Ep54: How To Increase Your Pricing With Ease + Do It Every Year
29 Jan 2025 · 18 min
Matt Dart shows gym owners two ways to raise prices without losing clients. Add a paid service like body scanning (he added A$5/week to 120 clients, kept all but 3) or offer clients hybrid coaching options at different price points. Build an automatic annual increase into your terms so pricing goes up 4% every July without the awkward conversation.
Happy Monday team. Hope you're having an amazing start to your week and hopefully you guys are kicking some goals in 2025 already. So excited to be here. As always, my little background here, I've listened, we've list bought some new luggage, luggage bags here. Going to Fiji in about at the time of this recording I believe it's about eight weeks. But I think when this gets released it'll be closer to 5 weeks. Usually film about 3 weeks in advance of my podcast. I'm very organized. So let's get, let's get stuck into today's episode. We're actually going to go through how to increase your prices. We're just on a group call today. This morning, to start off the weekend, a couple of my clients asked around, asked about increasing session prices. There's a couple different ways you can go go around doing this, but like let's talk about when you should actually do this type of stuff. And the simple answer is supply and demand. When you have more demand than there is supply, you need to increase your pricing or if you have a significantly low price, you need to increase your prices. And I'm going to give you an example and I'm not going to say the person's name, although I think they do turn into this podcast, but a certain personal trainer that I know and there's a, there's a lot of people that do this, they charge super cheap when they first start just to get some clients through the door. And I understand why people do it, no issues at all. But long term, obviously it's not sustainable. So we had a conversation this morning around how to actually increase the pricing. And, and I'm going to run you through a couple of different ways that we can do this and I'll show you how. I did it previously when I actually introduced an extra layer of service, which is one way to do it. When I did it, I think I had like 120 clients at the time, so I couldn't have conversations on for every single person. So I had to do it in a bit more of a general way. Whereas I'm going to tell you how to do it a general way and then I personalized way as well. So this particular example is it was the charging $100 a week for three sessions of PT per week. Now yes, that's obviously super cheap, but you know, everyone's going to start somewhere so all is good. And basically we needed to figure out a way to increase this person's pricing. So let me go through a way that you do it is as a general way of doing it if you have a lot of clients. And then I'll go through a way that if you don't have a lot of clients, you can do it all individually and quite personalized. So let's get stuck in, shall we? So I've got a couple of. I don't have a script per se, but I've got like the email that I used to send to all my clients about a five dollar per week price increase. Now if you can imagine this, this is pretty crazy when you think about it. I think I had 120 clients at that stage. 120 clients for extra $5, an extra $600 a week like that instantly. And actually by the way, I'll actually show you how to increase your price every single year. Actually I'm shot that down in case I forget it, increase price. I'm going to show you how to do that as well. Now what I essentially did and for those who don't know my story, I've got my own body scanner machine. And the way I was able to increase my price by an additional $5. And this, this is per session by the way. So for example, for existing clients it was a $5 increase overall, but for new clients it was per session was an extra $5 a week. So back to what I was saying. So we had a. I bought a body scanner machine. So for those who don't know they're worth 15k brand new, I chose to do it through finance, which is about 400amonth. Now how much of this is a no brainer? It was $400 a month to get a body scanner but I increased my price by 600 a week overall. So I was making an extra 2400amonth and only spending 400. Like instantly, instantly an extra almost 2k a month. Pure profit was absolute no brainer for me. Now these days most people have a body scanner machine, but if anyone wants a body scanner, it's literally in the corner beside that chair. If anyone wants a body and a Volt360 body scanner, I'll sell it to them super cheap because I literally have just sitting here collecting dust. So yeah, let me know if you do actually want one or want it. But basically I sent out an email to say there's some exciting things happening in the business that everyone's excited for for the future. I'll read a couple of things from it. Firstly, as always, we are so proud of each and every one of you for your continuous efforts inside and out of our gym, making a constant strides. Making constant strides forward to achieving your health and fitness goals. Secondly, and most importantly, we have some exciting changes and big news in relation to the direction of the business. Moving forward. We are excited to announce that we have purchased our very own Vault360 body scan to be used exclusively at our locations across North Brisbane. Here are some of the benefits and this is what you receive. You get a body scan every single month, which usually costs between 30 to 50 per scan and one body scan for a friend and family member per month included. You get macronutrient coaching and monthly analysis of your body composition. We've been working on this in the background for such a long time and can't wait to achieve even better results with targeted data. We cannot thank each and every one of you enough for your support and without you, this simply would not be possible. In relation to this change going forward, this will incur a $4.95 price increase on sessions and packages from 10th of February ongoing. There is nothing you need to do in relation to this change or debits will be amended accordingly. If there's any questions, as always, feel free to reach out. We'll get in touch in the gym. As a token of appreciation and for your conscious support, we're going to give every client five Kickstart packages to give to your family and friends valued at $150 each. Now how good does that sound? Basically, you're going to give everyone body scans included, $5 a week. So basically 20 bucks a month. They usually cost 30 to 50 per scan. That is how I did it. And I literally sent out that email to the 120 odd clients we had. I think it was three people opt out of the body scans. Three out of 120. Don't overthink it, guys. When people, people are happy to pay more for good service and better, A better service and a better product. So people have money. Yes, everything's gone up in price. But you know, people are still spending, you know, $7 on a, on a cappuccino at Starbucks. They've got money. They're still getting Uber eats most weeks or weekends. They're still taking Ubers everywhere instead of walking or catching the bus. People have money. So where are we at? So that's one way. That's the. If you're going to do it, rip band off. That's one way you can do it. Now, in summary, like, not everyone's going to be obvious. Not everyone can buy a body scanner machine. So what else can you offer your clients now? Prime example. If you're going from face to face to hybrid coaching, prime example of what you can do here. If you're not doing any type of online coaching, include online coaching now and charge it at a discounted rate. But for example, if your normal online coaching is going to be 40 bucks a week, this could be perfect example of how you can increase the service and then increase the price. Tell them another example. Another client of mine, not going to say the name, but what happened was we moved from a face to face to a hybrid model. And this particular PC, she was actually doing online coaching already, but she wasn't actually getting paid for it. So all the programming, the weekly check ins, the feedback, all the stuff that she was doing outside of the sessions, she wasn't getting paid for it. So many personal trainers do this and I did this myself when I was doing face to face PC, you need to charge for that time. People are paying for your time in the gym face to face. But yes, you're doing all this other stuff outside of the gym you still need to get paid for. But guess what happened? Her sessions I think were 80, 80 for 45 minutes I think. And guess what happened? Her online coaching was I think 40 a week. Correct me, I think it's 40 a week. So guess what happened? We said, hey look, we're changing things in the new year we're going to be doing hybrid coaching. So you're going to get more support behind the scenes. We're going to increase your level of accountability, support structure. New price is going to be 1, 120 a week instead of 80. No, everyone said, yeah, no worries. Literally every single person. Yeah, I get that's not always going to happen. I understand that. It is what it is. But if you've got a really good service or if you're improving the service and you've got loyal clientele, which a lot of you, what are you guys would should be, no reason why most of your clients won't go into the new pricing model. So that's another example of what's possible. But instantly we were able to make like an extra couple hundred dollars a week instantly. And now moving forward, she's actually getting paid for the time she's actually putting in every week. So if you haven't watched my, my training on the hybrid coaching model, make sure you watch that. I don't know what episode it is exactly on my podcast, but it's definitely in here. Now let's go through the more personalized Approach where you have, you might have some clients that you obviously know a lot more personally. Let's say you might have 20 clients. A lot easier, A lot easier to do it with 20 clients. Now let's use the example of hybrid because that's pretty common for PCs. Not doing the hybrid model, essentially what you go into. And this is what I went through with my client this morning and this is what I did when I moved all my clients online. I asked permission and I got feedback before I actually presented the options to them. What that looks like is hey guys or hey, hey Tamara. I'm really enjoying our sessions. You've been such a loyal client for such a long time. I wanted to actually talk to you about some possible changes that we're thinking of doing to the service and our structure, of our pricing structure. And I just wanted to know if you'd be open to a couple of potential changes to improve our service and get you better results. Would you be open to that? So ask permission. They're going to say yes, it's raining at the moment. Okay, so ask permission then if you're not too confident at this part, say, cool, I'm going to put together something and I'll come back to you next session and I can go through a couple options with you. Take the pressure off, just ask them permission first and if they're open to it, yes, sweet. I'll come back to you with a couple options and then let's say next session comes along. Cool. I ran through a couple of numbers and as you, as you know, we're getting super busy with personal training. So we've only got limited amount of times that we're available. So we've got a lot of demand, we don't have a whole lot of supply left, which means long term, what we've currently done with our pricing structure, it's not really viable anymore. But I'm going to give you a couple of options to make sure you looked after you get the best results. The structure and accountability to make it work. So what we're going to do, we're going to increase our service to include online coaching as well. So we're going to do some face to face stuff plus online coaching to make it a hybrid coaching model which ensures that you actually get the level of accountability and support that you need and the structure and guidance that you need as well. So what it's going to look like is this, this is the support behind the scenes. This is the support in person. Basically your pricing is going to change from this to this. That's the first option. Second option is you can do keep it a similar pricing point now, but the level of access would change slightly to me. So for example, let's just say they're doing two sessions a week for a hundred bucks and your new price is basically $100. With online coaching for one session a week you say cool, we can either keep the same price and we're going to do one session instead of two and the support will be more behind the scenes with the online coaching. Second option is you stop doing the face to face sessions and we just do online coaching. You get the support, the accountability, the structure, etc. That's just going to be 60. You save yourself $40 a week so it's more sustainable for you to do for a longer period of time. Which one would you prefer to do? Beautiful. Awesome. But nothing's going to change right now. It's going to start in four weeks. Time to give me some time to prepare everything, get everything ready to go. Just thought I'd let you know you don't have to do anything on your side. The payments are going to automatically change. That's how you do it team. That is how you do it. Now I do realize that not everyone is going to be as easy as that. This is the way you can tailor make the individual pricing for individual clients. So make sure you don't tell everyone else because they're going to be pissed off that some people are paying less than others. So you can do that. By the way, that's completely fine to tailor make the individual's price based on their individual circumstance. I understand that. That's, that's completely fine on my end. So what that might look like is so you might say someone can only really afford 100 a week but they really need face to face sessions. You can say okay, cool, I understand that what we can do for you, I'm not going to include any online coaching for you in particular because you don't need it. You just need the face to face sessions. So I'm not going to do the check ins outside of our sessions. We're just doing the face to face sessions and it's going to be 80. Okay. Tailor make it to suit the individual to get them the best results. Completely fine with that. But you want to make sure you value in your time. Okay. So hope that makes sense team. But that's a couple of different ways that you can increase your pricing. The other way that you can increase pricing is for pretty new pts, pretty new Personal trainers. I can't even speak. When you need to register for GST, you automatically have a 10% bill of your income, essentially. So you're basically forced to increase your price by 10%. This is when you get to 75k per year, you'll need to register for GST. So you're basically forced to increase your price by 10%. Anyway, a good opportunity is just to increase it by a little bit more than that. Okay, so let's just say Your pricing is 65. 10% of 65 is $6.50. So you might increase it by $10 for new clients. For current clients, you just increase it by 10%. Okay, now, I did write down before how to get your price increased every single year. And I'm literally about to introduce this into, into my pricing structure in your terms and conditions. So for those who don't know when you own a gym and when you assign a lease, the rent of, of that lease goes up every year. Now, for my, for my gym, it was 4%. 4% every year in line with inflation. So essentially, I recommend doing the same thing. I suggest saying in your terms and conditions on this date, every single year, the price are going to go up 4% or whatever percent you feel comfortable with. I would say 4%. So if your pricing is $100 a week, it's going to be $104 next year. And then keep going up and up and up. That ensures that you're still getting paid the market market value. You're not going backwards. When everything else is going up and you have to worry about having conversations around price increases, it's in the terms and conditions. You go through it when they first sign up. So, so my suggestion is 1st of July, so the start of the financial year, price goes up 4% without fail. Happens automatically. You have a recurring, recurring event in your calendar. Okay, cool reminder. All direct debits increased by 4%. Super simple, right? So that's my last bit of value for you guys today. I'm going to implement that into my business very soon as well. But in terms of conditions, get it in there. Discuss it when they first sign up. It's fair enough. Like, things go up every single year. You need to, like, you know, the subscriptions for everything else goes up. Why can't your price go up every single year? So hope that makes sense. Give me some feedback on any value you got from this episode and I'll see you next week.

