Mark Ottobre, founder of Enterprise Fitness, shows personal trainers how to build a client base without paid ads. Offer free sessions to gym members and their birthdays, network with local businesses for referrals, and give current clients vouchers to hand out. He shares examples like getting clients from car-service shops and real-estate agents through conversation.
How to get more leads in your personal training business without spending a dollar on Facebook and getting frustrated. Hi, my name is Mark Ottobre. I'm the owner and founder of Enterprise Fitness. I run a 7-figure studio and have been a coach for 20 years. And in this video, I'm going to explain to you how to increase the leads in your business without spending a dollar on Facebook advertising or getting frustrated by the Ads Manager. I'm a little bit bewildered these days as to why trainers think the only mechanism to increase leads or clients inside of their business is Facebook and Instagram. While those platforms can definitely be helpful. They are not the only two ways to get leads inside of business. In fact, if you rely on those two things, your business is built on sand. So I'm going to explain. If you're a face-to-face trainer, there is an underrated opportunity right now which you can take massive advantage of, and that is offline marketing. If I was renting out of a big box gym, say a Fitness First, a Goodlife, a Snap, or whatever these places are called these days, you have a captive audience the minute you start paying rent to that gym. And that captive audience are the members that go there. So instead of focusing on the millions of people around the world and having some pseudo Instagram following of people who will never spend money with you, focus on people in the local area who already put their hand up and said that they are interested in what you're doing. Really, there is a concept called 1,000 true fans. You don't need millions of followers to be incredibly wealthy. You really only need 1,000 true fans. But even then, you need less than that as a personal trainer. If you had 30 clients you would be unbelievably busy and booked out, especially if the average client trains with you twice a week. That's 6 sessions a month, if done at all. So there's a massive opportunity in doing so. The frame of reference that I would have if I was at a big box gym, I would go into the gym like it's my party and I'm the host, and I want to make sure that everyone in the gym is having a good time. So what would that look like? Building relationships relationships with all the members, saying hello, being of value, helping people with their exercise execution even if they're not going to pay you money, and simply being of service when you're there, getting off your phone and making sure that everyone is having a good time and working towards their results. What ends up happening is people see that, and even if they don't have the money, quote unquote, to say train with you, they're going to refer you people. And people say, who should I train with? They say, have you checked out that person? They look really awesome, they're really helpful. So that would be the first opportunity. The second one is, if you're at a big box gym, is building a relationship with the administration team and management team and seeing if you can speak to the people or call the people who've recently signed up and offer them an introductory session to your personal training, or a birthday phone call offering them a free birthday session with you. Some really easy hacks if you're at the gym floor and you're already paying rent. That's the first thing that I would capitalize on. If you're not at a big box gym, what would you do then? Well, if I was at a local gym, you've still got members to serve. I'd still be building relationships because business is building relationships. But I would also go outside of that circle. And I'd look at local businesses within my area and seeing if I could network with them and become an actual customer of their business. If you want someone to refer customers to you, become a customer of their business and refer them clients. And you've got to truly build a relationship with someone. I've got many different practitioners where I am actually a customer of their business. And they send me customers by consequence. I can't tell you how many clients I've gotten by incidental things. For example, I've serviced my car and the guy who services my car has referred us multiple clients. When I bought my house, the guy, the agent actually trains with us. When I jump on a plane, I speak to people and they end up becoming clients. People become interested at the conversations that I have with them and they end up becoming a client or at least being very interested in what I'm doing. Don't underestimate these opportunities just because you're kind of in civilian clothing. If you are a business owner, you always need to be marketing. You always need to be building relationships or at least offering people the opportunity as to what you do and letting them know about what you do. And that can be really, really powerful in today's modern world, particularly in a very, very noisy digital world where it's becoming increasingly hard to do business. There is one more, and this is the super one that I wanna give you. If you already have existing clients, they are often the best resource of new clients. And my hack for this is to build out a referral voucher, which you give to your clients and obviously you're going to be limited on time because if you're delivering these sessions, you, you are going to be limited on time. So I would give out little vouchers that are complimentary, give people that they know an introductory session with you, and you'll be amazed at the value that your current clients get from that, but the new clients that brings in. If you've enjoyed today's tips, make sure you hit Training Game, Enterprise Fitness Academy. And if you haven't already, make sure you download the checklist. And if you don't know what the checklist is, it is a very, very detailed checklist that I've put together for personal trainers covering admin, marketing, sales, service, training, nutrition, all the things that you need to check off to make sure you can optimize your business, be handsomely paid, and also get your clients the results that they deserve. So if you want to check that out, you want to download that today for free, go to wwwenterprisefitnessacademy.com/checklist. Fitness Academy. I'll see you next week for the next video.
