Article updated May 2025.
Most fitness professionals and business owner’s start out with a vague awareness that there’s a lot more to building a business than they initially thought. However, without understanding of the environment they’re now operating in, they end up feeling lost, confused, and overwhelmed.
Names give you power. They increase your comprehension and allow you to accelerate breakthroughs in cloudy thinking so you can focus on specific, necessary actions required to achieve your goals.
NPE Coaching talks about how they can guide fitness business owners through some core disciplines of success, with key terms that have been organised into functional areas of fitness business (and personal) growth that will prove crucial on your fitness business journey.
Core Disciplines of Success In a Fitness Business
Lead Yourself & Others
There’s a saying: “There are no problems, only decisions to be made.”
A business coach can help you learn how to analyse challenges, think strategically to identify opportunities, create a plan to win, and build a team that cares and grows your business with you. Whatever obstacles you’re facing, you’ll learn how to live from an empowered stance. Face challenges head-on, make growth choices and take action to move forward.
- Clarify your vision. Reject vague goals and foggy thinking. Get clear on your long-term vision, purpose, mission, and values.
- Become your best self. Understand your superpowers and kryptonite to maximise your personal effectiveness.
- 10x thinking. Find your breakthrough: how to identify risks and your biggest opportunities to drive 10x results.
- Strategic planning. Get a winning strategy to smash your goals with optimal efficiency.
- ‘A-players’ only. Recruit and hire A-players that care about your clients and business as much as you do.
- Develop winners. Develop and empower your team to achieve breakthrough results and give you freedom.
- Create career opportunities. Retain top talent by creating career opportunities that support the dreams and lifestyle goals of your best players.
- Agile project management. Learn agile systems to increase your productivity by up to 400%: Your aim is to get twice the work done in half the time.
- Laser focus. Stop stopping: Get (and stay) on task regardless of any distractions happening around you.
- Communication styles. Communicate with different voices and personality types to align for success.
- When (and how) to fire. Learn how to engage difficult conversations and off-board non-performers when needed to avoid “hostage situations.”
- Seek out alternative beliefs. Keep an open mind, seek out alternative beliefs, and create holistic solutions.
Get More Clients For Your Fitness Business
No clients, no business. Bad margins, no profit… you’re going out of business (soon). Learn how to identify the best clients for your business, price and package your offerings for profit, and confidently lead prospective clients to commit to their goals (and your programs.)
With a solid foundation in place, it’s time to learn how to drive more prospects to your website, phone, and through your doors… each and every month.
- Client avatars. Choose clients you love working with, who pay you more, and will have a greater lifetime client value.
- Pricing & packaging. Understand pricing and packaging for long-term client results and business profits.
- Sales scripts & tools. Close more sales, inspire clients to commit to their goals, and get paid what you’re worth.
- Marketing funnels. Launch an evergreen marketing funnel that consistently converts leads into scheduled appointments.
- Website design. Effective website design is key to, positioning your brand, and attracting visitors who convert into ready-to-buy prospects.
- Messaging & branding. Craft a story that speaks to your client avatar and differentiates your brand from the competition.
- Online advertising. Capture leads from online advertising with Facebook, Instagram, Google, and other PPC advertising platforms.
- Content marketing. Create and share content that educates your market, answers common questions, and positions your authority.
- Networking. Research, advance, and engage relationships to connect with influencers and prospective clients.
- Developing partnerships. Find the best partners, build reciprocal relationships, and capture quality prospects each month on auto-pilot.
- Ask for referrals. Turbo-charge ‘word of mouth’ marketing with powerful systems and tools that drive hot leads every month.
Deliver Passionately to Your Existing Client Base
Most fitness businesses fail because they’re losing existing clients as fast (or faster!) than they’re finding new ones. Learn how to create and deliver extreme value to break out from the pack. Design transformational client experiences, build lifetime relationships (not transactional ones), and better serve clients for life.
Further, learn how to align your team to deliver a consistent experience (at scale) so you can grow your business from the inside out and make a bigger impact on the world.
- Client experience. Deliver transformational client experiences that build lifetime (not transactional) relationships.
- Client on-boarding. Wow new clients with immediate (and unexpected) value delivery and show them you care from the start.
- Building loyalty. Learn the most important ways to win the loyalty of your clients for a lifetime (and the big key that accounts for 53% of client retention).
- Document client success. Monitor client progress and morale. Measure, track, and document results to ensure awesome service delivery.
- Testimonials & reviews. Capture powerful client stories to build credibility and trust (online and offline).
- Tribe & community building. Learn the secrets of long-term tribe and community-building for maximum client retention.
- Letting clients go. Determine when the fit isn’t right and have off-boarding conversations.
- Reputation management. Protect your online (and offline) reputation so one or two disgruntled people don’t sabotage your business.
- Service delivery (at scale). Deliver awesome (and consistent) client experiences as you add new members to your team.
- Team creates raving fans. Get your team to check their egos at the door, serve clients passionately, and create a culture of success.
- Increase lifetime value. Reduce holds, define cancellation policies, drive engagement and session consumption.
- Raising the rates. Better value yourself, charge more, and improve margins with existing clients (even with those you’ve been discounting for years).
Increasing Profits to Drive Business Success
Most fitness businesses fail to make a profit, and as a result go out of business. Growth doesn’t equal profit. Profit comes from having the right margins, cost structure, and efficiencies in place. With a strong business coach, you’ll learn how to understand the numbers that drive profit and how to adjust your cost structure when needed to ensure sustainable growth.
Finish with more cash in the bank that allows you to reinvest in growth, retire debt, and pay yourself more.
- Accounting & bookkeeping. Best practice accounting strategies reduce tax liability, protect assets, and efficiently track money in your business.
- Budgeting. Creating and managing business and personal budgets is key to controlling costs and maximising profits.
- Cash forecasting. Know what’s going out and what’s coming in (and when), especially during times when things are tight.
- Finance. Plan, prepare, and eliminate panic over cash requirements.
- Financial reports. Read and analyse financial reports (income, cash flow, and balance sheet) so you can adjust as needed.
- Capital & debt management. Manage working capital, carry (and pay off) debt, and raise funds when needed.
- Compensation plans. Design compensation plans to motivate, reward, and incentivise performance.
- Legal & risk management. Choose the right entity structure, review contracts, and protect IP for your business.
- Advanced KPIs. Numbers that matter to optimise advanced fitness business growth.
- Streamline for profit. Identify opportunities to simplify operations and improve efficiencies for increased profits as you grow.
- Increase client value. Strategies to better serve clients and increase their value to your business.
- Commercial property. Find, select, and negotiate terms for the best location and property (lease or purchase).
Focus Changes Everything For Business Success
Most fitness professionals try to talk to (and help) everyone – the 80 year old who’s recovering from injuries… the 40 year old mom who’s trying to lose weight… and the 20 year old athlete who’s working to compete at the top level in their sport.
They’re afraid to turn down work because they feel like they don’t have enough leverage. The crazy thing is though, trying to talk (and help) everyone is the exact reason why they aren’t getting traction with anyone!
The fastest way to progress quickly in building more clients-for-life is to:
- Choose a great client profile you want serve (yes, pick 1 not 3)
- Go ‘all-in’ on connecting and engaging them
- Build success stories and capture testimonials
- Share those results with others and keep going!
Makes sense right?
FOCUS changes everything.
Unfortunately, too many people get stuck on #1. How do you choose a great client profile you love working with? Do you have to say ‘no’ to other clients that want your help?
If you’ve been trained and certified in several systems and programs you can offer, which ones do you use? How do you fit them together?
The solution:
Ask yourself “What problems do you most LOVE solving?”
The ones that keep you up at night, and get you out of bed early in the morning to go learn more about, study, and work on.
Is it helping people recover from injuries? Lose weight? Increase sports performance? Get ripped? It’s probably not ALL of those at once, and certainly not to the same degree.
Pick a lane. Focus on it. And go hard until you are so busy and have built such an amazing professional reputation, that you have a waiting list of people that want to work with you. Then, align your ‘menu’ to a program structure (i.e., business model) that best helps the clients you want to serve solve their problem.
Keep it simple for success. Don’t try to offer everything and the kitchen sink (i.e., try my boot camp, 6 week challenge, semi-private program, private training services, nutrition counseling, life coaching, online training services, etc.) That just makes things way more complicated (and will prevent you from getting any traction).
So let’s review:
- Find a problem you love working on.
- Match your menu to best help the clients you want to work with solve that problem.
- Get to work!
For more information on NPE Fitness Business Coaching, how to grow your fitness business and create the life that you want visit the website www.NPEcoaching.com.au, or call (02) 8074 3506.
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