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May 2011
The UK’s No 1 fitness industry magazine
Why fit pros struggle to be profitable By Christina Eccles MANY personal trainers lack the vocational skills needed to create profitable businesses, making it hard for them to reach the people who need their services most, an expert has claimed. A survey by the Fit Biz Builders found 38 per cent of fitness professionals earn £10,000 per year or less – with many struggling to market their services to members. According to founder Scott Hodson, industry courses are good at teaching the physical side of PT, but there is little out there to equip trainers with the tools to effectively promote themselves. He explained: “We are churning out new fit pros who aren’t tooled up to run successful businesses and then we wonder why people leave the industry. “Ineffective business models, sales strategies and marketing messages are the main reasons why we can’t turn our fitness knowledge into cash. “I believe this is also a major contribution to why, as an industry we can’t break through to the inactive market and to the people who need us most.” To help trainers boost their earning
potential, the company has launched a free guide detailing five essential steps to fitness business success. And Scott told Workout gyms could do more to support their personal trainers by helping them gain important business skills. He added: “We are great at providing instructors who know about the anatomy but how can we turn that knowledge into a service and cash? “The guys we speak to don’t know how to do sales and marketing so just copy what everyone else is doing. “The big corporations are very bad at this. They won’t allow instructors to do their own marketing but they need that sales and marketing education to stand out from the crowd. Gyms could support them with that.” He suggested a good strategy for gyms is to encourage their PTs to become more specialised – with each one dealing with a particular market such as weight loss or older adults. He claimed that by doing this, trainers are no longer competing with each other for the same clients, members get a better, more personalised service and the club becomes a more profitable business.
No 212 £3
Thousands attend showcase in Blackpool
Leading fitness model Carly Thornton will be among the guests at this year’s Bodypower Expo. The show takes place on May 21 - 22 at the NEC in Birmingham and will bring together experts in fitness, nutrition and training from all over the world. For more on the show, see Workout’s special Bodypower preview supplement, which can be found inside this issue.
THOUSANDS of visitors have descended on Blackpool for this year’s International Fitness Showcase. The convention is dedicated to the UK’s health and fitness industry, attracting people from all over the world. Over three days, about 6,000 delegates took part in 300 fitness classes including aerobics, step, spinning and dance. The event is produced and managed by Chrysalis Promotions and director Steve Watson said: “Yet again Blackpool helped us deliver a fantastic convention and the Winter Gardens proved to be the perfect location for the vast range of activities we programmed. All our clients, partners and the thousands of delegates that attended had a great time at what is probably now the biggest event of its kind in Europe. “We are already planning our 2012 event.” Calculations suggest that an event on the scale of the IFS could have generated over £4m in revenue for the town.