How to Turn Your Side Business into Your Main Personal Training Business

Someone once asked me, “Can I start an online personal training business and have an in-person personal training business at the same time?”

The answer is yes, but here’s the real question: how are you going to manage your energy? Do you have the ability to manage your online energy and your offline energy?

When you’re with your clients in your gym working one-on-one, you’re giving a lot of energy to them. You’re coaching them. You’re spotting them. You’re encouraging them, motivating them. But juggling a second business at the same time could really exhaust you.

The best advice I can give you to protect your energy and fully transition is this: treat them as two separate businesses. Here’s what I mean by that.

 

Start at 80%/20%

My friend Craig Ballantyne calls it “having a Friday night project”. Let’s say that your in-person personal training business is what’s paying the bills right now. If that’s the case, focus 80% of your time on your in-person personal training business and then 20% of your time on building your online business.

What I mean by that is maybe you dedicate Fridays after 4:00 pm to working on your online business. That’s when you start creating social media videos, social media posts, a new landing page(s), and ads to run on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Really, you’re reaching outside of your local circle and outside of your community to find potential online clients.

That’s great, but how does that protect your energy and allow you to give your all to both businesses?

 

Protect Your Energy

If every Friday night, let’s say from 4:00 pm to 9:00 pm, you focus on your online business, and if you spend the remaining 80% of your time growing your offline or in-person training business, now you can actually manage your energy well.

The biggest problem I see is when people go, “I want to run an online personal training, but I still have my one-on-one personal training business that’s in-person,” and they’re training two clients in-person and then go behind their laptop or on their iPhone and do some online stuff and then go train one more person and then go back to their laptop and then go train three more people…

You can’t manage your energy well that way. You’re going to get exhausted. Soon, you’re going to get frustrated and want to give up.

 

From Side Hustle to Full-Time Business

80% of the time, you focus on the thing that’s making you the most money now, which is your offline business, your one-on-one in-person or your group personal training business. 20% of the time, or on a Friday night from 4:00 pm to 9:00 pm, you start doing the things that will build a foundation for your online business.

Then over time, it goes to 70%/30%. Then it goes 60%/40%, and then to 50%/50%. Before you know it, you’re spending more time on your online business and only working with your most preferred, funnest, coolest in-person one-on-one clients.

Before long, you’re 100%-in on your online business and you’ve got this lifestyle of freedom, and you can be anywhere you want in the world and work off your laptop and your iPhone and create online workouts and nutrition programs to help clients all over the world.

But first, you have to balance both businesses and protect your energy. Only then can you transition into running the personal training business that you’re truly passionate about.

Simple enough?

Committed to your success,

Bedros