Four simple steps to charging $10,000 for your service

Summary: In this article I uncover the pricing mistake leaving fitness professionals underpaid, and share the four-step approach I used to help one trainer charge $25,000 per client.

Four things you’ll learn in this article

• Why the traditional “build first, price later” approach keeps fitness professionals stuck in a scarcity mindset and earning less than they deserve
• The exact reverse-engineered pricing method I used to help one exercise professional collect $250,000 in pre-payments every January
• How to flip the pricing conversation so $25,000 a year feels like an obvious bargain to the right client
• Who you actually need to be selling to, and why trying to be for everyone is quietly costing you a fortune

There’s a really big mistake people are making with how much to charge for the service they’re offering. And this big mistake means they’re leaving a lot of money on the table. Whether you’re selling personal training, semi-private training classes, gym memberships, or anything else fitness related, you’re earning less than you should.

Here’s the problem. This is what people are currently doing:

1. People have an idea for a service they want to offer.
2. They build a business that will provide that service.
3. They look at the business they’ve built and try to work out how much people will be willing to pay for the service.
4. They release that business out into the world and hope that the right people will find them and pay them money.

The big problem with this is it really comes from a scarcity mindset. And it often seriously limits how much people are able to charge. The issue is that they are starting with the service they’re going to be offering and then they work out how much it’s going to cost their customer. They decide they want to sell personal training. They look at what people charge for personal training and they match their pricing to what everyone else is doing.

This is the same mentality as the people who spend their entire life to build their business and hope that at the end of the day there is some time and energy left to give to their life. The people who live to work instead of the people who work to live.

So how do we switch this thinking?

Let’s talk about a more abundance-mindset approach to pricing your fitness service to ensure you’re earning what you’re worth.

It comes down to four simple steps.

• Step 1. Find a problem that needs solving.
• Step 2. Look at how much money you want to earn, or how much you want to charge people for solving that problem.
• Step 3. Find a way to give more value than the cost, or how much you’re charging people to solve that problem.
• Step 4. Find people who can afford that cost.

Let’s unpack this. Firstly step one: find a problem that needs solving.

Too many people start their business with an idea.

But an idea is not a good idea – unless it solves a real problem.

You need to start by identifying a problem. A real one.

Ultimately every single successful business solves a problem. If you can find a big enough problem that has a negative enough impact on people’s lives, they will pay you handsomely to solve it.

So once you’ve identified a problem that needs solving, we get to the most important part of pricing your service.

Determining how much you want to earn.

And this is the big shift from a traditional approach to pricing a service. Normally what people do is they work out what that service involves and then how much they can justify charging for it.

But we’re gonna flip that. First we’re going to decide how much to charge for it and then we’ll work out what that service needs to be to justify the price.

This is the exact process I used with an exercise professional that I mentored a couple of years ago. He came to me because he had been running his business for many years and had reached a ceiling where he just couldn’t work any harder to earn more money. He determined that he wanted to earn a quarter of a million dollars a year in revenue, that he wanted to be a sole trader, and he only wanted to work with 10 clients. So some simple maths showed us that he needed to charge each client $25,000 a year to hit this target.

Now $25,000 seems like a lot of money for a fitness professional to charge for personal training. And it is but only if you start with personal training and work out how much to charge for that. Instead what we did was start with that dollar amount and worked out how good that personal training would need to be for $25,000 per year to be a good deal for the client.

Fast forward to today and this exercise professional receives ten payments of $25,000 (quarter of a million dollars) in his bank account on the first of January every year for his clients to pre-pay their annual fee.

Needless to say the service and experience that these clients are getting is pretty exemplary and it’s so good that they all think 25,000 is a great deal.

And that’s step three: finding a way to give more value than the cost. Once you know what you want to charge (and that should be high), work out what the client needs to receive so that the price seems perfectly reasonable.

And finally to step four, where we find people who can afford that price. It won’t be everyone and that’s fine. You shouldn’t be for everyone. You need to find the people who have the problem that you have built your business to solve and who have the money to pay you to solve that problem.

And that’s how you price your service.

Find a problem that needs solving. Work out how much you want to earn to solve that problem. Provide a service that makes that amount seem like a good deal. Then find the people who can afford to pay you.

Your action steps:

1. Identify a real problem you can solve Pinpoint a specific, painful problem in the market that your business is genuinely equipped to solve.
2. Decide how much you want to earn Start with your target income and client load, then do the maths to work out what each client needs to pay.
3. Design the service around the price Build out a premium offer so your target fee feels like a good deal for the person paying it.
4. Define who can realistically pay you Get clear on the exact profile of person who has the problem and the budget, and stop trying to appeal to everyone.
5. Put your offer in front of the right people Focus all your marketing time, energy, and messaging on reaching those specific buyers.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll also enjoy the following, they’re some of my most popular articles and podcasts on topics similar to this one:

• How to Raise Gym/PT Prices Without Losing Clients | Read | Listen
• 3 ways to make it easier to earn more in a fitness business | Read | Listen
• How to grow a fitness business WITHOUT more clients/members | Read | Listen