In this instructional video, the presenter walks gym owners and personal trainers through the SMART framework—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely—and shows how to translate each element into concrete financial goals. He critiques vague aspirations like “I want to get fitter” or “I want to earn more money,” insisting on precise targets (e.g., $100,000 annual revenue, hourly rates, weekly session counts). The speaker then demonstrates how to reverse‑engineer a desired income by breaking it down into weekly leads, conversion rates, average dollar sale, client transaction frequency, and profit margin. He explains each KPI, provides simple numeric examples, and highlights how adjusting one lever (especially average dollar sale) can dramatically boost a trainer’s business. Throughout, he stresses the importance of urgency—setting deadlines and writing goals down—and encourages the use of provided PDFs to structure the planning process. The video ends with a promise of deeper calculations in upcoming modules.
Chapters
In this third video on goal setting, I'm going to be talking to you about SMART goals. Now, firstly, what are SMART goals? SMART goals are specific. It's an acronym: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. So let's break these down. So too often people, your own clients, they might come to you and you say, what's your goal? And they say, I want to get fitter. Fitter is not specific, right? So if you come to me as in this class and you say, Mark, I just want to earn more money, that is not a goal, right? We all want to earn more money. We want to get more time. We want to be hotter and have better abs and all that kind of stuff. You need to be very specific. How much money? What is the goal? How much money per year do you want to be making? How much per hour do you want to be charging per week? What do you want to be taking home? All of those metrics should measure up. So if you have a goal of $100,000 a year, You need to look at that goal of how many hours a week are you going to be working and then breaking that, that down even further. So if you say you're going to work 20 hours a week, then your hourly rate to hit that is going to have to be very, very high if you want $100,000 a year. Likewise, if you've given 40 sessions a week, let's say for example, you've got 40 sessions a week to hit that goal, the per session rate to hit, say, $100,000 a year is going to be quite different. So it needs to be specific and we'll get into those exact numbers in, in further videos and further modules. Measurable. Can you measure the goal? Again, getting fitter is not a measurable goal. You earning more, a little bit more money, or I just want to earn more money. It's not exactly measurable. We want to know, did we hit the goal of $100,000 a year? Do we hit the goal of whatever that target is? Did we hit it? We want to make it measurable so that way we can manage it effectively. Is it achievable? So if you've just started on your journey right now as a personal trainer and I'm throwing out this number like $100,000 a year, is it achievable for you right now in your first year? Well, depending on the person, but probably not for most people. The first year you're going to be learning and you know, you're not going to know everything there is to know. You may do it with the knowledge of this course, coming to my seminars face to face with mentoring. You may be able to do it right if you work really, really hard. But I would say if it's your first year, maybe let's set the goal to $60,000, $70,000 a year, right? Make it achievable for you. And also it needs to be real in terms of how much you're charging per hour. If you're charging $50 an hour and you expect to make $100,000 a year, you're going to have to do an awful lot of sessions to hit that target. So everything needs to match relevance. Is it relevant to where you want to be in life, right? Is it a relevant goal? Is there, is Is it relevant towards where you want to go and what you want to achieve? So for example, you learning about typography, for example, isn't going to be necessarily that relevant to the success of you making more money, right? So you've got to make sure your goals are relevant and also in line with your values holistically in life and looking at that wheel. And finally, timely. Timely is very, very important. Every goal you set has to have a sense of urgency. This is why goals like I want to be fitter, I want to make more money, they're not good goals because there's absolutely no urgency in that. Those are indefinite goals. But if you put out a goal of I want to make $70,000 this year, make it timely, make it real, put a deadline at the end of these 12 months. This is how much I want to earn and work towards that. The reason why I've had success, another key factor for me is every goal I write down has a real sense of urgency that I have to work towards it today. And if I don't work towards it, I don't feel right. I feel like I've been lazy. I'm not living up to my full potential. So make sure you make your goals urgent and timely and put deadlines on them. So next, with your SMART goals, I'm going to relate it specifically to business, and I am going to do another video in the couple of modules in around when we talk about fitness planning. but I wanted to introduce this now because we are talking about goal setting. And these are the 5 key metrics, the key performance indicators of your business. KPIs, key performance indicators, right? So when you're setting SMART goals, you need to look at this. So if you say, for example, you want to earn— again, I'm going to use the example of $100,000 a year. We need to reverse engineer that, right? So this is where the SMART goals come in. How many leads are you getting per week? And leads can simply be if you're at a Fitness First, let's say, for example, one of these big box gyms, and you've got members on the floor, how many people are you introducing yourself to? How many new people are you introducing yourself to? Right? So that's leads. How many people each week are coming in and inquiring about your service? The second number is our conversion rate, right? So let's say, for example, we sit down with 10 people, and out of those 10 people that we see, we convert 20% at the lowest, right? So we see 10 people and 2 people make a full sale, right? 2 people sign up for the full program, the 12 weeks. and they, they become our client. So then we have 2 new clients, right? If our conversion rate out of 10 people is 20%, that gives us, uh, 2 new clients. Then what is the average dollar sale of those clients? You know, average dollar sale is very, very important. So is it $100? Is it $200? Is it $5,000, right? And then you can start to figure out lifetime value of a client, which again, we'll talk about in future videos. But Average dollar sale. What is the average dollar sale? What is the average package? And I always find one of the things with PTs is you can double a PT's business very, very quickly just by increasing this one lever, and that's average dollar sale. It makes a very meaningful difference. Then the average time customer transacts with you. So are they transacting with you once a week, twice a week, 3 times a week, 4 times a week? I mean, literally, if a client trains with you 4 times a week, you're gonna make, well, 4 times more than what you would if you were only training them once a week, right? How many times that customer transacts with you is another key metric because it indicates how much money they're actually going to spend. And obviously it's going to be based off average dollar sale. Then if you've got staff, if you're by yourself, this one isn't going to be as relevant because the real expenses for running, say for example, a gym inside of a business inside of a gym is the rental fees, right? You might be spending money on websites and this kind of stuff. So profit margin is obviously minus your expenses. And if you've got staff, that's going to then eat even more into your profit margins. But if it's just you, your profit margins are going to be quite high because you don't have to pay staff. But you figure out what is your profit margin. So if you're charging $100 a session and you've got to pay, say, a staff member, let's say $40 a session, right? Just using those numbers, then your profit margin is going to be 60%, right? So you're going to get a 60% return because $100, you're going to minus $40 out of it. Obviously, I'm using very simple numbers, because you've got to add tax into it, superannuation and GST and other types of expenses as well in terms of acquiring that client. But let's just use that as a say everything in total is 40% expenses, so you get 60% return. That's your total. And then all of those combined is going to equal your total turnover. So when we're talking about SMART goals, we need to reverse engineer when it comes to business, look at leads, look at our conversions, look at our average dollar sale, looking at how many times that customer transacts, and then what is the profit margin. And the profit margin again is just really looking at what is the expense per hour per session. You can figure this out and I'll help you figure this out in when we get into the fitness planning module. But that's that. So make sure you set SMART goals. Take some time to set out your goals, write them down and use the PDFs because the PDFs are going to help you and guide you through this whole process. See you in the next module.
