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Stronger Sundays

Dominate your fitness business with this weekly collection of strategies, tips, and tricks.
By trainers, for trainers.

03/28/2024

Quote of the week:

“Stop searching for the recipe for attracting anyone and everyone in your market and start focusing on serving the type of person you once were.

Nobody is better positioned to help that person than you are, and it will be your path of least resistance.”

                                                                                          - Pete Dupuis on Instagram
Watch for this newsletter from the Personal Trainer Development Center each Sunday.

In this issue:

  1. To get help, appeal to someone’s self-interest
  2. Tell us how the pandemic affected your bottom line
  3. How to lose clients and alienate your peers, and why you shouldn’t (Online Trainer Show recap)
1. To get help, appeal to someone’s self-interest – Jonathan Goodman

Consider the last time someone asked you for a favor. What went through your mind?

Chances are, whether you want to admit it or not, you thought of the request in terms of how it might help you.

Maybe it deepens a professional relationship, or opens a new one. Maybe it increases your perceived status among your peers. Or maybe it just makes you feel better about yourself.

There’s no need to feel bad for thinking this way. It’s selfish, yes. But selfishness is normal. We live in a world of exchanges. To get what you want, you need to give the other party something they need.

But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.

As Robert Greene wrote in The 48 Laws of Power:

“If you need to turn to an ally for help, do not bother to remind him of your past assistance and good deeds. … Instead, uncover something in your request, or in your alliance with him, that will benefit him, and emphasize it out of all proportion. He will respond enthusiastically when he sees something to be gained for himself.”

Before making an ask, assume the other person thinks like you.

  • What would make you feel better about helping someone?
  • How can you frame the request to appeal to their self-interest, without bluntly proposing a quid pro quo?
  • How can you leverage past exchanges without implying a current obligation?

And whatever you do, don’t go into it expecting them to help you. It’s a request, not a demand.

2. Tell us how the pandemic affected your bottom line

From the moment state and local governments ordered gyms to close, we knew it was going to be bad. We knew personal trainers and gym owners would take a hit.

But I don’t think any of us anticipated that the hit would be this big, or go on this long. The U.S. overall has recorded more than a million new unemployment claims for 20 consecutive weeks, with no end in sight.

We decided to use our second annual Personal Trainer Salary Survey to find out how hard the pandemic has hit the fitness industry.

How has your income been affected by the brutal economic conditions? How many of you lost your jobs? How many of you made the transition from in-person to online coaching?

If you haven’t already completed our survey, please take a few minutes to do that now.

Your answers will help us understand how to tailor our content to your needs, and help the rest of the world understand what the pandemic has done to our industry.

Just click this link to get started:

--> The Personal Trainer Salary Survey 2020
3. How to lose clients and alienate your peers, and why you shouldn’t

Some of you reading this have podcasts. Many of you have been guests on podcasts. Jonathan Goodman does a lot of both. He hosts the twice-weekly Online Trainer Show and appears frequently as a guest on other people’s shows.

It was in the latter role that he recently encountered an unfathomably lazy and inconsiderate host. As he describes at the beginning of Episode 21, How to Help Clients Follow Through for Big Results, the host not only showed up 20 minutes late, he opened the conversation by admitting he hadn’t even Googled Jon’s name to learn a little about what he does.

“Podcasting is a great medium to get to know people and to network with people, and to build relationships,” Jon says. “But I have absolutely no desire to ever have anything to do with this person again, in any capacity.”

From there, Jon and cohosts Ren Jones and Carolina Belmares turn to building relationships with your clients.

As podcast producer Amber Reynolds says, the goal isn’t to dictate solutions to their problems. It’s to facilitate their progress toward their own solutions.

Ren is still in social intelligence mode at the beginning of Episode 22, How to Optimize Your Process to Add Value and Increase Client Retention. “I’m average at best in most areas,” Ren says. “But I excel in not being a total asshole.”

The context—gratuitous dickishness in a Facebook group when people ask for help—is less important than the bigger message: Every fitness pro, virtually every day, has opportunities to be generous, empathetic, understanding, or simply decent.

Those who take advantage of those opportunities are the ones who thrive.

You’ll find every episode here:

--> The Online Trainer Show


P.S. Whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways we can help you:

1. Grab a free copy of The Wealthy Fit Pro’s Guide to Online Training
It’s your blueprint to building a fitness or nutrition business online. --> Click here

2. Join the Online Trainers Unite Group and connect with other online trainers  
It’s our Facebook community where fitness and nutrition pros like you can share insights and advice about starting or running a successful coaching business online.
--> Click here

3. Join the Online Trainer Academy
Our world-class certification course is everything you need to responsibly and profitably coach fitness or nutrition online. --> Click here


**Thanks for reading. What to do next**



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