Working as a Personal Trainer is one of the most frustrating, whilst simultaneously, rewarding careers on the planet.

If you are in the fitness industry, the reason is, most probably, the allure of doing something you love; feeling you are making a difference; and the feeling that you have control over your own career path and will be able to build and mould a future that brings you a joyful lifestyle and huge job satisfaction.

On paper, it all looks great.

But the reality is, those who enter the industry rarely find it lives up to that expectation.

Partly that is down to unrealistic expectations from the off. But these are expectations borne from promises and perceptions that seem plausible, before making the leap.

However, a lot of this is down to the infrastructure simply working against you. For many, it leaves a level of frustration that is going to cause you to either dig you deeper into the well of defeat or cause you to give up entirely.

Too many good trainers end up on this path and, often, it is the unscrupulous ones who have no interest in helping people, but are simply looking to feather their own nest, that make it work financially. Simultaneously dragging the industry down and giving a poor perception for the good ones, like you, to have to work against.

The hope, with what I’m about to share, is to reverse that trend and give those with the best intentions the keys to thrive, with the best possible long-term prospects.

It SHOULD be easy

In the Glasgow catchment area alone, there are currently just over 143 Personal Trainers (*figures based on REPS directory within 10 miles of City Centre).

Within the Greater Glasgow area there are over 150,000 gym members (and rising by over 5% per year). Suggesting there are over 1000 potential clients for every Personal Trainer.

For a PT to be successful would require as little as 5-10 clients at any given time (less than 1% of the available audience). Yet the majority struggle to even hit this level.

You know you have a great skill set to offer, right?

• If you know you have the skill to make a difference, if only more people knew about them…
• If you feel you are constantly competing with poor quality trainers who simply undercharge and deliver low quality…
• If you are frustrated by the ‘cutthroat’ set-up of most gyms and understand that putting the quality of the service first is the best approach, but the system seems to be working against you doing that…

Then read on to discover the route to a better solution that could alleviate all your issues and give you the opportunity to carve out a successful career, rather than constantly scrambling for more income just to cover your overheads for that month.

The problem is not going to change by ignoring it

What most people do, when hit with the challenge, is either complain about it in the hope that someone will listen and change things for them. Or, they will work harder, place more ads, discount themselves, try to build themed group training that looks like a bargin and sounds gimmicky and try to force the issue to change.

However, I would ask that you to imagine giving your clients advice to take a similar approach to their fitness.

Imagine a client has been crash dieting to lose weight (600Kcal per day) and they are not getting the results expected.

Would you be surprised?

Would you tell them to double down and slash their calories further?

Or would you inform them that this is unhealthy and detrimental to their long-term progress, even if someone else made it work and lost a lot of weight over a 2 or 3 week period?

Now switch that to your business model.

This is no different than discounting sessions to try and just get some money in.

It doesn’t help the problem long-term. Yes, it may paper the cracks in the short-term, but it ultimately just makes you the ‘cheap PT’ and that reputation is then going to be hard to shift and certainly it becomes difficult to build credibility from.

Similarly, doing something out of the ordinary, trying to set up a niche group training session, advertising to be an online coach, selling a 6 week weight loss course or whatever. Unless that thing is simply an extension of something that already works, it’s just the same as your client jumping from a keto diet, to a Cambridge diet, to a cabbage soup diet, etc.

The sensible approach is to make a long-term plan and understand WHY you are doing what you are doing at each point in the process. Everything should feed into the long-term plan and be both useful to your audience and aid in building your long-term credibility as an authoritative personal trainer.

Most people don’t do that and simply panic and follow the crowd or industry ‘best practices.

But then you are better than that! You are not ‘most people’

The fact you are reading this alone shows you care about the quality of the service you are delivering and your long-term future in the industry.

You want the best for your clients. And you want to ensure you always give the best of you .

You understand that your reputation is more important than making a quick buck.

If you want more detail on why ‘best practices’ are never a good starting point for making decisions, I’d encourage you to read Break the Wheel by Jay Acunzo

We’ve already established that you know, in your heart, you have a quality service to offer. One that will benefit your client base to a value much greater than any cash payment.

If someone has just been poisoned and you have the antidote, you wouldn’t stand there and try to convince them of its value and undersell yourself. You’d act from a position of knowing what you have is to their benefit and be confident in that fact.

Well you do have the antidote to the health and fitness issues that your audience is suffering from. But are you acting like that or are you acting from a place of lack, want and desperation?

How can you be the best personal trainer possible and build a career?

Imagine you could walk into a fully equipped gym, with all the space you need for every element of training.

Room for sprints, walking lunges, sled pushes and drags etc. But regardless of time of day, you still didn’t have to worry about it being so busy you have to compromise your choices for your clients.

Then imagine having all that space for yourself to create videos, do your own training, take pictures of elements for blog posts in a way that shows off your skill set and speaks directly to your target audience.

Now imagine having others there to back you up. You post something and the rest of the team shares it to their audience. You instantly get an additional 3,000 to 10,000 eyeballs on your content. And those eyeballs are not just random people, but people who have shown an interest in what you are doing.

Any one of these benefits would allow you to massively increase your profile in the long run. And you would always be able to deliver your very best.

But all these benefits, and many more, are exactly what Dynamic Core Studios was created to achieve.

How can you be the best personal trainer possible AND build a career?

Imagine you could walk into a fully equipped gym, with all the space you need for every element of training. Room for sprints, walking lunges, sled pushes and drags etc. But regardless of time of day, you still didn’t have to worry about it being so busy you have to compromise your choices for your clients.

Then imagine having all that space for yourself to create videos, do your own training, take pictures of elements for blog posts in a way that shows off your skill set and speaks directly to your target audience.

Now imagine having others there to back you up. You post something and the rest of the team shares it to their audience. You instantly get an additional 3,000 to 10,000 eyeballs on your content. And those eyeballs are not just random people, but people who have shown an interest in what you are doing.

Any one of these benefits would allow you to massively increase your profile in the long run. And you would always be able to deliver your very best.

But all these benefits, and many more, are exactly what Dynamic Core Studios was created to achieve.

The benefits don’t end there.

The stress of having to make rent every month is removed.

Every PT is expected to act and feel that they are part of the team. As such, the ‘retainer’ costs are covered by being in the gym for ‘rota’ hours. However, part of those hours would be doing things like creating content that would improve your profile (things you would likely look to do on your own anyway).

Plus, we have an inbuilt bonus scheme that ensures, if the gym as a whole is doing well, you receive a financial reward for that. If any individual element is hitting or exceeding expectation level, everyone shares a financial reward for that (in a good year, with a solid team, you could earn over £6000 from bonuses alone). And if you, personally, are doing well with a steady client base, you receive a financial bonus for that.

Also, as you build your reputation, your obligations to the gym (for rota’d hours) decreases. Yet, at the same time, your income increases.

The bottom line

It’s time to ask yourself, is there a disconnect between what you SAY you are in this business for and how you show up daily?

I’m sure, in your heart, you are in this to give the best service possible. But, do your actions simply reflect the ‘quick win’ mentality that you are always encouraging your clients and audience are a bad idea?

What if you could change all that with one move?

Making a change is a scary proposition, but what if that one move could change everything?

Our set up has recently been altered to include more paid bonuses than ever before.

To deliver everything above requires a few people to cover the extensive overheads. However, the long-term value vastly outweighs every other option out there.

Rather than feeling forced into stacking up 30, 40 or even 50+ clients (scenarios I’ve seen trainers put themselves in), our model ensures a client base of around 10 is the maximum you should be working with. Yet, a PT with any level of experience and an existing client base of just 2 or 3 can quickly look to use the resources on hand to build to around 10 and, combined with bonuses, could be looking at an income of around £32,000 from those 10 clients.

Even someone just starting out, either recently qualified or even someone only Level 2 qualified and working towards their Level 3 has the resources to earn over £20,000 per year.

By which time it would be a smooth transition into the next level and an increase to the £32K level should be fairly easy.

Ultimately, once you have built and proven a strong reputation, you can progress through the ranks and be targeting closer to £55,000 per year from that same level of 10 clients.

And if the facility exceeds expectations in any level, that could be even higher from additional bonuses.

Obstacles

The only things that are going to stand in your way are your own perceptions.

Let me try to address some of these now:

It’s too far

If you don’t live near our facility that could be a strong reason for not joining us. However, if too far is anywhere within a 45min drive, then I’d ask how seriously you are taking your career. We have members who travel over an hour to get to work each day. Some who have taken a weekday home near their office, because they live so far away. I’m not suggesting you do that (especially if you have no guarantee of a quick client base), but I travel for 35-40mins every day to come to this gym. We have another trainer who travels further. To say distance is an issue because we are not within 15mins of your house is the same as a client saying they can’t when the truth is, they can’t be bothered.

If you truly are beyond a reasonable travel distance (ie an hour or more) but you’ve found this page anyway, then it’s unlikely you’ll have a similar facility on your doorstep. We are pretty unique. However, you can still take the points here and have a read a this, before making any decisions on where you should set up.

I can say, definitively though, unless you have an amazingly infectious personality and people just love being around you, regardless of your prowess as a coach or personal trainer, a large commercial gym is probably a bad idea and you may need to look at what else is available or consider creating something of your own (though I strongly recommend this only as a last resort as the logistics in starting from scratch are extremely onerous). Meantime stay tuned to this site as I will be looking to post more content to help trainers make the most of their career options in the future.

Not enough members

The cry of the desperate!

The need to get clients super quick because there is a desperation to earn money due to financial stresses.

In this situation, you are simply not ready to build a business from scratch. It either needs to be in tandem with something that is there to pay your bills (a part time or weekend job) or you need to have enough resources (parents, savings, an understanding spouse etc) to support your day to day life until you build to something solid. Because starting from a point of desperation is a hole you will never get out of.

Poor expectation

If you think you are going to walk in and just have clients land on your lap, you are deluding yourself.

In large budget or chain gyms, the law of large numbers ensures that, because they have thousands of members, you, by just being one of the listed PTs, are likely to pick up a few clients. If you are the only trainer available at 6pm on a Monday, for example, someone is bound to select you for that reason.

Our online presence (ranking number 1 on average for gyms searched for in the area) means we get a solid drip feed of enquiries regarding personal training. And so, all PTs are likely to pick up a few clients by chance throughout the year. But to build a solid profile and a reliable client base requires action on your part.

We will give you the platform to shout from, but you must be prepared to get on that platform and make yourself known.

That means positively interacting with all our members. Creating content (videos, articles, infographics, audio content etc). The medium should simply be whatever you feel comfortable with and will never be forced on you. But if you simply turn up and do nothing, you are likely to get nothing (or very little).

And writing one article and expecting the floodgates to open is delusional.

You need to build and nurture a relationship with YOUR audience. That means knowing what your audience looks like and not worrying about offending or missing out on the others.

There is an audience of over 150,000 possible clients out there remember (more if you include those who have not yet joined a gym). You need to speak to around 0.1% of those (around 150) and then have 10% of those who listen turn into paying clients. And even that would be too many (15).

Penny pinching

The outline shows you can build to an income of over £30,000 from just 10 clients and a solid gym activity around you.

Isn’t that enough to be targeting as a starting point?

Once you are established, you are targeting over £50K and with plenty of spare time to look at other avenues of revenue (speaking gigs, writing a book, creating programmes etc). But that’s something to look at once you are established.

If you can build to over £30,000 as a starting point, in the Glasgow area, that’s a decent income. And so all your focus should be on working with the model and the ethos (of delivering high end, stress free, solutions for clients) that makes that a reality.

That should be the foundation that is then built upon.

No distractions. No trying to do workshops, online training or gimmicky classes just to get an extra few hundred pounds in your pocket this month, whilst putting the long-term plan on the back foot.

No operating outside the team by pushing for a client you know would be better suited with another trainer, to sign up with you. Or fearing the idea of other trainers joining the team. There is enough of an audience to go around if you can prove your worth. Everyone has their own unique skillsets. And if everyone sticks to their lane and helps promote the best options, even if it is not you in every instance, the result is the clients always get the best option, and your reputation grows with it.

Plus, our bonus structure means, so long as the gym income grows, everyone will benefit. So, it’s a win win.

If you can get over these distracting thoughts, habits and beliefs, you can truly build something amazing.

The choice is very much yours.

But don’t make your mind up yet.

Get in touch arrange a time to come in, see the facility, chat things through further and take things from there.

After all, we need to ensure you are a good fit for us too.

Send me an email (or fill in the form below) and let me know when you are free to come in for a chat and hopefully this could be the start of a beautiful friendship and a new, more focused path for your future and the betterment of the industry as a whole.

Note: There is a link on this page to a book on Amazon. In order to have complete disclosure, if you happen to buy that book after clicking the link, we will earn a VERY small commission due to having an Amazon affiliate account. The recommendation of this book has nothing to do with the financial benefit. I would have recommended it regardless. But as we have the account, we will earn the commission automatically. Any money earned would ultimately be re-invested in the business regardless, so you are only helping our members and clients (and if you happen to join us, yourself).