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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:

"What’s the Hippocratic Oath of coaching? Learn what the person needs before you figure out what you’re going to give them."
                                                        - Jonathan Goodman in Episode 8 of the Online Trainer Show
Watch for this newsletter from the Personal Trainer Development Center each Sunday.

In this issue:

  1. How to be successful, now and in the future
  2. From food stamps to full professor in 12 years
  3. The secret to magical customer experiences (Online Trainer Show recap)
1. How to be successful, now and in the future – Jonathan Goodman

It’s hard to build something that lasts.

We live in a world of immediacy, and it can be poisonous.

Being able to find any information within seconds on our phone is incredibly useful and efficient. But it also makes us lazy and addicted to the quick fix.

You might get a few clients with your Facebook ads today, but easy solutions to complex challenges never work for long.

What does work—what always works—is the long game. Building your business one customer at a time. Making sacrifices today so you’ll have something better tomorrow.

It all starts with a clear idea of what you want to achieve. You’re not going to do the hard work of building a business if the goal isn’t meaningful to you.

It’s like finding a map with a big X on it. It might be a good map, but it’s only effective if you know why you want to get to your destination.  

2. From food stamps to full professor in 12 years – Andy Galpin

Andy is a professor of exercise science at California State University, Fullerton.

Where I grew up, people don’t go to college. They build roads, hang gutters, raise livestock, become cops or firefighters. Not because they aren't capable of doing other things. It just doesn’t really come up.

I never knew anybody famous. I never even knew anybody who’d met anybody famous.

In high school, I spent 75 percent of my senior year on a tractor or in a weight room. I didn’t know much about college. If you’d asked me what a Ph.D. was, I couldn’t have told you.

Then I got a chance to play football at Linfield College, a powerhouse Division III program in Oregon, not far from where I grew up. (We won a national championship my junior year.)

I couldn’t believe my luck.

Money was always a struggle. I was on the free lunch program through high school. I was on food stamps until I was 24.

At Linfield I was excited to get a work-study job cleaning dorm bathrooms. Most people would be embarrassed to clean the toilets and showers of their teammates and the girls they were trying to attract. But the job kept me alive financially, and I felt lucky to have it.

I had massively kind mentors who encouraged me to get my master’s and Ph.D. in muscle physiology, and helped me launch my career as a scientist. I became tenured at 32 and was promoted to full professor at 36.

Almost every day I talk to a famous athlete or someone affiliated with a pro sports team. I’ve even worked with several dudes who’re so rich and famous I’ll never be allowed to even talk about it.

I make enough money to give my family a life I thought was only for rich people.

If there was one thing that set me apart, it was the way I looked at things.

My circumstances forced me to be creative. Everyone in my life—parents, teachers, coaches, professors—encouraged me to ask questions, and to see if there was another way to solve a problem.

And then I caught every break.

I can’t tell you how to do what I did, because I’m not entirely sure how I did it. It was like the cosmos dealt me blackjack on every hand.

But you can ask questions. You can find new solutions. You can reject simple answers to complicated problems, and accept evidence that undermines things you want to believe.

Then, with a little luck and a lot of effort, things should work out.
3. The secret to magical customer experiences

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

In Episode 7, Creating Magical Client Experiences to Increase Retention and Grow Your Business, Ren kicks things off with a tribute to Ricardo Montalban’s chest hair.

But then the team gets serious, with Jon, Carolina, and producer Amber Reynolds going deep on how to use every touchpoint in the training process to make clients feel cared for.

It’s the longest title in the podcast’s short history, and most content-rich episode.

In Episode 8, When to Use Paid Traffic, Organic Growth, or Neither, Jon explains the harsh truth of paid advertising:

"Facebook doesn’t care about your thousand dollars a month … Facebook doesn’t even care about your hundred thousand dollars a month. They have advertisers who spend millions of dollars every week."

There aren’t any shortcuts to building an online business, but there are ways to get your first clients without throwing money you don’t have at a company that doesn’t care.

Come for the money-changing advice, stay for the one weird trick to accelerate body hair growth.

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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