We get it — you’re over the early mornings, late nights, and split shifts. You’re tired of working weekends and missing fun nights out with your friends and family, and you dream of taking a vacation and unplugging. You want to pay all your bills at once rather than asking a client to purchase early so you have the cash to eat something other than top ramen. Or maybe you’re just ready to take coaching from a hobby to an actual business. Whatever the case may be, we get it and we’re here to help!
To get out of the grind of working all hours of the day, make more money, and attract the perfect clients who want to buy your coaching services so you can stop the continual cat and mouse chase game, I’m going to share with you an under-the-radar topic that even Gary Vee doesn’t tell you. These are real assets you need in order to grow and scale your business, and increase your return on effort.
Here at TrueCoach, we focus on giving you your time back by automating the programming administration work and keeping tabs on what and how your clients are doing so you can focus on what’s important to you. With more time in your day, you can work on other elements of your business to help it grow, you can go to a seminar that you have been dying to attend, or even take a vacation with your friends.
Below we will walk you through eight features that our top coaches use to maximize their time. Our biggest individual coach has over 130 online clients, coaches in person, and still has time to take vacations. We want YOU to have that too.
We’re here to help you grow your business by increasing your referrals, boosting your client retention, and improving the overall experience for your clients. This post will show you the tools to use as you scale so more clients doesn’t always mean more hours. We’d be lying if we said it wasn’t hard work, but we don’t want you to be tied to your laptop and gym all hours of the day.
1. Upload Your Own Video Library
Everyone has different ways they cue or coach a movement. Having your own videos will not only build consistency and trust with your clients as they are continually seeing you, but who do you think they’ll rave to their friends about after watching your demo videos when they hit a PR on a lift? The answer is, you!
Videos in TrueCoach also allow you to program faster because when inserting exercises in the workout builder you are using your terminology and you won’t need to watch each video to ensure it’s the one you want your clients seeing. While we have over 1,000 videos inside the exercise library index free for you to use, we want to provide you with the necessary tools to deliver the best experience possible when it comes to online training. We want to make the online training experience as close to a human-to-human interaction as possible.
What if you don’t have your own video library index? That’s OK. We have over 1,000 videos already uploaded that will hold you over. We suggest blocking out two hours a week to shoot your own video library index. In a few short weeks, you will have your own.
2. Include an FAQ Page in your Documents Library
There will always be questions and more often than not you’ll hear the same ones over and over again, such as “Why am I not losing weight as fast as I want to?” or “What happens to me if I miss a workout?” An FAQ page will serve as a quick reference guide your clients can use to answer common questions. Of course you’ll need to remind your clients to visit this resource when they have questions.
Although they could text you or message you in the app, imagine if you have 75 brand new clients starting up at once. Think about how much time it would take to go back and forth with each one of them compared to giving them the tools to answer their own question easily. Now the interactions you do have with your clients can be more meaningful and time effective. Coaching people already requires a high level of social bandwidth; let’s make sure you’re spending your bandwidth across high-value mediums.
In your FAQ page it would be a good idea to include common substitutions for movements or equipment in the event your client is not at a gym with all the tools they need access to. Remember they’re not coaches and they may not think of the solution right away or at all. Sometimes people pay for trainers so they don’t have to think. (Want to learn more about this? Read up on decision fatigue.) For example, in the even they don’t have a kettlebell, a similarly weighted dumbbell will work for their front rack squats.
Your FAQ page should also lay out parameters in which you would like to be contacted. It’s OK to set boundaries if you’re upfront and respectful about it. It’s not OK to retroactively be frustrated with your client not reading your mind. Communication, communication, communication — that’s the key to running a successful business.
How to read your programming lingo should also be included in the FAQ section. Many if not most clients aren’t used to reading things in sets, reps, weight, tempo, rest periods, etc., so you need to prevent them from feeling lost in the very beginning.
For example, if a lot of tempo work appears in your programming and you write it out as 40×2, explain what that means to your client. The last thing you want is to communicate unclear thoughts and expectations, leaving your client sitting in the gym wondering what they’re supposed to be doing, getting frustrated, and inevitably stopping their training with you because they “didn’t see results”.
3. Set Up Your Metrics
Your clients come to you because they want results. They’ve invested in your service trusting that you’ll help them reach their goals, so it’s imperative that they can see their progression. And if they don’t, they’ll eventually leave you for another coach who can show them results. So how are you going to measure your client’s success?
Have a few staple things in your metrics that fit most people’s goals as well as your coaching style. If your client wants to build strength, set up a series of benchmarks that you test periodically. If your client wants to run a marathon, add their time trials. If your client wants to get shredded before beach season, have them track their body composition. Whatever the case may be, also consider having some sort of measurement that isn’t related to body composition. That way, in case their body held onto some fat that week you can show them they tangibly improved somewhere else.
When setting up your metric features this is where we fill out our client’s baselines. It gives you a resource to show your client’s quantifiable data as to how they are improving or aren’t improving.
4. Check Your Compliance Rates
It’s much easier to retain a client than to gain one, and it makes growth a lot easier when you don’t have to continually chase new clients because your current ones are leaving due to something as simple as accountability.
Matt Reynolds, owner of Starting Strength Online, and his team average a 94.1 percent retention rate because of the TrueCoach Dashboard. This means for every 100 clients, about six may leave in a month.
The Dashboard is right in front of you when you log into TrueCoach. You get to see 7-day, 30-day, and 90-day program compliance percentages. If they fall below 80 percent on average it’s time to take a deeper look into which clients are not completing their program and reach out to see what they need. Because sometimes people get sick or injured and are too afraid to let you down by telling you the truth.
If you reach out and inquire how they’re doing, you establish a human connection with your client, allowing you to adapt their program before they get frustrated and quit. Checking in on them shows that you care, you’re paying attention, and you’re invested in their success.
Chances are if someone is coming to you for individual custom programming they’ve already tried other methods, diets, and workouts and none of it has been successful. By checking in more often than your allotted weekly email check in or once-a-month Skype call, it really shows you’re going the extra step.
5. Customize Your Notification Settings
The effective concept of block and tackle is about carving out a certain amount of time and completing certain tasks in that set amount of time. In order to do that we need to occasionally kill the notifications coming in from Facebook, phone calls, text messages or whatever is pulling you away from getting things done.
In a day of age where we are constantly inundated by notifications, our time and energy are running out. Let’s help you manage those right from the get-go.
Setting up your notification settings to only alert you on certain parameters might seem scary at first but it’s a necessity. It might feel like you’re missing out or not servicing your clients the right way but remember, you built a robust FAQ page to help answer a lot of the common questions you likely would get and your clients know to contact you when they need something specific. Filter out the notifications you don’t need to see in real time.
We also suggest you set up dedicated office hours time just like your college professors did and make yourself available to all your clients at a certain time. Perhaps you can arrange something inside a private Facebook group or even something more externally facing such as an Instagram live video.
6. Build Your Custom Programs
Chances are you have already built some pretty incredible programs and they’ve proven positive results. Don’t keep reinventing the wheel! Upload those programs so you don’t need to custom-build them every single time. That way, every time someone is ready for a certain program, all you have to do is assign it and make some minor adjustments to customize it for them. Being able to automatically assign a program to someone rather than building a completely new one out every single time will be a huge time saver.
7. Do A Practice Run On Yourself
Now that you have all the backend work done and set up, it’s important to test the process before releasing it to your clients. Just like a new movement or program, you wouldn’t administer it to someone else if you haven’t become familiar with it yourself. So set yourself up as a client, use a separate email, and go through the process as if you were your own client. This will give you firsthand experience as to what your clients will be seeing. If you feel you’re too close to your work and don’t think you would be a good judge of the experience, ask a friend to go through it and give you honest feedback. If they had a negative experience, your clients most likely will too.
8. Start Adding Your Clients
Now that you’ve done all the backend work, you’re ready to add clients in. Since you have all your systems in place, you can upload many different clients and administer multiple programs with automatic emailing right away, which means you now have more time to go live your life. When you start adding your clients, make sure to group them for easy access.
We built TrueCoach to save you time, get you more clients, and help you to deliver a world-class online coaching experience. Take the time to implement what we covered in this article and you’re eight steps closer to that six-figure salary. That’s why we built a super easy intuitive platform made for busy, dedicated coaches. We want you out and about with your friends, taking a continuing education course, or going on a vacation — not spending more time going back and forth with your clients or doing tedious data entry work. Set up your systems on the front end so TrueCoach works for you, not against you.
VERY VALUABLE! I know! you can actually make this into a 7 figure business this year, not just a 6 figure business! Seriously, i see the value! thanks for sharing it.
Thank You, Viaguld! So happy its added value to you!
Great content. Great read.
Thanks, guys. I appreciate the consistent newsletter email with valuable content.
This is great information. Thanks for sharing 🙂
This is great, thank you!
Yes Great info. I will implementing these for sure. Thanks!