Effective Client Attraction and Retention Strategies in Personal Training

GEORGE: Introduce yourself and tell us a little about what you do and your background.

CODY: All right, so excited to share this. My name is Cody Robinson. I own a company called HomeFit. We actually specialize in working with busy professionals, executives, entrepreneurs, various high-profile clients throughout the Southeast. And we are a concierge, in-home, online, and virtual training company. And so I've been around since 2013. I am the founder and CEO of the company. And so it's been fun to really create a company whose mission it is to really change and elevate the face of fitness as a more luxury type of approach with our clientele and be more white glove in how we operate. Really, our goal is to eliminate as many barriers as possible when it comes to health and wellness and fitness. Many of my trainers, yoga instructors, and now physical therapists that are a part of the brand, definitely have to have a certain level of emotional intelligence to be able to really connect, understand, and empathize with our clientele. And the fact that we go to their home, obviously we do bring equipment with us as trainers, but probably 80% of our clients at this point have entire gyms in their house. They just don't use them until we show up. But to be in such a vulnerable setting, like their actual living rooms or kitchens, their dining rooms, their bonus rooms, just their neighborhoods, you get an opportunity to really see deeper into what their lifestyles are like. And if they actually have social support from their families, or if there's barriers to work, or if a lot of our clients are parents, so middle generation kids are getting older, or parents are getting, the grandparents are getting older, and their careers are just really weighing them down. So to be able to connect and help them find a way to navigate the stressors that are not always common to general fitness clients is something we are very passionate about and are continuing to push throughout the U.S. at a larger scale.

GEORGE: Tell me a funny or interesting story about yourself that help's us get to know you as a human.

CODY: I would say something that's pretty funny and interesting for me is how I actually got into the fitness space. So, honestly, growing up as a kid, about eight or nine years old, my genetics of weight gain and fat increase started to really come about. And, you know, it wasn't until I was about seven or eight that we actually moved to the farm where my grandparents were and grew up on a farm. First time I'd ever been exposed to the fact that you have to eat your, you have to grow what you eat, and everything is cooked in, as in the south, everything's cooked with a stick of butter, and I just went to town. So, naturally, food was a huge part of my life, and still is. And, you know, as I got older and deeper into sports, I started working out a lot more, but I still battled a lot with being overweight and overeating, things like that, as a growing boy, I guess. But, honestly, when I got to college, I was at a kind of a road, a crossroads to where I had started really working out. So, fitness was really a part of my life at that point, even more so, aside from just training for sport. And I had two paths I wanted to go. I either wanted to be in the world of exercise science, that way, you know, I could really keep myself in check and at least not let myself get too far away from, you know, a weight gain standpoint or overeating. And, or I genuinely loved to cook. And so, at the same time, I was like, or do I want to be a professional chef? And, just naturally, I decided to go with the industry that would keep me in check, because I guarantee you, had I gone the path of an actual professional chef, I would definitely be 350 pounds right now.

GEORGE: What strategies do you use to attract and retain clients in your personal training business?

CODY: So with HomeFit being a mobile company, we had to get really good at social advertising, Facebook ads, Google ads, meta ads, and just refine them over the years to get better and better. While the world of fitness is definitely pretty heavily saturated at this point, I definitely have learned that there are a lot of trainers that really haven't taken the time to develop the skill sets of how to create a local awareness post or target specific demographics to be able to lead generate and convert the ideal clientele. So we've gotten really good at being able to pinpoint on GPS map, narrow down the demographics and sociographic, kind of the behaviors of our clientele, and exclude ones that we necessarily don't typically service. Again, most of our clients are more affluent, so we can even narrow down our advertising and lead generation to people who are in the top 1 to 10 percent of household income, and obviously narrow down kind of the common factors of what they do for a living and the fact that they are pretty much all families and parents and go about it that way. Google ads is where we spend probably heavier of our ad spend, so that's good. Also on Facebook, the avenue used to be able to do local placements on free pages like what's happening in certain of your locations. And then aside from that, we're definitely heavy on the referral base. It's harder to get clients for us directly from existing clients because our clients are so private, and the fact that they do in-home and they necessarily don't want others knowing what's going on. So that's a little more difficult, but parallel partnerships with other concierge, health and wellness companies, physicians, physical therapists, chiropractors, that type of approach has really helped us expand our reach. And then also other people who operate with affluent clientele as a service company. I could go on and on, but those are some of the things that have worked well for us.

GEORGE: What is your process for assessing a new client's fitness level and addressing their goals?

CODY: So traditionally, in a more of a clinical or a gym setting, you know, obviously sit-down assessment timeframe to really chat through goals, get an understanding of their layout and their quality of life, to get an understanding of their day-to-day, and then obviously what type of barriers are really getting in the way of their fitness levels in addition to trying to establish new behaviors. So that's more on the behavioral side. Fitness-wise, you know, again, standard would typically do more sometimes skinfold caliper, a lot of times more so body fat percentage, like a handheld body fat analyzer, and then just standard kind of functional movements from body weight squats, you know, foundational push-ups to check range of motion, and just various kind of elements like that. Home is less, pretty much kind of less evasive. We'll typically, we'll do foundational things like the body fat screening for the hand analyzer, and then just functional, kind of basic functional movement testing, but then we'll also put them through a, more of a kind of a mini workout, just an abbreviated workout, just an ability for me to see their actual range of motion, ability to move body weight, obviously, and then maybe some foundational medicine ball, kind of chops, things like that. So basically, do that twofold. One, obviously to be able to really see what their basic level of movement and range of motion, and even stability, strength levels, mobility, things like that. But at the same time, it also gives them an opportunity to see what it's like to even have a, what type of workout it might look like for me. So it's twofold. It's one to establish, you know, foundational goals and assess their movements and assess their biometric feedback and their data, but also in real time gives them an opportunity to start moving again, and in return actually buy into hiring me or one of my trainers as their fitness professional.

GEORGE: What certifications do you hold, and how do you stay updated on the latest fitness trends and research?

CODY: It's always a great question. Foundationally, I started off with the National Strength and Conditioning Association. My professors at Jacksonville State University were high up in that industry, plus I wanted to get into Division I, at least D1 level, and hopefully pro level at some point, training. So I definitely had the certified personal trainer certification in addition to their certified strength and conditioning specialist. Definitely two different worlds, but there's a lot of ways to tend to overlap for that. And then obviously staying in touch, keeping tabs on whatever releases in their organization. I do bounce around to other ones like ACSM, ACE, NASM, and now ISSA is definitely a lot bigger and more profound than they used to be. In addition to actual newest trends or movements, I actually tend to try and stay ahead on the industry in regards to technology and deliverables as well, and something I definitely would advise any fitness entrepreneur to do. It's definitely key, obviously, to develop your expertise and your craft and your deliverables from a fitness and health and wellness coaching standpoint, but as a business professional, it's definitely something to know what's going on and what are people gravitating toward when it comes to looking publicly for how to actually get fitness into their life. And so like Athletec is one of the main ones that I tend to gravitate towards. They do a really good job of releasing not just new technologies that major corporations can use, but also technologies and tools that can be used as a fitness professional individually to further enhance the reach of our clientele, because things like online coaching and being able to get in front of your client virtually, it's going to be huge, especially not as your direct clients travel or have busy, you know, maybe sometimes limitations, but also for you to be able to reach people pretty much anywhere in the world at any time and expand your practice.

GEORGE: How do you envision your personal training business evolving in the next few years?

CODY: That's a great question for sure. For me as a whole, over the last decade, I've really tried to build HomeFit to be a platform and a partnership for fitness professionals to enhance their reach, especially to get in front of high-end clientele and navigate those waters, but also to be able to elevate themselves above the competition, which naturally, it's hard to say that it is competition, because at the end of the day, we all genuinely just want to help people, but there are plenty of people out there that still need a ton of help. So as a collective, as HomeFit, we've rolled out a new program called the HomeFit License Trainer Program, which in essence allows them to leverage our established brand and resources, which thankfully now we've been able to partner with Fitly to be an extension of one of the top resources to enhance their career and skill sets and ability to grow, obviously, their craft and more opportunities for education. But aside from that, or in addition to that, we've just been able to really write the book on how to develop an in-home and on-site personal training company. And so having those, it allows trainers to not only have the opportunity for us to send them clients as a corporation, but as an individual to grow their clientele directly and actually leverage, again, leveraging the brand, leveraging the mission, the vision, our core values, and then our abilities and really just our processes that we found work extremely well to not only get in front of the top clientele that you want, but also hang on to them for a very long time. And then to also operate in more of a team vibe setting to overlap, cross educate, and even cross refer different parts of the country and different parts of our centralized locations. So definitely my vision is to continue to move forward and enhance opportunity for deserving fitness professionals to enhance their career, grow their career, and just not lose that momentum and not lose that passion that so many tend to get burned out, unfortunately, due to trying to make it directly on their own.

GEORGE: What do you think are the biggest challenges currently facing the fitness & personal training industry?

CODY: Obviously another great question because the fitness industry as many of us know is so saturated and it's so It's overwhelmed with just misinformation or people just trying to get the next program release. What I think a lot of unfortunately, a lot of trainers I think have gravitated to and Relied heavier on is more so the online coaching versus the in-person Training I say that for a couple reasons one. It's it's even more saturated I think or even more of a heavier burden of a competition to try to get people From an online coaching standpoint, obviously, I'm not discouraging it. I'm just saying that's to make that a sole priority I think it's tough because You know, he might charge a couple hundred dollars for a month for clients to build them programming Online and obviously you can help hold them accountable and you can have the messages back and forth and still have that accountability But then as far as our clientele, I mean we tend to see You know for only two to three Workouts per week, you know, they're paying between a thousand sometimes upward of $2,000 a month to personal train And that's in person on site and they're paying for that extended value So from a professional standpoint or at least from a cash flow standpoint obviously, you can technically reach more people from a programming standpoint online but you can financially make more and then have an even deeper relationship with clients that you train in person or at least virtually through you know, whether it's through zoom or FaceTime or MindBody or some of these other platforms that allow you to do that So, I think just leveraging the technology in advance because obviously there's plenty more competitions from like tonal and I mean I could go on and on from different avenues that clients are trying to buy into But nothing will ever at least for the next several decades will be able to overcome I think at least the personal connection at least for our clientele, which I think allows us to really separate ourselves from just You know general population standard fitness to people who really want more Education more deep dives into their lives and their behaviors, but also their functionality So getting back to the personal thing is the way to overcome the noisy competition.

Want more information about Cody Robinson & HOMEFIT?

visit: https://www.thehomefit.com/licensing

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