Matt (an online personal trainer and business coach) argues that most personal trainers quit or fail to earn a full-time income because they lack sales and marketing skills, not because of poor training ability or lost passion. He frames the solution as mastering two "growth tasks": consistent lead generation and converting leads (sales). He cites industry-scale claims (80% of PTs quit within six months; only ~5% of online PTs make a full-time income) and shares his own results (over $1M in PT sales, ~80% conversion rate, grew to ~250 sessions/week) as evidence. The episode emphasizes prioritizing marketing/sales over program-writing and recommends weekly, repeatable outreach and offers (social posts, CTAs, DMs, calls) to scale.
Questions this episode answers
80%
5%
$60,000–$70,000 per year
Over $1,000,000 in PT sales
Approximately 80% conversion rate
All right, so why do 80% of personal trainers quit within six months? And why are only 5% of online PTs making enough money to be like a full time income? Why is that? That's what we're going to go through in today's episode. So hope you're having an epic day team. My name is Matt. If you haven't met me before, I'm an online PT + business coach for personal trainers looking to have an online income stream or completely move online. So yeah, if you haven't seen my stuff already, check out the other podcasts. And if you do want to work with me, best place to reach out to me is on Instagram or Facebook. So let's get stuck in. Now before we get stuck in, if you could please just like or subscribe wherever you're listening or watching this, it does help more than you realize. The only way to help more people is to get more engagement on the podcast. So let's get stuck in. So why is that the case? Why do 80% of pts, why do 80% of face to face pts quit within 6 months? And what are 5% of online pts? Why do they never make enough to make a full time income? And you could probably argue full time income might be like 60, 70,000 a year. So like 1200 a week. That's not a lot of money. But why, why only 5%? That's such a low number. So let me go into a couple of, couple of reasons here. So there's a, it's not because like they're bad trains. It's not because they lost their passion. It's because they don't make enough money, they don't know how to get clients. And at the end of the day, and I said this on one of my posts the other day, where is it the best marketer wins? It's not the best coach, it's. It's not the person who looks the best. Irrelevant. Like, yes, obviously if you look good, you might get some clients, but if you, if you don't know how to market, there's no hope for you, unfortunately. And the reality is in the course that they teach you or you know, when you're in a gym, they don't teach you the marketing or the sales side of things. And you know, I've been lucky enough that I've had a pretty good background with that type of stuff before I started in the industry. So I kind of knew, yeah, it's a proper business. It's not something that you just do casually like so many people Just do PT on the side because they don't know how to market. I might just take a couple of clients here and there. And even though that's what they want to do, even though that's what they want to do and that's their purpose, that's their life's mission, they for whatever reason, they don't want to learn the skill of marketing and sales, et cetera, et cetera. So it comes down to one thing. Come down to one thing really. But it's face to face or online, it doesn't matter. It's what I commonly call them as growth tasks. Growth tasks are as follows. Lead generation or it's basically lead generation. Converting clients, that's pretty much the two things. So if you're not, if you're in a face to face gym, if you're not contacting leads weekly, if you're not doing marketing in the gym weekly, if you're not, like if you're an online trainer, if you're not posting on social media, if you're not doing call to actions on social media, if you're not having conversations in the dms, if you're not offering your service, there is no hope for you. It doesn't matter how good of a PT you are, the best marketer wins. Here's another analogy for you. Who's got the best burgers? Who has the best burgers? I would probably argue some of my favorite burgers are grilled. Grilled, Pretty popular. I like grilled now. I grilled the cheapest burger. No, what's the cheapest burger? McDonald's. How much does McDonald's make? The best marketer wins. Okay, so you need to understand sales and marketing. If you do not understand sales and marketing, you will fail as a PT and cause what happens when you fail as a PT? You become a club manager. Club managers are failed PTs most of the time. Not all the time. Most of the time club managers are failed pts. They want the security, quote, quote security of having a salary, getting told what to do, getting told what they're worth, etc. So this is just a bit of a reality check for you guys building your businesses that the things that you need to master, and I mean master if you want to be in this long term, you need to master sales and marketing. Sales is like once you understand sales, it's relatively easy. But marketing, marketing changes over time. What worked five years ago when I first started doesn't work anymore or it doesn't work as well. Still works to a degree. Social media is changing At a drop of a hat, clicking your fingers. Instagram could get shut down. Your account could get shut down. If you're relying on Instagram to build your business, if you're an online pt, if you're in a gym. I've got kicked out of gyms before. Not for my fault, but I've got kicked out of gyms before. So, you know, you might, you might have got lucky and, you know, been able to build a few clients. But what happens if that went away? What happens if you have to start from scratch again? Could you do that? So that is. Yeah, that's one of the big things that we teach in our program is sales and marketing. We don't really teach you how to become a better trainer. There's plenty of other people that can teach you that type of stuff. And like, for me personally, like, I'm probably a 6 out of 10 as a PT. Like, I hate doing programs, hate writing programs. In fact, I barely wrote programs when I was a pt. Everyone's so fixated on a program, they have to have a program. They have to have a program. Guess What? I had 150 clients, 250 sessions a week. Programs aren't what sell the service. I got people great results, by the way, Great results. But most people are training with me two, three times a week. I told them to kind of replicate our sessions during, when they train, but they don't need a super, super specific, super detailed program. Like, yes, it makes things a bit easier for sure, but it's a myth in the industry that people need to have these super specific, tailored programs for the general population. By the way, for general population, not saying, for powerlifting, bodybuilding, that type of stuff, you probably need a bit more tailored guidance. But the moral of the story here is I knew how to market, I knew how to get leads, I knew how to close, close deals, close sales in the, in the. I've been in PT six years now. I don't know what the current figures are, but I've closed over a million dollars in sales in just PT. And my conversion rate over that time has been 80%. 80% of people that sit in front of me sit in front of me. I close in some type of capacity. So there's a number of different trainings that you can watch on the podcast if you don't want to work with me directly on the podcast. We've got a couple of sales training. Objection. Handling videos. But it all comes down to the growth tasks. One of the reasons why I was able to go from zero to 250 sessions a week in I think it was two years, was without fail, without fail. Every single week I had 20, 30, 40 people to call as leads. Without fail. And guess what happens when you got 20, 30, 40 people to call each week. Guess what happens? You book in 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 15, 20 consultations every single week. And guess what happens when you have an 80% conversion rate? You grow very, very fast. And I'm not saying you have to have an 80% conversion rate, but if you were like, what would happen if you were to be doing calls, calls the leads every single week? What would happen if you were growing your audience every single week on social media? What would happen if you were offering your services on social media every single week, not just once every frigging three months? What would happen if you were actively doing lead generation to generate these leads every single week? What would that, what would your business look like? Because I can tell you what it would look like, it would skyrocket. There's a reason why majority of our clients double their revenue within just a couple of months of working with us. Could be focused on the growth tasks. What's going to be the biggest needle in your business right now? So many people are focused on doing all these PT sessions. You need to focus on the sales and marketing. So the quicker that you can, you know, have your price at a point where you don't have to do as many face to face PT sessions, the faster you're going to be able to do spend more time on sales and marketing, which is going to move the needle even more. And that's when you, that's when you like for example, I'm talking about like online right now. Even if you're full face to face, you obviously still take on online clients, right? It doesn't take much time. Takes like five minutes a week to manage an online client. But imagine if you spent five hours a week purely, purely on growth tasks. Watch your business take off when that happens. So this is a nice short episode. I'll leave it there. I think I made my point here. But that's the reason why so many people quit or they never make enough money to do it full time or even part time. So many people have a full time job and then do PT on the side. Okay, so I'll leave it there for this episode. If you do want to help with this stuff in sales and marketing, that is majority of the stuff that we teach because at the end of the day that's what moves the needle. That's what you need. That's what you need to, you know, make more money. I'm purely focused on making my clients more money. That's pretty much all I care about, or not all about. I focus on the profit, leverage, and the lifestyle. So, yes, I want to make them more money and then we start to leverage their time and then we improve their lifestyle. So, yeah, if you want more information, send me a DM on Instagram or Facebook and we'll see if we can help. Anyway, have an awesome day, Zane. I'll see you in the next episode.
