How to find the work/life balance as a PT

Around 80% of PTs don’t make it past the two-year mark. That means that, for every 10 newly qualified PTs, only two will still be working as a PT 24 months later.¹ Stephen Tongue discusses how to find the work/life balance as a PT while developing your business.

A career as a personal trainer (PT) can be very rewarding and fulfilling. PT is unlikely to make you a millionaire but you can make a very good living and combine your life’s passion with an income (that’s living the dream). Many PTs fail to sustain a career and others drag themselves through teetering on the edge of burnout – there is a work/life balance to be found. With a little bit of planning, self-care and outside help you can be a happy, healthy trainer with a thriving business and personal life.

The start-up stage

Starting out a career as a trainer is like jumping on a rollercoaster without a seatbelt – it’s both exciting and terrifying. You’ve taken the leap to do a role you love, but you need money to survive and you need it fast. This means you have to constantly prospect for clients, tirelessly promote yourself in the community and say yes to every offer of work that comes your way just to get cash in the bank. If you can learn to sell, you will make it through this phase and reach your survival target (the minimum number of sessions you need to deliver per month so you can be financially stable). Most PTs I have met who didn’t make it failed at this stage and simply ran out of time/money. If you can get to your survival target quickly, there is a good chance you’re going to build a great business going forwards.

Saying yes to every new client who comes your way usually means you fall into a trap of working peak hours only. This means working the pre-work peak 6-9am, post-work peak 5-9pm and all day Saturday and Sunday. Suddenly you find yourself with a seven-day week, 12-hour days in the gym and a few hours of dead time between peaks to organise your business and the rest of your life. The other big problem with this lifestyle is that you’re working antisocial hours, making it really difficult to sustain fulfilling relationships in your personal life, which are essential for your health and happiness. This just isn’t a sustainable model for most people and so you have to work hard to get your business to the next stage: achieving reasonable working hours.

To achieve reasonable working hours you have to shift your focus to one key goal: filling your dead time (off-peak hours) which are usually during the day. This means you have to promote available hours to a market that can attend them. Daytime hours are often filled with clients who are business owners, retired, shift workers, school or college students or remote online clients. Once those off-peak hours begin to fill, you should be able to unlock enough revenue to afford yourself a full day off! Ahh, remember what a lie in feels like – bliss!

Over time as your off-peak hours fill, you can afford yourself two days off and shorter shifts. You may decide you want to work exclusively early/late shifts or I have seen many PTs enjoy working four long days followed by three days off. The key to success at this stage in your business is not to get greedy and be tempted to work every hour available to you in order to maximise your revenue; it’s good money but you will have no time to spend it and eventually risk burnout.

I remember many years ago making it my goal to take weekends off. It took months of hard work to make it happen but, when it did, I was super proud of myself. It felt so good to get that precious time back with family and friends that had been missing for so long. Having days off during the week was great but when everyone else was working it could be pretty lonely and it just wasn’t quality social time.

Having established reasonable working hours, it’s time to begin laying down good habits for the future. Although PT is paid by the hour, there is a lot of work that has to go on outside of session delivery to keep the business alive. This could include writing programmes, managing bookings, payments, accounting, marketing, projects and more. As these activities are regular features of your working week, they should be scheduled into your working week as appointments, so you always have planned time available to complete the tasks without them spilling over into your personal life. It is important that you have a cut-off point in the day for work-related tasks. Clients will happily have you working all hours – I don’t know a PT yet who hasn’t had late-night calls or messages from clients desperate for help. You must set expectations and boundaries for yourself and your clients to follow; if the lines become blurred, there is no escaping the grind.

Find and integrate a time management system. There are apps and books galore on this subject and you just need to find a system that makes sense to you. I can remember discovering Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix and being so excited at how much it changed my game. Suddenly I had clear lists with tasks rated by priority and every spare moment I had I knew exactly what I needed it for – it felt like a lighthouse in a storm. When a system is in place, it’s much harder to procrastinate and become distracted because, when you know exactly what you’re supposed to be doing with your time, if you don’t do it you’re knowingly underperforming.

In the beginning, revenue generation inevitably dominates your time but, as that grows and stabilises, you establish a session delivery sweet spot that delivers enough money and enough time to get everything completed within the timeframe you want. As long as you don’t get greedy for revenue and don’t start to exceed that upper limit, balance is maintained.

The penny drop stage

When you have normal full-time working hours and a full-time working wage, you’re starting to get the work/life balance. You will start to feel you’re in a happy place. Day-to-day routines, habits and systems will keep your business ticking over and you will have the time and energy to develop and refine your business. This is when the penny drops.

Creating time to analyse, question, plan and develop your working life will really pay off now. Take time to work out how much of your routine tasks you can automate, outsource and streamline. Saving time on such tasks opens up space for you to explore how you might improve your service for better customer results and retention. Develop projects to work on secondary revenue streams and spend some time giving back to the community – it won’t go unnoticed. You have to recognise the value of your time at this point in your business; although it may seem costly at first to pay somebody else to do some of your work for you, it creates valuable time for you to up-skill yourself, plan and implement new ideas that improve your services and create new incomes. Your business will become more stable, it will be multi-faceted and its reputation will grow.

The quality of life stage

I have seen so many selfless and passionate PTs give all their time to others and save nothing for themselves. No time to eat, giving up their workouts to squeeze in clients and working too many late nights/early mornings. They are trying to outrun their own shadow and leading themselves to long-term fatigue and burnout. Remember that you are your business: you are a role model and you are a fitness professional. To have a fulfilling life, business and relationships, you need to be the best you can be. Use your skills to plan your sleep, nutrition and training. Plan in family holidays, hobbies, professional development, and business and fitness goals every year. Self-assess your performance as a business owner, fit pro, partner, parent and any other roles that are important to you. Recognise where change is needed and act upon it with an action plan.

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Steve Jobs

Summary

In the early days, it’s always graft to get a business started but, if you don’t get your working hours under control, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Actively work on your time management systems, build time to develop yourself and your business, and finally ensure you are doing what you need to do along the way to make your life fun, interesting and fulfilling.

Reference