Pat Rigsby is the co-owner of several businesses in the fitness industry, including the Fitness Consulting Group. He also serves as an industry consultant focusing on the development of profitable personal training departments. To learn how you can improve your club’s retention, referrals and profitability, sign up for Rigsby’s free newsletter and get his three free business building reports at www.fitnessmarketingmachine.com. Rigsby can be reached at pat@fitnessconsultingroup.com.

Is it really possible to dramatically increase personal training profitability in the current economy? Yes, it is not only possible, but it is likely if you follow these three suggestions:
 
1. Serve more clients per hour
2. Increase value per client hour
3. Leverage your trainers’ time
 
Serve More Clients Per Hour – When you see more clients per hour, you’re generating more revenue per work hour. You do this by either offering semi-private training, switching from 60-minute sessions to 30-minute sessions or provide large group
training, such as boot camps or group weight management. An underappreciated benefit of any of these approaches is that it increases your ability to handle a greater number of clients during the most popular hours. When you can double or triple the number of people that you work with during peak hours, your profits will skyrocket.
 
Increase Value Per Client Hour – You increase value per client by having more niche offerings, by becoming better at getting results and by improving your trainers’ sales skills. By working with a specific group of people and creating a track record of results with that group, you position your staff as experts for that target market and you’ll be able to charge significantly more.

Leverage Your Trainers’ Time – You can better leverage your trainers’ time in many ways, but two of the most important ways are through training in groups and creating back-end sales. Training in groups is a win/win across the board. Members can work with a trainer more cost effectively, and you can decrease costs because only one staff member is needed to train two to 20 people at a time instead of one on one. For back-end sales, I suggest that you use an autoship supplement program to develop back-end revenue generated by your trainers. This is a great addition to any training department’s offerings for three reasons:

1. Supplements are a consumable. Each month, your clients will use up their supply and re-order the same product. You have no need to invent a new offering every two months.
2. It is not time consuming. Setting up your autoship program and enrolling clients
are activities that can be done in a few minutes.
3. You should begin with finding ways to sell more to your current clients instead of
seeking new clients. It’s much easier to do and often more profitable.  
 
The best part of doing these things to increase training profits is that they lead to more revenue overall, yet your expenses drop.

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