1. Work ON your business, not just IN your business.  If it is a fitness business you operate then treat it like a business and not a job.  There is much behind the client interaction scenes that MUST receive attention.
   
2. Have a plan. Goals with no plan to accomplish or measuring sticks along the path will simply become unfulfilled goals.
3. Surround yourself with great people.  You will reflect the qualities of those you associate with.  Choose your friends and mentors wisely.
4. Specialize your fitness service.  Work to your strengths to fulfill specific needs.  This becomes your niche and you become the expert of that niche.
5. Work on the things that deliver.  The return on your investment is key both financially and maybe even more so for your time.  Outsource and delegate the small stuff and concentrate where the business has the greatest return potentials.
6. Purposeful use of time and tools.  Distractions are everywhere including some of the greatest social media tools available to you.  Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Email and more can be huge time sinks, yet they are excellent tools for spreading your message.  Schedule your time in these areas to keep control of your time.
7. Tap into hidden opportunities.  These are only hidden if you do not utilize them.  Up sell, cross sell, and down sell are traditional marketing practices that help you appropriate place offers in front of customers who are already at a purchase level with you.
8. Ask for the referral.  Obvious, but often missed.  Let customers and co workers know what you are looking for.  Referrals are powerful as you start from a more trusted position when their friend gives you the thumbs up to start.
9. Work from a list.  Again, cutting out distractions makes you efficient.  Create a daily task list and check them off.  Only after should the distracters be given your valuable time.
10. Master your craft.  There are many snake oils salesmen out there in the fitness industry.  They are not just the goofy ab machines either.  Whether you have developed a silver tongue or not, you should always be able to back up your exercise prescriptions based on current research and standards.  Keep learning and participate in industry education, follow blogs of respected fitness professionals and participate in mastermind programs.
11. Improve the experience.  Deliver extraordinary experience to your clients and students. Set yourself apart by focusing on enhancing customer experiences.
12. Don’t wait for perfect.  More than anything I have witnessed outstanding programs that could have truly changed lives never get off the ground.  They went to the wayside as one thing or another was never quite good enough.  Do as FaceBook does and get the program to a  reasonably acceptable level and let it roll.  Improve and tweak as you go.

Now these are some great items of advice from six awesome fitness professionals.  To read the full list from Kelli Calabrese, Stephen Cabral, Todd Durkin, Shelby Murphy, Bedros Keuilian or Pat Rigsby, go to PFP Magazine.

—–My 2 additional Success Strategies would include Goal creation and achievement strategies and the framing of the situation with scripted planning.

Goals- specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and possibly most important, time sensative.  Most have heard of these “S.M.A.R.T.” goals, but do you have a plan specific for attaining the goal? Are you being held accountable by other trusted peers?  Do you write down your goals and post them in often seen locations?
Targeted goals are powerful.  Use them appropriately and hold yourself accountable to attain them.

Practiced Scripts – Not that every word is planned out, but being prepared with leading topics as you tour a facility or run a potential client through an assessment.  ie when you show the treadmill you should be practiced at asking leading questions that help the potential client understand that they do not know all protocols for cardiovascular training, that there are ways to use it most efficiently, and an educated fitness professional would be an excellent choice in learning to optimally use that equipment.  Lot’s of areas of the gym to do similar.

What might you add to this list?

Following is a recent VLOG from Suzelle and if you are member of the community and/or ever enjoy the benefits of one of her teaching vacations, you’ll want to stay up to date on these weekly vlogs titled “Everything Fit Bodies”.

Login at Fitness Pro Travel, upgrade your account, and take full advantage of the many community features and ALL the travel opportunities.

*The discount is over, but the Premium Account Fees go up soon.  Act before the 1st for getting the best pricing.

**Do you direct a Gym, Bootcamp, Church or community organization that would benefit from a community based online platform?  <<MORE>>

When sorting out how to display a new feature (basic accounts can now view all available dates, even for those products they are not allowed to book) that was just put in this weekend I realized it is valuable enough to require mention here so that it reaches beyond only those going through the tutorial.

As FPT members have always known, you cannot access certain products if you do not qualify for them based upone your certified specialty skills.

As of this most recent upgrade to the social commerce platform you have likely noticed the access for those maintaining a “BASIC” or free account is a bit limited.

Hundreds of fitness professional immediately recognized the value of community membership and the expenses that go into not only Fit Bodies travel program, but also the building and maintaining of this high function site.

As expected, there are many who were not quite as  confident about immmediately upgrading their account to any of the three premium options.  This also created several questions that these most recent changes will help answer.

Previous to this weekend BASIC account holders could only access the short description and details pages of resorts that were considering traveling to…. That was unless those members were clicking directly on the 15 opportunities that are available to that group.

What this created was an issue where BASIC account members were not sure they wanted to upgrade just yet, until they knew that dates were available for the locations (which were not in the basic category) were available.

No More…

Now ALL ACCOUNTS can manuever all the way to the “Add To Cart” page for positions they qualify for.  The red pop up notice to BASCIC accounts will now come up only when they click the “Add To Cart” button.

This now gives the BASIC accounts, similar to all of the Premium Accounts access to the drop down menu so you can see what is remaining available for you to book whether you need to go upgrade first or not.

Sorry for the long winded explination, but mucho better now. 
Helpful???

Here is an example between a traveling fitness professional and a resort (Sunscape Dorado Pacifico Ixtapa)

Cross promoting adds benefit to both parties involved.  In this video example the pro and the resort not only cross promote to each others “lists” of followers, customers, colleagues, and friends; they also built a single promotional piece together to cross share.

Expand Your Reach – When you cross promote with another, the numbers of individuals who hear your message can be many times your reach alone.
If nothing else, you have the opportunity to expand your own list for your own future promotionals.

Save Time and Money- The cross promotion can save you based upon shared expense in promotional production. Likewise with time, you have an opportunity to share your message among many people very fast.  List building can take time.  Cross promotion lets you take advantage in quickly accessing someone else’ already built list.

Image via Wikipedia

Opens Doors – Working with an individual or company in cross promotions is often a lead int to other collaborative activities.  Ultimately, relationships are everything and building them through cross promotions may not only promote your immediate project and build your own list, but it may also lead to other income generating opportunities with your new cross promoting friend.

Builds Trust – All day long we can talk about ourselves or our service.  And, all day long most will at least initially roll their eyes and believe we are tooting our own horn.  When your cross promoter sings your praises you benefit by the simple fact that it’s not you talking.  You also benefit by their already developed reputation they have with their customers who are now hearing of you.

Authority Positioning – A little less direct than benefits mentioned above, but potentially powerful and far reaching is the “Authority” status you may shroud yourself in depending upon the structure of the cross promotion.  The fact that a trusted third party company is promoting you and/or your service puts you on display as the expert provider and positions you as the authority that others should seek out on this subject.  It also enhances your existing authority to the clients who already trust you.

The benefits of cross promoting are far reaching.  They can provide much more than a simple commission or one time sales pitch.  I encourage you to look at the big picture when selecting your collaborators for cross promotion.

The example above was between a traveling fitness pro and the resort (after being facilitated by Fit Bodies).  We have also worked with different fitness education companies.  Locally at our training school we have a standing cross promotion with a local massage therapist for professional referrals…

How about you?  What areas have you dabbled in cross promotions?

Bad Things Happen

Happy to say that most are getting around well and the many accounts (not bad out of 12,000 though) for whom we had to adjust their login to help them access are back in and active.

Surprising to me though is a use issue with the new vacation search tool that so many people use.  It is slightly different than in the past but provides many great benefits to scheduling the teaching vacations than the previous tool did.

Now, instead of searching week by week as in the old, you simply select a day from within the week that you would like to travel….. A list of resorts that have a week with that date available pull up with their short descriptions.

Since there is generally a Sunday overlap there are essentially two individual week blocks that share the same date.  One may end on a particular date and the next will begin on that same date.

From those search results a person would then click on the individual resort and on the add to cart page they would see specifically which week is available for booking.  Can be a pain for the searcher if you were looking for the week that isn’t actually available.  (SO – we are adding an element that will show you the available week dates in the first results screen rather than going all the way to the product page)

As is it should be nothing more than an inconvenience (again, which we are working on).  And, it should be only an inconvenience because we all know to NOT BOOK FLIGHTS until confirmation comes (within 48 hours usually sooner) on your booking……… And even more prominent than that is to certainly not book flights before you’ve even tried to book the dates at Fitness Pro Travel.

There is no guarantee that the dates will be available from one minute to the next as there are a lot of fitness professions utilizing this Fit Bodies program.

This information is splattered through out the site and is in the terms that you had to mark that you read when you created your account.  It’s also common sense.

* This is why many subscribe to the Enterprise Level Account so that they have access before the rest of the community on dates.

You likely can imagine I am not ranting on this subject without reason.

Yes, it has happened in the past that fitness professionals have bypassed the rules and booked flights before notice and even before actually booking the dates in the system…. and Suzelle has always worked when this caused a conflict to find a way to make it work (she’s got stories).

She, Denise, Erica, Lisa, and Alison all have to use the oops cleaners from time to time, but an oops that includes paying for air travel can be expensive.

It may not always be the case that they can fix your oops.  And, since we are starting fresh in our new site digs i thought I’d share this very important topic and hopefully head off one or more potential future “Oopsies”.

Make it a Great Day!

Related articles

• Sorting Hat of Fit Pro Vacations (fitprobiz.com)
• Booking A Resort Fitness Teaching Vacation (fitprobiz.com)

Many understanding folks have worked with me in getting their passwords reset and finding their way around the site… It’s been a good & fun kind of busy.

You can review the email that was sent out announcing the re-opening here.
And, you can use the below Recent Article for further details on the site changes.

Related articles

• Its Game On (fitprobiz.com)

This is a good time for me to see if I can practice what i preach.  I  have often said that TRANSPARENCY is important to build trust especially in the online world.

Well this morning we pulled down the construction sign at Fitness Pro Travel and within an hour we put it back up…. Grrr.

The functionality of the various systems seem to be working fine, but almost immediately we found that while the accounts we were testing with transferred nicely, there was a large enough number of accounts that didn’t transfer quite right.

So admitting that we have to fix the transfer issue and that our testing team missed what should have been an easy one, the Grand Re-Open is off for a bit longer.  My disguise of perfection is gone and I request your patience as I work out the details.

I’ll send an email when we open the doors back up later today.

When 10,000+ fitness professionals come through and check it out, I am certain there will be other “challenges” that arise. We fully intend to lose the next couple of weekends chasing those items down, but hope that all the major functionalities will continue to prove themselves solid.

We appreciate your patience, feedback, and notification for challenges you may run into.

Keep an eye out for our mailing system check on Monday.  Rumor has it that Suzelle will be offering a bribe for your patients with any issues and assistance with getting this greater functioning website rolling. 

The Fitness Pro Travel site will be down starting at 6pm Pacific tonight until sometime Monday morning.

Similar but Different

While we’ve been talking about these changes for the past two months, I am certain there will be some that will be caught by surprise.  That will likely make next week a busy week of answering questions.

For those of you who have taken the time to read through some of these recent blog posts, I hope that the transition is relatively simple…. I’ve added several links to the bottom of this post for you to reference if you want to look back at all of those sneak peak statements while the site is shut down for a couple days.

Final Site Update:

If you looked close enough to the above image you might have noticed the slight change in the look of the Fitness Pro Travel site.  This image change reflects a slight change in agreement on the areas that Fit Bodies and Fit Launch work together for various elements of the community. To you, the end user, functional procedures for your community and travel experience will be very similar.

Fit Bodies, Inc. will become the domain owner of fitnessprotravel.com and therefore we are updating the site to better reflect their presence and program within the site.

The community will run on FIT Launch’s Community Commerce Cart and Fit Bodies and FIT Launch will work together to service the many aspects and benefits that come with being part of this community.

I’ve covered quite a bit over the past two months.  I hope you’re excited for the slight yet significant functional improvements in coming this next week.  Your patience as we work out any kinks is appreciated.

Checkout these posts for various aspects of the changes to the Fitness Pro Travel website.

• A New Fitness Platform
• Fit Pro Details
• Booking A Resort Fitness Teaching Vacation
• Sorting Hat of Fit Pro Vacations
• Red Warning Pop Ups
• Updating Fit Travel Tutorials
• Sharing Your Fitness Content

Still here and reading?  I just talked with Suzelle a few minutes ago. We wanted to come up with something to assist in easing the growing pains with operating a brand new system/website… Because their will likely be hiccups that you the user will find and ideally pass on to us to fix (in a friendly manor), she want to provide a small discount code you may use if you like to thank you for your patience and your assistance.

Watch for Monday’s email for details.

Your Fitness Specialty in the Tropics

Now, only two days away the move will begin.

A couple more things i want to cover with you this time to ensure all 13,000 members are prepared:  1) The site will be shut down on Friday the 30th at 11:59pm EST.  2) Have you take a look at the side-by-side view of each of the premium account types.

Getting a bit more indepth on those…

THE MOVE:

Friday the 30th, 11:59pm Est we will be putting up a “under construction” type of sign letting you know we started the move to the new social commerce platform.  If you a need to check on a date or make a booking you’ve been planning on, Fit Bodies is still open for business.  You can reach them at Phone: 859-341-0830

We expect the site to be once again live with it’s slightly new look, new searchable features, new account access, and new premium benefits by Monday morning.

PREMIUM ACCOUNT BENEFITS

Following is a link to the side-by-side review of each of the membership types.  A few highlights everyone will want to notice…

all premium account types will go up in price on the 15th of January.  *two weeks to check it out and upgrade your account prior to the rate change.

basic accounts will have limited access.  all intentions are to always have a free option available with great choices, but now those choices will be limited to just under 1/4 of the total options available to those who invest in the community and program via premium accounts.

The upper level premium accounts, medallion and enterprise, will now receive an automatic reduction in fees by 5% and 10% respectively in addition to their other benefits.

Options have been created that allow for change requests up to 45 days prior to travel.  The fee for taking action on this change option varies from $150 to $50 running from Basic to Enterprise.

With just these few items you can easily view the value of premium membership depending upon your use of your account and travel habits. The following link will bring you to the current side-by-side listing of all account features.
These are still subject to change at any time, but there are a couple that could moderately change by Monday.  :-)

==>Fit Pro Account Side-By-Side<==

Those of you who have already upgraded, your set.  Although you might want to renew if it’s not too far away (another new feature is under the ‘account’ tab you can see when your renewal is due now) you may want to grab it before the fees rise just a bit on the 15th of January.

I’ll follow up this weekend to let you know how things are going.  Any questions?