Open a gym business
It might seem obvious but what's actually stopping you from opening a gym - your very own temple to health and fitness!
You'll need some small seed investment to open a gym, but boutique gyms are all the rage right now, with the ability to offer a more tailored, personal approach to your customers. Boutique also means the ability to charge a premium, so if you get your sums right then you can survive and thrive with fewer customers than the more mainstream offerings in your town.
Opening a boutique gym allows you to start with a small customer base and gradually increase your range of services and support. It also means you get to spend more time one to one with your customers, building up a real rapport, and greater word of mouth and loyalty. This reputation as a quality business for fitness will also help you develop strong and stable revenue streams alongside the ability to upsell health products to diversify your income.
Make a success of running your gym with a great brand and reputation and you then have the potential to open more boutique gyms in your city, or to think about going bigger in terms of size and scope or expansion beyond your city.
Become a personal trainer
Whether you decide to run PT sessions out of your gym, home, or customer locations, starting a personal training business is a great way to become a fitness entrepreneur.
If you're coming from a background where you have a great body, an interest in health and fitness, and like the flexibility of working with clients at times that suit your routine, then you're already halfway there!
Saying you want to be a personal trainer, takes more than just helping people work out though, so we'd also recommend taking some time to learn the ropes of exactly what's involved to support your customers’ targets and goals.
This could be through online personal trainer courses, shadowing friends in the fitness industry, or joining a gym and signing up for other personal trainers classes. There's no better way of learning fitness coaching than going through the process yourself, plus you can research how and where you'd improve your offering and pitch your own brand and business.
Start online personal training
Whether it's COVID related or just the general direction of the world moving online, virtual health and fitness has exploded over the past few years.
From a customer’s point of view, there's a strong move towards seeking convenience and flexibility and you can meet demand by offering live personal training classes or through video on demand.
Like most online offerings, you'll need to make sure your online personal training business is well branded, slick, and able to offer something that users can't get anywhere else online for free. You'll need to make sure it's professionally run and able to offer a 360 support package in terms of lifestyle and aftercare to make your customers come back to you session, after session.
Our advice if possible would be to start with a hybrid of online personal training and offline coaching, as you'll learn a lot more from your potential clients by spending time with them and perfecting your services before taking them to a larger virtual personal training online session.
Become a fitness consultant
Consultancy is often the holy grail in terms of income. It's the perfect opportunity to really sweat (pun kind of intended here...) your knowledge and experience to earn high, flexible, and, usually spontaneous income.
Starting a business as a fitness consultant could take many forms but is probably best thought of as being a side-hustle that ties into the many other busy things you've got going on in your life.
The key to being a successful fitness consultant is to really put yourself out there in owning this space, which means a great online presence, high-quality brand, and a direct call to action that you're exactly who people should hire if fitness and health experts are needed for short term fitness jobs.
There are many fitness jobs to be had in this area such as working with famous celebrities, movie productions, or adding value to other connected businesses such as health, wellness, and nutrition. You could also take on roles within governments and big businesses, giving advice, and setting up programs to help their audiences and staff lose weight or just generally live a healthier and happier life.
Run a nutrition, diet and wellness business
Yes, getting ripped, bulking up, and looking toned is all well and good, but usually, that's just half of a complex puzzle. Ultimately for a lot of people, eating a healthier diet and learning about different food combinations and their health benefits is something that should go simultaneously with hitting the gym.
Quite often diet and nutrition can be forgotten about in the noise of protein shakes and eight chicken breasts a day...So maybe here's the opportunity in terms of creating a nutrition business that runs alongside your personal trainer business.
Or maybe you could go it alone as a health entrepreneur, building up a relationship with another fellow personal trainer and offering the full package to each other’s customers.
From in real life meets, to online resources, diet plans, cookery schools and themed programs, a health and nutrition-based business could be an amazing opportunity to start a profitable and successful, scalable enterprise.
If you develop a customer base that subscribes to your services and sees your relationship as important as hitting the gym a few times a week, then you have a solid foundation to build a health and fitness business with repeat recurring revenue and high word of mouth potential.
Developing a health focused program and lifestyle packages
Speaking of programs, there's so much potential to target and go after the customers you want to work with on a daily basis.
From packages designed for better overall health and focused strength in football, tennis, golf (and anything else you can think of...) you have the potential to tap into short booster packages or long-term commitments that are specifically targeted at the sports you're able to specialise in.
Further coaching packages and fitness programs can be developed around customers’ aims and goals such as 'one month to a vacation body' or 'one month to lose 10 pounds'. You could even help patients recover from certain illnesses and injuries.
Developing regular packages for age-related customers such as 'Fitness in your 60's' is also a great way to target a potential high net worth customer base. A regular weekly fitness class will keep them engaged, offering you the chance for more repeat revenue week to week.
The route to success in all this is in specialisation. Work out who your target audience is, refine your offerings, and market to them so as they know you exist. Gain that customer feedback about what their requirements are and further refine the logistics so as you're running a slick and profitable machine - then sit back and watch the money roll in!
Start a fitness business on Instagram
You may find yourself asking how to start a fitness business on Instagram. Or you might think an Instagram fitness business is the worst idea in the world.
However, love it or hate it, Instagram has turned into one of the biggest storefronts in the entire world. In fact, alongside those ever rarer organic pictures from friends and family, millions of dollars are being spent daily with the constant noise and hustle from micro-influencers, who all have something to promote through their affiliate links.
'Everyone has to eat' as the saying goes, so if that's their way of working things out then power to them, however, if you're personally putting your brand and reputation on the line by using Instagram to sell fitness products then make sure you do it a non-spammy way that doesn't take away from your hard work of building your personal fitness business.
Use best practices so as you're offering value to your Instagram audience, and look at where the opportunity exists to sell high volumes of quality fitness products and health services through quality and scarcity. Skip the daily sales posts and avoid your hard-earned customer base unfollowing you in a skip if you're getting too pushy.
Our advice from chatting with many fitness experts is to mainly use Instagram as a marketing platform for your own services. Too many free fitness sessions can lead to a decrease in perceived value of your own brand. So pick and choose when you use social media to give you a boost, but ultimately you want to be building out your own followers on your own platform.
Health and wellness retreats
Everyone likes to get away and by setting up a fitness, health, and wellness retreat, you could bring your audience to an incredible weekend (or longer) that they'll want to repeat, repeat and repeat again.
The beauty of retreats is the ability to put together packages that holistically support health, body, and mind. It's an escape from the 'real world' with actual tangible benefits attracted to them.
Whether you choose to set up general health and wellness retreats or you like the idea of themed fitness weekends with goals and benefits, think about what the demand is like and then start slowly. It could be that you can find a location that acts as a day-long retreat for some of your loyal customers (think a spa 2.0), whilst you also run lengthier programs for customers who are more flexible with their time.
Referrals as a fitness entrepreneur
Network like a champion and you could potentially develop a seriously lucrative referrals business in terms of affiliates and repeat referrals.
It goes without saying that someone who attends your training and fitness programs, may also be interested in buying supplements from you or your friends. It could be that your customers have just had an intense week of cross-training or lifting weights, but now you have the solution by offering the services of a masseuse who can ease away their aches and pains. Customers needing to stretch properly after class? Why not add some yoga classes that you've recommended them to!
People buy from other people due to strong word of mouth recommendations. Work on your core business and reputation and the opportunity to develop further revenue streams will open up infinitely.
Online fitness courses, videos and podcasting
By saving this tip till last, we feel it ties in nicely to our overall vibe of encouraging you to develop your key services, brand, and reputation first, then looking for ways to maximise your potential revenue and upsell.
Once you have that customer trust, there's so much potential to keep them connected to you with regularly updated online and video fitness courses, fitness podcasts, and community initiatives that bring fellow gym heads together.
The amazing thing about online video courses is the huge potential reach on offer as you make one video and then sell it a million times over. You can genuinely start to think global as opposed to local and as more revenue comes in, you can improve the production values and content.
As we enter the creator and passion economy, genuine, skills-laden experts are rightfully starting to be paid for their expertise, meaning you could start charging for your podcast, weekly community zoom meets, or anything else that keeps your customer base/community engaged.
Forget fitness jobs, become an endorphin-releasing entrepreneur
Whatever fitness business you do choose, you're in for an enjoyable ride where you get to fit an exciting new enterprise around your interests and lifestyle. You can work flexible hours, build your business as and when it suits you, and spend your time working online and offline towards your financial goals.
If you're looking for fitness jobs, a flexible side-hustle or to build a health-based business, then we hope you've been inspired by our list.
We can't wait to see what business you're going to create!
Until next time...keep winning...
Jonny Quirk
If you like what you've read here or have suggestions for other great jobs for fitness and gym-based entrepreneurs then please do hit me up on Twitter - I'm always around!
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