Ep113: The Pricing Structure That Took Me From Undercharging to $15K Weeks (Steal It)

If I was doing PT again from the start, I would be pricing my services in a way that I could hit $10K per month, $15K per month, working no more than 20 hours a week. You are always going to be trading time for money, and you're always going to be undercharging because you've only got so much time that you can do. You guys are already doing online coaching, you're just not charging for it. In reality, you should be basing your pricing based off your skill set and realistically also your sales skills. So you need to be strategic with your pricing. You need to sell the transformation, not the session, or you'll be forever trading time for money and you'll never make a decent income without working a shitload of hours. Welcome to the PT Mastery Podcast, the PT Profit Leverage and Lifestyle Show. My name's Matt Dart. This is episode 113. Um, today's episode, the pricing structure that took me from undercharging to $15K per week. I want you guys to steal this insight from me. So, uh, I hope you guys are having an epic day so far. Quick little update from me. I've actually got some PT Mastery shirts here. Super epic. I've got jumpers, polos, singlets. So all of our clients are going to get some merch for our event that is in person in July. So I'm super pumped. So if you guys have been listening to this for a while and you're on the fence of joining us, more importantly, we obviously help you grow your business and we can catch up in person in Sydney as well. So let's get into today's episode. It is a juicy topic. It's more tactical today. Um, but of course I'm gonna give you some insights into, I'm gonna coach you guys for free, essentially give you a bit of an idea of what it's like to, to work with us. I'm gonna coach you for free, uh, show you heaps, heaps of value. So let's get into it. So I've got a couple of questions that's gonna keep me, keep me on track. Um, but essentially, uh, we're gonna go through pricing, uh, and why you're probably undercharging your service. So first question that I'm gonna ask is, what are you currently charging? And if you're honest, did you pick that number based But a lot of personal trainers, especially when they first start out, they'll base their pricing off what other people are charging. Like, it's— that's okay to start with, but in reality, you should be basing your pricing based off your skill set and realistically also your sales skills as well. So you need to be strategic with your pricing. So I talk about this all the time in terms of pricing, and PTs just don't understand when they charge for like per session rate rather than charging a result. You are always going to be trading time for money, and you're always gonna be undercharging because you've only got so much time that you can do, right? So what we always do here at PT Mastery and that I suggest everyone to do is have a hybrid model, combination of face-to-face and online, okay? You guys are already doing online coaching, you're just not charging for it, okay? Every single PT does programming, every single PT, pretty much every single PT that I know. Every PT does like check-ins with their clients. That is the online component. You need to be charging for that time. Okay, so so many people will only charge for that PT session, but then they'll do the other stuff as well for free, and you're not getting paid for it. If you were in a job and you were doing all that stuff for free after, after quote work hours, would you be pissed off or would you ask to be paid for that? You'd ask to be paid for it. So why are you guys letting that happen in your business? Okay, so that's the first thing. For one, stop letting other people dictate what your pricing should be. Base it off your individual skill set plus what you feel like it's worth. As well. Next question: how many hours are you working to hit your current monthly income, and is that sustainable for the next 3 years? So a common thing that I see with personal trainers is they will charge maybe, I don't know, $50, $60, $70, $80 per session, and they'll be working— they'll want to hit like $10K a month as an example, and they'll have to do, you know, 40, 50 sessions a week to hit that goal. And that just doesn't need to happen, okay? So if I was doing PT again from the start, I would be pricing my services in a way that I could hit $10K per month $15K per month working no more than 20 hours a week. Okay, that's how you should be pricing your service. You should be reverse engineering it. So how much income do you want to make and then how many hours do you want to work? Okay, so the prime example, let's just say you want to make $10K a month. Just say that's $2,500 a week. Just keep it easy. $2,500 per week. Let's say you want to work 30 hours as an example. Okay, which means, yeah, that's right, sorry. So $2,500 minus 30 hours, which means you need to make $83 per hour. Okay, so that is a very low amount for a PT to make per hour. Okay, so then you reverse engineer it again. Okay, cool. So that's probably a little bit lower than what I was expecting. Let's just say you were expecting to make $100 an hour. So $2,500 divided by $100, which is what you wanted to kind of make your price point, that's 25 hours a week. Would you be happy working 25 hours a week for the next 3 years to make $100K a year? So then what do you include in your service to charge $100 an hour? And by the way, I don't recommend doing hour sessions, by the way. I never recommend that. In fact, I usually would do 30-minute sessions, to be honest. But a lot of PTs will do either 30 minutes or 45 minutes. Then you work it out. So if you need to make $100 an hour, a 45-minute session is 75% of an hour. So it means your, your 45-minute session, or your weekly rate, needs to be $75 a week for one 45-minute session plus the programming or whatever. But then, for example, what you could do is add an extra, you know, $10, $20, $30, $40 a week for that online component, which could take it up to, let's just say, $110 per week for a 45-minute session plus the online coaching. Okay, and then you realize that you don't actually need to work as much hours if you can increase your price. That's how I was able to make, you know, $15,000 a week. A bit different for me because I had so many trainers working for me. You know, in reality, I just worked this out before. If I was doing PT again and I was wanting to only work 10 hours a week, then I would need to charge between $100— probably need to charge around $200 an hour for my time, which is fine for me. Like, I've learned the sales skills, I know how to market. I've been a PT for 6 years. I'm a sports nutritionist. I'm worth a lot of money to like the general person. So you've got to consider this when you're talking about your pricing and also how much you're willing to work to make that income. What does your client actually want to buy, a session or a transformation? I have this argument with so many PTs all the time. They're selling like, they're selling their sessions like, this session is just so good, like the sessions are just so amazing. Newsflash, nobody cares about the session. You think people like being in pain? No, they want the friggin result that you're going to give them. And the session itself is a byproduct of getting that result. Okay, so you need to sell the transformation or the result that they're going to get from working with you, which could be sessions, could be online coaching, whatever it is. But you guys need to start understanding that the session is not what gets people the result. It's what they do outside of the sessions. Okay, if you did, if you did 2 sessions a week with me, and you did nothing else the whole week and you had McDonald's every single day, do you think you're going to lose weight? Probably not. If you did zero sessions with me but you had a tailored training program that you followed 5 or 6 days a week and you track your food through MyFitnessPal and you were within your macros, you think you'd lose weight? 100%. You need to sell the transformation, not the session, or you'll be forever trading time for money and you'll never make a decent income without working a shitload of hours. If a client asks you right now why your program costs what it costs, could you answer without hesitating or discounting? Food for thought. So this comes down to your confidence with your pricing strategy, which comes down to the first question I asked is, are you pricing your sessions or your service, not your sessions, but your service emotionally or strategically? If it's more emotional, then you're probably undercharging your service. So what we typically do with our clients is we do like an actual price presentation. For the prospect and we walk them through what's actually included first. Like, the price is the last part. We walk them through what's included first to make sure it's actually valuable for them. We do a full value stack. So it's actually worth about $500 a week. And then when you actually tell them the price, that it's only $150, $200 a week, they're like, oh yeah, fair enough, that seems reasonable. But if you're just going to straight out tell them the price without any context or insights, then it's not going to seem valuable to them. So you need to give them the value first, what it's actually worth per week, and then you kind of drop the pricing. All this type of stuff, like, this is like the first thing we do with people is their pricing strategy because it dictates how much you can make with how many hours you need to work. And it also gives you the leverage and the strategy to be able to reverse engineer how many clients, how many, how many leads you need to get, how many consults you need to do to get your ideal income. Okay, last question here. What would you need to charge to hit your income goal working 30 clients or less? So this is more like I'll reverse engineer this for you guys, but realistically you wanna do this yourself. So let's just say for example, you want to hit $15K per month and you only wanna work with 20 clients. So what you've gotta actually do, so $15K per month divided by 20, which means you need to make $750 per month per client. So divide that by 4.4, which means you need to make $170 a week from those clients if you want to hit $15K with 20 clients. Now you might think, okay, well that's probably a bit too much for my skillset right now. I realistically could only get people to probably on average spend about $120. So perfect. Okay, so if the goal is still $15K per month and your average spent is $120 a week, so $120 times 4.4, which is $528. Yeah, $15K divided by $528 equals 28.4. So you're gonna need 28 clients or