Skip to content

Finance/Accounting

category Article Categories

Best Practices

Saving a Sinking Ship, Part 4: Understanding the Financial Structure of Your Business

When you’re looking to build a successful personal training business, having a sound understanding of finances is a must. Most fitness experts possess exceptional interpersonal skills and are able to transform lives. But they often lack the ability to effectively manage and balance a budget and to use it to forecast and take advantage of financial trends. Financial mishaps and misunderstandings can lead to business failure in no time. In this article, I will share several simple strategies that you can implement today to get your business on track to financial freedom.

Selling Services in a Faltering Economy, Part 2

In Part I of “Selling Services in a Faltering Economy” (in the October 2012 issue of IDEA Trainer Success), I discussed five steps you can take to energize your business: target your expertise; differentiate your products, price and relationships; protect your current client base; develop multiple revenue streams; and give gifts that reward you, too. Here are five more steps you can take to boost sales in a weak economy.

Offer Multiple Purchase Options [subhead]

Easy Ways to Increase Revenue

Wouldn’t it be great to gather the best practices of fitness facilities around the country and distill this knowledge into a succinct series? That’s what this new column explores: the very best secrets of success for operating, managing and marketing a fitness facility.

Australian Music Tariff Update

In May 2010, the Australian Copyright Tribunal voted for a significant fee hike (from $0.98 AUS to $15 AUS per class) for fitness facilities that play music in group exercise sessions. The Phonographic Performance Company of Australia (PPCA), an organization that protects sound recordings and music videos, requested the increase. Later that year the appeal courts overturned the ruling, prompting the PPCA to file its own appeal, which was rejected.

The Pay Rate Debate

If you’ve managed a group fitness department long enough, you’ve probably felt like the “red-headed stepchild” more than once. If your facility is like a host of others, your department isn’t considered a separate profit center, but rather a part of membership. Since group exercise doesn’t usually have a “home” on the profit and loss statement, payroll is often the only line item attributed to it. Consequently, when cuts are made, guess which department is most often flagged!

Lessons From the School of Sales

You’re sold on the importance of an exercise education. But do you equally value the study of sales? Whether you own an exercise enterprise or work as an independent instructor,…

Creating a Profitable Fitness Franchise

How does a small business evolve into a franchise? Here are two examples of real-world success: From license to franchise: Healthy Inspirations. Healthy Inspirations is a successful weight-loss program that Casey Conrad founded as a small business. “I opened a stand-alone location and, because of my exposure in the industry, people started asking if they could license the concept,” she says.

Determining True Program Costs

Before you can get your yoga or Pilates program off the ground, be sure to study your front-end costs–the amount it will take to get the program up and running–and the back-end costs, which will sustain your program. Consider the following categories as part of the cost of doing business and include them in your pricing.

Accounting and Hiring Practices

The Start-Up
By Justin Price, MA

Accounting and Hiring Practices
How to set up your books, choose an ownership structure and select staff for your new facility. a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You can create summaries by setting up ledgers (records in which accounts are recorded) and posting information to them. A completed ledger is really nothing more than a summary of revenues, expenditures …

Face Your Finances

Reinvigoration Strategies
By Kay L. Cross, MEd

Face Your Finances
Create a winning budget to gain control of your money– and life. During one of my presentations at the IDEA Personal Trainer Summit…

Financing Your New Business

You’ve decided to start your own personal training business. You’ve conducted a realistic assessment of the market and created a working business plan, so you know how much money you need to finance your start-up. Where do you get that money?