Starting up your own personal training business?
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What many fail to do is spend vital time on a business plan – a single document that defines objectives and goals of the business, how they will achieve it and how they will operate.

“A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power” - Brian Tracy

Without such a business plan, you become vulnerable to being controlled by external factors, continually responding to circumstance, not knowing what you need to be doing and missing opportunities and threats. It’s no wonder lack of a business plan is cited as the number one reason for new business failure.

All my businesses have such a plan and I’d be lost with them – indeed the one business I started and failed was the one I skimped on the business plan for.

What is a business plan
A business plan is, to borrow the definition from online ubber encyclopedia wikipedia,  a statement of a set of business goals, the reasons the owners believe they are attainable and the plan for reaching those goals. Above all, it’s a decision making tool.

To aid in decision making process, your business plan details your vision and strategy for the business with sub-plans covering marketing, finance and operations and also should contain…

What’s in a business plan – your business plan checklist
As I discussed above, the business plan is your vision of your business and your strategy of how to achieve its goals with sub-plans to cover marketing, finance and operations so the contents will cover all aspects of the business that have a bearing on how to achieve this.

Your personal training business plan should normally consist of three key sections:

• The Business Description
  This section gives the reader a view of what your business does along with background on you and others in the business so the reader can understand the key factors that will determine your success.

This will part of the plan will include:

• Business description – what it is you will do, what makes you unique in your market place: at home personal training or gym based instruction; what you have that other personal trainers don’t – a specialism for example.
• Management background – experience, skills, qualifications and credentials of you and the people you intend to recruit. As a personal trainer you would include your qualifications and any experience working in the fitness industry here.

• Your products and market place
  This describes the services and products you’ll sell; your market including its size and growth rate and how you will gain access to it, and a competitor analysis – who they are, their strengths and weaknesses. Primarily this section will detail what target market is, your advantage in this market, how you will market to it and how you intend to beat competitors (how many other personal trainers and gyms are there, what are they pricing plans, what do they specialise in).Get as much intelligence on your competitors as you can. Talk to local gym staff and scan your telephone directories to build a list of other personal trainers; get friends to contact them and see how they pitch themselves and their rates; how do they advertise themselves, what are they doing that’s working and not working.

• Financial data
  This part details your current financial commitments, the balance sheet, a break-even analysis which shows your costs and how much and when you expect to make a profit and projections of income, debt repayments, expenditure and profits for the first three years of your business. For the first first year, it’s good practice (and expected) to include a breakdown month by month. For years two and three, you need only show this information on a quarterly basis.

• Appendices and supporting documents
  After the main sections you should include supporting documents, this will include resumes of key individuals, copies of any contracts you have (such as agreements to operate from a Gym and credit arrangements with suppliers) and  financial statements for you and other senior management figures in the business.

Alongside these key sections, you should also preface it with pages providing a table of contents and an executive summary – a brief summary of the the business, its aims and why someone would invest in your business.  The executive summary is perhaps the most important part of the whole plan with many lenders saying they make a decision on this alone.

In the UK, Business Link provide a guide to business plans – including the above sections along with a Microsoft Word template to get you started. A sample business plan is also available on the blog LostJobStartBusiness while a business plan specifically for personal trainers is available here (affilate link).

How long should it be?
The standard length for a business plan is 10 to 20 pages. This may seem daunting when you’re first starting out, especially if you’re not familiar with writing, but once you start writing it won’t take long. If your plan is purely for your own use as a checklist to monitor progress and keep yourself on track you can also skimp on sections, your background and personal financial records for example.

A trick I use is to start a business plan checklist – see What’s in a business plan above – and write a little in under each item, slowly expanding on each. In this way, I find I can quickly build up the core of the plan very quickly without hitting the dreaded writers block.

Add in financial data, tables and graphs and 10 to 20 pages suddenly doesn’t seem much at all.

Closing thoughts
Having said all of this there are of course of course plenty of very successful businesses that skimp on planning. None other than Eric Schmidt CEO of Google for example said “We don’t have a traditional strategy process, planning process like you’d find in traditional technical companies. It allows Google to innovate very, very quickly, which I think is a real strength of the company” and nearly every entrepreneur will stress the importance of doing rather than thinking.

Nonetheless, planning is important and a good business plan for your small business will help avoid many pitfalls the bedevil start-up businesses so perhaps the wisest advice is to write your business plan but don’t let it get in the way of getting your personal training business up and running, to paraphrase the old saying:

“Planning without action is futile, action without planning is fatal.”

Hopefully, you’ll now have a good idea of how to write your business plan. If you’re looking for more information may I recommend the book, The Definitive Business Plan: The Fast Track to Intelligent Business Planning for Executives and Entrepreneurs. Although some of it is for management in existing businesses the advice provided is solid and, if you’re like me, your plan will certainly benefit from the advice within its pages. You might also be interested in my article Four common mistakes to avoid in your business plan.

This article is the first in a series of articles on Personal Trainer Training on the business of personal training, you might be interested in another series of articles starting with the super feature on how to be a personal trainer, which includes:

> What a personal trainer does?
> How much do personal trainers earn?
> What does it cost to become a personal trainer?
> How to write a fitness press release that gets you in the papers
> Personal trainer qualifications, and
> What equipment do personal trainers need?

 Images: Top, jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net,
Middle, healingdream / FreeDigitalPhotos.net,
Bottom, jannoon028 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net