Ep87: The 3 Mistakes Stopping $10k/Month PTs From Scaling to $20k+
16 Sept 2025 · 9 min
Matt Dart breaks down why personal trainers stuck at $10k/month can't scale higher. The three blocks: adding more one-on-one sessions instead of changing your model, running messy systems for payments and lead generation, and avoiding paid mentorship that costs time. Dart scaled to $55k/month.
All right, Team Matt here from the PT Profit, Leverage and Lifestyle show. We're going to go through the three mistakes stopping you from getting from 10k per month or going from 10k per month to 20k per month. So we're going through the three mistakes that most PTS make from achieving this. So for me, why can I help you with this is because I scaled from 0 to 55k a month in, in about two years and I made a lot of mistakes along the way and if I had my time again, I would actually, I wouldn't say I regret anything, but the model that I was running was the, was the issue, in my opinion. So we're going to go through the three mistakes stopping 10k month pts from scaling to 20k and more. So let's get straight into it. Mistake number one, you're trying to brute force more sessions. So many people just care about PT sessions. Trading time for money. Trading time for money. Trading time for money. But that is the reason why you will most likely never get past 10k per month. The only way that works is if you did it like I did it, which I don't suggest doing. And you hire 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 trainers to do the work for you. Trading time for money. And you get a small cut of that. That the, the difficult thing about that these days is because you basically cut away 30, 40, 50% of your margin instantly by doing this, which, you know, it looks good on paper, looks good, all these trainers, blah, blah, blah. But bottom line is people who have a proper model, like I'm about to share with you, make a lot more money and had a lot less stress on their plate than how I used to do it. Anyway, so that's the first one. So by doing this you'll only be able to make a certain amount of money, right? By doing this. So if you want to make 20k a month, right? So if we just get my little calculator out here, I'm just going to do the average pt because we're just talking about the average here. 20k divided by 4. So 5k a week. 5k a week. Even if you're, even if you're pricing, let's just say, for example, it's $100 a session. That's still, you still need to do 50 sessions a week to make that right. Now that is possible. 100%. In fact, I've done that myself. I wouldn't recommend it, but I've done it myself. And yeah, it's obviously possible, but I personally don't think it's sustainable long term. So in summary the number one mistake is people just think the answer is adding more sessions or in reality the model that you're actually doing is the reason why you're not going to 20k a month. Mistake number two is they're messy or they have non existent systems. So I was speaking to someone this morning about, about this and he was getting people to pay pay for the session after they finished was actually specifically for group classes funnily enough but even if it was for one on one and I said what's going to happen if you got 20 people doing the group class and they've all got to manually pay you going to wait 15 minutes and just manually take payments like is that really worth your time? Honestly you know some people are super super scared of subscriptions for some reason. But you know run the business how you want to run the business. But I certainly don't want to be spending extra time manually processing payments where you could just have people on a direct debit more scalable, more reliable as well. And you know if, if you want to, if you don't want to manually check the payments get a VA to do it paying $3 an hour get a VA to do that type of stuff. So that's that. So messy or non existent systems the couple of systems that you do need to scale from 10k a month to 20 when you, if you're a face to face trainer you could definitely still get to 20k a month from in the gym and you might not necessarily need to do any paid advertising for that. But if you want to go into more leverage, more lifestyle you want to start to automate a lot of these processes. So for example check ins might be automated and you know this is pretty much happening right now but there is some softwares that can extract your clients data from like trainerize ever fit kahunas or whatnot analyze the data and give feedback, give feedback to the client completely on autopilot. You actually don't need to do anything. So it's a really good time to be alive. Put it that way. The other systems is you need a system for generating leads and you need a system for nurturing and also the sales process system so you know you can, you could get to 10k a month without much systems. In fact I didn't even have a programming software until I was probably at 20k a month meaning I used to just use Google Sheets to get to do people's programs. Just Google sheets didn't want to pay for it, pay for a software. So yeah, a couple things that you, you'd want to, you'd want to have is systems to save you time to get time back. Number three, you're wasting years in trial and error instead of buying speed. If you're already at 5 to 10k a month. The only thing between you and 20k is structure and speed. It's one of the big reasons why I pretty much always have a mentor or multiple mentors that I'm working with because I'm paying for speed now. Like I'm not in any rush by any means. But would you rather pay X amount of money, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50k, whatever it is, and get the result in, I don't know, six months, one year instead of trying it on your own, having all this stress and it taking you 10, 15, 20 years to get the exact same thing where you can just pay someone that's done it and you can learn exactly what they did. That's the third mistake. People think they need to do it all on their own, which is just the ego. Too good to work from someone else or work work with someone else or learn from someone else. So all that is is ego. So which mistake are you? Are you mistake number one, are you trying to just do more sessions and that's the only way you think? Are you? Number two, where you don't have any systems at all and number three, you just think you're going to do it all on your own and you don't want to help. By all means, you could probably get the result on your own, but it's going to take you a lot longer because I can also guarantee if I didn't have the right mentors or the multiple mentors that I've had, you know, just in PT sales alone, I've done over a million in the last five years of PT sales. If I didn't invest, I think I've invested maybe $250,000 in mentorship in the last few years. If I didn't invest that, there's no way I would have made that much. But you know how many people in PT struggled to earn over $50,000 a year? And I was doing that per month because I paid for speed. So hope that gives you a little bit of context in terms of what's kind of stopping you from getting past that 10k to 20 and even beyond, you know, when you've got that type of income, 20, 30, 40, 50k a month coming in and you, you know, when you get past 20k, you're probably going to have to start looking at hiring a team to help you. But even then, like, the different the difference being, like, there's not a whole lot of extra work you need to do between 10 to 20k a month if you've got the right systems, and if the model that you're doing is actually of benefit to you. Meaning it's not just about doing PT sessions, because the quicker you can stop trading time for money, the faster you're going to be able to scale and get your time back, which is the most important asset that you've got. So that's a nice little topic that we we covered today. So if you want help with this type of stuff and you want to scale from that 10k to 20k and beyond, send me a message on DM right now on Instagram and Facebook, and let's see if we can speed up that process for you.

