Volo Innovations

The fitness industry is dynamic, fast paced and ever changing. Add to this the fact that our clients are often going through a physical and mental transformations and the emotional support that is required is substantial. When you bring all these factors together you have one the most unique and challenging businesses around.

Most people get into fitness management and ownership because they have a tremendous passion for fitness, this is great but does not mean you will succeed and definitely does not make you a great manager.

This may also explain why the fitness industry has such a high failure rate, only restaurants are higher. Why is this? Well similarly to how a great chef does not make a great restaurateur; a really fit and passionate person does not make a great fitness manager or owner. However unlike a restaurant where you have people that have no interest in running restaurant that are successful in fitness you cannot be just business person.

A great fitness manager has to have two key elements; a passion for health and fitness and good business sense. The ones that have these traits are worth their weight in gold and if you have one you should hold on to them.

Here are 10 things a great fitness manager will have in 5 that are related to their fitness passion and 5 related to their business knowledge:

Fitness Passion:

• An in-depth understanding of exercises
• Knowledge of different types of equipment
• Openness to new concepts and fitness programs
• Motivational to members
• Able to lead staff by example

• Understands budgets and sticks to them
• Business planning for new and existing programs
• Able to do cost analysis; you need to make a profit
• Systems oriented software, accounting and daily business process
• Advertising, marketing and sales experience to keep things moving

We all know one; some even live with them, control freaks. Now being this kind of freak can have benefits but for the fitness entrepreneur it could lead to major disaster and even failure in their business plans.

First thing you need to know is are you a control freak?

Second thing is do you have control freaks in your business, either as partners or staff?

If any of the following symptoms apply to you then chances are you are a little freaky in the control department. You may need a non-biased evaluator to read the list for you, if you can let them.

1. You brag, boast or often tell people how you never take vacations or you work during vacations and you need to tell people about it
2. You are always swamped with a backlog of to do items on your list that could go on for months even years
3. You are often angry when other let you down or make a mistake
4. People ask you a ton of questions, mostly because you are angry when they make mistakes
5. Your employees are actually annoyed when they see you coming because you constantly check up on them, your excuse for this is if you didn’t nothing would get done

And the number one way you can tell you are a control freak....

You honestly believe that nobody else can do it better than you.

So now you know you are a control freak. The good news is that most first time entrepreneurs are. The bad news; it is also one of the top reasons a lot of fitness businesses fail. What can you do about it? Simple, let go! You need to allow others around you to take things on or you need to hire to get things done. For some of you that are too far gone in the control deep end you may need to start with a good counselling session. But most I assume just need to learn how to do the following 5 things to have success in your fitness business.

Success will come faster and more often if you can implement these 5 steps:

1. Hire people; it is good to hire the right people but even if they turn out to be wrong the first time around it is better than not even trying. Hiring forces you to departmentalise your business and starts the process of finding the things that you can let go of. 2. Delegate; assume that you’ve hired you now need to give them something to do, if you don’t they will either quit, never a good feeling, or just do nothing even a worse feeling as it reinforces your faulty belief that only you can do it.
3. Learn to trust others; ok this is probably the hardest of all the things a freak needs to do because trust is typically earned but since control freaks tend to be too involved in projects they need to completely trust people without checking up on them and they will not know if the person can even do the task required.
4. Learn that mistakes are a fact of life; some would even argue that if we did not have mistakes we could not have any success. Accept, embrace and learn how to turn a mistake into a positive by growing from them and trying to never repeat the same mistake twice.
5 Learn how to build a great sandwich; not the kind you eat but more a way that you communicate with others. Compliment, suggest and then reassure the person they can do it as well as you or even better, this turns you into the mentor instead of the ogre that some staff may see you as.

By enlisting some of the above techniques and possible some therapy even the most controlling person can learn to let go, trust and accept that other people are there to help and not hinder the growth of their business.

This is how any entrepreneur will succeed because the greater your success the more your business venture will attract qualified people to assist in achieving greatness beyond your dreams.

Now don’t get me wrong I am grateful for every client I have ever had the opportunity to work with but as a fitness professional there are some clients that you REALLY like to work with, some that are fun and some that require more energy on your part. For anyone who has been training for awhile you will know exactly what I am talking about.

The good news is that you can train your clients but it also requires you to train yourself, have you ever watched the Dog Whisperer and he goes into these situations and trains the dog but also trains the owners?

The same applies to almost every situation in life both parties have to be trained to get the desired outcome.

By rewarding some behaviours over others, by keeping some promises not others, by having some expectations instead of others, you can create change.

You can train positive behaviours and negative behaviours so it is up to you to get the clients that you deserve.

Do you want clients that are:

• Respectful
• Patient
• Calm
• Open and accepting
• Walking billboards
• Loyal

Or do you want clients that are:

• Selfish
• Self centered
• Demanding
• Cheap
• Whiners
• Never satisfied
• Willing to change to save a buck
• Skeptical

The choice is yours; you can create the business and the atmosphere that you want for you, your staff and all of your customers. The customers you fire and those you pay attention to all send signals to the rest of the group.

I know that when you are getting started with your fitness business the thought of turning a client away seems like something that you would never do but I can tell you from personal experience that you will end up with clients that demand so much time and energy from you that they are taking away from your other clients. As a fitness professional you need to be able to give 100% to every client however if you have 1 client that is consuming 200% of your energy there is no way you are going to give the other clients what they deserve and they will eventually leave. In the end you will be turning away clients; it just won’t be the clients that you want to turn away.

So before you can start complaining about your clients you have to train yourself first to:

• Set boundaries
• Demand and earn respect
• Respect others
• Accept feedback and learn from it
• Be willing to grow every day

If you can get yourself whipped into shape I know that you will be able to train your clients and before you know it you will have the greatest clients in the world and a business that you love to be in every day.

Growing your fitness business is a challenge that every small business owner has. There is never enough time for the networking events, the online social media let alone training your clients. Some websites that you may want to look into and take advantage of are the sites that are designed for location based services.

Before we get into the different sites here are some facts about how small businesses are (not!) using the web:

• 40% of small businesses don’t have a web site
• 81% of entrepreneurs still don’t take advantge of social media
• 47% don’t think that Facebook, Twitter or even LinkedIn are beneficial to their business
• 84% don’t provide for e-commerce
• 62% don’t use email marketing

(Source: Citibank survey.)

If you want to stay ahead of your competition you want to be focused on utilizing all the tools that are available to you. Here are a few of the location based websites where you can list your services and get inbound links to your website.

• Yelp or Yelp for Canadians, on Yelp you can find anything from restaurants to personal trainers. People can write reviews and you can post all the details of your business
• Fitness Reviews (Canada only right now) a great site where you can list your business and have all your clients go and write reviews of your services. You can also post all your press releases there to help spread the word of what is happening at your business.
• Wellness to You is a services for mobile wellness providors from accupuncture to personal trainers. They have just started offering this service in Canada as well.
• Google Local is where you can list your local business and it will show up in the listings next to the maps when people search. Here is a good article on getting started with Google local

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!

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!