How I Sold Millions in Personal Training (4 Key Lessons)

What's up everyone, my name is Mark Ottobre, and in this video I'm going to be teaching you how I've sold millions of dollars in personal training. So first, who am I? I'm the owner and founder of Enterprise Fitness. I've been a personal trainer and entrepreneur for 20 years. I've built Enterprise Fitness, Enterprise Fitness Academy, Wolfpack. I've authored the Enterprise Diet. I've worked with everyone from Olympic athletes, Commonwealth Games gold medalists, world champions, fitness models, to even a former prime minister. And everyone in between, transforming thousands of physiques and having business success along the way. So in this video, we're going to be unpacking how I've sold millions of dollars in personal training. And note, it's not just about being really good at sales, although it does help. So we're going to break down 4 key areas that you need. The first one is generating leads and creating a marketing machine. The second is converting those leads, AKA sales. The third is providing the service and offering that is so good that people want to continue with you and spend more and tell all their friends and family about you. And And fourth is the admin management side that makes shit run smoothly. Now I've summarized those four things because I do fundamentally believe it does come down to these four things. Of course, you can add more things in later, but these really are the big rocks that you want to focus on in terms of building. You have an impact on one of these areas, it's going to have an exponential impact on, on your business. Let's look at the first one. And this is one that I see a lot of trainers get wrong. They want to focus on Facebook ads. They want to focus on Google. They want to focus on a bunch of different things about generating and advertising, but really it is about capturing leads. Fundamentals is you want to make sure that you have a good conversion page, a landing page where people can leave their details before you go to things like paid traffic, because paid traffic can burn a hole in your pocket. Likewise, people focus on doing a lot of organic content. They increase their budget to $500, $1,000, $2,000 a month creating organic content, spend enormous amount of time doing so, but they don't have the system of actually capturing those leads and nurturing them over time and then creating them as customers. So we want to make sure before we start spending money into the marketing machine that those things covered. And it's absolutely crucial in terms of scaling a business that we're not spending money on things that give us a return on our time or return on our money. The second part, and this is one that, as I said, sales, that can have a tremendous impact on, on your whole business from the leads, the service administration side, and that's converting that client. And most people, most trainers I meet don't enjoy sales, which is really unfortunate because it can definitely be enjoyable once you learn the skill. Like anything in life, once you get good at something, it becomes fun. A lot of people have a lot of negative connotations attached with sales, which is unfortunate because it really is the start of a business relationship. And I know in our business we transform lives, and if we weren't good at sales, we'd miss a whole bunch of opportunities to impact the people that we've impacted and change the course of their lives. And from employing trainers to employing other, other people as part of our business, sales really does— it's such an important function. So you need to learn how to sell to clients and how to bring them on board and get them involved in your mission, service, vision of what you want to do for your company. But also how that is going to serve their life and how it's going to help them achieve their goals. So study the sales material. Obviously you can subscribe to this channel where I'm going to be laying out some of my sales tactics for personal trainers. The third one is product and service. Now there's really two types of trainers that I observe. One that is obsessed with business and sees the training side as a side thing, and the other who's obsessed with training and sees the business as a side thing. We want to marry the two. We want to get really good at service, like outstanding at service and not see this as separate to business. And we obviously want to be a smooth operator when it comes to business. We marry those two things together. That's where we're going to really have magic and the most power. So the service aspect is part of the business because if you can delight a customer, this is going to make the step one, acquiring customers cheaper, easier, faster, and needs less convincing. And also that sales process. If the client that's going to come to see you has been endorsed by a friend, they're far more likely to give you any resistance objections. I mean, you'd have to really screw it up in many cases but it does become a lot easier. The other benefit of that, not just from marketing and sales, if you can keep a customer and keep adding on new customers, obviously that's how you're going to grow your business. Now, inside of the service, for most trainers, you're not going to hit 7 figures by yourself. If you want a small business where it's just you, and even if you're charging $200, $300 an hour, let's say, it's going to be very hard to hit a 7-figure income as a one-person show. You are going to need to hire people to create that turnover because one of the constraints with service is your capacity. And this is obvious— obviously isn't spoken about, but if you nail step 1, which is generating leads, and step 2, turning those leads into, into customers, then step 3 can be a real issue for a number of businesses. And that's simply growing the capacity of how many people can you serve, because step 1 and 2 is relatively easy to scale. But that step 3, when you're trading time and you're servicing people— I certainly don't have anything against trading time for money. I think we're all trading time for money as soon as we go to work. It's just there are leveraged opportunities and non-leveraged opportunities, but it's still trading time for money. In saying that, if you want to grow the business from a service side, we need to look at the constraint, which is how many people we can take on. So the only way we can take on is to hire more people. That's part of your service. So service over time can evolve to management, which means management of your trainers and education and making sure the people you bring on are every bit, if not better, than you are. Fourth and finally is the management and administration. Now certainly when your business gets to a certain level, you can break away those two and make it admin, and number 5 would be management. But for the purposes of this video, I'm going to put admin and management as one. If you do have a team, I would approach management a separate topic because a team, you know, if you're over 10 people, 11, 12, whatever, as soon as you get over 10, it really does become its own thing and you need to have more systems in place to manage those people and make sure things are on track. With the administration side, this can be the undoing for a lot of trainers because they simply don't track things like re-signs or sales conversions or where their leads came from. Essentially, your administration, admin done well, makes the business run smoother. So if you have a client who's due on the 1st of July and you're not getting to them until the 2nd of July and you're asking them for money, well, you may have serviced some sessions that you're asking for the money and then have to back pay, which then creates a very bad experience for the client. So you want to delight the client at each step, and that's what good administration and management allows. It allows you to delight the client while going and doing what you love. So it's not something that can be skipped over. And also, if you get this wrong, it can be hugely costly because you can be servicing clients, you can be doing sessions and never getting paid for it and have to write off a whole bunch of cash. So this is certainly something that you don't want it to be cute, you don't want it to be charismatic, you don't want it to be clever. You want all your management systems and administration systems to be clear. You want to be clear on what you're trying to achieve and why. And all of these things ultimately should help the business run smoother. To summarize the 4 areas: focus on your leads, converting those leads into sales, delighting the customer with your service, and make shit run smoothly through your administration practices and systems and your management. If you want to supercharge your PT business, check out Enterprise Fitness Academy. We have whole range of courses covering training, nutrition, business, sales, marketing, and of course my Wolfpack program, which is 12 months mentoring with me where you get a whole bunch of stuff to really help you— me alongside you to help you really grow your business. And of course, if you enjoyed this video, want more great tips like this, make sure you hit subscribe and ring that bell. Until next video.