Ep62: The Secret To Taking Holidays & Still Getting Paid

What's going on? Team Matt here from PT Profit, Leverage and Lifestyle Show. Hope you guys are having an amazing day. I'm officially back from Fiji. I just got back about a week ago, sorry, a couple of days ago. Losing track of time at the moment, still on Fiji time. But I thought this episode would be perfect to actually explain how to actually get paid or how to still get paid while traveling. I get this question quite a lot about personal trainers wanting to know how to get paid while traveling because most personal trainers actually still trade time for money. So I'm going to go through firstly how you, you're able to do the same thing. Now for those who don't know, yes, I do business coaching, but I'm also still an online trainer. All the clients that I move online are still like, I've lost a couple, couple of them, but majority of them are still coaching with me online. So, you know, I'm still in the trenches with you guys as well still, you know, online pt, I don't do any face to face anymore. But I'm going to tell you what I would do if I was a face to face trainer and what I was doing when I was doing face to face because I still traveled one of my honeymoon last year. You know, I travel two or three times a year at least. So. And I'm sure you guys have the same aspirations of wanting to travel if you want to. You don't necessarily have to travel, but of course, if you want to travel, we want to show you a way that you can still do that. So let's get stuck in, let's, let's explain what the usual scenario is. First the personal trainers, then I'll go through how to actually get those results. So what usually happens is personal trainers trade time for money. So if they're not trading the time for money, they're not getting paid. That's the current scenario for most personal trainers. Meaning, and I just spoke to someone else today about this. They're charging, you know, $75 for 45 minutes, which is great. But what happens when they go away? And what happens is this person said, oh yeah, I'll just give them a program included and then I'll just pause the payments when I go away. Like, okay, cool. So. So there's no real incentive for you to actually go away on a holiday than enjoy yourself and actually have a really good lifestyle, is there? Which sadly, probably 90% of trainers feel the same way and they feel like they can't actually take time off because otherwise the business won't operate or the business won't be able to grow, etc. Etc. So it's one thing to be able to take time off and get paid, but it's another thing to take time off in the business to still grow. That's a whole nother level, which we'll touch on today. So, yeah, as I said, most personal trainers are still trading time for money, and they're not charging for the additional stuff that they do behind the scenes, but they're not trading time for money. So they're not differentiating the two things. So when you go away, you have no option but to just pause their payments. Now, there's a couple options that you can do here. This is what some people do. Some people will pause their payments and say, look, we'll just continue the sessions. When you get back, here's your training program to follow while on the way. And then you pretty much just switch off and they come back and you. And they're like, oh, I don't need the PT sessions anymore. I can just follow the program. Thanks so much. And you just lose income as soon as you come back from holidays. What a great outcome. I'm just kidding. We don't want to do that. Second option is you do makeup sessions. Now, I used to do this. One of my previous mentors told me to do this, which I get that it is a good idea. However, what if you're doing 40 or 50 sessions a week like I used to do, and you better make up 40 sessions, you're going away for two weeks, that's 80 sessions. You need to make up on top of the 40 sessions you're doing on a regular basis. So you're gonna have to do basically do 50 or 60 sessions a week for like a couple weeks before you go away. So it's gonna burn you out before you go away or when you come back, you don't even want to be at work, you still want to be on holidays. You have to do 50 or 60 sessions to make up the sessions. Just killing yourself before and after the holiday. So it's, again, no incentive to go on holidays and enjoy yourself and enjoy the lifestyle, which is what I'm super passionate about. And what I help my clients with is having the leverage, the lifestyle, and the profit, all three pillars. So that's essentially what. What usually happens. So let me go through how to actually make the transition or make the change so you're able to take holidays and still get paid. Now, the key is a hybrid model. So you're still Charging trading time for money, you're still charging for that. I understand that a lot of personal trainers still need to do that, which is fine. But you're also going to charge a premium on top for the program design, which you should be updating every like month or so. The accountability behind the scenes and the additional support required to get them the results that they want. Okay, because you can do everything in the session, but all the other stuff you're doing outside of the session, most, most trainers are not getting paid for that, which you should be. So, for example, if you're charging $70 for 45 minutes of training, which is great, that's fine. Perhaps you should be charging an extra 20, 25, 30 bucks a week for the other stuff that you do on top of that. Meaning your $70 now becomes 1995 per week. So instantly, the first benefit is the average cost of your services. Got 20, 30 bucks a week. And guess what? If you've got 20 clients, that's an extra $600 a week just by doing that. That's an extra $31,000 a year just by doing that. An extra $30 a week, which you're already doing the work for. You're just not charging for it. And some trainers will be like, oh yeah, I'm just gonna give them a free program. It takes them an hour, an hour, two hours, three hours to make it every single month. Why are you not charging for that? And you're charging 70 for 45 minutes. So your hourly rate is whatever it is, 100 bucks an hour, as an example. So you gotta think about this stuff. So you gotta make a hybrid model. Hybrid model essentially just means you're charging for the trading time for money plus stuff on top, but you're packaging it together. So you're not saying cost 70 for the session plus 30 bucks a week for the online side of it. You're saying, cool, we do hybrid coaching. We do the programming, the nutrition, and your face to face Sessions. It's 95 a week per session, for example. Or you might do, you know, let's say that 70 for the PT sessions with the two sessions. So 17 times two, plus 30 for the online coaching. So 170 instead of 140. Stuff I help my clients with every single day. Okay? So the first thing is develop a hybrid model. So now what happens when you're going away? What happens is, cool, they already, they're already using your app, for example. They've already got their training program. You're still keeping them accountable behind the scenes. They're still doing the check in form, etc. Etc. So when you go away you say cool, look, we can do makeup sessions if you want, but otherwise we just drop you down to our online coaching, which is 55. So the key here is you don't just drop it down to 30, which is what they're paying for on top of the face to face session. That's only on top of if they're just going to do the online coaching, it might go down to 50 bucks a week. 55 a week. If you're, if they're paying like 70 for the face to face session, that part you need to work out specifically and tailor make to suit the client. But you don't drop it down from like 95 just to 30, you drop it from like 95 down to like 55, 60, 70. It's just a small drop because they still want to be a paying the. You don't want to like, you know, get 10% of your income. You still want to get a decent amount of your income while you're traveling. Plus you're going to be doing more like check ins while you're away and stuff as well. Okay? So like by the way, you're still going to need to do some work to obviously justify this, right? You can't just, you know, sip cocktails for a month and expect clients to keep paying while you're doing absolutely nothing at all. You've still got to be able to check in with these clients and you can check in with clients at the pool, check in with them at the pool, check in with them at the beach. That's the whole point of the online business, right? So all of a sudden if you're doing 40 sessions charging 70, you are making 2,800 per week. Now all of a sudden your average spend is 95. Now you're making 3800 per week. But let's say, okay, cool, 40 sessions. Let's say the 40 clients in this example, let's just do 30 because some people do two sessions instead of one. 30 clients and they pay 55 a week. You're still going to get paid 1600 a week instead of zero by doing this. This is at $55 a week. Okay? So yes, you obviously have a little bit of a drop and if you really want to, you could have a more premium online coaching aspect. If you really want to do a little bit more work, you could probably still charge the same amount. Personal preference, but this is what I'm doing. This is what I've done in the past. So how much better is that? Right? Instead of earning zero, you're now going to earn sixteen, seventeen hundred dollars a week while you're traveling. Okay. Clients are still happy and still getting results. They're still following the program. And then you might even find some of those face to face. Clients might actually just continue online because it's a bit cheaper, they don't need you as much and you get more time. It's a win, win for everyone. So this is what you do. That's exactly how you do it. And I've been doing this with all my clients and myself and it's the reason why I'm still able to travel, do whatever I want. Not trading time, not trading time for money. And you know, it's a luxurious life. You know, I get to choose what I do Now I do work a lot still, but I'm choosing to work a lot. I don't need to. Okay? Now the next thing, if you want your business to grow while or your business to still operate properly while you're away, you need a team. There's no other way about it. You need to have a team. Whether it's. If you're a face to face trainer and you might get someone else to take your sessions and this is just an option, I'm not saying this is what you should do and this is just a option. If you want to earn the same amount, let's say this is to the example of 40 sessions, so 70, 70 per session, so 2800. Now you might, you might have another trainer that can take these sessions. Let's just say they're doing 40 sessions, then you're going to pay them 40 an hour. So get 20 bucks per session. You're going to passively make 50 per session, so you have to pay them 800 and then you're going to make 2K. So yes, you're going to make slightly more money, an extra 300. But you're getting someone else to train your clients. You're going to have to train the person to, you know, on, on your skills, your systems, etc. Not so much your skills, but your systems. You have to get the clients who like them. It's a lot more work. Okay. Especially if you're only going to do it for while you're away. So for me personally, I would suggest putting people into the online model only because you want your profitability to be high. Right. The other thing as well, which I didn't think of until right now, is you could probably pause the rent while you're away as well. So instantly you're still gonna be making money, but you're gonna be saving, you know, 300 bucks a week in rent that you're not paying for while you're traveling as well. So even better, you're gonna make 1600 a week, but then you're going to save 300 bucks a week on the rent. So you'll actually make real estate going to be almost making 2k a week instead of 2800. So it's even better to do it this way. Now if you're an online trainer, even better business as usual. Except you're still going to need, you're still going to need to do the lead gen. But the good news is when you're an online trainer and you're traveling, you get to make more content that shows your lifestyle as an online trainer. Very good opportunity to make more content while you're traveling. Okay, hope this is making sense so far, team. I hope I'm providing a good amount of value here. Now, if you do want to outsource some of these things to help you grow the business, a couple of things of a couple ideas for you. And this is what I do. I have two, two virtual assistants. One virtual assistant does my social media for me. I was not posting any of any social media content except for some stories of me on the beach and sipping cocktails and whatnot. When I was in Fiji, I posted none of, none of the business stuff. The VA did all that for me. Okay. The VA did all the editing, content creation. Majority of that was done by her. I still did a little bit. Just the disclaimer there. I did some of the content creation. The VA did the editing for me. My other VA does lead generation for me. Find leads on social media, starts conversations with them. I take over the conversation from there. So I can just do that by the pool. Okay? Super, super easy. That's not rocket science. Now the other thing, sales calls or discovery calls, consultations, whatever you want to call it. I'm lucky enough that I've got a salesperson, Jason, absolute superstar, as part of my team. But you might not have that at this stage. But the good thing is as an online trainer or face to face trainer, you can take consultations over zoom or over the phone. That can be done yourself if you want to completely switch off. You're going to have to either hire a salesperson or update your calendar so people can't book in until you get back from your holiday. But there's pros and Cons to everything. The drawback is they're going to lose the impulse of, about wanting to, to get started with you straight away. So there's pros and cons to everything. But you know, if you really, if you really wanted to, you're only one, you know, one skill set away or one conversation perhaps with me, away from being able to go on holidays and still get paid. As my example before, trainer that I just talked to would have been losing $2,800 a week by traveling. Now because we're working together now, he's going to be making at least sixteen hundred dollars per week while traveling. Now he's not going to be traveling forever of course. It's just like a couple of weeks every, every six months or so. So he's still going to be building the face to face as well. But he's got the option now where he can move people onto an online model so clients get better results. He can still earn money while traveling and he's got an option for people for when they get back to just continue online or go back to face to face. Because most personal trainers, keyword most, some personal trainers want to be on the gym floor, you know, forever, which is fine, but most of them don't want to be on the gym floor forever. They want more flexibility. They want to just do like 20 sessions a week. And the rest of the people online. So be super purposeful with this type of stuff. Like long term, what do you want to do long term? How are you going to have the lifestyle that you want? Because there's nothing worse. And I've been here, I've done, you know, 60, 70, 80 sessions a week. It's not fun in my opinion. Like that was, it was just frigging hectic and I don't want that lifestyle. Then you guys might want that lifestyle. But for most of us, what that lifestyle. So you need to have a hybrid, hybrid coaching model. You're not just trading time for money. Make sure you're charging for the programming, the nutrition guidance, the check ins, behind the scene, the analysis, making sure you charge for that stuff. And then of course be confident. Say, hey, look, you can either do makeup sessions or we do the online coaching model. Which one would you prefer? So you don't have clients pausing while you're away. It just doesn't happen. It's not an option. The boundary is that you don't pause while you're away. And same thing goes for when your clients are traveling as well like this. They still need the accountability while they're traveling. Yes. It's not. They're not going to be able to train as much or do too much stuff, but, you know, you should still be keeping them accountable. So that's maybe a topic for another episode, but I hope that was valuable for you team and I'm super, super happy to be back. I'm sure you guys saw a lot of my photos from Fiji. So, yeah, super keen to do some more travel this year. We're going to Queenstown in July for some snowboarding, which is freaking epic. And then we're going to Japan in January or February next year. So super pumped, super grateful for you guys. In fact, I actually joined a new gym today and I actually ran, ran into someone that was listening to the podcast. So how freaking epic is that? So again, if you. The only way the podcast grows is if you share with other people. So send me a dinner DM if you like this episode and share with a friend and I'll see you on the other side in the next episode. Peace out. Bye. Bye.