Personal Trainer Jobs: Is The Gig Worth It?
You may think that every personal trainer gig is worth it. As a freelance personal trainer, you depend on client income to make a living. You need all the fitness gigs you can get, right? Well, sure, so long as all the gigs are a paying gigs.
When Fitness Clients Don’t Pay
Not only do you need your clients to pay you, but you need them to pay you on time. You have bills to pay, and when one or more of your clients refuses to pay you on time – or pay you at all – they make your life miserable. You have to learn to manage your budget on an unreliable income. And you can spend so much time tracking down payments from deadbeat clients that even if you end up getting paid in the end, you could have made more money per hour working at Starbucks or being a greeter at Wal-Mart.
When Demanding Fitness Clients Take All Your Time
Along a similar line, some fitness clients take up so much of your time that your per-hour earnings slip with every phone call, every email, or every rescheduled appointment.
As a personal trainer, you have an agreement to provide guidance to your client; but some customers want 24/7 access to your advice. And nothing is more frustrating than spending your time and gas money to get yourself to the gym, only to have your client fail to show. Whether he calls at the last minute or doesn’t bother to call at all, you still wasted your time. And now you have to reschedule this client, which may mean shuffling other appointments around to squeeze the make-up in, making your schedule later in the week even tighter.
When you have a long-standing relationship with a client, and if the client is usually very reliable, the occasional miss is easier to swallow. But some clients have no respect for your time or your carefully planned schedule. Some clients continue to miss and reschedule fitness appointments. Others continually bombard you with calls, questions, and complaints. Supposedly you spend eighty percent of your time with twenty percent of your clients. You don’t need that anxiety in your fitness business.
Schedule Efficiency Can Make Or Break Your Personal Trainer Business
Bottom line, you need to make money at this. If you are constantly chasing down client payments or rescheduled fitness appointments, that takes time that could be spent training other clients. When you’re in the freelance personal trainer business, you need efficiency to maximize your earnings per hour. Efficiency means having a tightly planned schedule and following it.
When it comes to freelance personal trainer jobs, your ability to maintain an efficient schedule can make or break your personal trainer business.
Deciding When To Cut The Strings With A Difficult Clients
At some point, you may need to consider letting that difficult client go. It’s a hard decision to make when clients are hard to come by in the first place. But time is money. Every minute you spend dealing with the client who costs you all your time is a minute you could have been spending marketing to or instructing a more reliable, cost-effective customer.
Letting go is risky; you could end up with no client at all. But that’s where effective fitness marketing comes in. With the right marketing plan, you can target reliable clients to replace the bad apples and fill the gaps, too, maximizing your earnings potential.
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