Ep 21: What I Would Do If I Was Starting A PT Business From Scratch

What's going on everyone? Matt here for another epic episode and welcome to the PT Profit, Leverage and Lifestyle Show. I'm your host today. So I'm just doing a single episode today, a bit of a solo episode. So this one's going to be pretty, pretty interesting for a lot of pts in the industry. So a lot of things have changed over the years. So I'm going to go through what I would do specifically if I was to start PT again from scratch. So for those watching, I might actually go through some slides that I had done previously and I'm going to go through like the pros and cons of the reason why I'm going to do it this way instead of another way. So there's obviously, you can obviously be a face to face trainer or you can be an online trainer or you could be a little bit of both. So I'm going to go through just quickly a couple of pros and cons of each one and then I'm going to tell you the reason why I would choose this specific option. So you can, you can leverage all three options. So, and like if I was to start starting out as a pt, I would want to have a leveraged business model. So if I was starting from scratch, the first option is to be a face to face trainer. So that would be what I would start with. The reason being it is super, super easy to get clients as a, as a face to face trainer. So a couple of pros and cons to being a face to face trainer in terms of leverage. So if you want to, or first off if you're starting from scratch, not even talking about leverage just yet, if you're starting from scratch, you've got an existing market that majority of the people will actually need some assistance with the training or nutrition. So it's very, very easy to market in a, in a rental based facility. So that's where I would start in a rental based facility, you know, like in any time fitness, like in jets or Snap Fitness, you know, maybe a good life fitness cartel. Like I prefer the smaller community clubs to be honest, mainly because they'll still get a decent amount of signups depending on the location. But a lot of the time you'd be the only trainer there. So you'd have full control of marketing and the entire market share of the clients. So that in itself has its pros and cons. But that's the first thing I would look for an established location that has anywhere from 800 to 1500 members, ideally zero trainers. I would have Complete control of the marketing. And then I would run some simple marketing strategies. So first marketing strategy would be we, we do like a bulk text message to the active members. And the bulk text message essentially is like a call to action, essentially saying, you know, massive. Welcome to our newest trainer, Matt. The celebrate. We're giving away the first 10 people who respond to this text message. A free health assessment plus PT session worth $170, something like that. To generate some interest. To start with, book those consultations in and convert them into regular PT clients. The next thing I will do is super easy. I was obviously get all the new member lists from the last three months and I would call every single person on there and book them in for a free health assessment. Now for, for that, let's give you some ideas on statistics for like, the clients that I do this with. Let me get up my calculator. So ideally you want, you want to get a club that at minimum has 50 new members coming in per month. There'll be 150 leads that you get for three months. When you call them, 30% is generally the pickup rate. So you'll be able to get in contact with 45 of them. Now, with the script that we use here at PT Mastery, 90% of those people should book in for a consult with you or a health assessment. So out of the 45, 27. It doesn't sound right. 45 times 0.9, 40 of them will book in for consultations. You got 40 consultations, which is, which is wild when you first start. So you got 40 consults. Let's assume that your conversion is 50%, even though mine probably like 80% or people that I work with, we get it up to about 70, 80%. Let's assume it's 20%. Sorry, 50%. So you get 20 new clients in the first couple of weeks, and this is how I get people fully booked, like in the first month or so, 20 or so on average. People do one and a half sessions per week. Between one and two, that'll be 30 sessions per week. That's all I would do. I want to get myself to 30 sessions per week. Then what I would do, I would want to start to leverage. So this is where there's a couple of different options that you can do in terms of leverage. Like I've done both, all three to a degree. The main one that I did that was leveraging face to face. So a couple of pros and cons for this now would be the leverage enables you to have a team of trainers, so you can leverage all of your PT sessions and I'm not going to go through how to actually do that today. This is just like the pros and cons of a leveraged business. Face to face, you can obviously learn off other trainers as well. You can have the whole location to yourself. So for example, if you're a snap fitness and you're the only trainer, you could hire trainers and build that location with your trainers and then there's no limit to the amount of locations that you can go to. So like for example, I had six locations at one time. You just keep having the same model over and over again. So I'm not going to go through how that model works just yet. I'll do that in a separate podcast episode. The cons though is obviously you got the higher rent, you've got to pay for the other trainers rent. The retention of trainers isn't always the greatest, if you like, because you have specific appointments. If the train is sick or on holidays. You've got to either you do the sessions yourself or find someone else to take the sessions. And that's not always the best experience for the member or the client. Obviously higher cost, as I said, with, you know, with wages and that type of stuff. You have to also train the trainers on how to use your system, on how to manage your clients. And you've also obviously got to deal with emotions and managing other people as well. So that's like the, the face to face model. So as I said to start with, I would get myself to about 30 sessions a week, so I have that stable income. So that will make be making you, depending how much you charge. What's that? Probably just shy the 2k a week. I'd say 30 times. Even if you're charging 65 a session, that's just under 2k a week, which gives you the stable base. Once you're at the 30 sessions a week, then you really need to decide whether you want to scale face to face or whether you want to scale online or you want to do like a hybrid model type of thing. So the second option is obviously scaling online. So obviously you still want to keep your face to face sessions. Well, this is what I would do. I would still keep my face to face sessions because you're only doing 30 sessions a week, which is only 15 hours of actual PT per week. Obviously the pros of the online model, unlimited amount of clients that you can take to a degree, you can obviously work remotely and you don't need a team to manage it or run it. So that essentially means it's high profit margins because it's just your time. Most things can be managed with one system or limited amounts of systems as well. To the price the cons is eventually for online you probably need to do some paid advertising. You can obviously just do it with organic, but it takes a lot more time and effort. Everything is pretty much on you as well with this one. Obviously just being your own business and harder to generate leads online as well, but generally takes a little bit longer to get clients online unless you're doing paid ads. So I'm just starting to do paid ads myself, so I'm kind of learning the ropes of that. And for, for a long time you do. You kind of lose money for a while until you figure out what kind of works best for you. And it takes a lot of testing for offers on social media like posting in different, different types of posts, doing different types of call to actions, etc. It takes a little while to figure out what works for your audience. So that's the leverage business model online. Now I'm going to go through the hybrid model. So this is what I would suggest if I was going back into doing PT right now as I said, I would start in a face to face rental facility because it is super easy to build up clientele. Super, super easy. So I get myself to about 30 sessions to just under the 2K per week, which is, you know, about 100K year, which is awesome. And then I would do a hybrid model. So I would keep doing my sessions face to face. I would not hire any team members, but I would start to build out my online business. And then the whole goal from here would be to. And I'm doing this with a lot of my clients at the moment. We've got them fully booked face to face or pretty much fully booked face to face. Now we're transitioning or now we're marketing more online services. And then eventually like your face to face income has gone up like this and your online income is slowly getting there, but your face to face income still staying like this. And then what you do is you're going to move some of your face to face clients online to give you more time to build the online business. And then eventually your face to face income will start to drop, but your online income will eventually overtake your face to face income. And then eventually, and this is like 12 to 24 months later you'll be able to be fully online. So I would start with face to face to get the baseline, then I would build online while keeping face to face. And then once you've got some good feedback from your online product, you have a few, you know, organic. So always start organic before you do paid. So once you've kind of got organic up and running and you're getting some new clients every single month organically, like you might have some referrals and stuff coming in, then I would start paid advertising. And then also when you start paid advertising, I would move some of your face to face clients over to online to free up more time to spend more on testing paid advertising, because that takes a lot of time. Okay, so let me give you some pros and cons of the hybrid model, which is what I'd probably suggest. So you have the balance of face to face and online and it was high ticket and low ticket options as well. So you can still do high ticket options for online. Like I know plenty of coaches that charge, you know, 120, 150 a week for online coaching. Just depends on what's included. Like obviously it's a one man team as well for this one, higher profit margins. But the most important part, and I actually forgot to put this in, you would market your online business in the face to face gyms. Most of these people in the face to face gyms need help, but it's better for them because it's more affordable to them. But they can still obviously see you in person and stuff as well if they want. But you would still keep doing marketing in the actual gym, but just be selling the online version. So you'd still be doing some consultations in the gym, of course, for like new members, you know, non attendees, birthday lists, you know, you do some giveaways or some seminars to generate leads and you would essentially just do the normal consultation, but you say, look, my face to face is full, but what I can do for you, I can still get you the exact same results, which is what you want, but in an online format is what all my clients do these days. So let's go through the options. That's the biggest pro is by still having the face to face business so you can still grow organically while you're kind of figuring out what works for you with your audience on your social media. It takes a while to build up your audience on social media again without payments. With obviously the hybrid model, you still need to be doing face to face sessions at this stage to start with. So you obviously still need to commit to certain session times. Everything's obviously is on you as well. And you still obviously need to pay that rent and you know, totally still need to obey the club rules. And that's where kind of, you know, where I had one of my falling out with the club manager at any time, fitness club. That's because I didn't really like, they kind of treated me like as an employee where I was a contractor. So I decided to, that's when I decided to obviously open my own gym. At that stage if, if you didn't, if you didn't know already. So go back and watch that episode if you haven't already. But that's essentially what I would do. So as I said, I would start as a face to face trainer in a rental facility, get myself up to 30 sessions a week. You know, if you need help with that, I can usually get that in the first month, maybe two months. And then, then we start to build out your online model where we start to get some more clients online by using face to face marketing plus online marketing organically. Then when that's going quite well and you've got some good feedback from your clients about the service or the product and we've got some good testimonials, then we can start to look at paid advertising. Move some of your face to face clients for online and then it's just a balancing act. Eventually your face to face clients will start to slow down because you're not going to be doing any more marketing for face to face. So when people naturally stop doing pt, your face to face sessions will drop, which is exactly what's happening with me right now. But my online income is going up, so I'm still making the same amount of money, but I'm spending more time at home working remote than doing face to face sessions. So that's what I would do. Team, that's what I think is going to be the best option. I'm working with a few clients for this process at the moment. So it's super, super exciting because they're kind of, you know, six months behind or 12 months behind where I'm at currently. Where, you know, I'm only doing maybe 20, 25 PT sessions a week, but it's only 12 to 15 hours a week for me. And the rest of it I'm working from home, which is what I'm doing right now. And I can do more podcasts and you know, I'm playing around with Facebook ads at the moment or meta ads to generate more leads to the online online coaching business. And yeah, really enjoying that process. And for those, for those who don't know I've got a. My, my son is going to be born now when this episode is released. He'll be born two days after that. Super, super exciting. So not the next episode, but the one after. I'll. I'll have my, my son. That'd be very exciting. So anyway, that's gonna be good value for you guys. I just kind of went through the three different types of leveraged business models, the pros and cons, and what I would specifically do if I was to start again as a trainer. So I would not start with just online to start with, which, which is what a lot of trainers will do. And I wouldn't only do face to face. You want to have a bit of a leveraged model. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't do what I did last time, which is building multiple face to face facilities. For me, the ultimate thing is leverage and freedom and time freedom. And yes, that did give me time freedom for a period of time, but it also gave me a significant amount of stress as well because of all the overheads and the amount of people that I was managing in my team. And that's probably, I mean, to be fair, it's probably on me. I didn't have the right systems instructions to manage it correctly, but if I was to do it again, I would do this model, whereas it's pretty much just me. So it's very high profit margins, you know, 90 profit, which will enable my cash flow to be quite good. And then you can obviously still have the time and freedom with that as well. That's what I would do, team. Hopefully you got some value out of this episode. If you haven't already, make sure you share the podcast with a friend. And we also have just started a free community as well, so I'll put that in the description if you're enjoying the free community and also our paid community as well. So enjoy the rest of your day, team, and I'll see you in the next training video.