Phone coaching: a new way of training: empower client to greater results while doubling your income

When I think back on my first few years in my personal training business, I remember thinking how lucky I was to have clients who trained with me week after wee month and even year after year. Clients know, painfully Well, they need to exercise at least three times a week to get minimal results. I believed most of my clients would not exercise without my physical presence. I believed this was a good thing.

However, once I got a full load of clients, I realized that my income potential was being limited. There am only so many hours in a day and so many clients I can train and still be effective. And, I started to feel like an adult baby-sitter, standing there making sure my clients did what they already knew how to do. After several years of one-on one training, I started to get bored and burned out no matter how many new ways I learned to teach a bleep curl. I knew there had to be a way to earn more money and enjoy greater satisfaction in my work.

Everything changed for me six years ago when Beverly, one of my clients, called me one year after ceasing one-on-one personal training with me. Beverly became a producer. And when Beverly was working, she couldn't commit to regularly scheduled appointments for her workouts. When Beverly wasn't working, she couldn't afford my services. Beverly was frustrated because she had gained all the weight back she had lost when we worked together. She wanted to know if there was a way to overcome her financial and scheduling obstacles and get back on track with achieving her goals. I had an idea and neither one of us knew if it would work, but we were willing to give it a try.

Beverly already had a gym membership, a step bench, free weights, a heart rate monitor and an accelerometer--all of which she was not using. I told Beverly that the heart rate monitor and accelerometer would become her 24-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week personal trainers and we would have a 20-minute phone call once a week to progress her goals. I had Beverly document her goals and actual achievements on specially designed diaries including frequency of exercise, duration, mode (type of exercise), calories burned and heart rate and fax them to me a couple hours prior to the following week's phone session.

Within six weeks, Beverly lost 12 pounds and was exercising most every day of the week. She said she had never been so motivated to exercise and never felt such control over her results (believe me, Beverly had tried everything!). The independent, confidence building approach I used with Beverly got her automatically exercising on her own. We both felt like we had struck gold! 1 finally realized I could make more money effectively by utilizing my knowledge and skills to empower people and move them forward with their health and fitness programs without depending on my physical presence and to capitalize on it. Phone coaching was the answer!

Clients who said they used to find exercise boring and difficult said my Fitness by Phone[R] method made exercise a fun game of numbers. I was making much more money per hour (twice as much!) without travelling, while clients were paying one third of my monthly one on-one rates. This was a real win-win. My client base expanded, my clients got far better results, and my work became much more interesting. I had virtually no unpaid cancellations and I didn't have to work at ungodly hours! After all, anyone who is serious about her commitment can take a break for a 20-minute phone appointment once a week--no matter where she is--to get expert focus and direction on her fitness program.

Since 1995, I have introduced my Fitness by Phone (FBP) method of coaching to thousands and have licensees in 42 states and in Canada. Heather Moreno. one of our first Master FBP Coaches, worked as a personal trainer in Woodland Hills, California out of a gym doing "OK "for herself. However, she and her husband dreamed of moving to a community over 60 miles away. They knew they couldn't ever afford the move if she had to spend time building a client base all over again. Heather went through the training to become a FBP Coach and within a year developed a clientele large enough to make the move. Heather's business is now exclusively coaching by phone, coaching clients only eight hours a week and pulling in over $5,200 per month in coaching fees.

Amy Lundberg, a personal trainer from Minnesota, had just started her personal training business when she heard about FBP. Being pregnant with her second child, Amy knew she did not want to be getting up at the crack of dawn to train clients in their homes with a newborn and a toddler at her home without her. Amy, who now has over 50 FBP clients, quickly gained enough FBP clients to be coaching 3.5 hours a week. Amy says she would have needed 56 one-on-one sessions a month to earn the money she was making coaching clients by phone only 3.5 hours per week. Even more importantly, Amy says that her traditional personal training clients who converted to phone coaching are having much more success than they ever did as personal training clients.