Becoming a Personal Trainer: Realistic Goals for Year One

It’s natural for anyone on the road to becoming a personal trainer, at the outset of their career to dream big and set lofty goals for their business in their drive to succeed. Everyone agrees on the importance of having a goal and planning strategies to work towards them. But the most common mistake many personal trainers make is to only focus on their long term goals, completely overlooking the minor but significant milestones they need to achieve first.

Breaking a big goal into smaller time bound targets makes your task more manageable and realistic. They act like check points to help you measure your efforts. Plan your career path by setting mini-goals for yourself and give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back on accomplishing them. The more mini-goals you achieve, the closer it will take you to the big ones and the long term picture you have visualised will seem crystal clear.

A Word about Long-Term Goals

Since it’s so easy to get carried away by our ambitions and set high flown goals that only end up misguiding us, we need to think from every perspective before deciding on our long term aspirations. Here are a few ideas to help you formulate your big goals:-

• Always keep your mission statement in mind: Every business has a unique ethos that it is built around so it is essential that your goals are in harmony with those values.
• The goal should prove a winner for all involved: When accomplished, the goal should meet the expectations of and benefit everyone including your clients.
• Plan goals keeping the end outcomes in mind: This will help us break them down into smaller, simpler objectives
• Estimate a realistic time for a Return on Investment: This keeps our feet firmly on the ground and prevents us from having exaggerated ideas about goals that would require from us more than we are in a position to give.

Once the main goals are in place, it’s time to break it into achievable mini-goals by setting specific time frames in which to accomplish them.

Planning your first steps

Systematic planning and strategy will help you consolidate a business that matches your dreams and ambitions. Concentrating on your first steps will enable new fitness entrepreneurs to make a sound start and create a solid foundation for their business. Here are a few milestones that you can work towards achieving within the first year of the launch of your personal training business. This can also be applied to working as an employed trainer and is often what is expected when working for some of the big gym chains.

• Work towards having 10-15 clients enrolled and regularly attending sessions in the first six months and aim for 10 more on completion of the first year
• Aim to undertake 2-3 specialised courses/workshops to further skills and knowledge and increase your earning potential
• Add at least 100 people to your personal networks that could be a pool for prospective clients
• Aim to blog post or guest blog post every month.
• Develop a vibrant social media profile, have an active presence on networking sites, and be adept at creating industry relevant content for your blog.

The last point is perhaps one of the most important. The web is today the most powerful tool to connect with the audience – both existing and target. With its exponential reach, you can be in tune with the latest trends and capitalise on the immense influence of the digital media to build a strong online reputation and create an effective marketing strategy.

If this sounds like a daunting task, we have the solutions. It is our endeavour at Love Fitness Education to equip you with skills that match the need of the hour and give you that decisive edge over the rest. Our unique Social Media Business & Marketing Course is designed with the aim of imparting personal trainers with a thorough knowledge about how social media works and using these insights to build a credible online reputation for your business, along with planning effective marketing campaigns to win more clientele. For more information contact us on info@lovefitnesseducation.co.uk.

The minor but significant accomplishments of the first year are an indicator of greater triumphs waiting to happen. So tread carefully as you take the first few steps to achieve the mini goals that will steadily transform into giant strides towards success.