EP 12: Building a Successful Online Personal Training Business with Adam Schafer

Welcome back to the Elite Trainer Academy brought to you by MindPump. Today, I have Adam Schaefer back on the show and he breaks down step by step what you need to do if you want to build a successful online business as a personal trainer or fitness coach. You're going to love this episode. If you find this valuable and you want to continue to support us, please share. Alright, enjoy the show. You know, I've been having a lot of conversations. Me, Cole, Marcello, we've been talking to a lot of trainers these last few days from a variety of background and experience level. And one of the common things that's come up or conversations I've been having as I've been asking trainers about their businesses, I'll ask what their goals are. Like, where do you want to take your business in the next six months, one year, two years, three years? And most trainers say, I don't know. They don't know where they should go. They don't know what their goals should be. They don't have like a reference point for like what success looks like in a personal training business. Yeah. So I want to ask like in your experience, you know, prior to MindPump, how did you define success for your business? Okay. Well, I mean, there's a couple of factors as a personal, as like personal trainers. One, obviously what we, what we're in the profession for, which is to change lives and help people. So one of the ways that you measure that is by the success rate of your clients and the results they get. And then how long do they continue to do that? The reality is 80% of them are going to fail. So you can't weigh all of that on you as a trainer. It's like, Hey, 80% of your clients fail. Therefore as a trainer, you suck. It's like, if that was the case, then a lot of us probably would have quit a long time ago. It's just, it's just a fact. Like you still need them to do the work. So that's one metric. Then the other metric is revenue. What can they, what can they produce consistently? And can they turn this into a legitimate career? Now you have to keep in mind that this was 20 years ago for me, right? When I, like how I would define a dollar amount of a successful personal trainer. And I'd say that it looks somewhere between 60 to $80,000 a year is what I would consider a very successful trainer. Now I say very successful, meaning like if you consistently can generate 60 to 80 grand a year, divide that by the month, like because everyone on trainer, I feel like they have peaks and valleys. They're real strong month and a little less than a strong month depending on sales. If you can fall in the 60 to 80 grand range, this was 20 years ago. So maybe with inflation, say 80 to 100 grand is probably the range of what I consider a really successful trainer today. That's about where I'd say their revenue would fall somewhere in between there. But that range is wide. And there's a lot of trainers I saw do quite a bit more than that, even 20 years. And there's a lot of trainers I saw do significantly less than that. So it really is a majority of trainers will be in the zero to say $40,000 range. A much smaller percentage will be considered good trainers. And then a very small percentage will be considered great where they're doing exceeding beyond that. But to your point about, you know, big box gyms, I always used to tell the trainers that work there before you go out and try and build that six figure business on your own. There's so much value to learning that for and pick your pick your franchise. It doesn't matter to me whether it's plan of fitness or 24 hour fitness or lifetime fitness, L.A. fitness. There's a ton of these big box gyms crunch that provide a really good structure for a trainer to be successful within that business. And a lot of trainers get hung up on, you know, their charge in $90 a session. I'm only making 25 or 35 or 45 of that. If I went on my own, I'd be making double or triple my revenue right away. That's a terrible way to look at that because anybody who's ever built their own business knows how difficult it is to get consistent lead flow. And sure you're looking at it in a snapshot of, oh, you've got 20 clients. They all love you. They tell you they're training only because of you. Well, that's great. And I believe that problem is you would have never even got that lead. Had you not been working in this massive gym that runs commercials on radio stations, on on television and drives, you know, it spends millions of dollars probably on a monthly basis to drive leads that you then get to benefit from. And so I think it's really important. If you think you're going to go off and build a successful six figure business by yourself, that you first figure out how to land in that 60 to 80 grand back then, which would be now 80 to 100 grand a year job working for a business like that because it only gets more difficult. You might get better as a trainer because of your results and how good you are. But that's only a portion of the business. A big portion of a business is your ability to generate consistent lead flow. And that part for most trainers, they fail at that. Even the ones that are really good. And at least if you have been successful enough to make that kind of money in a big box gym, you have a cushion of probably clients and some business that you can go learn and figure out how to build and scale a business outside of the big box gym that you're working on. That's just what I've seen for years. I never saw a trainer who fell in the lower percentile of revenue, meaning they were producing less than 60 grand a year, go out privately and make more than what they were making of that. Never. Not one. So 100% of those trainers don't go make more money on their own, even though they think they're going to do that. Now however, I have seen trainers that were in that 60 to 80 grand a year top, you know, and I consider that the top 10, 20% of trainers in a gym. Go off and replicate what they were doing privately with more freedom and autonomy and probably a lighter schedule because they're making more of their revenue. Very few of those trainers go out and go build even beyond that personally. The ones I saw do that tended to be the 5% maybe of the exceptional every gym that has 10 to 20 trainers. There's one or two guys or girls that are just they separate and everybody knows who they are in the gym. They are the top trainer in that gym and they've been that way consistently. All the other, their peers typically look up to them. The boss loves them the death because he's carrying a big portion of their revenue, carrying a big portion of their revenue. That trainer is a trainer that has the greatest chance to go off on their own privately and replicate or exceed what they were currently doing. Describe that trainer to me. Like what makes that trainer different? What? That's a great question. What separates the six figures? I'll tell you what it is. It's not their trainer knowledge and even how good of a job they do with their clients because I think those are essential. You have to have that to be the elite elite but you also have to have an understanding of business or at least a desire to want to learn that part of the business. You don't necessarily have to have, I didn't have a ton of experience and knowledge in that but I had a thirst for that. I think you're somewhere in this way. I know that even you were young when I first met you but you had a thirst for the business side and an understanding of that and a respect for that that you were willing to read all the books, watch all the podcasts episodes, download all that information to figure out that side and those are the trainers that end up or that's what those trainers look like. They only do they have the trainer knowledge experience and get their clients results. They also have a thirst or they're already really good at business and get that side because that's such a large piece to building a business on your own is either understanding that really well or willing and excited to go learn that side of the business. If they don't, the likelihood, unless they partner with somebody, partner with somebody who has those attributes, you ain't going to make it. You just not. There's too many variables in building a business that you need to learn and understand in order to scale and be successful without either partnering with somebody who has those skillsets or going out and learning those skillsets and the trainers that were that 1% or separate from us, they tend to not only be a great trainer and help clients and service them and had a lot of knowledge and experience but they also had a thirst or understanding for business skill. Yeah, that's really tough. A lot of these conversations I've been having with trainers the last few days, even some of the trainers that I do get a sense that they could be that person that they could have that thirst for learning about the business and how to run a business. It's tough because those trainers also tend to be running 12 back to back sessions a day. It's like back to back to back. You're just so in the business that it's so hard to take a step back and work on the business. How do you do that? How do you manage that? If you're so, especially I can see in a position where that's your income, you're reliant on that. So it's not like you can just take a step back and not train as many clients because then you take a hit on income. Is that what you just have to do or how do you manage that? You don't have to necessarily take a hit for hit with income but you do have to recognize that you're going to spend a lot of time outside the traditional 9 to 5 hours. I think that's the uncomfortable thing that people don't want to hear. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it was you. I think it was you who was interviewing, talking to me recently and I think I made this point. If it wasn't you, then it was some other interview I did. where I made the point that if I was counting the hours that I was putting into the work to become a great trainer to be a good business operator, then I probably would have never made it. If I actually sat down and did the math because I would have been like, I could go work at McDonald's. - Seven dollars, yeah, I could go work at McDonald's and get paid more by my hourly. What am I doing? But I didn't ever do that because I didn't care because I was so passionate about being good at this craft, building a business in this industry that you just don't do that. And so you gotta have that. You can't be, well, I already work eight hours a day and so I can either scale back to clients so I can spend two hours a day. I mean, maybe you want to believe that it'll work that way. I've never seen it. Typically the trainer that figures it out, either one, they're in a position where they can afford to not make as much money. So maybe you still live at home, maybe you have a partner that makes really good income, maybe you live significantly well below your means and you rent a house with four people. And so you're like, I don't need a lot to live. I'm really gonna figure this thing out. And so you live very modestly. And so you can carve into maybe those regular hours and you make a little less money. But typically it's, I've got a hustle and grind just to make the money I make and pay my bills as a trainer. And then outside of that, I'm probably not doing a lot of the weekends. I'm probably staying up till 8, 10 o'clock at night and that's when I'm taking certifications. That's where I'm learning business courses. That's where I'm reading books around email marketing and lead generation and all those things are taking courses like ours where you're learning about business simultaneously while you're training the people. Yeah, that's the trainer. And the trainer that hears that and embraces that challenge is like, yeah, I'm not afraid of it. Okay, let's go. Versus the trainer is like, oh, you know, how many hours you think I need to do it? Like they're asking questions like, how many you think I need to do? And but I need to have this and they're making all these like rules to how that's like, yeah, good luck. Because it's a lot and training is unique because we are at the mercy of our client's schedule and it takes years many times for even a really good trainer to formulate this beautiful schedule that is like conducive to their life while also taking care of all these people. It's like at the beginning when you're just trying to build it at your book, you're taking, and I remember this, I remember just being like, oh my God, I got a client at 5 a.m., two in the afternoon and then two at seven a.m. and it's like, so you're only doing five, I'm only getting paid for five hours work but I'm there all day long. And if that scares you or discourages you, yeah, I didn't aim for you. But if it excites you and you go like, I'm willing to do that, I love that so much that then you're more likely the person that will make it through all that stuff. - That's one of the biggest things that I see when I'm, you know, what I'm interviewing trainers to work for us is some of the questions that they ask. Like that's one of the biggest turnoffs for me in an interview is like, if they're asking. And it's like, there are reasonable questions. Like you wanna know, you wanna know how many hours you expect to work, you wanna know how much you're gonna be paid. Like of course, but I'm always impressed by the ones that aren't asking those questions and they're asking more like, like what does it look like to be successful in this in this position? - How can I, how can I, you know, how can I, you know, over deliver, how can I outperform the rest? Like that's the kind of trend that's like, I get excited about that. - Oh, obviously in my career I've done hundreds, maybe even a thousand interviews of personal trends, definitely lots of personal trainer interviews. The quickest way to interview with me is to tell me you can work these hours or to be asking, well how much vacation time do we get? And can I work this and that like you or if you already constraining your availability and concern more about when you're not gonna work with me in this profession, like interview over. - Oh my God, cool, nice to meet you. Good luck Steve. - Yeah. - He's never gonna call back. Like just because I understand the what it takes to build that and I know what it takes even with someone who has got the gift of gab and talent and hustle and also sales back, like it's still as hard. If you don't have all those attributes and then in addition that you're also constraining your work schedule and it needs to fit your lifestyle, it's like yeah, this probably isn't, this probably isn't for you. Unless you're completely content with, I'm probably this gonna be a side gig that I do. And even then that's not the type of person that I'm probably looking for as I'm sure you are too. You're looking for people that wanna pursue this as a career. And so yeah, you're probably not cut out for this. But I will say one of the things I think why we have, we've attracted such a talented, great, trained, even people that weren't trainers before, but great people is we've been doing this podcast for 10 years and we've been telling everybody how it really is for a long time. And so we have not been sugar coating what the trainer lifestyle is like or how challenging and difficulty in the fail rate. And so it tends to weed out a lot of those trainers that are kinda lucky lose or that might fall in category. I do find that's why you've probably had more success with these guys and girls that you've brought on, especially they've been listening to the show for a long time is like we have not glamorized personal training at all. So we've already kinda got a filter there for you that's so versus like somebody who just coming straight out of school is like, hey, I heard being a trainer is awesome. Where do I sign up? Totally different. - I mean, it is awesome, but it's a grind. Like to give context to the audience like Marcello. We talk about Marcello a lot. He's our top sale that he crushes it. He's phenomenal and he's a great trainer too, new trainer, he's not been training for more than a year. This last week was a hustle, it was a grind. He's our top closer and this week, he probably, I don't even, I couldn't even estimate how many hours he put in. - Well, I mean, you were sitting called to tell 11 PM. - I mean, 11.30 PM on a Friday night. - Yeah. And all of that, it was like that all week to close one deal. So it's like, that's the life, that's the trainer life. - Yeah, now to highlight more about him though, that trainer has sold, we're just now entering into October and he's clipped a quarter million dollars in personal training sales. Most trainers will not do that in two years or three years combined. So the fact that he has sold over $250,000 in personal training revenue in less than a year is unbelievable. - But he didn't do a work in 95. - Oh, no. - So that's the point I'm trying to highlight it's. - No, no, no, you're right, you're right. But what is very cool is that that guy, just a year ago, was pulling people over for speeding. - Yeah. - You know what I'm saying? With an idea and I remember when he was paying to come to the dinners and our live events and I remember meeting him before and he doesn't have this loud charismatic personality where he's like, oh man, that guy is just gonna be great at whatever he is quiet, very, very cop-like. You know what I'm saying? He had that kind of personality, stoic, professional, very, very polite. But you could see him at all these events when we would meet and we would talk. I could just see him downloading everything that we would tell him. And I would, we would tell him a few things and then he wouldn't implement it into his life and then he'd come back. And it was just, he was so consistent with like, this is what he wanted to do. And to see him move from being a police officer to having the success that he's having is such a cool rewarding thing. And also highlighting that, you don't, you don't have to have this degree in the field. You don't have to have been personal training people for a very long time. You don't even have to have a crazy sales background where you're just talented in that. He's, but he's passionate about what he does. He listens to everything that you teach him and he goes and applies it. And he's not counting the minutes or hours he's having to put towards getting great at that. He's on a pursuit to become great at all those things and he's willing to work whatever it takes to get there. And hey, in less than a year's time, the guy's gonna make deep six figures as a personal trainer's first year, that's pretty cool. I love seeing that. - Yeah. Yeah, and sales is always a funny one too. Like, trainers don't like sales. And I think there's this perception of like, you're either good at sales or you're not. He's a great example of that. He wasn't good at sales. Like, it's a learned skill. You can learn it. Like it's sure there are people that naturally, I think do have a bit of an advantage. Like I would say, Cole's like that. He has a personality that lends itself better to being good at sales. - Totally. - But it's a learned skill and he's learned it. - Yeah. - No, that's why I think it's so fun to watch that is because you can take somebody who, I mean, Justin was this for me. So people have listened to podcasts long enough, have probably heard me share, and I'm sure Justin doesn't like it every time I share this. But I think, I mean, I look at it as such a positive thing. I mean, he may not like it or whatever like that. But when I say it, I say it with so much respect that, here's a guy who doesn't like the limelight, isn't naturally charismatic, doesn't have this passion for sales. But like Marcelo, like he took stuff that I would teach him and he went and applied it and applied it and applied it until he figured it out and he goes, "Oh, there's a reason why he asked the questions like this." And there's a way to present training like this. And so he didn't have to have this natural gift of GAB in order to be uber successful as a trainer. And so I remember watching Justin do the same thing. And so they both kind of remind me of similar like that. Both kind of workhorses, don't talk a lot, sit there and are observing and listening and downloading. So yeah, you can, and then you'll talk about it, someone like, "Cool." Then you have someone who's just naturally charismatic and, and both can be very successful for different reasons. But it does highlight just the, the possibility for someone who may not think that they're that outgoing charismatic trainer that they can be really successful too, if they're willing to put all the work in and not count the hours and be like, "I know I'm going to take a while to do this. I'm willing to put the work in and then just go through the process." And I think we've also yourself and the rest of the guys and Anne and the team put together a really good, you got between all of our experience in this field, a lot, a lot of years, decades of knowledge around sales, business building, client retention. So if you do, and we've done, I think, a really good job of formulating that in our course and now what we're doing in person with the training department, if you follow that stuff, like it's a proven formula that we've, we've created for decades of experience, and it's cool to watch it unfold with this team here. Yeah. So the trainer that is hustling the 12 clients a day, like putting in a lot of time and does want to put in more effort to be that person to figure out how to build a six figure income. Where can they invest their time or where should they invest their time? What skills should they develop? Like what's going to be the best ROI for their time? So even if you're going to be an in person trainer, and this is this advice, I think is, is shifted for me. Now I think there was, I was a part of before, I've been a part of the transition and now like full on the, you know, what we do with social media and the internet, oh, it's personal training. That personal training was really an in person thing only 20 years ago. Like they're just what, even when the dot com came, there was some businesses that tried to happen. They just failed miserably and we just, the software wasn't there. The ability to connect virtually so smooth and seamless and inexpensive wasn't there. And so we're really in this new time where even if you are a full time in person, big box gym owner, to not be learning sales, marketing, email marketing, lead generation, just all the social media, learning what those offer for you would be huge disservice to yourself. Because even if you're only an in person trainer, those things can greatly complement and serve your people and also generate more people for you. So you've got to be learning that. You've got to understand how those platforms work. You got to understand how email marketing works. And even if you don't know any of that stuff and you're completely great, start learning that and start practicing and applying it because even if you're never going to go into the virtual world as far as virtual coaching or a business, like e-commerce or anything like that, and you're only going to be in personal training, the amount that that can serve you as in crowd. You know, it's one of the things I remember as we were building this. I remember the kind of when we crossed over a point when it was this incredible feeling of like, oh, I'm going to be okay. Like forever now, not because of a dollar amount, but because we have created so much buzz online that if all this imploded, Justin, Sal Doug, we all went different ways. I've learned that part of e-commerce, lead generation and social media that I'll ever I'll have a forever place to get leads to be a personal trainer. If I had to go all the way back to just being a personal trainer, one-on-one, in person, what we've built on here would sustain me for the rest of my life and some. And so because of that, I can't stress that enough to any and now, obviously, if you want to get into e-commerce, you want to be a virtual trainer, duh. You got to go learn all this stuff. But I really want to speak to the trainer who's working at 24-hour fitness or, you know, one of these big box gyms we talked about that's like, well, I'm an in person trainer. I don't need to do those things. Well, yeah, you don't need to. You're right, especially if you're already got a lot of business inside, but holy crap. Available. Oh my God. It's so invaluable. So on your downtime, that's the content I'm down on. I'm going through like our trainer course. I'm following the Russell Bronsons. I'm doing all these people like that, learning about everything there is to do with e-commerce, email marketing, social media marketing, lead generation online to compliment that business. And in it's if you figured out it becomes this incredible safety net for you as a personal trainer that you can always rely. And by the way, too, if you ever want to make the leap from working at one of those big box gyms and then eventually go private, boy, is that going to be amazing transition for you? And that didn't exist when I was a trainer and I had trainers working for me. So I can only imagine like that's if that was my ultimate goal. I used to just generically say, hey, don't leave a big box gym until you've become the top trainer because you'll need to learn all those skill sets. Now it might say different. I might say something like, well, wait till you build somewhat of an online presence and you understand all those things that I just listed off with email marketing, e-commerce, something in digital products, all the things and all the platforms. Learn all that before you make that switch because that's probably going to end up being the made source of lead flow for you. So email marketing, paid ads, organic networking referrals, like how would you rank paid ads at the very bottom? Okay. Very bottom. What? Very, very bottom. I mean, this goes back to the conversation you and I are just having before we came in here. So even at our size, paid ads just pale in comparison to organic traffic. A lot of people think that and then this is actually very, I'm glad you went that direction because it's one of the most common questions that we get with somebody that is trying to build an online presence is like, how much I spend on Google ads? How much should I spend on, you know, Facebook ads and like they're wanting to know how much money they should put in it. It's like, man, don't put any money into that. Not at least until you've built a solid foundation that you can add to that. No, no traffic will ever convert as well as organic traffic. And so for the person who's listening that has no idea what I mean by that, let me explain. I'm listening to this. I go, okay, I'm going to go turn on Instagram. I'm going to turn on YouTube. I've never used it. I'm an in-person trainer. I'm a start making content. I've got, I went from my family, my 10 people, my family, and I've got 50 to 100 people paying attention to me, 50 of them, at least 50 of them are strangers. And they're following the content that I put out. Okay, meaning that whatever I post about injury recovery stuff, I post about mobility, I post about burning body fat and building muscle and all the stuff that I'm practicing and putting out online, I'm starting to get attention from a few people, not even a lot, just a few people, 50 people that are now following me. That is far more powerful than me or any sort of marketing team coming in and teaching you like ad, how to do ads and all the tricks and the gurus that want to sell you stuff. That's more important. Why? Because the likelihood, whatever product you have, whatever it's personal training, whether it's a digital product or a service that you have to offer, you're far more likely getting one of those 50 people that you got the attention of for free on your social media platform to convert as a client to you, then spending any money going out, getting cold traffic. And you shouldn't go spend any money going, getting cold traffic until you can prove that you can get a decent percentage of those, you know, to get all of them or even half of them. You can just, you need to be getting a good percentage of them, meaning 20% of those people, you're hopefully converting into potential clients of yours or at least inquiring about whatever service you have to offer before you even pump money into that business. And that in itself is challenging enough. And most people, either one, start there and then give up or two, start there a little bit and then want to skip to the paid ads and then that's the tragedy. I used literally should just focus on, and the way I would explain it to somebody is, if you can't convince people to pay attention, listen to you and hear you out for free, you're never going to get anybody convinced to spend money for any of your services. Yeah. So go solve that first problem and challenge. How do I give thing, how do I give value for free to garner the attention of people out there for free and solve that equation? And then we'll talk about what it looks like to pay for leads and traffic and conversion rates and all the good things that everyone, that sounds sexy, that marketing people try and sell you online that make you go like, oh, that's what I need to do. I need to invest in this $7,000 marketing course or hire this guy who's going to help me sell. It's like, no, like go prove that you can get people to pay attention to you for free because that's hard enough for a lot of people before you worry about that. So that, to me, is the top of the list of what should I go do first? If I'm thinking about moving into this digital world and in-person trainer, that's where you go first. I think, I also think what you're describing is in my mind, like the difference of building a business and building a brand. So, like, this is something that, and I think this is one of the more detrimental things that has influenced the fitness space is like, it's not, it's totally doable to build a business that is kind of like fake. where you're just putting, it's just almost like a, it's just almost a math equation. It's just a math game where you're just putting in, you know, numbers, like I'm putting in this much money and it spits out this much money and I just keep doing that. And there's no real depth to the business. There's no brand. There's no like, there's no association with values. There's, it's just that. Like it's just that. And I think that's, that's one of the more negative, has a really negative impact on the space because that's where you see people going like the super unethical route of, like over promising results, like the 30 day fat loss challenge. It's like you pay, you know, pay me for this 30 day fat loss challenge and then like that's it. I don't, you know, there's no follow up on like if it actually worked or not. Like there's nothing like that. But it converts. And so like you're just looking at numbers on a spreadsheet and saying like, oh, when I say this thing, regardless of if it's true or not, it converts better. So I'm just gonna put a bunch of money into that and then it's gonna give me this return on it. Where compared that to building a brand, which is what mine pump is done, where it's like, there's an association. There's authority with that. There's this trust that's built with that. And that's come from exactly what you're saying, which is all the organic, the free value that mine pump is spent years putting out. And the great thing about that too, it has a compounding effect. So not only is it a far more sustainable and successful direction to go to build a business, when you do get into paid ads, it makes it way easier and it makes it way more effective. Like our cost per lead and our cost to get a customer is ridiculous. Like it's far cheaper than most, like the average in the industry. When you look at a company like mine pump that has a brand compared to just an average faceless company that's selling workout programs. - Oh yeah, I mean, that's a testament to what we're talking about. I'm just building so much value and giving away so much free content and first proving that formula. And so that's just compounded over a decade. You know, one of the mistakes that a trainer will make, let's say let's take the trainer who I said, has no followers decides to do that. And then they're starting to figure this out a little bit. They're like, okay, I'm putting out this good mobility content and I'm starting to figure out what gets people to take likes and comments and shares and, oh my God, I now have a thousand people that are paying attention to me. It's like, okay, you're starting to figure this thing out. This is, that's exciting. And what happens to a lot of these trainers at this point, they get targeted by marketing people online. They go, let us show you how to make 10 grand a month. They're like, oh my God, 10 grand a month, they'll be incredible. I haven't made anywhere near that yet. And so you pay for said course, thousands of dollars to get in it and they go, okay, this is how you set up a 10 week boot camp body fat challenge. And we're going to get those people, and you're going to do a free trial for so many days and get them in for free. And then we're going to upsell those people to one-on-one personal training you. There are other ones. And at the end of this challenge, we'll get X, Y and Z. And so they do this. And then they go and what ends up happening is they're so focused on capturing all these leads and converting to the most money they can in that minute or in that moment that they do. And the worst thing happens, they make the 10 grand. But what they literally did was they just extracted any and every possible lead that they had in their audience, threw them in some generic challenge thing so they could sell them and make money. And what ends up happening is 90% of those people that paid don't get some mind blowing service or they don't have an experience that goes, wow, that was incredible. And you got their money, but you'll never get them again after that. And they're gone. And then you try and run that challenge a second time and half the amount of people maybe sign up or even less. And then you do it a third time and now it's crickets. And now you've paid for that course that taught you how to do that thing. And you made your quick 10 grand, but then all of a sudden nobody's buying anything from you anymore and you're back to square one and you can't figure out what did I do wrong? Well, what you did was you finally did a good job of starting to get attract people by giving free valuable content. You diverted from that strategy and went straight to how much what's the most amount of money I can get from these people that are now paying attention to me. And you made a little bit of money real quick and now it's gone versus, okay, now I've got these people's attention. How do I over deliver on value on these people again? Like now they're watching me. Now how do I increase their engagement and talking to me? Or maybe I can get them to leave this platform and come over to a free community that I'm building, that I'm adding even more value to it and I'm fostering as a place to help people. That strategy, so let's say that person, no money in that, hey, I'm gonna do it. And there's so many things like school and Facebook groups and things that you can create things like this which I highly recommend. And you decide, okay, I got this thousand people. Now what I wanna do is I want to, the ones that are paying attention, because obviously some people, they probably started following me 'cause they saw my abs or they saw this cool post I did. Or they're just, they know they're a family friend of a friend and so they're following me 'cause they know who I am. But they're not really interested in what I have to say. Okay, well how do I now filter out the people that are real potential clients of me? Well, you know what I do is I'll offer something for also for free that's really valuable more specific. So I might look at this, I got those thousand people and I go, hey, I'm starting a free community for people specifically looking to lose body fat. And if you've struggled in the past trying to do that, you don't know where to start. Join me over in this school group or join me over here in this Facebook group, absolutely free where I'm gonna be helping people through this 12 week journey and answering all the questions I can. In fact, I even have my friend Steve, who's a doctor and has been working in this field with for so long. He's gonna drop in and do a live Q&A for an hour and people are like, oh my God, that's incredible. Free and I can move over and he's gonna have that, and it's like this is awesome. Now that thousand turns into just a hundred people. But you get now a hundred people that you know are all looking for fat loss and all raising their hand that I need help. And now I'm gonna again over deliver on value for that person. So now their process with me was, I found this guy online, didn't know who he was. He was dropping really good free information on Instagram or whatever platform you're using. And I liked him and he's also engaging with me when I put right in there with Smell or DM and wants me to know, like awesome, awesome. Then he's also starting this free group that's helping people just like me. Oh my God, I'm gonna go and I'm trying, like still I'm not being charged for this is incredible. And he's engaging with me in there. And he had a doctor come in. It's like these people now, their experience with you of the amount of value and how much you're helping them already is unbelievable. And so then all of a sudden you decide to sell a 599 fat loss guy. One of the, and you decide to create that guy because you've now got 100 people in this group. They're all that are all in here trying to lose fat and you're helping them. And what you see is wow, a large percentage of these people just don't know where to start diet wise. They all have, they're all asking the same questions. Okay, well how can I deliver something of great value for very inexpensive that generally helps, yeah, it's not individualized, but at least it gives answers all this question. So I don't have to go individually and tell you this. Okay, I'm gonna create a, you know, fat loss start guide, nutrition guide on some, some do's and don'ts. That's really valuable. I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it really nice and graphics in it. Maybe I'll put about a 5,000 word document to it. And what I'm now gonna do is I'm going to sell it for 599 for two of these people in this group. Hey guys, notice a lot of people, I've been asking a lot of questions where to start diet wise. I created this guide. It's only 599. It's a great place to jumpstart. If you're interested in it, hit the link here down. They in order to buy that, they got to input their email. So you can ship that product to them. It's only five bucks. Again, tremendous value. They've, you've already given them this process of value, value value, $5. I'm already asking that question anyways. Why not? Now that 100 turns to 20 people that have raised their hand and said, I want this help. I like this guy and I'm willing to spend $5. Now I've got 20 people that are admitting that help. Now I have an opportunity to create an email sequence that goes to these people that add more value. They get shipped to them once a week, maybe to newsletter, maybe it's a fit tip of the week. Maybe it's a recipe every week. And these people are just like, remember how they got here. Found me randomly online, came over to my group, met me and my doctor buddy, downloaded a $5. I mean, just, nothing get to the email list. That they get, they paid $5 to get that guide that helps them out to start the nutrition. Then they're getting like free recipe every single week. They're just like, oh my, these 20 people are hot to try. And then I'm like four weeks later, an email hits these people with another great valuable recipe or tip or something and it says, by the way, if you're still struggling and you're not seeing the results that you want from all this stuff that I've been doing in my community, I'm doing a coaching call, 30 minute coaching call. It's only $50. I'm gonna sit down with you, answer any of your questions that you have. If that's something you're interested in, book here. Now I'm running up to, now I have 50 bucks. Now those 20 people, turn into eight people. And those eight people are willing to pay $50 and get on a half hour call. I've now got a half hour call. I hate, I help all those people. While I'm on that half hour call, two of them are like, can I just hire you one on one? Absolutely, you can. This is what those services look like. And that looks, this looks like on a small scale of over delivering on value, continuing to listen to your community on the help and what they need, servicing them. And then repeat, rents keep doing that. By the way, you never stopped posting on Instagram. So there's always constant few people trickling in. You continue to add value inside that free community where people are getting information. So that's kind of backfilling a handful of people every month or maybe every week if you're doing really good online. And they all getting these emails and you're seeing how much they're opening. And by the way, that's a whole nother strategy too is like, are most people opening it or do they not opening it? So maybe I'm not giving enough value in my emails. Like that's a whole nother thing you can learn and read about or go through like our course. We talked about stuff like this. And you're doing all that and you just build on that. Now and that's how you build a brand and that's that is how and that's a long process. It's not you're not going to make 10 grand like that in your first month doing that. But what you will start to do is build a nice solid foundation that along the way, you're going to learn a lot. You're going to learn about how to make better posts on Instagram. You're going to learn about how to add value into a community that keeps people engaged. You're going to learn how to properly write emails that get people to open up those emails. You're going to learn how to distill from those people down to what people really might potentially want coaching from me. And then you're going to learn how to have those half hour calls to really help people and maybe convert and all of those are our skills to develop and work on to be great at your craft along the way and it's slow. It's not a million dollars overnight. It looks like a few hundred bucks and then it's a few thousand bucks and then it's tens of thousands of bucks. And then before you know it, you've built this incredible machine that has all kinds of levers you can pull where you could charge a little more here or you can offer a bigger product that's even more and there's so many things that we can do with that. That's the blueprint for most successful trainers, whether you're in person or all virtually that I would be building and I would step into it knowing that it's going to take me probably a year or two to really figure this out. And I'm going to work a lot of hours after my eight or ten clients a night. But two years later when I've been doing this, I'm going to have this incredible deal flow machine that's either one feeding my in person business or two, it's gotten so good virtually that I can walk away from the in person business and completely service people online because and by the way, I've only got like 5,000 people following me on Instagram. I don't need to be famous. I don't need to be go viral, but I've got 5,000 people that are following me for the content that I put on there, which 25% of those people are really good leads for the people that will go in my community. And those people, 10% of those people are really good leads that want to do one on one coaching with me. Yeah. Now I have a business. It sounds simple. It sounds simple. Nobody, there's probably going to be a few thousand trainers that listen to this. There's probably going to be a handful of people that actually do that because it's slow. It's a long process. It's way more attractive to say like, oh, I can just do this challenge that generates 10k instantly. And it's so funny because like as trainers, like we should know this, like the simple quick fixes never to answer. This is like your client that wants to lose 80 pounds and like you're constantly trying to talk them out of doing the boot camp shit, like the F-45, all that stuff. And it's like you're trying to teach them, no, like we need to just focus on these habits, this long slow process. It's the same thing here, but for some reason when it's in a business perspective, like trainers can't see it. Well, we just learned this about our own community. We lay out, we created this some crazy robust course with all the, like I basically some more stuff over it. We got a community where, you know, Anne's having calls with these people. But what we have found is there is a percentage of those trainers that are going like, listen, I will pay you 10x to hold my hand through that process or fly to my pump studio and help me do all those things you're talking about because I'm listening to it. And I hear what you're saying, but the application process, I'm just missing somewhere or I'm not doing it or I'm giving up the wrong way or something's not clicking for me. And I get what you, because you just painted that like, that's it. I get it. But actually applying it and doing it, I don't know. Some will go, oh my god, light bulb will go off of that trainer. They'll go listen to that stuff. They'll go do all of it and they will accept that this is not going to be overnight. And they're, you know what, for a year, I'm going to do this and they're going to go do it and it's going to take a while, but they're going to see it and it's going to click and they're going to be fine. But then other people are, it's just not clicking for me. And then that opens up that opportunity. It's why we're now offering that service because, and I, you know, I go back and forth on, you know, who am I like in that situation? Like, I do know, it depends on the thing, but I am the type of person who I tend to, I tend to shell out more money to have somebody hold my hand. I think because I like the accountability piece, I know that about myself. Like, I'm not, I'm not somebody who's just like, all right, well, just give me the information. I'll pay the least amount to get all the information and then I'm going to go figure it out. I'm more the type of this is like, okay, what do I got to pay to get you to like hold my hand through all this? Because I'm a visual learner. If I see it and you like hold my hand step by step through the whole thing, then I go, okay, now I got this. So I think that's, I think that's what we're figuring out with our own trainer course is obviously thousands of trainers have bought that course and we have all kinds of great success stories of how money are helping their business. But there is a percentage of them are just like, it's still not happening for me. And so I think those people are probably more like me in that situation when they're like, okay, get it, understand it. The course was awesome. The information is valuable. So that's still not happening for me. Like, take me through this. Like let me see it step by step and then like, then it'll click for me. And so I mean, even us, we are learning that about this part of the business and rule. And that's how we created it, by the way. We didn't go right away and we dropped our course. Like, okay, we're going to offer this $1,000 product, $10,000 product, $12,000 product. We're going to sell all these people on us and we're just like, hey, let's go over deliver on value with the course. We put our heart and soul into that for over a year. There's been a tremendous amount of money, time and hours, figuring that out, refined it multiple times to get it towards that. And people absolutely love it. Didn't have anything else to that. And then we've had now a year over a year of these trainers in this forum and what did I do? Listening to them. Helping this and we do, what do we do? All these free calls. You and Anne talking to these trainers on a weekly basis, listening to their challenges. And it's like, hey, you guys, I think there's an opportunity for us to take these people through like a 12 week hands-on type of training more personalized for their business. I believe that a lot of these trainers that have invested in $1,000 for this course, there's a percentage of those people that are raising their hands saying, I need that. I want that. That's how we built it. There is no different than what I just explained from the trainer who built the thing on Instagram, got the attention by adding value, built a community around it, over delivered on value from that. Listen to their community and said, what is it? They gave it like just, it's the same thing. It's on a different scale because obviously we've grown this thing to be much bigger than the trainer who's got 100 followers. But it's the same exact formula and it works long term. It's not a quick fix. Like we knew rolling this out, we'd probably end up putting a lot more work in than the money that we make from it. So what? I believe in what we're doing. And over time, it will be something that I think will do really well financially. But at first, it's more about over delivering, listening to your community, building value. That is the angle you come from. And then if you build on that, you'll build a brand that has a reputation around servicing, helping people over delivering. And now that you have something to build versus, hey, we have a bunch of people that would spend more money. Let's just get that money with a challenge or something like that. And then we'll figure out later. That's, that might have made us a bunch of money up front. But then all these people have a terrible experience. They never come back and never buy anything again. And now you got to find a whole other cohort of people to potentially make that same kind of money. And that's just, that's very, very difficult to do. Most businesses aren't big enough to be able to support that and do that. And it's a terrible strategy to try and scale and build your business. That's what I'm more exhausting to. Like, it's because you're constantly trying to generate new leads and sell them right away. And it's like, and honestly, when you do it, you don't feel like it doesn't feel ethical most of the time too, because it is just focused on the revenue. Like what you're describing, it is a slow process. It takes a lot of time. But like, you actually feel fulfilled because you're like genuinely helping people and putting out free, valuable content. And then like, over time, it does lead to sustainable success where all of a sudden you do have consistently flow without, you know, stress yourself out about constantly putting money out every day and to add to stay profitable. I mean, like, the perfect example of this is our personal training business. Like, we haven't spent a dollar in personal training advertisement and we built a seven for your business. How powerful it is to spend time building brand and building authority and trust. Right. It takes a long time though. Yeah. It takes a long time. Yeah. And just, I mean, I have a guy that I follow in the car world and that's one of the things he says is like, pick a thing that you're willing to grind for 10 years. So whatever it is, however, if you want to make really, really good money, then pick a field, whatever that field is, and go accept a 10 year grind on it. And if you can last and survive through that 10 years and actually make a little money along the way, you're probably going to be really successful. Most people just don't, don't have that. They don't have the, the ability to do that. to grind it and it doesn't mean you can't make enough to pay your bills along the way like Hopefully you figure that out. That's the idea of this But that you're committed for that much time you're committed to Doing ten years of working in a field to then be able to call yourself an expert in that field That's those are the people that that make really really good money doing the things they love But they didn't go into it going oh, I need to make this much money by this time or without they went in going like okay This is a field I want to be in and I'm gonna go do it for ten years or however long it takes to be successful And then if you're lucky maybe it happens before that But if you embrace that it's gonna take that long no matter what then you're not surprised when it's year seven And you're still not a multi-millionaires just like yeah I knew that this was gonna take a while to be there But I'm gonna keep going because I love it I believe in it and the feedback I'm getting from our people like this is this is I'm on the right path This is what feeds my soul. This is what I love to do the money will come eventually the money will come eventually And I think if you have that attitude it will but you got to have that attitude from the jump that you're willing to put that much time and effort into