With your business established and your first tranche of clients enjoying the services that you offer, you may decide that now is to time to grow your business. But what are the next steps?
The personal training industry in the UK is strong. More people are turning to personal training to maintain a healthy and active lifestyle. In the UK, there are over 13,000 registered personal trainers, mainly operating on a freelance basis. With the demand high, now is not only the time to move into personal training but to grow your business.
Scaling a business comes with challenges. When it comes to personal training, for example, you want to maintain the ‘personal’ in the services that you offer and maintain the same high standards whilst accepting more clients and more trainers into your business.
Increasing your marketing and promotional activities is all well and good but the danger is you become swamped.
Setting up a business on your own means you have limited economies of scale. In other words, there are only so many hours in a day you can offer personal training yourself. When all these slots are booked, you cannot take on any more clients.
Effectively, you need to look for personal trainers who may want to join your business, either on a freelance or employed basis.
But rather than just seeing this move as a chance to take on more clients, you could also use this to offer personal training services that you currently can’t or are not able to offer.
For example, yoga is popular with clients of all ages. Opting to include yoga classes or one-to-one sessions by working with a trained instructor expands the services that you offer.
Undoubtedly, for many personal trainers, it is working with other trained instructors that is key to expanding their business. There are pros and cons to both freelance trainers and employing someone but with your marketing pulling in enquiries, you have more availability and more happy customers.
You may be thinking that expanding your personal training business means taking on more trainers but is this enough? With more trainers and clients, and a higher financial turnover, you may need to consider outsourcing other important business activities such as bookkeeping, HR or admin support.
There are challenges and opportunities when expanding your business. What can be problematic is when growth is out of control. This is when you take on so many clients that it all feels and looks chaotic.
This happens when the processes behind the business are either not in place or are too ineffectual to cope with the sudden expansion in both staff and clients.
If this should happen, it can affect your business reputation, possibly damaging it for some months (or even years) to come.
Growth and scaling of any business must be controlled. In other words, you need to have a clear business plan and strategy in place. As part of this plan, you’ll need to identify the internal strengths and weaknesses of your business, as well as the external opportunities and threats.
When you have identified what these are, you need to identify the solutions both in terms of resources and people you already have, and what or who else you need to get involved.
You’ll also need to identify the costs involved in scaling your business, from more resources and equipment to insurance costs and staff costs.
You’ll have started to develop a brand image and reputation from the moment you took on your first client. There are many definitions of what branding means in business.
For simplicity, it can be defined as the look of your business and who it appeals to in terms of the visuals, as well as the services you offer. It is also about feeling – how do people feel when they interact with your business.
As you expand your business, clients will interact with it as an entity in its own right. At the moment, every potential client who contacts the company may speak with you and every client who takes up your services does so with you.
When you introduce other people into your business, this changes. For example, is the admin person answering your phone or responding to email queries doing so in a way that fits with your brand image? Do the trainers working within your business conduct sessions as you want them too?
Establishing and maintaining a brand image is key during growth and there are many ways you can do this:
Along with a website, you are probably maintaining a visible presence on social media. Both of these digital channels have value when it comes to establishing and growing your business.
But there comes a time when both are underperforming, possibly because along with everything you are doing to maintain your business, you are posting content, answering messages and queries.
You can’t continue to wear all of these hats when running a business and so free some of your time by considering outsourcing the development and maintenance of digital marketing to a freelance expert.
This could be:
Digital marketing can be incredibly successful but that doesn’t rule out offline marketing. Often seen as traditional marketing – adverts in newspaper, radio adverts, flyers and posters – these offline channels still have their place in the marketing plan for your business.
To grow your business, you need to attract new clients. This could mean focusing efforts onto a new customer demographic.
Studies have shown that parents will often start new routines, such as healthy eating regimes or physical exercise when children start a new school term in September. Likewise, January is also a time that gyms and personal trainers are busy with new clients and so creating ‘products’ to grab a slice of the market when it is buoyant can bring in a tranche of new clients.
And flyers through doors, posters in prominent positions, adverts in local papers and magazines are all part of this marketing landscape for growing your business. It can be hard to measure just how successful offline marketing tools are, but you’ll find that many people will mention ‘I saw your ad in the paper’ or picked up a leaflet etc.
As with digital marketing, an offline marketing strategy is key to success. Designing and ordering leaflets is one thing, but knowing how and where you will distribute them is critical.
In many ways, you are in an enviable position – you have an established client base that you can use as a springboard to grow your business. And this means you have people willing to give your business a ‘reference’.
This means you have credibility, so why not use it? Ask your current clients to give you a review – they could leave this on your Facebook page, a 5* review on your Google My Business listing or share their results via Instagram. This is all content that you can repost and share.
Using customer testimonials on flyers and in adverts, or even creating a case study of a willing client for an advert, can push this credibility further. Most clients like to share how successful they have been and the difference you have made to their lives. In terms of marketing, this is the stuff of gold dust. Don’t be frightened to ask your clients for reviews – they’ll be more than happy to oblige in most cases!
Growing and scaling a business is not without its challenges. It is tough with uncomfortable decisions to be made. But, get it right and stay in control of growth, and your personal training business will climb to the great success you want it to be.
