Earlier this month, Curtis, a personal trainer in California asked for some advice about making more money. His question was specifically related to whether or not he should continue to pay a percentage of his revenue to the gym owner, or strike out on his own. If you want to read my recommendations, visit the post here. But in this post, I want to speak more to the inherent drawback to being a personal trainer – capped income.
Capped income means, you can only make a certain amount of money and that’s it. It is an inherent flaw in personal training as a profession, and I think it is one that you hear very little about – mainly because there are very large industries that make their living educating and certifying personal trainers. These industry players spend significant money on marketing, encouraging people that are passionate about fitness, that they can make huge sums of money by becoming a certified personal trainer. We all hear the stories about trainers charging $50-100 an hour training wealthy clients. And yet, I have never met a personal trainer that is making a 6 figure income in their profession. In fact, most make less than $50k a year, and the only reason many of them stay in the profession as long as they do is because of their passion for fitness.
But why don’t trainers make a 6 figure income? What do I mean that their income is capped? It is very simple really. The fact is, the only thing a personal trainer sells is their time. So when you multiply the number of hours a trainer generates revenue, byt the hourly rate he or she charges, you can easily come up with a weekly, monthly, or annual projected revenue. Keep in mind that a typical trainer generally only bills out for about 50-60% of their available time. This is because most clients want the same time slots, which is usually before and after work. Often times you will find that in the middle of the day, trainers don’t have clients – and this usually when they will get their own workout in, have their meals, catch up on paperwork, or plan their next clients training sessions 9none of these tasks are billable).
So, there almost always comes a time in a trainer’s career when he or she realizes that they will probably never make much more money than they are making right now. The trainer realizes that they have absolutely no leverage, and that their income level is capped, and that this is the way it was predetermined all along. This can be a bit depressing for a personal trainer, realizing at this point that even though they considered themselves to be a business owner, they realize that in effect, they are really not that much different than an employee. Oh sure, they may have a bit more control over their schedule than an employee, and they may make more money per hour too – but in reality, they are just “trading time for money”, which is no different than what a typical employee does.
I wouldn’t ever want to paint such a bleak picture about what I feel is a very necessary profession without providing some ideas about what a trainer can do to “give themselves a raise”. So stay tuned for upcoming posts where I offer up some real practical tips about how to generate more income by leveraging your existing client relationships. I think some of my tips will surprise you. I’ll give you a hint, it has to do with generating more revenue in the same number of hours per week!
Another thing some trainers do to better leverage their time is charge clients a pro rated amount for a written workout they can do on their own…i.e. train two days a week, first day with trainer, second day do workout prepared by trainer but on their own and only pay maybe half price for the second work out.
Good advice Richard! You might not be able to make as much per client with this approach, but what a lot of trainers don’t realize is that this business is all about making more revenue per hour worked. So this approach allows you ultimately to fit more clients into a typical work week – thereby delivering you with more revenue in the same time period!
And if you’re a trainer who sell nutritional supplements, like Richard, the more clients you have, the more products you can potentially sell. So you make even more money per hour, and have clients that see results faster.