A Post On Building Your Fitness Business By Pat Rigsby

Recently Nick Berry and I were asked to contribute a chapter to a book called “The Only Business Book You’ll Ever Need.” This was an incredible honor as a few of the other authors were Brian Tracy, Robert Allen and Harvey McKay, all New York Times Best Selling Authors. This book won’t be on the shelves for a couple more months, but I wanted to share an adaptation of our chapter with you as it definitely can help you build your business.  Enjoy this sneak peek.

As an fitness business owner, you essentially accept the fact that you’re trading the security that comes with a steady job for the opportunity that comes with owning your own business.  But what if we told you that security and opportunity don’t have to be mutually exclusive?  Our experience is that not only can you have the best of both worlds, but you can do it more quickly and easily than you probably imagine by creating multiple streams of income within your fitness business.

About the time we launched our first fitness business together, our “The Only Business Book You’ll Ever Need” co-author, the legendary Robert Allen, released his best selling book: Multiple Streams of Income, which served as inspiration for us as we embarked on building our new personal training business. We were opening this fitness business in a town of just 23,000 people in Central Kentucky, not exactly a perceived hotbed for personal training, so we knew from the beginning that we needed to have multiple ways of generating revenue if we wanted this venture to be a success.  So instead of simply relying on selling one-on-one personal training services like most people who owned similar types of businesses, we created a number of different revenue streams, including:

• One-on-One Personal Training
• Group Personal Training
• Weight Management Programs
• Sports Performance Programs
• Dietary Supplement Sales
• Smoothie Bar
• Workshops
• Corporate Fitness Programs

This approach quickly propelled us to a point where we had over 400 clients in a town where utilizing the typical approach to this type of fitness business might have yielded 1/10 that amount.

And that’s where things really started to take off.  Soon, health clubs and personal training business owners were seeking us out to consult and share some of the strategies that we’d successfully utilized so they could employ them in their own fitness businesses.  These consulting opportunities opened our eyes to the vast opportunities that were available sharing our systems and strategies through information marketing and business coaching.

Over the next few years we developed a variety of coaching programs, information products and seminars helping personal trainers grow their businesses.  Most recently we launched two separate personal training-based franchises, one targeting the youth fitness & sports performance market and the other targeting the adult fitness market. Both are among the fastest growing fitness franchises in the world.

Once we’d positioned ourselves as industry leading providers of business coaching and resources for fitness professionals, we would be presented with opportunities to obtain ownership in other business in the industry where our expertise would be of value.  Now, along with our business coaching and franchises, we also have ownership in a leading fitness certification organization, an equipment company, several niche fitness information-marketing fitness businesses and a handful of other businesses, collectively providing us well over 100 different income streams.

Now we teach thousands of fitness professionals around the world to employ the ‘multiple streams of income’ approach and how simple it is to integrate into a fitness business.  While you may not have an interest in building a fitness business that looks anything like ours, the ‘multiple streams of income’ approach will work in your fitness business too, perhaps even better than it’s worked in ours.   Really it simply starts by answering these two questions:

1. What ‘problems’ do your current offering(s) create?
2. What opportunities do your current customers / clients / patients present?

By answering those two questions you’ll easily be able to identify potential income streams for your business.  Let us give you examples of how we might have answered those questions in our personal training business.

What ‘problems’ do your current offering(s) create?

One-on-one personal training is potentially too expensive for many consumers so offering small and large group personal training allows those than can’t afford one-on-one personal training similar benefits while being available at a much lower price point.  Also, personal training focuses on the exercise component of physical improvement, but there are other factors than can impact someone’s success while trying to achieve fitness goals like nutrition, supplementation and recovery.  By offering weight management programs, supportive nutrition solutions though our ‘smoothie’ bar, dietary supplements and workshops, we can address the other factors that will help our clients achieve their fitness goals more quickly and easily.

What opportunities do your current customers / clients / patients present?

Many personal training clients are either business owners or business decision makers, so they can open doors to opportunities to provide corporate fitness programs or off-site weight management programs at their companies.  Additionally, many clients have children and / or are in positions of influence (teachers, school administrators, coaches, etc.) for the youth population and would see the benefit in, and help promote, youth fitness and sports performance offerings.

Hopefully you’re already getting some ideas for income streams you can develop based on those two questions.  Another great way to get ideas for potential income streams is to simply look at other businesses and see what they do. 

Here are a couple examples:

Automotive dealerships don’t just sell cars.  They do repairs. They do preventative maintenance.  They offer financing. Some dealerships even provide things like detailing or car rental programs.  

Amusement parks don’t just offer rides and attractions.  They sell food and refreshments.  They sell a variety of retail products from theme-related attire and toys to sun block and sunglasses that visitors might have forgotten to bring.  They also offer paid parking, photographs taken during guest stays, and many have their own hotels that guests can utilize during their visit.

There are thousands of businesses employing the ‘multiple streams of income’ approach, so learn from the successes they’re having so you can create your own.

Once you’ve determined some general ideas of what other problems you could solve for your clients or the opportunities that they could create for you and your fitness business, then you need to decide on the models for your income streams.

Basically there are five types of Income Models you can implement:

1. Service Based
2. Product Based
3. Coaching / Consulting Based
4. Information / Knowledge Based
5. Affiliate / Referral Based

Each of these Income Models has it’s own set of benefits and drawbacks and some may be more appropriate than others for your business, but you should have no problem choosing a couple that you can integrate into your business and add additional revenue – in some cases almost immediately.

So let’s take a look at each of these Income Models in greater detail.  We’ll share an overview of the model and an example of how we’ve integrated it into our own businesses.

Service Based – This is typically the easiest to add to a fitness business, as it often requires little set up and relies primarily on you or a staff member utilizing skills that you (or someone on your team) possess and will be of benefit to your clients and typically compliments your primary offerings. The upside to this type of Income Model is the ease of start up and integration into your personal training business.  The downside is that it’s time and skill intensive.  

When we had our first personal training business, the easiest and most obvious Income Model for us to integrate was a Weight Management Program.  This program was basically a nutritional education program delivered by our staff members that helped our clients reach their goals faster and was the perfect compliment to the exercise based coaching that was our primary offering.

Product Based – Product based models are potentially very simple to integrate into your fitness business as well.  The upside to the product based Income Model is that it usually doesn’t require any special skill to offer products beyond some basic product knowledge and this model isn’t as time intensive as the others. 

The first potential drawback to the product model is the fact that most products or similar competitors will be offered in other retail outlets so there isn’t as much price elasticity as with the other models.  The other drawback to the product model is that it usually requires an upfront investment for inventory.

Our initial use of the Product Based Income Model was through selling dietary supplements to our personal training clients.  Our clients were regularly investing in supplements to help them reach their fitness goals and often consulted with our staff when choosing what supplements to purchase, so it became obvious very quickly that we should carry our own line of quality supplements and direct our clients to purchase from us.  Not only were there financial benefits to this, but we also now could direct our clients to products that we knew and trusted.  A great win/win.

Coaching / Consulting Based – Coaching / Consulting Based Income Models are great if you’ve established a successful fitness business and are willing to share your business systems and knowledge with other entrepreneurs.  The primary benefit to this Income Model is that the potential financial upside of business-to-business coaching /consulting is typically much greater than providing services to consumers. The other real upside is that it allows you to leverage what you already know and do in your own business by sharing it with others.

The potential drawback to the Coaching / Consulting Based Income Model isn’t really a drawback at all. It’s more of a pre-requisite.  To ethically coach or consult you should have experienced some success in your own experiences. If you’ve successful gotten a certain type of client results over and over – and have a systematic approach that others can model, then this approach is very powerful.

We first employed the Coaching / Consulting Based Income Model by teaching other personal trainers and health club owners how we’d successfully built our personal training business.  This Income Model eventually merged together with the Information / Knowledge Based Income Model and evolved into our two franchises: Athletic Revolution International and Fitness Revolution International.   

Information / Knowledge Based – In the Information / Knowledge Based Income Model you simply document what you know and do successfully and package it to be shared with others.  There are many advantages to this model.  Some of the biggest are the fact that you can develop information products to offer to people that normally couldn’t be your clients due to geographic constraints, so essentially the whole world is potentially your market.  There is great leverage with this type of Model too.  You can create a product once and sell it over and over again.  Typically the margins on offerings in this Model are very high too. 

If there is any downside to this Income Model, it is that while your market is no longer limited by geography, the same goes for your competition.  When offering an information product or program you will be competing for your prospect’s attention with many more marketers than you would typically face when just selling products or services locally.

We began with the Information / Knowledge Based Income Model with two different offerings at about the same time. One of our offerings was directed to other fitness business owners sharing our systems, strategies and tactics for building a successful personal training business.  The other offering featured my wife, Holly, and was a consumer product called Fit Yummy Mummy, which was a fitness program specifically designed for moms.  In both cases, we simply packaged the things that we’d done successfully in our own fitness businesses and shared them with people who could benefit from the knowledge, but couldn’t work with us face-to-face.

Ultimately both of these initial products laid the foundation for new fitness businesses that have each become category leaders in their respective markets.

Affiliate / Referral Based – This Income Model is very simple to integrate into your fitness business as it basically just requires you to find a product or service that you can refer your clients to, which is complimentary to your offerings.  The upside to the Affiliate / Referral Based Income Model is the fact that it requires very little work on your part to generate additional revenue.  The ‘partner’ that you are referring business to will provide the service or product while paying you a referral fee.  The downside to this Model is that you are putting your relationship with your customer in the hands of someone else.  If they provide an inferior product or service, then you will suffer the ill effects of that. Therefore, if you employ this Income Model, be certain to only refer only businesses of the highest quality.

We initially utilized this Income Model by referring our personal training clients to a massage therapist.  The massage therapist provided a quality service to our clients that we did not offer and paid us a referral fee for every client we sent.  In addition to those benefits, the massage therapist also referred their clients to us for our services to make this a great reciprocal relationship.

By determining what problems you could solve for your clients or the opportunities that they could create for you and your fitness business and the income models you can employ to address them, you can not only add tens of thousands of dollars to your bottom line and better serve the people you work with, but you may also lay the foundation for new fitness businesses that enjoy even greater successes and profits than the one you have now.  We certainly have.

Dedicated to your Success,

Pat

A Post On Building Your Fitness Business By Pat Rigsby

Recently Nick Berry and I were asked to contribute a chapter to a book called “The Only Business Book You’ll Ever Need.” This was an incredible honor as a few of the other authors were Brian Tracy, Robert Allen and Harvey McKay, all New York Times Best Selling Authors. This book won’t be on the shelves for a couple more months, but I wanted to share an adaptation of our chapter with you as it definitely can help you build your business.  Enjoy this sneak peek.

As an fitness business owner, you essentially accept the fact that you’re trading the security that comes with a steady job for the opportunity that comes with owning your own business.  But what if we told you that security and opportunity don’t have to be mutually exclusive?  Our experience is that not only can you have the best of both worlds, but you can do it more quickly and easily than you probably imagine by creating multiple streams of income within your fitness business.

About the time we launched our first fitness business together, our “The Only Business Book You’ll Ever Need” co-author, the legendary Robert Allen, released his best selling book: Multiple Streams of Income, which served as inspiration for us as we embarked on building our new personal training business. We were opening this fitness business in a town of just 23,000 people in Central Kentucky, not exactly a perceived hotbed for personal training, so we knew from the beginning that we needed to have multiple ways of generating revenue if we wanted this venture to be a success.  So instead of simply relying on selling one-on-one personal training services like most people who owned similar types of businesses, we created a number of different revenue streams, including:

• One-on-One Personal Training
• Group Personal Training
• Weight Management Programs
• Sports Performance Programs
• Dietary Supplement Sales
• Smoothie Bar
• Workshops
• Corporate Fitness Programs

This approach quickly propelled us to a point where we had over 400 clients in a town where utilizing the typical approach to this type of fitness business might have yielded 1/10 that amount.

And that’s where things really started to take off.  Soon, health clubs and personal training business owners were seeking us out to consult and share some of the strategies that we’d successfully utilized so they could employ them in their own fitness businesses.  These consulting opportunities opened our eyes to the vast opportunities that were available sharing our systems and strategies through information marketing and business coaching.

Over the next few years we developed a variety of coaching programs, information products and seminars helping personal trainers grow their businesses.  Most recently we launched two separate personal training-based franchises, one targeting the youth fitness & sports performance market and the other targeting the adult fitness market. Both are among the fastest growing fitness franchises in the world.

Once we’d positioned ourselves as industry leading providers of business coaching and resources for fitness professionals, we would be presented with opportunities to obtain ownership in other business in the industry where our expertise would be of value.  Now, along with our business coaching and franchises, we also have ownership in a leading fitness certification organization, an equipment company, several niche fitness information-marketing fitness businesses and a handful of other businesses, collectively providing us well over 100 different income streams.

Now we teach thousands of fitness professionals around the world to employ the ‘multiple streams of income’ approach and how simple it is to integrate into a fitness business.  While you may not have an interest in building a fitness business that looks anything like ours, the ‘multiple streams of income’ approach will work in your fitness business too, perhaps even better than it’s worked in ours.   Really it simply starts by answering these two questions:

1. What ‘problems’ do your current offering(s) create?
2. What opportunities do your current customers / clients / patients present?

By answering those two questions you’ll easily be able to identify potential income streams for your business.  Let us give you examples of how we might have answered those questions in our personal training business.

What ‘problems’ do your current offering(s) create?

One-on-one personal training is potentially too expensive for many consumers so offering small and large group personal training allows those than can’t afford one-on-one personal training similar benefits while being available at a much lower price point.  Also, personal training focuses on the exercise component of physical improvement, but there are other factors than can impact someone’s success while trying to achieve fitness goals like nutrition, supplementation and recovery.  By offering weight management programs, supportive nutrition solutions though our ‘smoothie’ bar, dietary supplements and workshops, we can address the other factors that will help our clients achieve their fitness goals more quickly and easily.

What opportunities do your current customers / clients / patients present?

Many personal training clients are either business owners or business decision makers, so they can open doors to opportunities to provide corporate fitness programs or off-site weight management programs at their companies.  Additionally, many clients have children and / or are in positions of influence (teachers, school administrators, coaches, etc.) for the youth population and would see the benefit in, and help promote, youth fitness and sports performance offerings.

Hopefully you’re already getting some ideas for income streams you can develop based on those two questions.  Another great way to get ideas for potential income streams is to simply look at other businesses and see what they do. 

Here are a couple examples:

Automotive dealerships don’t just sell cars.  They do repairs. They do preventative maintenance.  They offer financing. Some dealerships even provide things like detailing or car rental programs.  

Amusement parks don’t just offer rides and attractions.  They sell food and refreshments.  They sell a variety of retail products from theme-related attire and toys to sun block and sunglasses that visitors might have forgotten to bring.  They also offer paid parking, photographs taken during guest stays, and many have their own hotels that guests can utilize during their visit.

There are thousands of businesses employing the ‘multiple streams of income’ approach, so learn from the successes they’re having so you can create your own.

Once you’ve determined some general ideas of what other problems you could solve for your clients or the opportunities that they could create for you and your fitness business, then you need to decide on the models for your income streams.

Basically there are five types of Income Models you can implement:

1. Service Based
2. Product Based
3. Coaching / Consulting Based
4. Information / Knowledge Based
5. Affiliate / Referral Based

Each of these Income Models has it’s own set of benefits and drawbacks and some may be more appropriate than others for your business, but you should have no problem choosing a couple that you can integrate into your business and add additional revenue – in some cases almost immediately.

So let’s take a look at each of these Income Models in greater detail.  We’ll share an overview of the model and an example of how we’ve integrated it into our own businesses.

Service Based – This is typically the easiest to add to a fitness business, as it often requires little set up and relies primarily on you or a staff member utilizing skills that you (or someone on your team) possess and will be of benefit to your clients and typically compliments your primary offerings. The upside to this type of Income Model is the ease of start up and integration into your personal training business.  The downside is that it’s time and skill intensive.  

When we had our first personal training business, the easiest and most obvious Income Model for us to integrate was a Weight Management Program.  This program was basically a nutritional education program delivered by our staff members that helped our clients reach their goals faster and was the perfect compliment to the exercise based coaching that was our primary offering.

Product Based – Product based models are potentially very simple to integrate into your fitness business as well.  The upside to the product based Income Model is that it usually doesn’t require any special skill to offer products beyond some basic product knowledge and this model isn’t as time intensive as the others. 

The first potential drawback to the product model is the fact that most products or similar competitors will be offered in other retail outlets so there isn’t as much price elasticity as with the other models.  The other drawback to the product model is that it usually requires an upfront investment for inventory.

Our initial use of the Product Based Income Model was through selling dietary supplements to our personal training clients.  Our clients were regularly investing in supplements to help them reach their fitness goals and often consulted with our staff when choosing what supplements to purchase, so it became obvious very quickly that we should carry our own line of quality supplements and direct our clients to purchase from us.  Not only were there financial benefits to this, but we also now could direct our clients to products that we knew and trusted.  A great win/win.

Coaching / Consulting Based – Coaching / Consulting Based Income Models are great if you’ve established a successful fitness business and are willing to share your business systems and knowledge with other entrepreneurs.  The primary benefit to this Income Model is that the potential financial upside of business-to-business coaching /consulting is typically much greater than providing services to consumers. The other real upside is that it allows you to leverage what you already know and do in your own business by sharing it with others.

The potential drawback to the Coaching / Consulting Based Income Model isn’t really a drawback at all. It’s more of a pre-requisite.  To ethically coach or consult you should have experienced some success in your own experiences. If you’ve successful gotten a certain type of client results over and over – and have a systematic approach that others can model, then this approach is very powerful.

We first employed the Coaching / Consulting Based Income Model by teaching other personal trainers and health club owners how we’d successfully built our personal training business.  This Income Model eventually merged together with the Information / Knowledge Based Income Model and evolved into our two franchises: Athletic Revolution International and Fitness Revolution International.   

Information / Knowledge Based – In the Information / Knowledge Based Income Model you simply document what you know and do successfully and package it to be shared with others.  There are many advantages to this model.  Some of the biggest are the fact that you can develop information products to offer to people that normally couldn’t be your clients due to geographic constraints, so essentially the whole world is potentially your market.  There is great leverage with this type of Model too.  You can create a product once and sell it over and over again.  Typically the margins on offerings in this Model are very high too. 

If there is any downside to this Income Model, it is that while your market is no longer limited by geography, the same goes for your competition.  When offering an information product or program you will be competing for your prospect’s attention with many more marketers than you would typically face when just selling products or services locally.

We began with the Information / Knowledge Based Income Model with two different offerings at about the same time. One of our offerings was directed to other fitness business owners sharing our systems, strategies and tactics for building a successful personal training business.  The other offering featured my wife, Holly, and was a consumer product called Fit Yummy Mummy, which was a fitness program specifically designed for moms.  In both cases, we simply packaged the things that we’d done successfully in our own fitness businesses and shared them with people who could benefit from the knowledge, but couldn’t work with us face-to-face.

Ultimately both of these initial products laid the foundation for new fitness businesses that have each become category leaders in their respective markets.

Affiliate / Referral Based – This Income Model is very simple to integrate into your fitness business as it basically just requires you to find a product or service that you can refer your clients to, which is complimentary to your offerings.  The upside to the Affiliate / Referral Based Income Model is the fact that it requires very little work on your part to generate additional revenue.  The ‘partner’ that you are referring business to will provide the service or product while paying you a referral fee.  The downside to this Model is that you are putting your relationship with your customer in the hands of someone else.  If they provide an inferior product or service, then you will suffer the ill effects of that. Therefore, if you employ this Income Model, be certain to only refer only businesses of the highest quality.

We initially utilized this Income Model by referring our personal training clients to a massage therapist.  The massage therapist provided a quality service to our clients that we did not offer and paid us a referral fee for every client we sent.  In addition to those benefits, the massage therapist also referred their clients to us for our services to make this a great reciprocal relationship.

By determining what problems you could solve for your clients or the opportunities that they could create for you and your fitness business and the income models you can employ to address them, you can not only add tens of thousands of dollars to your bottom line and better serve the people you work with, but you may also lay the foundation for new fitness businesses that enjoy even greater successes and profits than the one you have now.  We certainly have.

Dedicated to your Success,

Pat

A Post On Building Your Fitness Business By Pat Rigsby

Recently Nick Berry and I were asked to contribute a chapter to a book called “The Only Business Book You’ll Ever Need.” This was an incredible honor as a few of the other authors were Brian Tracy, Robert Allen and Harvey McKay, all New York Times Best Selling Authors. This book won’t be on the shelves for a couple more months, but I wanted to share an adaptation of our chapter with you as it definitely can help you build your business.  Enjoy this sneak peek.

As an fitness business owner, you essentially accept the fact that you’re trading the security that comes with a steady job for the opportunity that comes with owning your own business.  But what if we told you that security and opportunity don’t have to be mutually exclusive?  Our experience is that not only can you have the best of both worlds, but you can do it more quickly and easily than you probably imagine by creating multiple streams of income within your fitness business.

About the time we launched our first fitness business together, our “The Only Business Book You’ll Ever Need” co-author, the legendary Robert Allen, released his best selling book: Multiple Streams of Income, which served as inspiration for us as we embarked on building our new personal training business. We were opening this fitness business in a town of just 23,000 people in Central Kentucky, not exactly a perceived hotbed for personal training, so we knew from the beginning that we needed to have multiple ways of generating revenue if we wanted this venture to be a success.  So instead of simply relying on selling one-on-one personal training services like most people who owned similar types of businesses, we created a number of different revenue streams, including:

• One-on-One Personal Training
• Group Personal Training
• Weight Management Programs
• Sports Performance Programs
• Dietary Supplement Sales
• Smoothie Bar
• Workshops
• Corporate Fitness Programs

This approach quickly propelled us to a point where we had over 400 clients in a town where utilizing the typical approach to this type of fitness business might have yielded 1/10 that amount.

And that’s where things really started to take off.  Soon, health clubs and personal training business owners were seeking us out to consult and share some of the strategies that we’d successfully utilized so they could employ them in their own fitness businesses.  These consulting opportunities opened our eyes to the vast opportunities that were available sharing our systems and strategies through information marketing and business coaching.

Over the next few years we developed a variety of coaching programs, information products and seminars helping personal trainers grow their businesses.  Most recently we launched two separate personal training-based franchises, one targeting the youth fitness & sports performance market and the other targeting the adult fitness market. Both are among the fastest growing fitness franchises in the world.

Once we’d positioned ourselves as industry leading providers of business coaching and resources for fitness professionals, we would be presented with opportunities to obtain ownership in other business in the industry where our expertise would be of value.  Now, along with our business coaching and franchises, we also have ownership in a leading fitness certification organization, an equipment company, several niche fitness information-marketing fitness businesses and a handful of other businesses, collectively providing us well over 100 different income streams.

Now we teach thousands of fitness professionals around the world to employ the ‘multiple streams of income’ approach and how simple it is to integrate into a fitness business.  While you may not have an interest in building a fitness business that looks anything like ours, the ‘multiple streams of income’ approach will work in your fitness business too, perhaps even better than it’s worked in ours.   Really it simply starts by answering these two questions:

1. What ‘problems’ do your current offering(s) create?
2. What opportunities do your current customers / clients / patients present?

By answering those two questions you’ll easily be able to identify potential income streams for your business.  Let us give you examples of how we might have answered those questions in our personal training business.

What ‘problems’ do your current offering(s) create?

One-on-one personal training is potentially too expensive for many consumers so offering small and large group personal training allows those than can’t afford one-on-one personal training similar benefits while being available at a much lower price point.  Also, personal training focuses on the exercise component of physical improvement, but there are other factors than can impact someone’s success while trying to achieve fitness goals like nutrition, supplementation and recovery.  By offering weight management programs, supportive nutrition solutions though our ‘smoothie’ bar, dietary supplements and workshops, we can address the other factors that will help our clients achieve their fitness goals more quickly and easily.

What opportunities do your current customers / clients / patients present?

Many personal training clients are either business owners or business decision makers, so they can open doors to opportunities to provide corporate fitness programs or off-site weight management programs at their companies.  Additionally, many clients have children and / or are in positions of influence (teachers, school administrators, coaches, etc.) for the youth population and would see the benefit in, and help promote, youth fitness and sports performance offerings.

Hopefully you’re already getting some ideas for income streams you can develop based on those two questions.  Another great way to get ideas for potential income streams is to simply look at other businesses and see what they do. 

Here are a couple examples:

Automotive dealerships don’t just sell cars.  They do repairs. They do preventative maintenance.  They offer financing. Some dealerships even provide things like detailing or car rental programs.  

Amusement parks don’t just offer rides and attractions.  They sell food and refreshments.  They sell a variety of retail products from theme-related attire and toys to sun block and sunglasses that visitors might have forgotten to bring.  They also offer paid parking, photographs taken during guest stays, and many have their own hotels that guests can utilize during their visit.

There are thousands of businesses employing the ‘multiple streams of income’ approach, so learn from the successes they’re having so you can create your own.

Once you’ve determined some general ideas of what other problems you could solve for your clients or the opportunities that they could create for you and your fitness business, then you need to decide on the models for your income streams.

Basically there are five types of Income Models you can implement:

1. Service Based
2. Product Based
3. Coaching / Consulting Based
4. Information / Knowledge Based
5. Affiliate / Referral Based

Each of these Income Models has it’s own set of benefits and drawbacks and some may be more appropriate than others for your business, but you should have no problem choosing a couple that you can integrate into your business and add additional revenue – in some cases almost immediately.

So let’s take a look at each of these Income Models in greater detail.  We’ll share an overview of the model and an example of how we’ve integrated it into our own businesses.

Service Based – This is typically the easiest to add to a fitness business, as it often requires little set up and relies primarily on you or a staff member utilizing skills that you (or someone on your team) possess and will be of benefit to your clients and typically compliments your primary offerings. The upside to this type of Income Model is the ease of start up and integration into your personal training business.  The downside is that it’s time and skill intensive.  

When we had our first personal training business, the easiest and most obvious Income Model for us to integrate was a Weight Management Program.  This program was basically a nutritional education program delivered by our staff members that helped our clients reach their goals faster and was the perfect compliment to the exercise based coaching that was our primary offering.

Product Based – Product based models are potentially very simple to integrate into your fitness business as well.  The upside to the product based Income Model is that it usually doesn’t require any special skill to offer products beyond some basic product knowledge and this model isn’t as time intensive as the others. 

The first potential drawback to the product model is the fact that most products or similar competitors will be offered in other retail outlets so there isn’t as much price elasticity as with the other models.  The other drawback to the product model is that it usually requires an upfront investment for inventory.

Our initial use of the Product Based Income Model was through selling dietary supplements to our personal training clients.  Our clients were regularly investing in supplements to help them reach their fitness goals and often consulted with our staff when choosing what supplements to purchase, so it became obvious very quickly that we should carry our own line of quality supplements and direct our clients to purchase from us.  Not only were there financial benefits to this, but we also now could direct our clients to products that we knew and trusted.  A great win/win.

Coaching / Consulting Based – Coaching / Consulting Based Income Models are great if you’ve established a successful fitness business and are willing to share your business systems and knowledge with other entrepreneurs.  The primary benefit to this Income Model is that the potential financial upside of business-to-business coaching /consulting is typically much greater than providing services to consumers. The other real upside is that it allows you to leverage what you already know and do in your own business by sharing it with others.

The potential drawback to the Coaching / Consulting Based Income Model isn’t really a drawback at all. It’s more of a pre-requisite.  To ethically coach or consult you should have experienced some success in your own experiences. If you’ve successful gotten a certain type of client results over and over – and have a systematic approach that others can model, then this approach is very powerful.

We first employed the Coaching / Consulting Based Income Model by teaching other personal trainers and health club owners how we’d successfully built our personal training business.  This Income Model eventually merged together with the Information / Knowledge Based Income Model and evolved into our two franchises: Athletic Revolution International and Fitness Revolution International.   

Information / Knowledge Based – In the Information / Knowledge Based Income Model you simply document what you know and do successfully and package it to be shared with others.  There are many advantages to this model.  Some of the biggest are the fact that you can develop information products to offer to people that normally couldn’t be your clients due to geographic constraints, so essentially the whole world is potentially your market.  There is great leverage with this type of Model too.  You can create a product once and sell it over and over again.  Typically the margins on offerings in this Model are very high too. 

If there is any downside to this Income Model, it is that while your market is no longer limited by geography, the same goes for your competition.  When offering an information product or program you will be competing for your prospect’s attention with many more marketers than you would typically face when just selling products or services locally.

We began with the Information / Knowledge Based Income Model with two different offerings at about the same time. One of our offerings was directed to other fitness business owners sharing our systems, strategies and tactics for building a successful personal training business.  The other offering featured my wife, Holly, and was a consumer product called Fit Yummy Mummy, which was a fitness program specifically designed for moms.  In both cases, we simply packaged the things that we’d done successfully in our own fitness businesses and shared them with people who could benefit from the knowledge, but couldn’t work with us face-to-face.

Ultimately both of these initial products laid the foundation for new fitness businesses that have each become category leaders in their respective markets.

Affiliate / Referral Based – This Income Model is very simple to integrate into your fitness business as it basically just requires you to find a product or service that you can refer your clients to, which is complimentary to your offerings.  The upside to the Affiliate / Referral Based Income Model is the fact that it requires very little work on your part to generate additional revenue.  The ‘partner’ that you are referring business to will provide the service or product while paying you a referral fee.  The downside to this Model is that you are putting your relationship with your customer in the hands of someone else.  If they provide an inferior product or service, then you will suffer the ill effects of that. Therefore, if you employ this Income Model, be certain to only refer only businesses of the highest quality.

We initially utilized this Income Model by referring our personal training clients to a massage therapist.  The massage therapist provided a quality service to our clients that we did not offer and paid us a referral fee for every client we sent.  In addition to those benefits, the massage therapist also referred their clients to us for our services to make this a great reciprocal relationship.

By determining what problems you could solve for your clients or the opportunities that they could create for you and your fitness business and the income models you can employ to address them, you can not only add tens of thousands of dollars to your bottom line and better serve the people you work with, but you may also lay the foundation for new fitness businesses that enjoy even greater successes and profits than the one you have now.  We certainly have.

Dedicated to your Success,

Pat

Creating a calorie surplus allows you to gain weight. A calorie surplus gives your body the extra energy it needs to build muscle which results in weight gain. While a calorie surplus is required to gain weight, simply eating more will only lead to unsightly fat gain. To gain muscle, you need to combine a calorie surplus with a strength training routine.

Creating a calorie surplus allows you to gain weight. A calorie surplus gives your body the extra energy it needs to build muscle which results in weight gain. While a calorie surplus is required to gain weight, simply eating more will only lead to unsightly fat gain. To gain muscle, you need to combine a calorie surplus with a strength training routine.

Creating a calorie surplus allows you to gain weight. A calorie surplus gives your body the extra energy it needs to build muscle which results in weight gain. While a calorie surplus is required to gain weight, simply eating more will only lead to unsightly fat gain. To gain muscle, you need to combine a calorie surplus with a strength training routine.

Creating a calorie surplus allows you to gain weight. A calorie surplus gives your body the extra energy it needs to build muscle which results in weight gain. While a calorie surplus is required to gain weight, simply eating more will only lead to unsightly fat gain. To gain muscle, you need to combine a calorie surplus with a strength training routine.