In this instructional video, Mark Ottobre, founder of Enterprise Fitness, explains why systematic tracking is essential for personal trainers and small fitness businesses. He argues that data transforms vague observations into actionable decisions that drive revenue growth. Ottobre outlines the core metrics every trainer should record daily and review weekly: the number of leads generated, appointment show‑up rates, sales conversion percentages, average dollar value of each sale, total expenses, and overall profit margin. He demonstrates how improving conversion rates or increasing average sale size can double revenue without extra marketing spend. He emphasizes monitoring trends to anticipate seasonal dips (e.g., low September sales) and adjust advertising budgets accordingly. Ottobre also discusses the mindset of viewing profit as a necessary reward that fuels motivation, and he promotes a detailed checklist available on EnterpriseFitnessAcademy.com that consolidates his marketing, sales, admin, and service processes for immediate implementation.
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Why I track absolutely everything in my business. Hi, I'm Mark Ottobre, owner and founder of Enterprise Fitness. I run a 7-figure personal training studio, have trained over 300 first-place winners in physique sports, Olympians, Commonwealth Games gold medalists, and even a former prime minister. In this video, I'm going to explain to you why tracking is crucial element of your business. Now I'm going to speak to you as a trainer. If you have a client who wants to get exponential results and you ask them to keep a food plan and they show up and they don't keep the food plan, how hard is it to manage the client's results. It's extremely hard, you know, if you don't know what they're eating, if you don't know what they're doing. Likewise with the training plan, if they just go into the gym and pick random weights and random exercises, you really don't know what they're doing and what results they're going to get and what the outcome is going to be. I used to hate tracking as a trainer. It used to drive me nuts, and I couldn't think of anything worse. Now I absolutely love it because I've turned those numbers into actionable words that I'm able to implement in my business. So the data is what informs you to make decisions. So you need to look at tracking number one as what is the purpose? Not to have these nice spreadsheets and just sit there and go, wow, I've got all this data in my business and I don't do anything with it. The whole point of having data is to make better decisions. The more information you have, the better decisions you can make. Starting off, what are some crucial things that you should track? Every business, every personal trainer, every business, no matter what industry, you want to track how many leads you get into your business every day and every week. If you just increase how many leads you get into a business, and you increase those leads, you're gonna get more people. And if you kept everything the same in terms of sales conversions and cost of service, you would increase your business. So the first thing you want to track is how many people are hearing about you. How many Facebook dings do you get? And how many times does the phone ring? It is not tracking if you do not write it down. You need to be able to refer back to it. The answer cannot be to this, well, I think 3. If you think it is wrong. It needs to be written down and recorded, done daily, reported weekly. The next thing you want to track out of those leads, how many of those leads show up to appointments? And that's a very important thing to track because that's going to inform the next part, which is out of those appointments, what is our sales conversions like? If we have a team member, or if we're looking at growing a team, we need to track that team member's sales conversions because we want to train them. We want to get them better at the leads that we're paying for to come into the business. And ultimately, if we can increase that sales conversion, we're going to increase the business without even spending money. All we're doing is spending time, or if we're doing the sales, we're upskilling ourselves to have a higher sales percentage. Easy example, if you have 10 leads coming to your business and currently your conversions are at 25%, you're selling 2.5 people a week. If you can increase that to 50%, you're going to sell 5 people a week. So immediately, if you can increase the skill you're going to double your business through that skill. So this is often the first thing if I'm working with a trainer or a business, it's often the cheapest thing because it's a skill to learn. The third thing we want to track is what is the average dollar sale in your business? Are you charging $100, $150, $200 an hour for your PT? And what do your personal training packages look like? Are they $500, $1,000, $2,000, $5,000? What is the average dollar sale of that personal training package? Because that gives you insight into if you do 20 sales, at $2,000, you can then predictably predict— predictably predict— you can predict your income for that month. If you undershoot, if you overshoot, you know where things should be. So average dollar sale is hugely important in every business, and you want to track that over the weeks, months, and years to see the trends. And the biggest thing is, when you do track data, is trends are your friend. If you know what the trend is coming, you can then combat that. If you statistically have a low month every September, well then you know to ramp up your ad budget in September because you're going to need more leads to be at the target that where you want to be. The next thing is tracking all of your expenses. Now the reason we want to track our expenses is because we want to track our profit margins. Now I've said before in previous videos, the whole point of business is to make a profit. And I say that hand on my heart emphatically. Every business should be in business to make a profit. It does not make you a bad person, or that everyone carries around this guilt. As far as I, I'm concerned, I love what I do, and nothing would burn me out faster than to pour my whole heart and soul into something that I love and not be loved back. That'd be really demotivating for me. The fact that I can pay for my house and make an income and make a living doing what I love inspires me to work harder and to give more, as I hope it does for you as well. In saying that, you do want to make a profit, and you want to take money out of your business for your own lifestyle as a reward, because that's going to fill up your cup and make you work harder. We need to track our expenses and making sure that we're able to take a profit out of our business, because therein lies the last thing I would suggest for, say, beginner tracking, is what is your profit margin, and driving at creating lower expenses and higher turnover. So if you've enjoyed today's tips, I have weekly videos coming out on this channel. Make sure you hit subscribe. And if you're a personal trainer and you're new to here, head over to the Enterprise Fitness Academy website where I've put together a very detailed checklist detailing everything that I do with my mentees from marketing, sales, admin, management, and the service side from training and nutrition and things that you want to implement into your business right away to make it firing on all cylinders. If you want that resource, head over to enterprisefitnessacademy.com and look for the checklist. I'll see you on the next video.
