How to scale your online pt business

So, you’ve got your qualifications, you’ve got great personal trainer software to deliver brilliant programming through (you’re welcome) - but…

Are you charging your clients correctly for the service you provide?

Consider how much you would charge for an in-person session. Your monthly fee likely covers 3-4 sessions worth of programming per week. 

If you’re running 1-2-1 programming the program will be bespoke to that client and you’ll be engaging with the client digitally - reviewing comments, progress and videos to check form. 
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Example scenario: 5 clients

Imagine you have five online 1-2-1 clients, charging each of them £75 a month. This might feel like a reasonable cost, but the reality is that you’ll be managing 5 different schedules and likely spending a day a week on each one. 

This puts you at only £375 a month and less than £10 an hour.

You wouldn’t turn up to an in person session and coach for an hour for less than the minimum wage, so you shouldn’t be doing it when charging for online programming either. 

If you were to charge £200 a month for the same five 1-2-1 clients, your earnings would increase to £1,000 a month - and your clients would be getting a fully bespoke service for 3-4 sessions a week for the price of 3 in person sessions. 

Obviously £1,000 a month is not going to earn you a sustainable salary on its own, so the next thing to consider is if you can take on more clients, or expand your services. 
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Expand your program library and scale

One way of expanding your services is to explore adding a service at a lower price point that takes up less of your time. 

To earn another £1,000 a month, you could have 20 clients on a group program charging each £50pm. With only one calendar to manage, and FITR automating personalisations based on client data, this will be less labour intensive but will increase your earnings significantly. 

To increase earnings further, without eating into the coaching time you need to spend on your 1-2-1 clients, the least labour intensive approach would be to add a Fixed Length program or two. 

You can sell one off downloads of a program at a lower rate. All you need to do is list them on your site and / or social channels, and passively earn money while you sleep.

Let’s have a look at what your business growth plan might look like:

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1. Start off with a small number of clients whilst you get comfortable with programming via FITR.

Experiment with using templates to share programming from one client to another and edit later, to save time versus starting from scratch. 

Here’s what your earnings could look like:

So, you only need 16 clients - or even just 11 if you sell your Fixed Length Program to your existing clients, to make £1,350 a month. Not bad. Now how can you scale it?

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2. Grow 1-2-1 to a manageable level and scale mass programming and fixed length programs

The most successful PT's on FITR supplement their 1-2-1 earnings with Group Rolling Calendar or Session 1 Day 1 programs. This is because there is only one schedule to manage, and it’s more efficient to sell one program to many people rather than work on individual programs for each client who demand, and deserve, a lot of your personal time. .

Although group programming can’t be sold at as high a price point as 1-2-1, using tech like FITR to automatically personalise each client’s experience of the program is invaluable.  

Now your earnings look like this:

Here, you’ve only had to add four 1-2-1 clients, five group clients and sell five more fixed length programs to almost double your earnings. 

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3. Continue to scale mass programming

Avoid using more time adding more 1-2-1 clients, and sell your existing programming to more clients. 

Here, you’ve only had to add four 1-2-1 clients, five group clients and sell five more fixed length programs to almost double your earnings. 

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4. Add another Group Program to provide another scaling opportunity
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5. Hire an additional fitness coach to step up your business

Adding another coach means that you can free up time to build your brand. You can take on more higher value 1-2-1 clients, managed by the second coach. You can share templates and ideas from other programs to expedite program development. 

As well as rocketing your earnings, the additional coach allows you to spend time on expanding your product offering and managing client relationships. 
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6. Scale

You’re now a successful coach with 120 monthly clients without managing a huge number of programs. You now have a great monthly salary, and can work from anywhere in the world.