In this solo, podcast‑style episode, fitness studio owner Richard Deterji walks listeners through the essential financial metrics needed to build a sustainable, $500,000‑per‑year (≈$10,000‑per‑week) fitness business. He begins by stressing that not all numbers—or businesses—are equal and that understanding a handful of key figures can prevent under‑charging and cash‑flow problems. Deterji outlines three revenue‑generation scenarios (200 members @ $50, 100 members @ $100, or ~62 personal‑training clients @ $160 for two sessions) to illustrate how different pricing models reach the target weekly revenue. He then explains how to calculate gross revenue, derive average revenue per client, and spot under‑pricing by dividing total weekly income by client count. The episode moves on to identifying the two biggest fixed expenses—rent and staff wages—while also urging owners to track all personal spend taken from the business and to set a regular owner‑payroll. Tax obligations are highlighted as a recurring weekly allocation based on projected annual income. After accounting for expenses, owner compensation, and tax, the remaining amount is defined as profit, the “holy grail.” Deterji concludes with actionable steps: audit your numbers, adjust pricing if you’re under‑charging, ensure you’re paying yourself a wage, monitor rent and staffing costs, and regularly calculate profit to guide growth decisions. Listeners are directed to his website (commarketing.com.au) and social channels for further support.
Chapters
Not all numbers are created equal. Not all businesses are created equal. So the numbers that matter are going to be key numbers that matter. Now, this one I'm going to talk to you about right now, this is the fundamental thing that most businesses that I talk to will generally not know or get wrong and really open up their eyes to what has been happening. I know what you're thinking. You went into fitness business so you could focus on getting people fit and healthy, not worrying about your numbers. Well, in today's episode, I want to break through some simple ways to grow your business and know the important numbers. And when you know these important numbers, it's going to help you to stick in your business longevity, to have a successful business so you can stay doing what you love to do. I'm Richard Deterji, and in today's episode, we are talking about knowing your numbers to build your studio, your fitness business of your dreams. I went into the fitness industry at 17. I had no idea about numbers. Well, I do lie. My mom said to me, Richard, if you ever put a dollar sign in front of your numbers at school, I always seem to get the answer faster. as soon as they understood the dollar sign in front of it. I don't know how much truth was in that, but she certainly believed that. And I've worked on the scenario of when we look at numbers, we need to have self-motivation for these numbers. When you look at a P&L sheet and you've got a whole bunch of numbers and lines and you're not sure what they are, sometimes they're really overwhelming. if that's not your jam, if that's not where you've come from. But it is really important to understand some key basic metrics, and I want to take them through with you today so you don't seem so overwhelmed. And again, you know, to be driven in your business, knowing numbers more than member numbers are really important too. So a lot of people focus on member numbers— how many members do you have, how many clients you have— and this is all great, but at the end of the day We want to make sure those members and those clients are paying what they need to pay so they do classify as being a client. So who's with me? Who has avoided the subject of knowing the numbers for so long? Or what about you don't look at your bank account because you know it's just going to be miserable in there? Or you don't— or the other option is that you don't know how to budget or handle what's going where. So again, you avoid this topic at all, um, in all ways. So I'm going to be short and sharp because it's, it's kind of relatively easy, the top line numbers. I'm going to focus on these. So guys, you are tuning in, um, love to know where you're tuning in from. Uh, if you're watching this on YouTube or on Apple or Spotify or any other audio channels, be sure to connect with us on ComMarketing, um, on our Instagram or our Facebook, or you can, or you can jump on my Instagram, Richard To turn G, spelled T O U T O U N J I. All right, let's get into this episode today. It's about knowing your numbers to build our fitness studio of our dreams, our business of our dreams. Now I'm going to run you through three ways like to get to a half a million dollar studio. We have a program, and and the focus is to get to a half million dollar studio. To do that, we need to fundamentally know some numbers. how to get that. So half a million dollar studio is around $10,000 a week, just short of $10,000 a week. Now I'll just give you 3 scenarios to get to $10,000. This is what you're going to need. So half a million dollars is what you need if you're running a group kind of scenario where there's a whole bunch of people coming into your studio or gym. Let's say you've got— you'll need 200 people paying you $50. So you might just write $50 down times 200. That will get you $10,000 a week. If you're running small group training, semi-privates, maybe group of 4— we've talked a lot about this before— you need 100 people paying you $100. Or if you're a PT, let's say on average doing 2 sessions, um, about $160 for the 2 sessions, so $80 per per se, you'll need about 60, about 62 clients to make this a reality. All right. So pretty simple, $50, $100, or they're paying you $150 and you need 200, 100, or 62 of those people. That is gonna get us to the half million dollars. Now, not all numbers are created equal. Not all businesses are created equal. So the numbers that matter are gonna be key numbers that matter. Now, this one I'm gonna talk to you about right now, this is the, the fundamental thing that most businesses that I talk to will generally not know or get wrong and really open up their eyes to what has been happening. So number one is the gross number. So what you want to do is you want to take down, for example, the number last week that you recorded or over a month, whatever you may be. So what, what came in your bank? What came in your bank account last week or last month? How are we going to work this out? So that's your gross. That's your— the gross. Now, you probably know your member number. So you want to take your member number and you want to go, okay, I've got 50 members, 10 members, 20 members, 2,000 members, and you want to divide it by your gross number. So I'll give you an example, quick example here. So let's say you made $10,000 and you said you've got let's say you've got 100 clients per se. And so you've got $10,000 and you've— and you take the client. So you want to calculate the clients you have divided by 100. That's $100 per client. Now you might say, oh, I've got $10,000. Yep. And I am charging $100 for the week. And so you do the maths on that. So then you look at how many clients you have and you might say, um, I've got 150 clients. You divide 150, so that's $66 for the client. So that means— this is the big thing here, guys— that means that you're actually undercharging what your memberships are. Now, this is a big problem for most fitness businesses. They've either got foundation rates, old membership rates, And you're thinking that you're charging a fee, but in fact, you're charging well and truly less because someone's on a good deal, multiple people on good deals, and it's really costing you in your top line revenue. So the reason why you're doing all this work, but you're actually not making what you want to make and work in the business house. So you need to know your gross and your clients. Now, some other— now you've got that, you'll probably have some massive aha moments and go, oh my gosh, I didn't realize that I was undercharging. Most— you mostly will be like that, right? Most people are like that. And so then you can take aboard what you need to do to get your rates the right rates that you need to be charging. And that's a whole other conversation. We've talked a lot about that in the podcast. If you need help with that, just connect with me on commarketing.com.au. We can help you do that. Now, the other numbers you need is what you're going to spend. You know, what are your expenses? So An easy way to look at this is you want to take your big expenses, your rent if you have some, and your staff wages. These should be your 2 biggest expenses depending on the size of your business. So depending on the size of your business, your rent or your staff. So for example, if you're an outdoor trainer, you might pay the council. If you have a studio, you'll pay your rent there. If you've got a gym, you'll pay rent, right? These will be your expenses you will need to know, and these are fixed expenses most likely. staff might be contracts, they might come and go depending on the clientele, but you should have an average there. The other point that you want to talk about that you mentioned here is yourself. What are you paying yourself? Now, you might say, I don't pay myself anything. I personally think that's rubbish. I think everybody pays themselves something. And I ask you to go through your bank account for your business and find every transaction that you've ever spent anything on. So it could be Did you buy petrol? Did you go to the shops and buy some lunch? Did you put your groceries on your business card? And it doesn't matter if you're a self-employed business, meaning, or you're a company, it doesn't matter. But you need to figure out what you actually have spent on yourself. Okay? And put that number and know that number. That's really important. The other number you need to know is your tax. What are you paying? What does your tax come up with each week on average? So if you had that $100,000, what is the average tax that you're going to need to put away? And so it shouldn't be like a random number. It's like, just get to know what it is and it roughly will be the same until you reach different brackets. And that's really important to know, to have that there. And then what's left is what we call profit, the holy grail of profit. And you get profit once you have got all your numbers right. So Some key things that I see a lot is that I think sometimes the— what you spend on— sometimes rents are really high and you need to have a look at that because your rents are really high. That means you'll need to get a huge amount of clients or take their rates up, and— or you won't have money to spend in marketing. So check on your rents. Pay yourself. I see a lot of people not paying themselves at all. I always say to my clients that if they can pay yourself something first, could be $50 a week, $100 a week, but you want to get into the habit of paying yourself through— pay yourself through a wage. And so then you can start to build. Now, the minimum here is to pay yourself for the hours that you train. So for example, if you're new business and you say, I can't, I'm putting all the money back in the business, that's cool. But pay yourself for if you had a trainer to replace you, what would it cost you? What are you paying them? You're paying $50, $60. What would you pay them? And pay yourself that. Because if something happens to you or you need to take a week off, you know that you can basically say, yep, I'm paying myself this, I can give it to another trainer. And that's really important. And then obviously you can pay yourself a standard wage for what you're doing in the business. Okay. And then you could see the profit left. So instead of saying, oh, whatever's left I'm taking, do it the other way around. That will literally change your entire business. Now we do these items here so we can grow and our business can get better. Without understanding these numbers, all we're looking at is the bank account, and then we're looking at the clients that we have. But in fact, we want to change it where we want to understand what our average dollar is, what our gross amount is, than our members. Our members are okay, but the members are just a number. If the members are not paying, it's not going to work in your favor or your, or your members' favor, because at the end of the day, if you can't run a business successfully, you won't be in business that long. So team, this is a short one for today. I want you to start looking at those numbers, start calculating what you have and what you don't have here. Then we can work out a plan of attack The most important number. I'd love you to do that right now. Work out your average dollar and your clients and see if you're on track or if you're under track. If you're under track, go and make the adjustments to make that happen. Go and really talk to your clients and see what you've done over the time to help them with their health and fitness, and then start charging what you're worth. We want to stay in this business long term. So team, hope that helps. Go out there. Feel confident with your numbers. Start diving into these to help you grow your health and fitness studio. Catch you next time.
