Always Losing Clients? Here's how to fix it.

Most online fitness coaches tend to lose their clients at about months three and four. If this is happening to you, then it is almost impossible to scale past 5 to 10k per month because all of your energy is spent on continually having to replace these clients. For myself when I was coaching I had clients that were with me for more than five years online. So I'm going to run through in this video the five things that I feel had my clients want to check in, got better results and were the reasons that they stayed with me long term. Number one is I had a short check in form and I audit their check in process and I look at the forms so on that the clients are expected to fill in. They're really long type forms that just ask monotonous questions. That's like scale of 1 to 5, how is your sleep? Scale of 1 to 5 how is your digestion? Scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate the week? How is your adherence? You know, list out three big wins from the last seven days. In what capacity can I help you further? This is fine for the first one or two check ins but once a client's been with you for two months, three months, those forms become A repetitive and monotonous and B they take too much time. My clients is, I would literally ask them for current program goal. Last week's body weight, this week's body weight, last week's circumference measurements, this week's circumference measurements, average daily steps, any deviations done. It was like 5.6 max. They could do the whole form in four minutes and it allowed me to just cut the chase, see what the issue was and just correct it. Whereas the problem is is that I see so many coaches have question after question after question after question when it comes to the check in. They're not actually taking any of it into account. So if a client was degrade their sleep 4 out of 5, one week 3 out of 5 and another back to 4 out of 5, their digestion was 3 out of 5. Most coaches don't actually change anything in the check in. I've seen this, you know, every order that I've done, I look at what the clients fed back, I look at the advice given and it's still talking about the same things which is always don't worry that you had a meal off plan at the weekend, blah blah blah blah blah. Go and audit your current check in form and make sure you are only asking for the questions that are actually going to dictate the changes that you're going to make this week. The second thing is where we have become so efficient with, you know, tech and so on in the coaching space, whether it's conditional logic, whether it's just using, you know, simple type forms and so on. Because what tends to happen is a client is confined to, you know, a text based field on a type form that they quickly type in on their phone or whatever. So the chance of them actually opening up and going through any of the stuff, you know, within their personal life is like zero. They're not going to do it. Whereas when I was working with my clients, they would have the simple form to fill in, but then I would encourage them to attach just like a brain download a word vomit. And this was often the most therapeutic thing for them because they didn't have a chance to do it to anybody else. So I would have my clients talk about their annoying colleague at work, the weekend that they just had, and the amazing restaurant that I should go check out myself, the Marvel marathon that they're doing with their two sons. Those things that are like infinitely more important than the whether they had a one off plan meal. Not only would I encourage you to trim down your form, I would also give them space. Whether it's a voice note, whether it's a loom to you, whether it's an email, whether it's a text based WhatsApp, but give them an area to be able to just, just then basically really, really overlooked, massively important. Next up is I solved one problem. So it's like a seven to ten minute loom every single week of them just trying to fix everything. And here's the problem. Problem number one is that outside of the first one, two or three weeks, our clients are busy. The chances of them sitting down like I am now on a laptop and listening intently for eight minutes to you listening to it, sorry, on their phone, when they're on the commute, when they're on the school run, when they're cooking dinner, that sort of thing. So these check ins need to become more concise, more to the point. They need to solve one issue. So you need to use the coach framework, which is this instead of doing a check in where you're trying to fix everything and you're trying to like, don't worry about eating out the weekend and are you weighing your food, are you tracking your sources and all these things, your job as a coach is number one to highlight the core issue. So you go through their check in and you want to figure out what is the one thing that If I just fix this one thing this week will move them in the right direction. That's your first job as a coach is to identify and highlight the one core issue. The second thing that you want to do is you then want to relate this to an actual story that, that you've gone through yourself, where you've gone through the same problem or where you've helped a client manager. So it could be eaten out the weekend, for example. And it could be, hey, actually my client that I worked with, you know, last month, she also had X, Y, Z with client dinners and here's what we did instead. And then the final thing. So once you've identified the one core issue, once you've related this to an actual story of yourself or a current client going through the process, you then want to agree on the, the future, the change. And here I would give one, two or maximum three action steps to fix this one core issue. But instead, what most coaches do want to check in is go through it and they'll try and like, fix something here, fix something here, fix something here, fix something here, fix something here, fix something here. Okay, good job, Keep going. You know, let me know if you need anything during the week. And I'm speeching it and it's just too much. You know, this just overwhelms the client. Whereas instead if you go through it, you highlight this one issue and then make the three action steps to like correct the issue. That is how you actually make change. And it's how a client feels heard and is clear on what they need to do next. Fourth is I used all four levers of progression. So what I mean by this is nutrition training, cardio and supplementation. Again, when I audit online coaches and I look at their check in process and I look at where a client of theirs started at week one in terms of what were their calories macros, what were the cardio recommendations, what were the baseline supplements that they were recommended, how does their training program looked? And then I go and Compare it. Week six, week 12 and so on. Nine times out of 10, it's pretty much the same. It's maybe their program has just been like overhauled twice because of every four weeks. That's what every coach does, but that's about it. There's no real like progression amongst the nutrition with the training. There's no, here's our foundational program now here's, you know, the advancement we're going to do on this. Here's the advancement we're going to do on that. There's no methodical progression through training. It's just a completely overhauled routine every four weeks. And then there's no changes to supplements. Cardio is often just from day one it's like, hey, you should hit 10k steps. No matter that they come to you doing 1500 steps per day and you're expecting them to 10x that from day one versus you're averaging 15k. Right, sorry, 1500 right now. Let's just hit 3k. If we can just do 3k steps per day for the next four weeks, we're good. That's progress. And then you get to week five and it's like, okay, can we take this from 3K steps now to five straight away? You 5X them from day one versus day one, giving them 10K steps and they don't follow it. So it's to make small progressions across nutrition, training, cardio and supplements so that the client feels like they're moving forwards each week. Just you trying to put out fires on every check in, trying to solve every problem. But in reality you're going to say the same thing next week, the same thing next week, the same thing next week. And ultimately, if you look big picture at the plans that you gave to the client from day one, it's exactly the same. But you're just spending each week just trying to fix everything. The client gets overwhelmed and never truly progresses in one area. And then the fifth and final thing is, where possible, I met up with my clients in person. You know, don't get me wrong, being online is amazing. Being able to work from your laptop, from your phone is phenomenal. But there's something really magical about meeting your clients face to face without a screen. So, you know, I used to do photo shoots with certain clients and then I would take them for a meal afterwards. We would do group shoots where I'd have five or six of my female clients all meeting at the same gym to do like group shoots. And then we'd all go for a meal. We would do training workshops. So I'd say to my clients, hey, I'm going to be at this gym in this location, which not all of them could get to. You know, Sunday at 2pm, let's go through a bit of a training workshop together. And I would correct them on that. Sometimes we would do just coffee meetups, you know, hey, for all my clients here, I'm going to be in this coffee shop, you know, Monday afternoon, love to grab your coffee. And then some of the most important ones were just actually personal catch ups. So one of my clients, Hatan, who was with me for probably five and a half years, him and I every Christmas would meet up and we'd have a steak in an old fashioned at Hawksmoor in London. Again, I just don't see enough other coaches like meeting their clients face to face. So just to quickly recap, number one, I think it's really important that you go through your current client check in form and you go, where are the inefficiencies here? How can I make this easier, more simple for the client to fill in so it's faster for them and so that ultimately I can make my job easier? Number two is once I've made the form easier, does my client have anywhere where on a personal level they can just offload to me and we can actually truly have a chance to build rapport versus me giving sort of one dimensional answers, you know, based on their Typeform responses? Number three would be are you guilty of doing really long loom check ins where you just say the same thing every week and you're not really giving them any key takeaways and things to fix? If so, I want you to start identifying the one key problem and then giving them one, two or three steps that's going to fix that problem. They focus on that for seven days and then in the next check in you're solving the next problem and then the next one. Trying to do everything at once is a shotgun approach. It's just going to overwhelm both of you. Are you using all four levers of progression? So if I was to go look at one of your current clients from week one, week six, week 12, you know, week 18? Am I going to see progressions within their training? That makes sense. Am I going to see progressions with how you are coaching them on nutrition? Am I going to see changes and tweaks in the supplements based on how they're responding? Am I going to see a progression in how you set up their, their either their neat or their conscious cardio or whatever? And then the last one would be, you know, when was the last time you met up with, with any of your current clients? When was the last time you started to build a community with them and had them meet up with each other? If you're not doing any of this, I would look here, first solve these five things and suddenly you're going to have clients that are leaving at month three and four, stay with you until month seven and eight and then you can fix the next problems and get them to months, you know, 11 and 12 and so on and so on. So I hope this has been useful. If you like this sort of, you know, very tactical information, go check out the rest of my videos on my channel. I think you'll get a ton of value from them.