Mark Ottobre, founder of Enterprise Fitness, charged $550 an hour as a personal trainer by setting his own price and accepting rejections. He used high rates as a branding tool, focused on leveraged business over one-on-one training, and raised prices by $5 after each new achievement or credential.
As a personal trainer, I was able to charge $550 an hour. Hi, my name is Mark Ottobre. I am the owner and founder of Enterprise Fitness, and I've been a coach and trainer for 20 years now. I no longer coach or personal train anyone. I focus on running the business. But in that time, I've worked with everyone from world champions, Commonwealth Games gold medalists, Olympians, former prime ministers, and coached over 300 winners in physique sport. I've had to increase my prices a number of times on my business success in terms of trying to push higher levels in business and to bring on a team and do all the thing— great things that we're doing in Enterprise Fitness. The question I get sometimes from trainers: when is the right time to increase your prices? Now, the truth is there is no right time to increase your price. No one is going to bestow upon you and say, I believe in you, you can charge $200 an hour. You have to make that declaration yourself and put that forward and say, this is what I'm going to charge. And you also need to be willing that A lot of people will say no. In fact, my rate is a fuck-off rate. I didn't want and don't want people to do personal training with me. In fact, I don't want to do personal training because I want to run the business. And actually, my time is better spent running the business and growing the business and doing education for my team and, you know, broader community of trainers that I serve than it is to be one-on-one with a client. Now, if a client really wants my time, then they can pay my high price. But I personally believe my master coaches at Enterprise, they're going to be every good bit as good as I am And that's why I have that rate. Now, that's a justification. That's not the real reason. You could charge that, but there are going to be fewer people in the marketplace who are going to be able to afford it. So it's also a position of brand as well as a position of who do you serve. The more mid-tier you are, the broader the market and the more people you're going to be able to serve based on that price. The higher you go, the less people and the less maybe demand. And this is where you need to get good at marketing. And a lot of people in the industry kind of see marketing as this dirty thing that— but marketing really is just letting people know what you do, who you do it, and how you do it. And if you get good at marketing, you get better at serving your clients because to be good at marketing, you need to develop empathy for your customer. When to increase your price. Again, there is no magic time. It should be based around who you want to serve, what your brand strategy is. Are you in a place where you can afford to say no? Because if you're not, then you probably want to have some money saved, and that way you're taking a calculated risk. And also you want to look at what are the business demands, or what else could you be doing with your time? So if there are other actions in your business that are higher— I say higher priority, but essentially higher leveraged opportunities in your business— well, you definitely want to be looking at those higher leveraged opportunities in your business. Taking the short-term pay cut to take the long-term growth approach. Now, that takes a long-term mindset to take, and often people don't take that because the $100 an hour, the $200 an hour is really, really attractive. It's really, really easy to take. But if you're committed to growing a bigger business, you need to look at the leveraged opportunities, and that's a broader sense. So there is no magic time. I would say as a general rule for people, every course that you do, every title that you win, Increase your rates by $5. That's what I did, and it got me to my very, very high— giving you tidbits, insight into my personal training journey and how I've grown the business that I have. Make sure you subscribe to this channel. It's the Enterprise Fitness Academy, and share it with a friend. And before you go, I have a special gift just for you. It's at Enterprise Fitness Academy and it is the checklist. Now my checklist is a very, very, very detailed checklist of all the things that you want to be set up and do to optimize your personal training business from sales, marketing, service, administration, you name it, it's on the checklist. These are the things that you definitely want to tick off if you want to optimize your PT business and it's yours today for free. Just head over to Enterprise Fitness Academy and download. See you next week.
