One Annoyingly Obvious Change I Made That Helped Me Add 50 New Clients

Creating a reliable bootcamp business seems simple enough yet when it’s not reliably growing it’s really hard to identify why it’s not working.

Ever hear the saying ‘you can’t read the label from inside the jar’?

It’s easy to make mistakes while trying to work things out because you’re inside the jar (aka your business).

Mistakes like the head in the sand approach where people should just join because I know my training is good. The knee jerk ‘more marketing approach’ where we look for more clients outside of our business instead of focusing on the one’s we already have. The mistake of not trying to build community in our bootcamps by offering more than just training to our clients. The mistake of not showing you care. And finally the mistake of mischarging what we are worth and sabotaging our business.

I danced around these mistakes for a long time. Probably because for me the solutions to those problems were the hard work. The work that would require me to put myself out there and maybe just maybe fail.

When in reality this was the important work that was going to allow me to work smarter and get the bootcamp business I desired. A reliable, fun bootcamp with a great group of people.

To stop my business from acting like a leaky cup I knew I had to start doing things differently. Over the next few months I tried and noted the impact of dozens of different tweaks.

One really simple thing I did that had one of the biggest impacts was I improved my ‘Game Face’.

Your Game Face is the attitude and energy that you bring to your session. Most people are like emotional vampires. They will absorb the emotion from the people around them. If you hang around glum people, you will start feeling glum. Hang around a group of positive people, life starts looking pretty awesome.

Game Face is not about going over the top and having serious conversations with your clients about going all the way down on their tricep pushdowns. It’s not about ignoring things that aren’t working and being stubborn. Game Face, in the way I’m talking about it, is about bringing that inner energy and lightness to each and every one of your sessions.

After reading about this on another site I decided to test it out. Sure enough, when I brought my Game Face consistently to my sessions my attendance went up. Instead of 14 out of 20 showing up, I had 18 out of 20.

Not only that but I was actually enjoying my early 6am sessions a lot more.

Occasionally I would find myself slipping back into not using the Game Face technique. So I would make an effort for 2 weeks to really bring it to each session.

Of course, attendance would go up again, me and my clients would enjoy the sessions more and when it came to paying for the next month there was no problems.

So I started telling the other trainers I worked with about it.

They told me about how they started enjoying training their clients more again. They told me how their clients were working harder during their sessions.

How to bring your Game Face:

Step 1: Give yourself time and space to get psyched.

Before you leave the house, get psyched up. You can do this by your favourite means: coffee, a shower, a quick workout, a pump up playlist, etc.

If you run your sessions early in the morning that will mean going to bed early and then getting up early enough to give yourself space to get psyched.

I used to get up an hour and 15 minutes before my first session. Shower, have breakfast and a cup of tea and then listen to some tunes in the car on the way to the park.

Step 2: Get to your location early. Like really early.

You should be ready to go 15 minutes before your session starts.

You may get away with jumping out of the car at 6:00am on the dot now, but that’s not part of getting your Game Face on. So we are going to stop that now.

Being ready means all equipment is set up and you are standing there ready to go.

No, you do not need to be annoyingly chirpy or overenthusiastic. No one wants that at 6:00am, just be ready for your clients and energized.

Step 3: Use the extra time.

Now as your clients arrive, instead of running around setting stuff up you can be relaxed and use this time to get to know them better.

It’s also a great time to do something else important. Attendance. Only by tracking attendance can you really know if your business is growing or not.

Now your know how to get on your Game Face you’re ready to try it out at one of your own sessions. Awesome!

But getting your Game Face on is just foundation of have a bootcamp that grows instead of shrinking or staying the same.

There are many other aspects like how to find new clients, how to position your bootcamp as different and how to keep looking after yourself through all this change.

And there are more things you can do to hold on to those clients do you have.

If you are interested in small daily actions you can take down this path then you’re in luck. Game Face is just one day of a 31 day course I’m running through the month of January. The course opens tomorrow (December 30th) and is perfect for anyone who is looking for real actions they can take to improve their bootcamp without trawling through the internet and business books.

But for now I’d like to challenge you to do just ONE THING in the next 3 minutes.

If you run a bootcamp (or are planning on starting one) post a comment below telling me how you would get your Game Face on before starting your bootcamp session.

Speak to you tomorrow. Until then I look forward to reading your comments.

Kyle Wood

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.