Solo fitness trainers often track earnings casually on calendars, losing visibility into their business. A simple daily spreadsheet with columns for date, client name, charge, tax, and session number takes five minutes to update and reveals weekly earnings, client balances, and growth trends that inform pricing and hiring decisions.
So welcome to Module 8. This is business management for solo fitness professionals. Now I'm going to share— I'd like to say it's a funny story, but it's not really because it's not funny, but it is. But I had a student a little while back and I wanted him to tell me how much he was earning per week. And he said he was earning, I don't know, $1,500 a week. And I said, how do you know? And he said, oh, I keep all the numbers on my calendar. I said, what do you mean you keep it on your calendar? He goes, oh, you know, on my calendar I put the amounts of what everyone's earning and I total it up at the end of the week. And that's what I totaled. And I hit my head. That's not how you do it. It's not how you do it, right? Not even close to how you do it, right? right? So if you want to be successful, you need to manage your business properly. You need to keep data. So what I'm going to recommend is a Google spreadsheet, or you can use Numbers on Mac, or you can use Excel. It doesn't really matter, just a spreadsheet, right? On that spreadsheet, and you need to do this every single week, and there'll be an example of this in the PDFs that you can download and utilize. in a Google Doc, but you've got your— on the first column is going to be the date, right? So let's say Monday the 21st of whatever, right? August. Then the next column, it's going to have the client's first and last name. The next column is going to be the amount that the client is being charged. So let's say they signed up for a 4-time-a-week package, and the 4-time-a-week package is $100 per session. So it's $100. The next column, you could put the tax that you pay on that, so any GST. The column after that would be if they've got any money in their accounts, and then the column after that is if they owe any money. The next column is going to be what session number that was for that day. So let's say, you know, session 1 of Monday, whatever it is. And then yeah, finally, that's in any notes. You can have final column of notes, and that's how you keep it. And then at the bottom of each day, you're going to have a summary. So let's say you train 5 clients, each of them at $100. It's gonna be $500 for that day, right? And you've got $500 for Monday, $500 for Tuesday, $500 for Thursday. And at the end of that, like let's say you did 20 sessions in total, it's $2,000. And at the top you can see how much is in everyone's accounts. It's a very, very simple way for solo trainers to do it. It's not convoluted. Again, you can download the Excel spreadsheet that we've got on the website there and use it. I use that from what, 2006 to probably, 2015, '16. Like, I mean, we were even doing like when we had multiples of like 12 trainers. I mean, our system's a little bit more updated today, having different staff members and people working on our stuff where we're a bit more sophisticated being at the level that we're at now. But the system I'm showing you is it's fundamental, right? Just you want to keep track of what every client's doing, their session amounts, how much is in credit. So, so important. Just do it every week. It's just discipline. Again, you're going to put it into your diary, into your schedule. This is up to you. And it's really exciting, you know, to look at what you're earning every week, to look, oh, you know, I earned $1,000, $2,000, whatever. Understand this is how much you earned this week. And if business goes down, you know, every single week how much money you're earning. And if business drops or increases, it's exciting. And then at the end of the month, you look at it, wow, I earned more money this month than last month. And you can project if I earn this amount of money every month for the next 12 months. Wow, I'm going to make $100,000 this year. And then, you know, once you're in business for a few years, you can then look at what you earned, you know, 5 years ago, what you earned 3 years ago, 2 years ago, 1 year ago. And you can— gives you confidence to future project. So this process is very, very important. It's very, very simple. But I often find it's with trainers that I've mentored over the years a real sticking point because people just don't like numbers. They get scared of, I don't want to do all that. But newsflash, if you're going to be in business, it's, well, number one, it's not that hard. It's just discipline of doing it. And if you've only got like 20 clients, 30 clients, it's not going to take you that long. You could do it daily. In actual fact, I'd recommend to do it daily. You fill it out, the clients that you've trained, you fill it out, you know what they're earning, how much you're billing them, how much you earned that day. It's a good day when you can put your head on the pillow at night and go, yeah, I did a good job. I made $500 today. It's good. I'm looking forward to tomorrow. I'm set to make $600. It's going to be a good day, right? You know your numbers. So simple, easy. Just get it done right. And when you're looking at bringing on staff members, you're going to need to create a very similar system to that. You know, it's the kind of system of that I speak about this in Certificate 4, the Fitness Business Certification program. but it's the same thing. Your staff are going to need to essentially fill out a session report. That's basically what you're doing. If you're an employee at my business, you would need to every day you need to fill out your session report of how many sessions you've done. There's no difference in you being a solo trainer except the only difference is my admin team will put in all the numbers, the accounts. You need to do that as the business owner. You need to put in the numbers of you know, how much money you've collected, how much money they have in credit, how many sessions they have in standing. So yeah, make it a habit. Schedule in your diary, you know, 5 minutes a day, easy. So I know that what I've just said might sound a little confusing. So what we're going to do and what we've done in this module, there is a screen recording of me explaining exactly how this spreadsheet works. Again, you can set up this spreadsheet in Excel, you can set it up in Numbers on Mac, or you can set up on Google Sheets. It really doesn't matter. But yeah, click on the next video, which is a screen recording video where I'm just going to talk you through the spreadsheet, exactly how it works. And yeah, you're going to see how easy it is. And again, it's now just up to you to do it every single week.
