10 Reasons Why Your Personal Training Business Could Be Failing

The fitness industry is an exciting, prosperous and an affluent industry full of potential to make a good living and create an excellent income. However from experience there are some Personal Trainers who struggle to take advantage of this opportunity. We therefore decided to identify our top ten reasons why your business could be failing:

1. You use your clients as a personal psychiatrist!! You may laugh but the amount of times I’ve heard and seen Personal Trainers talking about their relationships and love life with their clients is astonishing. Your clients are paying YOU for a service, not the other way round!!
2. If you are promoting yourself as a body composition expert or fat loss expert, then it would be advantageous to look the part!! You don’t necessarily need to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but remember, you are your best advert so take advantage of it and practice what you preach.
3. On the theme of practice what you preach, when you set up social media platforms to advertise your services, why post pictures of you drinking alcohol and partying every weekend? This is surely contradicting what you preach… immediately this affects your credibility as a ‘Health Professional’. As well as this, we often see Personal Trainers eating Fish and Chips, Subways and even a salt laced KFC take away at the gym reception.
4. You have not taken advantage of the various social media platforms to advertise your services!! In the majority of cases social media platforms are free to set up and we strongly advise that you take advantage of this… But, please keep the number of topless selfies to a minimum 😉
5. Lack of Results! As a trainer you are not getting the results you should be with your clients. This will affect the amount of referrals you receive and your overall reputation. There could be a number of reasons for this: non compliant clients, lack of nutrition knowledge and application, poor programming or lack of intensity in the sessions… too much talking and not enough work- see point one.
6. Lack of persistence!! As in any industry one of the main reasons why professionals are not successful is the lack of perseverance. It takes time for potential clients to ‘buy in to you’ and rate you as a professional. No successful businessman failed to persevere with their business.
7. No rapport!! Many Personal Trainers fail to create a rapport with their clients which makes it harder to hold on to clients. The main reason for this in our opinion is the lack of focus and attention which Personal Trainers give their clients. Far too many Personal trainers would rather be on Facebook, Texting, Tweeting and even taking personal phone calls whilst working with clients. When you think about it, why should a client pay you in excess of £25 a session if you are disinterested and texting your friends?
8. Similar to above, STOP hittin’ on and checking out the hot women and buff men training next to you!! When you’re working with a client it is really disrespectful and unprofessional to be drooling over the hot woman in short skin tight hot pants or buff guy in a vest training next you rather than focussing on your client and what they are doing… alternatively invest in some sunglasses to hide your eyes!!
9. Lack of business development!! Most Personal Trainers who do complete CPD only focus on developing their training and nutrition knowledge which is needed but then neglect business skills. As a result of this, FLM Training will be hosting half day business seminar for Fitness Professionals in Manchester in late November. The workshop will include website design, social media platforms (Facebook, twitter, Youtube etc) and the use of blogs etc to generate more leads. For more information on this contact Richard at Richard.jones@flmtraining.co.uk.
10. Lack of CPD!! Similar to point nine above, Continued Professional Development is something which most Personal Trainers neglect. Once they complete their Personal Training course the learning and development journey has not stopped but rather just begun. The importance of developing further understanding of  areas such as Applied Nutrition, Kettlebell Programming and Group Indoor Cycling is crucial. These are specialist areas and in most cases the L3 Personal Training Course just doesn’t go into as much detail as specific CPD course might.

We hope this e-mail has helped you identify potential areas for improvement and given you ideas on how to improve you professional practice. Please drop us a line with your comments and feedback.