How to Organize Your Home Office as a Trainer or Coach
COVID-19 has changed the way people live and do business. It has affected most businesses. However, personal fitness trainers and coaches are fortunate enough to have the freedom to run their business online from the comfort of their homes. But since they are not used to a home office, they may be confused and frustrated as they can’t organize their office. If you’re a new online fitness coach, here are a few tips that will help you organize your home office and get success in your online fitness coaching business.
Organization of Sales and Marketing
Form a System for Tracking Prospects
A big challenge while running an online fitness coaching business is the possibility of losing prospects. Just since they didn’t sign up immediately, it doesn’t mean they never will. Actually, it’s pretty common to get a prospect accompanied by 2-3 non-sales contacts before they decide to commit to a high-grade fitness coaching program.
Obviously, you can’t rely only on your memory about the prospects’ details. Gym managers and fitness coaches who try to do so usually miss their prospects. What you should do is:
Form a system for tracking the position of each prospect with a simple spreadsheet. You can save all the information pertaining to acquiring customers or analyzing trends. The information should ideally include the prospect’s name, basic contact information, source, date of the last visit, and response from that contact.
This will not only prevent you from forgetting anyone but also let you remember the individual personality of every person that visited you and follow up with the relevant tone. Thus, instead of sending a common message to everyone, you can use the last visit result to create a personalized message to which they are more likely to respond. A person who has already contacted you is easier to sign in than the one you’ve never met.
Keep Business and Personal Contact Info Separate
Many fitness coaches who work independently think that by using their personal phone number, email I.D., and social media accounts to run their business, they can save money and simplify things.
However, the truth is just the opposite. Things actually are simplified by compartmentalizing and by keeping your business life separated from your personal life.
Having separate accounts will help you maintain a balance between work and life, and will also give your business a much more professional look. And the best part is that you can do this by using inexpensive or even free services.
Phone
You can choose to have a new phone and business phone line from a wireless company without a lot of bells and whistles and pay much less. An even better option is to use Google Voice to get a different business phone number but still get calls on your personal device.
You can give that line its own voicemail message and since you’ll come to know that calls are coming to your business line, you can answer in a more professional way than saying just “hello?” Google Voice is extremely cheap.
Create an email account just for business and contact clients and sign up for services. This is an easy way to prevent important communications from getting lost among your other emails.
Email is also a great sign of professionalism. If you have a website, an email I.D. with your domain name is perfect. However, even a separate address from a popular domain like Gmail or Yahoo is better than your personal account.
Social Media
In the case of social media too, it’s ideal to create a separate page/profile for your business instead of your personal Instagram or Facebook account. Here you can focus more on your clients, promotions, and content. It’s alright to be seen and allow your followers to know you; still, it’s better to do so on your terms while keeping your personal information, political thoughts and activities that are not related to work.
Work Out a Testimonial Collection Process
When it comes to marketing your business, testimonials form a major part. What your existing clients say about you is usually trusted more by your prospective clients than what you say in your sales pitch.
You should have as much control over the messages your clients send as possible and there should be a steady flow of new ones that shows regularity and keep your page fresh.
For added efficiency, you’ll want to have a pre-planned schedule regarding when to request a review or testimonial from a client and set up an automatic reminder for when to ask for one. 60 to 90 days during their training are a good time window for checking with the clients and making a request. This time window is short enough to make them excited about the way you’re training them and long enough at the same time for letting them notice measurable progress.
Systemize Coaching
Conduct Initial and Regular Fitness Evaluations
Hallmarks of a professional personal fitness trainer or coach are an assessable gauge of success and knowing what you’re training and why you’re training it. This can be done by performing evaluations of your clients’ performance initially as well as on a regular basis thereafter.
Get Workout Tracking Software
Regarding the training you give to your clients, the old-school methods like bodyweight exercises and barbell training are still unbeatable. However, regarding your organization system, you always have a scope for renovation.
Nowadays, personal fitness trainers and coaches can do much better than using worn-out notebooks that they have to hunt through to find previous stats, and that always had a risk of losing. Today, new, innovative software tools are available with which you can build and deliver workouts through a custom Web and mobile app created for fulfilling your unique needs.
Keep Educating Yourself
Holding a recognized Personal Fitness Trainer Certification is necessary in the fitness sector. However, it’s equally important to recertify and get continuing education. You can reduce the load of these additional expenses on your bank account and your psyche by planning ahead and creating a calendar of the required activities.
Research about what you’ll need in advance and plan those tasks between recertification periods. This will protect you from missing your deadlines or getting overwhelmed.
Getting Started
Hopefully, these tips will help you organize your home office of personal fitness coaching business, and it will help you grow your business even during the coronavirus lockdown period.
Check out this list of fitness careers that let you follow your dreams which includes what it takes to start a career in personal fitness training. This is your most affordable and fastest way to become a highly qualified personal trainer.
Is your re-certification coming up? Learn more about earning your CEU credits. You can find the full list of CEU courses here.
If you are ready to start your online personal training or coaching business, don’t forget to learn more about our online coaching course.
One of the most popular and fastest ways to get started working with clients while you travel is to coach/train online. You will want to learn more about GymGo. GymGo lets you work with clients and make money in different ways: online, live-streaming virtual training & on-demand training. Use our link to get yourself a free 14-day trial >>> https://www.gymgo.com/nesta
Remember, NESTA and Spencer Institute coaching programs are open to anyone with a desire to learn and help others. There are no prerequisites!
That’s it for now. Take action!
PS: Click here to see many helpful business/career resources
NOTE: When you take your fitness business home, you can also work with clients outdoors as you operate your business from your kitchen table and even coach clients online from home.
