How To Actually Grow An Online Fitness Business

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]There are so many gurus online, especially on YouTube, telling personal trainers, if you want to go online, work from Bali remote, make $15,000 a month, then just follow these steps. But there's a big issue that no one's really talking about. All of these gurus have made all of their money, not from fitness businesses. They made their money from selling coaches the dream. No sales calls, selling DMs. You don't even need a salesunnel. And let's be honest, you get a desperate personal trainer, put them on a sales call, say, "Hey, pay me $10,000 and I'll make your dreams come true." You're going to have a pretty nice house and a pretty nice car cuz there's a lot of desperate personal trainers. The market is more saturated than ever. There's more competition than ever. People's spending is lower than ever. So, why should you listen to me?

[00:00:38]Well, my name is James Smith and I actually have an 8 figureure fitness business that's had over 117,000 clients. I've actually run and operated a fitness business, not made a fortune from selling people the dream about running a business. Now, just before we get into all of the stages that necessary, let me be honest with you, like most gurus aren't. out of that eight figures that the business has made, it's not made me ultra wealthy because all of that money I've earned isn't just mine. I have a business partner. He gets half. I have my amazing coaches. They get a huge amount of it.

[00:01:04]But what my business has done over the last 7 years, it's given me a life of freedom. I haven't had to go to work for 7 years. I work remote. I can live in any country I want. I've accured the level of wealth where I fly business class minimum wherever I go, but I'll still happily buy a car that's a year and a half old. I've accured the level of wealth where I can buy all my friends dinner whenever we go, but my house only has one spare bedroom. I'm not even here today promising you that you can make millions or instead I'm going to teach you how to operate and run a business.

[00:01:27]You can have more free time. You can earn enough to hopefully lay down on a plane and better yet use your time more wisely. Cuz when I created this system, I had more hours spare which meant I could write a book, then two books, then three books, then do the events and tours that come with them and then eventually build a personal brand big enough to start other projects. My online coaching business gave me the life of freedom. My life of freedom is actually what made me a little bit rich.

[00:01:47]Let's get into it. If you want to have an online business, first of all, you need to have a business. Now, just before we get into the first step, and probably the most important step, let's take a quick tangent. What we really need is a brand. And a brand, in my belief, is where your personality meets your business. If you go too heavy with, let's say, the information that you're given across and just information, you become chat GBT. If you care too much about your personality and think you're bigger and more important than you are, you end up making vlogs. However, if you can take a good fingering joke and intertwine it with information that your audience needs, you're going to discover a brand. So, it's really important that you get your personality across in your content, in everything. The biggest mistake that people are making when it comes to brand is they think they need to be a business at betteruptactive health at fit forever. No, you are the brand. I'm James Smith. He's Declan Jenson. Alex Wosi is Alex Wozi. Chris Williamson is Chris Williamson. Chris Williamson isn't Modern Wisdom. Modern Wisdom is Chris's podcast. Now, sure, when the studio bills get paid, probably Modern Wisdom pay that, not Chris himself. But he doesn't walk around. Hi, I'm Modern Wisdom. You can call me Chris. All of your clients pay you, not your business. They're not paying better upt. They're paying Dave. They're paying Sarah. The quicker that you can represent your brand as yourself, the better. Unless you're a team of five people all building the same brand. You are your brand. Get your name handle.

[00:03:01]The only reason I'd pt in my name is cuz I'm called James Smith. I've got the most common boring white name in the world. And the only way that I got the James Smith handle, I had to have a fight with another guy called James Smith. And I won. The next component is when I say you need to have a business, you need to have a business. There are people that want to get into online coaching that have never done any coaching that I've trained my friends.

[00:03:19]Okay, so you have zero experience. Trust me when I say this. Behind all great online coaches is a coach that was great in person. Yep. Okay. And what we're going to do now is we know your lower back's a little bit sore with the bent over row. So, we're going to do some TRX rows. As far the rep range, we're going to do between 8 to 12. Reason being is we've done the reps. I've done 5,000 hours of coaching in person. You may think that it would be amazing for you to go work online with the laptop. And although these sessions in the gym may be on paper, some of your least paid hours, these will pay you dividends way into the future. Because all of those sessions that I sat talking to my clients, chatting to my clients, putting the weights away from my clients. I became an expert in my clients. In the advertising space online, we have something called a lookalike audience.

[00:03:58]Let's say we're selling the course that's in the link to this description, the PT start kit, where you get a short form content creation course and everything you need to know about launching a PT business. And let's say it's $99. Link in description. we've sold four or 5,000 of those. I can say to Meta, "Find me a lookalike audience."

[00:04:12]And what it will do is it will find all of the things that those people have in common and create me a brand new audience to advertise to that have all the same traits. And lookalike audience ads absolutely bang. Why? Because they're just like the people that bought the course. Why am I telling you this?

[00:04:25]The people that pay you for in-person coaching are the exact same people that are going to pay you for online coaching. They're the same problems.

[00:04:31]They're the same demographics. They probably just live a bit further away.

[00:04:34]So, no matter where you are, trust me when I say this, find a facility. do some inerson sessions. Those conversations that you have with your clients allow you to understand them.

[00:04:41]The same way the reason I got you to click this video is I know you. I've actually been you before and now I work with thousands of you. I know what you think about when you wake up. I probably even know what type of genre of porn you watch. Dirty bugger. If you want to take your business online, you have to have a bricks and mortar business in the onset.

[00:04:56]Now, if you have a gym, if you have a facility, but you haven't got any clients, going online could take you weeks and months to get your first client. So, you probably will need to do some kind of facetoface marketing.

[00:05:05]walking the floor. Underrated, truth be told. Rewind about 10 years. I used to do this thing where I'd PT. I'd do like eight or nine sessions in a day and just as I went to get my car keys and put them in my pocket. Okay, James, go talk to 10 people. It'd be 8:00 p.m. at night. And I'd go around the gym and I would pray that no one wanted to talk because I didn't set the success as being I need to get a consult or put people in. My success was they've just got to book a session. So, I grab my keys, go around. Hey mate, you guys all right? Good. We got some heavy weights over there if you want them. You need anything? Cool. You have a good night.

[00:05:32]Hey, just to let you know, these pins are a little bit out of whack. Just going to move this down for you. I'm James, by the way. I'm just on my way out of here, but if you ever need anything, I'm in the gym. You have a good night. Get to the next one. Oh, sorry to interrupt. The other PTS, they always put these TRXs in wrong. And the last thing I'd want is for you to slip over and hurt yourself. My name's James.

[00:05:49]I'm one of the PTs here. I'm one of the only ones that actually knows what they're doing. I'm not here to sell you anything, but if you ever need anything, just come find me. My details are on the PT board. There you go. You have a good night. Then I just get to the last one.

[00:05:59]I'm like, are you guys all right there?

[00:06:00]Excuse me. How much is personal training? I'm like, [ __ ] I'd actually be annoyed that I've now got to go talk to this, but I just wanted to talk to 10 people and go home. Hey, mate. So, I don't discuss pricing on the floor, but what we can do is why don't we book in a consult. I'll take you through a little conversation. We'll talk about your goals. We do a little half hour session.

[00:06:15]You can decide whether or not you like me or not. No obligation. Look, even if you think you're wasting my time, you're not. It's good for me to be seen on the gym floor with people. When you next free, book someone in Tuesday. Boom.

[00:06:24]Some people out there think they can just talk to five people. No. Dozens of people. When I worked in door-to-d dooror sales, I had to knock on 100 doors to make one sale. Trust me, in the world of personal training, you have 100 conversations. You got at least five consults, of which four show up, of which three become clients. Even the shortest of short-term clients buy a bundle of at least 10. So, even in the poorest parts of England, that's £300 for a conversation. Without understanding your demographic and their problems, we can't even get into stage one. Content is a bit like martial arts.

[00:06:50]When you begin, you're useless. And every time, it's not about becoming a black belt. It's about becoming that little bit less useless. You can't lean on content to bring you clients because for some people it will take 6 months.

[00:07:01]For some it will take 12 months. For others it will take 3 weeks. Your business is your backbone to begin with and then eventually content is your way out of here. It's your way off the floor. But you must do it right. First thing I'm going to talk about is problems. People don't want to see your workout. They don't give a [ __ ] what your workout of the day was. Get ready with me. They don't give a [ __ ] Here's my lunch. No one gives a [ __ ] When I'm walking the floor and I'm trying to get new clients, I'm solving problems. Hey, do you need help with something? How does this strap work? Let me teach you.

[00:07:24]Get my phone out. TRX. Cool. Another client says to me, "James, what are macros?" Suddenly, when I go home from that day at work and know I'm making two videos. Yeah, I've just finished my clients. Say to someone, "Hey, can you hold a camera for a second?" If you're someone that uses one of these in the gym and you're not sure how it works, I'm going to give you three ways you can use this and it's going to beat using a barbell. Maybe another one. If you're someone that's intimidated by heavy weights or you actually don't want to step foot in a squat rack, this TRX means that you can get all of the workouts that you need and you can do it from the functional training room of your gym. Cool. The next problem might be macros. If you're someone in fitness that he said the term macros, you don't understand it. I'm going to use these three bowls of Skittles to help you understand. If you solve people's problems in your content, think about what a personal trainer is. We are hiring someone because you have a problem. Declan here solves a problem for me. My arms aren't long enough to hold the camera that far away. I don't want to be moving a tripod around all the time. I pay Declan to make my problems go away. My next problem is I need to go back and feed my son shortly.

[00:08:14]Declan's going to edit, take away a problem. When people hire a personal trainer, they don't go to the gym. They solve the problem of keeping them accountable. They don't follow a program. The personal trainer solves the problem of giving them a program. They don't do a diet unless they're told what to do. Personal trainer solves a problem. We are in the business of problem solving. React content. You can react to things you agree with, disagree with. What are you doing? You are problem solving because people see stuff online, they're not sure if it's true.

[00:08:36]You can be the voice of reason. This is what really happens when you take creatine. This is why you shouldn't consider the carnivore diet. This is what it could be like if you were to take a GLP1 agonist. I've worked with over 1,300 fitness coaches in the last year. Every time someone complains to me about not having enough clients or not enough people joined their 12week challenge or not enough people inquired for business or that no one bought when they put an email out about whatever offer it was, there are two things I need to know. What is the size of your socials? How many people are on your email list? 20% of your total amount of followers should be on your email list.

[00:09:04]So, if you've got 2,000 followers and you don't have 400 people on your email list, there is a problem. You need to go out and make sure that your content at the end of it has a call to action where you can get their email address. Maybe you put a chatbot. Maybe you put if you want to work out your macros, comment the word carbs. Then when you work out their calories for them, you also give them a link to join your email list so they can stay in the loop and find out more. If you do have 20% of your total following on email list, you should probably focus on growing your audience.

[00:09:26]Wherever I see people struggling to sell stuff online, there is a bottleneck.

[00:09:30]Their following is either non-existent, they need to put out more content, or their following is okay, but their email list is terribly small, which means they've not spent enough time converting. They've been putting all of their content creation energy into getting engagement, views, and vality metrics, and they've not converted any of that into data. I could go out on a night out, not now, 10 years ago, and chat up loads of women and people go, "James, you stud. I saw you talking to at least 15 girls last night. But if I got no numbers, what was the point to look good in front of my friends?"

[00:09:56]Whereas, if I'd only spoken to five girls and got five numbers, you'd be doing a lot more damage. Allegedly, so much of people's problems when it comes to going online sit here. We have the preface that some people want to be an online coach and never done a coaching session before. But let's park that to the side. People do not have enough data from their existing following, which can lead people on to how. How do you get people's emails? Before 2025, you could have probably offered someone an ebook that they don't read or put in a calorie calculator, but it's 2025. These methods have been rinsed. One trend that I see dominating at the moment is creating some kind of value autoresponder. You could automate 20, 30, 50 emails. You pre-write them and they go out in a sequence of 1 2 3 4 5 6 all the way to 50. Each one of those emails could address a certain point and problem.

[00:10:33]someone's facing and over time that automation will wear them down to the point they will start or consider using you in your business. Then you only have to write it once. A really good automation regarding your specialtity.

[00:10:43]Whether it's developing the glutials, whether it's losing fat, whether it's becoming proficient at boxing on a bag, whatever it is, if you can't put together 30, 40, or 50 emails that go out once a day that makes someone really confident that you're the person to solve their problems, then maybe you shouldn't be doing this as a job. If you can't put out one piece of content a day, maybe you shouldn't be doing this as a job. And I didn't say it had to be a perfect production. you're not Oenheimer. You're not producing an Oppenheimer. Then from that data, from those people, whether an automation or whether you want to send broadcasts, you send them to a landing page. Now, again, one of the biggest mistakes people are making, they're hosting this on Aweber, Mailchimp, Squarespace, it looks [ __ ] It doesn't look nice. You're like, "Oh, but my coaching is really good." If you turn up to a first date with smelly breath and dirty trainers, trust me, bro, she ain't going down there. So many people will do the hour sessions. They will put out content every day. They'll run an email marketing list. They'll create a bottleneck by having a shitty looking landing page. Clickfunnels or Lead Pages, both of them so good. Oh, it's $40 a month. Listen, mate, it's cheaper than a member of staff. I can assure you. This is where a lot of other gurus will say, "Get them on a call. Get them on a phone. Pressure them into sales. Get them onto the sales team. Get them on the phone." Listen, you've already got people that you're giving hours of your time to in person. When you're not doing that, you're creating good content. When you're not creating good content, you're nurturing an email list. When you're not doing that, you're creating variations of your landing page, which we'll get on to in a second.

[00:12:00]Where the [ __ ] are you supposed to find two hours a day to sit on calls with people where 45 minutes in, they go, "I need to talk to my husband." That will work for the short term. Let me get this right. Sales calls work. But as this grows, this gets bigger, and this grows, those amounts of calls are only ever going up. So, if your business thrives, if your business does well, if your business is going in the direction we want it to go, whatever amount of sales calls you've got now, to double your business, you need double the amount of sales calls. What are you going to do?

[00:12:25]pay someone else to go on it maybe or instead you make your landing page better. The way you do that is by creating AB splits. You create what you think is a good landing page or you join my program and I'll teach you how to do it. Link in the description. You create a brief version, a long version, one with a video, one without a video. Lead pages will then split the traffic between your landing pages and you get to see in real time which one yields the best result. And you can then go, "Wow, okay. landing page B that didn't have much text but had a really good VSSL video that was only one and a half minutes long got twice the conversions of the longer page. I thought people wanted loads of information about my program but the statistics show me that the briefer version actually does more.

[00:13:02]So what could you do then? You create three versions of that landing page. Now a lot of other gurus are going to go, why are you getting so complex, man? Why are you trying to make this so complex?

[00:13:10]Just get them on the phone. This does take time. But every time you do this and spend a few hours doing it your sales process gets better. It's only going to go up from 4% and then before you know it, 6% 7% 8%. Now that can seem trivial, but imagine this. Same business, same inerson coach, content starts performing better. But even if it doesn't, emails start performing bet better. But even if they don't, if your landing page can double its conversion, that's twice the amount of business from the same process. Same content, same gym, same hours, same wake up time, same go to sleep time, double the business.

[00:13:42]This, I believe, should be done without ever going near a sales call. Because although they work, you need to preserve every single bit of energy that you have being a good coach, putting out good content, writing good emails, nurturing your landing page, and making it better.

[00:13:53]Now, I wish I can make this video longer, but it wouldn't be fair on the thousands of coaches that pay me. But here's a bonus that you can take away.

[00:13:58]Give them the MBG, the money back guarantee. Now, this can be in person and it can also be online. In your landing page or maybe even in your emails, just say to them, "If you don't love the coaching, let me know within the first month. I'll refund you in full." That will triple your sales and maybe 5% of people will ask for a refund. But that's okay. For five times more sales, that's a good deal. Not to mention, if they hate your product for whatever reason, even if they're mentor, just give them their money back. You don't want a bitter, unsavory customer.

[00:14:20]Look at these other mentorships online, the other business mentorships who rip off the coaches in their course. They go on to threads online. They're all over Reddit saying, "This person ripped me off. This person sent me legal letters."

[00:14:29]You don't want that. Give them the money back guarantee. It will also help you with the way that you communicate your sale. And that's online coaching with James Smith. Affordable online coaching my app. In the first two weeks, if you don't love it for whatever reason, even after we've sent you the program, you let us know, we'll refund you in full.

[00:14:42]That's legit. I will give you one more bonus thing just to piss off the other coaches. This is the bit where the other business gurus are going to get really, really annoyed. Some of you are trying to charge high ticket prices because it's a premium product. What you have is amazing. Sorry, it's a workout. It's some macros and it's someone to chat to.

[00:14:57]It's great, but it's not amazing. So, what they'll say to you, you have your one month price of weeks, but they'll go, "Nah, let's times that by three.

[00:15:04]Let's sell them 12 weeks premium. But then what they'll also say to you is six month upfront. This is the word they love. Commitment. Commitment. I need a six-month upfront commitment. Do you know why they're telling you to do this?

[00:15:18]Because you will get 6 months of cash flow upfront. So let's say you're a PT.

[00:15:22]You charge, I don't know, £200 a month for online coaching. Cool. Times that by six. That's £1,200. So you're getting £1,200 from a customer. Let's say in January. Now you're going to get on sales calls with I don't know what 10 people, 15 people. That's easy to do.

[00:15:37]You could do that in a week. Suddenly, what's that? 16K. That mentor then goes, "Well done, Declan. You just hit 16K a month. What were you making before, Declan? I don't know, £1,000, £1,500,000 sounds better. Declan, can you come to my house? We're going to film some content. Why don't you come around?" You come around my house. And I go, Declan here was only making £1,000 a month before my mentorship. Now he's doing 16k a month, but he's not doing 16k a month.

[00:16:02]He did 16k in one month because he decided to take six months worth of revenue from his client and backhandle it all into one month right now. This is a vanity metric for the guru that you've hired. Not to make you look good, not to help you, but to make them look good, to make it seem that the results that you've got happened right now. It's a fast. And you know what happens when you make 16k in a month? You take your foot off the gas. You stop producing so much content. You stop caring about your emails. You're like, "I made 16 grand a month. Everything's going up." 3 4 months time, you look at your cash flow and you realize, "Whoa, I'm stuck. I'm in a shitty position." Why? Because you pressed and squeezed people for 6 months worth of revenue. Let me tell you this.

[00:16:40]I work with you coaches. The majority of you jump on a [ __ ] split pay. Why?

[00:16:45]Because you don't want to give over the cash all in one go. If I reduce that down to a lower split pay, you would take it. Do you know why? For security.

[00:16:51]You don't want to hand over all your cash in once in case you need it for something. you will take the minimum payment necessary to join my course. And I'm in a position to help you make way more money than what you pay for the course. Your customers are the exact same. You should be offering a monthly price and a weekly price, and it shouldn't be more expensive to be weekly. It can be a little bit, you know, economies of scale commitment. But wouldn't it be better for you to reduce the barrier to entry for your clients?

[00:17:14]Rather than them needing £1,200 to use the services, why not just say it's £50 a week? Because if you're not [ __ ] at what you do, they will stay. And even if they leave, let them. Oh, but they've only paid me £50. I wrote them a workout that did not take you an hour. Cuz let's be honest, you just signed up Steve and he reminded you a lot like Pete that you on boarded three months ago and you just got Pete's workout phase one and you put Steve on it. So don't [ __ ] cry that someone left after one week because all you did was assign them someone else's program. That's how online coaching works. You'll end up with like a thousand different templates, but you just assign the best one to them. They don't pay for novelty. They pay for results. They pay for accountability.

[00:17:49]Charging people weekly or monthly revenue won't give me amazing screenshots that I can use to bolster my own sales, but it'll help you with your cash flow and it will help you with the finger on the pulse of how well your business is actually doing. Then on a week-by-eek basis, you can see how your revenue looks to see how much attention you need to put into marketing or nurturing. Now, you will appreciate that sounds very different to what everyone else in the industry says. Do you know why? Cuz they're more optimized on running their business than your fitness business. Hopefully, that would have made a few light bulbs go off. If you want to work with me, there's links in the descriptions. And if you don't, well, I'll see you in 3 months when you've been ripped off by the other guys.