In 2007, 15 years ago this month I finished my certificate III and IV in fitness, paid my insurance and registration and I was all ready to go as a PT.
My first gym was approximately 60km from Home. It was a brand new large commercial gym with A base membership of people and 10 new personal trainers of which all of us were as green as a head of Broccoli.
I had just finished working as a chemist for a pharmaceutical company. My work consisted of laboratory testing all day and certainly didn‘t have any sales or business element to it.
I was a qualified Personal trainer with no idea how to build a business let alone run a business.
The first few weeks were ok because we had paid hours to create programs and then induct a whole lot of members into the club.
After 2 weeks I had no PT sessions booked despite huge numbers of referrals.
When I finally did sell PT the club took half the PT earnings and I was left with the other half.
The life of PT employed by a club.
In order to match what I made as a chemist would have to work 45 hours per week In paid sessions.
After 3 months of trying to scrape a living the club decided to run a 12 week challenge.
If I participated in the challenge each session would net me $21 per session.
It was at this point that I needed to reassess what I wanted to achieve as a PT.
Yes, I wanted to make people fit. But I still needed to pay the bills.
At this point I took a risk of working for myself and creating my own business as a sub contractor PT paying rent.
This was a steep learning curve for me because it meant that I had to sell my self without the back up of the club to feed me referrals.
After 6 months I had found my niche. I was now working with novice bodybuilders, getting them ready for their first contests.
As well as working with weight loss clients and skinny guys looking to add some muscle.
I had competed when I was younger with some success but now I had people relying on me to lead them to success.
In my first year I had some good success getting people ready with some winners in their first contests.
I had also discovered that PT can be a lot of work for little reward. Especially contest prep.
I was also very tired of driving 120km per day to the gym.
It was time to explore gyms closer to the city and closer to home and a little more upmarket. Apparently where the money was.
The decision when working at the new gym was to focus on people with more meaningful goals like losing weight and building some muscle.
This gym was right in the middle of The Valley with a lot of high earning men and Woman that were either single or in a relationship but had no family.
Once again the gym had the option of working for the club or as a self employed contractor.
I was still not super confident in myself as a sales person so I took the option of working for the club and working self employed.
I now had 18months experience as a PT so I built my business a little bit quicker than the first time and within 3 months was close to full of clients.
In 2009, the GFC hit and many trainers were struggling. I was maintaining a reasonable business without really killing it.
Once we hit 2010 and 2011 business started building again and I was starting to be busy 5 to 6 days per week.
In hindsight I should have increased my rates and followed the supply and demand curve of business.
Once again the lack of confidence in myself meant that I worked more hours when I could have charged more and worked less.
In 2012, after 5 years as a PT I was starting to burn out and I wanted to be closer to home.
To be continued......
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