“When it comes to training, ‘basic’ does not necessarily mean ‘easy.’”
                                                                 - Meghan Callaway on Facebook

You’re reading this, right now, because I had one big idea.

It came to me a few years into my personal training career:

For the majority of our clients, there’s hardly any difference between a really good program and a “good enough” program.

What matters, what really moves the needle, is understanding enough about what makes them tick to get them to want to do the program.

What do you do with an idea like that when you’re a 24-year-old personal trainer at a gym in Toronto?

I wrote a book called Ignite the Fire.

But I had no idea what to do next. How do I get it edited? How do I promote it? I didn’t know anybody, and I didn’t have much money.

So I Googled fitness books, emailed the authors, and asked them what to do. What’s amazing is that everybody replied.

That was a major revelation. When you reach out to people respectfully, no matter how big you think they are, they will get back to you.

From that point you can start to build relationships. The thing that worked best for me was meeting them at events, introducing myself, and letting them attach a face to my name.

After I published the book and launched the PTDC, I could add value by publishing their best ideas on my site and promoting them to my audience.

Then something even more remarkable happened:

People began to reach out to me, including the guy who wrote the next item in this newsletter.

2. Networking is the ultimate asymmetric opportunity – Alex Cartmill

In April of 2014, I wrote an extremely cringey message to Jonathan Goodman.

I told him I was a new personal trainer in Portland, Oregon, who was reaching out to show my appreciation for the content he published at the PTDC.

He got back to me the next morning (at 6:44 a.m.) to thank me for my message.

I wish I could say Jon immediately saw my potential and offered me a job. But it wasn’t like that at all. I got turned down for a mentorship and did unpaid work for him before I got my first paying gig with the PTDC.

That was more than a year after I first reached out. It took another year and a half before he hired me full-time.

And now, seven years after I sent that email, I’m overseeing product development and strategy for the entire company.

I think there are four lessons in my story:

• Overnight success is BS. Anything strong and sustainable takes time, effort and patience.
  
  
• If you aren’t satisfied with where you are now, you must take risks to get somewhere else. Learn to value discomfort. Seek it out. Develop that muscle.
  
  
• Failure is inevitable. If you let fear of failure hold you back, not only will you fail anyway, you’ll never know what you could have accomplished by taking a chance.
  
  
• The best opportunities are asymmetric, with the potential upside far outweighing the risk. Networking, done patiently and empathetically, is the ultimate asymmetric opportunity. You never know where it’ll take you. I mean, look where it got me.

Here’s what podcast cohosts Jonathan Goodman, Carolina Belmares, and Ren Jones talked about this week on the Online Trainer Show:

In Episode 70, A Real-Life SOLD OUT Online Training Launch Example, Carolina explains how she positioned and launched Fit for the Dress, her four-week program for stressed-out women 35 and older.

Carolina’s hook:

She isn’t just a coach. She’s a participant. She livestreams every workout for the 12 women she accepted into the program and promises to follow the exact same meal plan.

“I tapped into my own needs,” she says. When she noticed her clothes didn’t fit as well as they did before the pandemic, she figured a lot of her potential clients would relate to the goal of getting back to their pre-COVID shape.

In Episode 71, Your Content Is Your Life, Carolina, Ren, and Jon present three different models for how to speak to your audience.

Carolina, as you know from the previous episode, is her own target market. Every waking hour of her life informs the content she shares with her clients.

But Ren, who works exclusively with women, doesn’t have that option. “I exist absolutely outside my demographic,” he says. He had to “shut up and listen” and become “relentlessly observant and empathetic” to speak to his target audience.

And Jon has an entirely different challenge. With a company focused on business development, he has to speak to different audiences in different ways, depending on where they are in their careers and what problems they’re trying to solve.

You’ll find every episode here:

--> The Online Trainer Show