Brandon tells us how he scaled his training business online with Everfit so he could stop trading time for money and help more clients achieve their goals.
Brandon is a solo operator of Winning Mentality Fitness, located in the Bay area. He first began training 8 years ago after college and shifted to adding remote coaching right before the pandemic. Brandon invested heavily in himself to perfect his craft of coaching but also to build his business acumen.
Brandon applied his newfound business knowledge to scale his training business to $10k per month in just 3 months. He now works with 20 clients online and keeps a handful of in-person clients. Since his online training took off, Brandon was able to create another stream of revenue for his training business. This allowed him to be selective with the clients he took on in person and not rely on having to trade time for money.
Brandon’s fitness journey began as a kid. Growing up in an athletic family, Brandon played a variety of sports like baseball, boxing, and golf. After years of athletics, he went through many injuries that led to chronic pain. His own experiences are what eventually inspired him to get into personal training and help others live pain-free.
What inspired Brandon to start coaching? How does he use Everfit to help clients with pain and injury? What strategies does Brandon recommend for coaches to scale their business? We asked Brandon to find out.
What inspired you to get into personal training?
I went to college for kinesiology and had an injury my freshman year that caused me to see a physical therapist. The rehab process inspired me to help other athletes and people get pain-free and led me into personal training. Getting athletes and people out of their pain or injury is still what inspires me as a personal trainer.
I began with an internship in 2014, working with general population clients and athletes. Eventually, this led to creating “winning mentality fitness,” which is about having the mentality to always win no matter how big or small the steps are. I found that having clients focus on small wins helped to build them up to bigger wins and got them back on their feet pain-free.
How did you transition into online training?
I never thought about online training until I saw Everfit. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I had to find a way to reach more people and build my client base. I went from using excel sheets to a better platform to use for when I’m not able to be there in person. I still train clients in person, but about 60% of my clients are online.
I took business training in 2020 that helped me set sales and lead generation goals. I set a goal of making $10k per month. My business mentality led me to determine how many leads, assessments, and sales I needed to hit my goal. Over the last year of 2021 through 2022 combined, I maintained my 10k a month goal. It took me a good three months to reach that number and stay consistent.
What is your niche?
I work with both in-person and online clients but didn’t have a niche at first. I want to target people sitting in a chair most of the day, and I work with people coming back from injury to get them injury and pain-free. I also focus on mobility training to help clients move more and move better.
What were some of your biggest challenges prior to using Everfit?
- Communicating the Benefits of Online training to Clients
It was also difficult for people who had never trained before in their life to start virtual training. Getting clients to realize they can still get a big benefit from training even when I’m not there with them in person. It takes more effort at first for them to buy-in.
- Difficult for less experienced clients
Over the last year and a half, I’ve transitioned a lot of people from in-person training over to online training since now they’re more in tune with their workouts, and they can now work out on their own with more structure behind it. It takes more time at first to get them up to speed.
- Being a One-Man Team
Doing everything myself was difficult, trying to manage every aspect of the business. While I am good at some things, I am not so great at other things. Learning to delegate the things I don’t want to do to virtual assistants or coaches helped free some of my time.
What are your top 3 Everfit features?
My top three features would be payment, workout builder, and the exercise video library.
- Payment
Everfit’s payment feature allows you to invoice clients and take payment directly through the platform, either on a recurring basis or just for a single product.
- Workout Builder
The easy-to-use workout builder allows you to create workouts quickly and efficiently for any style of training.
- Exercise Video Library
Being able to upload videos of you personally performing exercises helps you build your brand and ensures your clients are doing movements the way you want them performed.
Having the data and showing the progression through body fat percentages, increased performance on certain exercises, or progress in sleep or water intake goes a long way toward a client achieving their ultimate goal. Clients can see progress as quickly as possible as opposed to before. I could track all of that through sheets, but it wasn’t instant like it is in Everfit. Being able to show that instantly has been really helpful.
With Everfit, everything is all right there. It makes it easy to manage everything and see everything all in one platform. Having Everfit as a hub for all of my training, the business side, program design, and managing clients is big, whereas before, I previously had systems through google sheets, email, and mail chimp. Before Everfit payment, I used PayPal, which was easy to manage but having it directly in Everfit makes it easy to see the revenue coming in from clients, and the product system makes it easy to determine which products are popular or which to change up.
What advice would you give coaches who are new to Everfit?
- Lay Down a Blueprint
It took a long time for clients to initially buy into the training, but Everfit made it easy to lay down a good blueprint of what the client is going to get from online coaching. It used to take me about 30 to 60 minutes to lay down a foundation of how the program was going to go.
- Education
I would recommend getting an education on training and business and figuring out who your ideal client would be. Anybody can be a trainer and give out the program, but to really master your craft and retain clients is going to take education on the business side of training. If you’re focused on retaining 5-10 clients rather than trying to train 20 to 30 all at once, it will be easier to identify mistakes and make scaling easier since you’ll have a blueprint for yourself.
- Ask for Referrals
Referrals are the best way to find your first clients and scale your online business. Implement a referral program for free and easy leads for your personal training business. Referrals are also highly qualified leads since they both contact you and come from a reliable source.
Retention is probably the biggest thing in personal training as a whole. If I can retain 5-10 clients each year, that guarantees me consistent revenue rather than just trying to build my clientele all the time. A good goal for me was to retain 5-10 people year-round and build 5-10 more on top of that each year. Communication on Everfit assisted me most with retention. Using the in-app messenger, scheduling messages for similar groups of clients, or leaving announcements helps to keep clients engaged.
Where to find Brandon:
Instagram: @coach_bwoo
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-woo-a44b8a178/
