Volo Innovations

It’s been nearly ten years since my partner Barry and I opened our own personal training studio. Like all trainers, we believed that running our own facility would be better than working for others – and it is!

But we quickly realized that for our business to succeed, to grow and to prosper we would need to be more than just great trainers. We would have to become – Business People.

Not the role most fitness professionals want for themselves! Our passion is for training, for working with our clients, seeing their health, their fitness and their lives improve. Every minute spent on bookkeeping or scheduling was a minute stolen from the gym. Accounting and data entry were sapping our energy.

If this sounds like you I have some very good news. It is possible to keep doing the training you love AND run a successful, profitable business at the same time. But you need the right systems in place to streamline your operations.

Whatever business you’re in the two biggest challenges are to control scheduling and to control billing. Time and money. Lose track of these and your chances of succeeding in a competitive business like ours are not good to say the least.

Choosing software to help you run your business is a big decision.

There are a lot of options out there and it is a bit overwhelming. Figuring out what questions you need to ask, what features you need and what is going to make your life easier and help improve your revenues.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Do you work day to day in your business?

If you do then you will be wearing lots of different hats and you will want to make sure the software has an interface that you are comfortable with for the day to day activities like booking appointments or making a sale as well as the reporting options that you will need when you have your owner/manager hat on.

• Do you offer services like personal training, massage and group training that needs to be tracked accurately to billing?

The more services that you offer the more challenging it can be to ensure accurate tracking of sessions to billing. You may sell packages for training, do monthly memberships and bill your corporate group training contracts at the end of the month. Make sure that the software that you choose can handle the different ways that you have set up your business in as few clicks of the mouse as possible. Be aware the number of clicks to complete daily activities can add up so think about that when you are assessing software.

• Do you want online software or desktop software?

This is a matter of what you are comfortable with and if you want to be able to run your business from anywhere. Do you want to be able to go on holiday and still run your monthly billing? If so then online might be the better choice for you, if you live in a remote area with poor internet connectivity then maybe not.

• Do you want to give your members control of their schedules?

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you finish training clients or teaching classes and realize that you have 4 emails, 2 voicemails and 3 texts from clients that need to change their schedules? If you can relate to this then using online software that has a member portal that you can set what your members are allowed to do will save you a lot of time.

• Are you primarily membership based?

Do you need the ability to check members in through a card scanner? Are you 24 hour access? Can the software you are looking at help you with these or will it have to be separate? When a member checks in will you be notified if they have a valid membership or unpaid invoices? You want software that will handle all components of your business in one. As soon as you start having to work with multiple pieces of software there is room for error.

• Do you want to accept credit card, is it critical that it is integrated with your software?

By having your credit card processing integrated into your software ensures more accurate data entry, if you are using a separate terminal you or your staff will need to manually enter the data into your software. Some online software will have an integrated e-store for you to use when you sign up for integrated credit card processing.

• Do you want to handle failed payments with your clients or do you want a debt collection service?

None of us like being a debt collector however you need to think about how big your business is, how close you are with your clients/members and how much you are willing to pay for this service. Typically companies that offer this as part of their software handle all of your billing and charge you a higher percentage on all of your payment processing regardless of whether or not the transaction fails. If you are not working day to day with your clients this might be a good solution for you.

I hope this helps you think about what you need to ask yourself so that you can make sure that the software that you are choosing is the right fit for you and your business.

To learn more about Volo, our online scheduling, billing and member management software enter your name below and we will email you the pre-recorded webinar to check out or call us for a private demo at 1-866-303-1038.

I hope that everything one has taken a moment to be thankful for the freedoms that we have in our countries. My question to you today is what are you doing with that freedom?

Running your own business grants you independence from a job provided you set it up correctly and have the systems in place that allow you the freedom to run your own fitness business without becoming a slave to the clients. This can be tricky at times because we want our clients to have success and we feel obligated to make times work in our schedules because we don’t want them to miss an appointment. While it is great to have that level of dedication to your clients that can also backfire on you as they can grow to assume that you will drop whatever it is you have scheduled to look after them.

3 quick tips to make sure you are setting up your fitness business to ensure your independence:

1. Online scheduling allows the clients to go online and find times that you have marked as available without them looking over your should at your schedule. They won’t know that you aren’t available because you have scheduled a nap all they know is that you aren’t available. I know a lot of Personal Trainers that when we first talk about online scheduling they are nervous to give up the control but if they only open up the times they want clients to be able to schedule in and they book all their regulars into their time slots this can really streamline your fitness business and allow your clients some control to deal with scheduling issues when it is convenient for you.
2. More rules than exceptions, this is a funny one but the more companies that I set up with Volo, our online scheduling, billing and member management software, the more I realize that some business have create a pricing structure that is so complicated due to the fact that they have these packages that they sell but almost every single person that they work with has an exception for 1 reason or another. There will always be exceptions but try to make them few and far between to save yourself a lot of administrative headaches.
3. Never stop learning everyday you can learn something new that will help you grow as a person, as fitness professional and as a business leader. Subscribe to blogs from the fitness industry, marketing industry, business leaders anyone that you might be able to pick up a kernel of information that you can add to your box of tools. As humans our potential knows no bounds so don’t limit yourself.

Yes when you first start any business you will be working long hours getting new clients, putting together marketing efforts, attending networking events with other business professionals attending education conferences to learn more about your craft but despite all of the work you are achieving a new level of independence. The independence to live your life the way that you want!

It's 10pm on Sunday night and your cell phone is still ringing, it's another client asking about your bootcamp fitness schedule or wanting to schedule their first personal training appointment. To those just starting in the fitness industry this sounds fantastic; people want to schedule appointments with you.

Schedules by their very nature are dynamic and as such they often change and require some supervision. The sooner you can get on top of this the better your business will run and your customer satisfaction will excel.

If the above scenario is annoying/frustrating to you I can guarantee that when your client trying to schedule their training and fitness it is 10x more annoying/frustrating to get a answering machine or worse to just not get a response.

Your customers want access to your services, they want to know when these services are available and they want to schedule them when it is convenient for them. It is easy to skip working out and we all know that our clients don't need any excuse to not make it in so the more accessible you can make it for them to book their appointment and check their fitness schedules the better of their experience and satisfaction will be.

So how do you give your clients 24 hour access to your schedules yet still have some private time? The answer is simple use Volo!!

This is exactly what Volo was designed for to streamline your business and improve customer service. Volo handles all of your scheduling needs and makes you more money. How do we make you more money? Easy, by providing an easy to use scheduling software that your clients, customers and campers can all access 24hrs a day 7 days a week. Add all of the payment options and automated billing features and Volo will free up hours of your time each week that you can spend teaching, writing that fitness book or training for your next Ironman race. No more 10pm phone calls on Sunday night, no need to be on email during your movie date.

Schedules run our lives in the fitness industry whether it is private training, bootcamps, nutritional counselling or even massage, everything in our business life involves a schedule. Even the membership gyms need to know when members are coming, why, to know the best time to schedule services and classes.

If you can relate to this situation and you want to have a solution then check out all Volo can do for your business. From all your scheduling needs to managing you billing, invoicing and operations we have a solution for you. All you need to do is decide if you are ready to be a personal trainer or a fitness professional.

Check out our pre-recorded webinar now:

Guest blog posting by Jason Van Dyke, CEO/president of FIZIO.

FIZIO is a new web based service for Health Care Professionals which gives them the unique ability to create and send a customized and personalized video home exercise program to their clients. The FIZIO database currently has over 700 video clips to choose from. New videos can be added by request, or even filmed and uploaded by members themselves for a truly customized approach

"Wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost." President Barack Obama

The Obama administration has identified this ideology as one of the core factors in their effort to improve the current United States health care system. Near the top of the President's agenda is the following statement:

"Lower Health Care Costs by Investing in Electronic Information Technology Systems: Use health information technology to lower the cost of health care. Invest $10 billion a year over the next five years to move the U.S. health care system to broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems, including electronic health records."

This proposed $10 billion/year investment by the government of the United States outlines the vital role that technology will play in the future advancement of our health and wellness industries.

If you are a health and wellness professional then this should be a strong hint to you that now is the time to begin finding new ways to harness technological advances to improve your business. As always, the most important thing to do is to identify technologies which are effective, efficient, and affordable. This is an exciting time with new services, products, and tools being developed on a daily basis. Identifying new technologies which can save you time, money and make you more profitable, could be the difference between a successful business and a failure.

It is up to each and every one of us to begin to examine ways that we can improve the quality and efficiency of our care, and to identify current technological advances that can help us do this without spending more money.

Simple but effective ways to utilize technological advances to improve your business and cut costs include:

• Save money on ink and paper by "considering the environment before you print," or better yet, make the move to a paperless system in your clinic.
• Save on paper and postage by keeping in contact with your clients via email rather than sending out "thank you" or "customer feedback survey" postcards.
• Utilize an online customer billing, management and scheduling service such as Volo to help you save time and improve efficiency.
• Save money on travel and gas by utilizing online services like Skype or GoToMeeting for your next company meeting.
• Demonstrate your professionalism and impress your clients by utilizing a service like FIZIO to create and send a customized and personalized video home exercise program to your next client. This site allows you to use the current videos on the site or even upload your own videos to create a truly personalized experience for both you and your clients.

Before you start spending money on ways to improve your business, talk to your clients or create a survey, using an online survey company like Survey Monkey,  to identify the most important and common concerns. Once you identify the weak and/or problem areas in your business, then you can search for a technological advancement that will help you improve upon your deficiencies, making your business stronger.

Jason Van Dyke, CEO/president of FIZIO.

Join us for a joint webinar with Volo and Fizio on June 3rd at 12 noon PST/ 3pm EST. Register now!

There are many different ways to grow your fitness business like networking, business management and marketing or creating referral systems. Generally any personal trainer can implement these concepts into their fitness business almost instantly.

One thing that people have trouble implementing, but it is a great way to take your business to the next level, is public speaking.

Now you may speak in front of people all day long but you may not realize that doing a public speaking event and teaching private or group exercise class are totally different.

1) In group exercise you are in your zone, you are the leader everyone is following you and they do as you say, sure some may not and some may do it poorly but this is not even going to register with you when you are in the zone. In public speaking the people are there for information not instruction this is a key difference because they will feel more justified in challenging your information and asking you questions on how you know this.

Best advice; make sure you are an expert before you do a talk on a subject, do research know where the information comes from and be prepared to defend what you are saying- without getting defensive.

2) In group exercise people have signed up and even paid to be there or it is part of a membership but even a person who does not like a class or training session will very rarely leave because they feel an obligation to stay because they want to get fit, even if they do not like it. In public speaking this could not be any more the opposite, people feel compelled to leave they actually want to go and do something else have lunch, make a phone call or even take a nap some will even do this during your talk.

Best advice; you need to really WOW them into staying and listening to you your topic and delivery needs to be clean, clear and compelling in other words tell a story that elicits emotion.

3) In group exercise you can cover up a screw up easily, if you ask people do something and you are demonstrating a different exercise you can say that you are testing them or that you did not say 'Simon Says'. However in public speaking once it is out there it is out there and you cannot take it back.

Best advice; own it and correct yourself, always correct it if you realize the mistake.

4) Fitness has ambiance there is music, action happening around you and even video or TV playing all of these provide a distraction for the client and they will even focus more on you as a result. Public speaking does not have this advantage if you are lucky the projector will work and you can have a slide deck going but do not count on this any good presentation needs to be able to go without a side show just in case.

Best advice: set the mood prior to the talk by being early and set up before the people, then play some music on a portable player and always have handouts just in case the projector does not work.

5) In fitness if a person is breathing heavy, sweating and wanting to lie down in complete exhaustion you have done your job. In public speaking they are probably having a heart attack and that is never good but luckily if you are up to date on your CPR you may save them and still get good reviews on the talk. Seriously the key here is in fitness class a person is participating and therefore unable to judge and in some extreme classes even talk back to you but public speaking has an opposite effect these participants are sitting and fidgeting and looking for a reason to move.

Best advice; is to let them, get them up for a stretch move them around the other option is to make them laugh because laughter allows people to feel comfortable and at ease with what you are saying. Also keep your CPR up to date just in case.

Practice, practice. practice get your friends and family together and run through the entire talk without restarting. Public speaking is probably one of the top ways for any fitness professional to become known as an expert in their field it can lead to clients, referrals and future jobs like writing fitness column in a company news letter. In business you have to earn trust and credibility and the only way to do this is to put yourself out there and start to build a reputation as the go to person for fitness information in your area.

Two things that I feel are often not taught and that I talk about with every new trainer in our gym are absolutes and justifications. One, absolutes, you need to avoid the other, justifications, you need to be able to do no matter what.

At our personal training studio we do an active interview for new trainers, any prospective trainer, no matter how much experience they have, has to put one of the owners through a work out. We don't pretend to be someone we're not but we ask the trainer how they would modify an exercise for a person with a specific health consideration.

These questions are as much about finding out what the personal trainer knows but are also designed to see if they are an absolute type of trainer. An absolute trainer tends to say things like "the best exercise is" or "I like this exercise" or "you can't do that" all of which are absolute answers. An absolute leaves you no room to move or progress and they cause a client to think that there is only one answer to their problems.

In fitness there are not really any absolutes, more often we have recommendations and progressions to exercise, just because a person herniated a disk does not mean they can never do squats it may mean they need to build back up through a progression that is safe and right for them and their fitness level.

Trainer may take a different approach to the same problem and this leadsus to justification. A great trainer will always know why they have a client do an exercise, if you are asked why you are doing something from a client you better be able to answer it and make it relevant to the client.

Years ago I had a young female client that was dating a NHL hockey player and she came in one day and said she wants to stop doing squats.

I of course asked why and her reply was that her NHL boyfriend said that squats are for athletes and that they will make her butt bigger. I reminded her that she wanted to fit into a specific pair of jeans that had become baggy in the butt therefore squats are good because they will help create some muscle to fill out her pants. The real reason we did squats was she had a weakness in her hips that was causing a knee tracking issue and knee pain, so the weight was never going to get heavy, but by justifying it for her on her terms made it better than me having to stop doing squats with her and finding an alternative exercise.

How you run your fitness business is the same as how you train your clients, are you an absolute or a justification type business person? When you set an absolute you make it hard for you to adapt to the ever changing landscape of business. So I hope that you can decide on a course of action in your business, justify why you are doing the things that you are doing and know that things may change in the future and so may your business. Leave the door open to see where you might end up going next!

One of the features Volo provides to help with member management is the member's portal. This is another way to streamline your  fitness business by alleviating some of the work on your end.The scheduling can be done online by your members freeing up valuable time for you.

Firstly, what is the member’s portal? It is the site in which your members can log into (depending on the permissions you allow):

• Sign up as a member
• View the schedule(s)
• Book themselves into a class/appointment
• Cancel if they can't make it
• Purchase sessions and/or packages
• Update their address/contact information
• Look at all their finished activities and their upcoming activities
• View all invoices (outstanding and paid)

The benefit of setting up a member portal is to allow the member to do some of the administration on their own.

By using the member portal, you can also have prospective members go to your website to get started with the basic tasks such as:

• Sign up as a member
• Purchase sessions 
• Book themselves into the class all on their own without you being involved.

The steps to creating your member's portal are as follows:

1. Setup the member permissions for each schedule. To do this go to Setup - Schedules - and click on Member Permissions

2. Next you'll need to turn on the option if you want non members to be able to sign up on their own. To do this go to Setup - Settings - Club Settings - and click on the box next to 'Allow Self Registration'

3. You will then need to create the login box for your website. The script to do this is in the Help portal. Here is the link to the article on how to add the script.

Setting up the member portal will help automate your business and allow information to be more readily available for your members while freeing up valuable time for you to use to get new clients! 

I hope I have waited an appropriate amount of time to discuss this hot topic. I am not here to debate the pros and cons of this historic piece of legislation but instead to look at what opportunities it may offer.

As a fitness professional and entrepreneur I like to look at all legislation from those two perspectives, first as a fitness professional does this new law effect me or my clients and then as an entrepreneur, how does this new law change my business and what are the opportunities it creates. The last point is often over looked when a change is introduced and this is a shame because the glass should always be half full. It is easy and often too much so to just look for the negative and jump on the ‘I hate this band wagon'. I say we leave that for Fox News and CNN. Most obstacles and changes in life present new and often better opportunities for a serial entrepreneur.

Whenever any government passes a bill or there is a vote on legislation you want to look at it as a potential business opportunity. In the new health care reform there is a provision that could allow the savvy fitness entrepreneur an opening.
One part of this current legislation allows for a discount on insurance premiums, up to 50%, for persons that are taking part in a wellness program. Talk about opportunity, every fitness company and corporate wellness company should be running to human resource departments and say "I am going to save you huge amounts of money." do you want to know how?

A second opportunity is the 15 billion dollar allotment towards prevention and wellness services. Medicare will provide one free annual visit that includes a health risk assessment and a personalized 5-10 year prevention plan. Fitness and wellness companies must be excited at the potential opportunities to expand their services from the employer to the individual market.

So no matter if you are a pro or con person it is time to take off the glasses that scrutinize and put on a clearer pair of opportunity glasses and go out and build a new wellness service package that will assist to propel your business to excellence. The best part is that our Volo software will be there to assist you. You can create new schedules and appointments that will track these offerings and will ensure accurate billing for all new services.

So no matter what you decide to do with the new legislation this is a great opportunity for your fitness business and a great opportunity for all the people in the US.

Guest Blog by Joe Carabase

Why make things harder than they have to be? Less work is more favorable than more work for the same result. Yet most fitness professionals (including myself up until recently) try to reinvent the wheel over and over rather than leverage what is already created.

Whether the bulk of your clientele are athletes looking to improve their performance or are busy people looking to burn fat, you are probably repeating yourself multiple times a day through multiple communication channels e.g in person, email, video etc.

Take a step back, jump outside your business and ask yourself how can I do this more efficiently?

My new mantra is to leverage everything. Here are some examples of leveraging that has allowed my business to expand while saving me a ton of time:

• Prospect within current clients: Within your clientele base and personal network, there are people will nutritional needs (both meal plans and supplements), who work at big companies, who are a part of social groups etc., do your clients know ALL the services you offer? Have you asked for referrals? Speaking opportunities?
• Pay attention to problems and create solutions: I would literally spend hours designing an info product, guessing what I thought people would want out of a product rather than listening to my clients problems. Leverage people who are asking for a solution and make that solution accessible to others.
• Create videos for the great content you put out: Every day we answer the same questions, we design killer routines etc. Record a small clip of a routine or of you answering a question. Not only will it be useful to share with all your clients, you can now send it to a website like viddler or youtube to offer it to the public. The Flip Mini Video Cam makes creating and editing videos extremely easy.
• Save emails and organize workouts: I am very personable to all my clients but I also make a conscious effort to save all emails with generic info such as maintenance workouts, info on programs/boot camps etc. Rather than writing new cardio workouts over and over for different clients, save the cardio workouts on in a customized template in an organized folder

Be aware of everything you are doing: can you leverage it? If not, then is it worth creating?

Joe is a certified personal trainer through the Aerobic and Fitness Association of America (AFAA), and the American Council on Exercise (ACE). Joe also teaches personal training at Branford Hall Institute through NASM and ACE. He earned a degree in Business Administration from the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts of Amherst. He is the owner of Carabase Training.com, specializing in online and on-site training programs for busy people

Seth Godin wrote a recent blog on what to do if you have bad teachers that really struck me as an interesting topic. Since fitness professionals are consummate teachers and as personal trainers are required to do continuing education it made me think of what the fitness industry could learn from teachers.

First let's look at the similarities between teaching and training people:

1.  People are putting their trust in you that you have the latest and greatest knowledge
   
   
2. The people attending your class or appointment are more nervous then you are
   
   
3. Everyone wants to do really well and will sometimes try to impress you with their knowledge
   
   
4. There is not just one way to teach and each person has their unique way of learning
   
   
5. People have an end goal in mind when they sign up
   

So how do fitness professionals handle the student teacher relationship?

1. Remember that there is not one way to teach; people learn differently so it takes work to be a better teacher. Avoid systems and catch phrases that will make you one of the pack instead of a leader. The key to a great class or individual session is that the teacher or trainer needs to be more adaptive then the student. This will allow them to share their knowledge with a wider group of people

2. Grades are like goals; there will be varying levels of achievement the key is to encourage the student to learn more no matter what the grade or goal is. Find a better testing system that allows you to test on more than just reiterating knowledge. Fitness professionals will provide exercises that complement movements they then test the student in various ways to ensure they understand the fundamentals of application of knowledge

3. Create raving fans; every person has had the teacher they love as every fitness enthusiast has been blown away by a phenomenal fitness professional. In the fitness industry you create raving fans by providing exceptional service to each person you touch. Teachers around the country could benefit from this knowledge. It is not your subject that is boring it is how you teach it. I often say to clients that I cannot make the gym fun it is what it is steel weights and cable machines but what I can do is make the learning of the gym and exercises fun, so how to use these tools becomes less of a chore.

Most teachers follow a curriculum that is set by the administration this is a system style of teaching. In the fitness industry every trainer knows that this does not yield long term results. My Nephew is a very smart kid, as far as grades go, he got straight A's in French for the last 6 years yet if I ask him a single question about French he doesn't know a thing. This is because there is not an adaptive learning mechanism for him to learn how to speak French in the current school curriculum. He ends up with knowledge of only what the teacher want him to learn for the purpose of standard testing. If trainers took this approach everyone would do pushups and sit ups and nothing else!

My advice to all teachers and fitness professionals out there is to  find your passion that drove you to teaching or training in the first place. Any great trainer has one thing in common with the other fitness professionals; they love fitness and want to share this knowledge with as many people as possible. If you are stuck in a rut teaching the same old curriculum to class after class you will get burned out. Take some time attend different classes learn how to become an adaptive teacher and then go out and get some raving fans that will champion your classroom, Bootcamp or personal training sessions as the apex of knowledge, learning and FUN. You will find your passion and share it with everyone and in the end this will make you a better person and both you and your clients or student will have better success reaching the desired goal.