How to Start a Personal Training Business

If you're thinking about starting up a personal training business, or indeed looking for ways to grow your personal training business, then this episode of Fix Your Business is well worth watching. Welcome back everybody, it's the next episode of Fix Your Business. I'm your host Robin Waite, the Fearless Business Coach, and today we're going to be learning about how to grow a personal training stroke fitness business. Our guest today is Paul Greaves. Welcome to the show, Paul.

Good afternoon, thank you.

So, Paul, just give everybody a quick sort of 30-second intro to your business. You're the founder of Edge PT, so what does Edge PT do?

It's mainly sort of one-to-one personal sessions. I do a little bit of small group and online classes and things as well, but then I work both mobile and from commercial gym.

Cool, excellent. So this session is gonna be fairly fast-paced today, Paul, so are you ready?

Yep.

Excellent. We had a quick chat sort of offline, so, you know, started to get a feeling for what sort of challenges your business is facing. Obviously, you know, there has been a global crisis happening, but you've managed to kind of weather the storm by the sounds of it. But one of your personal goals for your business is to pretty much double your turnover from £1,600 a month up to somewhere approaching £3,000 Why £3K a month? Why is that important to you?

That's just kind of the figure that I had in my head in terms of it pays the bills with disposable income longer term as well. I mean, I'm only in renting at the minute, so long-term goal is to sort of buy a house, get a mortgage, can pay as much in rent as what I would be paying in mortgage, which is quite nice.

Cool. I mean, I think one of the things I asked you before as well is why £3K and would you like more? And I think the The obvious answer was yes, I'd always like more. But £3K is a really interesting number because it's the answer which most people put down. They normally put down £2.5K to £4K as a broad, and £3K being sort of a good average. And actually, one of the reasons why £3K is quite common is because it's thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the general kind of like— it actually equates to roughly a national average wage, just a little bit more in the UK. So for some reason, because of the way that we've kind of been taught to go through our educational system, our parents putting the onus on us to kind of get our GCSEs, A-levels, and go to university and get a proper job. Most people put that down because that's all they've been used to in their upbringing and in their working life. Now, I know that you've obviously, you've got a couple of businesses running. You set up the personal training business more recently, having worked for, I think it was Pure Gym, wasn't it? And you're now sort of doing quite a lot more one-to-one work. So I'm gonna go back to you. We've got an opportunity now to increase £3K. Where would you like to get to ultimately?

Ultimately, probably around 5 would be nice.

Talk to me about kind of the, the programmes that you're selling at the moment. You mentioned you've got an online programme, you've also got some one-to-one clients. So talk to me about some of the numbers which you're kind of pulling through the business at the moment.

Well, when the lockdown sort of happened, myself and 2 other PTs, we collaborated into— because we all work from a Pure Gym, so we were used to delivering classes in big commercial, one-to-one, etc. And obviously that essentially was just stopped. Dead. So we had to create some sort of revenue stream, and we have put together the Gym From Home, we've called it, and it's effectively Zoom sessions on a monthly basis. And we're delivering sort of 24 classes live per week on a membership, delivered between the 3 of us, and different things like circuit speed camp, that type of thing, half-hour sort of HIIT sessions. And that's something that we're looking to scale and keep going long term as like a hybrid when we're allowed to go back more into sort of the gyms and one-to-ones.

Cool. I'm just going to share my screen a second. So I want to go through the numbers in a little bit more detail. At the moment, you've got that online platform which you're sharing between 2 other PTs, which is— it's great because it gives you a bit of extra, it gives you a bit of backup for a start to have a team around you. It means it gives a bit of extra variety for your clients as well on the program. But obviously at the moment, you're dividing that money, sort of splitting that money 3 ways.

Yeah.

Cool. So we'll talk about the new pricing. Obviously, we did discuss the the current pricing, but your new pricing, you're looking at introducing a £30 a month package and a £70 a month package, aren't you? So, and that was going to be for sort of a fixed number of sessions, which you said was 15 sessions, and then the £70 a month was going to be unlimited. Now, 15 sessions is, if you work it out, I mean, over the average month, that's pretty much one every other day. So that's still fairly intensive.

Yeah.

Have you got an idea from your existing clients how many people would go on to each one of those 2?

Well, the original members that we have, we did on just unlimited, and because of the situation, a lot of people have taken advantage of that, I think, because they've been from home.

Yeah.

Now we've noticed a drop-off in numbers from people starting to sort of transition back to work and things, so we've actually shifted our timetable a little bit. We used to do later starts, we used to do like half 7 in the morning. We've now pulled that back to 6:15, the early doors one, so that people are still able to do it. before work. It's hard to say in terms of if 15 would be too much for people or they would still want the unlimited as well.

Well, see, I actually think there is definitely a demand for the unlimited, but I think you've got bandwidth to just tweak those prices slightly because think about it this way. So 15 sessions at £30 is £2 a session. I mean, that feels immediately to me to be way too cheap per session. You'd never be able to go down to a gym for £2 a session. I know that probably when you've got the big sort of gyms where you can kind of go in and out at your leisure and things like that, but you're actually providing a really highly valuable service here in terms of personal— it is personal training, it's group sessions where people are going to get enormous value and there'll be an element of feedback which you don't always get from just going down the gym. But even at £2 a session, that's still way too cheap. So I mean, even if you, for example, if you reduce that down to 10 sessions, it means that now the price increases from £2 a session up to £3 a session. Which is 50% more revenue per session. If you think about it, that's a big chunk of change. And actually, when you're talking about— I talk a lot about price increases. Now, a lot of people, when you— they immediately think, well, a 50% price increase means I have to sell 50% fewer of the same thing. Actually, that's not true, because by the time you take out overheads and expenses and things like that, a 50% price increase could actually mean you could sell 75% or even more fewer of the same thing. You can have far fewer clients and make more money out of it. So that's just something to play around with. And then obviously if you drop that down to just 5 sessions, you know, now all of a sudden we're up to— wow, we're up to £6 a session here. We've trebled the amount of money we're making per session. And I mean, that's once a week. I mean, you could do it— I'd probably maybe go for something like 8, you know, 2 sessions a week. And anybody who wants 9 or more sessions, they go into your unlimited plan and it's double the price. Now there's economies of scale there which don't quite work out because then if you only then had 9 sessions at £70 a month, well, you're paying £6 a session. It kind of doesn't quite work out. So you've still got a bit of finagling to do to get the numbers to add up. But at least you can already start to see the momentum that it would create by having far fewer sessions for that basic package. Also, it's about, you know, making sure that when you recommend those packages to somebody, don't allow them to self-select. If you allow them to self-select out of those 2 packages, what do you think is gonna happen?

The cheaper one.

I'll have the cheaper one, please, because that's just what we do in Britain. British people love a deal. They'll just go for the cheapest one. But actually, each of those individuals will have their own goals. So what you need to do is identify what their goals are and make sure that the package is aligned with them. If they want to go off and do an Ironman, probably your basic package isn't going to cut it. They're gonna need, they're gonna need to work much more intensively and have more interaction with you. Granted, they may even need to then step up to your, you know, your one-to-one one program, but they need the unlimited package and you've got to hold them to account to make sure they make best use of it in order to achieve their goals. If it's somebody who's just a bit, hey, I just want to do a bit of CV work and just need a bit of somebody's help to make me do it, and I've got kids and family and busy work and I can only really do a couple of sessions a week, fine. Okay, the package we'd recommend for you is our basic package.

Yeah.

That makes sense? So I noticed in your challenges, one of the things you put was around sort of the sales side of things and being able to articulate your value and better, like, be able to sell more easily to people. So I don't know if you noticed the language which I used there, which was, so each client who comes through your business, you kind of need to do a bit of an assessment with them and a bit of a consultation with them in order to understand their goals. But then once you've got that information, it's like a diagnostic.

Mm-hmm.

You'd say, great, having looked at your assessment form and what your goals are and what we've discussed during the consultation, The package I'd recommend for you is our unlimited package, and these are the reasons why. And then I come back and they go, oh God, it's a bit expensive, and all the usual kind of bullshit stuff that people say. You say, no, no, your goal was to go out and do an Ironman. Like, the basic package just won't cut it. It just won't get you to your goal. If you want to achieve your goal, you're actually gonna have to go unlimited. And potentially, once I've got to grips with your ability, we may even have to discuss one-to-one, which is even more expensive. That kind of makes sense.

Yeah.

So the next thing I'm going to kind of focus on then is the one-to-one side of things, because at the moment you're charging that out at £40 an hour.

It's between 45 and 50 minutes.

Okay, so 45 to 50 minutes. Okay. And how many clients have you got doing the one-to-one side of things at the moment?

About 8 at the minute.

Okay. And how much on average do they spend with you? Say again?

About 8 sessions a week between the clients. I've got one client that does 3 sessions a week.

So it says £320. So you're, you're doing about £1,300 a month out of one-to-one, and then I'm guessing the rest of the £300 income you're currently getting is from the group program, the online, online version of it. Okay, this is probably just as a little bit of a reality check. So if you want to get to— I'm gonna actually, I'm just gonna focus on the online program. I'm just gonna come back to that in a second. So if we were to focus on your $5K goal, and you will have seen people do varying degrees of this before, so to get to $5K, well, that's 1 client at $5,000, it's 10 clients at $500, or it's 100 clients at $50, for example.

Okay.

So you can see your online program is kind of round about here, but That's split 3 ways for the online. So actually it's not £5K, it's— we can add a 1 in front of all of those. So actually your business needs to make £15,000 a month in order for you to get paid £5,000 if it was just the online version of it. So it means that— or actually that's 300 clients at £50 a month. Does that make sense?

Yes.

You're at £60K, you've got to 5x the number of clients you've got in that group currently. Is that feasible?

I think it's a long-term transition. I don't think it would be something that would happen overnight.

When you had a chat with your 2 buddies, either down the pub or in the gym, when you set this up, did you, did you have a specific number of clients in mind when you were like, right, in order to get this, make this thing successful, we need to get X number of clients? Did you set that goal out?

Not as such. We kind of muted around a couple of hundred would be a nice sideline because we're continuing the one-to-one on site.

And that's averaging out at about 50 a month? We were talking about sort of you've got £30 a month for the basic package, £70 for the unlimited. So averages out at about £50. So it's kind of actually we're just about there. Where it starts to get interesting though is, and this is kind of a basic sales funnel which I'm gonna show you. There are 3 numbers which I operate on and I wear them on my wrist everywhere I go. 70-10-2. And I didn't make these numbers up. They came from Google's Zero Moments of Truth document. So it's a white paper they did about how much effort do you have to put in in order to get clients spat out at the bottom basically. And they created this document with a gazillion bits of data which they've got for service-based businesses, which your PT business obviously is. So how it works is we put some content out. Now we don't know how much that is, we just shove some content out, and off the back of that it starts a few conversations. So could be people find out about your gym or your PT business online, offline, maybe they get a referral or something like that, and so they'll message you and say, hey Paul, sounds really great, I'd like to lose some weight, how much does it cost? How often do you give them a price?

I'm usually quite transparent and I do give them a price.

Good. Okay. I want you to— I call it the dirge of Facebook, right? And people are kind of window shopping. How much does it cost to lose some weight, Paul? And then we automatically, we're kind of like, we're hooked into sending them a price back. We wait and see whether they come back to us or not. And often they'll go, oh gosh, that's expensive. So I'm just going to tell you a little story. You may have heard me sort of tell this before. It's called the bleeding neck situation. Okay, so you're no longer a PT, Paul, you're now an A&E doctor, right? Somebody comes running into your A&E with a bleeding neck. Normally what you would do is you would have— you'd be like, you'd see blood spurting out, making a mess of your A&E, and you'd be like, right, need to get the crash team in. Come on, nurses, get him on the bed. Let's bundle him up to the operating theatre. On the way up, we'll do the assessment, see how much blood he's lost, work out how much— what we've got to do. Let's get on the phone to the anaesthetist, you know, so we have a process for it all. Today it's slightly different though. Today this person's just come in and, you know, they've just messaged us and just said, got a bleeding neck, what do we need to do to fix it? How much is it going to cost to fix it? So they've just walked into your A&E, they've had a quick look around and gone, it's a bit busy and a bit dirty and I don't really like the curtains and this doctor, I don't really like the look of him, so I'm just going to go back out and find another A&E. Needless to say, they go back out and they bleed to death on the street. So when you do that, you give them the price immediately. What's happening is you're giving a price to somebody who is totally uneducated. They've come to you with a bleeding neck. They've said, I need to lose some weight, and you've gone, this is how we're gonna fix you and it costs X. In fact, you haven't even said, this is how we're gonna fix you. You've just gone, this is gonna cost you this much, and you've then allowed them to make an uneducated decision. Okay? So it's actually much better if you say something along the lines of, when somebody sends a message like that, listen, I can obviously give you a cost for it, but I know nothing about you. I don't know whether you're doing any training at the moment. I don't know whether, like, what your goals are. I don't even know whether it's a good fit or not. So before we get to price, it's much better if actually we hop onto a call. I could do a mini assessment and consultation with you and we can work out whether it's a good fit. At that point, I can tell you about our packages or make a recommendation as to if we're not right for you, what route you should go down. So you're starting them off on this sort of educational journey, basically. So When we look at this, it's that process of moving people from that piece of content where they like, comment, or share, then you start them off on a conversation, but we want to proactively move them into a consultation. Okay, so that's where you get to go through that, give them a bit of education, you get to find out a lot more about them, you get to assess and you see, oh, actually it's just a nick, it's a bit— it looks worse than it is. We can just do a quick, you know, bit of local anaesthetic, stitch you up, plaster it, off you go. Or actually, actually, no, it's really serious. We need to get, you know, send you off to a specialist over in Celia. You can only do that if you book them onto a consultation. Super important. And then once you've gone through that process, obviously you make the recommendations to which package they have. So you get the conversion. Over a while, you'll also build up that bank of loyal clients, which you've already got. And they obviously do sort of word-of-mouth referrals. They skip the first 2 steps. So word-of-mouth referrals. They're easier to sell to because they've, you know, Lauren has said to Cheryl, I'm getting great results from this program. It'd be perfect for you. Go and sign up, you know, have a quick chat with Paul and get signed up. What we're going to do though, and this is where it'll get interesting, is because we've now got to multiply these numbers up. So we've got to have 300 clients at £50 a month, which means you've got to run 1,500 consultations. But we've definitively got to do 1,500 consultations in order to get 300 people booked onto your monthly membership. Now, it's not beyond the realms of possibility, but 1,500 sales consultations, if you do the maths on that, that's about 30 a week. Now, split between the 3 of you, 10 each, you could do it. You could do it if you wanted to get to £15K a month income. You know, with 300 clients, you could do that in 12 months quite easily. And actually, at that point, you've got a near $200K a year business between the 3 of you, which is fantastic. You know, nice recurring revenue. It's all online. You can pick and choose your one-to-ones. You can work whatever hours you want to work. It's much more flexible. Makes sense? Are those numbers a bit surprising though?

I suppose it's drilling it back into how many touchpoints you need beforehand to get that conversion. That's the— you don't realize it is that sort of, like you say, putting a piece of content out then has to reach X amount of people to then start that conversation. It's that transition all the way down the funnel.

Yeah, but most people get hung up on the sales. How much money are we bringing in? So those are called— they're what we call lag indicators. I'm not going to go into that too much, but actually the more important metrics that we want to get you guys focused on is The lead indicators. What it means is that, for example, if your goal was to, I don't know, get— what's 300 divided by 12? 25. So if you want to get 25 new clients a month, that's pretty much one a day. If you get half— if you get to the end of the month and you've only got 10, say, there's nothing you can do to influence that up or down. But if you actually get halfway through the month— so let's say you get halfway through the month and you've only done 30 consultations between the 3 of you, you've got 2 choices. One, you can go, Oh well, we're gonna fall short of our goals, but we don't really care because we've got loads of clients. We're happy with that. That's fine. Or 2, you've got the opportunity, the option to double down and just, you know, how can we— it's a different question. Not, oh, we haven't got enough clients. How do we get more clients? How do we get more consultations booked? Because naturally, if we book the consultations, it's going to lead to clients. Next thing, and this is really important. Okay, so what would you say your conversion rate is at the moment? 10%.

On the online?

Yeah.

It's hard to say because we haven't really, other than initial setup, we didn't push it from after the first month or two. We kind of got to a level and just stagnated a little bit. And that's something we're now working on is to drive some leads through Facebook ads and bits and pieces.

Great.

So we're running a 7-day trial and then probably Assess the numbers from that.

7-day trial, that, I mean, that's a cracking way to kind of get people through the door just to try it out and see whether it's a good fit. So that's fantastic because actually that actually kind of makes that process between the conversations, consultations that much easier because it's kind of like fairly frictionless, not going to cost you anything, you know, in you go. Got to make sure you do still book them on for the consultation though so you have that sales opportunity. You can't just passively expect them to to know to start paying and to book in. They don't know what the next steps are going to be. So make sure you have— you've probably got a process for it already, but if you haven't, make sure you've got a process for proactively subscribing them basically to the paid. Most people, when I ask this question, they're like, oh, if I get in front of people, my conversion rate's really high. So they'll say something like 80 to 90%. And actually, they— it creates this false belief that they're a good salesperson.

Mm-hmm.

And if I said double your prices and keep 80 to 90% conversion rate, immediately they go, oh, well, no, Robin, that's just dumb. I couldn't do that. You don't know what you're talking about. And I'm like, no, it's because you're not a good salesperson. You can't retain that, that level of a conversion rate. Okay. And actually, for a service-based business, Google say that a good conversion rate is somewhere between 1 in 5 and 1 in 3. So if you're converting more than 33 and a third percent, that normally is a good indication your prices are still too cheap. So, and obviously that's bridging that gap between here. So if you start to measure that and the numbers are too high, you can probably increment your prices and actually you end up, you can have fewer clients and still make more money.

Yeah.

Yep. So you could end up with 150 clients and still make £1,500 a month. Sorry, £15,000 a month.

Yeah.

If that makes sense, you know, and it's much easier to manage 100 clients than 300 clients.

Yeah.

You know, or 150 clients and 300 clients. It's, you know, because you get some dickheads in there who just want a ton of support and waste a load of your time, you know, and there'll be other people who just get tremendous value out of what you're giving them and don't take up extra support time, for example. So the fewer people there are, the less chance there is for, you know, sort of what I call time wasters basically to take over because you just don't get it. So really, I guess my point is I'd take these numbers and obviously, you know, take these numbers back to your team now, your 2 other guys, and just say, hey guys, look, I've done this session with Robin. What do you think of these is, is this on track with what we want to achieve? How can we increase these numbers? How can we book more consultations? What have we got to do to grow this thing? Obviously, you can increase your prices. That will get you to your goal quicker. You will get more nos. You know, a big thing for service, well, for people in general, is fear of rejection. We don't like people saying no to us. But to go from 70, 10 to 2, for every 2 yeses, we're actually getting 68 nos or 68 nos, not now. So There's this massive inherent amount of failure built into business. So if your assessment qualification process is good, you shouldn't be afraid to be turning people away in their droves to get those really brilliant clients that just love the value and love the things which you do, and they get the culture and the mission and values for the, you know, values of the business, the vision for the business. Now we're going to actually push the online stuff to one side for a second, and now Just for argument's sake, imagine your business is just one-to-one. Okay. You're currently charging £40 an hour. Let's say, just to make the numbers easy for myself, you wanted to get to £4K a month from one-to-one. Okay.

Yeah.

That is 100 one-to-one sessions a month. That feels like a lot of work. Plus, you've also got to do the sales side of it and the admin, the marketing and the blah, blah, blah. That, you know, most people typically Work, I don't know, 40-hour weeks, so that's typically 160 hours a month. So you're already at 2/3 of your capacity just to get to £4K.

Yeah.

Okay, so I don't know about you, but I mean, you could argue that you could raise your PT prices to £80 a session. Okay, now I know what you're thinking— that's doubling my prices, that's a massive increase, all my clients will be like, no shit, Paul's taking the piss, that's way too expensive, can't possibly afford that. Okay. How many sessions? You said that they typically have 1 session a week, 2 sessions a week? How many sessions?

Probably 2 a week.

2 a week, okay. Um, why do they come to those sessions?

I've always said I think personal training works in the best way because it's accountability. So it is that guidance, they turn up, it's an appointment in the diary, they have to do the work because I'm either knocking on the door or they're meeting me at the gym. However it works.

Great, but why do they come to you?

To achieve specific goals, but also losing weight.

Cool, so talk about those specific goals then.

The traditional, the standard is sort of generally wanting to lose weight, feel healthier. I tend to be— I tend to attract sort of middle-aged female, probably Gained a bit of weight, had kids, feeling a bit crap about themselves really. I suppose that's the— they want to do something for them after they've had the children and feel better.

What's your success rate?

Uh, pretty high. I mean, I've had some really good sort of success stories from women that are wanting— scared to walk into a gym to going off on their own and 3, 4 times a week, not even thinking about it.

Okay, so here's something which I think will probably change the way you might look at how you're pricing those sessions. I'm of the firm opinion that charging by the hour is actually fundamentally unethical. And I'll explain why. So I used to run a web design business, sort of, you know, so I'm actually going to use that as an analogy as opposed to the PT business, just to depersonalize it slightly, but it's still relevant. Imagine we've got 2 web designers that somebody's choosing between. So you're in— let's say, Paul, you're in the market for a website, right? And I'm going to— we've done the back and forth and I've given you a quote and it's for 20 hours at £50 an hour. Okay, we've agreed it, we're gonna go ahead. What I didn't tell you though, Paul, was that I've only been building websites for about 6 months. I'm not particularly good. The websites I build don't typically get found in Google. They're probably unlikely to get you leads. It won't be— it won't look as good as, you know, some of the others, but I'll give it a good go. And actually, What happens is I come back to you in 3 months' time and deliver you a half-assed website and say, here you go, Paul, and I'm really excited and enthusiastic. And you go, ah, but there's this other thing and this other thing that I wanted on there, and by the way, you haven't put my logo, it's not the colors I want. Oh, oh right, okay, but I'm really sorry, Paul, but we've used up your, your 20 hours that I quoted you, so I reckon those changes will take another 10 hours and you've got to pay for those. Is that okay? Hmm, yes, but really? So it's a bit frustrating. Now most people are ethical, upstanding human beings. They wouldn't just jack an extra 10 hours onto it and charge the client. Most of them would just take it on their back. But now there's tension, there's frustration on your part, frustration on the designer's part. It's not a very happy relationship.

Okay.

On the other hand, we've got Dave. Now Dave has been designing websites for 20+ years. He's just not particularly business savvy. He's never had a business coach. He doesn't really kind of understand it. So he comes and he gives you a quote. And he's got— there's 2 choices now for Dave. We've got Dave Mark 1 and we've got Dave Mark 2. So Dave Mark 1 says, well, I'll do it at an hourly rate. It's £50 an hour and I'll just charge you however many hours it takes. And Paul goes, yeah, okay, I'm not sure about that, but it sounds okay. Now because Dave's really good, he gets it done in 10 hours. So he's only gonna make like, you know, a grand out of this as opposed to 2 grand that the other guy's gonna make out of it. Sorry, £500 as opposed to the grand that this guy's gonna make out of it. So he makes half the money, but his websites are better because he's been doing it for 20 years. You know, you get found in Google, you get 5 to 10 good leads a week and you're flying. Like, you make a massive return on investment out of it. So Dave's much better, yet he gets paid less than the guy who's less experienced than him. Doesn't make sense. Whereas Dave Mark 2 now, who's had a bit of coaching, he comes back and he says, well, actually, Paul, I can do all of that for you, but I can get you 5 to 10 leads a week. You will get found in Google. It'll look amazing because I've got 20 years design experience, but it'll cost you 2.5 grand. Okay, so it's 2.5 times what the original website would cost, and you're a bit like, I'm not sure about that, but actually what Dave can do is he can turn around and say, listen, I'm confident in my work. If you don't get those 5 to 10 leads a week within the first 3 months of it going online, I'll refund you, because it's not worth my reputation to put shoddy work out there. I want you to refer me, and the reason I get referrals is because my clients get leads. Now actually, I don't know about you, but I'd be like, well, the £1,000 website guy isn't giving me those guarantees. The £2,500 guy is more expensive, that's a little bit more painful, but he's giving me those guarantees, which one do you have more confidence in?

The guy that's guaranteeing the leads.

But the key thing is he's not charging— Dave Mark 2 is charging for a package. He's not charging for an hourly rate. If Dave does it and it doesn't work, we've got a couple of choices. We hit the refund key or Dave keeps on working until he makes it work. Yeah. And again, Dave's an ethical, upstanding human being. He'll do everything he possibly can. He's got skin in the game. He'll make it work. Okay? Because also he's experienced. So for your one-to-one work, you shouldn't be selling sessions. You should be selling the result. Okay? Which you kind of are at the moment, but you're— because it's a bit easier to— it's less painful to give somebody a session at £40 than it is to charge them £1,500 for a transformation product.

Yeah.

Yep. So imagine this, right? Imagine the next 10 people that come in for a consultation with you for one-to-one, right? They want to lose some weight, and you say, my results are 100% guaranteed. Now, we cannot guarantee that you will lose X number of kilos or X number of stones, okay? Because you're a human being, and human beings are, you know, unpredictable physiologically, mentally, and everything else. However, one of the things which I do guarantee is perceived value. So if you come in, and even if we don't achieve the goals, but you feel like you've got everything you need to, you've got, we've equipped you, we almost got to losing, you know, 10 kilos, but not quite, but you're, but perceived-wise, you're like, you know what, Paul, you slam dunked it. Even though we got to 8 kilos, we didn't quite get to 10. I love the process. I've got everything I need nutritionally-wise. I've got my plans now. I've got the accountability. You know, I'm confident I can leave it. We're happy.

Yeah.

You know, or like, listen, how about— I did say we could do this in 3 months, we didn't quite get there. How about I give you a bonus month so we can shed those last 2 kilograms, so that I give you what I promised you in the first place and you pay me no extra? It's £1,500 for the change, the result, and the outcome. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So what— have you got any questions for me at this point about that?

No, it's probably just a block in my own sales ability of how I would sell that. Because like I said, the first question everyone asks is price. You tell them the price and it's expensive.

They'll go, oh, it's expensive. And that's when you've got to start to get into sales objections. Now, I don't have time, unfortunately, to kind of— maybe we need to do a second episode where we go through those sales objections. First, you've got the guarantee, so that will deflect a bit of that, oh gosh, you know, it gives people confidence. The second thing you can do is, well, actually, you know, I know that a lot of people don't have £1,500 stuffed down the back of the sofa. So how about we do it this way? You know, let's, let's, I can take a deposit and we can put the rest on an installment plan to suit you. But what you're paying for is a 3-month, you know, transformation program.

Yeah.

Now the other benefit of that is, so rather than your £40 sessions just going on and on and on, And maybe that's not the ethical way to do it because, you know, it's— now it's within your interest to see those £40 a session build up. Actually, now it's— you've got skin in the game to get that result in 3 months and move the client out the door because they got the result, or keep them as an ongoing client.

Yeah.

You know, and now all of a sudden, rather than £300 a month per client for 2 sessions a week, you're actually making £500 a month per client. Or you say, well, it's a 3-month program, but actually I'm a nice guy, you can pay for every 6 months. How does that sound? Plus also, if they ask for loads of niggly extra support and things like that, you're not going to be worried about the fact that it's not per session, they're paying for results. So actually, I can give them a bit of extra time if I need to. So you can actually get a better result. The other thing as well, because it's a package, if you start— if you hit that 1 in 5 to 1 in 3 magic golden ratio of conversions, and all of a sudden you start converting loads of people because you're really fucking good, You can go, well, actually, I'm going to put my prices up and now my transformation program is £1,800 or it's £2.5K or it's £5K. Or you can do what my mate Lazo Freeman does. So he started out as a jobbing personal trainer. Have you heard of Lazo? Do you know him?

No.

Yeah. So he started out as a jobbing PT, £20 an hour, working 90-hour weeks and all this sort of stuff as most PTs do. He developed over about 6 or 7 years, he developed this transformational product for high net worth individuals who travel the globe. Although probably not so much anymore because of the crisis. But he has 10 clients that pay him $100,000 a year. He's a personal trainer if you break it down. But actually, because his program is concierge, if a client is in Doha and they want his help, he'll fly out to Doha for a week, break them down, build them up physically and mentally, and then fly on to his next client. And that's all included as part of the package.

Yeah.

He just needs 10 clients. So, and that's because he understands his value. He has a really tight niche. He started off at £30,000 and gradually he went through those, you know, the levels of initiative. So he packaged it up so it was a £1,500 program. And then he got— there was high demand for it because he positioned himself as a key person in his industry. And then he was able to sell it at £2,500, £5,000, £10,000, £50,000, fuck it, £100,000.

Yeah.

But you've got to— you may need somebody's help, somebody like me to help you go through all of the— there's a lot of steps to go through in terms of that productization piece. Like, I can guarantee you, if you went and pitched 10 transformation products over the next week to prospective clients, you will sell 2. I can guarantee clients are like buses, they're unpredictable. So the first 8 will say no. It will be the last 2 that will say yes. Okay? By the first 3, you'll be starting to have a wobble and wonder whether I know what I'm actually talking about. Okay? You'll start to lose confidence because all of a sudden now we've got to pay our rent, we've got to put food on the table, I'm not getting the sales that I was getting when I was at £40 an hour, and you start to have those wobbles in confidence. The process of scaling up from hourly rate, value-based exchange, up to transformational exchange, is normally about 4 to 6 weeks. So it'll take you 4 to 6 weeks to speak to 10 to 20 prospective clients and get 2 to 4 clients booked onto that £1,500 transformational product. But when you do it, all of a sudden, like, you sell one of those packages, you've just equaled your monthly turnover.

Yeah.

Would you be willing to just try it and wait 4 weeks if that's what it takes to book one extra client at £1,500?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

You may have like a downsell product, which is if, you know, actually the £1,500 program is way too intensive. Actually, I've got a weekly program rather than, you know, twice a week. I've got a weekly program which is £900. Same price as what you were doing before, £300 a month, but half the input and energy that you've got to put into it. And it might be that actually that session is, rather than being 45 minutes, we'll maybe make the session a bit longer, give them more education. There's more stuff to go and work on themselves. So it's knowledge transfer. So then they'll get better results that way. Do you see?

Yes.

You can now— now you've got a silver and a gold package. You could have a platinum package, which is the Ironman package, which is like £3K to get you from, you know, couch to Ironman in 3 months. I don't know if that's feasible, but you know what I mean. So now we've got tiered products. And all you've got to do is find the right client to fit into the right product. Job done.

Yeah, I suppose I think it is— you just kind of follow the lead of everybody does it in a session price or a block of 4, 8, 12 sessions, and you charge that rate. And I've had it before with people where it's natural to give a discount for the more sessions. But I can't remember who it was, someone who said, why are you charging them less when they're going to get a better result?

Yeah, 100%. And I'll just let you in on a little secret, okay? So you've alluded to competition-based prices, pricing. So we've got— this is Paul, you've got Dave over here, and you're looking at Dave to see how much he's charging because it's on his website. And he's— so Paul said, I'm— well, let's imagine actually you haven't you know, you just started out and you're just kind of doing a bit of research. So you look at Dave and Dave's charging, I don't know, £25 an hour. Dave actually happened to look at, I don't know, Roger, and there's Roger. Roger's a little bit more expensive. He's £50 an hour, and Dave thought that the right thing to do was to cut, you know, slash Roger's pricing in order to get clients through his business. Roger was looking at, I don't know, Sharon, And Sharon was charging £15 an hour, and then Sharon's looking back at Paul to see how much Paul is charging, right? Who actually set the prices here?

No one.

And what was their science behind like how they chose their prices? They fucking made it up. So what tends to happen is when we look at the competition, we— it's the right thing to do, by the way. There's nothing— I don't— I never knock Go out and look and see what the competition are doing. The mistake is assuming that the competition are actually right. Because all Sharon's fucking doing is bitching and moaning that she's not making enough money. And actually, most of her sessions are at a loss because she's having to pay the gym £5 for every hour that she's there teaching her clients. She's making tenner an hour. By the time she takes off tax and expense and everything else, she's earning less than national minimum wage.

Yeah.

And you've got Dave, but Dave's actually got his own unit. So Dave's actually paying him really high rent, but he undercut Roger, who actually— Roger's got it nailed because he goes off and uses National Trust fields. So he's got no overheads whatsoever. He's creaming it, right? So we assume that everybody is right when actually we're not paying attention to their personal circumstances. We're not paying attention to what stats— So when I was going through this, like, we've worked out some numbers that economically are going to make your business stack up. So your prices are relevant to you and your business. When people are looking at the competition, those prices are relevant to their business. It's wrong to assume that they've got it right.

Yeah.

Does that make sense? So, you know, so like I said, you can look at them. It's always worthwhile looking at the competition. And I don't know about you, but I would always rather be sort of up at the more expensive end of the market. Because one of the first things that people say to me— I mean, I'm not the most expensive in my market. There are people charging 6 figures for some of the work which I do. You know, but when I tell people, especially local small businesses, my prices, the first thing— well, one of the first things they typically say is— it's normally one of two things— gosh, that's expensive, or you must be good. Because we assume that if something's a bit more expensive, it must be better. And I'm a big fan of pay cheap, pay twice.

Yeah.

That runs— it's so true with everything that you do. You know, we bought a cheap paddling pool for the girls and now we're on our 3rd paddling pool. Like, we might as well have bought the really expensive, really thick one with the aluminium frame on it in the first place.

Yeah.

You know, cool. Listen, Paul, we hope there's some really— hopefully there's some valuable insights there that you've got out of this. We're at time already. In fact, we've gone over a little bit, but what I'll do is I will— I'll send you the diagram which I drew up which has got those stats isn't it, for you and your business partners to kind of mull over and obviously give them that, like, pop them into the Facebook group if they want to check out this video before it goes onto YouTube. For everybody else's benefit, hopefully if you've enjoyed this episode of Fix Your Business, make sure you drop any questions you've got into the comments below. If you, you know, a couple of free gifts, I've got some pricing frameworks. If you want a copy of my Mindset, Validate, and Time pricing framework, my MVT pricing framework, Just drop MVT or pricing into the comments below and I'll make sure that you get access to a copy of that somehow. And if you did want to come on to the Fix Your Business series, you can email me robin@fearless.biz and we'll find a way to get you onto the show and fix some of the inherent issues that you've got within your business and turn it into a 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 or gazillion-figure business, whatever it is that you want to achieve. Paul, it's been a pleasure. Hopefully that you found that helpful.

Yeah, brilliant. Thank you.

Thank you for your time.

Great, thanks.