If you’re one of those people who consider fitness as a way of life as opposed to considering it just a hobby, then starting a fitness business can be beneficial to you. To run a fitness business, you need to be passionate about fitness itself. Throughout your journey, you’ll encounter countless hurdles and hardships that’ll require you to work for less money, work overtime, and be patient for the results.
If you’re truly passionate, you’ll pull through in the times of adversity, and if you aren’t, you won’t be able to make a name for yourself. Starting a fitness business isn’t as easy as starting businesses in other industries. With those businesses, you need to work hard for some time until you’ve established yourself enough. After that, the business runs smoothly. In the case of fitness, you need to constantly work harder and stay at the top of your game.
If your customers aren’t happy with your level of fitness and performance, they’ll leave for competitors. You’ll need to keep learning new trends through courses or training sessions such as the ones offered by W.I.T.S. Education. Only then will your business establish itself, and you can enjoy the fruit of your hard work and passion.
How To Become A Fitness Trainer?
If you’re passionate about opening a fitness business, surely, you’ll be at the top of your fitness. But just being fit and healthy isn’t enough to become a personal trainer, especially if you’ll be responsible for the health of others. The first thing you’ll have to do is get proper certification, that’ll solidify your case and will help you get your first few clients.
In order to get a certification, you’ll need to match their prerequisite requirements. Some require you to have a high school diploma, while others want a college degree or at least that you be enrolled in one. Second, you’ll also have to check the kind of certifications they offer. The fitness industry is huge, and hence there are several courses you can take. To become a personal trainer, you need to take courses that’ll cover all aspects of personal training and teach you different fitness routines.
The courses last from 3 to 6 months, depending on your level and the institute’s requirements. Some may even take longer if you’re a novice. After finishing the course, you can work with a well-known fitness center or gym to get professional experience. Customers like trainers who have industry experience. Only after doing that will you be able to find clients who would hire you.
How To Turn Your Fitness Passion Into A Business?
After you’ve established yourself as a personal trainer, you’re now ready to step into the business world. However, even qualified trainers struggle to take their business off the ground. What you’ll need is to create a brand image for yourself that’ll attract clients and help you scale. Here are a few things that’ll help you solidify your business and help it grow.
Find Your Desired Niche
Even though personal trainers are skilled in many different forms of exercise, it’s still a good idea to start with a niche. You can pick a niche based on what you like the most, but it’s a good practice to research the industry trends and figure out which areas have the biggest market capitalization options and the predicted market growth. For instance, senior fitness and medical fitness are emerging fields with lots of room for development and market capitalization.
Similarly, you can find niches that spark your interest while still being attractive from the business point of view. Besides picking a niche industry, it’s better to determine a demographic you’d like to work with. For example, if you want to train women only, or youth, or even senior citizens. That way, it’ll be easier for you to grow.
Give One-On-One Training
Don’t expect your business to take off at once just because you’re passionate and have the required qualifications. In the beginning, you’ll face many setbacks, so it’s better to start small. You can start your business by scheduling one-on-one training sessions. This is the best way to start getting clients. Clients like trainers who pay attention to them and make themselves available.
Once you’ve got a few clients under your belt, you can now start thinking about getting some more. The easiest way is to ask your customers to recommend you to their family or friends. Word-of-mouth is still the most popular form of marketing. You can even offer them exclusive family and friends discounts.
Establish A Clientele
If you’ve been successful in getting clients through word of mouth, it’s not time to invest in a marketing campaign. You can try the traditional way by asking potential customers to sign up for free classes and training sessions, or you can post about your services online. Your marketing campaign strongly depends on your chosen demographic.
If you choose to work with young adults, it’s important to market on social media, but you’ve chosen to work with adults or seniors, you’ll need to apply methods that are relevant to that age group such as newspapers and TV ads. Through this marketing tactic, you’ll be able to find clients outside of the determined customer circle that’ll allow you to tap different areas of the market.
Establish Your Credentials
A good way to attract new clients is to display your credentials and let them speak on your behalf. Your credentials don’t need to be strictly related to your niche. For example, if you have experience in running marathons, you can train people for that as well. People from all age groups part take in marathons, and this will give you a good opportunity to expand your services.
Additionally, you can even display any specializations or certificates you already have to strengthen your claims. You can even display positive client testimonials that’ll give your business a more organic appeal that would surely attract more customers.
Get Extra Certifications
Once you get enough traction with your business, it’s time to work on the expansion. You need to start with yourself. If you’re a certified personal trainer, it’s better to get some additional specializations to add more credibility to your skills. You can take courses related to wellness or medical fitness to broaden your scope of services.
Not only that, but you can collaborate with other fitness centers and offer special courses that focus on different factors like personal training with medical fitness or group exercise training. One more you can do is hire a specialist from different fields. Like you can hire a yoga instructor or an instructor for Pilates.
Expand Your Niche
To grow your fitness business even further, you’ll need to start expanding your niche at the right time. Many people wait too long to expand and lose to their competitors or new businesses. There are two ways you can expand your business. First, you can expand to other niches like weight training, weight loss, maternity fitness. Second, you can find untapped markets within your niche.
If your niche is senior citizens, you can start offering nutritional advice or organizing marathons. If you can’t figure out where to expand, it’s always a good idea to study your competitors’ business practices and find out how they have managed to expand.
Find More Customers
With business expansion, your operational costs will increase as well. You’ll need additional clients to fund the business to keep your profits steady. Generally, your expanded list of services will attract clients on its own if you have made a name for itself. But that doesn’t mean those clients will be enough to keep the business afloat.
You’ll need to offer additional discounts or free trial training to get potential clients interested. You can also schedule visitations around your fitness center and show off your equipment and facilities. Impressive equipment and services are a solid way to bag more clients.
Give Online Lessons
Online lessons are the hottest trend in almost all industries; the same can be said for the fitness industry as well. Many fitness trainers are expanding their clientele by offering convenient and easy-to-access online workout sessions. The sessions can be of two types; pre-recorded video lectures that clients can access anytime they like and make their own schedule and workout plan to follow them.
The other type involves on-demand live training sessions where instructors can interact with clients one-on-one or give training to multiple people at the same time. This type is a bit more demanding, but it allows trainers to be more involved in their client’s fitness, and they can even monitor the progress more closely as opposed to just sharing recorded sessions.
Market Yourself On Social Media
If you’re going towards the route of online lessons, it’s important to market it just right. Social media is a great way to share your work and upload trial video lessons to get potential clients interested. Your social media page can act as your portfolio, and customers can look up your services, read client comments, and even see the latest discounts and pieces of training conveniently.
Not to mention that social media is the most popular method of getting young customers to try out your services; if your page has enough testimonials and a good brand image, people will most likely be interested in giving your services a shot.
Establish A Better Training Facility
With so many services being offered and a huge number of clients to be managed, your training facility must have enough capacity to give clients a relaxed atmosphere. While we know that gyms are commonly loud with people doing different kinds of workouts and the machines being constantly used. However, no one wants a crowded gym.
People want to be able to work out in peace and have a bit of personal space to feel comfortable. If your gym can’t offer that, then it’s time for an upgrade. That doesn’t necessarily mean s you need a new facility; a good remodeling job can add a lot of extra workspaces as well.
Learn Some Fitness Management
It’s easy to keep track of your business when it’s starting out. You won’t need a lot of people to manage it; a few software would do the trick. But the story is completely different once the business starts to grow rapidly. Because you’re the person that’s responsible for all the training your clients get, you’ll dint it hard to keep up with the work while managing the business.
With a fitness management certification, you’ll learn methods to effectively keep the business on track while cutting down your workload. You’ll also learn when to hire more staff or outsource some of your work to maintain a good flow.
Tips On Setting Yourself Apart
Here are a few additional tips on getting even more business after you’ve finished all the steps mentioned above.
Create A Unique Brand Image
In this day and age, setting yourself apart is the most important thing. Previously, businesses were focused on offering the same services as their competitors to maintain a steady supply of customers. But now, it’s all about being unique and different. Your logo, theme colors, interior, and marketing tactics should use the same themes and tone to appear homogenous. Make it a point to make your business be known through your brand image. If people see your adverts or social media posts, they’ll instantly know it’s from you because of your brand image.
Target Under-Served Areas And People
There are a lot of groups that are sort of barred from the fitness industry for being too difficult to work with. Such as people with chronic illnesses or disabilities. But with the developments in medical fitness, trainers can now work easily with these people and help them attain their fitness goals. You, too, can capitalize on this untapped market and grow your business.
Turn your passion into a viable business with W.I.T.S Education’s fitness management course. The course will you all the basics about managing a fitness business, including marketing tactics, how to get clients, and managing risk factors. W.I.T.S Education is a training institute offering multiple fitness-related courses such as youth fitness courses, senior fitness courses, and personal trainer courses.
Through W.I.T.S, you can get NCCA accreditation for the courses you complete. In addition, W.I.T.S is the only institute with state-of-the-art practical labs in different parts of North America where students get hands-on physical training. Besides that, the institute also has online classes for courses to give students an easy learning outlet. This allows students to find good employment opportunities at leading fitness centers. Take a look at the course or get in touch today!