pace and intensity of a workout at a level that will challenge your client. Besides variety, accountability, and motivation, a higher level of intensity is another reason why people look to hire Personal Trainers. You want them to achieve a level of intensity they couldnt get on their own. No matter how much your client likes or appreciates you, they still want to feel like they worked hard during the session. On the subject of pace and intensity, most trainers make two different mistakes: 1. Dont work hard enough: When conversation, socializing, and monotony take over, the intensity of the workout really begins to suffer. The training session is not your social hour with your client: if anything, you should create field trips or go to a clients parties whenever youre invited so you have time to socialize and catch-up with them. Dont get me wrong, listening to our clients major issues is a valuable role we play as trainers; often times, were the only person they have to really talk to. But his should never take over the integrity of the workout. During one of my training sessions, youll here a lot of conversation and laughter, but it never takes away from the session. Ill cut-off any talking once its time to get back to the next exercise or time to focus. Any socializing should serve the purpose of the workout, not take

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away from it. Remember, youre a trainer first: be a pro! 2. Intensity for the sake of intensity: on the opposite end of the spectrum is the trainer that physically kills their clients, but with no method to the madness. They just blast their client with a series of exercises without rest, but also without a definite purpose. The exercises and routines should not only make the client sweat, but also serve the larger purpose of their long-term goals. The trainer that can design a session that not only makes the client work and enjoy that particular session, but also helps them realize how its creating change for their future goals can undoubtedly charge more in the marketplace. This is the Zen of Personal Training: treating each session individually while thinking of it as the first of a hundred sessions, both at the same time. Note-Taking After youve pre-planned your session, the next step is to take follow-up notes during the actual session. This will go on the same standardized sheet you used to plan the workout. Some of the information that will go on this sheet is: 1. The weights and reps the client was performing. 2. Any important new milestones that were achieved 3. Exercise that werent performed that need to be covered next time 4. Notes on exercises that work well for the client or they seem to respond well too 5. Plans for the next session 6. Any problems the client is having performing a particular exercise 7. Any other sudden notes or realizations you have that can help your client If youve been a trainer for a while, you know that taking notes during sessions is nothing new. Its one of the modern practices in Personal Training that has be-

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come almost universal; they key word here is almost. There are still some trainers (and you know who you are) that dont take notes during their clients sessions. They either have a photographic memory or dont really care what was performed that session. Whatever the case, theyre really undermining their ability to add value to their sessions. I remember when I first started as a Personal Trainer at a Ballys Total Fitness. My training manager at the time didnt think it was necessary for me to keep notes. He questioned why I did it and why I couldnt just keep all the preplanning and progress tracking in my head. Despite his advice, I kept doing it and in a few short years was earning a six-figure income. Last I heard about him, he was still bouncing around the chain gyms and still earning crappy pay with a huge workload and tons of stress. The difference I realized at that time was the importance of adding value to my training sessions. Because of this added value, I was slowly able to train a higher level of client, charge more, and work fewer hours. This should be your goal as well. Service Providing outstanding service is a vital part of what we do as Personal Trainers. Although were leaders and multi-skilled professionals, we still need to keep the service we provide to our clients in mind. When you put that into the mix youll have a product so powerful that the sustainability of your practice will be guaranteed. What does it mean to give good service? Its just extra attention to the needs of your client. Within the session, this means: Helping them rack weights at times Handing them weights at times Keeping your hands close to them whenever they need spotting Keeping your attention on them every minute of the session Never answering your phone during a training session under any circumstances

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Never having a conversation with anyone else in the gym on your clients time.

Outside of the session, here are a couple of things you can do:

Responding quickly to their voicemails Staying in frequent touch with them through e-mail Showing up on time to every single training session Rarely if ever canceling or rescheduling a session Giving them holiday and birthday cards and even small presents

The bottom line to delivering better training sessions is just being more present
for the sessions. You have to be train your client for an hour anyway, so why not just pay a little extra attention to the details? Its precisely that, how tuned in you are to your client, that separates the $150 session from the $15 session. Which would you rather earn? Well it all starts with you - how much of yourself youre willing to invest. Since its not a tangible product we sell, everything comes down to ways you can add more value. If you want to raise your rates, half the battle is improving your session design. The rest is marketing, which well cover in detail in later chapters. Especially once youre no longer doing the training yourself, educating employees on what makes up a high quality session becomes vital. Thats why learning and mastering the techniques in this chapter and then making them a part of what you teach your employees in order to help them hold up your standards is a good idea.

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Progress tracking is a technique you can use to bring instant value and better
quality to your training sessions. From the minute you decide to use this habit, you can charge more and are perceived to be offering a higher value product than someone who doesnt. On top of that, youll see your own performance improve: youll be more organized, and much more efficient at making changes to your clients routines; this will yield even more progress. Im sure for many existing trainers, you already employ some form of progress tracking. Keeping track used to be something that only the best trainers did to monitor what their clients were doing and lifting during their sessions, and also to chart the progress they were making in their measurements and on the scale. Its what used to separate the serious trainer from the amateur. It helped create better sessions, more personalized service, and measurable standards, all of which led to a higher priced session. At that time you could get away without taking notes on your clients, but as Personal Training has gotten more expensive and clients have begun to expect more from their trainers, the need to use progress tracking has increased. Yes, its

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true there are busy trainers who dont pay much attention to what their clients are doing. But they usually arent the ones who move up in this industry and turn this into a lucrative career. Although I wish them well in their future pursuits, those are hardly the people that Im watching to see how the job is done. When I first became a Personal Trainer, it wasnt a very common practice to take notes; in the first health-club I worked at, I was the only one doing it. Now, you hardly see a picture of a trainer in the media without a note-book, clipboard, or some other sort of tracking system in their hands. Its become common place and a necessity. Thats because it works, for both you and your client. It lets you know what they did their last session, what changes to make for their next session, whats working, and what needs to change. This brings about better results for the client, and undoubtedly leads to faster progress. But besides that, it also has benefits for the trainer as well. It allows you to be more relaxed and better prepared for the session. You can then spend your mind power on other aspects of the training session instead of worrying about what to do next, or trying to recall what the client did in their last session. If you have more than one training client (and I hope you do), keeping track of what theyre all doing will become difficult. Progress tracking allows you to just focus on motivating the client and all the other aspects that we spoke about in the previous chapters that go into making a highly successful and sellable Personal Training session. People expect a certain calmness, cool, and preparedness from the most expensive trainer on the market, which it is your goal to be. Having your workout planned in advance allows you to display these qualities. Its true that any tracking system is better than no tracking system, but when it comes to progress tracking, there are some ways that are better than others. For example, in some cases just keeping track of what the client is doing during their session is enough. Ideally , youd like your system to be regimented so that at a glance you can locate and compare the information youre looking for. If you want to know what the client benched last session, how long they sprinted for, or what they weighed, you want to be able to locate it right away. Having an organize tracking system also helps when youre preparing for the training session, allowing you to look up the necessary info quickly and not take up too much of your free time.

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What To Track For?

ow what are some of the important criteria you want to look out for in your tracking process? Well, this really depends a lot on the focus of your training. Your tracking parameters should be centered around the key performance criteria that are vital to the success and performance of your client. Progress For most trainers, things like weight, measurements, body-fat percentage, and progress photos fall into this category. My program goals are centered around the objective criteria of decreasing body-fat percentage, with the subjective criteria of physique improvement, and increased energy and athletic performance. The only areas I measure are the objective criteria, and for that, I have specified 9 different progress matters that I keep track of on a periodic basis these are weight, bodyfat %, and measurements at 7 physical points. Workout Sheet This is your main sheet where you keep track of whats happening within the training session. Here youll map out what you want to do that day with your client, and take notes during the session on how they performed. The design of this sheet will depend on your particular program goals. For me and most trainers, having a section to record weight training, a section for cardio training, and a blank space for general notes is enough. How to Prepare and Record Progress As youve started to understand already, progress tracking isnt just about what goes on during the session; its also about the preparation process before the client arrives. This is the phase where you take about 5-10 minutes before you meet to jot down what the plan is for that particular session.

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As we mentioned in the previous chapter, there are two things to keep mind when planning a clients workout. These are in the forms of question we can imagine the client is looking for in each session. To review: 1. Show me something new! - Each session, I want the client to feel that something new was accomplished, whether it was a new effective exercise, a new training milestone, or a new level of intensity. The aspect of newness is one of the key things that people are paying for in a training session, and for that reason its important in my mind to keep that as part of the session. 2. Focus on my goals! - But the other part of the psychic value and of course the tangible value is the achievement of results. For that reason, thats also one of the vital criteria I pay attention to when Im designing the clients session. I try to never have the workout be something selfserving to me or just another session for them. I want it to be something that will have a major impact and cover some ground in helping them toward their goals. First I consider the overall goals for the workout and list those at the top of the page in a small area I have labeled plan. Since my workouts have both a cardiovascular and resistance training aspect to them, Ill set goals for both of these areas. I then make a list of the specific exercises and the specific order I want to do them in. Lastly, I may jot down what the client did last time, for example with a bodybuilding client, I may write down that they last benched 200 pounds for 10 reps, or with a fat loss client, write down what their max speeds on intervals was. This will then give me some milestones that I can look to beat this session. During the Session Now that I have the exercises and order planned out, my hard work is done. The rest is really a breeze and a pleasure; I can pay attention to the most important part of the session my client. Were free to talk about things like how theyre eating, how much theyre doing on their own, and anything else we want. As any Personal Trainer will tell you, we are also trusted friends to our clients and sounding

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boards for a lot of other things going on in their lives. At times this has an important purpose: keeping their minds off of the pain of the brutal workout! During the session Ill then periodically take notes on exactly what theyre doing. This may be how much they lifted, how many reps they performed, or how fast they ran. You have to be present for a training session anyway, so you may as well make sure you work while youre there. And finally, after the session is over, you can write a summary of how your client did and also a few notes on what you want to do or change next session. You can review these notes during the planning phase of the next session, to make that process even easier for you. Sheet design For your sheets you can be a little creative; create a tool thats really going to work for you and be easy to use. Ive never used anything more complex than Microsoft Word to design my sheets and it was always simple for me. Just play around with the design functions in that program, typing the information you want into text boxes and moving them around to the right places until you have the desired look that youre going for. Then create a grid to put in the information, and in addition you can play around with color and the look to make it attractive. After that insert your logo (discussed more in Marketing). Remember, how this page looks reflects on you and your business because your client is likely to see it and may even want to view it themselves. Once you have the tracking page complete, here comes the hardest part youve actually got to use it! No tracking process is useful if youre not holding yourself too it. The purpose of the tracking process is to improve the happiness and satisfaction of the client, but I think the main benefits are selfish, working to the benefit of the trainer even more. They contribute peace of mind, better organization, save time, and create returning, raving fan clients. They also allow you to charge top dollar for your sessions because they are of such a consistent, high quality. Its something that works out to your benefit and becomes very much a habit and second nature the more you do it. But to your client, its viewed as something extraordinary and prevents them from thinking of ever going anywhere else for their training - as far as theyre concerned, they'll be a client for life.

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The purpose of this manual has been to make your life simpler and also more effective at the same time. Although you now probably have a long list of new things you want or need to do in your practice, you also realize that you wont have to be keep doing a lot of the things that have been wasting your time anymore. We deal with a one and only one very simple concept here: creating a Personal Training Practice. The process of opening a studio or a gym, and hiring and managing a large staff of people isnt what this book is about. For those of you that have that as a goal, theres nothing wrong with it. But thats only a decision youre fit to make after youve achieved mastery on your own. After exploring Personal Training as a profession for a while, and as a result being involved in many different aspects of the fitness industry as a whole, will you have a good idea of your true purpose. But a problem (if you want to call it that) youll encounter soon is that youll actually have too many clients. To those of you just starting out in the field right now, this might sound like a fantasy. But I hope from reading the chapters

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on Marketing and creating a Training Practice youll starting to understand how this can happen. Even after you go through all the steps of refining your practice; youve created a specific specialty, raised your rates, and carefully chosen your clients, you still may encounter a situation where you have more clients than you can handle. This is especially true if youre intent on keeping your schedule to less than 30 hours per week, which I feel is essential to stay refreshed and motivated about this job. In the minds of many trainers in this situation, the next logical step, and their ultimate dream, is to open their own training studio. Finding and outfitting a location to house your training practice, creating systems for the business to run smoothly, negotiating rates for leases, and launching a marketing campaign is what running a training studio is about. And that doesnt even begin to take into account the monumental headache that managing other people can turn into. But just like anything else, you do learn to get better at it, and your business and management skills start to grow. At that point, this can be an excellent way to set your business up for future growth. Other trainers think that the best way to handle an overflowing client roster is to train them in small groups. The way they say it makes it sound very simple: that you should just see two clients an hour and you can instantly double your rates. Its true that in certain situations this can work; for example, if you have a lot of credibility you can get away with it. Ive been able to do this on occasion and still maintain the complete satisfaction of my clients. On a side note, I must remind you that we are not talking about bootcamps or discounted group sessions, where a drop in attention is part of the lower price. I am talking about high-priced personal training sessions, which is what this program is about. In these situations, the problem with small groups wasnt the satisfaction of the clients, but my own. I felt that I wasnt doing as good a job as I could possibly do. You see, the sustainability of my practice depends on my ability to create an absolute WOW! experience for my clients every single time. And when seeing two clients at a time, even though I knew I was doing my utmost best, I felt the sessions werent as good as my one-on-one sessions. I couldnt stand the fact that I knew my training could be better. Letting things like your session quality slip will eventually hurt your training rates and client retention. After going through

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all the effort to attracting the type of high-level clients Im looking for, I dont want anything at all to stand in the way of me keeping them indefinitely; especially something thats directly under my control. But after some time I came up with a better solution. It was a way for me to train more than one client at a time and simultaneously contribute even more to the client experience. It allowed me to use the help of an employee, but not leave me at the mercy of this persons skill or ability (or possible lack thereof). Its what I call the Super-Trainer System; what this system does is give you a way to extend your skill and ability to more people without diluting it. This system involves the use of an assistant to help you train multiple clients at once. It puts you in the position of ringmaster, orchestrating multiple people and activities at once. What you do is create separate workout plans as if you were training these clients separately, and then have your assistant (s) administer the plan along with you. When your attention is directed to any particular client, its up to your assistant to continue to implement your practices on the client that youre away from. Its like having two trainers, but with one mind. For every client you train in this system, your set-up process is the same as when you were training clients one at a time. You still need to prepare your sessions in exactly the same way, keeping the goals and purpose of the workout clearly in mind. You need to look at them as two separate clients, not two people sharing the same training session. Usually in small group training, trainers have every client perform the same group of exercises. This makes absolutely no sense and thats not what well be doing here. With this system you can have both clients doing totally different exercise, and through the use of your assistant each client will be receiving individualized attention. Before this point, its understood that youve done your homework. Through your marketing and branding, youve differentiated yourself and your training; youve made it clear that your brand of Personal Training is something completely unique. The client understands your specialty, realizes that its for them, and understands that they cant get it anywhere else. At this point they realize you are the one and only one trainer for them. Youve also created a mix of exercises, techniques and a philosophy that is unique to you. Its the responsibility of your assistant trainer to help you administer these workouts and this philosophy to your clients. When theyre helping you

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train your clients, they wont be doing exercises that they like to do, or employing techniques that they want; theyll be implementing yours. This makes their job very easy and clear. They know what exercises to do with your clients, what to look out for, and exactly what needs to be done every session. All they have to do

Super-Trainer System At Work

You sitdown with your assistant and go over the routines for both clients that day. For the spots in the routines when you both wont be in the same part of the gym at the same time, you let him know what to do and look out for. You also let him know when the two of you will be switching clients; this is so both clients feel theyve gotten equal time with you, the master trainer. You brief him or her on the goals for the session and any key points to keep in mind with that particular client. You cant take for granted the fact that your assistant will know how to administer certain exercises or know what kind of intensity to use: you have to tell them in detail beforehand. Once the session begins, you then allow your assistant to perform the given exercises with one of the clients, while you work with the other one. Even though youll be focusing in on the client youre with, you can still keep one eye on the other one, making sure everything is going to the exact standards you demand. If you see the technique or intensity of anything taking place doesnt meet your standards, you immediately step-in and correct it. Remember, your assistant is not training this client, he/she is merely administering your workout. If your workout isnt being administered properly, its your responsibility to step-in and correct it.

Its about 5 minutes before your clients are supposed to arrive.

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is deliver the program. Let me give you an example of the Super-Trainer System at work. One of the major advantages of this system is that it allows you to charge full price for more than one client at a time. If you dont know already, finding quality employees in todays marketplace is extremely difficult. If you had a training studio where you employed another trainer to work for you, you would inevitably have to charge less for the sessions here because this trainer would not be able to train your clients up to the same standards as you. Not only that, but because this trainer would have the full responsibility of training the client, you would have to pay this person more. In this system, you maintain all of the responsibility. Your standards dont drop with either of the clients in the session, so neither do your rates, and it also places less responsibility on your assistant and requires less experience on their part. In that way, you can pay them less than traditional trainers. In fact, its probably better in the Super-Trainer arrangement to hire someone that has no prior Personal Training experience. As weve talked about before, there are so many people looking to get started in the fitness business that this shouldnt be difficult. All you really want to look for is a good attitude (this is key) and a desire to learn how to be a top trainer. If you just simply adhere to all of the principles in this book; the principles of focusing on your specialty, preplanning your sessions, being attentive to your clients, and providing top service, youre immediately in the top 5% of the trainers in the world. It will be a great experience for this new trainer to learn from a top professional like you; by the time youre busy enough to need this assistant, youll be that top trainer. In terms of paying your assistant, Ive always started them at $15 an hour, with frequent pay raises as their ability improves. For training sessions that require some commute time for your assistant, for example in-home and on-location Super-Trainer sessions, you can pay them a little more; between $25 and $30 an hour. Ive charged between $85 and $99 and hour for training sessions with my assistant, so after his salary this still gave me a net profit of at least $168. And that was just for when I was training two clients at a time. Ive also used the system to train between 3 and 4 clients an hour; however this was in the private health-club setting, where my rates were $60 per hour for sessions. In this situa-

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tion I had to give the health-club a percentage of sales, but in spite of this it still yielded a net of over $150 an hour for me. Using a mix of this system in the gym with some clients and other training structures outside of the gym allowed me to consistently earn over $100 an hour for all my training hours. As long as you pay attention to your basic marketing responsibilities and continue to improve, getting to this level shouldnt be difficult. It just takes a float of about 15-20 clients, which can be accumulated over a few months. Not only does this system pay you more, but it has an interesting effect; it makes you look better. Theres inherently an added respect we give to someone who can lead and manage other people; they seem more powerful, competent, and responsible. And interestingly enough, even though you may only be working about 20 hours a week, it gives you the appearance of being in hyper-demand. What this means is that your perceived value goes up, and you even have the potential to raise your rates slightly because of it! Your clients wont be aware that you employ the help of an assistant to keep your working hours as short as possible. Theyll assume that you work 40+ hours a week just like them, and earn a much higher income than you actually do. Managing an assistant is a good learning experience for you too. From this book, youll understand that I view Personal Training as the beginning part of your journey in the fitness industry. Its not just the money or the achievement of success in the gym thats the most rewarding; its the potential the job has to help you grow as a person. Managing your assistant is a major part of that process. It will teach you the responsibilities of being a leader, a mentor, and setting a good example. No matter how simple or stress free the career path you eventually chose, youll still have to manage employees and take a leadership role at some point. The Super-Trainer System will be your first taste of that. You might make some mistakes in the beginning, but its all part of your learning process. Having an assistant thats familiar with your training style and standards also gives you an added dimension of freedom. When your assistant trainer has mastered your techniques and principles, you can leave them in charge of your clients whenever you decide to take an extended holiday. It takes away one of the major drawbacks of being a trainer, that if you go on a two week vacation, almost all of the progress your clients achieve vanishes! Especially when youre an out-

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standing trainer, your clients become even more dependent on you. This creates a situation where its hard for you to take any extended time off, knowing that when you get back your clients will be shell of themselves. In these situations, you can put your assistant in control with instructions to work toward the same goals and maintain the same intensity with your clients while youre gone. This allows you to take the occasional two, three, or even four week vacation. This isnt something you can do more than twice or three times a year, but having your assistant allows you the option without having the progress you and your client have worked so hard for go to waste. Your clients will be happy to train with your assistant while you enjoy your much deserved vacation, and you dont have to charge them any less for training for the training while youre gone because its still of the same brand. You may want to pay your assistant slightly more for this time that theyre captaining the ship on their own (optional), but the true reward for them is the experience of training a high-level client load by themselves. In my experience, theyre grateful for the responsibility and do their absolute best job to maintain your standards and not let you down. Having this peace of mind that your clients are covered is something that almost no professional in this type of field can afford, but its something that the Super-Trainer System allows you. Almost everyone else is harmed by the fact that any time they take off interrupts the normal routine and consumption patterns of their clients. Once youve gained this client and got them hooked so to speak, you never want to allow anything to break the momentum youve gained, and a vacation by you will do just that. In that regard, having an assistant gives you a huge edge. It also gives you the ability to earn close to your usual income even while youre traveling, a huge advantage as well. Youre vacation can basically be paid for by the work your assistant is doing while youre gone.

Finding An Assistant

How should you find this assistant? Like I mentioned, finding quality employees is a difficult process. The way its worked for me in the past is this: in most

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gym situations I enter, I start to make friends with many of the gym members. I especially make friends with the younger athletes in the gym; theyre always looking for free training advice and are never shy about coming up and asking. They also view Personal Training as the coolest job in the world, and as they see my client load swell and how professionally I serve them, their questions quickly turn from how to work-out to how they can become trainers themselves. You can give one these apprentices some part-time work with you on a trial basis. Like I mentioned, its not even important for this person to have past training experience, just that they have a passion for fitness and a willingness to learn. Finding your employees through this type of networking is probably the best way to find quality people. At other times, in other training practice set-ups Ive tried, Ive placed ads in the help wanted sections of major newspapers. This has always ended disastrously for me and I dont recommend it. The majority of people that view these ads are not just un-employed, theyre unemployable. They arent capable at all of handling the responsibilities that come with any job, let alone what youll be giving them. Rather than getting into any horror stories, and Ive got some great ones, Ill just tell you that the only people you should work with are the ones that youve gotten to know personally or that you get to know through a personal reference. And Im sorry to say that even those wont work on occasion! Work Arrangement The work agreement you have with this type of employee however is kind of a sticky situation. (That doesnt comply with this countrys labor laws, but remember this is the unofficial guide to succeeding at training; if you wanted to hear the same old rhetoric, you could have gotten a book at the bookstore.) This has worked for me because of the tone of my work arrangements; Ive always had an amazing camaraderie with my assistants/employees. Theres been a synergy that together we're trying to change lives and help people reach their full potential. And through it all, were trying to become better and stronger people ourselves. However, I can completely understand if you want to make this a more legitimate work arrangement. I in fact encourage you to do so, since it will help you learn how to set-up these work agreements as you move forward in your business career. Im going to outline some simple information in this area, but you

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definitely need to speak to either a lawyer or accountant for a full understanding of how these arrangements work, whats the best for you, and how to set one up. The simplest form of work agreement is when youre employee is viewed as an independent contractor. In this case, you have no real legal obligations to them. All you need to do is at the end of the year, give them a simple form letting them know how much theyve been paid over the year. Itll be up to them to file their taxes on their own. This situation works well because your assistants earnings can also be a deductible work expense for you. However, there are a couple of problems with this type of agreement when it comes to a training assistant. The law states that with these independents, you can hire them to do a job for you but youre not allowed to supervise them or tell them how to do it; thats completely up to them. This law works to your favor in any of your agreements with private facilities since it keeps them out of your business, but with your assistants it doesnt because youll be telling them what to do and how to do it. Although this agreement is very simple for you and your assistant, it doesnt follow the letter of the law and for that reason, in all honesty, it cant apply to this situation. Whats left obviously is treating your assistant as a part time employee. In this case, beyond the salary you pay them, youll have certain other employer expenses as part of your responsibility to them, and they will also see their takehome income decrease as well do to taxes. If you have an accountant, this type of arrangement is fairly easy to set-up, and you can even quickly print paychecks and keep records with programs from the Quicken series (although Ive never liked doing this type of paperwork). Its just that this arrangement costs you more and your assistant make less, both at the same time! These are both drawbacks for you, but thats the reality of doing business in our fine American economy. For those of you reading this from other countries, youll have to look into what laws pertain to you: hopefully its something more favorable.

You should now have a clear vision in your mind of how this system can serve
you. If youre client load is already over-flowing, you can slowly begin transitioning your practice to incorporate the help of an assistant. If you dont have the need yet, its good to keep this system in mind and begin to adopt it as soon as the

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need arises. Theres absolutely no better way to multiply your exact brand and quality of training than this. And Im sure many of you reading this will be able to implement the system to higher degree than even I have. Whatever the case, having an assistant will give you more leverage, help you do more in less time, and give you more authority - it really does make you a Super-Trainer! Furthermore, if and when you have a facility and are no longer doing the training yourself, the Super-Trainer System will still be highly valuable to you. Its a way for you to run group sessions without having to rely on too many experienced trainers. Finding qualified and experienced trainers is always the most difficult part of running a personal training business, and with the Super-Trainer Sytem, having just two or three of these trainers working for you, will allow them to manage an army of assistants, and allow you to serve easily over a hundred clients with your business.

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People get caught up in wonderful, eyecatching pitches, but they don't do enough to close the deal. It's no good if you don't make the sale. Even if your foot is in the door or you bring someone into a conference room, you don't win the deal unless you actually get them to sign on the dotted line. - Donald Trump

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Sales is an interesting subject for the Top-Level Trainer System, since its designed to make the trainer essentially sell themselves. It creates a base of permanent clients, along with a steady stream of new clients coming in through referrals and inquiries, making it unnecessary for a trainer to every have to actively sell. But in spite of this, you still need to understand the dynamics of selling to keep this process working fluidly. Especially when youre starting up a new practice and acquiring clients, or looking to fill up some empty spots in your schedule, having a sound understanding of selling and especially the sales conversation will give you outstanding results and allow you to get booked solid very quickly. Although sales is a dynamic process, it does have its own rules and patterns. Some of the biggest companies in the world have spent millions of dollars determining what works and what doesnt. Theyve determined that theres a certain way that you need to develop a sale, and there are other things that you can do to kill it. Ive applied much of this information to Personal Training, and what Ill show you now is a sales process that has been field tested by me to death and has resulted in a near perfect sales conversion record over the years. What well

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do is go through the conversation step by step and show how it develops.

First Meeting

This is your first interaction with your prospect; this interaction could occur over
the phone, or even through e-mal. If it does happen to be through e-mail, its best to try to get your prospect on the phone as fast as possible. This interaction can take on many forms but it usually begins with a question or statement on the part of the client. Here are a few possibilities: I want a Personal Trainer. What are your prices? How do I get started? Im looking to (particular result), can you help me with that? Of all of these potential openings, you still need to guide the interaction and get it moving forward in a positive way. A rule in sales is whoevers asking the questions has control. When your conversation with the client begins, it usually starts with them asking all the questions: they have control. What you need to do is regain control right away.

The Question

Rather than answer any of their questions, you need to respond with a question
of your own - and theres one foolproof question you can ask to immediately get

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things on your track: What are you looking to accomplish? Thats the $100,000 question; although subtle and natural, this question immediately shifts directions and sets the tone for the rest of the interaction. Heres what it accomplishes:

Gets them talking about there favorite subject: themselves. Gets them focused on their results, which theyre looking to hire you to achieve in the first place. Makes them paint the picture of what theyre dissatisfied with right now, helping to create the gap of where they are now to where they want to be.

Once this question has been answered thoroughly by the prospect, youre well on your way to making the sale.

The Answer

The answer the client will give you to this question could look anything like this:
I want to lose weight. I want to fix problem area x (stomach, hips, butt, arms). I want to feel better. I want to gain some muscle. And the number one answer the one youll hear the most and also the one that makes the least sense is:

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I want to tone-up. If youre already an experienced trainer, youre nodding your head right now. Since thats the one well hear the most, Ill base the following sample dialogue on that particular question. In my opinion, toning up is a combination of gaining muscle and losing fat. Ill often tell them this in exactly those words, and that leads to my second universal question: What does your routine look like right now? This question is nearly as devastating as the first one. Itll result in the future client spilling their guts to you, telling you all the things theyre doing wrong and essentially explaining to you why theyre desperate for your help. Among the answers youll get to this are: Im not working out right now. Im just doing cardio. Im working out once in a while but dont really have a routine. Im doing workout routine x. They may give you a workout routine theyre following that is probably not intense enough or that theyre slacking on. In some cases theyll be training very hard and following a good schedule but still not getting the results they want. After these two questions, you really havent said much but have already crystallized two major gaps where the client can use your help. And best of all, you made them do all the talking. At this stage, scheduling a first session or even making a full sale shouldnt be very difficult. However, we still need to move carefully and allow the sale time to progress. In the process of this first conversation, a few other questions you can ask along the way are:

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How long have you had this goal? How long have you been working to achieve it? Do you have a time-line; something youre getting ready for (like their wedding or a big vacation)? How long have you been doing that? Is that getting results for you? What have you done in the past? As you can see, these questions even further increase the gap from where your client is right now to where theyll be with your help. In the process of answering these questions, youre client is basically selling themselves.

Create Some Common Ground

After these rounds of questions youve got the prospect to open up and describe
many of the things that are wrong with them. Theyre probably feeling very bad about where their bodies are right now, and their self-esteem is very low; Ive even had people in tears at this point! But you now also have a lot of information about this client and have come more than half the way toward making the sale. Nows your chance to slowly build them back up and get them focused on the solution (ie. you and your Personal Training services.) Its finally time for you to talk; in nearly every case, youre first response and statement will be:

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I see a few areas for improvement. You can now start to demonstrate a small sampling of your training knowledge for the prospect. Start to describe a very basic plan for them, one that will get them excited about whats possible and whats to come in their relationship with you.

After these questions have been asked and answered, youll have just engaged in
results focused discussion spanning several minutes. The points that have been covered are their current training situation and their future results. You didnt waste time like most salespeople talking about the weather, sports, or their family; you spoke only about relevant information which has gotten them thinking even more about why they need you and what you can do to help them. In other words, their buying desire is even higher that when the conversation started. Some personal info may have been shared along the way as well, and the two of you may have even shared a laugh or two. Now the stage is set to take the discussion in a direction leading to the first appointment and eventually the sale. However, before we discuss this next phase of the interaction, lets explore one more First Meeting scenario.

Taking a Phone Number

Another potential first interaction with a client can occur at a time when you
dont have the opportunity to really engage them in a complete conversation. While youre training clients, or even when youre busy during a consultation, many people will try to talk to you about training. This is an effect we consciously try to create; getting people excited when they see us in action. Unfortunately when youre training someone else you dont really have the time to engage a new prospect. We therefore run the risk of losing this hot prospect forever.

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What most trainers will do is just give them a business card if they have one, but Ive found a much better way, one that puts you in the drivers seat. Its better for you to get a phone number instead. This gives you the opportunity to take control of the interaction, and slowly guide the client down the sales pipeline. The opening questions or statements you might get while busy are: Id like some training sessions. This is an ideal situation when someone walks up to you and asks you for training, but its still important for you to take it slowly or youll lose the sale Do you have a card? This means youve got them interested in your training and theyd like the option of contacting you. Unfortunately, many such inquiries do not turn into sales. What are your prices? While this may look like a sign of interest, its not completely. Youve gotten this prospect interested, but their expecting not to be able to afford it. Whatever the way they ask you, your response should be the same in all cases. First, you ask them the magic question lets say it out loud: What are you trying to accomplish? Allow them to speak for a few seconds - as weve talked about, this in itself moves them closer to the sale. What you need to let them know next is you may be able to help them but youre a little too busy right now to talk. Next you must do two things: 1. Give the future client a business card so that they can visit your website and let your website do the job of selling for you (actually verbally tell them to visit your site so they can find out more, and in most cases theyll do it). And next, more importantly ...

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2. Get their phone number. Write this down or store it in your phone, and make sure you dont forget to call them the next day. When they pickup, you can go through the beginning of the sales conversation as if you were face-to-face with them.

Of course, every sales conversation has a close. In the case of a cars or electronics, the close is to make the full purchase. But for Personal Training, a commodity for which you are charging top dollar and seeking a long-term training arrangement, its important for you to still move as slowly as possible. What well cover in the next section is exactly what type of close to look for.

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Up to this point weve talked about the structure of this first interaction but havent said a thing about what the goals are. Like I mentioned, every section of the sale has a goal. The goal of this first part of the sale isnt to sell them a hundred session package or convince them that youre the best trainer in the world: its to create a relationship. Personal Training is a high priced commodity that has a huge relationship component to it. With such a commodity, theres a major pitfall to watch out for: the fear of buyers remorse. A high priced product creates the potential for many buyers remorse spikes during the buying process. When a customer gets very emotionally excited about a major purchase and very close to buying, theyre logical mind will often step in and stop them because theyre afraid of spending too much money and getting burned. This is something that you need to be very much aware of; that you never want to trigger this buyers remorse hesitation. The faster you got them close to the sale, the more violent this pull-back will be, and sometimes it will be so violent that youll never see them again.

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Our goal is to turn this client into a life-long customer. Quality clients for us are a very valuable commodity they represent tremendous life-time value and are also hard to find in the market place. Therefore, how we proceed in the sale is very important. What you want to do is proceed in this sale gradually; we do that by asking for only a small close initially. Buy asking for only a smallcommitment at first we can get around the buyers remorse spike and instead allow more buying desire to build.

No Free Sessions

For many trainers, a small commitment first step represents a free introductory
session. Although this practice is almost universal in the field, Im not a believer in it. The training relationship and the TLT System depend heavily on the perceived expertise and authority of the trainer. Like I said in the first chapter, were in the best profession; were high level professionals, even higher value than doctors in most cases. From this position, giving away a free session looks a little desperate and although its a nice and natural gesture, decreases credibility slightly. Would a booked solid professional have the time to give away a free training session? Or are they more likely so booked that they have a hard time fitting people in to their schedule. Thats the reason that instead of giving away a free session, I have a better solution.

The Three Session Intro Pack

Rather than giving away that free session, create a small, no-commitment three
session introductory package instead. The three session intro-pack is a way for you to get the client to make a small financial investment while taking the time to

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get to know you. What this system banks on is that your sessions are irresistible, and that once the client experiences them they wont be able to stop. It also causes the client to invest; when people make a concession early on, they are much more likely to make a greater one later. Your prospect doesnt know all this however; what they think is theyre getting a way to try out your training before they commit. But once they do take the three sessions, they become so overwhelmed by the quality and satisfaction of training with you that it becomes simply impossible to stop; I cant remember the last time I had a client not opt for more sessions after taking the intro-pack. After taking your high quality sessions and experiencing the excellent program design and unbelievable service, it should be impossible for them not to continue. Ive heard many times my clients call my sessions crack they become addicts. But thats not what you tell them when suggesting the three session intropack. When youre selling the intro-pack, you should be selling only the three session without the commitment to any future training. That goal is just to get them to try it. Another thing to do is discount the intro-pack to eliminate price resistance. When someone is about to purchase an untested commodity (at this point, they havent trained with you yet), there may be price resistance. After they try your sessions however, this price-resistance will most likely disappear. To prevent it initially, I lower the price to make the offer irresistible. Offering a discount at this stage doesnt hurt credibility. First off, if the client has any buying experience theyll understand this discount is only for the first three sessions, and that your usual rates are probably higher. I also make it implicit that during the three session period, Im deciding myself if theyre the type of client Ill be able to help. This adds an element of role-reversal, where Im the one evaluating them over the three sessions. These types of situations go a long way toward increasing buying desire. Heres how you can word it: Just from talking to you I see a few things we could change and I think Ill be able to help. I have a three session introductory package for only $___. I think that should be our first step. In that time youll see what my training is

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like, and Ill be able to get a good feel for your body and figure out whether youre a good fit for my type of training. How does that sound? With this statement youve given the prospect a low-risk way to begin training with you without appearing needy yourself. In half of all cases, after youve gone through the entire dialogue described in the last chapter, theyll now agree to the three sessions. Just schedule the first one and take it from there. The other half of the time theyll try to milk the full price out of you. Theyll ask you: How much does the training cost after that? Youll be shocked by how routine this is and will most likely get the question in those exact words. This question is your first major hurdle in the sale; how you react and handle it will be the primary determinant of whether you make the sale or not. When it comes to the question of price at any point of the sales conversation, theres only one rule: Dont tell them how much your training costs or youll most likely kill the sale! If you answer this question if you tell the future client how much your training costs before theyve experienced your sessions and had a chance to interact with you personally, youll most likely kill the sale. Theyll get scared away by the high price of training with you, who at right now is a total stranger to them. Theyll then tell you they want to think about it, and as you know, youll never see them or hear from them again. At that first meeting, the client knows nothing about you. They may have had a bad experience with a lazy Personal Trainer in the past, or they may think that all trainers are the same and just be price shopping for a good deal. Thats actually the two most common places most new client are coming from. If you jump in here and volunteer your full prices before theyve understood why youre special, the client in most cases will get sticker shock and youll kill the sale.

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If you follow all of the tips in this book, you can market yourself as one of the, if not the highest priced trainer in your area. I charge between 50% more to double what the personal trainer right next to me is charging in almost every training environment I enter. This will be the case with you too, but you dont want your client to know this until after theyve full experienced your training and understood why youre better. Before they understand why, theyll just think youre offering the same training as everyone else, but at a higher price. However, after experiencing your training and personality, their attitude will change. Peoples perception of price changes once a relationship is formed. At this point, theyll be more than willing to pay your full prices. They may actually relish the fact that theyve paying the most for the best, the same way people love to own expensive cars or handbags: for the prestige. Your clients will be willing to sacrifice in other areas of their lives in order to pay for your training, but not until after theyve experienced it for themselves.

Do Not Quote The Full Price Until After The Three Session Package

Trust me, the client will beg and plead to get the price out of you in the first
meeting. This is a natural impulse we have with anything we want; our first reaction is to check the price tag to see if we can afford it. In many cases, subconsciously the client actually wants to be scared away its their procrastination instinct. They want to just walk away and say well, I tried but couldnt afford it. But as we all know, if we really want something we can always find a way to afford it. Before the prospect even talks to you, Im sure they know that your training will cost at least $40-$60 a session. Even the worlds worst Personal Trainers cost at least that much. So if youre one of the worlds best and you charge between $70-100, thats less than twice the price; that means youre actually an unbelievable bargain! Thats a key point and the reason that TLTs perform so well in the marketplace: where else can you get the best in the industry

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for less than double the price of the worst? Nowhere. If you want to drive a Mercedes, youve got to pay between 5-10x as much as you pay for a Hyundai. If you want to eat at the best restaurant, youve got to pay at least 10-20x what youd pay at McDonalds. So if your future client was expecting to pay about $60 a session, and you wind up costing $84 dollars a session, but during their 3 sessions with you they realize that youre a top-notch trainer, do you think theyll have a problem paying the extra amount? Absolutely not! In that time theyll have gone to your website and seen your testimonials, observed your training style and techniques, and noticed that youre an active listener and results focused; theyll have realized theyre in the hands of a true professional that makes their doctor, dentist, and accountant all look like flabby, scrubby amateurs. When all of this becomes clear to them, theyll be more than happy to pay about 30% more like I said theyll actually consider you a huge bargain. So what do you say when the client is pressing you to get your prices before theyve agreed to the three session intro pack? Client: No really, tell me how much the training costs after that. TLT: I really dont like to get into that until youve really seen how I train and what I can do for you. Lets start with the three sessions and see how it goes, and we can talk about price immediately afterwards. How do you feel about that? Client: Uhhhh, I guess thats okay. When discussing the three session intro-pack, sell it by itself, and more importantly, try to play it up. Let them know that a lot will be accomplished in that short time; that all of the shortcomings the two of you just discovered in their routine will be completely overcome. When they realize theyll be getting all of these benefits for a good price, and if they like you, in almost every case theyll

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have no problem taking this small step.

After The Three Sessions

ow it goes without saying that during the three session intro-pack, youve completely wowed your client and shown them what training at the highest level feels like. Youll learn the precise details on how to do this in other chapters. Now, after either the second or third session of the intro-pack, can the price discussion finally occur. The subject of price is usually the hardest and most touchy aspect of any sales process, but since youve taken your time in developing this relationship, it will now actually turn out to be easy. Youve been a true professional and been patient, and now its time for your reward. Over the course of the two or three sessions, the client has become attached to you and dependent on you. Youve become a part of their world and they dont want to give you up. Just like the puppy-dog the pet store lets you take home for the weekend, theyve fallen in love with you and dont want to give you back. You can now charge between 50-100% more than had you quoted them your price at the beginning, which is what most non-TLTs do every day.

The Training Package

In the health-club environment, the goal of every trainer is to sell the biggest
training package possible. They want to get a signature on the sales contract, chuck it over their shoulder, and then proceed to deliver the lowest quality Personal Training known to man. But thats not what you do. You have habits and disciplines built into your training sessions and practice in general that make you more valuable as time goes on.

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After your client has begun the three session intro package, youve already gone a long way toward creating the client relationship. But its not fully cemented yet and wont be until your client has fully opted for a training package at full price. Once your client has purchased and is actively consuming a group of your sessions at full price, you cant consider yourself out of the sales phase yet. Although weve brought the client very far down the training cycle, we still have to show a little restraint in the size of training package we look to sell. Although Im sure many of you reading this have sold 100 session packages off of a cold approach, thats not what were talking about here. What Im describing is a system that will work every time, not one bold stroke thats hit or miss. Thats the reason why after the three session introduction, my next highest training suggestion for my clients is usually only 10 sessions: The training is now $___ per session and you can pay for it in groups of ten, so next time we meet just bring in a check for $____ and well be set for the next month or two. Okay? You dont want to go directly to selling a 30 or 40 session package directly after the three session pack. Its still a little bit too early to get into that long-term and pricey a commitment. But what if they ask to purchase a larger package? Many times I will have clients who are so happy and motivated after their three sessions (if youve done your job right, this should be very often) that they want to opt for more sessions at this time. You might call me overly cautious for still suggesting only ten sessions at this point. That may be true, but Im still wary of the chance of buyers remorse popping up. Thats the enemy of anyone making a sale; I try to avoid it at all costs and instead try to keep buying desire as the overwhelming feeling in the clients mind. Asking for smaller concessions is the way to do this. Now after theyve paid you for and completed the three session intro pack and completed 10 sessions with you, we can now finally consider the sales process over and the training relationship established. At this point you can recommend they pay for 20 sessions at a time if you chose. I personally never request payments of more than 10 sessions at time, although my clients will regularly vol-

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unteer a payment for 20 sessions to make things more convenient for them. Why dont I push for a bigger package? Because it puts me in a non-needy position. It makes me free to fire my clients if Im not happy with them, or more importantly, to raise prices whenever I want. My relationship with my regular clients is so deep that they genuinely fear that I will one day dump them or get too busy to train them any longer, and theyre willing to do whatever it takes for that not to happen.

How Much Should You Charge?

This is a very good question. Your rates are not dependent on the amount of certifications you have, the kind-of shape youre in, or how many years youve been a trainer. These are all factors that influence the price, but they dont determine it. The sole determinants are your own self-esteem and the belief you have in yourself and your training services. What do you think, that performing at your peak-level, you could realistically get away with in the market place? That should be your rate. If you have no experience right now, charge 10-20% less than that until you become comfortable with closing sales and giving outstanding service. But after that, on future training packages and all re-signs, begin to slowly raise your prices. I also dont provide a sliding fee scale. My prices dont go down if you chose to buy more sessions, simply for the fact that the value of my time and service doesnt go down the longer youre with me. A few clients have asked if I offer discounts on larger packages, but when I tell them I dont, no client has every questioned it.

Psychic Value

The primary determinant of the price you can set as a Personal Trainer is your

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psychic value. With most things that we purchase, this is the deciding factor. Thats what makes a Maybach nearly a 50 times more expensive than a Hyundai. Your ability to create that value is your primary asset as a top consultant. The reason most clients think they need a Personal Trainer is to improve their appearance or performance in some way. And surely, I achieve amazing results with my clients and Im sure many other trainers do too; thats one of our key success areas of course. But its not the only one, and surprisingly its not really the most important one. Since results are largely dependant on factors that are up to the client and out of our control, this cant be the deciding criteria. What Personal Training starts out as is a way to get in shape; what it actually turns into is a high quality, highly regimented activity to engage in on a regular basis. Its the training session and the trainer that are the products that the client is paying for. The feelings this trainer and training session can elicit will be the determinants of price. It follows naturally that a Personal Training session that feels the best will achieve outstanding results. It will also motivate a client to do their best on their own, which will contribute even further toward outstanding results. But thats only a by product of the Top-Level Training session. Its the session itself that comes first.

Your Training Session

In order to create additional value in your training sessions that we can then
charge more money for, we need to start thinking differently about them. This was discussed in detail in the section on Session Design, but well now identify the actual properties of the session. We need to view it as a product, and just like any other product, we need to start thinking about what its made of. How does a great training session sound? How does it look?

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How does it feel? How does it taste? (take your mind out of the gutter) How does it smell? How does it make you feel? All of these are important parts of the whole of your training the quality that youre perceived to have. Some of these questions might seem esoteric; after all, you cant taste a training session. My point is that you need to consider all of the factors that could directly, indirectly, and psychically affect your session. The reason Jackie Warner from the reality show Workout can charge over $400 for her sessions, and her trainers can charge over $200, isnt because theyre better trainers (if youve watched this show, you know this is clearly not the case). The reason is because they train out of an exquisite studio in a posh neighborhood and theyre all good looking; these are all factors that have nothing to do with the training itself. Although we may not have those same things going for us, there are certainly ways we can increase our own psychic value, as well discuss in this and other chapters.

Price

In most major decisions, price is not the deciding factors; as we discussed in The
Definition, its really perceived value. The client makes their decision on many factors, one of the last of which is price. Its only bad trainers that cite price as the primary reason that clients dont buy. The successful trainer doesnt view price as the deciding factor. He/she pays attention to all the other facets of the job, and spends more of their effort justifying price, rather than arguing for it.

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Price Shoppers No matter how justified your rates are, there inevitably will be some clients that will think they're to high. Maybe they had no idea how much Personal Training costs or theyre just used to bargaining for anything they buy; but in your experience youll find customers that will adamantly request that you lower your prices for them. You never want to get involved in a price war with your clients. The research shows that consumers that fight you on price are usually the highest problem customers there are. These are exactly the people you need to avoid; just politely let them know that your prices have been set in competitive marketplace, and with all things considered you actually turn out to be a tremendous value over other trainers. Interestingly enough, price in our society often has a direct correlation to quality; people expect to pay more for the best. For that reason, when something costs more, its perceived to be better and that leads to there being even more demand; you can actually hurt yourself by charging too little! Ive noticed the phenomenon first hand. When I first started as an independent consultant, I went through a dry period where I could hardly find a client. I incorrectly assumed price was the reason in that particular training environment and lowered my prices down to $20 per session for a half-hour session. Even at that ridiculously low price, I still had no takers. This should be considered rockbottom for any trainer, and I soon realized that things couldnt go on like this. Over the next year I raised my prices and simultaneously improved the quality of my sessions and sought to improve my image as well. In about a year in the exact same training environment, I had raised them to over $60 per session. I eventually had such a demand that (using the Super-Trainer system) I would often see three clients at a time, taking my net earnings to over $100 an hour - quite a difference! If youve done your job of justifying your price through outstanding sessions, what youll find is a different situation; clients wont be looking for concessions on price, but instead on training frequency. Your client may understand your rates and feel theyre justified, but they might be looking for a concession from you on how often they can train per week. Some trainers and gyms have a

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rule that you must train at least twice per week, but Ive always been flexible on this. Unlike the price shopper, this type of client is one of the most earnest in their desire to train with you, but either because of time or financial restraints, cant afford to. They usually turn into great clients and sources of referrals because they value your training and are appreciative of the opportunity to train with you. The only drawback is that this type of client may turn out to take more time per week to service, since they may call or email you more for coaching in between their sessions. They also may take away peak time slots from other clients that are training at a much higher frequency. For these reasons, its up to you to decide whether youll allow less than twice weekly training in your practice.

Ways To Add Value To A Training Session

As we mentioned, justifying price is the key point. If you cost the most, on what
basis do you do so? Here are a few:

You are in great shape yourself. You have a sound knowledge of all the key information to handle common client questions. Youre perceived as more busy and in demand than other trainers. Youre personal appearance indicates that youre one of the best in your field. You have a professional attitude, like what would be expected from one of the worlds top trainers. You are punctual and prepared every single time Your sessions are always challenging and excellent in every way. You have a positive personality.

When you put all of these together you get a complete package that can easily go for more than what other trainers are charging in the marketplace, sometimes

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twice as much. Through these factors and many more I havent listed, you can eventually grow into one of the highest earning trainers in this field. Is there ever a case where this sales structure, where the first meeting, leading to the three sessions, onto the small training package, doesnt work? Not really. If you do have any problems closing the sale, theyre most likely not do to anything you said or did; theyre most likely image problems. If the system fails, youll find it happen fairly early in the process, meaning few clients will be even willing to take three sessions with you. If this is the problem, youre most likely not coming across as credible to them. You need to focus more on your delivery of the first stage of the sale.

Do you sound confident or needy? Do you appear to be a professional or an unskilled amateur? Did you clearly demonstrate knowledge or the opposite, a lack of experience. Did you get them excited about everything theyll accomplish with the three session intro package? Did you show them during the three session package that youre training is the absolute best on the market, or did it just seem like everyone elses?

The only time Ive found this sales system slightly out of place is in cases where youre getting a very strong referral. This type of individual, after hearing so many great things about you, will show up to their first session with you with their check book in hand looking to pay in full for your largest training package. However, sticker shock and buyers remorse can still be a problem with even the most motivated customer. Even in these cases I recommend that you move slowly with your sale. If youre confident in your training, you should never be in a rush to make the big, quick sale. The more you take your time, the more credibility you build and the greater life-time value you can get out of your client.

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Another situation is cases where the client is very wealthy and has absolutely no buyers resistance at all. Theyre actually slightly insulted at any indication of price or any obvious sales techniques. These types of clients are usually used to the best of everything, and paying for it is not a problem for them. This type of wealthy client is very rare however; Ive had to sidestep price negotiations with clients who were multimillionaires many times. Even with the wealthy, in most cases theyre very careful and shrewd about how they spend their money; thats how they got that way.

The Screening Frame

As a Personal Trainer, you play different roles at different times. When you
have your sales and marketing hat on, youre looking for better clients and to charge your worth. But when youre in your role as Top-Level consultant, youve got to look at your sales process from a completely different angle. I call this the screening frame, where you create the perception at all times that youre evaluating the customer to see if theyre qualified enough to train with you. This puts power clearly on your side and allows you to guide the sales process in the direction you want. The screening frame begins from the very first interaction you have with your client, from your first question to them - lets review it one more time: What are you looking to accomplish? You must pay careful attention to their answer. Once theyve told you their needs, your response should be something along these lines Ok, I think I can help you with that. This implies that had they given you a different answer, you would have dismissed them. You then allow the conversation to develop with further questions

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like weve already discussed. And as youll remember, we make another screening statement when we say : I think Ill be able to help you. I have a three session introductory package for only $___. I think that should be our first step. In that time youll see what my training is like, and Ill be able to get a feel for your abilities and figure out whether youre a good fit for my training. In this statement youve done an important thing: youve politely informed the client that the three session intro-pack is a kind of probationary period for them. Theyll feel that if they cant handle it, they may be declined and will have to go looking for another trainer. This puts them in the weaker position and gives you the upper hand. This is a position you always want to be selling from; that your services are scarce and cant be enjoyed by everyone. Clients will be more willing to train at times more convenient for you and pay your prices when they know they could lose you at any time because youre in such high demand. By the way, this frame should be your reality; you should never be looking to train everyone, but instead analyzing your prospects to see which ones are the best fit for you and your practice. I do turn down many people that ask for my services, meaning I dont even allow them to take the 3 session package. I have no desire to train someone at a discount who I dont think even has the potential to be a long-term client. And on several occasions, after the three session package, Ive informed people that Im probably not the best trainer for them and they need to look for someone else.

If you follow the rules on training in this book, your sessions will be an unbelievable experience and bring tremendous value to the lives of your clients. Thats important because in order to sell something you need to be completely confident that your product is one of the best possible. Thats why in my sales efforts, Im never hesitant in leading my clients down the pipeline and guiding them to the

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purchase. Although Im leading, Im constantly proving myself along the way, ensuring the clients comfort and happiness. Rather than feeling youre being manipulative, your clients will constantly tell you how much they love their sessions, tell you they cant believe they didnt start sooner, and rave and recommend you to everyone they know. If they dont, it means youre doing something wrong. You should have this confidence in what you do from the beginning, and your sales process will prove to be very easy. Reading through these two chapters, and not only learning the dialogue, but also mastering the principles can be extremely valuable. It will allow you to guide the discussion any way you want, to a point where you can develop your own nuances that suit you and your training business the best. And it will allow you to teach the same system to your trainers or sales people, when youre ready to hand this job off to others.

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Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing. - John D. Rockefeller

SUCCESS IMAGE

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Your success image is one of the most important things you can develop in your
professional life. Contrary to what some people may think, how were viewed by others is something almost completely under our control. Realizing this is one of the most liberating feelings you can have, because once you do, youre free to create the image you want. The term success image was first coined by the marketing consultant Jeffrey Lant. He uses it in reference to the easily identifiable personality that a consultant projects; this then makes it easier for a prospect to understand and relate to the consultant. In todays marketplace, people want to deal with an expert - time is too short and money is too valuable to spend any of it dealing with an amateur. But theres more to it than just that; the term Lant uses is the accessible expert. In addition to expertise, you also project a warmth and accessibility: An image should be clean, crisp and capable of being understood in an instant it lets the prospect know, in an instant, that you are

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not only capable of solving his problem but that you are also a person they want to be with, an individual the client prospect wishes to spend sustained amount of time with. When I first got started as a trainer, I didnt really care much about how I looked or how I came across. I wore a chain, a pinky ring, and displayed other poor taste. These behaviors served my needs but conveyed nothing of value to my clients. However, when I started my independent practice and was solely responsible for the success of it, the way I viewed myself started to change. It was then I began to pay careful attention to how I looked and presented myself. I realized that I wouldnt be able to succeed unless I projected that I was the best at my profession; therefore, I consciously sought to convey this image. I purchased new, matching , tasteful training uniforms, and spent time bringing up my training knowledge and diversifying my training techniques. Not coincidentally, I saw my credibility and income grow at the same time. I also put a greater focus on client care and service. I carried a training log for each of my clients to every session and started paying close attention to their training experience and session design. Once I started adopted my version of this accessible expert image, my success story in the field of personal fitness began. Just like me, your success as a Top-Level Trainer will be based largely on your success image and how youre viewed in the marketplace. Too many trainers dont consciously look to create a success image; they dont think about the importance of how they look or how theyre viewed by their clients and the public. For that reason their growth in the field is severely handicapped. Just carefully analyze any other field or business, and youll find its the image thats the main determinant of the marketability of the product. This rule applies in a heightened degree to the independent consultant like you. Crafting an image that is not only appealing but also appropriate and easily identifiable is very valuable. Lets take a look at some sample success images. The Expert Trainer This is an image I took on when I first began my independent training career. I

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was still not very confident in my training skills, my physique, or my ability to command a high salary. I compensated for those short-comings by dressing a bit more professionally than your average trainer. I recommend this success image to any trainer that temporarily needs a boost to their perceived credibility. This image is characterized by khaki pants instead of sweat pants, and a an embroidered short sleeve polo shirt. The shirt should have the name of your training business on the front and the words Personal Trainer embroidered on the back. You should wear this shirt to each and every training session, even when you train the client in their home. This image would be especially valuable to younger trainers; for example a 20 year old will come across much more polished and professional if they are in the semi-uniform of the Expert Trainer success image. If youre dealing with a population that puts an emphasis on technical skill, for example the pre-natal population, senior citizens, or post-rehab clients, then this would also be a perfect look to establish mega-credibility. These can be very lucrative client groups, especially if you adopt the right image. Also, if youre just getting started as a trainer and arent yet in as great shape as youd like to be or dont have much experience, you can adopt the Expert Trainer image to emphasize your technical skill (which you should be working to grow rapidly) rather than, say, your personal experience. The Guru This is a somewhat eccentric image that can be adopted by a trainer with lots of experience or credentials in fitness. Rather than taking away from their credibility, it adds some flavor to it. A perfect example would be famous body-building trainer Charles Glass. Charles has his own unique style and eccentric personality which is unique to him and separates him from any other trainer on the market. However, hes unique only to a point; youll still always see him wearing the same colors and the same types of clothes in all of his interviews and media appearances. And youll always see his assistant trainer wearing a Charles Glass Training shirt with his slogan on it. Its obvious Charles pays careful attention to cementing his role as an authority in his clients and the publics mind. Although every Top-Level Trainer should display a large amount of consistency in their appearance, the Guru can get away with a little more lee-way. An-

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other example is bodybuilding trainer Geno Silvane located on Queens Blvd in Queens New York. I trained with Geno in preparation for my competition last year, and he too is the quintessential Guru. His client list and credentials allow him to basically do whatever he wants, setting his own hours, training structure, wardrobe, etc. Boxing coach and personal trainer Dave Scooter Honig, co-author of a fitness book with LL Cool J, is another example. Ive met Dave personally on many occasions, and he too has a funky way of dressing and acting. But hes a an older trainer with credentials and a client list thats impeccable he can get away with this at his level, but acting like him wouldnt be advisable to most. The Guru image isnt for everyone: its suitable only if you have tons of experience and/or credentials. For example, youre a champion athlete in your area or are famous for some other reason (not just a genius in your own mind). In most cases though, the guru image is just something that comes about naturally, rather than one you consciously adopt, and even in that case its still tempered with professionalism. Master Trainer The success image of the Master Trainer would be the most ideal for any TopLevel Trainer, and is the one youll see most often adopted by trainers on television and in the media. The clothing of this image is usually characterized by an athletic outfit it could be a tasteful matching track-suit or fitness shirt and pant combo. What separates this outfit from typical gym clothes is that its something more new and expensive than something you would normally workout in or wear to the gym. While its still a wardrobe appropriate for fitness, you have the feeling that this person has come to the gym for a professional matter, not to workout themselves. This wardrobe is combined with exceptional grooming and a very positive personality. This is the type of image of celebrity trainers like Gunnar Peterson and David Kirsh, but can be easily taken on by anyone. This image is especially useful if youre in an environment where youll be training around other people who may be potential clients, such as a private gym. While it seems like common sense to appear as experienced as possible, most trainers in these environments pay no attention to how they look.

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A priority for you in these environments is to differentiate yourself as a leader and an authority. The advantage of this type of outfit is that it distinguishes you as a Personal Trainer, even if when you arent currently conducting a training session. Through this wardrobe it will be obvious to anyone that sees you that you work in the fitness sector in some capacity. What defines the Master Trainer image? Open a Nike catalogue, and often times most of those matching outfits qualify. If you have Nike Town in your area youll have no problem at all finding clothes for this look; if not, youll probably need to go to the biggest and best sporting goods store in your area. Top this image off with a good physique, excellent grooming, and youll be your best advertisement and well on your way to being booked solid at the highest rates possible. Player/Coach This is an image that I used to employ in my younger days. I used to take part in the dynamic workouts I gave my clients, things like boxing and sprinting with, and also leading them through other intense exercises. Although I was expecting to sweat with them, I in no way wanted to wear common work-out clothes while I was on the job. I also wanted to portray a vibrant image in order to attract the young fit clientele I was looking to specialize in. This image gives you more lee-way in your choice of outfit: for example you can wear shorts, an arm band, or sports (not baseball) cap. The difference is it should match well. When I employed this image, I combined it with an embroidered muscle-t, which was black, tight fitting, and had my logo on the front and Personal Trainer embroidered on the back. I complimented this with shorts in the summer, an armband at times, and a sports cap when I felt it was necessary. I felt like this image was my most potent, setting me apart as the complete package, and encouraging exactly the market I was targeting to seek my services. This image is effective if youre conducting outdoor sessions, where your training will be hands-on and probably require you to get involved and sweat. Dont confuse this with a trainee outfit (one of the negative images listed below). Again, the clothes must match, be clean, and set you apart from someone merely working out themselves no wife-beaters or old gray sweat pants!

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Negative Images
Friend Trainer The negative image of Friend is where many trainers fall into, and its a trap thats hard to avoid. When you start wearing jeans or denim shorts, you have a problem; you should never look like youre going to get the morning paper or play a pick-up game of basketball when youre about to conduct a high-priced training session. However, this is an easy trap to fall into. When youre seeing the same client three times a week for months or even years, youll develop a very close and friendly relationship with them; theres nothing wrong with that and in fact is quite positive. It happens with me and all of my clients; I begin attending all of their parties, spending time on their boats or houses, going to bars or clubs with them, and even accompanying some of them on vacation. The problem comes when you begin to take your client for granted; thats when your sessions and image start to lose their edge. No matter how close you get to a client, you should never fully fall into the role of friend. While some might think this is a good thing, its actually a step down in the mind of the client. As the trainer, youre in the role of leader and mentor to the client. They look up to you and respect you. Becoming their friend completely takes away some of this aura and hurts your credibility. And if you start to view them as a friend, you may even begin complaining to them about your personal life. This is the road to disaster, but one youll notice many training relationships travel down. Youll find both the trainer and client making the workout and goals secondary. This especially hurts your credibility in the overall marketplace. When other people see you and your training style, theyll get a negative impression about your services. You may also find yourself spending less time on learning new information and slacking on your progress tracking, punctuality, and scheduling. Dont allow this to happen; holding it all together begins with keeping control of your success image. Although I develop personal relationships with my clients, I never completely fall into the role of friend. Even when Im spending time out of my private life with them, Im always still on in some way. Youve got to be a pro and realize you need to keep your priorities straight. If you live a balanced life youll

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make plenty of friends and not have to go looking for this type of relationship with the people that pay you. If your credibility takes a hit in your clients mind, that could be the beginning of the end of your training relationship. If theyre ever looking for a place in their life to cut some corners on their expenses, youll be one of the first to go. This is different from the Top-Level Trainer, whos services are indispensable, come hell or high water. When it comes to your business, you dont want there to be a gray area; you can be a friend to your clients, but your role as an advisor and consultant entails much more responsibility than just that. Trainee The image and especially the clothing of most Personal Trainers falls into this category. In their attempt to wear a sporty outfit, one theyre comfortable with and is in keeping with gym attire, they end up wearing their own workout clothes and looking like a trainee themselves. This is categorized by wearing clothes that are old, dont fit properly, dont match, or in general are just cheap or ugly looking. Spend a little more money and time in picking you clothes so you dont fall into this trap. No plain white tees or your beat-up New Balances; remember to look like the best and your training follow.

Personal Points
Punctuality When it comes to punctuality I have a saying: On time is the new late. With the fast pace of business and life today, you can no longer just be on time. In a business like Starbucks or Mcdonalds, making the customer wait 5 seconds without service is something that can create such a negative experience that they

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may not want to come back - just take a moment to visualize it yourself. By the same token, when someone is paying absolute top dollar for Personal Training, they dont want to wait even a minute for the session to start. Punctuality is part of your perceived value; a trainer thats consistently punctual can charge ten dollars more in the marketplace just on that point alone. But like I said, on time is the new late. You cant just depend on being on time anymore youve got to be a couple of minutes early every session. When your client over the course of time realizes that youre always early; that youre always there waiting and your serious about their session, theyll be more serious about the training themselves. Theyll talk about you with others in a positive way, which is exactly the kind of effect you want. So if on time is the new late, what is late by the way? Well being late reflects that youre not serious about what you do. If a client who themselves is not motivated about working out and has hired you to motivate them, sees that even youre not motivated about the training session, it creates s a tremendous negative impression. If youre constantly late, you need to ask yourself why. When I started out as a Personal Trainer, I was always exactly five minutes late to every training session. I couldnt explain it, but it was always five minutes, no matter when the session started. As Ive moved on in my career and have begun dealing with employees, Ive seen the same phenomenon and have begun to understand it: your punctuality is a reflection of your own self-esteem. If you dont really believe in yourself, dont believe in what you do, and your life is a raving mess, then you can never manage to get yourself anywhere on time. You subconsciously make yourself late everywhere you go on purpose - its a form of sub-communication. Have you every known a sloppy person that doesnt really believe in themselves? Theres always something wrong with them, like a stain on their shirt, or its wrinkled and fitting poorly. It doesnt even matter if this person somehow earns a lot of money and can afford to do better: they just dont. What theyre doing is sub-communicating their self-esteem to you. Its a completely subconscious process that tells the world what they think of themselves. Its exactly the same with punctuality; thats why youll hear some employers will immediately get rid off someone who shows up late to an interview; they wont even bother to see them. You might ask yourself why are they being so hard? The person might be good; they were just a little late. The reason is that

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employer has found through experience that lateness is a sign of an even bigger problem. Theyve probably found that out the hard way, and so they choose to make this judgment call from the very first impression. You also hear about this with girls when dating; that theyll dismiss guy for some strange reason like his shirt was too big or he had a bad haircut. From experience too, theyve found that we communicate a lot through these non-verbal criteria. In my case, I found that once I got better at this profession and had more success, I couldnt even imagine being late to a session; I couldnt fathom making a negative impression about the services which I worked so hard to build and believed in. The most important point is this works both ways: if you want to improve your self-esteem and the quality of what you do, just improve your punctuality. It will force the quality of what you do to get better; this is called backwards engineering and its remarkable to watch it happen to yourself. Energy As a top consultant in any field, you play the role of white knight; your clients view you as a super-human savior thats come to slay the demons that have been tormenting them. While in other fields most consultants only need to fulfill this role for a short time, as a Personal Trainer youve got to be like this every time your client sees you, sometimes for months or years on end. It might sound like a daunting task, but its really a great discipline to learn that will set you up for more success in the future. For one, this means that you can never be tired or allow anything in your own life to take away from your personal energy. Its only your client thats allowed to feel tired sometimes or have bad day but you never are. If you ever show up to training session with the same problems and complaints as your client, then you lose your position of power. In your position as a Personal Trainer, your client will completely follow your lead. They look to you not only for fitness, but also on how to behave; many times my clients begin dressing and talking like me as well. In that case, you need to set the standard: if youre flaky, youre clients will be flaky; if youre tired theyll be too; if youre boring, theyll be bored. Thats why you need to bring youre A-game to every single training session. A trainer that can effectively maintain the position of an expert advisor can charge double what a trainer who doesnt do this can. I regularly have charged at least double what the trainer standing right next me charges in the marketplace be-

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cause I pay attention to these points. Was my training twice as good as this other trainers? Probably, but thats besides the point; whats more important is that I positioned myself in the clients mind so strongly that it appeared like it was. Even if my client knew the other trainers rates were lower than mine, and most often they did, theres no way in the world they would switch because of the way they feel from training with me. Another key to maintaining excellent energy is creating a Top-Level Trainers Lifestyle for yourself. Your average trainer has a very hard time to remain energetic because he/she is usually over-worked and doesnt have adequate rest time. But a trainer that earns a higher income can have more time spend on rest and recovery, allowing them to bring more of themselves to each session. Positive Personality A positive personality is an indispensable part of any success image. This is one of the ironies of success: its hard to achieve success without a positive personality, but people that arent successful usually arent very positive. Its kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy; people that dont genuinely like others usually dont get very far. If youre starting from a position where for whatever reason youre not very successful now, smiling might not be a natural thing for you. You might not like other people, not have a generally positive impression of others, and not have too many friends either (I wonder why). You may have been working at a crappy, dead-end, no respect job before you became a TLT. You might have been earning a very low salary and may not have a very active social life. Thats completely understandable, but now that you are one, thats all going to change. But until that transformation is complete, youve got to fake it for while. Youre going to have to go out of your way to be in a good mood, smile at people, and generally like others. This may be hard and feel unnatural in the beginning, but after a while youll find your groove and itll become second nature. At that point, youll find your outside world (your finances, friends, and lifestyle) greatly improved as well. I dont need to get into all the self-help talk of why this is the case; just take my word for it. Ironically, your personality betrays you success level; if youre a negative person, people will assume that youre not very good at what you do. When I was

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flat broke, living in my parents basement, with absolutely no friends or prospects, I had no reason to smile. But I consciously made an effort to be a more happy and positive person. With that decision, my life and success started to change as well. Thats one of the gifts this career can give you; this might sound a little sappy, but it can literally save your soul. It allowed me to become a more positive person and bring happiness and value into the lives of other people. It will be able to do the same thing for you. Developing the success personality is the last step that will unlock all of the success you deserve. And just like all the other aspects of the Success Image, its something you can control. You can do so by proactively looking to create positive relationships with people, making them feel at ease with you quickly, and doing your best to resolve negative situations and turn them positive before they take away from your well being. Most people are largely lost and theyre living in reaction their entire lives; not just with their bodies, but in every area. You must be the leader and take the initiative in creating positive interactions. You can influence people and change lives in many areas beyond your work. Take my word for it: smile more. Your Body Staying in outstanding shape is a critical success area for Personal Trainers. Unbelievably, some find this one of the most difficult things to do. But if youre in the business of helping all kinds of people achieve outstanding physical results in the shortest time possible, you cant get away with being out of shape yourself. Theres no excuse for being out of shape if youre a trainer. I dont want to hear that youre a power-lifter, off-season, or have a bad knee; you need to get your ass in gear. If you work out and eat correctly, you can achieve an absolutely amazing body in just four, one-hour workouts a week. I have done this myself and helped many, many people do the same. If you cant put in this commitment, find a different line of work. One way to hold yourself to being in good shape is to enter some sort of competition in your field of expertise. You can then blog (detailed in the chapter Web Marketing) about your training process, which your friends and clients will find very entertaining, inspiring, and motivating. At the same time, your seriousness will establish mega-credibility to any new prospects who are referred to your blog. In general, the whole experience can prove to be very positive and benefi-

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cial to you and your training practice, and get you in outstanding shape at the same time. You dont have to even win the competition youre entering for it to work in your favor: the journey alone will be enough. Preparation When you get a roster of high value clientele, youll find yourself spending your working hours face-to-face high value people, extremely successful business people, and other top performers. People like this can smell a phony from a mile away. For that reason, even though my work day is usually only three hours long, I prepare for it like Im going to speak at a national conference. I make sure I look good, am well groomed, and have each clients session thoroughly planned. Why do I prepare so meticulously, probably a little more than I should? Because just like in every other area, I want to constantly maintain the psychological edge in the mind of my client. This is the reason why I never have to market, advertise, and spend time on promotions, but still continue to get new highlevel clients. That preparation time for my clients is actually my marketing time Im reselling myself to my current clients, to anyone these clients may tell about me, and to anyone else that may be watching the training session in progress. If you can learn and master this aspect of the job, youre success is almost guaranteed.

Weve seen that there are many aspects to creating a Success Image, both inside
and out. How we present ourselves to the world has always been something most people take for granted, but ask any serious professional and youll find he/she is always on top of this and is always trying to improve it. There are many knowledgeable, hardworking, and well intentioned trainers in the world that are doomed to mediocrity because they cant really understand this point: dont underestimate it. And once you have trainers working for you, youll still want to make sure theyre projecting a positive image that you want associated with your businessdont leave this up to them or leave it to chance.

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In reality, the entire SIX-FIGURE TRAINER PROGRAM MANUAL is a book

on marketing; we cover the techniques to make you a more marketable trainer. Youll notice there arent any chapters on exercise or kinesiology here. While thats all important, that interestingly enough isnt what makes the best trainers with the best lifestyles. What does is their personal marketing: how they position themselves in the minds of their consumers and how actively they work to create their ideal lifestyle. In this chapter, were going to talk about how you present yourself through your printed materials and marketing techniques. Youll learn a few strategies on making an effective impression to everyone your business comes in contact with. I know weve all heard the term you cant judge a book by its cover, but from all of our experience, we know thats really not the case. Anywhere you go and with anyone you do business with, youll notice the way a person or business presents itself to the world is a big indicator of how they view themselves and the quality of their product or service. Can you imagine going into a Mercedes Benz dealer-

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ship thats dirty or has a salesperson with a ketchup stain on his tie? Absolutely not. A company that prides itself on making the best cars with the most prestige would not allow their image to slip for a second. Even Mcdonalds, a company whose best selling products are $1 french-fries and hamburgers, prides itself on immaculate cleanliness and a pristine image. I dont know who started that you cant judge a book saying, but he was completely wrong. What you find in reality is that both go hand-in-hand. Those that have a good product are equally strict about how theyre viewed in the marketplace, and those businesses that are viewed well usually work very hard to back it up with their products. For that reason, were going to focus on the specifics of the outer game of marketing. When it comes down to it, improving how youre viewed in the marketplace is one of the best things you can do to improve the actual quality of you training. And no doubt that its one of the best things you can do for your bottom line; taking the time to display an attractive image is time well spent. It will create a tremendous internal drive for people to do business with your company. Theres something psychologically fulfilling about doing business with a high value business that goes beyond the actual product you receive. Its a fact of our consumer economy that we like to buy flashy, expensive things. As a Personal Trainer, you have to understand your product for what it really is. Youve got to look beyond the weights and sweat and realize what a high value commodity it is youre selling. I hope I made that clear in The Definition, but now its time to present your training in a way that shows an understanding of these ideas.

Naming Your Business

Giving your training practice a good name is something that adds the vital element of credibility to what you do. In reality it might not change a thing, but in perception your customers will look at you with more respect; this added respect is of course something you can charge for. Especially for the Top-Level Trainer who takes his work seriously and provides excellent service, naming your com-

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pany is the icing on the cake which cements you in your consumers mind as a better and more serious person to deal with. Itll make all of your advertising and marketing more effective as well. It doesnt really matter what you chose to name your business. The simplest choice would be naming it after yourself, for example John Doe Fitness. Although that works for many trainers, it may be better for you to think of a name besides your own for several reasons. First off, if youre just starting out, it may be too early to brand yourself; you may not have a strong enough personal image to do that yet. However, if you pay attention to all the training and service aspects of your business, then this certainly something strong enough to brand. Therefore, your business name will represent everything that it means to do business with you.

Creating A Logo

The second part of naming your business is creating a logo. This as well goes a
long way toward establishing credibility. A trainer that just got his certification yesterday can look like hes been in business for 10 years and served hundreds of clients if he has a business name and a well designed logo. In terms of a logo, generally simplicity is better than going over the top. While Personal Training is a dynamic field its still a professional service, and for that reason your logo shouldnt look like it belongs to a professional hockey team. Follow the example of the popular health-club chains and you cant go wrong. Along with your logo, you should also decide on some colors for your company. Pick a color scheme that builds both positive energy and trust. Im not going to get into the psychological impact of color, but pick a few you like and feel comfortable with. Most of your marketing materials and even your clothing on a regular basis will reflect these colors, so make sure its something youre comfortable wearing as well.

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Once youve got your logo and company colors set, put them on as much of your materials as possible. You should dress in these colors, buy matching sneakers, a matching hat, and put it on the progress tracking books you keep for clients.

Trademarking

While youre still at the small level of a private Personal Training practice with
no physical location, its not yet necessary to trademark the name of your business or set-up a legal company. You wont be reaching millions of people with anyone looking to steal your intellectual property. And dont worry, no one will come and shut you down and arrest you because you havent officially trademarked your company name and logo or incorporated your business; you just arent allowed to use the words incorporated or corporation in the name of your company. Just having the guts to get started is as much official licensing as you need in the beginning. However, if you do open a training studio this will change and youll need to protect your intellectual property. In terms of getting your logo designed, this shouldnt be too hard or long a process. Through globalization and outsourcing, getting top-notch professional logo design with unlimited revisions is now much cheaper than its ever been. If you want to save some money, you can just ask a friend of yours thats computer savvy to use a simple program like Photoshop, Illustrator, or even a program like Publisher or MS Word to create the logo. Although you wont get a high resolution image that can be used everywhere using the simpler programs, it will be able to serve your purposes for the time being.

Business Card

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The first and most basic form of marketing is the business card. Nearly everyone has one, but most people overlook its importance. When you give someone your business card, you need to give them a memorable commercial for your services. If theyre interested in what you offer and take your card, you want it to be something that stands out in there mind so that when the time comes, they give you a call. If you have an attractive card, theyll also talk about you to other people and are more likely to save your card instead of throwing it away. When designing a card, creating something attractive is key. Whats important is that your card not be ugly so that it immediately goes in the trash or leaves a poor impression on you client. My first impulse is to advise you to put your picture on your card and make it something highly attractive, like a mini-brochure. I created a card like this and was very happy with how it turned out and was often complemented on it. But Ive also seen many more trainers get this type of card completely wrong, so unless you have a good graphic designer working on your card, Id advise against it. Only if you feel you have a good designer and are very happy with the look and feel of the card should you go this route; if not the card will leave a poor impression on your potential client and might kill the sale. The best way to go is often the simplest, with all your basic contact information cleanly lettered on a plain white card. Make sure a full color, high resolution picture of your company logo is there, along with your website prominently listed. You can also develop a catchy slogan and place that on the card as well. In terms of paper for your card, get the best you can afford. Make sure its either a high quality stock of paper or the type thats glossy on one side. The back of the card shouldnt be glossy so that you can easily write on it, since youll find yourself using it for that purpose often.

Web-Site

As youve probably realized from what Ive said so far, having a top-notch website is very important. In this day and age, the importance cant be emphasized

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enough. Its probably the most important marketing tool you could possibly have. The look of your site should be consistent with your business card and all of your other marketing materials. We get into a lot of detail on setting up this site in the chapter Web Marketing.

Brochures

When used effectively, your brochure can be the second most powerful tool, behind your website, in bringing you clients. Its the centerpiece of all your physical, person to person marketing. Brochures have gotten a bad rap because we usually see them strewn all over the place like junk-mail. Thats not an effective use of this important vehicle. When used effectively, a brochure can be an add-on to another marketing piece that works to further drive home the message. Its in this way that your prospect has a tangible version of your message that they can refer to later and may eventually motivate them to give you that all important first call. Ive used brochures most effectively in conjunction with large posters placed in gyms I was training clients out of. An interesting sales cycle was created in these situations; people would first see me training and would get interested in my services; the poster would tell them who I was, almost like a personal introduction even when I wasnt around or to busy to do so; lastly the brochure would give them something tangible to take home with them that had my contact information and a detailed description of what I offer. In the brochure I would also prominently mention my website several times, which they could visit for even more information. This process creates a different kind of sales cycle, one that happens almost passively through your marketing. The brochure is a key piece of this cycle that will turn you from a complete stranger into someone the prospect knows something about. I also like to use my brochure in place of my business card because its impact is so much greater. Through most of my career, whenever anyone has asked for my business card Ive given them my brochure instead. I would also leave my

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brochure with the other professionals I joint ventured with and the private condominiums I trained out of, for them to give to their members and customers. While most people only usually leave a business card in these types of situations, I leave more information to convince these motivated prospects to take the next step and take action. In fact, what I do is glue my business card into my brochure. I do this for no other reason than to create something more appealing, tangible and forceful in establishing my credibility in the customers mind. Its simple steps like this that make you the better option and allows you to dominate your area. It goes without saying that this brochure must also have a clean, professional look. Mine had many pictures of happy clients enjoying my sessions, along with testimonials and head shots of my clients so prospects could see the high-level of individuals I work with. Without going into too much detail about design, just make sure theres nothing negative about the brochure, like blurry pictures or typographical errors that will hurt your credibility.

Posters

As Personal Trainers, most of us have been fit our entire lives and fitness has
come relatively easy to us. But to the majority of people in our society, theyre in a constant state of wanting to get in shape. For this reason, posters advertising our training services are especially effective. The same way most people dont realize theyre hungry until they see that Mcdonalds billboard on the highway, most people dont remember they need a trainer until they see a poster of your services on the wall of somewhere theyre already getting health and fitness services. People are generally lazy, so although they may be intrigued by your poster, they may not be motivated enough to write down your number. For this reason you should affix a dispenser to the poster holding either your attractive business cards or your informative brochure. This will make it much more likely that someone interested will have the information they need to contact you.

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The message Ive used most often on my posters has been a case study of a client: Ill show pictures of this client working out with me along with before and after pictures and a testimonial. Another excellent poster Ive used is one that shows only testimonials. Remember, people dont necessarily believe what we say about ourselves, but when someone else says it, its considered true. The poster is best used in the private health club setting. In these types of arrangements the health club owner gets a percentage of all the business you do, so they should fully support any marketing initiatives you put in place. You should use this to your advantage and market as hard as possible. If you secure this type of deal and place some well designed posters throughout the gym, youll find yourself booked solid in just a few weeks. Creating a poster isnt difficult. Ive always used the simple program Publisher to create mine. If you dont know how to make one, have someone thats good with design help you to create it. To keep things simple, Ive always just printed my posters on plain paper and then assembled them, rather than taking them to Kinkos and paying for it. If you frame the poster after its assembled, no one will ever be able to tell its printed on plain paper. Just make sure that you use a color laser printer for the printing. However, for larger, more durable posters, for example something waterproof at about three feet by six feet, youll have to pay close to $200 Although this is expensive, Ive found it to be worth it.

Your Uniform And Clothing

For all the materials you use to promote and market yourself, the best and most
important thing marketing your business is you. At all times youre the walking billboard for your training practice, and people are often making an immediate buying decision at the moment they see you. Thats why of all the things you use to market your business, you have to take the most care in how you present yourself; all the marketing in the world cant help you if youre making a bad impression. When it comes to how you present yourself, there are a few rules you can

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follow to make sure youre always making the best possible and most consistent positive image. The great success coach Brian Tracy likes to say that 90%of the first impression you make is based on your clothes, because your clothes cover 90% of you body. Ive found this to be true to a large degree. There are thousands of trainers across the country who are booked solid and have made very good livings for years based solely on the fact that they make a strong impression and have good personalities. When people see them train, they want to meet them and find out about them; and their existing clients like the fun and prestige of training with them. Your clothing is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you dress like the best, you eventually will become the best and people will start to see you that way. Even if youre not very good now, changing how you dress will put more pressure on you to live up to the impression youre making. Heres a simple method to use in dressing yourself before you go to see your clients every day. Get in front of the mirror and ask yourself if you look like the best Personal Trainer in the world that day. Look at yourself closely from head to toe and ask yourself if you saw this person on TV and they were announced as the worlds most successful Personal Trainer, would you believe it? If not, keep changing clothes until you do. And that goes for your grooming too nothing on your person should take away from your image as one of the best Personal Trainers in the world; if it does, get rid of fit immediately. If you dont have the clothes you need to be the best right now, go out and buy them. Pay attention to trainers like Gunnar Peterson, Mark Jenkins, and David Kirsch. If you look at their outfits youll actually realize its very simple to look like the best. You just need new-looking clothes that fit you properly and that match. Your clothes should also match your sneakers, which should be new looking as well. Having a good wardrobe is that much more effective because most Personal Trainers pay absolutely no attention to how they look at all. By comparison, this makes you look even better.

Uniform

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The highest level of professionalism you can display through your personal appearance is created with a uniform. Having a shirt that has the name of your business on it and says Personal Trainer on the back will take away any doubt from the mind of your prospects as to who you are and what you do. Especially in a private health-club, this uniform combined with the absence of other competitors will cement your image as an outstanding trainer and a true professional. It might seem like a minor thing, but the psychological impact such a uniform can have on consumers is tremendous. Thats the reason why every major company in the world has strict policies on the dress of their employees: its extremely effective. It signifies that you have the highest standards and believe in projecting what you stand for. The truth is we all do judge books by their covers for the simple reason that when you do, youre usually right. Just like all the other important, winning strategies in this book, creating a uniform is very easy. Simply find a plain shirt that youre comfortable with thats of high quality and durable, and take it to a local embroidery shop. Embroider the logo of your company on the front right side of the shirt, and the words Personal Trainer on the back. Once youve embroidered your shirt, youll be amazed at how much higher quality it looks. I used to have polo-style t-shirts and gap muscle-tees that I had embroidered in this way. My assistants and I wore them whenever we were conducting training sessions. You can also embroider your logo on hats and wear these as well. These custom uniforms, combined with our training standards and techniques, created a tremendous, positive effect on the members of the healthclubs where we trained. It became a status symbol to train with us and we had a waiting list of the gyms highest level members looking for training. Ive had the same effect in every other situation where Ive employed these clothing standards: Ive been able to charge top rates and have the highest level clientele clamoring to train with me.

Positive Personality

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Having a positive personality is one of the most underrated aspects of success in

our society. Ive met celebrities that were famous for their violence and mean public personas; upon getting to know them I found they were actually some of the nicest people Ive met; they would go out of there way to introduce themselves to me and were always very humble about everything they accomplished. This made me realize that no matter what, having a positive personality is vital for success. Theres a direct correlation between a persons success and how positive a personality they have. If right now youre not a very social person and dont feel like smiling at people and making friends wherever you go, I can assume that youre probably not very successful either. Whatever the case, if you want to get anywhere in the world, youre going to have to fake it til you make it in this area. If right now smiling, greeting people, and being social feels fake and unnatural, dont worry; youll eventually calibrate to the point where it feels like who you really are. Success is dependent on how many people you know and that know you in a positive way. Just like so many other aspects of this job, becoming a more positive, social person is a lesson youll be able to carry for the rest of your career.

Creating T-Shirts

For a service like Personal Training, referrals are the absolute best way that you
can get new, high quality clients. The existing, ideal clients that youve been fortunate to attract all undoubtedly have friends that are just like them; if you do an outstanding job, theyll be excited to tell all their friends about you. You want to cultivate this valuable source of clients as much as possible and get the most you possibly can out of it. One way to do this is to give out t-shirts with the name and logo of your Personal Training company on them, along with your slogan (yes, you should develop a catchy slogan). Youll be really surprised by the fact that your clients will try to wear them every chance they get. Remember it takes just a

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dozen or so clients to have a huge, overflowing training practice; techniques like this make it easy to create that situation. Getting one hundred t-shirts in one size with your company logo can cost about $400 to $500 dollars, which might be too expensive for those of you just starting out. If you don have many clients and are just starting to utilize some of the techniques in this book, I dont recommend that kind of investment as a first step. Spending that money on t-shirts would be a good investment later on when you have a thriving training practice and want to keep it self-perpetuating. What you can do now however is use a smaller service, like caf-press (www.cafepress.com), where you can produce your shirts one at a time. This costs a lot more per shirt, about $15 each, so you should hand them out very selectively. For example, when you get the first $750 check from a client for a 10 session training package, you can reward them with a t-shirt. Theyll love you for it, and youll be sure to get at least a few more $750 checks in the future, and at best a few of their friends giving you calls and setting up appointments. Just like Ive mentioned in some of the other techniques in this book, its unbelievable the psychological impact small things like this can have on the mind of the consumer.

Getting In Shape

It kind of goes without saying the importance of a Personal Trainer to practice

what they preach. Staying in shape is your best advertisement; as trainers, we sell the idea that fitness can be achieved in a short amount of time without an inconceivable amount of effort; for that to be true, youve got to embody it. While Im not a professional model or bodybuilder, Im stopped everywhere I go by people telling me what great shape Im in. Although staying in shape is very important to me, I have a very hard time doing it on my own. Since my mid-twenties, I havent been able to get in shape without the help of a motivated training partner. It goes to show the importance of Personal Trainers when even I cant get in shape without motivation!

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It shouldnt discourage you if youre a trainer now but not in great shape already. You just need to start employing some new techniques to getting yourself motivated. I always have had success when Ive made it an organized, group activity. Right now, I have a training partner who is a maniacally serious bodybuilder. He never, ever misses a training session, and gets on my case if Im late or slacking for any reason. This makes it imperative for me to bring it every training session. What he gets from me is my wealth of knowledge in training and fitness. By using the advice Ive given him on training and nutrition, along with keeping a close eye on his technique, hes made huge strides in his own physique; and with his help, Ive hardly missed a workout in years, a habit that over time has led to great results. In addition, I take Muay Thai Kickboxing lessons at the best school in my area. These gut-busting workouts leave me battered, bruised, and on the verge of throwing up almost every single time, but from the chastising of my instructors and watching the dedication of my fellow students, Im constantly motivated to improve and push even harder. These two arrangements serve the important purpose of making it impossible for me not to stay in shape. I also gain a vast amount of knowledge from all my time partaking in high-intensity physical activity, the type you cant learn in a book. While being fulfilling hobbies that give me a lot of pleasure, staying in shape also makes me a lot of money (is this job great or what?)! Im honest with myself, and I know theres no way Id be able to stay in the same shape without the help of my training partner and organized training activities. If its this hard for a Personal Trainer to get motivated without outside help, it make me realize the important role that trainers like us play in the lives of our clients. Because Im a trainer I have access to the best fitness resources out there; I help bring this experience to the lives of my clients as well. What are you bringing to the table? Although I dont recommend it, it is true that you dont need to be in top shape to be a Personal Trainer. In fact, if you use the techniques in this book youll be able to be the highest paid and most sought after trainer in your area whatever fitness level youre starting from right now. Just realize that getting in shape will only help you in getting more clients and charging more for your services. And even more importantly, I dont think as a fitness professional youll ever truly like or respect yourself if you dont get in top shape. Thats something

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that will pay the most dividends in your life. But whatever you do, never make excuses to your clients, yourself, or anyone else for why youre not in shape there is no excuse!

Advertising

Im not going to go into any traditional advertising techniques in this book. Ive
tried many and have even had success with a few, but compared to the low-cost and power of web-marketing, traditional advertising is simply a poor use of time and money. For my absolute favorite forms of marketing, read the Web Marketing techniques described in the chapter by the same name. For a top consultant, marketing and advertising is a more slow, steady process, not something that can happen in just one shot from one effective ad.

Credibility Indicators

As Ive demonstrated in many ways in this book so far, being small and independent actually works to your benefit. However, even though I teach you how not to use the same marketing techniques as major companies, you still need have the same credibility indicators as them. A credibility indicator is exactly what it sounds like: a particular element of a business that indicates its credibility to us. From interacting with thousands of businesses in our lives, there are certain elements we are conditioned to look for in order to feel trust with a business or businessperson. Personal Training is largely different from most other types of business or private practice, but having these indicators in place helps us build more trust and comfort in the mind of our clients. Its like the Pavlovian dog; when people see these elements in place, they

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immediately associate them with high quality. Ive seen many trainers in the marketplace who, although they were booked solid and had many clients, still charged 25-50% less than me. Its employing these credibility generating techniques that will help you maximize the amount you can earn in the time you work, and also improve the respect you get. Heres a list of the most popular credibility indicators (some of them weve already covered):

Legitimate Email Account - Just like with your phone number, your email account must appear legitimate as well. If you have a website, then were probably given free email a long with your hosting plan. Its up to you to figure out how to activate your account or have someone help you do it. Having an @yahoo, @aol, or heaven forbid, @hotmail suffix on your email address hurts your credibility Quick Response - Every major company prides itself on the speed of its service; youve got to do the same. Whenever you get a phone or email message from an existing client or new prospect, you must respond as fast as possible. Especially with a new prospect, the longer you wait, your chances of losing the sale grow exponentially. The only exception is in dealing with existing, longtime customers. Treat them like you would treat a good friend - sometimes responding too quickly looks needy and desperate. Web Site - In todays age, not having a web-site is an immediate red flag that warns us that this person or company isnt serious about their success. Its a sign that there are probably other shortcomings or oversights with them as well. If you dont have a website at this point, youre probably a very sloppy trainer thats not earning much money. Theres nothing wrong with that; youre reading the right book to fix this situation. Now get with the program! Uniform - Having a uniform is a strong indicator of credibility; thats why every single major company in the world has one. Above all, it indicates a consistent, highly quality experience in dealing with you. If youre just starting out and dont have much experience and arent in particularly good shape

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yet, a uniform is a good way for you to cover up these weaknesses and give yourself an immediate credibility boost. However, for the trainer that already has mega-credibility and long-term relationships with their existing clients, a uniform may be over-kill. Even in this case though, its important to maintain some consistency in dress, whether its wearing the same type of clothes or the same colors on a regular basis. While not a formal uniform, this consistency in clothing will indicate to your clients that they can expect a consistently highquality sessions. And of course, no jeans!

Grooming - Excellent grooming is mandatory for every Personal Trainer. You must always look good, smell good, be clean shaven, and have clean and trimmed nails. There are no exceptions. Personal Style - Although your general style of dress and appearance are largely a personal choice, they still have to have some professional consistency. There are just some choices in style that scream a negative message at people and cause them not to trust us. Although these styles might be appropriate in some situations, they might not be right for when youre working. Some examples could be overly baggy pants, too much jewelry, or overly gelled hair. If you look like a gang member or stripper, maybe its time to think about a change. Professional Materials - Having high quality, well designed materials are something that were used to equating only to top-flight companies; having them as part of your small business will give you the same credibility immediately. This goes for everything printed that you have: your business card, posters, brochures, and progress tracking materials. On the flip-side, having ugly, cheap and poorly designed materials are an immediate red-flag; in that case its better to have nothing at all. Business ame - The decision to name your business is a major step; it takes you from being just another Personal Trainer without a professional identity to one that has a professional image to maintain. Could you imagine going to a place called coffee instead of Starbucks, or bank instead of Commerce?

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Absolutely not!

Logo - Having a logo shows that your business has values and stands for something. If youre a high integrity trainer that delivers an outstanding product, your prospects will be reminded of this every time they see your logo. Being In Shape - As weve already discussed, being in good shape is very important for a Personal Trainer. Heres a sign if youre doing well in this area: if complete strangers are not regularly telling you what great shape youre in, or asking you what you do to stay in shape, then you probably have some room for improvement. This doesnt mean you need to be a professional bodybuilder or fitness model - not even close. You just need to put in a little more effort than the average. If youre not in good shape already, got on top of this ASAP. The best way to do this through organized activity, either with friends or in classes. Under no circumstance should you ever make excuses for why you arent in shape; this just makes the problem look twice as bad.

All the extra things you do that make you stand out in your consumers mind
make them more comfortable to train with you. They cost more and may require more effort, but you can transfer these costs directly to your consumer plus a premium. Sure, dressing well, having professional materials, and a working 1-800 number and web-site will raise your costs of doing business; but having a Personal Trainer that has all these elements are something that your clients will gladly pay more money for. And what weve covered in this chapter is just the beginning. Youll get an advanced education in marketing that will allow you to sustain and grow your training business in other sections of this program.

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I still remember listening to the audio of a seminar given by the great sales and
success coach Brian Tracy. He talks about how computer literacy and using the Internet are an indispensable part of business today; how were in the information age and even five year olds are computer literate. He made it very clear to everyone in attendance how important it was to begin adopting computers and the Internet; how youd have to be insane not to. This seminar was held in 1997! Now more than 10 years later Im sure its clear to every single person reading this book that were very much in the information age and the Internet has revolutionized the world as we know it. Its as much or more a part of how people live today as the television or telephone. The way consumers and businesses interact has changed as too, with the Internet as the go-between in this relationship. But the Internets not just an extension of old ways of doing business. Its a completely different medium, and it has its own set of rules and nuances. Theres

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a way to attract, reach, and interact with people using the web that isnt apparent to those of us coming to it for the first time. It only becomes obvious when youre fully immersed and begin studying how and why people use the Internet when searching for services. Once you understand this, you have a competitive edge that puts you in position for a tremendous windfall. You can actually gain an overwhelming number of quality leads through a website thats essentially free to maintain. If you didnt know that already, welcome to the information age!

Personal Trainers And The Web

While businesspeople and consultants in other fields were early to adopt the
web and by now have refined their approach and message for their customers, Personal Trainers have always had a love-hate relationship with computers. Through my own experience and the many other trainers Ive come across, their adoption of the Internet has been slow and painful. I think its just the nature of us as trainers that makes us uncomfortable with this important medium. Theres nothing wrong with that; its just the personality type of those that enter fitness as a career doesnt mesh well with computers. Those that chose fitness as a career are usually vibrant and energetic people that value all the nuances of human contact; and the Internet, no matter how personal it gets in our age of Web 2.0, is still just too detached:
Why

send an email when you can hear a voice over the phone? Why meet people on line when you can meet them face to face at a club? Why buy something online when you can go to the mall and touch it and try it on? I think its this element of our nature, almost a physical ADD, that prevents us from sitting in one place and exploring the world even if it comes over a highspeed connection. But one thing youve got to realize is thats not how your customer is or

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how theyre looking of you. Todays consumer for Personal Training is the exact opposite of you, which is one of the reasons why theyre looking for your help. Lets profile the computer habits of this consumer:

They use their computers heavily at work and its a part of almost every work function they perform. They most likely are on their computers all day, even using them for most things in their personal lives. They have more than ten years experience online. Any research they do or consumer choice they make is shaped completely by information they find online.

This consumer is not sympathetic to the fact that you dont know how to talk to them or relate your marketing message to them online. If they visit your site and dont get the news and information theyre looking for to pop-out at them immediately, theyll be gone in under four seconds; thats what the research shows. So just being on the web isnt enough; once youre there, you need to know what your customer is looking for and how to give it to them immediately.

Level Playing Field

The amazing thing about the Internet is that unlike any other form of media, it
allows small contractors like you and I the opportunity and power to reach the same market as any major company. This is probably one of the most remarkable breakthroughs of our time. A person typing on a key-board out of their bedroom can make as big an impact as a major media outlet, even without any marketing budget at all. The kingpin search engine Google is actually designed in a way that gives more relevance to the little guy, with the major media companies trying to play catch-up. As an independent Personal Trainer, this is a huge advantage for you. The

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Internet has allowed the online consumer to look through all the media hype and garbage and find the small-time provider who is giving the best, highest quality product. This works entirely in your favor.

Your Message

Remember the exercise we went through on picking our Specialty and creating
your Success Image? Your website is where all of this comes together. Youll now have a chance to explain to your customer in detail who you are and how youre different from everybody else out there. If you dont take advantage of this opportunity and instead just put out the same marketing rhetoric as everyone else, youll quickly lose your visitors and theyll be gone and never come back. What you need to do is express why youre different front and center in a way that benefits your prospect. You want them to realize that what youre offering is for them, and then give them compelling reasons to take action now. If youre like most people, youve probably been convinced that flash is the way to reach customer online. Everyone must be similarly misguided, or else so many trainer wouldnt be using this approach. They spend all of their reserve money paying web-designers to make them a flashy site with a flashy introduction (using a program called Flash, interestingly enough) and then watch in horror as their site brings them no new customers at all. They just chalk it up as a cost of doing business in the world today, and dont realize that their website could actually be the primary vehicle bringing them more qualified leads than they could possibly handle. Unlike what you may have been led to believe, creating a flashy site isnt the key to success. That approach is used by companies looking for immediate promotion and branding, for example the latest blockbuster movie or flavor of Bacardi. But the person online looking for information is hardly interested in any obvious hype. Thats why youll notice that the biggest sites today are very simple, sometimes ugly sites but that focus on putting the key information right in the face of their visitors as soon as possible. Google has meteorically risen to the top

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of the Internet world, and theyre built around the principles of simplicity and relevance. Just look at the other big name sites that are ruling todays marketplace, sites like Craigslist, Myspace, Facebook, and Youtube, and youll notice theyre all built around the same principles - helping the user get what they want as fast possible, with no filler.

Keeping It Simple

If youre like the traditional person when it comes to how you view the web, it
might not make sense to you to put a body of text on the front page of your website. In fact, anyone you show your site to will tell you that its ugly, unattractive, and will lose the interest of the visitor. What they dont realize is that our traditional ideas on product packaging do not apply when it comes to creating a website for the online consumer. This person is looking for only one thing: relevant information to make a buying decision. Theyre similar to a person picking up the New York Times; they want the story so they can make up their own mind. Thats why our website has to put these key benefits in the prospects face front and center. Just like a good newspaper, attractive, high quality pictures and excellent presentation are also important, but what will win is your headline and follow-up text. As the independent consultant, you dont have a PR department or brand recognition to make the sale for you: your website needs to do the entire job of speaking to your customer and making the sale. I use video testimonials and video clips of my workouts on my website, but I only provide them as further content for my prospect to explore; I dont let the technology take over the message. It instead is used to back it up, which is very different.

Site Design: Headline First

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Site design is a very complex topic that youll be able to find many books about.
What Ill do is just go over a few main ideas that may not be obvious to you right now. Keep these principles in mind as you surf the web, piecing together things you like from other sites, and put it all together when you make your own site. The most important thing to remember is not just to do what makes you happy, but instead to jump into the shoes of your customer and see your site through their eyes. What most people do is put the name of their business front and center on their site. Its the first thing they show the customer at the top of the page, followed by a lengthy description of the trainer and the company. This information of course has absolutely no relevance to the customer; they dont care about your company, they just want to know whats in it for them. For that reason, you need to take a completely different approach. The first priority of your site is to draw the prospects attention; to immediately make it clear to them that your site has the information theyre looking for. The way to do this is the same way its been done for more than a hundred years through all different media: a powerful headline. A headline is a simple statement that in a few words makes the major benefit to the consumer overwhelmingly apparent. You only have a few seconds to hook your visitors attention and this is the way to do it. You need to make a bold, relevant statement that will catch their attention and make them read more. This headline should relate to your specialty and give your customer a reason to keep reading. Here are some sample headlines: Introducing the Break-Through Training Techniques Making Seniors Feel Ten Years Younger in Only 4 Weeks! Forgot All The Fancy New Workouts Just Admit It - You Want to Look Better Naked, Dont You?

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If You Want To Feel Like Your Body Is A Maserati, Im The Right Trainer For You! Warning! After Reading This You May Never Step Foot In A Gym Again! By putting the headline first, youve answered the major question going through anyones mind when they come to your website: Whats in it for me? I know youve heard this term (WIIFM for short) before, but it takes on a different meaning on the web: this is the purpose of your entire site. Thats because the psychology of the web consumer is built completely around whats in it for them. Through experience, their ability to sift through all the filler and get right to the key information that applies to them has become very sharp. For that reason, you need to make it clear to your customer whats in it for them right away. By putting your headline first, you've done that; youve put the primary benefit for your customer front and center. Like I mentioned, you only have a few seconds to attract the attention of your customer and keep them on your site. As you probably already know, theres tons of competition online, and your client is expecting to scan many sites before they decide on one. The clearer and more effectively you can convey the benefits of your training program to your prospect, the better your chance of being the one this client contacts.

The Sub-Head

The next section is a follow-up to the headline, called the sub-head Its a complete sentence that transitions from the statement made in the headline to the body of the text that youll be presenting to the client. Lets take a look at an example:

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Example: In-Home Personal Training

Lets take a look at an example of a sample combination of headline

and sub-head for a website. Here, well use the example of anin home-training business, a very easy to implement, high return business model. Here is a particularly strong headline: Warning! After Reading This You May Never Step Foot In A Gym Again! Heres how a good follow-up to that headline would go: The truth is, it wasnt possible to get a high-level workout at home until now! This follow up line, which will be written below the headline in a smaller font, follows up on the message of the headline. Youll then transition into the body-text of the home page.

The combination of the headline and sub-head are the most important part of your site. Although theyre just too short lines, you need to spend a lot of time and put a lot of thought into creating them. No matter what your benefits, qualification, or expertise, none of it matters if you cant get the interest of your prospect and get them to stay on your site.

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Body Text
.

As we already talked about, your website is a sales vehicle for your training
practice. Its kind of like a stand-in sales person, talking to your potential client when you cant physically be there to do it. This conversation occurs in your body text; here, you need to speak to your client in a personal tone and guide them through a tour of all the relevant information that will motivate them to take the first step and give you a call. The tone of the body-text needs to be enthusiastic and personal at the same time. It will pick up where the headline left off and guide your potential client the rest of the way toward taking the first step and giving you a call. Although the body is largely text (hence the term body-text), its not just a boring sales letter. There are many techniques well use to spice it up such as:

Pictures - This goes without saying; your pictures will be the major determinant of the visual impression your site makes. Bold Text - On a first visit, most people will just scan your text. Having large and bold text throughout will allow the visitor to get the main points quickly, and should entice them to read in more detail. Video - Using video on the web has never been easier. These days inserting video as easy as inserting a picture, and nearly everyone has the highspeed connections to view them. Audio - This is another way to communicate with your customer in a more personal way. A simple element like this can cause you to win the sale.

In addition, bullet points, bold and highlighted text, and additional subheading can be used to make certain points throughout the body. Back to the subject of photos mentioned above, its important these are high quality, high resolution images. You simply cant convey your message without having high quality images to accompany it. These images should be placed throughout your text to drive home or demonstrate the important points youre making. In general, most of these images should be of clients happily utilizing your service, not of you working out. Combined with the text, youll have the ef-

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fect of a good magazine article; highly intriguing and entertaining for your prospect to read.

Testimonials

In addition, testimonials are another important part of what should appear on our
home page. As a rule, consumers usually dont believe anything that a business says about themselves: they look to what others have to say. You should include authentic testimonials from your clients along with pictures, either interspersed in appropriate places through your body text, or in a separate column on the home page. Which of your clients you chose to feature in the testimonial is important; make sure that theyre from the ideal market youre trying to reach and theyll make a good impression on your business. Dont put all of your testimonials together on a separate page that your prospect has to click on a link to find. Your testimonials are some of your most key sales text and should appear on the homepage where its most important. I have mine appear along the right column of my home-page, running right next to my sales text. However, if you chose to go the route of long client testimonials, which are very effective but wont all fit on your homepage, you can just put a portion of the text on the homepage with a link to read more.

Guarantee

Even if youve used all of the techniques weve talked about here and created an
excellent site with a catchy headline and an outstanding body, and your customer likes you above all the other sites theyve visited, they still may not take action. The truth is that the fear of loss, in this case loss of money and time, is great in any sale, especially when it comes to choosing to deal with a Personal Trainer that this client has never met before. The best way to allay this fear is to offer a bold

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and sweeping guarantee. The guarantee is an interesting aspect of any sales process. Its kind of like a car airbag: youre not expecting to use it and hoping you never need it, but its comforting to know its there. The guarantee can be the last step to let your customer know its okay for them to make the leap. Offering a guarantee for a personal service is an interesting concept. You cant actually take back the product, in this case the training session, if the customer doesnt like it. However, that actually works to your favor; it makes it look like you have more to lose. The guarantee needs to be bold in order to work; just the simple . or your money back wont cut it anymore. You need to let the potential client know theyre completely covered if theyre not happy for any reason. Here are a few sample guarantees to use:

Best In-Field Guarantee - A very bold guarantee but one your customers will appreciate. Here, you guarantee not only that your prospect will be fully satisfied, but that youre in fact the best Personal Trainer that they could possibly train with! Complete Satisfaction Guarantee - A pretty standard guarantee that covers all bases; just make it clear to your customer that they can have their money back if theyre not satisfied for any reason. Money Back + Incentive - The boldest of guarantees but one that can prove to very rewarding. This is where offer to give your client more than just their money back.. Usually this is just more money, as much as double their money back (called a double-your-money-back guarantee). Its true that this one should be used with caution, but any business that uses it usually sees a jump in sales.

These are just a few of the types of guarantees out there, but the ones that are most applicable to Personal Training. In my experience Ive never had anyone take me up on my guarantee, and if youre doing what youre supposed to and following the lessons in this book, you never will either. However, just for arguments sake if someone were to ever ask for their

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money back, how sweeping should your guarantee be? The answer to this is very simple. As we discussed in the chapter on sales, you should only ever be trying to sell the three session introductory package to new customers. The guarantee that you publicize will cover only these three sessions, nothing more. Someone should know after three sessions whether or not youre the right trainer for them anyway. If they decide that youre not, then they have the option to get back their investment. This works out well because it puts a cap on the amount of money that your prospect can get back, limiting your risk..

Call To Action

Even after all of this work, you still need to fight the natural laziness of the average consumer. No matter how relevant, risk-free, and compelling an offer may be, most people are just too lazy or scared to take action. What you need to do now is put the fear of loss in your favor. You must create a compelling call to action, a statement that motivates the customer to act now. A good call to action has three parts: 1. A compelling reason to act. 2. A time-sensitive offer. 3. Call-To-Action specifically stated.

Compelling Reason To Act

The first part, the compelling reason to act, can be represented by the three session introductory package. If you carefully explain the value of these three sessions and what an unbelievable offer it is, your prospect will find it worth their while to take action this time.

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Example: Wording For 3 Sessions

Here is some sample wording for the 3 session introductory package

that Ive used in my marketing:

Special Three Session Intro-Pack:

The Intro-Pack is more than an introduction - you'll start to achieve real results and ramp-up your training program in every way: 1. Find out what youre doing wrong and fix it immediately. 2. Find out the exercises and training regimen that will work for you. 3. Get all the information you need to overhaul your eating and unlock your fatburning potential. 4. Get super-motivated!

All this for only $149

ing program in New York!

- you wont find greater value from any other major train-

Best Part of All Its Backed By Two Money-Back Guarantees!

Besides the Intro-Pack, there are many other compelling offers you can make. Despite its low cost and money-back guarantee, some people may still find too much risk with the intro package. For that reason, there are other options which can make it even easier for the prospect to take action. The free phone consultation is one of them:

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Free

Phone Consultation - Called a tele-consultation, this is where you give your customer the option to call you for a live trouble shooting session over the phone. If youve done your job establishing your credibility properly, the ability to have some of your time, even if its over the phone, should seem like a highly attractive offer to your customer. And of course, this gives you the perfect opportunity to go through the sales dialogue with the prospect. You can take your time during this consultation to upgrade the prospect to the intro-pack, and then take it from there.

Combined with your bold guarantee, your compelling offer should make it easy and risk-free for them to take the first step and contact you. Think of it like the pull of gravity: getting lift-off is the hardest part, but once you have take-off, the space-ship has enough energy to propel itself indefinitely. Thats how any client relationship starts; your client will be hesitant and cautious to get started, but once the relationship begins, itll eventually gain momentum and carry on for a very long time by itself. You just need to create a situation where there will be the absolute minimum amount of resistance for your client to get started; after that, the rest of the job is very easy.

Time Sensitive Offer

The next thing you need to overcome this initial client inertia is a time-sensitive
offer. You need to let them know that if they dont act quickly, they might lose out. This goes back to the fear of loss we were talking about: you must use it to your advantage in order to motivate your prospect to take the first step toward the sale. There are a few different ways you can do this:

Let them know your introductory package will expire after a certain amount of time. Let them know that theyre not the only one reading this message and that

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they may be placed on a long waiting list. Let them know your rates will be going up very soon.

Is it fair to use these tactics? Not if you have a bad product. But if you have a strong product that you believe in, one that consistently leads to satisfied customer, theres nothing wrong with it at all. Pay attention and youll notice that nearly every business of every size uses these exact same tactics.

Adding The Personal Touch

As an independent trainer one thing you have going for you is the fact that for
specialized services, clients prefer to train with a qualified independent contractor rather than a large company. Especially for a service like Personal Training, savvy clients know that the type of trainer they can find searching on their own will be much better than what theyd find if they tried a large training service or commercial gym. You need to use this to your advantage and put yourself out there front and center. Dont hide behind the name of your company, your sales text, or any training jargon. Speak to the client in a personal way, use real pictures of yourself and your clients, and include your personal e-mail address. Let the customer know that youre putting yourself on the line. That s one of the reasons youll see most Top-Level Trainers actually naming the business after themselves; they realize that they themselves are the product. One thing you may not want to include however is your personal phone number. Trust me, if your personal phone number is out there for the world to see, you will get calls in the middle of the night. In fact, answering all telephone inquiries personally will actually reduce your credibility. Instead, purchase a 1800 number that you either set up with a voicemail account, or have forwarded to your own private voicemail. You should have a detailed voicemail greeting instructing the prospect to leave a message, and just make sure you check your messages frequently and call back promptly.

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Besides that, your website and blog should open you up and make you a live, three dimensional person to your clients. You really cant put enough information about yourself in there. You may have heard that prospects dont want to hear you to talk about yourself, and this is true to a degree. The benefits to the consumer are the focus of the site and what your entire home-page is devoted to. But besides whats in it for them, the other thing the prospect wants to find out about is you. Whether you look like a competent, trustworthy person plays a part in whether a client will want to train with you. For that reason, throughout your site there should be plenty of pictures of you, your happy customers, and information about your professional life. In particular, the type information theyre looking for can be separated into three categories: 1. Credentials and Education 2. Qualifications 3. Your Story

Credentials and Education

Qualifications are an interesting subject when it comes to sales. If you asked

potential clients whats most important to them when looking for a trainer, theyll tell you its the education and qualifications of their trainer. In reality we know this isnt entirely the case. Through a lot of research its been discovered that customers make their buying decisions on emotional criteria, not logical information. What does that mean exactly? It means that your education is important, but only if its presented in an impressive and forceful way. If you do have an advanced college degree in a health related field, one that could be a potential selling point, youve got to drive this piece of information into your prospects. Youve got to milk every advantage

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this degree gives you and make it clear to your prospect. Let them know how much of a better trainer this makes you and that they would have to be crazy to train with any other trainer. As we know it isnt necessarily true that a degreed trainer is better than a trainer without one. While higher education is a plus, in reality most clients have only one critical criteria: whether or not youre certified. Clients want protection from all the horrible stories in the media about what can happen at the hands of an uncertified Personal Trainer. What most clients dont realize however is how easy most Personal Training Certifications are to get. Its natural at some point that all of my clients ask me how much schooling I had to go through to become a Personal Trainer. They usually ask out of a sense of admiration once theyve seen me in action and are impressed by how much value I bring to the table. Im almost embarrassed and theyre usually surprised to find that my certifications were each achieved over just a long weekend. It doesnt sound to exciting, but thats the reality. Although most certification are relatively easy to get, when describing it on your site you want to make it seem as prominent as possible. On a separate page of your site, the side column, or bottom right side of your home page you need to list your qualifications and experience as a trainer. Here, also mention a few points of why your certification stands out and the benefits it gives you. The best place to find good information about your training certification is on the website of your certifying body. You can just copy some of their best sales text (Im sure they wont mind) and put that in to the section where you describe your certification. Another way to enforce the authority of your certification is to do a search of it and find out what other famous or prominent trainers also have it. If you arent certified yet, you may even want to choose your certification based on this criteria to make your marketing job easier in the future. For example, the simple but popular ACE certifications can count Gunnar Peterson and many other prominent and notable trainers as certification holders. Youll find this with almost every other certification as well; even some of the worst and easiest certifications have well known names as members. Mentioning that your certification is the choice of top trainers naturally makes you look good by association. As we already mentioned, if you have a college degree in a health-related field, your job in establishing your credibility is even easier. List this prominently

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on your site, even more so than your certification. Talk about the type of degree you have and the role its played in the work you do with your clients. If you achieved any honor status or special recognition during your schooling, briefly mention that as well.

Qualifications

As Ive talked about many times, certifications and even a college degree in a
health field alone dont make a great trainer. Personal Training as a profession is largely experiential; it takes an understanding that cant be learned in any class room. This experiential knowledge can be referred to as your qualifications: the reasons you deserve to be a high earning Personal Trainer. All aspects of your personal history can fit into this category. No matter who you are, Im sure you have a body of knowledge and experience that makes you stand out; if not, get started right away in building it. Anything that makes you more qualified than another Personal Trainer needs to be played up as much as possible. These personal accomplishment more than anything else are the primary determinant in the clients mind on who to train with. This is whats known as PR: painting yourself in the most positive light. Its then your job to take your list of qualifications and relate them to what you can offer the client: your specialty. The two should work together in creating a strong case of why youre one of the most qualified people in the world at what you do. For example, Im only a locally known independent trainer in Queens, New York; but when I sat down and actually thought back on all the things Ive done in this industry, I was blown away. From the deals Ive made, things Ive accomplished, and the businesses Ive been affiliated with, I realized that I actually had a tremendous resume. Even situations which may have ended negatively all had their positive aspects. When you take the time to think back on all the positives in your own past accomplishments, youll be surprised at what you find. In fact I dont list my full curriculum vitae anywhere because it would seem like Im brag-

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ging. Even if youre just starting out, after you get started and are in business for just a few months, youll begin forming relationships and see your own image grow as well.

Building Your Qualifications

Developing your list of qualification is one of the most important things you can
do as a trainer. If youre passionate about fitness (and if youre a trainer, I hope you are) its also one of the most fun. You need to take part in activities and gain accomplishments that will give you experience. Active participation is the best way to learn this trade, and will give you a far deeper knowledge than what you could get from any book.. In addition to making you a better trainer, it will also give you things to say about yourself on your website and write about on your blog as well, as well see in the next section. These are the types of things that will set you apart from the 95% of the other Personal Trainers out there. Theyll demonstrate your passion for this profession, which is what clients are looking for from their trainer the most. In your career as a Personal Trainer, its a good idea to slowly build an impressive resume. As you know, you dont need to have the most impressive background in order to be a trainer. The truth is some of the most widely recognized trainers had no such qualifications when they started. But as your career goes on and youre looking to position yourself for growth, youll want to have the basic credentials thatll make people consider you a serious player

Telling Your Story: Your Blog

Just when you thought having a website was enough, things online have
changed. Creating a static website where people come to get information isnt

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enough anymore. Like weve already talked about, you need to tell a story. But since youre a living, growing human being, this story is constantly changing. Its ongoing, and if you want to form a strong relationship with your customers, its one theyll want to know about. This is where a blog comes in. With the Internet being about information, thats precisely what your prospect is looking for when theyre searching for a trainer online. In order to be comfortable with you, they want to form a relationship before they even meet you. While I told you your website can do this, its better to go even deeper than that. Often, the person that gives the visitor the most access and personal information is the one wholl win the sale. Thatll be the one that forms the stronger relationship with the prospect, and like we already talked about, the relationship is everything. What Is A Blog? Traditionally, a blog (short for web-log) was like an online diary, but businesspeople like you use it with a specific purpose: we transmit our passion, philosophy, and values through our posts. Your first-time visitor to your site and blog are what wed call a motivated reader; theyre hungry for information. What the blog does is provide them with an abundance of this information in a low pressure way. What Info Do You Put On Your Blog? Although the blog is meant to be a chronicle of your thoughts and events, kind of like shooting from the hip, to use it to its full effect you need to have a plan. If you want to rant about your political views or the exploits of your pet cat, then you should start a separate personal blog for that. For your Personal Training business, everything you put on your blog should be relevant information that in some way applies to the needs of your client. All of your posts should be an extension of the concepts you talked about on your website.

Remember how you mentioned your specialty? The posts on your blog related to fitness should talk about concepts that apply to your specialty.

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You should also have posts elaborating on the training experience you described having on your web-site. Talk about a new milestone you hit in your training regimen, if you just achieved a new all time best time on one of your runs, an all-time best weight on your squats, or whatever. While things we do in our own lives seem very mundane to us, to the sedentary person thats looking for the help of a trainer, these will seem like super-human achievements. Your clients were most likely a major part of your home-page; Im sure you had many client testimonials and talked about the benefits your clients get from your training. Some of your posts can go even a little deeper and put particular clients you have front and center. If one of your clients is getting ready for a vacation and is trying to drop some weight before they go, you could make a post talking about the four-week plan youre implementing to shape them up. When you have posts that specifically address the needs of your clients, the prospect visiting your site will in their own mind put themselves into that place and imagine getting the same personalized service.

Like I described in the beginning of this section, even Personal Trainers with the highest prices and the most experience arent using the web to its full potential. A prospect will quickly leave their sites because they all look the same and have all the same unfocused content. But in your case, your site design will draw them in, and once they visit your blog theyll probably be sold. Every extra minute they spend reading your content is a minute they cant spend searching for another trainer.

Whats the power of a blog? I would have to say that every single new client that has found me online has mentioned that my blog was the reason they decided to give me a call. They point out that it demonstrates my seriousness, passion, and competence.

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Will the blog take a long time to make? Not at all. If you dont like writing, making your posts in the beginning might take some time. But this will be a great opportunity for you to improve your writing skills. Just like weve said a hundred times to this point, the journey of becoming a top trainer is the most rewarding part. If youre not a good or effective writer yet, the process of writing your blog posts will help you learn just that. Effective writing skills will be vital to you no matter what you do in the future of your career, and your blog is going to help you sharpen these skills. In general, you only need to make about one post per week to keep your blog fresh and relevant; depending on how fast you can compose and edit the post, this could take as little as an hour. Considering it a marketing investment; itll be the best hour you spend on marketing every week. How do I set-up a blog? This is also very easy. Wordpress blogs are now the gold standard and most popular (www.wordpress.com). To use Wordpress to its full potential youll probably need the help of a web-developer. Ask them to suggest a blog template for you, because new, amazing templates are coming out all the time. In fact, wordpress is so powerful that you can now have your entire website housed on the wordpress blog platform. This is actually the best way for you to have a website that is easy for you to update and maintain.

Marketing Online

All the effort you put into making an effective web-site is wasted unless you attract visitors. Getting web traffic is a science unto itself and could fill a hundred page book (there are actually many such books out there). But Ill go through a few of the basics to start you off. Mastering basic marketing for your site will take you a little time, but will be rewarding on many levels. Itll make you more Internet-literate, which is a valuable skill both personally and professionally. No

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matter what you do in your career, the web will be a major part of it. Getting a strong mastery of it now will pay major dividends later on down the road in helping you expand. Secondly, once you master these disciplines the process actually gets very easy. The basic work that goes into marketing your training practice is easy and doesnt takes much effort. Were going to go into a few of the most important techniques now. When done right, theyll bring you a steady stream of exactly the type of traffic youre looking for.

Using Adsense

If you dont know what Google is, I dont know how you ever got a hold of this
book. As of this publication Google is the worlds largest search engine by a mile, and it doesn't look like things are going to change any time soon. Googles primary source of revenue is the ads it sells through its Adsense program. If you type in the term Personal Training for example, youll see paid ads appearing at the top of the page and in the right column - thats Adsense. The way it works is these advertiser place a bid (the maximum they were willing to spend) for this particular keyword and whoever has the highest bid gets placed at the top of the page, with the rest appearing below it and in the right column in descending order, depending on how much they were willing to bid. The more broad or competitive the term, the higher the bid price. For example, a highly sought after term like Personal Training in a highly competitive region like New York City can go for as much as $10 per click. That means the trainer placing the ad is charged more than $10 every time someone clicks on their ad, whether that person buys or not! Obviously, bidding the most for expensive, competitive terms in a busy marketplace is not what I recommend you to do. What I want to show you is how to beat the game and get a high level of exposure to just the people youre looking for at a fraction of the price. If youre creative, you can target your ads like a laser-beam at just the people you want. Its this property that we want to use to keep both our costs down and our success rate high.

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If youre not really familiar with Adsense, the next section should still make sense to you but you may not know how to apply it. Thats fine, because you wont have to depend on me to learn how to use Adsense. Google has an extensive training program on how to use Adsense on their website at www.google.com/adsense. It makes sense for them to teach you as much as possible about their program and make it easy for anyone to use, because this of course makes them more money. Theyre surprisingly open about giving you as many tricks to help you create a more targeted campaign. Im just going to show you a few things that are a little more advanced. Targeting By Region The first technique were going to talk about is targeting by region. Google allows you to isolate on a map exactly where you want your ad to appear in search results. This is a huge advantage - it allows us to chose exactly which people we want to see our ad when they do a search. For example, we can isolate the most wealthy suburb in a particular area, and place the ad in a tiny 5 mile radius of this area. Whenever anyone in that area does a search, theyll see our ad and be able to click on it, but to anyone in a different area doing a search, our ad will be invisible. This will cut way down on random clicking of your ads and will guarantee it gets in the faces of the people that you want to see it. In combination with this last technique, we need to use another one; Google allows us chose exactly what words we want to appear in our ad. If you put together a very specific keyword with specific Adword text, youll get an ad that answers exactly what the searcher was looking for. This is a technique that not a single Personal Trainer I know of uses to their advantage (remember, theyre not that web-savvy), but its the same technique Ive used to attract the highest value clients. Remember I told you that you bid for particular keywords and the most sought after keywords cost the most? Well, we dont want to directly compete for those key words and place the highest bid to get noticed. Instead well take an indirect approach to get noticed that gives us a more highly targeted response. Let me describe to you a case study of exactly what I did to land one of my most high paying client sectors. After implementing this strategy I was able to retire from the game of online marketing because I had gained such a high-value, highly tar-

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geted client base (I of course taught the technique to other Personal Trainers and helped them get great results as well) .

Case Study: How I Took Over Long Island With Adsense

My first step in taking advantage of the specificity of the Adsense

program was identifying the particular area that I wanted to target; in this case it was the Great Neck section of Long Island, New York. I chose this area for several reasons: it was close to where I was living at the time in northern Queens; it was a highly affluent neighborhood, full of luxury mansions; and finally competition in Long Island is relatively weak, unlike the Upper East Side of Manhattan, another affluent neighborhood but one that is full of gyms, training studios, and other independent trainers. I used the Adwords program to bid for variations on the term Personal Training in this neighborhood. If anyone entered a term such as Personal Training or Personal Training, Long Island, which are the most likely search terms for someone to use, I wanted my ad to show up. I chose to include the more broad and competitive term Personal Training because I wanted my ad to be seen by as many people as possible in this area. As I mentioned, this term is highly competitive and even in Long Island costs more than $7 per click to reach the top spot. In a traditional advertising sense, paying a lot to reach high value clients is a part of doing business and is considered a worth-

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while expense. Car dealerships pay over $2,000 just to get a cheap car off the lot (you of course pay them back for this when you buy the car). But in my case, I didnt want my advertising costs to spiral out of control. The low budget also makes these techniques effective for the new Personal Trainer who has a limited budget to work with. So heres what I did: Remember when I said that you could chose the words that appear in your ad? I chose my ads to show the word Long Island in the ad result whenever anyone searched for Personal Training. What that means is if someone in Long Island searched the term Personal Training, my ad appeared among the paid ads, except I was the only one with a targeted ad saying Long Island. Heres an example: Usual ad result in Google Personal Training For You Get Great Personal Training From Me, GUARANTEED.
www.averagepersonaltrainer.com

Heres how my ad looked Long Island Personal Training Top-Level Personal Training Comes To Long Island.
www.gohardfitness.com

Notice how I used the term Long Island twice in the text of my ad. This is a huge advantage because when someone from Long Island scanned the ad results for their search, mine was the only one that actually had those words appearing in the ad text. That means my ad stood out and probably had a good chance of getting clicked. In this way, I didnt even have to bid the most money for the top spot, which

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in this case was $7. I was able to bid about $2.50 per ad, enough to keep the ad on the first page, and still get a great results. Even though my ad wasnt at the top spot, a prospect quickly searching which ads to click will likely choose mine. Thats all I want, because using the web design techniques we discussed already, I can let my web-site text do the rest of the work. Almost no one else knows about this technique of targeting your ad results, but when you use it your ads will have a higher chance of getAnother uncommon technique in choosing text for ads is to write something really out of left field and uncommon. For example, I could create an ad like this: Dont Hire A Personal Trainer Dont Even Think Of Hiring A Trainer Until You Read This. www.slickpersonaltrainer.com This is inevitably shocking and makes the prospect want to click the ad to find out what it means. If once they click the ad and visit your site they get caught up in the content, theyll completely forget that they were ever tricked into visiting your site in the first place. This technique as well will get you a better than average click through without paying for the highest bid on Google. Landing Pages The use of specialized ads can be stacked with another technique, the use of landing pages. This is where you create a separate home page to correspond to each different type of ad. For example, my Personal Training practice was based mainly in Queens, but for my Long Island ads I had them directed to a landing page that had the words Long Island all over it. This way, when a person clicked on my ad talking about Long Island, they were taken to a page that corresponded to that ad. To the prospect living in Long Island searching for a Personal Trainer, it appears to them

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that theyve found exactly the right person for them; my ads and my website were targeted specifically to their location. If setting up these landing pages and Adsense campaigns sound like rocket science, you can either have a web-designer or a friend familiar with the Internet take care of it for you. To a web-designer setting this up is extremely easy and should cost you very little, and even a friend may be able to create a separate landing page for you and direct your Adsense campaign to it.

In summary, these Adsense techniques cost money but can prove to be a worthwhile investment. If you find that youve spent a couple of hundred dollars on your Adsense campaign and have hardly got a call or received a strong lead, you need to pull the campaign and reevaluate what could be going wrong. Maybe your web-sites look or message is losing out to one of your competitors; or it could be the call to action on your site isnt compelling enough or your customers cant find your phone-number or email address on the site. Whatever it is, theres got to be a reason. In my case, when I first started using Adsense, I first brain-stormed the places I would want to train and then directed my campaign only to those areas. I received the strongest and highest profit clients of my career from this method and highly recommend it to anyone that is slowly trying to transition into a progressively higher level clientele. It wont pay dividends over-night and will be the most expensive form of online advertising you do, but over a few weeks it will give you exactly the strong leads youre looking for.

Search Engine Optimization

Although Google makes most of their money from Adsense, thats not why most
people visit them. Google is the dominant search engine because of their natural searches: the unpaid search results that show up whenever you enter a keyword. In fact, many people are skeptical of the paid ads because they know these are

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dominated only by those businesses that are willing to spend the most, but may not be the best. Unlike paid ads, Googles natural searches results are usually the most relevant information for your search. The key point is that getting listed as a natural search result is free. Depending on how popular the search term is, the sites that appear here may get thousands of clicks without paying a cent. Thats what makes getting a higher natural ranking on Google the holy grail of marketing on the web. The process of getting yourself a high natural search result is something you cant do overnight; youll have to work at it over weeks and months. The good news is if you know what youre doing and are persistent and patient, youll eventually get to the top of the listing for your desired term. When you do, youll find that youll have a flow of clients coming to you all through the year for free without having to do a thing. Your position can eventually become so strong in fact that youll be able to create an entire fitness business around it. Theres more good news. Although the Internet has been around for a while now, its still not very difficult for a brand new player to get listed and work their way up in the natural search listings for the term Personal Trainer. You just have to implement a few easy principles in order to get the ball rolling. Again, let me take you through a case study of my own experience and youll start to see how this can work for you too.

Case Study: Personal Training, Queens

As Ive said, Personal Training in New York is a very broad and competitive term. Typing it into Google will give you a wide range of search results; youll get listings for Personal Training Certifications, Online Personal Training services, and Personal Trainers that are not even in your area. If someones looking for a good trainer in their area, this

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term alone is way too broad. Because the results are so broad, most web searchers know that they have to do a more specific search. At the very least, what most people will do is include their area in the search field too. Its here that we can start to carve out some differentiation for our site and slowly get to the top of the results. In my case, being a trainer in New York City, the cream of the client crop of course lives in Manhattan. Its the home of thousands of multimillionaires and hundreds of thousands of others looking to get in shape. But for those same reasons, its also the most competitive area to earn a high listing. Google pays attention not only to the content of a web page, but also how long a site has been in business; some of the players in Manhattan have been on the web for 10 years or more. Also, youll find some of the big companies like New York Sports Clubs and Ballys spending their millions in advertising to create sites that get higher page-rankings in this area. I was little too impatient to get on the boat of competing for high rankings in Manhattan. I wanted to make an immediate dent in the search rankings of my business, and although competing for high rankings in Manhattan would eventually turn out to be worthwhile, I decided to stay out of it. Also, as we discuss in the chapter on Lifestyle, I thought about the lifestyle and size of practice I wanted and realized training in Manhattan wasnt really something I wanted to do, even though it was the best market. Id lived in Manhattan at one time and didnt like city life much. I prefer to move around by car and lived a more relaxed lifestyle. Behind the glitz and glamour of the big city youll find a lot of stress and unhappiness, which I didnt realize until I lived there and fully immersed myself in that environment. After a short time I found that this wasnt for me and instead moved to the borough of Queens in New York. Since I live there already, I decided to focus my Training Practice in Queens as well. For those of you that dont know, Queens has a population of about 2.5 million people which in itself makes it one of the

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largest cities in the country, and has pools of very wealthy people dispersed throughout. Its no Manhattan, but is still a very strong pool to draw clients from and can more than adequately support a small training practice like mine. Even though Queens is still a strong area to base a training practice, the online competition in Queens is much weaker. I was surprised to find that the search term Personal Training, Queens had hardly any competition at all. I noticed one old training business which was at the top of the natural search results because of seniority, but had such a hideous and unprofessional site that it was hard to see how they could convert a single visitor. The rest were new players just like me, that happen to be at the top of the search just because the competition was so weak. They were largely there by accident and had hardly put in any effort to earn a high ranking. This is when I realized that getting to this position wouldnt be difficult at all. If the online competition in this key area I was targeting was so weak, Im sure many of you will find that your immediate area or other adjoining high value areas will also be ripe for an online take-over online. Implement some of the techniques described below and watch as your page-rank slowly starts to climb.

Although most Personal Trainers have websites today, Search Engine Optimization is not as utilized by them as youll find in other business sectors. In other areas, SEO is a vital part of doing business; but in Personal Training, which for the most part is a non-technical field, youll find it used to a lesser degree. This opens the window wide open for you to jump in and become an established player in a very short time.

Putting SEO To Work

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ow were going to get a little complicated; this book isnt meant to be a technical manual, but were going to go into some of the aspects of setting-up your site that Google will pick-up on and help you get noticed. There are two parts to SEO that we need to think about. 1. On-site Optimization: Changes we can make to the actual site design and layout that will cause it to rank higher in keyword searches. 2. Off-site Optimization: Initiatives we need to implement to build our sites rank in searches.

On-Site Optimization

The first part of our on-site optimization relates to things we can do on the site
ourselves to get the site noticed and indexed where we want it on Google. Surprisingly, these tactics may be all you need to get all the way to the first page. Headers The first part of this process is an aspect of our site design we spoke about earlier: our headers. These were the headline and sub-headline discussed earlier in the section on site design. You want them to be tagged properly as H1 and H2 headers; Google reads these tags specifically looking for the gist of the content on your page, so labeling them properly is important. This is something your webdesigner can do for you easily if you point it out to them, if they havent done so already. The next point is the actual wording of the headers. Google reads your header, so youll want to include the keywords that youre looking for your site to show-up for. In my case, I tried to make sure the words Queens, and Personal Training appeared at least once in my headline and sub-headline.

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This makes writing the job of your headline a little harder: you want to have something that is relevant and catchy to your site visitor, but you also need to keep Google happy with your keywords. Finding a balance is often times difficult. In my case, I put my H1 Header in the upper left (just like people, Google reads left to right) corner of my home-page and had it read Queens Personal Training. I did this only for Google, since this info wont really catch the attention of my site visitors. I then go into a headline devoted to the main need of my target audience which often times doesnt have either of my keywords (Queens and Personal Training), although it may have other keywords like fat-loss and lose weight. Content After your headers, the next most important thing is your content. Google reads all of your content, so its important to have your keywords appear prominently throughout. You want them high up in the page, and in bold or italics if possible. Although its not good to artificially litter your content text with your keywords, theres nothing wrong with having them peppered throughout. If they do appear often, Google will deem your site relevant for that particular search term and will give it added weight. Site Description Lastly, you want your site-description, which appears all the way in the top-left of your browser, and tags, which are invisible but can be read by the search engines, to also include your key-words. Your web-developer should be able to read both the description and the tags of your top competitors, and you can then pick a group of tags for your own site that will help you compete.

These on-site changes are the most basic things you can do for your site to get
noticed, but in many cases its enough. Theyre so easy as to almost be common sense and most web developers these days should be doing them automatically. However, dont depend on your developer to know everything they should about SEO; although many of them can create a good website, they dont know how to

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put together a good SEO strategy. Because this is area is so vital (like I said, it can bring you tons of free prospects) you need to ask your designer what theyre doing towards SEO for your site. Once you put a strong SEO initiative into effect youll completely blow-out any of your competitors that havent paid attention to their tags, headers, or content on their home page - that makes nearly everyone!

Off-Site Optimization

The next phase of search engine optimization requires the help of other people
and is a little more time consuming. Its the process of Link-Building; having important sites linking to yours. Although a little tedious, its not very difficult and well worth it. Links are the most important thing Google looks at and are essentially theyre claim to fame. When they analyze your site, they pay attention to who and how many other sites are linking to you. Its just common sense that any site thats important and relevant will have many other sites linking to it. If you can build a large number of inbound links to your site, youll see your search engine ranking growing as well. Your link building strategy is something that will require work on a weekly basis and may take time to bear fruit. Fist, you need to identify all the other possible relevant sites in your industry. This could be sites from people such as masseuses, physical therapists, small health food stores, and of course other trainers. Google pays attention to the type of person linking to you; for example, as a Personal Trainer, if you have a bowling alley linking to your site, Google wont care. In fact, if you have too many of these unrelated links you may eventually be penalized and see your rank drop. Once youve made this list of potential related areas, you want to find the top-sites in these sectors. These are the sites showing up highest in Google rankings for their search terms. Dont be shy - make a very long list of potential linking partners, both of people in your area and also across the country and even around the world; the only rule needs to be that theyre relevant. Its even a good idea to form link partnerships with other non-competing Personal Trainers; you

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cant get a higher level of correlation than that! Now heres the last part - send an email to each of these link-partners that youve included describing who you are, and what you do. Let them know that youre creating a highly competitive site and your page-rank is rapidly climbing. Finally ask for a link-exchange with them, informing them that youve already put their link on your link page (which you should do beforehand) and request that they do the same. Many of them will do it, but for those that dont, dont take it hard. Just remove them from your links page, and if you think its worthwhile, you can try contacting them again in the future. Youve got to realize that for a site just starting out like yours, theres very little benefit for a stronger site to link to you. They might not want to dilute their link pool by doing something like this. As your page-rank grows however, youll be surprised how much email you get asking for reciprocal links. Youll then realize how it feels to be in the position where you have to chose who you link to carefully. In general however, if you sound credible in your email, and your site is clean, serious, and professional, many people wont have a problem exchanging links with you. As you can imagine, this process is time consuming and can take time to show results. Thats okay because you wont have all your eggs in one online basket; this is only one part of your total web strategy; so you can afford to wait it out. Just spend a little time every week looking for new partners, getting them added to your links page, and sending out emails. Then wait to see what happens, and wash, rinse and repeat. Although the process takes time, in todays age having a high page-rank is very important. Its basically thousands of dollars of free advertising that you can turn into tens of thousands of dollars of new business.

Craigslist

Another absolute gold-mine for getting new clients is Craigslist. Craigslist is

one of the most visited sites in the world, with a current Alexa (measure of mostvisited sites) ranking of #11 in the US. Yes, thats right, its the 11th most visited

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site, ahead of sites like AOL and CNN. For millions of people, using CraigsList is a way of life; they use it to buy and sell things all through the year. When it comes to searching for a trainer, its a place theyll turn to out of habit. In spite of the fact that Google is the best way to search for anything on the net, for services many people will use CraigsList. In addition, they feel that an ad on CraigsList will be placed by someone actively seeking new business right now. Whatever the case, you can be assured that ads appearing on Craigslist will reach a huge audience. Were going to spend a lot of time right now going into the details of how to launch an effective ad campaign on CL. Posting here isnt something thats usually part of most businesss marketing plans, but for an independent Personal Trainer, its one of the smartest things you can do. If you thought Craigslist was just a seedy site that youd use just to sell your old ping-pong table, youre wrong. Its true that you may get a few strange responses to some of your ads, but thatll result from no-matter what ad campaign you run. For every inquiry you get thats out of left field, youll also get a strong, high quality lead. Not only that, but Google loves Craigslist; when you place your ad on Craigslist, as long its full of keywords, it will also rank high on Google as well. In my neighborhood of Queens, New York, my ads always appear on the first page of Google. Your Craigslist ads may even get a higher ranking than your actual website! Ive had situations where I consistently occupied three of the topten search results in my area, one of them with my website and another two with my Craigslist ads. Thats just more exposure that works to our benefit. On top of all of this, placing ads on Craigslist is free. Once you learn how to do it and get good at it, you can place your ads in about a minute. If you have a few different ads tailoring to different client sectors and needs, you can expect a steady flow of inquiries. When Ive launched aggressive Craigslist ad campaigns I would receive an average of 2 calls or inquiries per day. After sifting through all the leads to find the best clients, I still had so many potential leads that I had to pull my ads because I couldnt handle all the new business. Depending on the size of your market, this is a situation you may find yourself in too.

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How To Advertise Effectively On Craigslist

But alas, all good things cant be so simple; because Craigslist is free and so
popular, youll find competition. But the fact is that most of the trainers advertising on Craigslist are complete amateurs: the dont know how to create a decent ad, how to stand out from everyone else in the crowd, and how to follow-up. What Ill show you are the simple techniques on how to do that. There are three thing you need to consider when placing an ad on CL: 1. The section youre placing your ad in. 2. Your ads headline. 3. Your ads body text. I wont show you how to place an ad on CL; like I mentioned, its free so you can practice and figure out this extremely easy process yourself. But well now go over how to optimize your ads for the greatest effect. Ad Sections When a new visitor is searching for your ad on CL, there are two ways they might look: they may be lazy and just enter a search on the main page of the site. In that case, as long as your site has the right keywords, things like Personal Training, your area, or any other words that matter, such as certified or fitness, itll get noticed. Another way people tend to search is by section. If you visit the homepage of CraigsList in your area youll notice a huge number of sections in which the ads can be placed. Theres a particular section called services, within which are several more sections such as therapeutic, lessons, beauty, and skilled trade. Now the particular section in which your ad is placed is up to you, but I would most highly recommend lessons. You can then intermittently mix it up and place them in the other sections to gauge what kind of response you get. In general for the sake of simplicity, lessons will work best.

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Headlines After youve picked the section to place your ad, you next need to think of a catchy headline. As you can see, writing headlines is a big part of what you do as a trainer: this job is fun, isnt it? And just like the headlines we were composing for our website, the headline on CL must keep two people happy: your prospect and Google. In terms of your prospect, there are few things that will be of concern to them and that you want to establish right away in your headline:

The areas where you operate: this is of primary importance to your prospect and something theyll want to get out of the way. Even though CraigsList is already divided by area, you can never be sure exactly how this visitor has stumbled upon your ad, so its important to mention your area one more time so the ad has more relevance to your prospect. Your primary consumer benefit: this goes back to your specialty - you want to let your prospect know exactly what you can do for them. Be specific: your ad inevitably wont please everybody, and thats not what you want anyway. You just want a key segment of visitors saying aha, thats the right trainer for me!. Your credibility: because placing ads on CraigsList is free, anyone can place an ad, and just about anyone does. There are a lot of bad trainers and just plain clowns on there; for that reason your prospects will be screening actively to figure out whos for real. In your headline you want to establish that youre the most credible choice.

I know, thats a lot to accomplish in just the 70 spaces they allow you, but its very important. Your headline alone will determine 90% of the effectiveness of your campaign: if its not clicked, the whole process ends at that step. One thing youve got working to your advantage is that as a classified ad, your CL ad doesnt have to be artistic; just by their nature, classified ads headlines are choppy and incoherent at times, going back to the days when people paid per line for advertising in newspapers. Your prospect will be scanning all the ads,

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looking for the key groups of words or sound bites that apply to them directly; once they find them, theyll click the ad to dig deeper. Here are a few sample ads that contain all the elements we talked about above: Personal Training | Queens | Abs Specialist Will Get You Six Pack By Summer! Change Your Shape! Top-Flight Personal Training For Manhattan Residents! 8 Week Body Make-Over! | View Our Site | Manhattan You need to constantly play with and refine your headlines to find out which ones are working best. The way to tell which ones are converting is through the use of Google Analytics, the free program on Google that links to your website and tells you exactly where your web traffic is coming from. You may need the help of your designer to install Analytics, but it will tell you which of you CL ads is bringing you traffic. As a matter of fact, it will tell you exactly where all of your traffic is coming from, which is very important to know. Ad Text If your headline is clicked, the next place your visitor goes is to the body of text which is your actual ad. There are people that have written books on the subject of how to create an effective ad, but its still inconclusive exactly what works best. However, there are a few musts when it comes to your ad text. On CraigsList, the sales process is a progression: Headline > Ad Text > Visit Your Website >Contact You You need to continue to build interest and desire as you move the prospect from one step to the next. The ad text is the vital step in this process because its the point where your customer goes from being at Craigslist and going to your site. For that reason, in your description text you need to build desire so that the pros-

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pect is compelled to go to your website. In fact, you should include a live link to your website in every ad. This is a little harder to do without experience, but like Ive said a web developer or friend familiar with the web can show you how easy it really is. Before we talk about the style points of what makes a great ad, lets talk about some of the things that have to be there:

Your name and phone number - if your ad is good enough, the prospect may call you without even visiting your website A live link to your website - you want them to visit your website, at which point your website sales text can handle the rest. Your credentials - this builds on the credibility which we discussed is vital. The specific benefit you can offer - most everyone else on CL will be talking about themselves; thats why you need to talk about your prospect and what you can do for them.

The key is now putting these four elements together into a concise, flowing ad. Whats the best and easiest way to do this? Simple: just use the heading and subhead from your website! Think about, youve already done all the hard work to create a killer head and sub-head for your site, one that will gain interest and build desire, so we can just use it again here in your CL ad text. All you have to do now is just include your contact information at the end - heres an example:
If Youre Looking For A Lean Attractive Body Youve Come To The Right Place! With GoHard! Personal Training you'll get a program and combination of exercises that will get you the results you're looking for. That's our area of expertise unmatched by any other training program in New York. Visit our site to find out more: www.gohardfitness.com Kaiser Serajuddin Certified Personal Trainer 1-877-8-GOHARD

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This ad doesnt overwhelm the prospect with too much information - it gives them just enough to make them want to find out more, and gives them the information they need to do it. All you want is to help them take the next step and visit your site. If youve taken the time to create a good website and blog, then it should be able to handle the rest. At this point theyll be so far down the pipeline into a relationship with you that theyre very unlikely to explore any other ads or take them seriously. Spamming The number of ads you can place on Craigslist will be a big determinant of your success; obviously, the more the better. However, the rules of CraigsList are against this. They technically dont allow you to post more than once in any forty-eight hour period. This of course is not nearly enough to have any presence or get noticed in a competitive location. This brings us to an important issue: spamming. Spamming is just a term for the abuse of the unspoken rules of communication on the web. Youll find some people being obnoxious with this: they might place their ad five times in a row. This is irritating to see as a competitor, and must frustrate prospects as well. This raises the question of how much is crossing the line? In my opinion a little spamming on CL is okay, depending on how busy your section is. For example in New York more than fifty Personal Training ads may go up in a day. If you were following CL rules to the letter and not posting more than one ad in 48 hours, its hard to imagine how youd ever get noticed in this crush of ads, especially with some trainers posting 5 or more ads a day. What I always liked to do was sure my ad appeared once every 15-20 ads. That means that for Manhattan I would post an ad in lessons three times a day at different times. And remember, thats only how often youd need to post in a competitive area like Manhattan. For example, in the areas of Queens and Long Island, I only needed to post once a day to maintain a strong presence. This may be the case for your area as well. The way to place more ads on CraigsList is just to open more email accounts. If you have enough accounts, youll be able to post several ads per day without any problem. The easiest way to open multiple email accounts is through the free email services you were probably given as part of your web-hosting pack-

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age. You can open 10 or more accounts and just rotate the accounts you use in your posts. Also change the text in your ad and description so that its not too obvious that youre making multiple posts. You can just write these out beforehand and cut and paste them into the body so you dont have to type all of the text in every single time. Craigslist allows other users to mark your ads as spam, and this may happen to you on occasion, most often by your competitors. In this case your ads may occasionally be removed; if it happens too often your account may even be cancelled. Thats not a big deal since you have many more accounts to post from. Getting Marketing Help While web marketing is easy and worthwhile like youve just learned, you may find it tedious and time consuming. If thats the case, you can just hire someone else to do it for you. Its a simple job that you can teach someone to do for you for minimum wage. However, make sure that you personally handle all of the emails and phone calls that result from the ad. Thats too important to leave up to someone else. Responding To Ads At a place like Craigslist, your prospect may contact several trainers at a time and decide who to work with form there. For that reason, its important that you get back to them as soon as possible. In this type of situation, the sale will often go to whoever contacts the prospect first. If they contacted you by email, try to get them on the phone as fast as possible. You can just run the sales conversation which we discussed in a previous chapter. At this point, youll most likely win the sale.

Since Craigslist is free, its the entire marketing plan for every low budget Personal Trainer in the world. Why should we still use it? Because in spite of this fact, many high quality prospects still go there every day to look for a trainer. This is where you, the Top-Level Trainer come in. Ive got Harvard Law grads, Upper East Side residents, and many more rich and successful clients from Craigslist. The fact is that hardly any trainer on Craigslist has a website or profes-

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sional demeanor that will make a prospect want to train with them. Through your ads, website, and follow-up, you have the ability to absolutely dominate this medium. Your goals should be to get all the business!

Other Important Uses Of The Web

First and foremost, the web is a tool for communication. Everything weve
talked about in this section has been about forming new relationships with new people. The web makes communication faster and easier, which benefits you in many ways. Keeping In Touch With Lost Prospects Over the course of your marketing, youll get many leads which you for whatever reason cant convert immediately. However, youll still want to keep these individuals in your sales-funnel, especially if you youre using a time-leveraging technique like the Super-Trainer System that makes every new client a pure source of profit. Using the Internet makes staying in touch with these people very easy. The research shows that in a sale, it takes five contacts with a potential client before they decide to buy. I never believed this until I tested it: after putting a program in place with my practice where I tracked how many times I contacted lost prospects, I was shocked by what I found. Many people that werent ready to train with me initially eventually came around; in fact there were many times that my new client actually signed up for their training the fifth time I contacted them! And these werent people that just opted for three sessions and thats it; they were major, multi-thousand dollar clients. Many others have signed up on the third or fourth time Ive contacted them. I was running the Super-Trainer System at the time, so every new client I got represented thousands of more dollars without any addition time on my part. This should show you the importance of being persistent. Back to the subject of the Internet, nothing makes it easier to keep in touch with the people on your list that youve lost touch with than email. You can let

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them know if you have any new information for them, or just to keep tabs on them to check where they stand and make sure theyre on their way to reaching their fitness goals. Just make sure these emails are personalized to each client in particular, and not just a stock message you send to everyone - thats spam. But if youre genuinely interested in how these people youve come in contact with are doing and how you can serve them, theyll appreciate it. Although your first five attempts to contact the prospect should be over the phone, you can maintain a longer relationship throughout with e-mail. E-mail also makes it easy to stay in touch with old clients. You can contact them easily and find out how theyre doing and what theyve been up to. Ive formed deep friendships with almost every single person Ive ever trained. For the ones that for whatever reason have stopped training, I still love to stay in touch with them; I keep them up to date on things going on with me and my training practice, and also keep tabs on whats happening with them. Through this process, Ive had many contact me to train again. E-mail is a simple and unobtrusive way to stay in contact with your old clients that can lead to more business.

Research

Of course, it goes without saying that the Internet is the absolute best way to
stay on top of this industry. Just an hour of research a week will keep you up to date and on top of your business. Training conferences are great places to network and stay in touch with other people, but theres no better way to get relevant information than just simple searching on the web. If youre depending on magazines or even courses to give you the latest info, youre really going to fall behind. There are so many blogs and articles on training out there today with good information that you wont have the time to read it all. At times it can turn into an information addiction; Im in recovery myself. If you want to broaden your horizons in this business, you should get into the same habit of frequently researching on the web too.

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This has turned into a very long chapter, but learning the techniques to be a TopLevel Trainer without giving you the methods to build an overflowing client list would be unfair. And theres no better or cheaper way to build a client list than the Internet. As you progress as a trainer, youll find the web serving you in different ways to accumulate clients and bring you new business opportunities. But for now, the techniques Ive outlined are the best to help you start getting clients immediately. Furthermore, using the web is also one of the most valuable skills you can learn. Anything you seek to do in your future will involve the web, whether its advertising for your new training studio, promoting a training conference youre holding, or selling your e-book. Thats why learning the basic skills Ive outlined will be highly valuable to you in the future.

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Its time do some critical thinking about probably the most important topic in your career, and it doesnt have anything to do with your career at all: Your Lifestyle This is the purpose of everything we do as Personal Trainers. Dont think for a second that its selfish for you to think about creating your ideal lifestyle: no one else is going to do it for you! On the contrary, the majority of people are going to have an absolute disregard for your lifestyle; theyll try to exploit you to help them achieve their own ends and. This is regardless of what you want for yourself, whats good for you, or what makes you happy. This goes for everyone: your parents, friends, and customers. Sorry to be the one to break this to you, but now that you know you can take back control. Many of the problems we see today in our society are due to the fact that people pay absolutely no attention to the type of lives they want. As the saying goes, they get working in their lives and not on their lives. They chose their ca-

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reers and friends almost arbitrarily and just let things continue on autopilot for years on end. Then one day they wake up and realize things arent the way they wanted them. It then takes drugs, alcohol, or prescription medication to help them cope. Its really sad but for probably the majority of people, this is reality. Ive already devoted a chapter talking about how Personal Training is the worlds greatest job so Im not going to get into that again. But what this career affords you is the real ability to carefully plan your own destiny. You can shape it into the type of career thatll work for you. Do you only want to work evenings, mornings, or weekends? Theres an easily executable business model that will make each of those scenarios possible. Lifestyle is what were working for as trainers. The primary allure for a career in Personal Training is not income per se. Personal Training will not make you rich, at least not in the beginning. For example, this book is not a program on how to get rich; its a blueprint for earning a $100,000 income in about 25 hours a week. And after that, to set up a training business that can pay you the same amount or more without you doing the direct training yourself. Compared to other programs or business seminars out there promising hundreds of thousands of dollars on autopilot, 100K doesnt sound like much at all. But I dont think you picked up this series because you were attracted to just the income potential; theres more to this job than just that. Its not just the money, but that you can earn it doing a job which you know to be fun and rewarding. If you can add a method to create a steady stream of clients on top of that, you have one of those mythical things that all people are looking for: a wellpaying job with zero stress! Just to review, here are some of the benefits this career affords you:

Chose your own knowledge base. Hand-pick your customers. Set your own salary. Set your own schedule.

What all of this really adds up to is the creation of a lifestyle; thats where this job

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really pays off; not just in initial salary, but through the intangibles, the piece of mind you have in shaping your life in whatever direction you want. Its this type of person whos in a position to make a real difference in the world. These are the kinds of people that others like to be around and help to succeed even more; they tend to attract more opportunities for advancement and success.

The Deferred Life Plan

The problem with too many people today is that they havent given any thought
to their lifestyle. Theyre on what Tim Ferris, author of The Four-Hour Workweek calls the deferred life plan, where they think that someday, maybe after 10-20 years of 60 hour weeks theyll be able to take some time for themselves: maybe buy a boat, do some traveling, write a book, etc. But as you probably already know, this isnt a solid plan for success. In the time you spend working for someone else you end up losing touch with yourself. You lose the connection and the love for those things that make you unique. The result is a situation where if you ever do achieve that success you were waiting for, you wont know what to do with it. The only thing you really know how to do it is work, so you just continue to do more of that. On top of that, youll discover that youve spent the best years of your life sitting in an office making someone or some other company a lot of money. This might sound like a very sad story, but this is the reality of most of the people living in the Western world today. The advantage of Personal Training is it gives you lots of free time, and doesnt cause stress that encroaches on that free time. It doesnt matter what you do with your time off: the point is you can do anything you want. You can spend it studying another subject, spend it with family, or just having fun with friends. Many Top-Level Trainers spend their time expanding their current businesses, or creating new ones. I for example was able to write this book and create its website in the free time that this job allows, all the while not affecting my living standards or work obligations at all.

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You cant really put a dollar figure on the lifestyle advantages this career gives you, but its value is tremendous. The people you meet and the things you get to do as a result make it worth more than just the salary alone. So enough talk about the importance of lifestyle; lets talk about the best part - how to achieve it!

Location

Once you learn the ropes in this career, your training location is something important you need to think about. Being a Personal Trainer gives you nearly complete freedom of location. In picking where you want to train, there are two considerations, the professional and the personal stand point. Lets take a look at both for a few moments. Your choice of where to live is primarily a personal decision when it comes to this job. To put it simply, live where youre going to have the most fun and enjoy yourself the most; the place where your personal and social life will be served the best. Thats because from a professional standpoint, a top Personal Trainer can make a living anywhere. Many people think that my success is due to the fact that Im from New York City; that if I was from any other neighborhood, I wouldnt have access to the same type of high-level clients. But for most of my career, and especially the best parts of it, I made my living in the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, and not very affluent parts of these neighborhoods at that. It was only very recently in my career, the past year or so, that I actively began to recruit clients from Manhattan. Even in that case it was completely an ego thing for me; that I wanted to be a high level Manhattan trainer. I actually earned no more money in Manhattan than I did in Queens, and eventually abandoned it. Even if you want to be a top-tier, $100 plus per hour trainer, you do not need to be in the busiest or most affluent neighborhoods to do it. Wherever you are now, you can get started and began making real money and honing your skills and your practice.

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That being said, youre also free to change your location as well. If because of the specialty youve decided on, or just your own interests or personal goals, you feel that your current location wont cut it, your free to make a move. Lets take a look at a few examples of how location can influence a training practice.

Case Studies

Its only in extreme cases that location will make a real difference. For example,
in speaking to Gunnar Peterson, he attributes his position as Hollywoods most sought after trainer solely to the fact that he lives in Hollywood. Although Im not buying his story completely, there is something to it. If being a celebrity trainer is part of your career MO (and this is certainly a realistic career aspiration for any Personal Trainer), then location will be very important; you cant train celebrities where there arent any. Another example is Personal Trainer extraordinaire Jamo Nezzar. A funny thing about Jamo is that although his roots are in professional bodybuilding, he decided he wanted to be the go-to trainer for Professional Surfers. Its important to point out that when he made this decision, he didnt go out and get a certification in surfing; he just made a decision, and that was it. The only requirement to make a decision like this is access to a lot of professional surfers, which is exactly what Jamos location in San Jose California allows him. Just like in Gunnars case, this specialty wouldnt be possible without the location. Thats the primary way that your job will dictate location - if your selected clients require you to be a certain place. Its worth pointing out that those two trainers didnt chose their specialty and then move to get clients; they were already in those places, and just made an interesting choice of target market based on what was available in their location. But in our case as TLTs, we have the option to take the process in reverse; if you have a particular desire or interest that cant be fulfilled where you are now,

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youre free to move. If you absolutely love skiing and want to be a core training specialist for skiers, it would be a good idea for you to move to Vale, Colorado. Once you do, your success image and basic marketing will do the job after that (all things covered in this book). That being said, some places are better than others. Again Ill give you the example of my own location. Although New York is a very competitive market, I have to say Ive had a very easy time getting clients here. Thats because anyone and everyone in New York needs and wants a trainer; no matter how many trainers we have, theres always room for more Top-Level Trainers to make an outstanding living here. Id have to assume that its the same in other major cities. Personal Training is an interesting commodity in that you dont realize that you need a top trainer until you meet one. An overwhelming number of my clients didnt realize they needed or wanted a Personal Trainer until they saw an experienced fitness professional like me working in front of them. It was at this point that the light bulb went off and they thought to themselves Hey, I could use a trainer!. This is completely different from other businesses; people usually only buy cars when theyre in the market for one, or buy food when theyre hungry. But with Personal Training, people dont always realize they need one until they meet a good one. Its one of the most interesting impulse purchases that someone can make.

Personal Choice

Since weve already established that this profession doesnt make it necessary for
you to live in any particular place, the only thing you should be thinking about is what works best for your personal life. Thats a beautiful thing; when you hear about other people getting transferred to far out places because of their boring jobs, it makes you appreciate the options you have in this business.

Where will you be most happy?

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What are the priorities in your life right now? What will serve your future goals and aspirations?

When Im talking about relocating to a place that serves you, Im not advocating a gypsy lifestyle where youre bouncing from city to city. What I mean is make a sound choice of a place where youll be happy, proud to call home, and will be able to grow as a person. If this happens to be a major city thats great, but it doesnt need to be. Using the techniques in this book, you could chose to live wherever you feel would be most convenient to you.

Hours

Over the past two years, the time Ive spent working with my clients and in
my business has been the most rewarding time Ive had. Thats because I love what I do and was able to do it at a high level, make changes in the lives of other meaningful people, and accomplish many of my financial goals. However, one of the keys for me to be able to enjoy my work so much was that I had a lot of time away from it. I gave myself a lot of time for renewal, either working on my craft or doing something totally different. This time away always made my work more fun and challenging for me. Youll hear this same story over and over again from professionals in every field, about the importance of taking time away from work so that you dont burn out. This is an important part of being a Top-Level Trainer, one thats built-in to the job description. You cant really bring any value into the lives of your clients if youre as burnt out from work as they are; youve got to be the exception, someone that brings positive energy to their free time.

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Free Time

In addition to location, free time is another key to an appealing lifestyle. Its in

this gap between our work and sleep that the magic of life takes place. Even though Personal Training is more a passion than a job, its still important for you to create this free time for yourself. Free time is really a misnomer; this time isnt free at all. Its actually some of your most valuable time; thats the reason we want to make more of it. Keeping a smaller schedule should be a goal in designing your lifestyle. Having lots of free time is a form of value that goes beyond salary. For example, throughout this manual, I refer often to earning a 100K income. If you viewed this profession like others, with the mind-set that more is better, you could earn much more than that probably 200-250K. Saying that you can earn over $200,000 would probably have made for better promotion for this book, but it misses the point. Working 50+ hours a week isnt something I think anyone should aspire to. Its a worst case scenario that you eventually want to work your way back from. When referring to a six-figure salary, what we mean is earning it no more than 25 hours a week. You really cant be a Top-Level Trainer working more than that. You cant have a calm relaxed demeanor, time to eat well and maintain your own physique, and time to enjoy your own life and health if you work more than that. Your ability to be a top trainer is actually diminished when you put in too much time, an interesting law of diminishing returns that plays out in this business. As we talked about in an earlier chapter, the product is you and the session youre able to create. Inherently, this means the product is improved only by spending more time away from the job, not more time in it. In addition, youll need this time for a different kind of work: work on you career. Although this job is wonderful, one of the great parts about it is it doesnt have to be an end-all; its actually just the beginning. In your time as a Personal Trainer its important that you find yourself professionally, you need to proactively decide where you want to go in this profession. This could be anything from creating an elite training studio, opening a health club, writing, modeling, education, promotions, or nutrition; the possibili-

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ties are really endless. Pursuing your strengths and achieving your full potential are some of the most important things you can do in your life, but its a journey that takes time. The beauty of being a top trainer is that it gives you the time to do that while still earning a living and being in the business.

Social Life

I understand its not my job to tell you at all what your social life should be like.
I dont care if you like to hike mountains, race mountain bikes, or bar-hop as your favorite pass time. As long as its something positive to you and the world around you, youve got my endorsement. As a Top-Level Trainer, youve earned the right. Thats the life of a Personal Trainer: having fun is part of the job description. When a client thinks about their trainer, the last thing they want to imagine is someone boring that they dont look forward to seeing. Theyre looking for someone fun thats going to get them pumped and motivated, and for a short time take them out of their own boring lives. For that reason, not only are you encouraged to be a fun and interesting person as a trainer, its almost mandatory! When I started as a trainer it was in a health club, which was a terrible experience we dont need to get into again. I then made the jump into independent training, which is the stage that most of you are at right now. At that time I had only one thing on my mind: making money. I was a completely one dimensional person, and looked at training as a high pressure job and my only way to make a living. Guess what happened? People could see right through this mindset and it actually repelled them. Theres a kind of a mystical law in the universe that if you look to make money without contributing even greater value to the lives of other people, you will not succeed. That was the case with me, and for that reason my training rates were low, my client load was small, and my training was crappy. I watched in horror as trainers around me that seemed to be less serious had many more clients, were earning more money, and strangest of all, they seemed to be

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having fun! The truth is that people dont want a boring, bossy trainer thats just looking to make sales. With a trainer, theyre seeking a positive relationship; they want to bring a person into their lives thats going to add a different, fun, postive element. Out of the training itself they are seeking the capacity to live a more rich and full life themselves. How could you possibly give them the ability to do this if you don't know what that is yourself? That was the case with me in the beginning; I just wasnt a fun person to be around. My life was boring, I had no hobbies, and didnt pursue any real interests. Even my own training regimen became stale as a result and I started to get out of shape. This pervaded my training and made my sessions as lackluster as I was. As Michael Gerber says, boring people start boring businesses. At a certain point however, I made my personal relationships a priority. I started investing more time in myself and making myself a higher quality person, and as my life became more interesting and dynamic, so did my work. You need to keep this in mind as well. Often, the best thing we can do for our work and business is to get some altitude on the situation; to step away from it in order to gain perspective. We can then come back to our work with a fresh outlook and be many times more effective than a person thats in their business all the time. Furthermore, working on yourself and exploring your own interests is one of the most rewarding things you can ever do. Doing this in a positive way is what life is really about. Although society will tell you differently, life is not defined by your job or the possessions you have. Its defined by the people you meet, the places you go, the rich experiences you enjoy, and most importantly, who you become as a result. The magic of Personal Training is that it allows you to work at your passion, connect with important people, and help them to enjoy their lives more fully as well. This creates an ongoing spiral that can take you to personal heights that few human beings have ever been able to enjoy.

Professional Interests

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Im assuming that as a trainer, some of your interests will be physical. For the
success and growth of your career, these should be things that you can focus on and improve in at a level that will serve you professionally. If youre really into cycling for example, if its one of the things that you enjoy to do in your free time and also is your primary way of staying in shape, then you need to get serious about it. Learn everything you can about cycling, enter organized events and competitions, and look to constantly improve your skills. Not only will this make the cycling more fun and make you happy, itll also make fitness a three dimensional part of your life. Itll give you a story to relate to your clients and to chronicle on your website and blog. This is an important part of making you an alive, complete person in the mind of potential client. Compare this to the person that continues to ride three or four days a week for a few hours a day, but without a purpose: the difference is obvious. In my case, Ive committed myself fully to my pursuits of physique improvement. Im trying to make progress and improve every single time Im in the gym. To make things more interesting, I enter a physique competition every year. Not only that, but I tell all my clients about it, and chronicle the entire process prominently on my blog. Let me remind you that I never actually win these competitions. I always try my best to look good, but Ive never won first place. But entering and competing just makes the process of getting in shape much more fun for me and makes it something more interesting to relate to other people. Whatever you chose to do, let it be something that contributes value to the world. Make sure you break out of your comfort zone: thats a must to getting anywhere in this field.

Conclusion

It may seem strange to have devoted such a long chapter to a subject that had
nothing to do with training. In fact, it has everything to do with training and your

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success as well. If youre somebody that just wants to be like everyone else, overworked but still standing in place while watching your life flash before your eyes, then you can read all the other books about training and go to the training conferences and do what everyone else is doing. But if you take your life seriously and are determined to make it the best one possible, planning your lifestyle is one of the most important things you can do. I wanted to shoot a few potential scenarios at you; how your life actually takes shape is completely up to you; just dont forget youre completely in control.

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