It’s December 8, 2013. Tears stream down my face as I remove family pictures from the great room in my home...

The year before… 

I had a comfortable 6-figure income, no debt, owned outright a 4200 sq ft house I loved, a Lexus, retirement funds, and no worries about paying my son’s tuition let alone where my next paycheck was coming from. 

If You Think It Was Easy for Me 

My house was not even under contract, and every belonging I had that wasn’t with me, sat in boxes in the middle of rooms in that 4200 square foot house I loved. I waited for a buyer, but temperatures are below zero for weeks, reducing the number of buyers looking.

Circumstances that started when I handed in my resignation letter January 16, 2013, started a cascade of 8 major life changes that occurred over 14 months. I could have only predicted two. I quit (safety, security, and a regular paycheck) on purpose, on a mission, and my son was going off to college. The other 6 – some I’ve hinted at here others matter a little less, but here they are. 

A 10-year relationship fell apart, as it turns out it was entirely built on false pretenses, and I’ve learned that painful reality over and over again for years, my financial situation changed dramatically based on investing everything – time, energy, and money into a business(stubbornly trying to do it myself).

Living the Struggle 

I went from mastery in everything I was doing every day to totally learning from scratch how to build a business in a different way, I’d moved away from immediate family and friends, and suddenly had much less in common with them (who else did I know after all that was in a 100% online business? Um, no one. My family once again did not know what I was doing. I’m not sure they still do to tell you the truth. They say things like, “you can do that from anywhere,” with no idea that this is more than about posting to Instagram from my phone daily.)

If You Want to Get Untouchable Fitness Copy

I’m going to share with you how to do that. You can imagine we can’t possibly cover everything that goes into the programming, the pricing, marketing, selling … the what you say when they say “… “  details you need.

At the end I’ll share with you the last chance to get support this year. I have a passion for up leveling the fitness industry.

Copywriting for Marketing to Women Workshop

LIVE July 21, 2021 3-6pm Pacific 

Miss it? Try clicking on the link and we’ll have something special for you. 

•  5 Profiles of Female Buyers (they aren’t all like you)
• 12+ Word families that influence purchases
• 5 Templates to use for infinite inspiration
• Mining your stories
  

Think your fitness marketing never works? It will. When you tap into your magic, and your customers. 

Register for this workshop and let me show you how easy it is. 

The best lessons for fitness & health coaches are always going to come from making mistakes. Let’s face it, if you get it right the first time, you got lucky. You need to know why. So often that comes from doing it wrong, realizing what can go wrong, so that you can avoid it and plan for it next time. 

Even with an experienced team, you’ll have mistakes. Sometimes it’s because of the experience. They aren’t looking at it fresh and meticulously like something they take ownership for it the first time will. It’s time to make a change. 

It takes a village.

From behind the scenes to get it ready, and keep it going, to the partners who promote you, and ask you to do lives on their platforms, to the team members who are invested in the breakdown of a launch or event after and get to work on completing tasks.  

For your affiliates, find like-minded business partners. 

For your team find people to hire that you both like and agree to be accountable for the measure of success of their role responsibilities. When mistakes happen it’s easy to get upset but when you genuinely like the people you work with it’s easy to forgive when it blows over. 

What Did You Expect

That said, you need to have a clear expectation and see when someone isn’t meeting your needs and is overstretched or can’t support your backend the way you need it. Sloppy mistakes and lack of willingness to report on measures of success is either a lack of understanding, lack of ability to do the job, or lack of motivation for what they’re doing. Decide what you can fix. It might be communication, instruction, and it might be the wrong WHO to do the job.

If you have someone you’re grateful you have, ask them what they need to succeed and what could distract them from doing the work you have to have done. 

You’ll depend on others more and more if you want to grow and grow. For us hard-to-delegate I’ll-just-do-it people it’s a big and necessary step. 

Things will break and mistakes will be made.

Expect it, anticipate it, and you can get best at preventing it. 

Writing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) is a start. But holding a person accountable to doing them is the important part of operations. If they skip a step or complete it incorrectly, your business suffers from the mistake. Once you’ve created SOPs you need not only to have them checked, but it has to be visible. An individual who is following instructions behind the scenes is not holding themselves accountable for their role. 

That just doesn’t work. Hire responsible people who want to do a great job, be held accountable, love checking off that they’ve done a task and are on track. Then everyone can celebrate it together. 

People are watching, listening, and reading your content if you’re consistently adding value. 

A few people will buy after first meeting you, some will buy when a source they trust introduces you, many more will follow you for months, or even years, before they decide to finally buy.  

Play the long game and it will pay off. Your emails should offer so much value that people want to open them and stick around. Email promotion after promotion without any value is not enough. 

You can email frequently and it’s okay as long as you offer value. 

Mailing infrequently is a surefire way to fail. So, if you’re worried about emailing frequently, what you already know or fear is that your emails don’t offer value, you don’t know what to say, or you don’t have buyers on your list. Decide which of those is causing the most reluctance and deal with it. 

•  Your emails don’t offer value?
•   You never know what to say?
•   You don’t have qualified leads? 

These 5 lessons for fitness & health coaches are all important but none potentially more important than the last. If you want to make a major change in your business and be a personal trainer or health coach, but be THE personal trainer or health coach, then you need the ability to do this. 

Put yourself in your customer’s place and make it the basis for any and all content you create.

The only thing that matters is what she thinks and feels. Put your personality into your content. Put facts into your content. And put emotions your customer can identify into your content. 

I hope these 5 lessons for fitness & health coaches were helpful. Especially if you’re having a tough day! When mistakes happen it hurts! It’s your business and if a team member makes a mistake, they aren’t the owner, though you may get lucky and find someone who treats it like it’s their own, they will likely never care as much as you. 

There is nothing different about making $5000 a month and making 6 figures a month when it comes to relationships with your customer. So, if you nail the conversation now, you’ll be on your way. If you don’t have the right message or clarity about what you do, who you serve, so that you can create more happy customers, then consider this.

Resources Mentioned in this episode:

Marketing to Women Copywriting Workshop 

https://www.fitnessmarketingmastery.com/copywriting

Hurry as this live event will close July 21, 2021. 

Is hiring help on your radar?  Are you at a point you need to hire? 

The start of relationships is always yummy and exciting. The middles are riddled with hiccups and speed bumps, and the ends are either mutual or explosive. 

Here’s what I know after 37 years of private business work, as the individual being managed, as the manager, and as owner.

You know what it takes to write a good ad for support? 

It takes copywriting skills. 

It’s not that different, hiring internal customers vs attracting external customers. Over 20 years ago when I first labeled our staff members internal customers in a then mid-sized health club,it changed the way I led them. 

[Mind you, I still had a lot to learn. For instance about the different personality needs. I assumed too often- and still do - that people are like me. That is I get my satisfaction from accomplishment, finishing, I actually don’t love praise from others because if I feel myself it was well done that’s so much more to me and if I don’t that kind of external praise doesn’t land on me well.

They're Not You

But I tick differently than others. And so do you. For instance, I assume people will get the job done that they say they will, or we will communicate about it ahead of time. It would never occur to me to change a date or deadline without advance notice. But mostly, I would just get it done. I know what I can get done realistically and I don’t promise more. Not everyone is like that.

I Never Knew

External acknowledgement is one of the most important things to most people. To someone like me, that’s a shock, so I have to really effort to do it, without if feeling fake. And it’s not that I don’t appreciate the job, but when the job expectation is to complete it, on time, working well, that feels to me like making a huge fuss about stopping at a red light]. 

I’ve been involved in private businesses from health clubs, to financial planning businesses (very lightly and by way of marriage), and my personal fitness business since 1987. I’ve stepped into leadership titles often before I was a leader because that’s how we did it in the fitness industry early on. 

Know what I mean? If you were hired and promoted fast, you do. 

Don't Make the Fitness Industry Hiring Help Mistake

Teaching fitness, and being a responsible rockstar employee that showed up on time, never called in sick, then often got you promoted to “director” or “manager.” But.. it’s an entirely different set of skills. 

There was a need to set a standard, a set of guidelines, and expectations for job success and what would lead to termination if those expectations weren’t met. I’ve conducted thousands of weekly and monthly meetings, some effective, some just chit-chat in my eyes that employees loved. So you’ve got to balance the task-minded, focused with the what your hires need. 

Again, a need for clear communication about needs, and goals, and task-at-hand so that none of it is forgotten. 

You’re a New Leader?

Or maybe from the aftermath of 2020, you struck out on your own. Suddenly you’re the owner, entrepreneur, and you may wear all the hats for a time. As you do, if you don’t create systems (the steps for the actions you take every day), you’ll struggle to delegate when you hire. I’ve got systems I created in 2013 however and I have yet to find someone who can do them as quickly as I can, so I still do them too much. I see them sitting in the little file that says “systems” dated 2013. 

That’s a delegation problem. That’s on me.

At some point hiring help is mandatory for your growth. Compensating an A-gamer who gets things done on your timeline, meets deadlines, is proactive and intuitive, and careful to check and test anything before releasing it to the public is asking a lot. But not too much. 

Not if you’re clear from the beginning. If you have someone who doesn’t want to be contacted when something they’ve built goes wrong and wasn’t checked & tested, you’ve got a problem. But if you failed to share the details for measures of success and expectations in reporting, it’s on you. 

Business Differences and Similarities

The dynamics in each business are different. From a small one-location fitness center, to a partner-owned studio, to a multi-location business with annual growth of a department that had to work within a whole and 8 team members around a conference room table every Monday, to a small solo-run financial planning business with 4 individuals and a region of dozens of agents… each was different and yet so very similar. 

You as leader have to be clear.

And I for one, wasn’t. When I started hiring new people to help with tech and customer service, I wasn’t clear. And because of it I learned a lot of lessons. 

So.. in case you’d like to be spared some of those, take this message now! 

Successfully hiring help hinges on clear expectations and measures of success. When you do that you find the right person for the job. You’re finding the right “who” to perform rather than filling a what (a person to fill a position who has the skills). You have to have both. 

Doesn’t that ring true of any program or service you offer? You’ve got to describe with complete clarity the expectations for the customer. You share with them what you’ll deliver in terms of transformation(benefits), and the way you’ll do it (features). 

Similarly when you’re hiring help, you’ve got to be clear. There’s been a shift. If you want to level up a team, the best way to leap a hurdle of hiring help is to stop writing job descriptions alone and be clear on the measures of success for a job. 

Successfully hiring help hinges on clear expectations and measures of success. 

When you do that you find the right person for the job. You’re finding the right who to perform rather than filling a what (a position). 

How do you get clear? In a special Q and A during the Copywriting for Marketing to Women masterclass I’ll answer how to write a better job description to avoid headaches. 

In addition to the 5 Templates you’ll get, I’ll share a template for creating a killer job opening so whether you’re hiring someone to help you build a campaign funnel, manage your social media, assist with your household needs so you can take care of business, or something else, you have the best shot of getting a match you’ll both say “I do” to. 

EXCITING OPPORTUNITY

It’s really exciting when you step into leadership for your own business. Are you thinking like a business owner who already makes what you want to make? Who already has the influence you want to have? It’s easy to play small and realize one morning that what’s not working is you. 

Hiring Help Gets Easier with the Right Words

It’s also easy, oh so easy, to flip the mindset shift, and get on with hiring help in a most effective way so your days are far less stressful and you have the creativity you need to without having to keep a thumb on deadlines for everyone else. Every week… the measure is there. Every day between meetings and check ins team members know what has to be done and their role in doing it. 

Clear messaging internally and externally is a big part of your start, your ability to grow, and your ability to scale a business. When you’re hiring help it’s crucial.

Ready to get clear on messaging? 

Learn more. 

July 21 I’m sharing a 3-part 3-hour copywriting for marketing to women workshop.

I’ll present and you’ll craft messages during as well as take 5 Templates with you for use creating your daily, weekly, and monthly content. The bonus template is based on today’s content, hiring help.

Register to save your spot as I share the 5 profiles of female buyers, how to emotionally propel them into action ethically when you have a product or service that improves the QOL. 

Resources:

fitnessmarketingmastery.com/copywriting 

FAQs about the copywriting workshop:
Q: Will there be a replay? 

A: Yes, so you can "workshop" in your own time. (and replay this later to create killer content for your upcoming programs!)

Q: I'm not even sure about my offer yet, will this be appropriate for me?

A: Absolutely. No matter where you are, communication is important. You can use the right words to identify what your audience wants. Even with a small list, (or for growing a list), copywriting is a skill you can't succeed without.

I don’t personal train anymore. Want to know why? 

I don’t work one-on-one any more except in a coaching relationship. I never exercise with a client. And would not advise you to be doing that if you’re coaching someone online. That’s a ridiculous service job that takes you back light years. Imagine exercising for 6-8 sessions a day.

That kind of thing last happened in the 80’s as the norm. It carried over into the 90’s for those “addicted fitness instructors” who ignored the well-known risks science had discovered. (My master’s thesis, in fact was about how to avoid exercise injuries from “aerobics.”)

You Don't Have to Repeat Past Mistakes

But trainers did it. During the pandemic trainers who never would have done it meeting in person with a client did it when meeting virtually with them. What was that about? Discomfort. Lack of confidence and belief in what you were doing being enough. That is something valuable to acknowledge, and to deal with. 

You are no less valuable training a client while they’re at home in their living room than you are in person. The exercise done to proper fatigue is just as valuable for them. You in fact monitor them less keenly while you yourself are doing the exercise. Upgrade your services by making sure you’ve given tips to them instead. Provide a more accurate cheat sheet for them as well as homework between sessions. 

•     In a darker background, wear light clothing
•     Wear form-fitting clothing so they see your demonstration
•     Be sure you have a quiet space so clients can hear you 
•     Check your internet connection. 

But you exercising all day is a super quick way to burnout, reduce the value of your time, and trash your body. Why would you want to send the message to a client like that? You’re their role model, right? 

Do What You Love 

But that’s not why I don’t personal train anymore. I can’t afford to. My time per hour would price me at a ridiculous rate. If I’m not making $500 an hour it’s hard to justify time spent training when I’ve got other things to do in my business. 

Fitness professionals today don’t “exercise for a living.” They support others exercising for a living. There is a big difference. 

I have a gym owner friend who says, and has for years, “I sell sweat for a living.” In my opinion, that’s a functional mindset issue and a message to staff and public that loses clients and trust. What he really sells is hope, optimism, and inspiration. 

Inspiration Not Perspiration

And so do you. 

You can stand out online in this crowded market, even if you don’t personal train as we know it anymore. 

It’s not hard. 

There are a lot of copy cats making it easy to be unique.

Pay less attention to what someone else is saying on their social media. Pay more attention to what your customers are saying. Respond to that. Know your customer better than anyone else. 

That is good copywriting. And if you’re not good at it now, you can get better at it. 

Right Message Right Time

Here are 5 examples of where you’ve got to be good at it:

• Email subject lines
• Emails
• Social media posts (the copy below/above your image)
• Your blog/video titles
• Your video script

And I’m giving you all 5 PLUS a bonus template 

• descriptions for hiring your virtual team or staff members

Those alone are worth the registration for my Marketing to Women Copywriting workshop July 21. I’ll share what I’ve used to grow from $5000 a month to 6 figures a month. Using original content only you can create and everyone will want to copy, but can’t. 

Think outside the box. Think about how you can really do what we all must do to be in business, solve a problem.

• What is it you solve?
• How do you do it uniquely? 
• What’s special about your method? 
• Why you? 

If you can get a clear and compelling message to the audience you want answering those questions you can create thriving business.

People are texting asking me if they can promote my program to their group. 

Carole, who I met a few years ago at an event we were both attending and we’ve been friends on Facebook and see each other annually otherwise (except for COVID). That’s it. But she knows what I do. 

She knows me and she knows her audience. 

She knows they need what I have. 

And she’s seen me promoting. I’ve been in lives on Instagram and Facebook on my own timeline and been a guest on a mutual friend of mine’s timeline. I’m advertising in Facebook and she’s probably seen the ads. 

Typically, you will reach out to others. And I have. I have 3 others promoting for this launch. But Carole is not the only one, another friend asked last week and she and I did a live for her audience Thursday night. 

So that’s 5 people actively promoting to their audiences who share my target customer. 

When you successfully grow your email list all the time so that you can launch to your own list (and not burn the same people out selling the same product), and then… 

You have others who have a significant sized list email and promote for you… 

You will not only grow your sales… 

You will grow your email list…

You will grow your social media following…

And you will have another chance to sell something more or sell something the first time to these people. 

Texts and Emails can become overwhelming at times. But I’ve always got room for these kind. 

Your homework:

List 5-10 affiliate marketing partners that you would love to have promote you

List 5-10 affiliate marketing partners that you could promote (the lists might overlap) 

Start nurturing those people. 

Like their social media posts, comment, share

Think of someone you know they should meet and ask if they’d like in intro 

And?

Register for the copywriting for marketing to women workshop! https://www.flippingfifty.com/copywriting