It is the perfect time to begin a personalized fitness business. The health and fitness business is expected to be $147 billion by 2024, with a huge focus going towards personalized training.
That being said, we do understand that running a business can be a worrying step to take. As a business owner, you need to have self-confidence and have the hustle in you.
This article will breakdown, in 3 simple steps, what you need to start a fitness business from home.
- Legal Business (including insurance)
- Planning Your Business
- Setting Up Your Home Studio
1.Covering the Legal Aspects
One thing that drives most business owners is being in control of where their future. It’s also nice not having someone else dictate terms and conditions.
It can also be said that fitness businesses are not set up for just financial rewards.
Fitness business owners are mainly focused on a mission – which in most cases is improving the lives of their clients.
Personal trainers, gym owners, yoga teachers – no matter what type of market you’re in, generally the main goal is something bigger, something more meaningful. They are helping someone’s father be more healthy, they are focused on providing energy to mothers, they provide self-esteem to their clients. This list is endless.
The business legalities are mainly broken down into 2 segments. One is the actual business structure and the second, insurance.
There are various business structures but as a starting point you may want to consider the 3 most common type of businesses structures:
Sole Proprietorship:
This means that your business assets and liabilities are not separate from your assets. What this means, is that you will be liable for debts and obligations.
Partnerships:
Partnerships are the simplest structure for two or more people to own a business together. This is a legal breakdown of who owns what and can be broken down in partnerships (LP) or limited liability partnerships (LLP).
LLC:
The most common type of business is setting up with an LLC. This protects your assets and profits and losses can get passed to your income without having to face corporate taxes. You do not need to pay as high taxes with an LLC as with a corporation.
The other legal aspect to look at insurance.
Insurance is dependent on the type of business you are deciding to set up. But as this article is aimed at what you need to do to set up a fitness business from home you probably would not need public liability insurance. This is normally taken out by gyms but you may want to consider professional indemnity insurance – this is if you are providing advice and protects you from anyone playing the blame game. One way to protect yourself is waivers – ensuring these are stored for you seamlessly.
2.Writing a Business Plan
Before taking any steps, it’s critical to put a well-crafted plan together.
As Benjamin Franklin famously said: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
You need to be mentally prepared to run a business, and a well-laid-out plan helps put the building blocks in place so that you can visualize what it is that needs to be done to generate sales.
You need to write down what exactly sets you apart from your competitors. You probably are aware that fitness businesses now have competition from several other experts who sit in your space, but there are also digital services with the rise of Peloton, Mirror, and Nordic Track’s, as an example.
Now, we are not here to dissuade you, actually quite the opposite. It is amongst the best time to begin a fitness business. It is very affordable to get up and running with a fitness business as companies like Peloton are doing a huge service for the industry. They are educating the market, motivating people to begin to think about getting active.
But Peloton & Mirror have an issue. They are unable to get personal as they are aimed at generating interest at scale.
If you are someone who wants to run your fitness business then you do can be a lot more personal with your clients. Something Peloton cannot do. Also, you have the added advantage – people need someone to hold them accountable to achieve real results.
Running a fitness business from home, you can yield real results for your clients. So create a mission statement, what is it that will set you apart from your peers.
Market Research:
Now that you have your mission statement detailed and the legalities in order, it’s time to do market research so that are in a position to get the best results for your marketing dollars.
Before spending a dime on marketing, understand the demographics for locations. A great resource to exploring the breakdown of certain locations in the United States Census Bureau – https://data.census.gov/.
Choose locations that you can serve and then analyze the breakdown of the demographics in those locations, are your clients there? To begin with, you can do an internet search and see how many fitness businesses, like gyms, are registered in those areas. Areas where fitness businesses are not common probably need your services, so make a list of 5 locations and get your messaging going there.
Make Sure You Offer a Better Service:
Philip Kotler once said, “There is only one winning strategy. It is to carefully define the target market and direct a superior offering to that target market.”
Now, as a fitness business marketing is often done on a discount basis – we associate marketing with a monetary discount on a month off or join now for $10. This is bad for business and devalues the value behind fitness businesses.
Rather than driving your service based on a dollar amount, aim your messaging based on the desired outcome.
- If you’re targeting older people: ‘Want to enjoy a more active lifestyle? Then get in touch for a tailored plan that is done at your pace.’
- Targeted at busy office workers: ‘Did You Know Exercise Helps Productivity by 30%? We can help you be more productive.’
- Targeted at mothers: ‘Kids Are Hard Work. Let Me Help You Discover Your Inner Self.’
3.Setting Up Your Home Studio
Running a fitness business from home has never been easier. All you need is an internet connection and a laptop.
Now that you have chosen your business, you have your marketing set up (which can be a website, a Facebook page, or an Instagram account) you need to get your home studio set up.
How much you spend is dependent on your budget, that’s obvious but you can easily start low and scale your equipment as your business scales.
Firstly, you need to use an all-in-one software like turnfitter, which will help you to keep track of all your clients, help you assign plans for them, and then help you deliver 3D immersive sound quality sessions, either live or OnDemand.
Before adding your clients to this software, you will need to create your weekly schedule. After this, you can set up your fitness plans, payment plans, and goals for your clients.
If you’re not going to use turnfitter for your video offering, you can use Zoom to run your video sessions – you can record but as Zoom is not a solution made for the fitness sector you may see a drop in quality but it does the job.
You will also need to ensure your users can schedule themselves into your sessions seamlessly.
Once you have a professional-looking studio setup, all you need is a good camera and a computer to get going.
The camera should really run in 1080p HD in at least 30FPS (our software automatically renders the best quality image based on internet speed).
For sound, you can use the same device to capture audio (i.e. Logitech Brio Ultra HD captures audio and runs 30fps).
If you want to run music and be talking throughout your class to your audience then we would suggest using a dedicated microphone. This can be paired with a USB mixer which can be used to feed your phone, your music input, and your wireless headset (should you want to use one – make sure the input has XLR input)
Now, turnfitter uses Dolby-based technology to eradicate background noise to enhance the sound quality, and that is why our clients love the product. So the software is just as important as the hardware – but it’s all dependent on what you want to offer but you do need to spend $50 million like Peloton does to compete with them.
By Rehan Sajid, Director of Growth at turnfitter