HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL SERIES

PART 2: THE VALUE LADDER! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

By Vito LaFata

Here I will discuss the Value Ladder and look at how I can help you earn top dollar, help as many peo-ple as you can, and still have time off to enjoy life and family. If you remember, we talked a little bit about the three stages of being a fitnesspreneur. If you haven’t have a chance to check that out, I recommend that you go back and check it out.

 \I am assuming that you have and you have chosen the stage that you want to be in as far as whether you

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THE VALUE LADDER

want to be in the technician stage one or stage two or if you want to be mov-ing on toward stage three as an entrepreneur.  

The critical step for you to make more money as a personal trainer requires you to get good at creating the simple value ladder here.

The value ladder increases your income while taking less time to de-liver your results to your clients. That’s really the sweet spot for you learning how to make more money as a fitness professional, group instructor, studio owner, and anything in fitness and wellness space.

You have three factors here; one is that you’ve got price. Price is going to be increasing as the value ladder builds; value up on the left axis is going to be going up as you deliver more and move up the value ladder.

However, time actually declines as you come across the value ladder because in the beginning, the program and the things that we do re-quire a lot of our physical time. If you remember what we were talking about in the technician stage, it required you to show up, you’d be the trainer, you to do the work and that meant that it took up a lot of your time and your in-come was only as much as you can command in that physical presence and that’s why the value isn’t high priced and the time it takes is high.

FITNESSPRENEUR TIP:The value ladder increases your

income while taking less time to deliver

results to your clients.

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

The Value Ladder:Step 1

Feeder program gets clients charged for private training,

semi-private or group training.

Let’s break this down and look at some scenarios that might fit inside of your business. Here we are down at the first step of the value ladder where it says assessment intro session and feeder program. This is some of the tradi-tional things that we've talked about in the industry. You’d do an as-sessment to get somebody in, try a free personal training ses-sion, try a free class, come on in and get that overhead assessment. All those things have been traditional ways that we've gotten people in and they take a lot of time because either you or a trainer has to do that and then try to sell the person on continuing on up the ladder. Basically, that’s getting them to a private training, semi-private or group training, and then moving them up to the next level.

Often, we are not taught how to do those intro sessions and assessments well, getting charged so that you make income on them, they are given away for free and I am an advocate of that feeder program and that little initial offer for somebody that has come on in. Show them that is going to work but the

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

FITNESSPRENEUR TIP:Your clients are

shopping for results. Results make them

believe in you.

more you can actually make sure that someone is committed to something on that level – maybe they are using a nominal fee of $27 to show interest for that intro session and assessment you’re placing value on that – you tend to see better conversions of people that have paid that enrolling up into other programs. You are going to get less people in be-cause that will be more of a barrier for some people. So it’s just a kind of trade off that want to make this up. Do I want to charge that initial assess-ment or intro session and know I’m going to get less people but they are better qualified? That is the business decision. You want to get more people on the front door and then rely on your marketing team or yourself to follow up. Make sure the person wasn’t ready to buy that day; was there a follow-up mechanism in place to have them come back in to still deliver more value? Keep educating so that as the time does become right for them, they are still in your business marketing follow up.

Third one; the feeder program. It tends to be my go-to program where we create what I call a dating program; it might be a five, ten or seven day challenge. It doesn’t make a difference, anything that is better than a free week pass and an intro session because here is the problem: with a free week pass and an intro session, they don’t deliver any results. All they do is just let the person test out a service, but don’t understand how it helps them get a result. People are not shopping for a free class; they are not shop-ping for a personal trainer. They are shopping for a solution to some sort a problem they have.

Let’s choose an example of a person shopping for weight loss.  A class by it-self isn’t a weight loss solution. A trainer by itself isn’t a weight loss solution. A program that comes with nutrition, cardio, exercises, motivational coaching that starts to become more of a plan, a program, or a system; that’s a solution.

We know 10 pounds isn’t going to come off in that first 5 days but can you make a great impression on them by showing them you aren’t like the other facilities out there. We don’t have only training sessions. We are basically your one stop shop. We’ve got a program together and here’s why and how it is going to get you your results. Maybe you struggled in the past;  you’ve tried exercise, you’ve tried gyms, you've had memberships, you've tried dif-ferent training.   Why hasn’t all that worked?  

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

This is potentially because you weren’t in a program. We are going to get them in our program and right now you can help them within the next three or five days to get three to four pounds off, until then, continue to talk to them about how else we can continue that journey toward those ten pounds.

Now you’ve put them into a little feeder program that allows you to deliver on your word. You can get results for them; you design the program to be turnkey and now the person that comes in gets that result! You look like the business owner or the trainer that is true to their word. That little dat-ing process makes them believe in you and what you can deliver. That is going to help you deliver more value and help them roll over into your business more than just wanting to come in and try a session.

What changes?

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

“You design the program to be

turnkey and now the person comes in

and gets that result!” More helpful adviceTEXTTEXT

Nothing. There is just a small change in the value proposition of what you are offering to them; that’s more in line with what they are actually shopping for. They are shopping for the results.

Well, you doing just one training session and saying that it’s going to get rid of your knee pain isn’t the same as letting them know what the program is. You explain how it is a combination of myofascial release, stretch and flexibility, mobility, stability and it’s going to be a four-week pro-gram. Each week is designed to cover one of those pillars, so come on in and taste two sessions at this special rate; I can show you what this looks like and then we will continue to scale you up. Hopefully that is making sense at ways that you look at building that first value ladder step and what you can do a little bit more with those feeder programs. You want to keep those intro sessions and assessments, by all means, they are highly recom-mended but I would potentially think about making them a little bundled offer.

As we move up that value ladder, the next thing you can do is going to allow you to start commanding more dollars and delivering more value. Let’s obvi-ously move them into our classical training model, whether it’s private, semi-private or group training.

Private training has a limit to how much impact it can make and how much income it can bring in. If you’re running 60 minute sessions, you’re capped by 8, 9, 10 sessions a day. Whether it is you or the trainers, you are capped by number of people each person can see before they can collapse at the end of the day. It’s kind of reality. You can only do so much with 60 minutes sessions.

If you want to create more value with less time with private training, I am a big advocate for a 30-minute model.  You can get bigger results by in-creasing the intensity. We know that results are not correlated in duration; results are correlated to intensity.

If you get your clients to cut chit chat down and get more focused, they can get better results in less time. You can then get more sessions in, which means more dollars coming in because of the rate change you can of-ten charge. You might be charging $65 per hour session, you can charge $40 for a half hour, you get two people on $40, you get $80 an hour instead of making $65 an hour.

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

You’ve just increased your income and you’ve increased the number of peo-ple you can see and you do so in less time. That is the model that I am a big advocate of when it comes to private training.

From there, I often like to move people into semi-private training that is a 2 to 4 person model and I still keep it at the half hour because in those half hours, we can work just as hard. We get good group energy and the group commander and the whole thing going to with semi-private, we still get good results and now we’re connected to more people. When you con-nect more people in your facility, you are building in the culture and the family feel of what’s happening inside. That is going to get them be-cause they are going to come for the program and they are going to stay as a community. The more you can build communities, the more your people are going to be able to step.

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

The Value Ladder:Step 2

FREE HANDOUT

FITNESSPRENEUR TIP:Semi-private

programs will attract people because of the program and make them stay because of the

community.

Now once again, you might be charging like $25 for a semi-private half hour and if you get four people in there now you see $100 a half hour, $200 an hour. So one trainer can go from making $65 per hour when they were on 60-minute session to $80 when they were in the half hour private session to upwards to $200 when they are running a fully booked semi-private session at half hours.

Right there you’re increasing your model. You are creating a little bit more of a hybrid offer because you still have people that want that private model. You use that in select scenarios. I use that more for newbies that have never exercised before, people that might be injured that might need to be in a private scenario, letting them know that once they advance past the newbie and passed the injured phase, we move them to semi-private training and group training.

Group training is just that ability to deliver that 5 to 15 people a session

depending upon space limitations and things like that. Start to create group-training rates where you see it is popular with Crossfit and all the little boutique style gyms that are out there. These gyms also know that by running group training at the popular morning times – 5:30am, 6:30am for pre-work crowds, 9 am for the stay-at-home moms and 5:30pm, 6:30pm, 7:30pm at night for the post work crowd – they have cre-ated a schedule that allows them to make an offer group training at an afford-able rate for almost everyone.

So, the plan you should be thinking is this: “If you can get 15 people in per hour with my group training and you are running 4 sessions a day, you know that you can then sell at least 30 to 60 memberships to make up your group training program. You can actually sell more than that because none of them are going to come every day. If you’re charging $100 a month for your group training and you know that you have a capacity of 60 sessions, you know that you can be running $6,000 a month from your group training.

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

More helpful adviceTEXTTEXT

If you have extra number of people in your semi-private session, for example, let’s say you have 40 people in your semi-private training, well now you might be like I am bringing $6,000 from semi-private, $6,000 from group training and $4,000 from private training.  I've created a scale hybrid model and each step up from private to semi to group takes less time. You get more skill from each trainer or yourself and you can make more dollars for the matter of time that you’re out there and that is how we move up that value ladder.

Now you can add specialty programs, nutrition and online coaching; the beauty about these things is it is all added value. You’re going to have people needing more coaching than just the physicality of when they see you because there is 23 to 23 and a half hours that they don’t see you and everyone wants some mobility and some flexibility; there are things that pop up every day and they cannot make it to the gym or they are traveling but they need some solutions on the go.

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

The Value Ladder:Step 3

FREE HANDOUT

When you have online coaching as a component of that, you are now able to help them stay in touch with you, get programming, motivation, inspiration and get answers via online coaching. That can be either by add on or using one of our BeachBody coaching models. Our nutrition program is where we plug in like Shakeology as an example.   We plugged in a super-food meal replacement because we know our clients were suffering nutrition wise. It was the biggest element that I couldn’t control with clients. We could work them out all day and the moment they get home, they ate terribly and there is not much else we could do about it.

So we were like; we’ve got to do something about it so we started to do meals that are a super food. Make it convenient and friendly for them and assure them they’re going to get better results – and that proved true to the tune of additional six figures in a year.

What we ended up finding out was that for every a client that was on Shakeol-ogy, we were bringing in $30 because the client’s need nutrition month in and month ou and that money was coming in just like a membership does, every single month. And we started to build more value by getting them better re-sults, as now we were the one stop shop helping them with nutrition, online coaching and now we started to have additional revenue that was coming in while we slept. It wasn’t something that we had to resell over and over.

It added a lot of value and once we did the work, it was bringing it every month – that’s how we got massive amounts of freedom of time and we just simply started to add specialty programs, fun things like tank-top arm challenges, butt and thigh challenges, back solution challenges, our new world programs, our knee programs, trainer programs, triathlon programs, marathon programs, outdoor venture boot-camps.

We started to just scale outside of standard services that everybody provides so that we can start to differentiate ourselves from everybody else out there. All of the sudden, those brought in additional revenue streams. We were now able to start having people who didn’t even live near us be able to partake in our challenges because we had these online programs. We were making money from people who didn’t take up space in the gym, didn’t alter our overhead and didn’t acquire my trainer’s times. That meant high profit margin, high value, and high-ticket items.

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

FITNESSPRENEUR TIP:Money is not a

barrier for clients in high-end coaching.

Achieving their dream is the thing

that they want.

This is probably the sweet spot that I think most business owners and per-sonal trainers are missing. That specialty program; nutrition, online coaching, that’s the window that has opened for everybody to jump in right now, as you can instantly add that to your business now, with turnkey solutions. If you want see how we've done it, go to www.vitolafata.com and enter your name and email into the Income Freedom Plan and I’ll show you how you will plug five additional revenue streams. It’s just what’s happening right now with the online and Facebook group; you’re missing an opportunity of adding more value and increasing your income.

Last value ladder step is where you really step into that high-end coach-ing info product and master lines, and this is where you might start taking some of the things like the specialty programs and create them into high-rank coaching. It might be that you are doing triathlon programs but there is a subset of people inside there that really want to get after and they

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

The Value Ladder:Step 4

FREE HANDOUT

Stabilize your business and create

monthly memberships out of everything you do.

want super specialized coaching. They want it monthly and they are going after championships or record-breaking times. When you get into ambition or aspiration coaching, you can command high-end dollars to the tune of $500 to an additional $1,000 a month, if not more, because for those peo-ple, money is not the barrier anymore, achieving their dream is the thing that they want.

High-end coaching is something that can open up possibilities for you de-pending on what your specialty is or what you might be focused on. Maybe that's not the way you’ll operate now, but you at least want to know how you eventually add items. I remember one of my mentors Todd Durkin, he cre-ated a mastermind for clients because he had a lot of CEOs and executives and he knew that those guys were very high performers. They were looking for more coaching beyond just the fitness, the exercise and the nutrition. They wanted to know how to build their best sales

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

as CEOs, be better leaders and entrepreneurs, so he connected them to how nutrition, exercise and mindset all made them better at all those things that they wanted and he created a mastermind program for them. That became additional revenue. He was able to coach many people at once but was com-manding top dollar because it was about ambition not just about losing weight or dropping inches to fit in their clothes better.

Almost in anything that you guys have out there, with your experience, knowl-edge and programs, you can start learning how to package that stuff to what is called info products. You can package and put it into an online course, PDFs and they become products that you can sell and market online. That can start to bring you an income while you’re sleeping. You’ve got all the elements of master-minds which is just again like a version of high-end coaching but all of those start to bump you up that value ladder. They all are always delivering better results along the way and you’re able to increase that income and move it across.

For your business, I want you to think about a first step that I always coach people on; start selling packages because one of the downfalls of a trainer is the “feast or famine income.” Stabilize your business and create monthly memberships out of everything you do. Classes become monthly member-ships, training sessions become monthly programs and look for opportunities.

I started to do things; I noticed most people either come once, twice or three times a week for training, so I created a full time a week personal training package or group training package. We scaled it to private, semi-private and group training and it was 4, 8,12, unlimited and I just took the average price of $50 an hour and my four time a month semi-private training package is $200 a month. You are then able to offer to your clients packages, design programs and our programs are either depending upon what is going to take to get you to your result.  The person maybe is ag-gressive about their result and you are like; Yes then we are going to train three times a week and you’re like, awesome, its 12 sessions and that’s go-ing to be $800 a month and instead of them having to put down $2,500 - $3,000 per package, you’re able to say find the answer with us at $800 a month, your sessions are due each month we don't bail, if you cancel, we re-schedule, we get our sessions every month they don’t roll over borrowing emergency or something like that, we get them in the month so that you’re

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

Do you want to add more

value to your clients?

Do you want to add more value to

your clients?

consistent, you are accountable to your program, that’s how you get results. That’s all we’re about here.

Now you start to create a stable income where you knew the money was coming in on the first of every month and being online helps you bill any day a person comes in so you have money coming in all month long, what-ever you want to do, you can sell a specific date, and that allows you to get out of the “feast or famine,” create some cash flow and continuity, stabilize the business and now you’ve got something running. You are no longer stressed about what’s going to come in each month and off you go.

A strategy will simply be from here, I want you to go and implement it in the next week or two. No longer offer packages, offer just programs. Your cur-rent clients that are on packages, start with the ones that you are closest to and let them know about the value of this; more consistency, more results, more accountability, the ability to train more, we don't skip session, we just reschedule them so they see the value of why you are doing this and your best client will totally get in! You let them know this is what you are doing, this is going forward as a business, most clients are totally understandable about it when they get there, and there are the ones there that are laggards

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

COMMENT

about it, the time that the other people start shifting to it, eventually they start to come around and start to shift to the monthly billing cycle and off you go.

Worst case, if you have a few that don't want to change, they’re grandfa-thered in there no big deal, but at least going forward, start to make that shift that will stabilize the business. Ask yourself if you want to add more value for clients and what way can you do it? Go back and look at that value ladder and ask yourself along the way, what I can do as far as setting up a feeder program into your business.

If you don't have any feeder programs, check out the

http://grouptrainingmoneymachine.com

and get yourself some turnkey group training systems so you can start plug-ging feeder systems into the front end of your business. Look at how you can create a hybrid model scaling private training and moving it to half hour. What can you do about adding in semi-private, group training, do you need to bring other people in to cover some of those things? What can you do about nutrition or online coaching if that is something you don’t have, then go book a strategy call with me at www.vitolafata.com , or go to my Team Rockstar Fit page and go to my income freedom plan training series. I'll show you how to add this kind of stuff so we are on a strategy session, I will teach you that and then eventually, depending on the way you are in your business, the higher end coaching and info products and masterminds could be a part of that.

At least start designing and architecting what you want from your business. I want you guys to be like one of my BeachBody coaches here, Spase who was a trainer and spin instructor up in L.A., and ran out of hours even in his days to help more people and to make more money and we met at a mastermind event. He was into personal develop-ment, we tried to be like how do I grow as fitnesspreneur I’m talking about and we went right to value ladder, third spot; right to nutrition and online chal-lenges and ending those feeder systems. You went to plug in nutrition and the time he did that, six months later he had an additional $3,000 a month in income just by starting that program. That was a progression in his business and now he is starting to be like that each month because he is selling more of the residue, he has given up all of his spinning classes and he has now be-come more of a virtual health club owner.

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

He has a lot of his business online and he is able to create mobility and flexibility in his lifestyle and he feels that now progress is opening up, he is outside of that technician and instead of being that studio owner, he is the virtual studio owner and he is moving toward that fitnesspre-neur and that is the promise of where we can all be going.

You guys are all learning step by step how to continue to learn how to make more money as a personal trainer, as a fitness professional, studio owner, wherever you find yourself in this industry. We can go out there and keep making this big difference while still creating that income and lifestyle that we deserve as health care today. Stay tuned for next week's video where we start to step into to build your dream income blueprint, until then, keep going out there making a big difference today.

For more information visit www.vitolafata.com.

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HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL: THE VALUE LADDER

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