“For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to
conquer.”
We love awesome quotes here at Startup Active, and who better to quote than the legend himself with one of our favourite quotes from him – business lessons from Arnie, the legend.
The need in business to stay hungry is so important and as a fitness professional who faces their clients every day to try and get them to change their bodies and even their lives, it’s even more so. Most personal trainers and fitness pros are in this industry not for the money (although that’s a very welcome and necessary addition!) but originally because they love fitness themselves, perhaps they got in good shape in the gym and saw how they could benefit others in a similar position to themselves.
Business Lessons from Arnie
Put yourself in a position of not needing money and ask yourself, what are you trying to achieve here over the next 3 years? over the next 5?
If you’re looking to open a gym then you need to set those lofty goals and break them down into chunk sized, actionable goals which you can complete every day which will move you ahead and get you to your dreams.
We’re no business coaches and learning business lessons from Arnie is one of the better things we’ve done here at Startup Active. We won’t pretend to be expert business coaches but what we can tell you is Josh and myself have grown our little startup from working on 2 laptops between our grotty flats 3 years ago to now employing 5 members of staff full time and having a happy client base of over 300 clients at this time of writing.
So we can tell you what’s worked for us and also what we’ve picked up from our 300+ client base!
A small exercise
Arnie is a “Doer” and we all should be learning business lessons from Arnie to get ourselves in his mindset as at he thinks about what he wants to do, and he gets on and does it. If any of you reading this have read his book like I have, you can take that away from it more than anything else!
Se let’s get ourselves on the same path as Arnie…
Get out a pen and paper, write down where you want to be in 3 years – that could be your own gym, 25 weekly clients or a change in career – just make sure it’s something tangible and not something such as “Make £100,000 per year”.
Once you’ve got that written down, break it up into large chunks. Let’s use our “Open a Gym” example for this exercise. If at the moment we have 10 steady clients, one of the goals needs to be to get to 25 steady clients which will pay your basic salary and give you enough clients to take on another PT, at least part time.
With that goal achieved, you will need to look at your job within the business evolving and how you can step back to steer the business while you pass work onto your PTs. This stage of the business will grow fast and is one of the most challenging as a personal trainer, but you will need to take on more PTs – these guys can work freelance for you for now.
With 1 or 2 PTs working with you, you should be financially stable and able to look at properties to rent and kit out with your gym equipment – this will take a couple of months, so don’t underestimate it. We’re now well on our way to learning business lessons from Arnie and should have a solid business to build a legacy onto from here!
Finally get your signs done and guess what? you’ve achieved your goal!
Shout if you’d like advice
We love helping out personal trainers and fitness professionals, so would love to help you any time – client or not. We have been learning business lessons from Arnie ourselves and will do our best to pass our learnings onto you!
Give us a call on 0800 092 1311 and ask to speak with Andy or Josh (we’ll never grow to big to speak with you personally!!) or just drop us an email.
