Online Training - Past, Present, Future - Jonathan Goodman

Almost every day somebody's like, I've tried everything and I can't get clients. What do you what are you guys doing? And I always I always respond the exact same way. I just I just type into the comments, how many people have you spoken to today? Like, well, I mean I I created a funnel and I looked at this ebook and I put these ads out and nobody's responding in to it. I'm like how many people have you spoken to today? Oh, but I mean, none of the maybe you should speak to people.

Hey fitness fans, welcome back to the Future Fitness Podcast and Interview Series. This is your host, Eric Falzone, and we are on episode number 93. And I get to talk to Jonathan Goodman. What a treat. What a treat for me, what a treat for you. I'm gonna talk about all the things you need to know about Jonathan Goodman. Well, actually, just a few. Um interview goes pretty in-depth about what he does and his thoughts and his um his path that led him to the success he's seen. But before we get into that, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. Everyone who listens to the show, um in the last month or two, we've started seen a lot of really solid traction on listenership and downloads and all those things. And uh it means a lot. It's great. You know, I've been working hard on this for about 10 months and uh working really hard to get great guests like Jonathan Goodman so I can offer more value to you, offer more value to uh the guests who are on the show. And yeah, it's exciting. So please, you know, keep keep doing it, keep listening, keep telling your friends, um, post us on social, uh, subscribe, review, all those things. Just just keep it up. That's all I'm asking, and I hope uh I am fulfilling my end with offering you a ton of value as well. So uh yeah, from the bottom of my heart, once again, thank you. Now, um Jonathan Goodman. So he is one of the forefathers of online coaching. Now, online coaching, I talk to a lot of people every month, if not every week, about online coaching. Uh, I it was a revenue stream for me when I owned my gym. It was an additional revenue stream, and it was pure profit, really. It was just my time, right? Um, and then a few easy tools. So the allure of online training is obvious, right? You stop trading your time for money. Uh you have freedom, you can live wherever you want, have any kind of schedule that you want. Uh, it's alluring, it's sexy. But is it easy? I don't think so. Otherwise, everyone would be doing it. And maybe they are. I don't know. Maybe everyone is doing it. But uh, there's a lot of people out there, there's a lot of opportunities, a fairly new field, and it's only going to grow. But there's a lot of things you have to know. And Jonathan Goodman points those out. He's developed a whole uh certification behind it, and he provides a lot of value for the people who go through his course. So uh it was great. Plus, we talked about Marina wool. Why is that relevant? Well, it's relevant for a couple of reasons that we'll talk about it in the podcast, but reducing decision fatigue every day by just having the same clothes. And we'll talk about why that would piss some people off and why other people would be like, oh, it makes a lot of sense. And uh why travelers like Jonathan and I, uh, we're both average travelers, why we love it, and why it fits our lifestyle. And uh after all, I think this episode, if anything, really just talks about lifestyle. You know, how do you build a business through the fitness industry that is lucrative and fits your lifestyle? And uh, and then what do you do with that lifestyle once you have it? So uh one last thing before we get onto the show here is the fitness accelerator. So, you guys, I have interviewed almost 400 people uh within the fitness profession in the last year, and that's between this show and the fitness blitz. And I can tell you, um, I have a very powerful network, and I didn't know always what I was gonna do after I sold my facility uh after nine years of ownership. Uh, I didn't really know. You know, I knew I'd hit the road, my wife and I'd go see things, I'd build businesses, I'd start a podcast. But this group, and it's it's selective, you know, the application process is no joke. Um, but there's just so much opportunity. It's amazing when you get the right people in the right room, what happens? And uh I I've working on projects now. I never would have dreamed. I thought I would have no, there's no way I thought I'd be working on this segment. I didn't even know what some of these segments of the industry were. Uh, but thanks to my network and the group that we're uh producing now, um, here they are. I'm working on them. It's crazy cool. So if you want to learn more, you go to fitnessprofessional online dot com forward slash fit accelerator. And there's an application process there. Uh landing page could be better, I'll be honest, but it doesn't matter because the group is awesome. So if you want to be part of it, fitnessprofessional online dot com forward slash fit accelerator, find your way to the application uh filled out uh as much detail as you can, then you'll be hearing from me. So without further ado, this is episode number 93. Jonathan Goodman, enjoy the show. Jonathan Goodman, welcome to the show, man. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I'm uh I'm excited to have you. You are uh your name has come up so many times in so many different conversations I've had with with people in the profession that um you know I'm glad I got finally tracked you down and got you on the show. So um I have you know a lot of questions about online training because I get asked a lot of questions about online training. You know, it's something that a lot of people are getting into. They see the value of it, they see the future of it. But my first question for you is uh Merino Wool, Merino wool t-shirts. Yep. Tell me that role in your life and why you chose Merino wool. Because I read a social media post and I too wear t-shirts on the Bion RB neck.

Well, well, it's funny, you know, you and I were talking offline, uh, which is the most annoying thing for anybody on a podcast to do. They're like, yeah, me, me and the host or me and the guest, we're talking offline about something that's super interesting, and you missed it. Uh so we were talking offline about something super interesting, and and terrible Canadian coffee, of course, uh 10 horns. And um, and we both established that we love the outdoors, we love hiking, yeah, and and we love travel. Yeah. And so it started, I started, I found out about Marina War when I started doing a lot of hiking. My wife and I did a 48-day road trip where we hiked uh 16 national parks and monuments across Canada and the United States. And, you know, we've we've we've hiked, I've done trekking trips through um Brazilian national parks. Awesome. The Yogue, right beside a national park, like you know, South America, Central America, all over the place. So we've done a lot of we've done a lot of time, a lot of hiking. And Marina wool is just the best fabric that you can find as long as you're not allergic to wool. It works away sweat well, it doesn't stink, doesn't it, it looks good wherever you go. And so I always loved it. The problem is it's super expensive. And um I my buddy puts out a Kickstarter one day. I didn't even know that he was doing this, but he puts out a Kickstarter one day for a new company that he started called Unbound Merino, which is a direct-to-consumer merino wool brand for people who love to travel. And it started with V-neck t-shirts. So I'm like his best customer ever. And now he sends me a bunch of free stuff because I always talk about it. Yeah. But uh, but yeah, man, it's the only shirt that I wear. I've got six in black, two in navy, two in gray. I've got um a long-sleeved shirt from them, I've got a zip-up hoodie that's gonna be coming pretty soon. I'm wearing their socks right now as well. They've got underwear, I don't know the underwear yet. But but the main reason behind wearing the same shirt every single day is a little bit different than that. Um, a lot of super successful people, you hear like Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, all of this rule where they wear the same t-shirt every day, they wear the same clothes every day. It's it's meant for me, you know. I don't know why, I don't know why other people do it, but it's meant for me to minimize cognitive fatigue. I think that we underestimate just how many decisions we make over the course of a day, and how few of those decisions actually impact our desired output. And so if my if you like fashion, then this is a moot point. What I'm about to say is like poisonous for you. But for somebody like me who doesn't particularly care about fashion, I mean, my only goal in wearing a t-shirt is to be comfortable and feel like I look good. So if that's my desired output, is wearing a different brand t-shirt going to affect that desired output? Yeah. So I wear the same one and then I don't have to decide what to wear every single day. So I can save that decision-making power, that willpower, to something else that I think is more important. And I do this in a lot of other places in my life too. Like I don't look at menus, for example, because same thing, I don't really particularly care about food. So I have a whole bunch of like ordering websites that I order food from if I'm at home or if I'm out with my wife, like she'll pick the food. And if I'm gonna order lunch, all that I need to decide is like Mediterranean, Japanese, Greek, or Middle Eastern. Once I decide that, I already have preloaded in the meal, the restaurant that I like, the meal that I like, my credit card, and my office address. And it's literally click, click, click, click, it'll come to my office. So I think I don't know, I think it's just important to figure out what's important to you and what's not important to you. And if something isn't important to you or you've established what your desired output is, like eliminate that decision so that you can spend your time and energy on more important things.

Yeah, yeah. I love it. And I've uh, you know, I've told you too, and a lot of people who listen to the show know that I've I've lived in so many different places. Right now I'm in Lake Tahoe. And every time I move, um, I have one green bag of clothing, right? It's a snuffle bag. And every time I move, if I haven't taken things out of the bag, then I they're they're gone. Right. If I haven't used them in the last two months, then they're gone. That's awesome. And one of the things I've been working on is I started looking at Moreno Wool because I'm like, God, you know, what what if I just had eight t-shirts? That was it. Because I owned a gym. I had 60 plus t-shirts, only 30 of which I had made on my own. But the point is, I agree. And they stunk, right?

Like long hours in the gym. Man, my drive freight, my drive that stuff stunk. It was disgusting. I'd have to change my shirt three times in a day. Yeah. This is like a sale, this is like a sales auto for for I'm dumb with you. I know, I didn't intend this.

And you know, I uh I was telling you before I got to interview, interview Dan John uh about a year ago. And same thing. He's like, Eric, I have like he has like three pairs of jeans, right? He has you know 10 different t-shirts, same, like two two different colors. That's all he does. He eats the same thing every day because that that decision fatigue is a real freaking thing. I mean, even this morning I I sat down to do my to-do list at you know 6 a.m. and I'm like it's too many damn decisions, man. You know, I just need to clarify this. And I think that's that's a big part of it. And I think that's part of, you know, when you go, and we're obviously this is a big topic, but when we get into online fitness, right? Um, or just any online entrepreneurship, there's so many options. There's so many things you can be doing.

Yeah. Right.

Um so I know you've probably told your story uh a few times, but if you can, just give us your backstory, John, on how you got to be, you know, essentially the the trainer of online trainers.

Okay, let me let me talk about the decision fatigue thing a little bit more, and then I'll give you a little bit more of my backstory. I think, you know, because because you kind of tease the bit of like there's too much to do online and there's too many things that you think that you should do. I think the biggest problem with people who try to do stuff online is they don't actually define the problem. They don't actually first define what they want to get out of it. And and they got c they get caught up in in message transduction tools, they get caught up in software, in tactics. And if you don't actually, if you don't actually define the problem, if you don't actually know what you want to get out of something, what you want to achieve with something, it's impossible to figure out what the solution is. And as a result, then you're never sure of something. When you're never sure of something, you've never fully given yourself permission to take action on it. If we don't take action on that thing, we never succeed with that thing. So the problem all comes down to definition. Just to give one example with software, everybody's like, oh, what's the best software for online training? I'm an advisor to four different companies. I can tell you right now, there's no best software for online training. There's better for certain people. So what do you do? You take a step back and you don't even look at any of the softwares first. You take a step back with a piece of paper. You're like, what are my three must-haves with software? Well, I have to be able to build with it, I have to be able to do strength conditioning coaching, and I need to be able to have teams on there. Cool. Then you go out and you find the first software that fulfills your top three, and you sign up for it, and you never think about that again. That's it. Like that's if you define that as your as your top thing, don't even it doesn't mean that there isn't a potentially a bit better solution, but the marginal difference, the marginal improvement of finding a bit better is so small compared to the amount of time and energy it's gonna take you debating over which is best. And in those weeks when you do that, uh you should be just taking action on the next step. So even if you pay a couple bucks more a month, who cares? Yeah, you know, in the great scheme of things, it's such a small decision. Um, as long as it meets your basic guidelines. Anyway, my story. Um my story is is I have a kinesiology degree. I was personal trainer at the university. By the time I was 23 years old, I was making as much as you can make as a conventional personal trainer here in Toronto. I was, I was, um like I was at the top of the pay scale. I was referring my overload of clients to other trainers. I was um I was even earning a bit of a salary for hiring and training trainers. And so I reached that point at 23 years old where I was like, well, this is what my my life is gonna be like. And and I'd asked myself that honestly, and I didn't like the answer because it was cool for the time being. I was making good money, but I was a 23-year-old and I was like, there's nowhere to go from here. And anybody who's had any kind of success at that age is obviously has a bit of a growth mindset. And that's that was a really difficult thing. And the tipping point for me was I played, I you know, I played ice hockey my whole life, and even after university, I played it, and I got tripped. I I pulled a hamstring when I got tripped, and I had to take two weeks off of the gym and I didn't make money, and I was like, well, I this can't be what my life is gonna be like. At one point, I'm gonna want a family, I'm obviously going to get sick, I'm probably gonna get injured at some point. You know, I got to figure out another way to make money. So I started looking into multiple passive income streams, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is back in 2008 before these things were in your face. I went to the bookstore. This is when bookstores still really existed in a big way. Right. I went to the bookstore, I went to the business marketing section, I looked at all of the best-selling books, I wrote them down on a list, I walked across the street to the library and I checked them out. And I just started reading. And eventually I came across a book called Multiple Streams of Income by Robert G. Allen, and it introduced a term called infopreneuring, which basically means selling your IP, selling your information. And in that book, he suggested writing a book about what you know best as the core of everything that you do. I was like, why know personal training best? And I was so ignorant around why a 24-year-old shouldn't write a book to educate his industry and how hard it would be to write and publish and market a book that I just did it. And the book started doing really well. Um, to promote the book, I started a website called the Personal Trainer Development Center. Personal Trainer Development Center has now turned into the largest collaborative independent resource for trainers in the globe, with reaching five to seven, five to eight million people a year. And anybody who has a big platform online, um, I mean, the data that we've been able to accumulate of what trainers need and struggle with is unparalleled. And so I started doing hundreds of phone calls with trainers. I started doing a tremendous amount of observational and quantitative and just analysis and surveys and things like that. And what we came across, we were able to define the biggest problem in the fitness industry with trainers to one sentence, which is at some point in their career, one to three years in, every single good trainer eventually needs to figure out a way to make a bit more in a bit less time with a bit better schedule. Again, going back to that definition thing, with the problem defined, it was time to find a solution. This is back in 2012 now. This is before anybody really knew about online training.

Yeah.

And so came across online training as the best solution to that problem. Built a model for it, tested it with 24 people, 22 finished the test, took in their feedback, built a course, which, to the best of my knowledge, is the first course to teach people how to do online training in 2013. And at that point, it was our job actually to convince people that you could train online. You know, um, Gene Schwartz, like like famous advertising legend Gene Schwartz, talks about how the job of a marketer and an advertiser is to make a market, create desire in the thing that you do with you at the top of that. Not go into another market, create your own market. Yeah. And so that's what we did. And over those years, um, I take a lot of credit for publicizing online training because that was our job for the first like four years, where we trained thousands of people, created huge communities, created a lot of content around it. And now the entire world is like, the entire first world is like, okay, well, this online training thing is pretty legit.

Yeah.

Now our job is to say, hey, we're the gold standard of education. Like when you're ready to get serious about this thing, come to us. So converted that course over in 2016 to the first ever certification for online trainers, wrote the first ever textbook on it, and um here we are.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, you got in at a great time. I mean, um and and intentionally, right? You saw you saw a problem that you you had, you solved it.

We I mean, you know, we saw a problem that existed, and we knew that it was a problem. Yeah. Um, and and and created the solution. I didn't realize how valuable the solution was. I didn't realize how potentially profitable the solution was until a few years later. Yeah. Um, I didn't recognize, I mean, we've got we've got a 200 plus partners promoting us at this time, and some of the most influential people in the fitness industry, you know, who really don't promote much of promoting us. And I didn't realize that the real power of this thing was that we had established a complementary business to just about everybody out there where it's safe for them to promote us and and make money promoting us, but also promote a good service that they're asked about that doesn't dip in that adds on to what they're doing. And I think that's a very powerful, underspoken model, this this complementary model. You know, how can you how can you build a service or product that doesn't compete with your colleagues, but helps your colleagues win even bigger. Yeah. And approach them with that and build relationships with them based off of that, um, so that everybody wins. And so I I think, you know, I didn't realize that at the time, um, but but I've realized that now, and and that's the real reason why it's why it's growing the way that it is.

Yeah. You know, I'm I'm noticing an interesting um pattern in the things that you're saying. A lot of it seems to me, and correct me if if my thoughts are wrong here, but you know, figuring out a way to become a category of one, right? Sure. You know, that that seems to be uh something that that you're you're pointing out.

Yeah, I mean we've got we've got a put newsletter service, a put marketing newsletter service called Fitness Marketing Monthly. And the second issue that went out, which is why it's fresh in my mind, I write the lead column for it. And and the title of the lead column is literally if you think you're competing, you've already lost. Because I don't I don't think that you should. I I think that marketing incest is a big problem. Yeah. I think that looking at what other people are doing is a big problem. I mean, like you said, like you said offline, uh that very interesting conversation we had online that no one allowed. I mean, so much more interesting than what we're talking about now. The you guys really missed out. The um the the biggest problem, I think, uh uh understanding that the fitness industry is really young. Yeah. Like I don't know a retired personal trainer. It's you know, it's about 40 years old, right? It kind of depends who you who you go to, but it kind of started in the 1970s with the book cardio. And I mean ACE started around then in the 70s, the first certification started popping up around that time. And uh anyway, super young, super young, constantly evolving. And if you really think that people have it figured out, you're just straight up wrong. I mean, they don't. They're just they're just copying one another over and over and over again, not really knowing why. And to add to that, not recognizing that availability bias has lulled a lot of fitness professionals into a false state of confidence in their ability to market. I think that a lot of trainers don't realize just how easy it is to acquire a clientele in a local gym simply because clients won't travel. And so you have availability bias helping you. Then you go online and now you're competing with that gal in Germany and that guy in Malta. And now you have to differentiate yourself. Now you have to figure out not the 99% that makes you the same as everybody else, what's the 1% that makes you different? That's an uncommon commonality with other people in the world, even a reasonably small people. Where are the communities that already exist around that thing? And usually it's unrelated to fitness. How can you diffuse into those communities, become a part of the conversation, and become the fitness expert in those communities? That's how you differentiate yourself.

Yeah, yeah. And I you just hit the crux of it. You know, so many. Um I I have a pleasure of talking to a lot, a lot of fitness professionals, probably not as many as you have, I'm sure, but um so many of them, you know, like we talk about the the lifespan of a personal trainer is eight years on average.

Um depends what personal trainers you're talking to. Yeah. Really? Okay. Well I mean it it depends, right? Like if you're just going by people who get a certification, it's eight months. If you have some like minimum requirement for like hours worked or even if your minimum requirement is to have ever worked in the industry, then it goes up pretty considerably. But yeah, no, it's it's it's like eight months, depending on where you look.

Yeah. And so and so many people want to get into online training and they believe I'm sure you've heard the story before, hey, I'll just do a couple social media posts and uh I'll start training. Well, who are you gonna train? Uh anybody between the ages of 18 and s and 75, right? And uh that's 17 strategy.

Sure, why not?

Now, um, you know, that was one of the biggest questions that I have for you because I think that's that's the most the biggest misconception I've seen from my point of view is that people think they're just gonna go online and people just start coming in, you know.

Well, it kind of used to be that way, right? Yeah. You know, it's it's it's interesting. If you study marketplace economics, not even related to fitness, but if you study marketplace economics, almost every major industry right now is becoming decentralized. Some are further along the way than others, but the fitness industry is becoming decentralized. There's no gatekeepers. And when any marketplace, again, if you if you become any kind of a historian and you study what happened in the past, you can kind of know what's going to happen in the future. The fitness industry has become decentralized. Doesn't really matter if you work in a gym, doesn't really matter where. Even the supplement industry now, anybody can white label their supplement, sell it to their audience, and so you have these huge supplement companies that are hurting because there's thousands of people that are all grains of sand that are all picking away at their business. This is happening in all aspects of the fitness industry. What happens in any decentralized market is it becomes kind of a cowboy era for a certain period of time. The early adopters who go in have a relatively easy time going in there. If you're just in there shouting and shouting a little bit louder, you could probably make a go at it. But pretty quickly, and it seems to have taken about two and a half, three years in the fitness industry, especially in the online fitness industry, the cream begins to arise top. And any decentralized marketplace quickly resembles a third world economy. Where you have a few people at the top who are making a lot of money, who are winning big, you have almost nobody in the middle, and you have a tremendous amount of people scratching at the surface who might are probably getting by, but aren't doing particularly well. And we see that happening. You have the the good online trainers that are trained well, who know what they're doing, are doing really well. Really, really well. My buddy Mike Dolo runs um runs Stronger U Nutrition. They've had over 20,000 clients in like three and a half years. Wow. And that's really without marketing. I mean, I don't know if they spent more than a couple hundred bucks on ads. Like it's it's just he gets it. He gets how to take care of people, he gets what people really want, he gets how to acquire staff who already have their own market. You know, the the most brilliant thing that he does is he's he's very he's he does a very good job at integrating himself into networks and communities where trainers already exist. And when a trainer showcases the ability to be a great member of a community, he basically picks them off and gets them to work for him. Because that trainer has already showcased that there's somebody who is very active and and and great in a group and a community. So he gets that. And so he's winning big, right? And we've got it, we've got a ton of people who we've trained who have hundreds of clients at a time. I mean, you talk about like the six-figure trainer, it's like, well, I think that that's kind of crap because I think that six figures just make you happy. Makes some people happy, it makes other people unhappy. I think some people want millions, some people just want sixty, seventy thousand, some people want an extra thousand dollars a month. I think it's first important to figure out what makes you happy, but but the reality of this, those who get it are gonna crush it, and those who don't aren't gonna be able to make a go of it pretty soon. Because we're reaching that, we we've been in that bottom of the decentralized market for a couple years, and we're starting to see our way out. Where it's quite frankly just getting harder. Paid ad spend user acquisition keeps going up. You've got um cost per cost per thousand impression, um, cost per click have gone up three times since January on Facebook. That means 33 cents in January is now a dollar today. You've got email deliverability going down with stronger spam filters, you've got organic reach basically being kaput. I mean, Instagram is still pretty good, give it eight to ten months, it's gonna be gone. You know, organic reach is gonna be the same as Facebook. So, so all of these tools that made it easy are now becoming hard, which means one thing. You've got to be better. You've got to be good. And I think that that's what's starting to happen. And it's why the good people are winning big and the not good people are getting increasingly frustrated and yelling in Facebook groups about how it's too hard. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, it's so interesting because I'm I I came from a CrossFit background. So my my gym that I was telling you about that I own was a CrossFit affiliate in Santa Barbara. And I saw, you know, I got in relatively early with CrossFit. You know, I started in in 07, started the business in 08. Oh yeah.

Jeez, you were you were a freaking early adopter, man. You yeah you had that vision. That's cool. I got the joints to prove it, man. Um you were in CrossFit when CrossFit was really CrossFit.

We had no idea. Yeah. We had no idea what we're doing. We're like, how do we make it harder? I don't know. Put on a weight test. Um so yeah, but I've seen that whole thing play out, right? You know, it's like the early adopters get in, so growth. Then, you know, right now you're seeing a major correction because if there's one community of people who is completely decentralized, um, it's it's CrossFit. And you know, everyone was staking their their putting their flags in the ground. I I went to a town that I'd never been, nor did I know anybody to open my gym because I saw the opportunity and no one had put that flag in the ground yet. Right.

Well, and and you know what Glassman did with CrossFit is he made it so easy, he made the barrier so low.

Yeah.

When when it first started for the first couple years, the affiliate fee was fifteen hundred bucks. Yeah. I mean, it was nothing. And all of a sudden now this guy's like, oh yeah, you can open up a gym for 1500 bucks and you don't really need equipment.

Yeah.

I mean, it was it was the easiest sell ever. I mean, now that price has gone up. But you look at that versus traditional franchise models.

Yeah.

You look at Orange Theorio F-45, you know, some of these franchise bootcamp type facilities that are starting to pop up everywhere and that are that are spreading fast. And I'm a member of F-45, I like it. Um, but to open up a gym is a few hundred thousand dollar investment. Right. You know, versus it's not fifteen hundred bucks anymore. But what's what's the license fee for CrossFit now?

Uh you know, I when I got it, it was a thousand. So I was paying a thousand a year, which is stupid, right? Yeah, it's ridiculous. And uh now I think it's it's at least three thousand. I believe it's over three thousand a year, but still, you know.

So you can you can start a facility for what, probably twenty thousand bucks.

Yeah, that's really that's bootstrapping it pretty hard.

I mean, we can I think mine thirty thousand, thirty-five thousand bucks. Yeah, yeah, you can do that, you know, a thousand square foot facility. Yeah, and have all of the brand equity and pay three thousand dollars a year for the licensing rights. Right. And and charge people seven to ten times more for a monthly membership than your local gym can. Right. I mean, that's a pretty compelling offer.

It is. It is. Well, here's the thing is you still have to know how to run a business. And that's um, you know, so many times in in and I don't want to get too much into cross, but is you get here's how it goes. Somebody's a great coach at a gym, right? One of their clients goes to them and whispers in their ear, hey, you should you should open a gym, right? And they're like, no. And then they go home that night, they're like, Yeah, yeah, I should open a gym, right? Yeah. And then they get, and then maybe they go back to that same person, and this that guy or or woman says, you know, I'll I'll finance it. Okay. Cool. Let's do it. Next thing you know, they open a gym. Six months later, they're like, This is not what I wanted to do. I wanted to coach people. Um and then now you got a three-year lease, got a little bit of debt, and uh, you got to figure it out. And the good ones rise to the top, you know, and uh, you know, it's it's so I see that pattern as well. And it's it's interesting because now the separation's getting bigger, but um, and it'll be interesting to see what happens with that. So nowadays, then, John, right? Uh August 2018, you know, what to get into online training uh compared to 2012, 2013, 2014, what what's the key, what do you what do you have to know before you get started? Like, what's the mindset you have to have? What are the realities you have to be aware of?

Well, I mean, the first thing you got to know is is you gotta know how to take care of people. Like, yeah, everybody asks me, like, oh, I'm I'm a brand new trainer, but I don't really want to work in the gym. Can I do online training? It's like, yeah, you could, and I could teach you how to build a business doing that, but I don't think you can do a good job. So I'm unwilling to train you. I'm not gonna take your money to sign up for a course. You're very upfront with that in our marketing, for no other reason than online requires a much more proactive and lateral approach. You need to anticipate what's gonna happen before it happens. You can't have somebody bench pressing and saying my list hurts, and you sit there and you're like, okay, well, you know, change it up to this, or does it feel like that? No, you need to kind of know those things. You need to know that if you're working with a 35-year-old professional male who sits at the desk all day, he's probably gonna be rounded in the shoulders. You're probably not gonna give him a bench press in exercise 2b for a 4010 with a minute and a half rest. You're probably gonna take him out to neutral grip and do an incline neutral grip press for a 4010 for a minute and a half break and exercise 2B. Because you understand that if you picking him under a bench press, it's just gonna make his problems worse and it's gonna give him some pain. And it might result in an issue, it might not, but you need to proactively program for issues that may arise, knowing your clientele well, and you need to laterally sidestep it with your programming. And it's very hard to do that if you haven't worked with a lot of people, and so so I think that that's step number one. You need to be pretty confident with your programming, and that not just saying I can give people sets and reps, like you need to you need to know who you're programming for and not just their fitness goals, but like what's gonna go on in their life. You know, if I'm working with professionals, what are gonna be their busy seasons? Because I'm gonna need to ramp it up and calm it down for my accountant who's going through tax season, for example, or else I'm just gonna break that woman down. I mean, you know, if if that woman is like a go-getter alpha-type professional, you know, she's gonna do it, but it's gonna destroy her. And so so you need to know these things. Um, that's step number one. Step number two is to ignore everything fancy, is to ignore every single funnel, is to ignore everything that every marketing expert tells you to do, and understand that you already have every connection you ever need to start and grow a business that you've been building unconsciously over time, and all you need to do, I call it the rule of five, is talk to five people every single day. You know, we get people in our we've got two Facebook groups, one for online training, one for in-person training, but 50,000 people total now on both of them. And we get almost every day somebody's like, I have I've tried everything. I've tried everything and I can't get clients. What do you what are you guys doing? And I always I always respond the exact same way. I just I just type into the comments how many people have you spoken to today? Like, well, I mean I I created a funnel and I wrote this ebook and I put these ads out and nobody's responding. I didn't do it. I'm like, how many people have you spoken to today?

Yeah.

Well, but I mean, none. So maybe you should speak to people. Yeah. Like, maybe what you're missing is you should go on your Facebook or social media, whatever it is, and you should look at five people who you knew at one point in your life, identify something that they care about, which is very easy to do, because every time somebody posts on social media about anything they're doing, they're posting about what they're passionate about. Very easy to figure that out. You should like it and you should send them a message saying hi and a positive comment about what they're passionate about, compliment their band performance. Talk if they just had a kid, you know, congratulate them, whatever it is. And all that that does is it creates another node on your network. Fitness, client success, when you boil it down, is nothing other than catching a lucky break. Success is about nothing other than catching a lucky break. If you want to scale your chances at being successful, you need to give yourself as many opportunities as possible to catch a lucky brick. To have that girl who was in a band who you commented and said, Hey, that's a really great performance, and made her feel good because also when we post on social media, we post because we're reaching out for support. I won't bore you with the research in that, but I kind of wrote a book about this. And that girl now is at dinner with her parents and they have family friends over, and their family friend is complaining that they have low back pain and they've been seeing a trainer, but they're not quite happy. And now you're gonna get the recommendation for that client. Maybe that's gonna happen, maybe that's not. But they know that you're a fitness professional because you post something on your Facebook, and if you have an instant message conversation with somebody, you become more relevant in the eyes of the algorithm, which means that they see your posts for a period of time, which means that they know you're an expert in fitness.

Yeah.

That's kind of all it comes down to. For some people, this happens very fast. For other people, it doesn't. And then once a week, twice a week, three times a week, you literally showcase a transformation, a testimonial, or you put an ask, understanding the components of a compelling offer. You know, there needs to be a specific leader, there needs to be some sort of scarcity urgency, there needs to be some sort of like specific this calls out to a specific person, and there's seven steps to a compelling offer, but those are the major ones. And and you need to just post like, I'm looking for this many people by this date who want to achieve this goal. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of it. Because then once you get on, I talked about this rule of five, five people at $200 a month is an extra $1,000 a month. An extra $1,000 a month for most people makes a significant change in their life because that allows them to then um compact their time a little bit more. You know, that allows you to give away maybe stuff that you don't like doing. And when you do that, you have a little bit more time and energy to study more, to get better, to market more, blah, blah, blah, which begins to compound upon itself because then you start to get a few more clients, you start to make a bit more, and you start to buy back a bit more of your time. And that process very quickly compounds. And then once you get those five clients, it's a matter of knocking it out of the park with those five clients and having a good referral system in place and taking care of those clients more. I think that you should invest more time and money and effort into taking care of your existing customers than you ever should trying to get new ones. And if you do that, then they send you other people, and they send you other people, and they send you other people, and now all of a sudden you're boasting up the seams. That's how you build a business. Yeah. It's not funnels.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's um, man, that there's so much gold there because I think it's so easy to get caught up in all the tactics of marketing nowadays and building out funnels, but really like honing your craft and being patient in that and knowing that it takes time. You know, I didn't start a podcast in the best time to start a podcast. I started a podcast in 2017, right? Like that initial early adopter phase of podcasting is gone, right? The Joe Rogan's, the Mike Bledsoe's, all these people like, I'm never gonna catch them. Well, all I can do is just get really good at what I what I enjoy doing and just doing a thousand episodes. What if that's it? You know, just focus on on getting good at the craft of it all.

And it's that's a thousand people you've had a one-on-one conversation with for half an hour or an hour. You were I would never talk, we'd never have a relationship. Right. You having a podcast means that you're now having a one-on-one conversation with me. Whether you think I'm important or not is kind of irrelevant. Right. You know, even if you think that I'm not important in any way, I'm sure that you've had other people who you think that are important on your podcast. You're important, John. You know, well, thank you. I've been I that was just me asking you to tell me. Will you please verify my importance? Yeah, please verify my importance. I was I was throwing it through there pretty deep. But but the reality of it is that's the biggest benefit in doing a podcast today. It allows you access in a way that you could never get any other way. Yeah. Um, and and that's fantastic. Yeah. Because now if we're ever in the same place, you and I have already started a relationship. Yeah. And we enjoy talking to each other, which means that you know, maybe it'll be a coffee, maybe it'll be a walk, maybe it'll be a drink, like whatever, to get to know each other better. Yeah. Um, that's the benefit of podcast to me. Oh, it is. It's not it's not the promotion bit.

Yeah. If you focus, I mean, if people are listening, they're like, I want to do a podcast, don't worry about your downloads for a while. I mean, pay attention to it. It's an indicator, you know, but it'll drive you fucking crazy. And uh, you know, you just gotta be really get good at the craft and make sure that whoever you're highlighting, um, you're doing them a favor. And that's that's the best thing is you it's easy to give a gift, right? To give value up front when you do this kind of thing. And um here's a question I get all the time, and I have this, I probably have this conversation with trainers once a month. And I don't do what you do, I don't consult them um in doing it, but I do point them in the right direction if I can. The importance of finding a niche or a niche, right? How elaborate on that because I think that is is a really key factor. And whether you're doing it intentionally or if you just kind of stumble into it, or maybe it's organic for you.

I think it's very different offline than it is online. Yeah. Um, so I'll hit on both of them really quick. I think that offline it's a lot less important than you think. I think that um offline, like I said, you've got availability bias. I think also a lot of trainers going into the industry think that they know what they want to do and they have no clue. You know, everybody wants to train celebrities, uh, work with athletes, blah, blah, blah. And then they actually work with celebrities and they realize that it's totally cool until your singer goes on tour in Japan for three months and you've got to fill that 10:30 a.m. spot Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then when she comes back, she wants her spot back. That may or may not have happened to me. Or it's totally cool when you work with athletes and you and you coach a kid up for the NHL draft, and now you see him as a second line center for the Toronto Mate Beliefs, which is awesome to see, but you have a client that's an amazing client, and then you get him to go for the draft, and then he goes away to college, and then you never train him again. Um, or any athlete has seasons, you know, the same thing, and you're not getting paid anymore for that. Right. Which I think, you know, anybody who's not that these are stories from my life or anything, but but it sounds oddly Canadian. It sounds oddly Canadian, yeah. Um but but I think that a lot of the time you don't know, and the only way to really know is to train a whole lot of different types of people and and and pay attention to what you stay up at night researching. You know, I couldn't my eyes bled when I read Tudor Bumper's work on periodization for athletes. And and I realized at that moment that I wasn't gonna train athletes, even though I thought I was going to. You know, I had a kinesiology degree. I worked with Olympians, I worked with NHL players. And I found that I was staying up at night reading Stu McGill's work on low back rehab. So I was like, maybe this is my thing. And that became my thing, helping people out of chronic low back pain. And then into not necessarily performance, but like into vitality. Um, you know, these weren't performers, these were, these were, these were dads and moms type. So I think offline it matters less. Online, it matters a lot more simply because you need to differentiate yourself somehow. I think it's less about who you train and more about what that 1% is that makes you different. We've got Tim Ross is a great example. One of our students runs a Facebook group called Ripped Gamers. He's a video gamer, he's always been a video gamer. So we started a big community for video gamers who want to get ripped. He trains people like anybody else. But he's he's created his category of one by doing that. And we've got a ton of examples like this of people who have joined, have have created Mexican expat groups, for example, and and told their story, or even gone into other expat groups and just told their story. And their story, of course, ends with you know them finding fitness and getting into good shape, and it's helped them in this way, and and and um now I become a trainer and I love helping other people. We had one of our one of our students post her story in a group of Mexican expats. She had 688 applicants for her program out of one post in one group. Wow. She just they could connect with her that way, right? So that's that's That's where I mean finding a niche and and differentiating yourself, Eric. But um but I also believe very strongly that it's a matter of uh going super deep online until you boast at the seams and not trying to expand too quickly. That said, you know, I say boasting at the seams, like if if you're training a specific type of person and they refer somebody else to you who doesn't fit into your niche and you feel like you can help them, I can't help them. Yeah. Why wouldn't you? Um doesn't mean you have to stay with that type of person. Because once you get clients and do a great job with them and take care of them really well, they're gonna refer you other people who may or may not be like them.

Yeah.

You do a great job with those people and they'll refer you other people who may or may not be like them. And any experienced online trainer will be the first to tell you that their clientele usually doesn't fit a mold. But if you're gonna get started today, I think you at least need to use that to direct your marketing. Yeah. And then and then understand that it's gonna expand at work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think that's a natural progression. I've seen it. I uh, you know, there was a period where I had over 20 online coaching clients when I owned my gym as well. And uh, you know, I started out with, you know, maybe some CrossFit athletes. Um, but then it just got, you know, I I couldn't figure out what that that niche was, but that's okay, right? Um as long as you said I think the big question you have to ask yourself is can you help this person? You have to be honest, you know. Um and if you can't, refer them to somebody else.

Yes, and and that somebody else will refer them to you. Yeah. I mean, that's that's that's a lot of what we do without community as well.

Yeah, and those relationships are gold. So um big question I want to ask you because I know our our time is getting tight. Um looking forward, I mean, technology is is you know, I have, I'm looking at my desk. I have like three different types of wearables at my desk, right? Um that kind of guy.

I don't even own a watch.

Yeah, I got too many. Um, but uh, this technology is is really, I mean, it's all it's all working in the favor of the online fitness professional, right? We're gonna have so many metrics to to know, and we're gonna be so engaged, and we can constantly be in contact with our clientele and seeing everything um that they can do. Where where do you see like in two, I mean let's not even go like too far, two years in the future, what do you think the life of an online trainer is gonna look like? I think it's gonna be specific to the trainer and specific to the client.

The beautiful thing about online training and online fitness is the we used to be forced in a brick and mortar environment, scheduling time constraints. Yeah. The perfect workout is not an hour long. The perfect workout is not 30 minutes long. And the perfect workout for a client changes based off, you know, as that client progresses and and and goes throughout their lifetime. Maybe it'll be 25-minute metabolic boasts before their wedding, and then it'll be in an hour and 15-minute hypotrophy, and then an hour and 30-minute strength training sessions because you need longer breaks or higher volume. And so all of those things are gonna change. Well, now what you can do with online training is over the course of that client's lifestyle, lifetime, you can say to them, I'm gonna give you exactly what you need, when you need it, how you need it. And that might look different from time to time. And that's beautiful.

Yeah.

I think when it comes to these wearables, I mean, you're talking about this whole quantified self movement, which is a very interesting movement that's happening. And every time a new wearable comes out, or an artificial intelligence personal trainer, you always see this sensationalistic articles like, is this the end of personal training? And it's laughable because it's so clearly not. I think what's just happening is different people are different. Different people want different types of guidance and direction and support and accountability. Some people respond really well to wearables and artificial intelligence trainers. Some people respond really well to magazine workouts, some people really respond well to one-on-one training, some people respond well to Zumba. Like it's just another delivery mechanism for another different type of person. The type of person who's going to respond well to an artificial trainer is not the type of person who's going to do well with an in-person trainer. It's just the way it's just humans are different. And then I think the other piece of it, Eric, is with the onslaught of data that's available to us, there is an over-reliance on things that can be measured and an under-reliance on things that can't. And I think the whole world is starting to fight back on that. We went the pendulum swung so far to this right-brained arithmocracy mentality of everything that can be measured is of the utmost importance for no other reason than we can measure it. And now we're starting to realize we're like, maybe that's like 5% of what's important. You know, understand that 90 to 94% of word of mouth still happens offline. So if you're fighting to try to get your message heard online on social media networks, you're not even at 10% of the conversation. What can you do to get into the conversation offline? You can't measure it. You can't ever measure making somebody feel good and then them going to their parents and having a conversation with their parents' family friends who talked about low back pain, and you get the referral. There's no data to measure that. But that is so much more important than anything you could ever measure. And so much more valuable because that's how you get a client to come to you and say, How can I train? versus you going to them and say, Please, please, please, please, please train with me. Here's the lowest price. Yeah. It's it's a completely different ballgame. So all of this data for training clients, even when you get into graphing all of their results and all that kind of stuff, cool. But figure out first before you get obsessed with all of that data, what actually matters, and then go out and find platforms that provide you with that data that matters. Don't look at the platform first and look at all of the toys first. Figure out what you need first and then find the toy to provide that.

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome, man. It's such good advice. And it is, it's so critically different. I mean, I've been in both situations where you're just begging people to work with you and inevitably you just start devaluing your service. But if you if you just focus on inward, focus on the people you have. You know, talking to a young lady on Friday who's just getting going, she got her first two online coaching clients and she wants to know how to expand. Like, well, first thing I would do is just over-deliver the shit out of those people. You know, make them your your your prize and just be thankful that you're just getting started and you already have two clients. That's amazing. You know, it's a great place to start. Um so, John, if if people want to get um more information on you, maybe you specifically the the fitness marketing monthly newsletter, where where do you send them?

Fitness marketing monthly, you can go to fitness marketing monthly.com. Uh it'll redirect you, or the ptdc.com slash fm. They're both fine. Um they'll they'll direct you to the same place.

Awesome. Well, man, I I can't thank you enough for putting on the show. This is uh, you know, I honestly I'd never I'd seen some some videos of you talking. Um I was admired your love of Moreno wool. Um, but I didn't realize how uh exactly you know intelligent and well spoken you are. And it's it's it's cool. It's uh I I learned a lot today. And I'm guessing if I learned a lot, if I learned a lot, then people listening learned a lot too. So appreciate coming on and sharing all that.

And if you're ever on the East Coast, we'll go hiking.

If I'm ever out on the West Coast, I'm gonna call you up to go hiking. Yeah, man. That sounds awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, Jonathan Goodman. Hey fitness fans, don't leave yet. It's your host, Eric Malzone, and I have a quick favor to ask. Actually, three favors. So, number one, if you're a fan of our show, I ask you to do something that takes under three minutes. Go to iTunes, please, and subscribe to our show. Please, please, please. It means so much to us. It's so important. And then give us a favorable review. We would really, really appreciate it. And uh, I can't tell you how much it means and helps us out. So I know it takes two minutes of your day, and uh it means a lot to us. So please do that. Number two, go to our YouTube channel, their fitness marketing alliance, and uh please subscribe to our YouTube channel there. Number three, if you like this episode or any of the episodes that we've released, share it on social. That's huge. That's a big deal for us. And when we put a lot of work into these episodes, uh trying to give you great actionable content uh for the fitness industry. So that would mean a lot. And that's it. So we have some big plans coming up for the show. I'll be talking about that in the next couple episodes. But thank you so much for listening. It means so much. And uh if you have any questions, please reach out to me. I'd love to hear from everybody. Eric E R I C at Fitness Marketing Alliance.com