If you’ve been a personal trainer for more than a couple of years, you have experienced a slump. These are those times when everything seemed to be going ok. Your schedule was full and life was beautiful. Then, all of a sudden, that couple that you were training 3 times per week (each) move out of town, another client gets injured doing yard work, and still another finds they can’t afford to train with you anymore. Now you find yourself with a third of your schedule open and feeling the financial pinch of making less money. Top that off with the fact that you can’t seem to pick up any new clients. You start to feel panicky and anxious. Life no longer seems beautiful. What happened?

Well, when you began as a personal trainer, you knew you had to hustle, talking to everyone, making connections, creating opportunities to sit down with potential clients and transitioning them into paying customers. This builds your schedule to the point where you are comfortable with the number of people you are helping and the money you are making. And guess what? You stop hustling. You sit back and go about your day-to-day training and everything is fine… until it’s not. 

The key is to never stop prospecting, never stop hustling. You know from having built your schedule the first time that gaining clients is not an overnight thing. It can take days, weeks, and sometimes months before a potential client decides it’s time to start.  That slump can last for months and that’s not fun. On the other hand, if you keep hustling, keep working it, what’s the worst that could happen? You could take on a few more clients than you had planned on, or maybe you pair them up with another client with similar goals (creating a small group), OR, you could pass these new clients on to another trainer, which helps more people, helps the other trainer, build good will, and keeps you in the game. 

Losing clients is inevitable. Having that loss send you into a slump, is not. Keep hustling and you’ll keep busy.