Growing your own

Nic Jarvis, leadership

development expert, fitness consultant and regular speaker at REPs conventions shares his

expertise on how to succeed in business… O

ver the years I have had the pleasure of working with hundreds of fitness professionals in all sectors of the

market, full and part-time, staff and freelance. One of the things that has never ceased to amaze me is how many of them see their ultimate goal as running their own business.

This shows me they want to take responsibility for their futures and to create something that has their own unique spin on it.

Sadly I also see most dreams unfulfilled and as a result, these people leave the industry and take dead-end jobs, which they hope will pay more. Or they stay in the industry, dissatisfied and de-motivated and unfortunately pass this on to their customers. I believe that with some simple education this situation can be reversed to the benefit of not just the fitness professionals, but also the employers and of course the customers.

My solution focuses on two primary things; teaching fitness professionals the basic stages of developing a business and providing coaching on how to implement each stage.

The strategies for growing a business There are three key strategies for growing a business: 1. increasing your client base

2. increasing transaction frequency 3. increasing average spend

The first is quite obvious, the more clients you have the larger 16 your income will be.

The other two are often overlooked by business novices, but can make a crucial difference to your income. For example if you are a personal trainer who has 40 clients in a year, who on average purchase 1.5 blocks of 10 sessions at £300 a time, your income will be £18,000 pa.

By adopting the three-strategy approach and changing each aspect by a small amount you can make significant improvements. So add 5 clients making a total of 45, increase the average number of times they purchase by a quarter to 1.75 and add £50 to their average spend by selling additional equipment or supplements and your annual income increases to £27,562.

The six steps to growing a business

Would be entrepreneurs, or those who just want to become self- employed, take the three strategies and integrate them into six steps, which have been proven to build many kinds of small businesses and work well for personal trainers, studio teachers, etc.

The six proven steps to grow a business are:

1. A product that customers immediately want and you find easy to explain so they are happy to invest in a long-term relationship with you. Most fitness professionals don’t know what their product is and they definitely don’t have a Unique Selling Proposition (something that differentiates them from the competition).

The REPs Journal 2010;16(March):16-18

successful business