“Every journey has a first step. Every saga has a beginning.”
The fitness industry is designed to abuse us trainers.
The business model breaks us down, exhausts, us, and leaves us without much money at the end of it all. You’re told to follow industry norms but you must carve your own path and challenge them. Here’s the sad truth:
Industry norms generate average results. They develop or are designed to bring everybody to the middle. The middle is safe. Nobody stands out or causes a ruckus, and everybody is just fine and dandy.*
The fit pros who refuse to challenge the status quo are the ones who become frustrated, burnt out, and the sorry majority who will have the casket closed at the end of the day wondering where time has gone. Sorry to be so grim, but that’s a fact.
Look, I’m a realistic guy and believe that it’s important for all trainers to get in-person experience for a minimum of a year before starting online training. This isn’t because you can’t make the business work, it’s because you probably won’t be able to do a good enough job.
But once you’ve been training for a solid 1–3 years you need to take the first step towards liberation. Towards freedom.
Your First Step
I don’t view online training as a way to magically make boatloads of cash somehow with very little work — Made that abundantly clear a few days ago. In response to that article people accused me of turning online training into a commodity, just another offering that has you trading dollars per hour similar to a gym.
That’s far from the truth. Instead, I view online training as a tool that should be accessible to all fit pros to fight back against the (sometimes) abusive fitness industry so that coaches can regain control of their destiny because …
Every journey has a first step. Every saga has a beginning.” — Star Wars Episode 1 tagline
Online training is the first step to whatever you want to do both in the fitness industry and outside of it. It creates space.
Sure, you can try to scale it and make 100’s of thousands of dollars and maybe that will come later, or maybe you’ll write a book, or maybe you’ll be happy just making a few extra thousands dollars each month because that means that you can hang out with your son more.
I don’t know what freedom means to you but I do know that it’s something different to everybody and making six figures, while it sounds nice, doesn’t actually contribute to happiness. If you ask people what they want many will say that they desire to get rich, but what most would prefer is to be happy and the two are not the same.
“Happy’, though, is a nebulous term.
The more happiness research there is, the less we understand about it. We do know a few things:
- As long as our basic needs and loved ones are taken care of money has almost nothing to do with it. (In 2010 in the USA $75,000 was the magic number. It’s probably a bit more now. Article on the study here or read the study here.)
- Maintaining a sense of purpose all throughout life leads to fulfillment and longvity**
- We overestimate both the intensity and duration of an emotional response like happiness particularly in response to buying anything (a new car, for example).***
Control –>Freedom –>Wealth –>Happiness
Working in a gym training clients leaves you exhausted because you are not in control. It’s a responsive environment where you are at the mercy of everything from the mood of the gym owner to your clients schedules to the weather and traffic.
You’re not in control.
All good trainers reach a point, usually 1–3 years into their careers, where they need to make a bit more money in a bit less time with a bit better schedule.
And that’s where online training fits in.
It is the transition. The first step. Every saga has a beginning.
High yield first, scale and passive income later
When faced with a (sometimes scary) transition like moving to online training there are steps to take to maintain control of your situation. The first is to respect the power of high-yield activities that can be done on your schedule.
It sounds nice to be able to write an Ebook and sell thousands of copies passively. It sounds great to develop a transformation program or membership program where you take on 50, or 100, or 100s of clients at once all going through variations of templates with online group support. Both of these things are great, but neither of them come first.
The first step is to start simple, for everybody the number of clients needed will be different and pricing is a complicated topic that I cover in tremendous detail in my Online Trainer Academy certification course but 5–10 clients is usually enough.
5–10 clients at $100-$300 a month is an extra $500-$3,000 a month, more than enough to fire the in-person clients you don’t jell with or that don’t fit into a tight schedule, block off your time better, and open up more time to develop your marketing or write that book you’ve always dreamed of writing.
And yes, the time spent training these clients might be similar online as they are in-person (usually it’s less but all depends on how you structure things). The difference is that you are in control of your schedule now.
With the scheduling freedom resulting from hybrid or online clients you now have room to think, to breath, and to work and that, moo-chacho, is where the magic happens.
With that control you decide whether you want to continue taking on more online clients, write a book, or take the extra time that’s resulted in a more structured schedule to volunteer, travel, spend more time with your family, or develop the more in-depth marketing funnels required to acquire the hundreds or thousands of customers needed to make significant money selling Ebooks or with membership programs.
You decide. My definition of wealth is synonymous with freedom. It’s to dictate my own life. It’s to spend mornings and lunch with my 3 month year old son, to escape the Canadian winter to Costa Rica, and to visit my family scattered throughout the country.
Daniel Lopez, a graduate of my Online Trainer Academy wanted to sing opera. Making a living is difficult as a performer so he became a trainer and put his opera career on hold. Online training has allowed him to quit his in-person training and just finished a show, is practicing for another in Hawaii, and just booked his first movie role.****
Your definition of wealth is probably different than mine and Daniel’s but one thing that I do know is that when you really think about, it has nothing to do with becoming a ‘six figure trainer’.
Whatever your definition is, it starts with the first step. Every journey has a first step. That first step is online training.
-Coach Jon
P.S. I wrote something called the Online Trainer Freedom Liberation Report and I’d love to send you a copy in the mail (like, with an envelope and stamp). If you’re interested, click here and fill out the form: www.onlinetrainer.com/freedom
