If you want to build a successful fitness business, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article we’re going to highlight 6 easily avoidable mistakes you might be making and how to rectify them.
Get this right and you could:
- Make more money.
- Reach more customers.
- Grow a targeted community.
- Be more productive.
- Reduce your stress.
If they sound like results you want, then read on to find out more! Or, you can click below to watch the article as a video:
Let’s go…
1. Not Having A Clear Goal
Your fitness business needs a clear, well-defined goal. You can’t make the shot if you’re not aiming at the hoop, right?
It’s important you know what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve it. The more specific to you and your business you can be, the better!
Depending on the type of online fitness business you run, this could be:
- Reach 15,000 followers on Instagram by next June.
- Publish 4 videos a month to your YouTube channel.
- Increase my online fitness studio’s income by $500 in the next 6 weeks.
These clear and specific goals can help you identify your next steps and highlight the tasks you should (and should not!) be spending your time on.
2. Not Having A Well-Defined Audience
Niching down your fitness business is a scary thought.
It feels like, by saying your business is only for a specific type of person, you’re going to shut the door on a lot of potential income! But, the truth is…
Saying exactly who your business is for is one of the best decisions you’ll ever make, and can lead to more income in the future!
Let me explain…
Take a second to think about all the different “camps” of people in the health and fitness industry, like types of training and diets. You might end up with a list like this:
- Bodybuilding
- CrossFit
- Yoga
- Spin
- Paleo
- Intermittent Fasting
- Atkins
What you’ll notice is that all of these types of training have a clearly defined audience. You can probably picture a stereotypical “avatar” for each of them!
You need to take the same approach to your business. Who is your ideal customer or client? What do they need? How do they like to train? How can you best help them?
Humming Puppy Yoga is a great example of this. They’re a brick-and-mortar yoga studio from Australia who pivoted online during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Humming Puppy uses audio frequencies to create a unique yoga experience. They drench their audience in sound that, science says, can help them achieve peak performance.
This is a really niche approach to Yoga and isn’t for everyone. But that’s the point! The customers they do attract love their approach and keep coming back for more.
Humming Puppy
How This Yoga Studio Used VOD To Keep On Flowing During COVID-19
3. Not Being Consistent
When your fitness business begins to grow, you’re going to find yourself pulled thin. You’re going to have to wear a lot of different hats: marketer, salesperson, coach, accountant.
That’s a lot of work, and it can all feel pretty overwhelming. When that feeling of overwhelm sets in, consistency is often the first thing to go, and…
- that video gets pushed to next week
- those social media updates go out a little late
- you’re slow to respond to that important client email
- you have to reschedule sessions
…which leads to you endlessly playing catch-up to get things done and keep clients happy!
Your customers, subscribers, and followers all count on you being consistent. They expect you to create, publish, and deliver on time. There may be a little wiggle room, but not much.
Take our Uscreen Health and Fitness Channel, for example. It was only when we began consistently posting one video a week that we started to see growth in our subscribers:
The good news is:
You only need to be consistent in the tasks that will help you achieve your goal. Be ruthless in identifying what you need to be doing and focus your energy there.
For the other tasks, you can create systems…
4. Not Creating Systems
Fitness businesses often suffer from bottleneck syndrome. That’s when one person insists on being part of every process, and prevents other people from getting work done.
Now:
When your fitness business is your brain-child, it’s common to want to be involved in everything. It’s a natural reaction. But, there comes a point where it’s too much for you and your team.
It’s important to create systems and processes that can easily be replicated by other people on your team, and keep the quality of work in-line with what you want to achieve.
There’s a great book on this topic called The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. It explores practical ways to record and implement repeatable systems.
By doing this for the tasks where you don’t need to focus your time, you free yourself (and your staff) up to work on tasks where you can have a more consistent impact!
5. Not Managing Your Finances
You’ve seen it before…
A gym closes. A studio shuts. A personal trainer goes back to the 9-to-5 grind. All because they couldn’t properly manage the financial side of things.
And be honest with yourself, when was the last time you had a clear overview of your financials? Not guesswork and rough spreadsheets, but a concrete understanding?
If it’s been a while, it’s important that you get a grasp on it. It’s one of the most common mistakes all types of fitness businesses make!
This hit fitness businesses especially hard during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ones working outside their means ran into financial troubles pretty quickly.
It’s important that you learn to run your fitness business in a healthy way. Pay for only what you can afford, borrow only what you know you can pay back. Invest wisely!
If possible, bring in someone who can help with your bookkeeping and accounts. Someone who will give you sound advice on what you can and can’t spend.
It might mean you need to bootstrap and scale back for a little while, but your fitness business will benefit in the long run.
6. Not Taking Time Off
Yeah. You read that right!
As a fitness professional you’re used to working in other people’s leisure time. That’s when the most classes, sessions, and workshops are scheduled for.
And this can create a habit where you don’t respect (or make time for) your own leisure time. You know, a bit of chill time where you can unwind and recharge.
There’s a lot of research to suggest that “lazy time” can help with productivity, efficiency, and working towards a goal over the long-term.
It’s tough to bring your A-game when you’re tired and burned out. Plan in rest and take a load off everyone once in a while. You’ll be able to work harder in the long run because of it!
Wrapping This Up…
If you want to build a more successful fitness business, you’ll need to eliminate these 6 mistakes:
- Not having a clear goal
- Not having a well-defined audience
- Not being consistent
- Not creating systems
- Not managing your finances
- Not taking time off
Do you have questions about anything you’ve read here? Share them with us over on Twitter or Instagram!
