New York City Is My Gym
The economy sucks and everybody’s looking for a deal, right?
This includes my clients, and my friends’ clients, and basically every single person I’ve been trying to build business relationships with (and when you’re somebody’s personal trainer, it’s NEVER just a business relationship). And you know what?
The gyms are screwing us. I mean, check it out. We trainers do the work, we pull in the clients, we get them going, we help the poor bastards shed those pounds (and pounds, and pounds, and POUNDS) and the gyms give us a commission, then the next thing you know your client runs off (and bear in mind that their formerly-fat-behind is only running because of the work YOU did!) and joins another gym to take advantage of their joining offer!
This happened to a friend of mine, whose gym has monthly dues of about seventy bucks a month – she had a great relationship with her clients, they really liked her, blah blah blah, and then when they finished their one-year commitment to the gym, what happened? They saw a “no dues for three months” special at a competitor’s gym and ditched their membership – and my friend as their trainer!
So what does my friend do? The same thing any self-respecting businesswoman would do in this situation – she starts seeing this client on the sly, at a reduced rate (because now the gym that employs her isn’t getting a cut), and taking her through outdoor routines until she can get a separate space up and running.
And man. The routines she has this client doing are insane. They run up steps. They run down steps. You know how the steps of the post office across from Penn Station are usually used by tourists killing time before their train leaves? My friend makes that her (and her client’s) own personal field course. She’s got her client dodging around Baby Mamas in Harlem, Perfect-o-Moms in Park Slope, and Meatheads in the Meatpacking District.
But what else is she supposed to do? Slap some glasses and a mustache on her client and tell them to rejoin under a misspelled name? (And yes, that has happened, one of my friends works in sales and he gave another girl the ‘family and friends’ deal in order to keep her business when her initial one year commitment ran out). Obviously not, because a skinny girl in Weezer glasses and a Harpo ‘tasch is gonna raise a few eyebrows at the club’s check-in desk.
Running your own business on the sly is just something that sort of happens for trainers in New York. Got a client who can’t afford the gym’s full trainer rates? Cut ‘em a break and take a check under the table for half what the gym’s charging. Hey, it’s your time, isn’t it? And you’re helping the client out in the long run.
Not that that will make much of a difference when they run off to a competing gym with a better introductory offer, which is why I think my friend with the outdoor obstacle-course idea is on to the right track. Except in the winter, which in New York City gets pretty freaking cold, why not just move all the workouts to the outdoors? (Hey, it’s called a work OUT for a reason, right?) Avoid the obvious places and you could go far – why not check out Crown Heights with your yuppie client from TriBeCa on a Friday night? Bet those gunshots will make ‘em run faster!
Anybody out there have other ideas for great places to take clients?
Sent in by “Kelly Jacome”
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