Personal Trainer’s Glasgow
Are You The One We Are Looking For?
Exciting New Opportunity
The frustration of trying to carve out a career as a personal trainer is very real.
And the industry is not set up to help you get where you feel you want to go.
I’m sure your goal was to inspire, enthuse and change the lives of those you work with for the better. And it seemed so easy from the outside.
There’s a good chance you saw PTs training clients and thought it looked both fun and something you’d be good at.
You may have even felt what you saw was not the best and you could add more value?
But then, once you take the leap and this is now your source of income, the reality hits.
First you need somewhere to train your clients.
You have a few options open to you:
- Find a gym where you can pay rent to use their facility.
- Find a gym that will hire you to work in their facility and will pay you to train their clients.
- Find a gym where you can work as a glorified cleaner and gym instructor for free. In exchange you can use their facility to train clients (who often must also join the gym).
- Open your own facility.
- Use local parks and clients homes
There are alternatives, but these are the top utilized options.
(If you’ve already realized these are not good solutions & why, scroll to the bottom for a better option)
The lies that got you here
Personal Training is sold as an easy gig by all the major course providers.
But within one month of entering the industry you quickly realize this is not the case.
Despite the advertising of “Earn £60K per year with this qualification” and the fact you can apparently qualify in 4 weeks in many cases, the truth is, once you are a qualified personal trainer it’s not as if the clients just fall in your lap.
Yet, whilst these allow you to work as a PT, that is what it is, work.
A career as a Personal Trainer seems, on the surface, to be one where you can build a reputation. You get a certain amount of flexibility. You are your own boss. And there is room for growth.
In building your reputation, you should have room to develop your own brand.
This is a career forged from passion and a desire to make a difference.
Unfortunately, these options quickly destroy that passion. Leaving what was a vision of a career as little more than a job with unsociable hours.
Going through the options one at a time:
1. You Pay Rent
This means, from day one, you are in debt. From the point you pay your rent, you must then scramble to find a client base.
The first few clients you find, though, do not earn you a penny. All you are doing is earning enough to cover the next rental payment.
And if you don’t find enough clients, you still owe your rent.
This is hardly a set up that allows you to give the best of yourself. Your focus cannot be your clients because you know you need more.
Only once you establish yourself and build up a strong client base can you relax. But when will that day come? And when it arrives, will it last?
If a bunch of your clients go on holiday one month, or you get a few cancellations, the rental costs are still there.
Being stressed and panicking about bills is not a good place to be if you are aiming to give the best of yourself.
And without delivering your highest service level, how do you build a reputation? And without a strong reputation, how do you build a strong client base?
2. You Train Clients for Someone Else
This isn’t the worst route when starting out.
Someone else has a strong client base and reputation. They have too much interest to cope with. So, you piggyback on their reputation to try and build your own.
The only thing here is, their client base and niche has to be very close to your own. If not, you have to be something you are not and that’s not good for anyone.
So, to make this work, you must find a successful coach who is looking for help but also aligns with your approach.
Easier said than done.
Even then, at some point you must step out of the shadows. So, it’s key to ensure that is possible.
3. You Work as an Employee
This route removes the stress of having to pay rent. So now you can focus on the job of delivering your best service.
The problem here is, you are now back to being an employee.
As a PT, you are, most likely, one of many in that facility.
You may get added to the facility’s website or put up on the wall as an option. But beyond that, you are simply a trainer. One of many.
Any hope of showcasing your unique voice has now diminished.
There may be a good chance of finding clients on the gym floor. But will these be clients that are in your specific niche? Will working with them help you cement your reputation? Or are you left training people at random and without thought, to ensure you fill up your diary?
This route generally acts as a trap.
You start out thinking you’ll use it as a starting point. Once you are busy, you’ll move on.
But the type of client base you end up forming is more of a churn. It’s rare to find clients on the gym floor of a busy commercial gym who have a long-term view of things.
More often the goal is a holiday, a wedding or a quick result. When the deadlines pass, or something ‘magic’ fails to happen immediately, they stop.
But you will be reliant on the basic income you are earning and won’t want to move on. The fear of starting again is too great.
Usually, in this scenario, trainers either become complacent and settle in. It becomes a job with little to no prospects and that’s how it is. Or, frustration hits and they give up and look for another career.
4. Open Your Own Facility
This always sounds better than it is.
The question here is, are you willing to invests tens of thousands of pounds on day one? Are you looking to spend a huge amount of time dealing with daily admin? Do you want to be responsible for getting utility quotes, water rates, phone suppliers and so on?
I’m sure you didn’t get into fitness to become an office manager.
In some rare cases, yes. But for most, the responsibility of maintaining a building, equipment & complying with regulations, is not a dream career path.
Add to that the fact that it will be years before you make your investment back. Plus, like option 1, you are now responsible for the outgoings, even if your income doesn’t match it.
5. Use Parks or Client’s Homes
In this category you could also include using your own home or garage to some extent.
The big issue here is, limited equipment.
In a home or a garage, limited space.
And, in a park, you are relying on the weather as well.
Unless your niche or specialism is with outdoor, all weather athletes, this is not going to showcase you at your best.
Having more tools at your disposal doesn’t mean you have to use them. But when you need them, if they are there, you are continuing to deliver the highest quality service.
In my view, this route is a selfish one.
It is penny pinching.
It may be post justifiable, but the client’s best interests are not at the fore.
And if you don’t focus on your client’s interests, you are not delivering your best service.
A New Career Opportunity
This frustration is the only reason DCS exists.
If there were other options in the Greater Glasgow area, DCS would not have been necessary.
But this frustration has also affected us.
We have tried many options to allow trainers to flourish.
Some have been far too costly to the facility and open to abuse.
Often the level of expectation is too outlandish.
If you feel that you should only need to show up and the clients will start rolling in, you need to review things.
The goal is to develop your brand. No matter what the set-up, you are the only person who can do that. And while we will always look to give you the platform to have your voice heard, you need to do the talking.
The Infrastructure
What we have always had available is a facility with more than enough space. But because of the way we have it set up, that space is NEVER crowded.
This means you, as a trainer, never have to compromise your plans because of crowds or lack of floor area.
You should be able to deliver your very best service at all times.
On the flip side, it means our member base is not a resource that will deliver the bulk of your client base.
Thus, you need to get your voice heard beyond our physical walls.
For that, we have a website (you’re on it now) with a section with articles on it. You could write your own. We have a good sized social media following to share your content.
And, unlike commercial gyms, we will let you share your ‘voice’.
In fact, we encourage it.
So, you can deliver your best service at all times. You can promote your message and build your reputation. But what about building a client base and earning a living?
The Finances
We don’t do the ‘stack em high, sell em cheap’ approach that all other facilities seem to use.
This leaves us in a ‘chicken and egg’ situation.
Not having thousands of members who pay but don’t use the gym, we must supply a service to everyone who does attend.
This means that anyone being part of the gym must be an asset. As, if they are not, it means they are a burden.
Where other facilities ensure this is not the case is through charging rent. This guarantees they are getting an income regardless. Or they pile in thousands of members and pay the trainers minimum-wage to look after them. Either way, there is a guaranteed win for the facility.
But, as discussed, this causes undue stress on the trainers. And stress caused sub par service levels.
We have always sought to avoid this.
We kept costs to the trainer to a minimum. We then eliminated them all-together. But, the problem remained that the trainers had to earn a living.
I have often suggested that, the first months as a PT should be considered ‘training’. You are building experience and laying the foundations for your future.
During this time, you have a facility at your disposal and existing resources. It’s up to you to use them. But don’t expect an immediate income.
You don’t get paid to go to college, university or on a course of any kind. This should be the same.
The goal, when joining DCS, is to integrate as part of the team and start building your future. The value comes in the fact that you have a better infrastructure to do that. But you need to play the long-game.
So, we ask PTs to join our team. You are still a freelance PT, but you will also be working within the DCS community. Thus, you are expected to contribute to the facility in general.
You do not pay rent. You only earn from one to one client sessions (or you did until now). And how much you earn increases as your experience level grows.
“Dynamic Core Studio is a fantastic independent gym. The facility is extremely well equipped and the music playlist is really well put together.The members have opportunity to learn from very knowledgeable and experienced owner Mark Tiffney. I would highly recommend this gym If you are serious about reaching your fitness goal.“
~Piotr Jachym
What’s New?
This route may have seemed logical, but we had to admit it has been off putting.
I will continue to argue that you need to enter the profession with a financial safety net. You must assume you will not earn anything for a few months.
If you only join us because we don’t charge rent and you can’t afford the rent elsewhere, that is no basis for a future.
But to ease the pressure, we now have added routes to earning an income.
- We now have a profit sharing scheme. If you help us raise and maintain our member levels to certain levels, you will earn a share of the profits. Done well, this could boost your income by thousands. And it means, when looking to help someone, you don’t have to think you must convince them to work one on one with you. You can suggest the best route for them to succeed. And even if that doesn’t involve you, it could benefit you.
- We are offering paid hours for the first time in our history.
We have, in the past, paid for admin services and managerial services. But we have never paid Personal Trainers to do work in the gym.
Our feeling has always been, this is your gym, your calling card and you should want to help maximize it.
Plus, you have full use of the facilities to create promotional content.
How much would you pay to hire a high definition camera, microphone & digital recorder?
How much would you pay for high end video editing software?
What would it cost to hire a studio to shoot videos or record audio?
How much would you pay in advertising to reach a targeted audience of over 10,000 people?
You get all this, a kitchen with utilities and, of course, use of the gym.
All this, plus our profit sharing scheme and paid PT sessions should be enough.
But, for one trainer, we are going to look to improve things further.
We will offer to pay you for up to 12hrs per week.
Ensuring that, not only do you have no costs. Not only do you have full use of the facility and resources.
But you can ensure you hit at least £100 per week while you are looking to build your client base.
Is this a huge income? No!
But again, if you are seeing this as a job, you are not the career and reputation driven trainer we are looking for.
This is an extra layer to your safety net, that is all.
It is to remove the stress of finding an instant client base.
As you build your client base we’ll remove some of the hours (so long as you are earning more than we are cutting).
In Short
To summarize (for clarity). We are looking for an enthusiastic, driven personal trainer to join our team.
The advantages of joining us are:
- No monthly rent
- Full facility resources available for brand building
- An exiting online audience and high traffic website to host your content and promote you.
- A profit sharing set-up to ensure you profit from a growing member & client base.
- PT clients passed on via our marketing and promotion
- Pay level for training clients increases with your experience level. (An ultimate target of £50K per year from around 25 sessions per week + bonuses)
- An entry level offer of up to 12 paid hours per week. To limit short-term stress from cash-flow as you look to fill your diary.
Interested?
If this is of interest and you’d like to know more, or discuss further, please get in touch.
Get In Touch!
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