You’re there burnt out from doing another long week and you’re stressed because you’ve been absorbing a lot of the negative energy your clients have been bringing to you in their sessions.
Looking over the last year it seems as though your thoughts and feelings towards how you’ve progressed have diminished and you’re now feeling more drained than ever before.
What’s it boil down to?
Taking on the wrong clients who drain your energy and who you bend over backwards for. That isn’t the place you want to be in, is it?
When you’re running a business, you want the business to work for you, not the other way around.
A personal training company should be just that: a business that helps people become fitter and healthier with you at the helm driving things forward. It shouldn’t be you working in the business.
And if you’re thinking that “it’s just me. I don’t run a company” then take a moment to think about your aspirations.
It’s okay to think big: to get there you’ll need to have some solid foundations and those foundations are developed thinking about the ideal place you want to be in business in 1, 5 and 10 years’ time.
One of the solid foundations is choosing the right personal training clients. I touched on this point in the post about marketing yourself online as a personal trainer and in this blog I’ll be writing a little bit more about it.
There are certain points along the way when you’ll get a gut feeling that a prospect isn’t going to be right for you.
Maybe you can’t really put your finger on it, but they just don’t feel right.
That’s the point when you make the decision to not take them on as a client right now, but choose to wait until you can discover why there isn’t a connection there.
Later, you discover that they wouldn’t have been a good fit and you stuck to your customer avatar.
What’s a customer avatar?
Choosing who you want to train as clients might seem a little far-fetched, especially if you’re in a position at the moment where you don’t feel that you’re getting enough leads coming through. But, it’s better to shape your business the way you want it to be than to accept and work with personal training clients who put you in a negative space.
Some people call the avatar a customer profile or a prospect profile. Essentially, it’s a written down account of who you want to work with: how old they are, their interests, what they aspire to be in life and how often they’re able to train.
Why should you care about it?
Choosing the right clients (and repelling the wrong ones) will help you grow your business to where you really want it to be. Not just simply ticking over as it currently is: you wouldn’t be reading this blog if you thought you had everything, would you?
The red velvet rope
You’ve probably heard (or read) about this concept already. It’s about having a velvet red rope around your business. Its concept is quite simple: you treat any prospect as a suspect before you invite them to consider becoming a client: yes, to be considered.
Taking on a new client is just as much your decision as it is theirs and your velvet rope will allow you to choose who you let into your client circle and who you don’t.
Some key things you should consider are:
- Your gut check: how do you feel about them in the first instance?
- Are they motivated and committed to reaching their goals?
- Will they listen? You’re the professional here, not them; they’ll need to have an open mind and listen to you
- Are they willing to invest? Some people are cheap. They’ll have a consultation with you, say you’re too expensive (not matter what things you come back with) and then go out and buy a designer watch or handbag.
- Are they similar to your current clients?
If you don’t have space for them in your current week then you could consider adding them to a waiting list. You can keep them as a warm prospect by having an automation system in place to keep them updated about how you can help them and cementing you as the expert in your field.