So Tori was a personal trainer up in the Seattle area, all in person, and she wanted to take her business online. When she started she didn’t even know Facebook Business Manager existed. Like, at all.
Three months later she had upwards of 20 online clients and about 50 grand through client fulfillment. She also paid off her car somewhere in there, which she mentioned kind of casually at the end like it was nothing.
She sat down with my team to talk through how it went, and I wanted to break down what she said because a lot of trainers are stuck exactly where she was.
The gym floor does half the selling for you
When you train people in person, the connection basically does the work. Someone walks in, you train them for an hour, you talk between sets, they like you, they come back next week. Tori said her whole goal in person was to turn people into lifetime clients, and in a gym that makes sense because you see them every week.
Online that kind of goes away. There’s no handshake, no small talk at the squat rack, and now you’re sitting at your laptop trying to figure out how to get someone to trust you enough to pay you when they’ve never been in a room with you. She said it straight up, how do I get these people to like me and actually commit to spending money on me?
That’s where most trainers freeze. They’re good coaches. They just have no idea how any of the online part works.
How she got people to trust her through a screen
What she landed on is being as personable as possible. Sending people helpful information, quotes, pictures of herself just being a normal person, so they get that she’s a normal person too and not some account trying to sell them something.
I mean, people buy from people they feel like they know. A logo and a price list doesn’t do that for anybody.
The other thing she did, which I thought was kind of cool, is she let her first clients see her get better. The people who signed on with her day one or day two watched the progression. She’d tell them, hey, I learned a new lesson, this is new, and instead of making them nervous it built trust. She said everybody has been super great with her and the relationships have been good.
So she didn’t wait until she had it all figured out to start. She started, told people what she was learning, and kept going.
Nobody tells you about the boring stuff
This part made me laugh a little. She said taking payments was one of the things she never thought about. In person it’s like, oh, just Venmo me. Online that doesn’t work as easily, and she figured that out quick.
Then it’s messaging people on Facebook, setting up Business Manager, learning what a funnel even is, all these little components on these apps you didn’t know were there. She said it’s foreign when you come from in person training. She’s even been helping her mom with a Facebook group now, which is funny because three months earlier she didn’t know half of this existed.
What she liked is that every lesson builds on the one before it, so you get a little better each time and you can use it on your clients right away. She also came from a college background, so she said it felt a bit like going back to school. Take notes, absorb as much as you can, go.
I think this is the stuff that quietly kills people. They don’t quit because of some big dramatic failure, they quit because they spent two weeks stuck on something dumb like how to take a payment and it just drained them. Having someone show you the steps saves you a lot of that.
Accountability when nobody is on your schedule
Asked what her first action steps were, she didn’t say ads or posting. She said the biggest thing was holding yourself accountable.
Because it’s super easy to go, all right, I’m gonna sleep until noon and start working at noon. She admitted she gets those urges too. In a gym you’ve got a 6am client on the books so you show up whether you feel like it or not. Online there’s no 6am client. It’s just you.
So she started with the morning formula. Day one you sit down and decide what you’re going to do, what you want, and how you’re going to drive yourself forward. You write your mission statement and where you want to go, and it becomes a constant reminder that keeps you motivated. Then you turn it into actual steps, building your programs and getting them ready to go.
On top of that she uses daily check in sheets and stays organized. She said if you don’t have that, you’re going to be lost. Especially when you’re the only one holding yourself accountable.
Honestly she’s right. Most people don’t have a skill problem. They have a “I didn’t do the thing today” problem.
The numbers, give or take
Upwards of 20 clients in three months and about 50K through client fulfillment. Quick math, 50 grand over 20 clients is about 2,500 bucks a client on average. For someone who was training people by the hour a few months before, that’s a big jump.
And to be fair to how she told it, she had some clients come over with her who gave her a little revenue boost. But she said the profit was from clients she got through the program, and she doesn’t think she would have landed even one of them without it.
She made her investment back about three weeks in. She said she’s seen people in the group make it back in three days, but she took a bit longer because she wanted to absorb the information first. That’s fine. Three weeks is fast.
Then the car got paid off. She just kind of slipped that in.
Why she kept going
She decided to move up to the next level with us, and her reasons were pretty simple. She’s competitive, always has been. She’s got a bunch of friends who are trainers trying to go online and they’re stuck, and now they’re reaching out asking her how she did it. She wants to help as many of them as she can.
She also said she wants her own business, she wants the flexibility, and she wants a life of more than enough. I like that line. Not a Lambo, not some crazy number. More than enough.
And she said if you ever have a question, the team will answer it no matter what time it is. She admitted she’s messaged people at some pretty rough hours lol.
If you’re a trainer thinking about going online
What I’d do is stop trying to piece it together from random videos at midnight. Tori was a good trainer before any of this. What she was missing was the online part, how to build trust through a phone, how to take money, how to stay on track when nobody is checking on you.
She said she was stuck too, same as her friends. Then she put the money down, did the work, and three months later she’s got 20 clients and her car is paid off.
That’s it.
Want to know what’s capping your business right now? Take my free 90 Day Ceiling Plan. Answer 18 questions and get a written plan, built on your own numbers, that names the one thing holding you back and what to fix first.
