Mark Ottobre runs a successful 7-figure personal training studio but hasn't opened a second location because face-to-face training doesn't scale. The real bottleneck is hiring and keeping great trainers, not marketing. He emphasizes tracking cost-per-acquisition and creating what he calls a "profit wedge" by controlling expenses as revenue grows.
Why I haven't opened up a second personal training studio. Hi, my name is Mark Ottobre, and I am the owner and founder of Enterprise Fitness. I have been a personal trainer and coach for 20 years, and I have a very successful personal training studio, which I've had for 10 of those 20 years. We have a great team of 16, 17 folks on staff, and we are busy almost every single day of the week except for Sundays when we're closed. One of the biggest questions I get is why I haven't opened up more studios. For multiple reasons, really. The first of which is a personal training business is hard to scale because especially if you're doing face-to-face, the delivery is dependent upon the people. So training and hiring and finding the right people to be part of your team and then finding them clients can be a challenge in itself. Now the marketing and the sales of the systemization of the business, that's actually the easy part and we can do that on autopilot and I've been very successful at that. The hardest part is finding the right people and I would rather have a really close-knit team of people who I can put my hands on, so to speak, and get to know, trust, and teach them all the things that create an excellent experience. And that's— in business, you have to make a choice at some point. Do you want to scale to the point of McDonald's where there's one on every street corner, or do you want to have something special that's unique and truly unique in the sense that it's very, very hard to replicate? Now, I've certainly gone down the road of having a business that is very hard replicate because I am the owner and founder and I'm there every day. The business has my personal touch on everything. So if you are wanting to scale, here are some things to consider. First of all, what is your cost per acquisition? And this is something in business and as trainers many people don't even consider. They just simply want to run Facebook ads and get as many leads as possible, but they're simply not tracking how much their advertising efforts cost versus the money that is coming in from that client. And that leads to the business running very, very inefficiently. And a lot of the time people think that scaling businesses or open multiple locations will simply increase higher revenues and higher profits. Usually it just increases overall turnover and expenses. So if you're running multiple locations, yes, it's true that the marketing and some of those expenses are going to be incurred in wages, but you also have double the overheads many times. And your most important thing, your focus and time is in two split directions. I'm a big fan of optimization. I want to get everything I can out of what I have. And there is a concept in business called the profit wedge. As your turnover starts to climb And as you start to make money, expenses often match that. When you earn more money, your expenses go up. And that's a, that's a generally a normal part of business, is the bigger the business, the more expenses it's going to have. But at some point, you do want to create that wedge where you're optimizing and looking at what expenses you can cut out, because the whole point of business is to make money. People have stuff on making money, but the whole point of business is to make money. And I say that because if you don't make money from business, you're going to burn down the business because you're frustrated, tired at not getting the results. And ultimately, you started the business because it was something that you loved and once enjoyed. The fastest way to ruin something you enjoy is to not make money from it and burn out. So business, you want to create a profit wedge between your expenses and your expenses and your turnover goals so that you can have money in the, in the bank. And think about where the scaling opportunity is. And it's not always a case of more is better optimization, squeezing what you have out of what you've got right now. Often is the fastest road to success. My name is Mark Ottobre. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you hit subscribe for our weekly videos. So before you go, I have just put together a fantastic resource for all personal trainers. It is my checklist, my systems and resources of starting and operating a high-level personal training business and studio. So the checklist is going to include what to do in your marketing, in your sales, in your service, and in your administration. And you'll be blown away about how much detail I've put into this checklist covering all areas. So if you want my systems of how I've built a 7-figure personal training business, head over to enterprisefitnessacademy.com and download my checklist today.
