Patricia started her group fitness business soon after getting her qualification as a PT.
Back then she didn’t call it a business though, she just got together a few of her friends and a few of their friends and met in a park twice a week at 6am have Patricia run them through a workout.
She knew she should charge money for it, so she picked an amount that she thought her friends could afford. Soon after she started a Facebook page and then before she new it she had people coming to her sessions that she didn’t even know.
With the initial success of her workouts she decided to add more session times, putting on some evening ones too. She started training a few clients privately too. She was super busy while having a ball helping people doing something she loved. Things were going great.
Or so it seemed.
While Patricia was super busy, for some reason even after a year of running her business she didn’t seem to be making any money. Each month after all the bills were paid there was only a small amount of money left to pay herself even though she was working her butt off.
It started to wear on her. She felt like she was always thinking about her business or answering messages from clients or having to plan new sessions.
After a few more months a job came up in her old profession. It was tough, but she decided she couldn’t live month to month anymore with no end in sight. She took the job and sent out a message to her clients letting them know that sessions would end at the end of the month.
Patricia is made up, but her story isn’t.
I’ve heard this story from many trainers leaving the industry over the years of running Bootcamp Ideas and it kinda breaks my heart every time.
90% of trainers in Australia quit in the first 12 months. Recently, I heard the average career length of trainers in New Zealand is 4 months.
There is a way to run a sustainable group fitness business and one of the first things to do is to work out the numbers. With better data you can make better decisions rather than just leaving things 100% to luck.
How much money do you want to earn? How many clients is it going to take to do that? How much will you need to charge?
In the next article I’ll share with you how to work out these numbers. It’s a very useful exercise for helping you create the dream fitness gig that you set out to create all those months or years ago.
Kyle Wood created Bootcamp Ideas in 2010 when he was hunting around on the internet for workout ideas. He ran a successful bootcamp in Victoria, Australia and spends his spare time managing this site, adventuring (or lazying) with his wife and find new ways to make bootcamps even better.
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