Thomas Plummer The Business of Training

Product Description

by Thomas Plummer

Thomas Plummer Training Business Video — Thomas Plummer Business Lecture — Training Gym Business

“Anyone can build a gym: A space and a pile of equipment, mirrors and a desk. Try our two-for-one special, this week only. Very few can build a gym business, manage it and make it flourish. Thomas Plummer can, and he will tell you how, and without fail or failure.” ~Dave Draper, Mr. America, Mr. World. Mr. Universe

If you’re like most fitness professionals, you got into this field because you’re passionate about fitness and helping people live better lives.

But if you’re thinking about owning and running your own fitness business, passion alone—no matter how great—is NOT enough to guarantee success.

Owning and running a successful fitness business requires more than passion, and it requires more than just being the world’s best trainer.

Whether you call it a gym, club or training center, at the end of the day, you’re running a fitness business.

And if you want to be a financially successful business owner, you have to be willing to run it like one…every single day.

This is often what keeps people struggling in their fitness businesses.

It’s not a lack of skill in training people or lack of passion for fitness, but a lack of mastery of the different business skills and systems required to run a gym. Skills such as raising capital, managing a staff, mastering marketing and sales, financial management and developing programming, which all have to be in place for the business to survive and prosper in a competitive market.

Mastering the business side of fitness is crucial, because the fitness business is one of the most challenging and intensive small businesses you can own. The typical risks and stress involved in running a small business means managing a staff, building a regular clientele, refining business systems, ensuring profitability, keeping an eye on the competition and handling changes in the market.

At the same time, you have to constantly refocus and refine the vision of the business compounded by the intense customer and service-oriented nature of the fitness industry.

These issues can take a serious toll on your physical, mental and emotional health, with long hours, stress and anxiety impacting both you and your family. Opening a fitness business also involves a significant degree of financial risk, often with large sums of money invested by you and your investors. This money can be lost if the business fails.

And if the risks and challenges associated with running a business weren’t enough by themselves, changes in the modern fitness industry have also added a new layer of complexity to the process.

Succeed in the Business of Fitness with the Help of an Expert

Thomas Plummer is the founder of the National Fitness Business Alliance (NFBA), and is a renowned fitness business expert, having put over 100,000 people through his business seminars. He’s also sold over 100,000 books on running and managing a fitness business.

Over the past 30 years, he’s helped all types of fitness business owners turn around their fortunes—from individual owners of small gyms, to some of the biggest chains in the world doing over $300 million a year in revenue.

Thom has been a trainer, salesperson, manager and owner of multiple fitness businesses. He understands all aspects of the business, and is keenly aware of how things have changed over the years.

Running and owning a fitness business is hard, but if there’s one person who can get you off to the best possible start, and give you the business advice you need to succeed in today’s fitness industry, it’s Thomas Plummer.

In The Business of Training, the fitness industry’s top business adviser will teach you how the training business REALLY works, how the industry is changing, and how to build a thriving and financially successful fitness business in this changing environment.

Learn What it Takes to Run a Successful Fitness Business

In The Business of Training, Thomas will show you what it takes to run a successful fitness business, including—

• How training has changed from the 1980s focus on bodybuilding, and how it will continue to change
• How to develop a profitable pricing system that makes your business sustainable and more attractive to clients
• How much successful businesses are making, and the business model they use that allows them to reach this income level
• How to build a business you can sell, and why you need to think about that upfront
• How to raise money to start your fitness business
• Negotiating property leases and purchases: what you should know
• What to consider when starting your own business
• How to put together a business plan
• Planning the layout of your gym: what size, equipment and facilities you need in order to be attractive to clients, and to maximize return on your investment
• How Thom runs his gyms: classes, trainers, sales, finance, and more
• How he markets gyms
• Your role and responsibility as a business owner
• and much more

The Business of Training is NOT aimed at personal trainers. This DVD is designed to equip people who own or are thinking of owning a fitness business with the knowledge and skills they need to be successful.

If you’re starting, or thinking of starting a fitness business, Thom will show you the everyday realities of the gym business, and will tell you what you need to consider and sort out BEFORE you open up the business. You’ll have more confidence when starting and running your fitness business, and save thousands in avoided mistakes.

If you already have a fitness business, but it isn’t producing the profit you need, The Business of Training will show you where you’re going wrong. He’ll give you the business models and systems you can start applying right now to start making money from a struggling gym.

Let Thom show you how to make more money, free up more time to spend with your family, take more vacations to relax and recharge, reach more people with your business, and build a thriving business that supports the lives of the trainers you employ.

What’s Covered in the Presentation

Disc One

Here’s what’s covered (including transcript page references)—

• How much the top gyms are making now, compared to leaders like Gold’s Gym 20 years ago. pg.1
• The mistake most passionate fitness business owners make when setting goals for their businesses. pg.2
• The biggest gift you can give to others as a fitness professional. pg.2
• How long people stay in the fitness field on average: the surprising statistic on pg.2
• The most ineffective way to make money in fitness, and six reasons why it stinks. pg.2-3
• The maximum number of hours you can be productive during a week. pg.4
• Why discounted packages can be the dumbest thing people do as trainers, and why you need to get rid of them. pg.4
• What percentage of your business should be one-on-one training. pg.4
• The one strategy Thom needs to see before he lets his clients buy a building or sign a lease. pg.5
• The number one thing he looks for when hiring a head trainer. pg.6
• One of the worst-dressed trainers Thomas has ever seen. pg.6
• What the fitness industry was like for trainers, gyms and clients in 1995. pg.6-7
• The goal that most trainers made their clients strive for in 1995. pg.7
• Why most of the massive national and international chains are failing. pg.7
• What people want from a gym and their trainers today. pg.7
• How clients have changed over the past few decades, and how that impacts what they want from fitness businesses. pg.8
• What kind of training gyms will be in greatest demand in the future. pg.8
• How much revenue one of Thom’s clients makes with his club in Atlanta: how much revenue he makes, how much he nets, how many trainers he hires, how much time he takes off each year, and how large his gym is. pg.8
• What Thomas is trying to do with one of the biggest chains in Europe who currently does over $300 million a year in revenue. pg.9
• The national average net profit for a big-box health club. pg.9
• What the training club of the future looks like: a drawing showing the kind of equipment and the layout. pg.9-10
• How many treadmills you should have, and why. pg.9
• What you need to sell in the training club of the future: what more and more clients will want from you. pg.10
• What you need to provide if you want clients to stick with you. pg.10
• What kind of pricing system you should consider. pg.11
• What will limit your fitness business. pg.11
• The problem with CrossFit’s business model. pg.11
• How long training memberships should run. pg.12
• How often membership payments should be made: What America does, and how Australian and European clubs do it differently. pg.12
• Thomas’ recommended pricing system broken down and explained. pg.12-13
• The business model Thom recommends that is used by Alwyn Cosgrove at Results Fitness, Rick Mayo in Atlanta, and hundreds of Thomas’ clients.
• Group personal training: the maximum number of people in a group, how often workouts change, how the sessions are structured, and what kind of exercises they do. pg.13
• What clients do in their workouts in one of Thomas’ women’s club with 1,500 members. pg.13
• The motto of his women’s club. pg.14
• How to create a large group that caters for clients with different ability levels. pg.14
• How you should train large groups, and how you should train small groups—and why they have different needs and structures. pg.14
• Which age group you should put in the large group, and which age group you should put in the smaller groups. pg.15
• How many times a month a client needs to come into your gym—any less than this and your chances of losing the client in the next 90 days dramatically increases. pg.15
• How to incentivize people to come to your gym more often. pg.15
• How much more it costs to find new clients instead of keeping current ones. pg.15
• What Thomas gets every group to do at the end of the session. pg.16
• How long sessions should be for clients to feel like that got their money’s worth. pg.16
• The dangers of running 60-minute back-to-back sessions. pg.16
• Which types of clients should go into one-on-one training. pg.16
• The only type of person you shouldn’t sign to a 12-month membership program. pg.16
• Should you make extra money selling bottles of water, pre-workout shakes, protein powders, and more? See pg.16-17
• What Thom sends to his high-end training clients every month to make sure they’re pampered and well looked after. pg.16-17
• How much Thomas charges top-end clients. pg.17
• How much you should spend on pampering top-end clients. pg.17
• How much independence and control you should give trainers you hire. pg.18
• How much Thomas pays his trainers and how it can vary. pg.18-19
• Why Thom doesn’t call his trainers ‘trainers,’ and what they are referred to instead. g.19
• The two categories trainers get divided into when hired by Thom’s gyms. pg.19
• How to fit and schedule all the different membership groups in a 3,000-square foot gym. pg.19
• The one thought usually holding people back from getting the help of others to leverage their own time. pg.20
• The only two things you should focus on every day as a fitness business owner. pg.20
• How you should treat clients. pg.21
• How to set yourself apart from other trainers to get known in the field. pg.22-23

Disc Two

Here’s what’s covered (including transcript page references)—

• The three ways most training gyms are financed. pg.23
• Building a business plan for a training gym: what you need. pg.23-24
• What you need to understand if you really want to get wealthy in the fitness business—it has nothing to do with your gym or how you run it. pg.24
• In which states you should and shouldn’t buy a building. pg.24
• The two reasons people fail to make money on real estate. pg.25
• Thinking of selling your business in the future? What will make your business attractive to buyers. pg.25-27
• Where you’ll find prospectus model Thomas used to raise over $300 million in capital. pg.25
• What should be in your prospectus. pg.25-26
• Who to give your prospectus to. pg.26
• What kind of car you should drive to your bank to maximize your chances of getting a loan. pg.27
• What to consider if you’re buying a used gym. pg.27
• What investors are and aren’t looking for when you bring a business deal to them—know this and make your proposal sound less risky, and more attractive to your potential investor. pg.27
• The two legal partnership groups usually set up for a business. pg.27-28
• Which end of the deal you make all of your money. pg.28
• Don’t get tricked by supposedly cheap rents: how to calculate the actual rent you’ll pay for a lease. pg.28
• How much you should spend on rent. pg.29
• The one thing that will probably separate you from wild financial success, and a mediocre living in the fitness business. pg.29
• Which items you need to negotiate in your lease, and where you should get help. pg.29-30
• The one thing you need on your lease—if you don’t have this, it’ll make it tough to sell your business in the future. pg.30
• What size gyms need locker rooms, how much they cost, and how big they typically are. pg.30
• The type of flooring Thom puts in his gyms. pg.30
• The only cardio equipment Thomas puts into his training gyms, and the only type of cardio he allows his clients to do. pg.30
• The minimum height your ceilings should be. pg.31
• How much reserve capital you should have to cover the things that go wrong. pg.31
• The type of marketing Thomas uses to promote his gyms. pg.31
• How much money you’ll need for marketing. pg.31
• Where to find everything you need to know on the training business—for free. pg.31
• Who you SHOULDN’T market your gym to. pg.31
• How much of the population have never set foot in a health club. pg.32
• The two big worries people have when deciding whether to join a gym. pg.32
• Who should talk to people considering signing up to your gym, and what they should talk about with prospects to successfully project your staff as professionals who understand what they want. pg.33-34
• The mistake almost everyone makes when writing a dynamic warm-up. pg.33
• How to help prospects avoid the embarrassment of having to say, “I can’t afford this.”
• Understand how your customers’ brains work, and how you should market to them: the book should you read. pg.34
• Should you use free trials in your gym? pg.34
• What you should offer twice a year to give people who are hesitant about going to a gym a first step into a longer commitment. pg.36
• An example advertisement for a fitness club. pg.36
• The next big thing replacing websites for attracting new members. pg.36

Get Your Copy Today

If you’re thinking of starting a fitness business, or would like to turn your existing fitness business around, there’s nobody better qualified to help you than Thomas Plummer. Get The Business of Training today, and equip yourself with the knowledge you need to start and manage a successful fitness business that gives you the lifestyle and income you want.