[Jean-Paul]

The difference is that your actual teaching hours aren't set, and they can span a day leaving you with no time off. When you are hungry, you don't want to say "no" to any potential customer, but you can quickly overload yourself, work 13-16 hour days 6 days a week, and after a year of that find that you are dreading going to work. You hate Sunday because it is your only day off and you have to spend it playing catch up on all the personal work you don't get done during the week, you've got no time for your family or any of your old favorite activities (like rock climbing or mountain biking), and you don't have time to actually take care of your business. Even if you work for yourself, you haven't found freedom, you've just put your name on a door and gotten yourself another JOB. Only this time, da man is YOU.

Next thing you know, you start looking at other jobs and remembering when you had time to yourself, paid vacations, medical insurance, and stable income, and that grass starts looking a lot greener over in that pasture.

I really hit that point hard after my first two years in business. I would work all day long in a windowless studio (my first place), and sometimes even had to have lunch delivered because I didn't even have an open time slot to eat. I would start my first client at 5am (a surgeon who could only train at that time), and finish my last clients around 8 or 9pm. I made a ton of money, but I crashed so hard that I almost went out of business my third year. I really had to honestly examine myself and my goals in life.

I came to the conclusion that I'm not really cut out to work for someone else, so I was going to have to come up with another way to keep doing what I loved without exhausting myself. I didn't actually figure it out. I cut back my training hours after we started having kids, but I increased my work in so many other areas that I found myself staying in a constant state of stress. And still training too many clients!

It's only been in the last year that I finally figured out how to manage my business from 30,000 feet. That's 16 years into it. I think that is important to note though... Every successful entreprenuer has to pay their dues. It takes some time to figure all this stuff out. I didn't even realize how much IN my business I was. It is a lot easier though to work ON the business than IN it.

I finally realized the precious value of Human Energy Hours (HEH). I have a lot bigger resevoir of HEH than most people I know, but no matter how you slice it, everyone only has a finite amount. I have the ability to endure suffering, so I survived, but it doesn't have to be that way. Once you realize the TRUE value of HEH, you can start to work smarter, not harder.

If you are working for $50 to $100 per hour all day long, you have a ceiling on your income, and in essence it is like bending over to pick up a dollar while hundred-dollar bills are flying over your head. A wise man in my industry (Thomas Plummer) told me to pick my top two clients and pass the rest off to my other trainers. I had all the typical responses (my clients won't stay; no one can train my clients like I do; etc).

The fact is, he was absolutely right. The ultimate leveraging of my time is now spent developing my training methods and standards and TRAINING my trainers to train the clients the way I want them trained. It makes the training staff more connected, confident, they feel like they've got support from the boss, they know they're being watched too, and now I can clone myself many times over and have a bunch of people driving revenues through the business instead of my limited number of clients.

I didn't realize how much I was hobbling myself to train all those clients! Ultimately, I had to learn how to EXPRESS myself into the business, not EXTEND myself. There is a very clear difference. One thing that will never change is my willingness to work as hard as necessary to achieve my goals. But spending my time designing my business instead of doing every job in the business has given me the freedom I was looking for.

I am not at my business right now, but I know everything is being done and done well. I know which trainers are there, which sales staff, which manager is going to come in and go down the check list and do a walk-through, I know my prosepects are getting followed up on, I know my calls are being answered in the way that I want them answered... I used to try to do everything because I could never find smart enough staff to figure it all out. DUH! NO ONE could put all those years of my collective experience together and do it to my standards, unless I TAUGHT THEM how to do it. I can't teach them if I am too busy DOING everything.

Some trainers get burned out because they have unrealistic expectations of the industry. I'm not really addressing those trainers. They get burned out from doing 6 clients a day. They don't count. They don't have the personality or the fortitude to make in my club or future clubs. They thought training would be glamorous, not work, and reality doesn't take long to rear-end them at high speed.