I wanted to chat to you today about how you can charge more for your personal training services and why most personal trainers tend to be stuck on charging per session. The biggest mistake is that they charge based on what other personal trainers in their town are charging. I'm going to give you an example that you can use in your fitness business as well.
I'm on holidays here at the minute in Ibiza with my wife. It's our second wedding anniversary today and since she's down at the pool, I just wanted to show up and record a quick video.
As you can see, we're in an absolutely stunning hotel. We paid quite a lot of money for this, probably the best part of three thousand pounds for a week, including our flights from Manchester. The reason why we paid more is because of all the add-ons that we got. So, for example, it's a really nice hotel, we've paid for a pool view, as you can see, which also includes a sea view. Breakfast is included. We have private transfers from the airport. Actually, I thought it was going to be a taxi, but it turned out to be a minibus that we had just the two of us in. We paid for the extra legroom seats on the flight, and we paid for it just to be somewhere that we know is not going to be too busy and nice and quiet. If you look up — I don't know if you can see — you can just see the marina there just over the top. So, we're not in the middle of town where it's all busy. We're just slightly on the outskirts and it's exactly what we wanted.
I'm not telling you guys this to boast or anything like that. I'm telling you this to try and show you how you can package up what you sell as a personal trainer and basically charge more. You see, the most common model that we see these days for personal trainers is the per session model. Usually, it's 25 to 40 pounds per session. Charging like this puts your clients into the same model so you need to educate them on how you operate as a trainer.
Here is an example, when we had our personal training business, what we would do is we would tell our clients that we would not take them on as a client unless they were able to commit to at least 12 weeks. We knew from experience if someone is session minded, then you're always on a per session basis and you never know how long they're going to stay as a client.
This allowed us to package up our services. We had 12-week drop two dress sizes service that included two personal training sessions a week plus a session extra out of boot camp if they wanted that.
We gave them access to a sports massage person.
We helped them with the nutrition.
We helped them with their mindset.
We gave them access to a Facebook group.
We gave them telephone access to the trainers whenever they needed it.
Adding value all the way
This also allowed us to repel people who who were shopping on price or the clients who were trying to find the cheapest personal trainer possible, because these are not who you want to attract because these are low end and these guys don't generally tend to have any loyalty.
They tend to complain more. They tend to be the guys who are a bit of a nightmare to work with. So, what you find is, when you package your services a little bit more higher end, you'll
A) start to attract people that can actually afford your services;
B) you'll get people who value what you do a little bit more because they're actually paying a little bit more; and
C) they will actually stick to the plan.
They'll do what you want to do in terms of sticking to the nutritional plan. They'll turn up to the sessions. They'll do some exercise when they're not seeing you. They'll be ideal clients and you'll find that they'll tend to stay longer as well.
So, packaging up your services for higher end clients is a way of putting your prices up. So, for example, if you charged 500 pounds a month for the package that I've just described, then if someone says they can't afford it, you can take something away from it. You can say, “Well, we can get you into a boot camp which is 147 pounds a month. You won't get the one-to-one access, but you will get the same results” because at the end of the day, these guys want results.
And some people will want to pay extra for the higher end package, but it gives you a way to negate the price resistance. So, you can have a higher end price for the people that absolutely want to work with you one-to-one, and who want to get the results, and don't mind paying for it. And for the people that may not be as affluent, you can drop them down into your boot camps, or your groups, or your online training, or whatever it is that you want to do because at the end of the day, guys, all you really need to try and sell is the result. It doesn't matter how you do it, that one-to-one group, online, is just the vehicle for doing that. That's just the way you deliver your content and the way that you push people.
That's me for now. I'm going to get back to the pool. Check out our website at internetfitpro.com and check out our SWAT personal trainer website and marketing program.
If you've got any questions, please feel free to get in touch.