How To Become A Personal Trainer

Hello, personal trainer. My name is Mark Ottobre, owner and founder of Enterprise Fitness, Australia's premier personal training studio, and founder of personaltrainermentoring.com. Today I am here to share with newbie personal trainers my insights in getting started in the industry and how to get started in the industry. Personal training is a career that has given me a lot of— well, it's given me everything I have, basically. I've made my career and living from personal training and grown my own successful personal training studio, and I've worked in pretty much every facet of of the fitness industry, from writing for Muscle Mags, for lecturing at places like the AIF, to everything in between, working at different big box gyms and working at local gyms, to then eventually opening up my own studio, that is Enterprise Fitness. I've also had the pleasure with personaltrainermentoring.com to consult for personal trainers around the world and help them build their business. So one of the people that I come into contact quite frequently is people who are considering a career change and wanting to become a personal trainer, 'cause they see it as a kind of kind of cool lifestyle and kind of lifestyle shift for them and they like fitness and all that kind of stuff. So this is what their video is about. So personal trainers who wanna enter the industry and giving you some advice there. So I think the first thing I really wanna share is that personal training is not for everyone in the sense that the hours are somewhat sporadic because the hours are when your client can train. So for example, you know, it's early mornings, you'd probably be up at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning and in the gym at 6 because you'll have some people who wanna train before work work. So you might do 6, 7, 8 o'clock, have a break, train yourself. Maybe you'll have a couple of during-the-day clients if you're lucky when you get started, and then you're back in the gym at night training clients to maybe, you know, 6, 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock, and then finish at 9 o'clock. So it's not the most, I suppose, socially friendly hours. But the thing is, for me, it was never an issue because I love the gym and it's where I wanted to be. And I think if you are going to make a career out of personal training, that's probably where you want to be. I do need to quantify or qualify one thing in this. I I really am speaking to people who wanna be personal trainers, not so much group exercise instructors. Group exercise instructors, they do operate under a different set of rules in the sense that often they're gonna be employed by clubs. So let's talk about the different models you can enter the industry as. So firstly, you have the big box model. The big box model is like your Fitness First, your Goodlife, your Jets, whatever it is, where you're gonna be paying a rent to the club. So that rent is to basically get access to the members there and get, you know, operate your own business inside that club. That is the, currently I would say it's probably the most common way to be employed as a personal trainer. Or you're not really employed, so I shouldn't say employed because you're actually a subcontractor. You're leasing the space at that Fitness First or Goodlife or whatever it is, and you're running your business through the club. So in that scenario, the client or the member at that gym would pay you their money directly and you're gonna take care of your own tax, your own superannuation, all those factors, money management, billing the client, admin. So there's obviously a lot to do. There's a lot of sides to that. Usually when you're going into these big box gyms or you see trainers at these big box gyms, they're usually what you call a franchisee agreement or a franchisor agreement, and that's how they're running. The other cases you might see is studios. So at Enterprise Fitness, I employ, I straight out employ all my staff here and I employ them as casuals for the reason being that's not because I wanna get rid of any staff members anytime soon or at a whim, that's not at all, but just the nature of personal training. Personal training hours are somewhat sporadic. So I always say to people that if I was to employ someone Someone says a full-timer and let's say their set wage, let's just say it's $1,000 a week, right? One week they might do 40 hours, in which case I might be underpaying them. Another week they might do 20 hours, in which case I'm overpaying them. What really is the best way to do it is to figure out how many sessions people are actually doing and then pay accordingly to that. And obviously with something like personal training, sessions change week to week. And why do they change week to week? Well, because people change. You know, some of your clients might go away for a week, it's school holidays or they get sick or, You get an influx of new clients and everyone wants to train on the same week. So that is the nature of PT. And obviously the way you set it up, which I talk about in later videos, is as minimum commitments so that you can lock in session times for your clients, which is obviously good for them and good and stabilize your business. When people talk about big box, that's the agreement there. So if you're gonna apply for a job at a Fitness First or one of those big box gyms, it's good to know that you will be paying rent. Most cases they don't really do an employment system. The way they usually do it, by the way, is they usually start you start you off with something, I don't know, it's gonna depend on each gym. So I don't know the exacts on the way different gyms do it, but it is generally the way industry conducts itself is that you'll start with kind of like a rent-free period, but you need to do some hours on the floor and then you go to doing less hours on the floor and then you might pay half rent until the third month or whatever it is, you're paying full rent and doing, they're giving you no gym floor hours. And that's generally quite a normal way that when consulting with different PTs of how it's done. But again, you gotta check with the gym that you're at. Now, as I was saying before you might get employed at a studio. But you do need to realize that employments from studios are far and few between. And a lot of good, to be frank with you, a lot of good ones. I mean, the way we set it up at Enterprise is the gold standard. And we look after our staff very, very well and have further development education programs where our staff can impart in. But that's why we're the leaders in what we do. And our jobs get filled for PTs and coaches. They get filled very, very fast because frankly, there aren't a lot of ways at studios. And there's numerous reasons for that. 'Cause studio owners usually aren't well-versed in business and how to run these things. But those jobs do exist, but you gotta look for them and you gotta be damn good at what you do to get employed and get those opportunities. I know that's the way it is here. There are other studios where the, and the fees that they're gonna pay you is gonna be very broad range. I couldn't tell you because every studio kind of does their own thing and there isn't a set norm. So some studios might offer you, let's say $25 an hour, others might be offering you $50 an hour. It really depends. And also what you bring to the table. Are you gonna bring clients? Clients with you. So that's where you probably find this negotiation involved, and depending on whether they're gonna be able to subcontract or if you're gonna be able to subcontract, and that's something you're gonna need to speak to an accountant or lawyer about. But that's the way studios work is that it will be different on studio to studio. So if you're going into going, well, this studio does it like this, I expect this studio to do it like this, it probably won't be the case. Each studio will have their own way of doing it based on percentages. And you know what it comes down to, frankly, as a business owner, it comes down to how much can you afford to pay someone in terms of what is what is the session minimum that if I charge a client, let's say $100, then how much is left over for me to pay staff, for example. So that's gonna depend on the hourly rate. Now, they're probably the two most common ways. And then as I said, you have things like group instructor and then working as a gym floor rep and then everything else in the fitness industry apart from personal training. As I said, that's what I specialize in. So I can't really comment about group fitness instructors because usually those deals club to club. So look, they're the two most common ways of working in the industry. I hope that helps outlay a bunch of stuff. But basically, long story short, I'd love to hear more questions around what is going on for your scenarios and jobs that you're considering. But if you are at a small box gym and it's not structured the way you want it to be or the way you thought it would be, just do know that there are other ways. And personally speaking, I really do think that the big box gyms actually do offer an opportunity for people who wanna work hard. I think the biggest thing to understand about that is you will be running your own business inside a business. So you might say, but I'm not a business person, I just wanna get into training. Again, you're gonna have to work for a studio or something like this, but that is the most common way. And you know, you gotta learn about this stuff. And that's what I obviously assist with personaltrainermentoring.com. That's what I assist folks in doing. Anyway, love to hear your thoughts, love to get your questions, love to be able to give you more value. If you enjoyed, make sure you hit us up and download one of the freebies on personaltrainermentoring.com. We're giving away our personaltrainermentoring.com pack that has a full course in it, which is about structurally assessing your clients as well as a bunch of ebooks about how to get started, how to make more money as a PT, how to increase your rates, how to get more clients, and expensive mistakes PTs make. So you can check all that out. All you do gotta do is just leave your name and email and phone number and yeah, and then we've got our courses that are coming up, Sales Mastery, Training Mastery, Nutrition Mastery. It's all at personaltrainermentoring.com. Make sure you follow me on Instagram, it's Mark Ottobre. Next time, keep raising the standard of personal training.