Ep106: If Your Face-to-Face Business Isn’t Clean, Don’t Go Online Yet: Here's Whys

If you're trying to go online just because it looks cool, then it's not for you. As I said at the start of this episode, online coaching is a lot harder than face to face. So if you think face to face is hard and you're not willing to put in the effort for your face to face business, there's no point you going online. It is a lot harder to get clients online. In fact, on average, our clients usually sign between three and five clients or three to five clients a month from online coaching. Face to face they usually sign between five to 15 clients a month. Is a lot easier to do face to face coaching. All right, team Matt here from the PT Profit, Leverage and Lifestyle show. This is episode 106. Today we're talking about if you're a face to face business and your business isn't clean, online will not save you. So so many online or so many face to face trainers want to go online, but they're face to face business isn't set up properly. So you're just gonna have the same issues, if not more when you go online. Cause believe it or not, online business is a lot harder than face to face for a number of reasons. But we're gonna go through a few questions today to understand what I mean by this. A lot of the time face to face personal trainers want the online lifestyle, the online dream that I'm lucky enough to have now. But there's a lot of work that I put in place for systems and processes, sales processes, follow up processes that most personal trainers don't have right now that you need before you go into the online space. So couple of questions that I'm gonna go through. And again, side note, I'm in an actual podcast studio today, so I'm super pumped to share this with you. So just give us some feedback in the comments on what you think, if you like the setup and any feedback for other episodes as well. What does a clean face to face business actually mean and what am I? Non negotiables. So you wanna make sure you've got the foundational stuff set up first. So, so let's go through a couple of things in terms of the foundations. So the first thing, your payment software. You need to have all your clients set up on a direct debit, so it happens automatically. You shouldn't be collecting cash payments, bank transfers or anything like that. You need to make sure that that part of your business is automated. Number two, terms and conditions. You need to make sure you've got a terms and conditions template that you can use for both face to face and online to make sure you've got expectations and boundaries set up with your clients to make sure it's a seamless process from once they get started to when they or if they eventually leave your services. Third thing would be business tracking. Business tracking essentially means what data are you collecting every single week to make sure your business is moving in the right direction? That is, are you tracking leads? Are you tracking how many people you're calling every week? Are you tracking how many people answer? Are you tracking how many consults get booked? Are you tracking how many people show up to the consults? Are you tracking how many people sign up to your program? Are you tracking how many people leave? If you don't track those numbers and don't understand that data, online business just isn't gonna work for you because you need to track even more things for online coaching. So if you're hoping online coaching is gonna be easier than face to face, unfortunately you're going to fail like 95% of the other online coaches that try to make this work. And that's actually a True stat. Only 5% of online coaches make enough money to make a full time income. And even face to face trainers, 20% of them succeed. And when I say succeed, they last more than 12 months. If you don't have the basic fundamentals set up, then don't bother going online. You better track social media on top of all those other things I just spoke about. Next question, what are the warning signs A PT is trying to go online for the wrong reasons. If you're trying to go online just because it looks cool, then it's not for you. As I said at the start of this episode, online coaching is a lot harder than face to face. So if you think face to face is hard and you're not willing to put in the effort for your face to face business, there's no point you going online. It is a lot harder to get clients online. In fact, on average, our clients usually sign between three and five clients or three to five clients a month from online coaching. Face to face, they usually sign between five to 15 clients a month. It's a lot easier to do face to face coaching. What's more important before going online? Leads conversion, pricing or retention? So this is an interesting question because a lot of people think they need a big audience to go online, but in reality all they really need is the right systems and structure. So it's just a different type of marketing for online. So you still need to track leads conversions, retention, etc. But the biggest thing is leads. Leads are harder to find online. And what I mean by harder to find is if you're in a face to face facility, like a commercial facility, like, like Anytime, Fitness, Snap, Fitness, Good Life, those type of clubs, you literally have phone numbers, emails that you can call pretty much anytime you want by getting a few lists or reports from the club manager or the owner. In the online space, you need to go out and find those leads yourself, whether it's by outreach or whether it's by making really good content to get people to follow you and then send them, sending them a message, which you can't just go up and call someone for online. I mean, you obviously send them some messages, but you can't call them. So that's one of the reasons why face to face is so much easier than online is because you've already got people right in front of you that is your ideal client. And you can just literally go up and talk to them, or you can literally go to the club manager and be like, hey, can I call or can I have a list of new members that joined in the last 30 days to give them like a free health assessment as an example. That's what I mean when I say online's a little bit harder because it takes a lot more volume to get the same type of result. But in saying that as well, like all those other things still need to happen, it's just leads. Leads take a little bit longer to happen in the online space than it does face to face. So you, you need a bit more resilience, you need to work a little bit harder. Most pts don't want to work too much harder in the online space because everyone thinks that it's so much easier to do online than it is to do face to face. Next question, what face to face system should be installed first so online becomes easy and not another job. The foundational stuff that I talked about before is the bare basics. But you need to be posting on social media if you want to grow an online coaching business. You want to. If you're too scared to post or if you're worried about, you know, what people think of you, then online coaching probably isn't the thing for you because you're gonna need to be posting content and if you are not posting content, you're just not gonna be seen. In the last episode that we did regarding hooks, I spoke about needing attention. You need to have attention in the online space. Cause whether you like it or not, you're competing against people in America, Canada, us, uk, and there's millions and millions of people over there that probably smarter than you in terms of PC qualifications. But how can you be different to get them as a client? You need to understand your ideal client so well and you need to have your messaging so dialed in that you need to talk directly to your client, directly to their pain points. If you don't know the basics of social media in terms of like how to build a hook, how to how to do a call to action, or how to do follow ups, how to send DM messages, all that type of stuff, then it's just gonna be a very difficult time for you in the online space. Next question. Why does online amplify chaos rather than fix it? What does that look like in the real world? So this is an interesting question. The good thing about online, once you have the baseline established, it's more around increased volume. So when I say like why does online amplify chaos rather than fix it? Is if you haven't got those fundamentals and foundations in place, it's just going to feel like the world is kind of blowing up. Because if your face to face business was already in chaos, adding online to it or switching to online is not going to fix it. As I said at the start of this episode, if you don't have the fundamentals for your face to face business, then there's no way you're going to make it in the online world. In context. When I grew, my face to face business went from zero to two and a half K per week in two weeks for my online coaching. It took me a few months to do that like three or four times as long to it and it's just because there's so much more volume involved. So moral of the story here is for the face to face coaches that want to go online, make sure your face to face business is set up correctly first and you've got the fundamentals and foundations in place before you want to go online. Now for me, I moved all my clients to online in October 2024. I've been fully online since, which is epic. But I had the right fundamentals and foundations in place to make that an easy transition. I lost zero clients during that time, so if you want help doing the same thing, just comment or send me a message saying 10k and I'll see if I can help. I'll see you in the next episode.