Ep40: Why You Need a Hybrid Model for Your PT Business

Good afternoon team. Hope you're having an amazing day so far. Welcome to another episode of PT Profit, Leverage and lifestyle show Just Me for today's episode team. So I've got a pretty juicy, juicy topic for you. As always, if you guys have enjoyed the podcast so far, getting more and more people send me messages. So I love getting those messages. So if you do enjoy the podcast, whether it's on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or whatnot, make sure you let me know, give me some feedback, what you like, what you want to see more of. You know, obviously I help a variety of face to face trainers, plus online trainers as well. So if you guys want to see more face to face or more online, then the only way for me to to know is for you to tell me. So speaking. Make sure you do that. But topic for today is going to be why you actually need a hybrid model for your PT business. Controversial. Controversial. I can speak controversial topic about having a hybrid model. So let's get into what exactly is a hybrid model to start with. Then we'll go through the pros and cons, because everything has pros and cons. There's no full balance and there's no better or better or worse. It's like what, what, what's best for you. There's so many different ways to make it work in, in business, let alone in the fitness industry. So you just gotta pick what works, what works for you. Like I've tried a variety of different ways and I found what works really good for me. So let's, let's go through it. Hey, and if you haven't liked, like and subscribed or followed, then make sure you do that, team. That's the only way the podcast is going to grow. So why do you actually need a hybrid model and what exactly is it? So a hybrid model is a variety or a combination of face to face plus online services. Now the biggest reason for me or the reason why I think you need a hybrid model is because you cannot have leverage without a hybrid model. In my opinion, you can have leverage if you hire a team, which I have done myself, as in hiring trainers. Now for those who've listened to the podcast for a while, you would know that I have done very well with that. However, it's extremely, extremely expensive, especially if you're hiring people in Australia. You guys might have known that I hire some people from the Philippines to help me, which is a lot cheaper. But a hybrid model will enable you to scale without needing a lot of people. Essentially what I mean by that is, you're not going to need to hire trainers. You can, you're not going to need to hire trainers though if you have a hybrid model. And that will enable you to scale past, you know, 3, 4, 5, even up to 10k a week with minimal overheads, which means your profitability or profit percentage is really high. So I talk to my clients about this quite a bit about leverage. So because we're in a service based business, we don't have to buy any goods or goods to, to resell. All we're selling is our knowledge in our time at the moment. So you should have pretty high profit margins. Like there is going to be some expenses of course, like for those that are doing face to face pizza, you've obviously got your gym rent. You'll have a variety of other expenses as well. Doing online, you might be doing paid ads, you, you might have to have a CRM system. You like every single business has overheads. But if you can avoid having to have a huge team, you are going to save yourself a lot of money and a lot of headaches in the long run as well. Like I only have two VA's that work for me now and I'm making more money than what I was profit wise, not revenue, but profit wise, which is the most important figure. If someone says they're making $1 million in revenue but their expenses is 950,000 then they're only making 50k. Whereas if you were making 250k in revenue but your profit was 150k then you're a much better position. A lot less headaches as well. So I just want to want you to imagine this. So let's say you have a hybrid model. Well, let's actually compare the team building one. So let's say, you know, you get yourself fully booked face to face and then you want to scale that business and scaling that business means you need to hire more trainers. So you're going to pay them 40 to $50 an hour plus you're going to cover their rent. So an extra 200 to $300 per week in rent plus you know, if you're charged, let's say you're charging 100 and 120, 130 an hour, they're getting 50 of that. So what's that, 30? All right, 30%, let's just do that for now. So 30% of your income is gone instantly because you obviously have to pay the trainer, you obviously don't have to train the trainer, you don't have to manage the trainer, you have to deal with their emotions. You don't have to do payroll, you don't have to do all that type of stuff. So more time is going to be invested on your end. Yes, you're going to be making some passive income, but you're going to still have to get the clients for them. So there's pros and cons to everything, but, you know, you're obviously going to be making more money in revenue, but your profitability percentage is probably going to be a profit margin. That's what I'm looking for, profit margin. Your profit margin is probably going to be anywhere from 15 to 30% or could be as low as 10%. So if you're making a million, you might make 100k, whereas if you have, and then if the other, you have the other spectrum where it's just online, you might be having, you know, just paid ads as your main, you know, overhead expense. Everything else is just online. You just have a computer and a mobile phone and Internet. You might have trainerized, for example, but in that scenario you might, you might sell 200k worth of revenue for the year and you might notice you might have 150k of profit for that before tax. So you might have 50k that you spent on ads and subscriptions and whatnot, but then everything else is basically profit. So that, that's the other end. What I'm suggesting is having a bit of both. So I'm suggesting, still doing some face to face, because it's very easy to get clients face to face compared to doing paid ads or organic marketing online, where you're competing against a lot more people. Plus you've obviously got the, the challenge, the challenge of doing Facebook ads, it's a lot harder. Whereas face to face is really, really easy to get new clients. So you can easily funnel people from face to face for leads and then have them as an online model. Majority of your clients, some of them, there weren't one online, which is fine, which is why you still have the face to face aspect. So that's why I suggest having both. So if you have face to face, let's just say, for example, you might do 20 sessions a week over three days a week. So you do three days a week in the gym and you might do between six to eight sessions a day and you can obviously pick, pick that. And you might make, let's just do some rough figures here, 20 sessions, you might charge 70 for a session, so 1400. And let's just say you do some online Coaching with those clients, which you might charge an extra $10 a week for a program. As an example, the 20 sessions times 80, so 1600. And then you might pay rent, so let's just say 250 for argument's sake. So you left with about 1300. And let's say after all your expenses, you left with about a thousand bucks a week, which is not too bad. You know you can get behind that thousand bucks a week, 50k profit per year. So you're 1600 times, so about 80k and your profits about 50. Not too bad, not too bad at all. But then what you do is you funnel people after you've tapped out your 20 sessions to online and you're going to charge anywhere from 50 to 80 for online. You have a premium and you'll have a group option. Let's just say the average spender is 60. So then you add another 20 clients to your online option, which is all done from home. It's all leveraged. It might require 10 minutes a week for those clients, not that much. That's an extra twelve hundred dollars per week just there. Now let's say you then just scale the group aspect of online coaching, meaning there's not very much one on one stuff. It's mainly a group option which is like the 50 on a week. Let's say you get 50 clients at 50 bucks a week online, two and a half K per week. As a leveraged model, two and a half K, same workload every single week, no matter if there's 100 people or whether it's 50 people. If they want the one on one, then they pay extra. Okay, I'm just talking examples here team. So you know, don't come after me if this doesn't happen for you. This is just an example, this is what you can do. So Therefore you get 50 online clients and you still have 20 face to face. And then what happens? Your total income is just over 4k per week. But then your expenses stay roughly, roughly, not not exactly, but roughly around the same. So you might have, you know, the 250 plus, maybe you might spend, I don't know, 500 bucks a week on ads and then you might spend another 200 a week on subscriptions or whatnot. So then all of a sudden you're making 4k a week in revenue, but your profit is over 3k per week. So if you wanted to do 3k per week in profit, you would need to be doing around 3 1/2 k worth of PT sessions, which is only 44pc sessions a week and you can absolutely do that by the way. But I prefer the leverage and the lifestyle that's just me because I've done that, I've done 60, 70 sessions a week before and I've made you know, 3, 4K a week just from PC and Hills here. Not sustainable long term in my opinion. Maybe for someone that has like a ridiculous amount of passion for it. Like I still have passion for it but not that much. So that, that is why I always suggest to my clients and like for people that work with me, majority of them want to get fully booked face to face, create a hybrid model so it's face to face plus online, move a lot of their face to face clients to online and then continue to scale online. They still like that, they still like to have face to face as an option, which I like. But I've also got clients that then gone from face to face to purely full time online. For example one of my clients and I'll keep him anonymous, let's just call him John. He, he got, I got him fully booked face to face in, in Sydney and he's actually moved over to Europe full time as an online online PC. Super, super exciting which is pretty cool that we're you know, able to have that opportunity in this day and age. So that's pretty much all I wanted to go through today. So I wanted to give you that insight as to what I'm doing with my clients and literally what I have done over the last couple of years I've grown my business to six gyms, 250 sessions per week, 12 traders working for me, you know, doing well over 15k per week in revenue, not profit. So there's a lot of expenses for that type of business to then slowly reducing it down, reducing my team closing one location at a time so it's a bit more manageable. While I create my online leverage model which is business coaching, which is still one on one by the way but you know, it's relatively leveraged where possible. A lot of automations and stuff and then one by one I closed them one by one. But then my profitability actually went up as my online income went up and my face to face income came down. And you guys have probably seen that over the last couple of years made the transition and you know, no regrets. I learned a lot of that type of stuff and how to manage people, that type of jazz. But yeah, that's exactly why I suggest a hybrid model or some type of online aspect so you can have the leverage so you've got capped for your income, and you can actually enjoy the lifestyle that business should have. You know, I talked to someone else about this today about, you know, the opportunity of business compared to working for someone else. And, you know, if I was to make. Even if I was to make the same amount of income as I do now, working 40, 50 hours a week for someone else, and, you know, you know, I. I choose to work a lot, but I don't have to work that much. Like, I'm in the process of moving all my clients to online, as you guys would have known. But I only work four days a. Work four days a week, usually. I usually have Wednesdays at home with my wife and my two kids, and then I usually don't work weekends. Sometimes I choose to. That's by choice. But just looking at my calendar, I've got like, 1, 2, 3, 4. I got about eight or nine coaching calls a week, sometimes not even that. I got a group coaching call, and everything else is done. Everything else is pretty much leveraged. So I have a lot of spare time on my hands, and that's what I want for you guys as well. Where's Zoom gone? There it is. So that's why my three pillars are profit, leverage, and lifestyle. That's my three, three pillars to success for any type of business. So that's it, team. Hope you enjoyed this podcast episode and I'll see you next week.