My PT Story part 2 - The reality of being your own boss

After becoming a qualified personal trainer on a Friday, I made the executive decision to take the weekend off and start work like most others at 9:00 AM the following Monday.

Obviously, I wasn’t getting paid to work over the weekend, so I wasn’t prepared to do it. Looking back, when you’re self-employed and standing on your own two feet, refusing to touch your own business because you’re not getting paid for it isn’t the sharpest strategy. But we live and learn.

So Monday morning rolled around, I sat down with my coffee, stared at the screen and thought: OK, what do I do now then?

After years in the corporate world building start ups and having numerous plans for a plan, I realized I didn’t have one for my own business. No clients, no structure, nothing. If I wanted any online visibility so people actually knew I existed, I needed the digital essentials: LinkedIn, Facebook and a website. But quickly looking at what tied all of those things together, I figured out the most important job for day one...I needed a logo.

So, I designed one and because I couldn’t completely shake the corporate brain just yet, I overthought it into oblivion. Similar to the flyer that no one understood pre course, it was supposed to be a clever nod to NA.

The concept featured two thick lines on the outside representing the sides of the ‘N’, with a dots traveling from the top of one to the other to form the diagonal slash, followed by another dot and line configuration to make the ‘A’. To this day, zero people have ever looked at it and worked that out. In fact, I recently threw it into an AI just to see if it could figure it out and it failed completely. A classic corporate masterpiece born on day one.

One of the first real hurdles you hit as a fresh PT is setting your prices.

At the time, I was sitting around the 100kg mark, I wasn’t young and I had no track record, history or clients. I couldn’t pitch myself at the top end of the market because I would have been competing directly with seasoned trainers who actually had results to show for it.

The obvious temptation when you lack experience is to go cheap just to get people through the door. But the problem with the cheapest end of any market, which you only learn the hard way over time, is that you attract the lowest quality clients. If you buy the cheapest option on the shelf, you know the quality isn't going to be the best. Back then I would go for the top end myself because you get what you pay for but to get things rolling, I compromised: I set my rate just above the lowest in the local area. Not the absolute cheapest but dangerously close.

I decided early on that I wasn’t going to work out of commercial gyms. Gym floor rent took too much of a cut with no guarantees and going fully employed meant dictated hours, which stopped you from building a business away from the venue. So, I went independent, mobile training in people’s houses and outdoors, covering Kent.

For my very first home visit with a guy from nearby Maidstone, I rocked up, knocked on the door and got absolutely nothing. No answer. Not a great spike for motivation. He got in touch later with a terrible excuse, rebooked and I made sure he paid for both sessions upfront before I’d step foot near his house again.

To his credit, he did and I remember standing in his living room, putting him through a warm up and thinking: “Okay, this bloke is paying me because he thinks I know what I’m doing. I am in full control of this room and yet I haven’t got a clue.” All of the training, my minute by minute session plan, everything seemed to go out the window when I was standing in front of him. He didn’t turn out to be a long term fixture anyway, largely because he was completely unreliable and we mutually parted ways when he stopped calling.

My first real block booking came from a client around the corner in Gillingham who wanted someone three times a week. Old corporate habits died hard. I immediately slipped back into start up mode: Let’s lock them in for three months, get a massive block booked and secure some stability. I quoted a price based on my low baseline, they agreed and for the first time in a long time, I saw a four figure sum hit my bank account. I was ecstatic, self praising my corporate skills for seeing an opportunity no one else had.

Then reality hit. When I actually broke down the numbers, I had priced myself into a proper corner. It worked out at roughly £15 a session for prime time 8:00 AM slots, three times a week. By the time I factored in travel time there and back, it choked up my morning schedule so badly I couldn’t fit anyone else in. In the corporate world, you hand off low margin deals and let someone else worry about delivering it. When it’s your own business, you’re the one sitting in the car realizing you just locked yourself into a three month discount. My negotiating skills and my pricing strategy needed a very rapid evolution.

Then came my first real network breakthrough: a client down towards the posher Faversham area, looking for a birthday present for her husband. This place was massive. I literally had to drive through a field of sheep just to get to the front door of a sprawling estate that had its own cricket pitch and tennis courts. I remember thinking you're way out of my league here and I'll do well to blag this one!

After a surprisingly easy sell, she assured me that her husband was a laugh and the sessions would be fun and she wasn’t wrong. I eventually ended up training him for his first white collar boxing match and the introductions to their network led to years of solid clients, groups and connections that supported other businesses I opened down the line.

Years later, she admitted something that completely burst my bubble... she could tell I had only just started and she had basically just hired me to help me out. I thought I was walking around playing the game and acting like I’d been in the industry for years. Turns out, I wasn’t fooling anyone. But that relationship was a massive anchor for my network and a crucial lesson in early stage survival.

Even with that win, the start was a very tough grind. By the end of the year, I decided to cave and see what the gym floor setup was actually like. I refused to work at the gym where I trained—rule number one of keeping your sanity is never mix where you work with where you actually enjoy going to switch off. So, I checked out another national brand in Maidstone, which was basically a tennis club with a gym and swimming pool bolted onto the side.

It was a disaster waiting to happen. There was already an established, ex-military PT there that everyone knew and unfortunately loved. Other trainers had lasted all of a month or two before packing it in because he held a monopoly on the place and the members knew it. Nobody wanted to touch a new trainer when they figured the chances are that I would be gone in a month.

The only person who actually trained with me in that place was the gym manager. But even then, he would only do sessions with me behind closed doors in his office so he wouldn’t upset the apple cart. In the real world, having the gym manager train with you is the ultimate social proof: Look, the boss trains with him, he must be decent. But instead, we were hiding out in an office where nobody could see us.

I tried to salvage it by getting a couple of mates from kickboxing—as the club I trained at was literally next door—to come down and hit the pads with me. Predictably, that just frightened the members. It didn’t fit the tennis club vibe. I lasted two months before packing it in. When you’re paying gym rent just to stand around losing money and wasting your time, staying home and doing nothing is a better business model.

Working out of that gym felt entirely like stepping right back into the corporate grinder. You quickly realize that whatever you say to one person will make its rounds, complete with all the backroom politics. As an example, when new inquiries walked through the door, the receptionist had total control over who got handed the leads. And that preferred PT was never, ever me.

It was an expensive, frustrating learning experience but I’m grateful for it. It hammered home a harsh truth about the working world that I still live by today:

You don’t really have friends in business because money can cloud the relationship. You’re basically on your own.

I know it sounds bleak but it’s just the reality. If I treated my friends the way I have to handle business, they wouldn’t be my friends anymore. And if I treated my business like I treat my friends, I wouldn’t have a business.