Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2367: Five Factors All Online Coaches Need to Consider

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

5 Factors All Online Coaches Need to Consider The explosion of online coaching. (1:39) The misconception is that this is an easy way to build a business. (3:47) What makes a “good” trainer. ...(5:38) 5 Factors All Online Coaches Need to Consider #1 - Must have a strong online presence (think retention and value add). (7:25) #2 - Use good workout programming (ie: MAPS). (14:04) #3 - Coach people for free at first, gradually raise prices. (17:32) #4 - Build an online group (ie: Facebook). (21:54) #5 - Don’t overcomplicate the process. (24:55) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Hiya for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** Receive 50% off your first order ** June Promotion: MAPS 15 Minutes | Bikini Bundle | Shredded Summer Bundle 50% off! ** Code JUNE50 at checkout ** Mind Pump #2302: How To Be A Successful Trainer In 2024 With Jason Phillips Mind Pump #2172: Five Commandments For Successful Personal Trainers 3 Day Mind Pump Personal Trainer Webinar Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources  

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Starting point is 00:00:00 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is mind pump. Right. Today's episode, we talk to online coaches, five factors you need to consider if you want to be successful. Now this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Haya Health. This is a vitamin
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Starting point is 00:01:01 If you're interested, go to mapsfitnessproducts.com and then use the code June 50 for that discount. Alright here comes the show. In recent years online fitness coaching has exploded. This is a good thing for the most part. Look for those of you who want to be online coaches or are now today's episode we're talking about the five factors you need to consider to become successful. Today's episode online fitness coaching talking about the five factors you need to consider to become successful. Today's episode, online fitness coaching. I'm so proud you kept a straight face.
Starting point is 00:01:30 You're such a robot now, bro. I know. I can't even mess with him anymore. He's a professional. Oh, with his sounds? Yeah, Justin over here. We're working on our explosion noises. I like it.
Starting point is 00:01:37 I'm messing up over here. I don't think it's funny at all. So online coaching, it's been a thing now for, what would you say, at least 10 years? Kind of been a thing. Yeah. But it really, really took off, uh, during COVID. Uh, it was a huge spike in interest and in the amount of
Starting point is 00:01:53 people who became online coaches for obvious reasons, right? People couldn't go to gyms. A lot of trainers couldn't train their clients. And so everybody kind of went to that online space. And then in general, there was a huge interest in just health and fitness overall. I think people were like, I got to do something. The new part to that is, is people considering that as a focus of their career without even being a trainer first, which is a totally new thing.
Starting point is 00:02:18 It was nice because initially for us and for other people that were like-minded in terms of looking at the future of personal training. It was like, oh, this could be a nice addition to your service offerings, right? Like, this is something that you can incorporate if they're traveling or whatever, but now there's actual coaches that are strictly virtual only. I think this actually, I think we in the last, uh,
Starting point is 00:02:41 I'd say 15 years, we saw two big explosions. And I do think COVID was one of them, but even before COVID, the introduction to Instagram as a social media platform really did this because, and we saw this, remember early on, we talked a lot about Shreds as a company. And there was a few companies like Shreds that saw Instagram as a great. And there was a few companies like Shreds that saw Instagram as a great
Starting point is 00:03:06 marketing tool and that the fitness space was kind of untouched or untapped from that angle. And they gathered up all these popular kids that had great bodies and physiques, no real experience of training people in real life. And they marketed online coaching with them. And they made a lot of money doing that because they were some of the first, and it was just sheer volume. They had millions of followers and they had these great physiques that also, by the way,
Starting point is 00:03:33 they got caught Photoshopping and doing things too, that they use to market themselves, to sell the supplements and to sell their own online coaching. And I really think they exploded that first and then COVID just accelerated. Yeah. And I think there's a misconception too, or
Starting point is 00:03:50 misunderstanding that this is an easy way to build a business in the fitness space. Right. I would say it's probably more challenging to build a business just purely being online. Although there's a lot of pluses, right? So you have this kind of unlimited potential for reach. You're not limited by distance, right?
Starting point is 00:04:11 People don't have to be close to you. You can, you can literally coach somebody that's on the other side of the world. But on the other hand, it's hard to get through the noise. There's like, how are you going to get people to find you? And then when they do, how are you going to build enough value to someone that you've never met before who's going to be willing to pay you to, you know, coach them through this process? It's a challenging side of the fitness space, I think.
Starting point is 00:04:36 However, if you do it right, you can build a really nice, successful business. We know a lot of online coaches like this where they, they've built their businesses online and they're doing really, really well, getting people good results and a lot of people like the online coaching, uh, from a client perspective because it typically is less of an investment than in-person training. Um, and a lot of online coaches kind of offer this daily support that you don't necessarily get with a, the typical personal trainer. Um, not all online coaches do this, but a lot of
Starting point is 00:05:08 people like that, that they could text this person throughout the day, um, and get some advice. It's definitely a new side or new kind of, you know, space in the fitness industry, relatively speaking, when it comes to, uh, to training. But I will say like a lot of people really have a lot of misconceptions about how to build an online coaching business. There's a lot of people
Starting point is 00:05:49 on social media that are competing against each other, but I would say they're all competing to attract the same clientele who doesn't know any better and is just trying this out for the first time. And that if you wanna build a long-term successful business in the space, the key, even though we're going to go over five things to consider when doing this, is to truly chase mastery as a trainer and as a coach over trying just to gain attention. I think that that's the first mistake that's made by a lot of these trainers is they get so caught up in acquisition
Starting point is 00:06:26 and how many clients can I get to or how many people can I get to pay attention to me and see me that's this game of volume when really what they should be focusing on is their craft and how good they are at servicing even if it's only a person or two that they're helping but really focusing on mastery over that and not getting so much caught up in acquisition. We had a recent event where we were talking to some trainers and they had all these ideas on how to scale their business and they were already training like 15 or 17 clients. And they're like, what do you think of these ideas?
Starting point is 00:07:00 And I'm like, well, instead of you trying to come up with these other ideas to scale your business, why don't you just continue to add value to the current 15 people that you have and then maybe you can charge a higher price for your service or you'll get feedback from them on their needs and their wants. Instead of going, hey, I've got this other idea or other thing I want to do, focus on continuing to add value to the current audience that you do. Yeah, so you're talking about having, okay, so I think it goes without saying that you need to have a good online presence.
Starting point is 00:07:29 And what Anna was talking about is, you know, think about adding value and about retention. Now, why do I need to say this, right? Every business understands this. If you talk about almost any other business, they would say, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Once you get a client or a customer, you want to retain them, you want to add a lot of value, you want them to regard you as a- That's always secondary in the conversation. Yes. It's acquisition.
Starting point is 00:07:51 Yeah, so I think it's because social media has devalued people that you're connected to, because we look at them as followers, right? We label them as followers. I have a thousand followers, I have 10,000 followers, I have 500 followers. I've heard too many online coaches say things like, well, I have a small online presence.
Starting point is 00:08:10 Well, how many people are following you on your pages? Oh, just, you know, 400 people. You know, I would have killed to have 400 potential people that I could talk to and contact as a personal trainer in a brick and mortar gym and no brick and mortar business would ever say that. Imagine if you owned a studio, a personal training studio, and you had access to 400 real people that are watching what you're doing and listening to what you're saying.
Starting point is 00:08:37 That's a lot of people. I mean, even 50 is a lot of people. So when you have that many people think value and retention. Alright, what does that look like? Well, when I do a post on social media about something, it could be anything diet or exercise related or whatever, and somebody comments, that's no different than somebody peeking their head in your studio and saying, hey, here's a comment I have on that thing you're doing. Now, what are you going to do? Ignore them? No, you're going to talk to them back, engage with them, potentially lead them to your DMs so you can continue
Starting point is 00:09:09 to build value by offering them more free coaching, free services, whatever, because that person can very often become a client. Instead, what people do, a big mistake people do with their online presence when they're trying to be an online coach, is they just look at numbers of followers. Ooh, I added 10 people today. Let's see if I can add 20 tomorrow. Let's see if I can add a thousand. Ooh, I have a viral video. I added 500 new followers. The person you have in front of you is worth way more than the potential people you have to try and gather tomorrow. You want people based off of your reputation that you put out there, not based off of what hacks you figured out. You know, you want your craft to speak for itself.
Starting point is 00:09:50 You want that to take on a life of its own, create evangelists that will then, you know, convince all these other potential clients that this is the place to go. And you know, that's so much more powerful, not just, I mean, you're gonna see a bit of an initial bump, but later on down the road to have that as your business model as opposed to just pure volume. Now you're going to be filtering out a lot of people that may not have had the same experience
Starting point is 00:10:18 because you haven't put all the effort into the quality of what you're actually providing. Yeah, it's interesting because we all know, obviously we're in the new media space, we know people personally with tens of thousands of followers who have seven figure businesses. And we also know people with hundreds of thousands of followers that can't scrape together 30 or $40,000 a year in business or less. So the amount of followers you have is irrelevant.
Starting point is 00:10:43 What's relevant are the amount of people that you're actually impacting, working with and building value. The people that really want to hear what you have to say, who are considering hiring you. So when you get that one comment or that like, like that's a person that just walked into your business. What you need to think to yourself is how can I add more value to that person that just commented under my post? How can I engage with them and how can I get that person to view me as somebody
Starting point is 00:11:07 very valuable that they might want to hire? Well, there's an exercise that I have these trainers do when they ask a question like this. And I said, you're asking yourself the wrong question. You're asking yourself, why can't I, or why don't I have 10,000 followers? The better question is why do the 30 or 40 people that do follow me, why aren't they buying training from me? That's a better question. So, and that should be where your time should be focused on
Starting point is 00:11:32 is like, if you have the eyeballs of just 20 to 50 people, which most people do, most people turn on their Instagram and can get the attention of at least 20 to 50 people. And so the question is not, how do I get to a thousand or 500 people is what is it about the 20 people that are following me that I can add enough value to them that they would potentially buy personal training from me? And if they're not, why would you go waste your time getting more attention when you can't even get the current attention to be interested in what it is
Starting point is 00:11:58 that you have to offer? So that is the better strategy to solve that answer or that problem first before you even worry about acquiring more people. And many times that is because what you're doing, what you're providing for free, because social media when you do a post is free content, what you're providing for free isn't even valuable enough for people to pay attention, listen, or comment.
Starting point is 00:12:20 And so that is the first problem that you need to solve is to be able to give enough free information and content that gets the people paying attention to you to engage and talk to you solve that problem first And then what you'll see as a byproduct you'll start to add people because those people will go Oh, wow This was a really interesting post or this really helped me out and then that person shares it with somebody who they know That that might be be helpful to also, which is the person that you want to attract to your page, not some random person because you did some viral clip
Starting point is 00:12:51 or because you used a catchy song that everybody's doing or you took your shirt off and you looked awesome. Yeah, so instead of focusing so much on trying to add more numbers, ask yourself, what is it that you could be doing to get the people that are currently paying attention to you, even interested in what you have to offer. What's interesting about this is we're talking about online coaches. The average, and there's variance here, okay, because some online coaches run
Starting point is 00:13:15 their businesses differently than others, but on average, if you're a successful online coach, you're by yourself and you're working with people, what are you going to have, 30 to 50 clients a month at most, right? 30 to 50, that's a lot. How many followers do you need to gain 30 to 50 customers? Right? You don't need a lot. You just need to provide a lot of value.
Starting point is 00:13:34 I mean, a hundred people that really value what you have to say that think, man, this person knows their stuff. That this person actually has some authority is way more valuable than 10,000 people that just want to look at your pictures. Those are almost worthless in terms of building a business. So it's all about retention and building value and spend a lot of time on each and every single person that reaches out and contacts you and comments or likes or whatever. See if you could turn them into a real follower, not just a looker. Which transitions perfectly into the second point, which is using good programming.
Starting point is 00:14:08 I mean, you should then focus on, so let's pretend you have only one or two clients. Instead of being so focused on trying to get more, the third, the fourth, the fifth client, figure out how to really service and take care of the one or two. Because if you can change that person's life, one of those two clients you have, you can change their life through good programming, a good plan for them. They're more likely to go out and go tell 10 of their friends that they should buy a personal train for you. With a walking billboard.
Starting point is 00:14:38 Yeah. Versus being so hung up again on getting more attention and more clients. It's just so interesting to me because we you know, we all train people in person. Same rules apply here. Let me ask you guys this, as when you were trainers, what was easier, getting a current client to re-sign with you or having to find a brand new client? It's the difference between 80% and 12%.
Starting point is 00:14:57 Yeah. Okay, so 12% of, to convert a new person, the average trainer who just gets started, closes at like 12 to 20%, 20% on the high end. And that's if they can get a personal friend. Right, right. So it's okay. So 12 to 20%. The resign, the average resign is 80%. You have clients that you've serviced. So you're far better off paying attention to and focusing on the client you already have in front of you and changing their life, and then them recommending somebody else,
Starting point is 00:15:25 because that will start to snow. Now it's a slower process than comparing to the kid who went viral and also has a thousand people paying attention to him, but it's a better process. It's a more sustainable process. It's how you actually build a business. It's not how you just get and sell a couple deals. It's how you actually learn how to be a good coach
Starting point is 00:15:42 through changing people's lives. Yeah, I mean, if that's the and you know you're seeing not a lot of re-signs and that should be a huge red flag you know you're gonna be a going out of business business because you know to constantly get the enough volume of people to kind of go through your system and then continuously kind of forecast that like how is this gonna play out if I'm not servicing the current clientele I have to the hundredth degree of effort that I can, you know, it's just going to be a failing business. Yeah, now we're talking about workout programming and you know this is a bit of an issue in the online
Starting point is 00:16:16 coaching world. Online coaching places more of an emphasis on diet and nutrition coaching and less of an emphasis on workout. In fact, I know a lot of online coaches that do nothing with workouts. The client just works out on their own. Then the coach just helps them with their diet. Now I get it. I get that, you know, helping someone with the nutrition is very important, especially if you're in contact with them on a daily basis,
Starting point is 00:16:39 actually makes a lot of sense. But if you can provide this person with good workout programming You're gonna separate yourself from your peers because a good workout look I don't think I need to say this to our audience But the difference between results and no results many times is good workout programming. There's a science to it now I'd like to communicate this to our audience, especially if you're a trainer or coach Use our training programs as templates if you have maps maps, anabolic and maps, aesthetic maps, performance, map, symmetry, whatever, and you're following those programs, look at the programming and modify it for your client, right?
Starting point is 00:17:14 Went up for your client. You've got good programming there. You don't have to start from scratch, but use them as templates or as guides so that you can write workouts for people that actually work. Now think about it this way. You're helping them with their diet and it's really successful. You've also given them a very effective workout. Now think of your value then. I'm going to skip a point because the next one doesn't follow as well as the one after that which is actually giving your service. Don't be afraid to give your services free
Starting point is 00:17:41 because one of the challenges when you first get started and you're trying to build your clientele to get the experience is, man, this is really tough to get this experience when I only get one client here, one client there. And I used to, it used to blow my mind when I get trainers like that. And I'm like, what are you doing with your other hours? Why are you not putting people in front of you? Why are you afraid to give your services away to somebody to get the practice, to get the, to learn, to get better at your craft, to chase mastery.
Starting point is 00:18:07 Like you're far better off doing that. And for some reason we're in this weird time where people feel like they have to do the compute the math. Well, my time is valued at this and I would never do that. I'm going to devalue my training services if I offer this for free. It's like, are you kidding me? Like your main focus should be becoming great at what you do and chasing mastery, getting practice. And I use the analogy a lot with this podcast. It was exactly our strategy with
Starting point is 00:18:31 five episodes a week. There wasn't some algorithm we were trying to hack. There was not some reason behind like, oh, we're going to do five because this is what will get us to the... No, we thought we knew we were going to suck at this and we've never done it before. And if we're going to get good at it, we're going to throw ourselves in the fire and we're going to do as many hours of it as we possibly can. And we're not going to worry about, you know, trying to analyze every one we do and then wait another week before we do another one. It's like, no, just get the reps. Let's do another one and do another one and do another one. Analysis by analysis. Yes. And get those hours under your belt. The same thing goes with your personal trainer and you're just getting started and you're trying to get good at this, do not be afraid to give
Starting point is 00:19:07 your services or give those hours, donate those hours to people to learning your craft. This goes with the first point about adding value. If you're getting started in online coaching, why don't you get yourself 10 clients for free? Get yourself 10 clients that will let you coach them for free and then work with them and build value with them and build value with them. It'll be easier to get them to pay you later than it will to get brand new people to pay you right off the gates. So, and by the way, this is going to help illuminate a few things because if you're getting started and you can't get 10 people to hire you for free, you're not going to sell anything. You're not going to sell anything.
Starting point is 00:19:42 So this is a good way for you to know when, you know, is it a good time for me to start charging for my services? Well, you can't get free clients. You're not going to get some. Listen, even with all the experience I have in personal training, when I went over into the online space, I looked around at all the different online coaches that were out there and I looked at their pricing and I came underneath that. Even though I valued myself higher than that
Starting point is 00:20:05 and know that I'm probably better than a lot of those coaches that were offering those services, that wasn't the desired outcome for me yet. The desired outcome was I need to go figure this out. Even though I've been a great trainer to people in person, this online model is new for me. So let me take my skills, my experience, my education, I'm moving into a new space,
Starting point is 00:20:24 now I care about practice and learning and getting feedback from the clientele. So what did I do? I came underneath what the average price was. I'm gonna come underneath. First goal was just get my schedule book. Now underneath might be zero to your point. So if you have no skills, no education, no experience,
Starting point is 00:20:38 and you're trying to figure this out, maybe it is offering your services free. Luckily I had a little bit of a name for myself in the space so all I had to do was undercut everybody to get my book filled up right away. Then my book was filled up, and it was like listening and hearing feedback from the people I was currently training
Starting point is 00:20:53 and what other services people were offering, and then trying to come over the top of that. Oh, this person, they do check-ins once a week? Well, what if I communicate with my people daily? Oh, these people, all they do is do a diet, they don't even go over a workout? Well, what if I offer a workout and a diet and I have with my people daily? Oh, these people, all they do is do a diet. They don't even go over a workout. Oh, what if I offer a workout and a diet and I have a check-in?
Starting point is 00:21:09 Oh, what if I actually add a free recipe every single week and I have an email to them every single week and I automate that? Oh, that would be cool. Oh, what if I automate this motivational tip that hits them every single day so they open up their phone and they get this? Like, I started thinking of all these ways
Starting point is 00:21:22 that I could be way more valuable than any of my competition out there on top of servicing these people really well through good coaching and training. And then what I would do is each time I would have an opening, I would increase my price and then I would increase my price again. And then before you knew it, I'm charging four or five times what the average trainer was. But I wasn't afraid, even with all my experience experience to start much lower just so I could gain the experience to load my books up.
Starting point is 00:21:49 And then the goal was, can I prove that I'm better than anything else? Everybody else out there doing it. Right now along those lines, uh, another valuable thing you could do is build an online group. Facebook allows you to do this. In fact, for free, you can build a group, uh, on there, a page, name it, whatever you want, you know, Sal's, you know, online coaching group or whatever. Invite people in and now you can start to build a community where people can
Starting point is 00:22:13 communicate with each other, see other people that are working with you. You also have a very easy way to communicate to all of your people all at once, and you also have a very, very valuable way to offer free services to people so that you can pluck from their brand new clients. These online groups, in fact, are growing faster than almost any other page on Facebook. This is an absolute must for normal service. It's a shared experience too. Like you said, there's accountability built in there and also just a lot of times there's
Starting point is 00:22:42 more touch points. And so what we've learned about like managing people is like you cannot have enough attention, like that you can never provide enough attention. And so this is also another way to kind of pile on top of what you're already providing service wise with a group of people collectively doing the same thing. There's also this expectation that this is where business
Starting point is 00:23:04 is a little bit different today than it was 20 years ago building your business. It's because of all the free information that is at the tips of everybody's fingers through YouTube and through these Facebook groups and through newsletters. And there's a lot of free content, Reddit, like that people have access to. And so there is a part of doing business now where you
Starting point is 00:23:24 have to compete with all that noise. And one of the ways to do that is to create a Facebook group where you yourself as the leader of that group is providing your value to the space. So I use that Facebook group to add, this is where you could put recipes. This is where you could have the workout of the day. This is where you can drop studies and talk stuff, or you can create dialogue around things that people are debating in the fitness space, or maybe you're sharing other podcast episodes that are really informative or good for your people.
Starting point is 00:23:55 But you start to build this community of people that are like-minded, that are wanting to change their physique or do something in that space, since that's what you do for a living. And this is a network of people that you potentially could pull from. Now what's cool is that you start off with this as a free community and then eventually that might be something you could charge for as you build value into it and as you automate things. So people that have maybe found us in maybe the last five years and didn't know how we started, our Facebook group originally was free. When we first started that Facebook group, we didn't charge for that,
Starting point is 00:24:27 but what's great is that we've continued to add value. We have now doctors and other trainers, and we have really, really high level people inside that forum, including ourselves, that are helping and coaching and doing things for people that we can now actually charge for even that Facebook. Now I would tell people to start off free if I was building my business by myself,
Starting point is 00:24:47 but if you continue to do a good enough job of adding value to that group, you even have the opportunity to charge or just use it as a consistent top of the funnel or a lead magnet. Totally, now finally, when you are working with people, don't overcomplicate the process. There's a lot of these kind of online tools and apps now that revolve around online coaching and oftentimes I've seen this happen a few
Starting point is 00:25:09 times where an online coach makes the process so complicated that it's hard to follow that the clients like oh my gosh you're gonna enter things here do this follow that whatever when it could be as simple as some text messages and here's your workout and then let me know what you think type of deal. Now why is simple important? I'm not, I'm not talking against things that make things efficient. That's, that's good. It's good to make things efficient, but you want to keep things simple because
Starting point is 00:25:33 just like with personal training, when we were trainers, when I first got started, I thought the more complicated my workouts were, the more valuable it would appear. The absolute opposite proved to be true. Later on, it was the simple workouts that proved to be tremendously valuable. It was my ability to teach someone how to squat properly, not how to do a different, 500 different variations of squats with overhead presses and curls combined with it, it was the simplicity that gave me the best results, or give my clients the best results.
Starting point is 00:26:03 So keep things simple so that this person can find good success. Don't get caught up on all those, all the tech apps. When we first started the podcast, we had a friend of ours, mutual friend, who was building an app. He was spending a ton of money and time and effort into and it was very sophisticated. It was designed to basically build in the progressive overload and it had all these bells and whistles. I mean, it was really, really, it was really, really cool.
Starting point is 00:26:32 But the three, and I remember when he presented to each of us this app, and you know, I'm probably in hopes that we would be excited and help get behind it. Maybe we would talk about it on the show one day. And all of us kind of looked at each other, and he was a friend, and so none of us really wanted to burst his bubble because of how much time and money
Starting point is 00:26:49 he'd already spent on this app. But all of us looked at each other and we were like, this is really cool, but a terrible business idea. And the reason why we thought it was terrible is because we had all these years of experience training people, and what we had realized for so many years is like, man, the KISS method is so much better when you're trying to get people to adhere to diet and exercise and having an app that
Starting point is 00:27:10 is so sophisticated that it's, you know, changing and you got to enter percentages and figure out like that stuff is for the average person. They're not going to follow that. If it took him, he was a trainer. He was explaining it to other experienced trainers, us. It took him over an hour before he could kind of explain it and for us to kind of get what he had, how are you going to explain this to the average person who doesn't have this experience and doesn't want to sit here for an hour?
Starting point is 00:27:35 They get blinded. What happens is trainers get blinded by something that they geek out and get excited. So you have to keep that in mind that you may think this app, you may think this thing is oh, this is super you may think this thing is, oh, this is super user friendly and this is super cool, but it's like, if the average person is not gonna do it, if it's an extra step for them to do another thing, besides already committing to going to the gym
Starting point is 00:27:56 and committing to eating their meal plan, it's gonna be really difficult to get people to adhere to that. Well, there's really an art to what you present in front of a potential client in terms of not over-complicating, not providing them with information overload. And to be able to do it at the opportune time. So what they need to hear when they need to hear it.
Starting point is 00:28:19 And I mean, the same thing applies when you're kind of constructing that in the process of their user experience, right? Like I want to keep just the very base essentials for them to focus on That's gonna move the needle the most but you know, we can have all the conversations via I'm talking to them, you know in our chats or texts or whatever But in terms of like what they really need to know, it's like two to three things. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:28:46 It's also, look, it's also like this, like you take somebody who's getting started on their fitness journey. Now I could think of 50 things the person could change right now to make profound impact, but they're not going to do 50 things. They're going to do one thing. And I have to pick the one thing or allow them to pick the one thing that they're going to be most consistent doing. And then when they get that one down, then we add something else.
Starting point is 00:29:08 One of the biggest mistakes coaches and trainers make is they throw everything but the kitchen sink at this potential client, overload them with too many things, even if the client is on board and goes for it, it's such a radical change from their current way of living that it's not sustainable. They haven't built the skills that you need in order to do all these different things. This crazy change in my lifestyle. It's one small step at a time is how you walk a thousand miles.
Starting point is 00:29:33 So that's what we mean by simplification. Going crazy with your, okay, here's your aura ring, here's your this app, let's measure your heart rate variability, do this, give me all these numbers, here's all these, you know, you are going to blow people out of the water and even if you do get somebody that's willing to follow and do all of these things, they're not gonna stay very long and you're gonna lose them because they're not gonna be consistent.
Starting point is 00:29:53 In other words, don't over-communicate. And along the lines of communication, something I wanna add to the points that we made because this was a game changer for me with the online coaching space, which was I started to do this like one hour call before they would start, where they'd actually get a Zoom changer for me with the online coaching space, which was I started to do this like one hour call before they would start, where they'd actually get a Zoom call with me where we would basically talk about
Starting point is 00:30:11 what we were going to be doing. I learned a long time ago in the brick and mortar space, how important it was to forecast to your clients what we would be doing. So a mistake I think trainers make, this is both in brick and mortar and online, where they get someone committed to personal training and they, whatever it be a package or a month or two of training and they saw it.
Starting point is 00:30:31 And then that's the last bit of talking about what we're going to be doing together as far as the programming and like what to look ahead. And one of the challenging things for personal trainers is to resign clients after they've already sold them their first package of training. One of the mistakes that they make is they wait until that is almost up and then they wait and hope the client saw great results and they're going to want to re-sign with them versus them having communicated this process from the very beginning. So when I would take this call, when we first would meet each other, I would forecast my
Starting point is 00:31:04 entire plan and let them know what to expect. And so this is something that I think that we miss out on is this, if you've been training people long enough, you know what the ups and downs look like. It's not like it's this linear results where they just get stronger and stronger and they can lose weight, lose weight, and it's like get better, better, better. It's like there's this kind of up and down of getting, you're going through this of consistency and inconsistent and seeing a little bit of body fat come off to plateaus.
Starting point is 00:31:30 And it's important that you lay that foundation or you communicate that from the very beginning so that when it happens later on, it doesn't seem like it was unexpected. You expected that to happen. And so this is really important that when you first start with them, that you have this call or meet with them where you talk about this is what we're
Starting point is 00:31:49 going to. It also sets you up for your potential resign if they need to buy more personal training for you. So it's like, Hey, for the next two months, Justin, this is what we're going to be focusing on. We're going to be focusing on your nutrition, a lot of the mobility and the squat assessment stuff that we talked about, you know, in this first month or so too, we're gonna be building your metabolism. So I don't expect for us to see a lot of weight come off the scale. You might notice it is. In fact, sometimes you might see your clothes fitting a little bit different. Don't freak out.
Starting point is 00:32:15 This is totally normal. We're right now, we're really trying to rebuild your metabolism. We're not focusing on just losing weight yet. Don't worry. We'll get to that part. Then in the second month, we're going to transition into this. And so you're laying this all out for them for what it looks like for the next two, three, four, six months or a year, if you can plan it out that long. And then that there, then as they go through this process, then nothing seems unexpected. Absolutely.
Starting point is 00:32:39 So look, because of this, here's what we've done. We've put together a three day training. It's free. It's for trainers. trainers and we're gonna teach you how to close deals how to present training how to forecast your business it's totally free for anybody who wants to be a trainer or a coach it's at mind pump trainer course comm again mind pump trainer course comm three day free training taught by myself and Adam we know you're gonna enjoy it now you can also find us on social media. So Justin is on Instagram at mind pump. Justin I'm on Instagram at mind pump to Stefano and Adam is on Instagram at
Starting point is 00:33:11 mind pump. Adam. Thank you for listening to mind pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB super bundle at mind pump media.com. Check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle at mindpumpmedia.com The RGB Super Bundle includes maps anabolic, maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs.
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