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

I was asked yesterday “What is the difference between online schedule management and other forms of scheduling like paper, Excel, Outlook calendar, I-calendar or Google calendar?” I realized that to me, a co-owner of Volo Innovations, a company that does online schedule management, the question answers itself but lots of people don’t see the differences and think they are all interchangeable.

The first two, paper and Excel, you can create a calendar on and are some of the most common methods that our clients used before upgrading their business.

The last three on that list are all online but they all end in the word ‘calendar’ not ‘schedule’, this is the fundamental difference. A paper, Excel or online calendar is where you can enter your events or appointments for the day week or month but that is it; an online schedule manager focuses on management of your schedules and tracks, reports and bills for all of the scheduled events or appointments.

What does this mean for a fitness business? Control, without being a control freak.  You want to be able to control the business process or systems and billing for any services, memberships or packages the fitness business offers.

Online schedule management allows a fitness business to use the latest and greatest in software technology to advance their business and improve their business management, systems and billing. This is done by connecting all of the activities that are on the schedule to a powerful CRM (customer retention manager) and in-depth billing features. So everything that happens on a schedule is tracked to the member or client’s account and is either deducted from pre-bought packages or the software will store the activities to be billed for at a later date. No matter how you charge your clients there is a way for us to bill and track your money.

With Volo’s online schedule management system you can easily create new online schedules and manage them separately.

By having different appointments and packages tied to each schedule you,the business owner, have the ability to personalize the schedule based off of your business logic.

Addin this dynamic flexibility to your fitness company will allow you to grow, enhance, build or adapt your business to the often changing market.

Whether you decide to use Volo’s online schedule management or one of the calendar options you must decide what you want for your business.

• Do you want to grow?
• Do you want accuracy in billing?
• Do you want to be viewed as a professional?
• Do you want to know what your business is doing through in-depth reports?
• Do you want unlimited access to your schedules, accounting and business systems?
• Do you want a system that can adapt to how you run your company?
• Do want to save time on administration of your business?
• Do you want to save money eliminating costly errors?

If you answer yes to the above then you have essentially figured out what your business needs an online schedule manager or another form of scheduling like paper, Excel, Outlook calendar, I-calendar or Google calendar. The five options listed cannot provide any of those benefits to your business only an online schedule manager can.



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.

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!

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!

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

I was recently reminded of a fantastic comedy bit done by the late George Carlin, about how we all need a place for our stuff and how we only feel good when we have access to our stuff.

Personal trainers and other fitness business people can learn a valuable business lesson from this comedian. Every business needs a place to put their stuff.

This exactly what Volo does for you, we provide a place for your stuff and access to it whenever you need it.

Why is this stuff so important? And why do we need access to it? Knowing where our stuff is and know we can get access and see it when we want provides us with a sense of security and peace of mind that we are in control.

Running your fitness business is a complex thing there are all these different pieces that need to come together, members, staff, schedules, billing, reporting and so much more. Having 1 piece of software to look after all these pieces allows you to simplify the management of your business which will leave you more time to focus on growing your business or taking a little more time to reach your personal goals.

This is the stuff are we talking about. Every fitness business needs access to members, schedules, staff, accounts, billing and reports. The more access in more places the better. As George said when he goes on vacation he needs to decide what stuff to take. With Volo you can have all of your stuff with everywhere you go. There is nothing better than being able to check on your business or make sure your billing went through even when you are on the beaches of Mexico.

Any good business should be able to stand alone and run even if the owners are not there, but as an owner of two businesses it sure is great to be able to access my stuff when I want to.

Running your fitness business is a challenge and finding tools to use that are going to make it easier are a critical step in taking your business to the next level. Finding a piece of software that you can use to have all of your scheduling and billing in 1 system is a big step forward as the software will be able to accurately keep track of personal training that you have provided, bootcamp memberships and so many other parts of your business without you even having to worry about it.

Having worked with both online and desktop scheduling and billing software I have noticed substantial differences between them. Here are a few observations as I have seen as a tech support person:

1. Installations:

Online - Installation is extremely easy, quick, there typically isn't any actual install just opening up a web browser and accessing your secure site.

Desktop - Installation can be like passing a kidney stone and can take many hours/days. The time frame depends on the size of the files being transferred, internet speed, firewalls, hardware, etc.

2. Running Reports:

Online - Reports run quickly. Even when there is a lot of data to go through (such as invoices or payroll, etc) it usually runs in an acceptable amount of time. But if you ever do get bored of waiting, you can just open another window and keep working on something else while your report builds in the background.

Desktop - Reports are painfully slow. For some reason when something is taking forever to build we tend to click the mouse violently like the program knows you're becoming impatient. This usually lands up with the program freezing, sometimes even freezing the computer. Ugh! Start menu... restart computer... restart report...

3. Updates:

Online - Updates are usually seamless and clients don't usually notice the update.

Desktop - Updates are like seeing lightning then waiting for the thunder. You have to send the update. Once the update is sent, you can usually expect a mass amount of calls saying the update destroyed their software to the point it's not even usable. Grey hair starts to grow at this point.

4. Windows / OS updates:

Online - Microsoft Windows updates or Macintosh OS updates don't affect online software... which is awesome.

Desktop - Microsoft Windows updates or Macintosh OS can and do affect desktop software. Sometimes the updates can change settings on the computer, which then can affect the software. When you work with desktop software you are very aware to when Windows and OS are sending updates. You program it into your calendar as you would your mother's birthday.

5. Accessing your system:

Online - If there's internet, you can access your system. With most online software this includes iPhones, blackberrys, laptops, etc.

Desktop - If you're at your computer, you can access your system. Unfortunately I don't think you'd be allowed to setup a desktop computer at a coffee shop because you want to do some work.

6. Data Recovery:

Online - Web-based software usually has automatic backups to their servers. So data recovery is not normally an issue.

Desktop - If you don't have an up to date backup you could lose your data. If the hardware failed, then data recovery could cost you a few hours with a technician or sometimes is impossible to recover at all. Re-entering every member's information and inventory does not sound like a way I'd want to spend my weekend.

Many fitness professionals need to access their schedules from various locations, so online business management software may be more effective. Being able to book appointments and view schedule changes is vital and software should help make this easier.

Refund payment and item: This will return the item so it no longer shows on the members account. It will also refund the payment if the member has already paid. Reasons to use this refund option would be if you made a mistake and charged them too much / too little or the member no longer wants the original purchase.

How to refund payment and item:

1. Click into the invoice you need to refund
2. Click on the refund button
3. Select Refund payment and item
4. Change the quantity count to the quantity you wish you return
5. Select the method of payment you are returning
6. Click Refund

Refund payment: This will refund the payment only leaving the item on the members file. So once the payment is refunded there will be an outstanding balance for that particular invoice until it is settled. Reasons to use this refund option would be if there was a mistake when entering the payment method (ie accidentally clicked Cash instead of Cheque).

How to refund payment:

1. Click into the invoice you need to refund
2. Click on the refund button
3. Select Refund payment
4. Select the method of payment you are returning
5. Change the Refund amount to the amount you are returning
6. Click Refund

Refund item: This will refund the item only leaving the payment on the invoice. This would primarily be used if you're replacing the original item with another item of the same price (ie different size of shirt). Please keep in mind if the item is replaced with one of a higher or lower dollar value, then there will be an outstanding balance on the invoice or an amount owing to the client. In this case, it would be better to refund both item and payment and re-do the invoice.

How to refund item:

1. Click on the invoice you need to refund
2. Click on the refund button
3. Select Refund item
4. Change the quantity count to the quantity you wish to return
5. Click Refund

Fitness businesses need to make money in order for you as the fitness professional that owns the business to continue to pay your rent/ mortgage, power bills and all the other things that have to be paid on a monthly basis to make sure that you don't have to sleep in the street.

That is why more and more fitness professionals are moving to a recurring revenue model. This way, like your monthly bills, you will have monthly income! There are complexities with moving from a package type business to a monthly membership type business -if you want to learn more about how to look at your pricing and transition your clients to this type of package let us know in the comment area what your top questions are and we will make sure to address them in our next blog posting.

We come across many fitness professionals who question the idea of getting a merchant account, especially if their business is just starting. If you don't know what a merchant account is and how it works please read this blog posting on "What is a Merchant Account" first.

Here are a few main reasons for this skepticism:
1. Money - don't have much
2. Privacy issues - internet can be a scary place for credit cards
3. Banks - they can be a pain in the...

Undoubtedly, there is work to be done with getting a merchant account. There's an application process, credit checks, faxes, etc. But with everything that requires a bit of work, there are benefits to be had.

Because of the psychology of the human brain people tend to spend more when they use a credit card. An increase in revenue is then to be expected. Also when you have a merchant account you can set up automated billing. This means you don't have to track down your members and ask them for payment on a monthly / weekly / daily basis. No one likes to be a debt collector, so why not let the bank do what they do best?

This is where a decision needs to be made. Will the revenue made from accepting credit card payments overcome the financial cost of the merchant fees? The answer will differ for different businesses, and no, it can't be found on Wikipedia or Google. You need to look at how big your business currently is, how much time you spend creating invoices, tracking sessions, following up with clients to get your money and then getting to the bank and depositing it. Now multiple that by how much you make when you are training your clients. I bet you are looking at $100's of dollars every month. Use this number to do your comparison against what you will pay for your merchant account and then factor in where you want to grow your business to. How many more hours per month will it take to keep track of all your clients and there invoices? Would you rather use that time to grow new business rather than manage your existing business?

Using software like Volo allows you to bring all aspect of your fitness business together billing, scheduling and member management so that you can focus on making sure your clients reach their goals and tell all their friends about you!

Photo credit by Andres Reuda