Maximizing Coach Success: Marketing Strategies and Overcoming Challenges

You're listening to the PT Profit podcast, episode number 374, Maximizing Coach Success, Marketing strategies and overcoming challenges. Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hi, I'm Beverly Simpson, former fitness manager turned online personal training business owner. And this podcast is where smart fitness professionals, including trainers and clinicians, discover how to increase client performance in movement, package and position their products and services and get out of their own way so that they can increase their revenue to live a life that they love without sleazy sales. Welcome to the PT Profit Podcast.

Welcome back to the PT Profit Podcast. This episode is actually an Instagram live that Aram Gregorian and Beverly did together. So in this episode they had a discussion about how coaches can optimize their businesses and improve their marketing tactics to attract more clients. And throughout the Live, Beverly shared her expertise within the business here at B. Simpson Fitness and emphasized the importance of prioritizing client needs, maintaining strong values and avoiding self centered approaches. So Beverly offers practical tips for content creation and overcoming limiting beliefs, drawing from her extensive experience in the fitness industry and within helping people build their business. So overall, this is going to be a very valuable, very quick episode. So we hope you enjoy.

Happy Tuesday folks. Have my friend Beverly Simpson coming on today. She's going to talk about how coaches can make the most out of their businesses, how they can improve their marketing tactics, how they can attract more clientele and just be overall better coaches, serve.

More people at a higher level and.

Be able to do this while earning themselves a good and comfortable living. And the more comfortable of living as coaches we make, the better we can serve our clientele base. Chatting with us about the things that she helps coaches with every single day.

Yo.

Hi. How are y'? All?

Good. What's going on?

Oh, you know, the use. How about you? Can you hear me okay? Yes, perfect.

So my agenda was to cover like three main topics and then keep it around 10 or 15 minutes. Very tactical and very helpful. So you're give us a little like, give us a quick like elevator pitch on who it is that you are and what it is that you do.

Yeah, sure. So thank you by the way, for hosting me. It is honestly a pleasure and privilege to be here with you to serve your community. My name is Beverly Simpson. I am a former district fitness manager for Crunch. So I was responsible for hiring and developing personal trainers and fitness managers in the Manhattan and New Jersey area and I ran size gyms and then I left after I had my second daughter and I built two multiple six figure businesses online. In the online Space first in the B2C sector and then into the B2B sector.

Okay. So plenty of experience, more on the business development side of things and the employee development side of things. So perfect segue into talking about skill set that you find coaches today are missing.

Okay, I love that. Specifically in the business side.

Let'S start with just overall, like, like what in your, in your experience, what makes a coach a good coach?

Okay, so I'm going to say I'm going to speak to this in terms of two. Two veins. Okay. Now you and I had talked about this previously because I think that one of the things that makes a good coach a good coach first and foremost is operating from the do no harm, the do no harm experience as well as with the client as the forefront of the, the transaction. Meaning operating from this place of knowing, like, hey, I'm here to serve you. I'm here to do what it takes to help you get into, to get to your goal, whatever that goal may be. I think what happens to so many of us, and I think this is the human condition, and I'm saying us because I'm not exempt, is that we just get to be very self focused and we tend to think every time we get into to language of why isn't this working? I'm doing all the right things, I'm trying, blah, blah, blah. All that noise and nonsense that we often get into is oftentimes self focused. Sometimes the first shift can just be what do I need to say today? Who do I need to be to communicate, to help, to help the person that I'm looking to help. That just, that is automatically the number one shift that gets you out of me thinking into you thinking who can I serve today? Right. So I feel like that's first and.

Foremost and I think that probably comes down to as a coach having a pretty stringent or specific set of values and Stanleys.

Yes, yes.

Which I think sometimes we have coaches that don't spend. I mean I didn't for a very long time have specific standards or values that I wanted to uphold. And once, once I did define what those were very clearly, it helped me show up much, much better in my business and for myself.

Yeah. And, and I, I think too that it's, it's, you know, as you, you started off with like what are the skills? I feel like sometimes it's a mark of just starting and everybody starts somewhere and it's not, it's not a bad thing. But even if you look at ancient wisdom, right. You go back to to masters, like, if you look at Buddha, whatever, like, take faith out of it for a second. It's the people that say, you know, I. It's like, as I get more seasoned, as I grow, those are. I. I start to recognize and realize, I don't know. And the. And the true masters are the ones that can live on the razor's edge of knowing that this is my expertise as well as. As I'm going to continue to grow and learn and be okay with that. I. I know for me, when I was young, I got into dogmatic and young, not in age, but young in my career. I was like, this is my dogmatic approach. This is right. I had to be right instead of trying to serve. And I do I. A lot. That. That gets lost in the online space.

And when it comes to, like, content creation, I think you see a lot of coaches creating content for other coaches, and it's not content that's really helpful to the end user who's really just missing the basics more often than not. And we don't need to make things more complicated than people already feel they are. So when it comes to delivering a message that resonates with your audience, what are some tips that you have for coaches that are struggling in that department?

Okay, great. So I think that you hit the nail on the head when you said that we are oftentimes we're creating for our colleagues and not for our clients. And so the first thing that I would say if you are struggling to really communicate your message, the first thing I would actually tell you is to just kind of just mute all your friends. Just mute all your friends and just mute and even mute the people that you look up to. Even if you're new, just for now, you're not. You're not going to mute them forever. And this is not about scarcity or feeling like, oh, I'm not enough. Like, all of that. We're just gonna mute them for a second so that we can really just communicate with the people that we're wanting to work with. Go and talk to the people that you want to work with. I don't mean be sleazy and dm don't DM a hundred people and be like, cute kid. Hey, let's go, like, maybe get on a call. That's all I'm saying. I'm saying go and observe your client in their environment. So how do you do that? Well, I'm going to give you some tangible things that a lot of people don't talk about. People talk about Facebook Groups. Yeah. Cool. Go look at the scary site Reddit because that's where everyone's going to be honest. Okay. And don't. And just go look up questions that they're actually asking. You probably already know to go look at Facebook groups. Awesome. Why don't you go to Amazon and Google on Amazon, people who've written books about your topic and go read the reviews of what your clients say and ask, because that's going to be real feedback that potential clients are having. Go into like parent Facebook groups or just your community Facebook groups. Go to a party. Okay. And have a conversation. I, I mean, it sounds so, I, I laugh because it sounds so simple, but it really is. It gets to be that simple.

I agree. I mean, most of my content comes from conversations I've had with real people. It, it, it almost always comes from. Somebody had said something to me in a grocery store that sparked a three minute conversation. Somebody that stopped me on the boardwalk, at the beach while I was walking my dogs, that asked me about, you know, how is it that you stay as big as you do or what, like just pedestrian conversations that I think so many coaches are just overlooking. Like, we have so much content in our head already. And I just, these people have this idea that if it doesn't have, if it isn't a perfect and pretty message, I don't want to bring it out into the world because it isn't good enough. When in reality you're going to say the same hundred things for the next 20 years of your life on repeat. And that's really all it comes down to. So when people are struggling with that idea of like, if it's not the perfect piece of content, or if I don't have the perfect offer, the perfect website, you know, why should I even bother being a coach? Because a lot of coaches never quite take off into that next tier because they're always having these limited belief systems. How can coaches break through those limiting beliefs and get to themselves for that next level?

Okay, so what I'm hearing, there's, there's two things that I heard in that question. The first one was, you know, how do you know? A lot of people get into the perfectionism, like, it's not perfect, I got to get it perfect. And something else you had even said previously was, you know, what if it's not good enough? So usually I find that those two things go hand in hand. And then I also want to circle back because sometimes what comes through there is that sense of imposter syndrome of like, oh, I'M not enough. I'm not enough. I need to get it perfect and I need to work harder. And I'm going to talk about this through the lens of those excellent coaches because what I find oftentimes are the coaches who care about the science of training, who actually care about getting your clients results, they're the ones that suffer through this the most because they're oftentimes the ones that are. I just next, let me get the next certification. Let me go to that next live event. Let me just keep learning and learning and learning. And that's part of being great. That's what's going to make you be a good coach, to be a great coach. But you get to live in the and where you are an expert now and going to continue to grow. That's what's really going to propel, propel you to that next level. So if you're feeling those feelings of imposter syndrome, I would acknowledge them and I would say, oh, this means that I actually care. Because I tell you, those shirtless grocery store walkers, they don't have imposter syndrome. They're not caring about, you know, their clients. So the fact that you feel this is a good thing, it means that you care and you get to continue to be an expert at your current level and continue to grow. So what I would say to you and what I would offer to you, if you're feeling that is, number one, how do you know that it's good enough? When will you know that it's good enough? At what capacity? Like what, what is going to happen that's going to say, oh, I'm good enough. Right. Oftentimes, especially for high achieving, smart coaches, they just keep pushing the barrier. And so I would say, number one, acknowledge that you're, that you're feeling imposter syndrome. And you know, thank it because it means that you care. Recognize that where you are right now is exactly where you need to be. And then number three, this is going to be some like your third tangible action steps. Especially if you're feeling like, I don't want to copy my colleagues, I don't want to, you know, be boring or, or basic. I'm going to say two things. Number one, when you're the first person to acknowledge the truth about what you're experiencing, it takes, gives you your power back. So for example, I'm feeling really nervous to be here live with you. This is, it's been a minute since I've done something like that. That's me sharing my experience and Owning the truth. And nobody gets to throw that in my face because I said it first.

So, so basically like radical often is hiphy and radical vulnerability.

Just being honest, right? You just be honest. Like, oh, you know what? I'm sorry, I changed my mind. I used to think this and now I think this and that's okay. The second thing I'm going to tell you to do is to just give credit and context, period. I went to this amazing summit called the Real coaches summit in 2025 in Vegas and it was amazing. I met this person and this person and this person and these were my big takeaways. So then, so that's my credit. I'm going to give my credit and then I'm going to be like, then I took it and I put it on my client and here's what I discovered. Now it's my context. You and I could listen to Alan Aragon speak about the exact same thing. And through our own context and our own experience, our own filters, we're going to experience something and we're going to implement it and we're going to have different options or different experiences of what happened, right? And then we get to put that into our, into our work and then that's going to become ours. We're going to give credit and then owning.

I think it's comes down to the perception that we all have through our own lens and what we're able to then do with that information. Because a lot of us, because we know that like the physiology of this stuff doesn't ever change. We know that the science of this stuff isn't beaten anytime, rebutted or refuted anytime soon. But our ability to apply this to the general population is the hard part. So I'll leave you with this one last question. Throughout your career, what was one of your biggest mistakes that you made and what did you learn? What did you learn from it?

Oh my gosh. I'm going to tell you two things, okay. And it's a per. It's a perfect thing because we've. I've. I've shared this with you before, but I'll share it again. Is that, is that in addition to like self. Self importance, there's also really self reflection that also is really important. I think that we are very quick to point fingers and forget to look at the three fingers that, that are pointing back at you. And for me, I think one of the biggest mistakes I made and I have made is forgetting to, to be realistic about expectations and be. And be realistic about communicating, communicating expectations. Because of our different lenses. So for example, I, I, it's really easy for me to generate any amount of revenue in any amount of time. Like for me, I see the numbers. Business building is super easy for me. The skill required to communicate messaging to a client and to help facilitate a transformation is very easy for me. What's easy for me is not easy for others. So sometimes I had a mismanaged expectation experience. And it's very easy for a lot of coaches in our industry to put that on the client, when in reality I think it's on me because I was like, oh, this is easy. But I just did not take into consideration their client's skillset level and a client's skillset ability to acquire skill. That's on me. And this is true for, for business building as well as for clients. Like, I could tell a client like, hey, you're going to lose £20 in 12 weeks, no problem. But did I take into consideration the circumstances that they're living? Is this a single mom who's got three jobs and also got four kids who's never lifted before in their entire life? That's on me as a coach. And so I feel like that is that. And then because I had made those types of promises, I would push people past their limit of capability and capacity, and that's on me. So those, those were, that's like one of my biggest lessons, definitely one that.

I'm actively learning now and I'm 15 years in. So if, if you're hearing this and you're a couple years in, you're going to fall in a few hundred more times and these are all good things to do, so. Well, Beverly, I appreciate the time. Thank you. I, I will make sure to tag you in this so people can come find you so they know that you are a helpful and available resource about this stuff. Because there's definitely not a lot of people in this space that I trust or that I would vouch for, but you are one of them. So thank you.

Thank you. I really appreciate that.

Yourself a good rest of your day.

You too.

Bye.

Bye.

Thank you for listening to the PT Profit podcast. If you like this episode, chances are your friends will too. So it would be a huge service to us if you would please leave us a review and share with your friends on your social media channels. When you leave us a review, be sure to take a screenshot of it and email that screenshot to my team at info@bsimpsonfitness.com and we'll send you a very special Instagram podcast that will show you how to create compelling content so that your ideal clients come to you. And you go from wanting clients to a wait list of clients ready for your services. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you on the next episode.