Mark Ottobre, founder of Enterprise Fitness, argues that personal trainers should treat training as a business first. Most successful trainers skip the social media hype and focus on systems, hiring, and client relationships instead. Without business fundamentals, trainers end up doing something else entirely.
In personal training, you either have the career of having a business or the business of having a career. My name is Mark Ottobre. I'm the owner and founder of Enterprise Fitness, and I've been educating trainers for well over a decade, and I'm here to raise the standard of personal training. This approach is for trainers who want to reach that upper echelon of personal training, who really want to make personal training their career. It's for the trainers who need systems, methodologies, and practices that streamline their business. An example of getting your businesses in order is the ability to bring on team members, is the ability to bring on more clients, to be able to service a greater area, and ultimately, fundamentally have more impact on your client and get better results. That's what having proper business systems, methodologies, and structures in place allows you to do. The problem with personal training and business is that business for personal trainers often can feel really icky and yucky and something that isn't a part of them. And I get it. In personal training, we know our clients very well. It's the whole idea of personal training. We're seeing them multiple times a week, and people often think that business is separate to that, but it's not. Because what good sound business practices enable you to do is actually deepen your connection with your client and provide an even better service, and they can put an even bigger smile on their face and get even better results. So there's two ways this can go. Way 1 is you don't learn business, and statistically you end up like 80% of trainers, and that is you go find another occupation or something else to do. The second way is that you learn business, but not only that, you realize that you are in business. You're in the business of people, and what learning sound business systems and structures do is put your client at the center of your universe so you can help get them better results and also streamline your own life to be more effective. And that's the thing, most trainers think that success in the fitness industry and personal training is having hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, or to get there, learning really complicated marketing strategies. Where the truth is, some of the most successful trainers and some of the wealthiest trainers I know actually aren't on the social media platforms, but they earn great money and get amazing results for their clients. And the simple reason is because they're dedicated to their craft and have the business fundamentals and structures around them to get them there. So I hope to see you in class where I can help you personally develop your business acumen to take your game to the next level.
