Moving Your Personal Training Clients Online: Online Coaching Business Model

Successfully transitioning your clients from in-person to online makes a ton of sense for your quality of life and business model as a strength coach.

The biggest value of in-person training comes primarily during those initial sessions, when often drastic technique changes need to be made and you develop a relationship grounded in trust, expertise, and benevolence.

As the relationship progresses, however, the value of in-person coaching decreases. Form correction becomes less frequent and less drastic, whereas programming changes become more complicated and necessary.

Asynchronous online coaching allows the client to lift wherever and whenever is convenient, and then the coach to respond within 24-48 hours wherever or whenever works for the coach.

It increases the dollar-per-hour pay to the coach while decreasing the cost to the client.

How to Move Your Personal Training Clients Online: Make More Money & Improve Your Quality of Life

Matt Fever has made the transition from personal trainer and leader of group classes to professional coach. Attending an in-person lifting seminar with Barbell Logic was a turning point, as Matt Fever signed up for the Academy, started receiving online coaching from Matt Reynolds, and really honed his knowledge and expertise and learned about the online coaching business model.

He has been transitioning his clients from in-person to online. This has allowed him to spend more time with his family. It has also led to his clients having higher compliance, as he can coach when he is on vacation (whereas previously he could not coach and did not get paid). His clients can also lift and receiving coaching if they travel.

Moving your personal training clients online dramatically improves your quality of life and helps you develop a successful online coaching business model.

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Time Audit: Why It Matters – Know Where Your Time is Going

You are your biggest time waster. You may feel that others (e.g. your boss, kids, etc.) waste most of your time, but a couple things in response to this notion of your.

One, you cannot fully control these things. Two, insofar as you can control them, it often comes with how you react to them, approach them, or major life overhauls (e.g. changing jobs).

C. Northcote Parkinson describe in a 1955 essay in the Economist what has called Parkinson’s Law – works expands to fill the available time.

If you give yourself a month to complete a task, it will take a month. That same work could have taken you a week or day if you had assigned that amount of time.

Ultimately, this has limits (you cannot assign a nanosecond to something and assume it will get done), but this law has value. Instead of considering it a negative reality, give yourself less time and hold yourself accountable. Work to develop better habits of time management.

Just like nutrition or budgeting, worst knowing what you are consuming or how you are spending helps you begin to modify your actions.

Time Audit: What It Is & How To Do It

A time audit is a method to track how you spend your time over a given period. It helps you identify non-urgent, non-important tasks you can eliminate and urgent tasks you can delegate. Additionally, you will likely fine that the simple act of completing the time audit will improve your time management actions.

Track blocks of time down to the 15 or 30-minute increment for one week. If something takes less than that time, you can write that down.

Matt has a 15-minute timer that he uses. When it goes off, he quickly jots down what he did.

Matt uses Clockify, but you could use a spreadsheet or pen and paper.

You can read an article Matt recently wrote about the time audit here. You may also be interested in reading Dan Martell’s book Buy Back Your Time.

Matt recommends, even if you have done pretty well with time management, doing this annually or bi-annually to check-in and continue to improve your time management.

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Don’t Be Lazy: You Can Do More

Most people do not do enough. The evidence for this is all the time people waste performing non-important, unurgent tasks such as watching TikTok, doom-scrolling through Twitter, or binge-watching Netflix.

Do not build walls around your time that should not exist. “It’s unhealthy to work on the weekend” or “I deserve to not work on the weekend” can be the difference between your business succeeding and growing or failing.

You have more time than you think. You can do more than you think. This does not mean that you do not enjoy time with your family or in leisure activities. People, however, by and large, are too lazy. People generally do less than they can.

Don’t Be Lazy Because of Your Freedom

Business owners and the self-employed enjoy the freedom to set their own schedules and choose how to spend their time. This may be the single greatest aspect of starting a business or being your own boss.

If you give in to your worst tendencies, however, you will not do enough. You will choose laziness.

Matt, for example, gets up early to complete urgent tasks when no one else is awake. He does this on the weekend as well, which leaves him ready to perform on Monday as the CEO. He does not begin work Monday morning having to catch up on email.

Don’t let freedom lead to laziness. Don’t be lazy, but rather do the work.

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Pick Your Battles: Cool, Calm, Collected

Someone in the All In conference Matt, Niki, Andrew, & Josh recently attended said “that’s below my line.”

What does this mean? It means certain things should be below “your line” that stirs up your anger.

Of course, anger is an emotion, and emotions arise sometimes whether you want them to or not. That being said, you should avoid outrage culture, and if you find yourself dominated by your passions, you should step back and deal with it.

Matt has identified that addressing a situation in anger almost never works out well. This does not just mean yelling or punishment, but even talking in anger – it usually does not come off well.

If accomplishing the goal is the goal, and anger does not help, then don’t lean into the anger. Acknowledge, overcome, and try to make peace.

Pick Your Battles: Assume the Best

One component of picking your battles is assuming the best in others, especially others who have built up a level of trust with you.

You cannot be in a healthy relationship with your spouse or really any other important person in your life if you assume the worst possible motives for their actions.

Reach out to the other person and listen. Winning an argument or seeking to dominate conversation is not a good way to reach understanding or peace.

Pick your battles, seek peace, and overcome anger and other passions.

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Client to Coach: Fitness to Strength

Barbell Logic has identified a somewhat typical progression among a cohort of its clientele. These folks go from fan to strength client to Academy client to coach using TurnKey Coach.

Micaela Bickel followed this path.

She began more in the fitness space, programming circuits and endurance. Barbells were sprinkled in.

Despite her skepticism and fears, training with barbells produced the results she wanted and not only did not hurt her back but actually helped her back.

She attended a seminar and left humbled but ready to pivot to strength-based training for both herself and her clients.

Client to Coach: The Business of Coaching

She soon found the Academy and learned many of the practical and academic things it teaches. Despite having an exercise science degree, she derived a huge value from the academy.

She opened a gym in February 2023. That was a steeper learning curve.

She learned as she went, though the Academy also not spends more time addressing the business of coaching.

Her first important transition was from charging per session to charging monthly. Soon thereafter, she moved to a hybrid model of coaching, where clients receive usually 2-3 months of in-person coaching from her and then are moved to online through TurnKey Coach.

This has increased her ability to coach more clients and decreased her time at work.

The way TKC measures progress and PRs has encouraged compliance, and clients are able to train while away from the gym (and Micaela can coach away from the gym).

Learn about Micaela’s story from client to coach and how she crushed the client life cycle.

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Burnout: Definition & Identification

This is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion. It comes from doing too much for too long, especially too many urgent things. Some people have performed some great feats of endurance in their lives, but they often focus on the important, not the urgent.

You will experience a lack of desire to work, even with things that used to motivated and excited you. It will affect all areas of your life.

There is a clear parallel with overtraining. Overtraining is actually less common than most people think, but if you become overtrained it is debilitating. Overtraining and becoming burned out are better to avoid than dig yourself out of.

Burnout: Avoidance versus Digging Yourself Out

This is one of those instances when important things become urgent. You drown in an overwhelming amount of urgency for too long, and you will have to confront it. It is better to get out in front of it.

Ensure that you are making time for the important. You are taking days off and there are things you do unrelated to the urgent every day.

Take care of your health always: physical, medical, spiritual, psychological, social.

Do not medicate with activities that can exacerbate the problem, such as alcohol or other drugs, unhealthy foods, empty pleasures, risky behaviors, or excessive spending or gambling.

To dig yourself out will require more work and greater effort than if you had never found yourself burned out in the first place. And, of course, some people never dig themselves out.

Avoid burnout, but reach out for help if you find yourself burned out.

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When to Break the Rules: Increase Speed & Decrease Costs

In many industries and organizations, there are general guidelines, rules, or ways of doing things. You may learn, early on, that generally, for example, employees should have one manager only or that you should never divide your forces in the face of a larger force.

Great victories and advantages, however, lie in consciously not following these rules.

For start up companies, your advantages over larger companies come from nimbleness and low costs. When you start your business, you are the technician, the manager, and the owner. You wear all the hats.

You will hire employees, and they will begin to take some of those hats.

Do not, however, force your people and processes under principles that slow you down or increase your costs.

As you scale, you will reach higher level nodes where payroll will increase. As you do this, profitability may decrease as you take on more people, but then it will improve as you improve and grow at that node.

Move fast and move cheap. Know when to break the rules and knowingly break them for the good of your business (when it makes sense).

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Leverage Education: Put Insights Into Action As a Content Consumer

You almost certainly consume content in some form. Free or cheap content abounds: podcasts, social media, YouTube, reels, articles, books, audiobooks.

You should be consuming and encountering meaningful, challenging, useful content. You should constantly be learning.

That being said, too many people do not put lessons learn into action. Don’t be one of these people. Then, your education is really just infotainment.

You do not improve yourself or your business by knowing more but by improving yourself and your business by changing your habits and applying the insights you learn from these educational resources.

Leverage Education: Build Trust to Create Leads & Conversions as a Content Creator

Some businesses focus on monetizing content and making money through content.

That is not Barbell Logic, and that is not most businesses.

Content is a means to build trust and demonstrate value and expertise. Potential clients (leads) consume your content, they become warm leads, and eventually some of these people will purchase your products or services.

For example, Matt has purchased Alex Hormozi’s books (which are cheap) and watched some of his free online content. Because of the value he has gleaned from this, he was willing to pay more to attend an intensive in-person seminar.

Why? Because the free and cheap content, and Matt and Barbell Logic’s application of the lessons contained in that content, have provided value. Matt was willing to invest more deeply in a higher level of service with a higher price point because of this trust from previous experiences with the content.

How are you building trust with your potential customers?

Leverage education and build trust.

Leverage Education to Identify Your Constraints

Barbell Logic used the seminar, and has used free and cheap content from Hormozi and acquisition.com to identify constraints within the business and levers to pull that will provide the most return for the least effort, time, and money.

Sounds a lot like MED (not on accident)!

MED does not mean do the least you can. It means valuing your time, money, and effort to get the biggest return on investment you can. It applies the law of diminishing returns. It asks, if you can add 5 pounds to your squat every 2-3 days with 1 set of 5 repetitions of the deadlift, why would you do a program that involves 3×5 or 5×5?

Leverage education to identify constraints and improve yourself and your business.

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Strength Training at West Point: Simple, Hard, Effective

Greg Hess is an instructor and athletic trainer at West Point. In this role, he has a host of responsibilities, including immediate treatment of injuries, overseeing mandatory physical training of all cadets during their cadet basic training, and leading an elective course on compound barbell lifts.

Really, what he is doing, in his roles, is trying to spread the benefits of simple, hard, effective training.

During basic training, he exposes cades to the deadlift and bench press, despite the limited time.

In his elective, however, he has more time to instruct technique on the four main lifts, along with the power clean and power snatch. Cadets also learn how to coach other cadets.

This is a good thing. Cadets at the United States Military Academy (West Point) are being exposed to simple, hard, effective strength training.

Learn about something exciting that is going on at West Point.

PS -  Coach Smarter, Earn More: https://bit.ly/3X4ixOX Matt's Links Website: https://ryanmattreynolds.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reynoldsstrong/?hl=en Chris's Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismreynolds/  

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Not All Metrics Are Created Equal: TTIs & KPIs

Two main categories of metrics exist to help measure progress toward strategic goals and gauge the health of the company: targets to improve (TTIs) and key performance indicators (KPIs).

TTIs are your top set of metrics, which have to directly impact your strategic priorities. Your strategic priorities need to align with your tenets and core values.

If these metrics improve, you have moved closer to or met your strategic priorities. These are not monthly or quarterly (though you measure them monthly and quarterly and probably more often than that) but likely annual priorities and TTIs.

KPIs are snapshots of the health of the company. If they improve, they should help your TTIs and strategic priorities (for the most part).

Often times, these are metrics that lower-level employees may care about. The CEO does not need to get into the weeds of Instagram post performance, for example, but the social media manager does.

Some metrics will likely not move, but if they do move you need to identify why they moved (either to understand the success or address the underperformance).

For Barbell Logic this might be churn. A good example in another industry is engine temperature in an airplane. This should remain constant, but if it starts to go up you need to address it quickly.

Not All Metrics Are Created Equal: Hierarchy of Metrics

What you measure focuses your attention, so pick your metrics carefully. The CEO should not be looking at 100s of metrics. Improvements in your TTIs must actually move you closer toward your strategic priorities.

For example, if a strategic priority for you is to earn $50k in coaching revenue this year, revenue is a TTI. KPIs that align with this may be churn, clients, cold calls, and life time value of clients.

Make sure your metrics align with your priorities and your priorities align with your values and tenets. Prioritize metrics: do not measure metrics just because you can.

Not all metrics are created equal.

PS -  Coach Smarter, Earn More: https://bit.ly/3X4ixOX Matt's Links Website: https://ryanmattreynolds.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reynoldsstrong/?hl=en Chris's Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismreynolds/  

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