Burn out

[Jean-Paul]

This is a pretty serious problem for trainers that causes our business to rise and fall constantly, which is not good for stable income. I have several ideas on this from my 21 years of experience working as a trainer, but I would like to know first if any of you have dealt with it.

Have you ever hit the burn out point?

What is your method for combatting it?

How much did it effect your income?

How many clients to you train on an average busy day?

Do you work on Sat/Sun?

Do you have other sources of income or is your income strictly PT based?

[OldGuy]

Do I have an answer for you. Well, not me actually.

[Jean-Paul]

What a coincidence that we both posted about this on the same day.

I agree with some of what he said.

Burn out sucks but you can never forget that each and every client is paying $50-$100 for that hour, so there are NO throw-away sessions. I don't know why, but reminding myself of that really helps me get my mental focus before a session.

Sometimes you have to give up clients. Some people will suck the life out of you, like energy vampires. Pass them off if you can. There are always young trainers willing to train anyone to build their base.

In those time slots you block out, prepare as many workouts as you can. Being organized and not having to scramble to get your workouts ready conserves a lot of energy.

I have also found that training groups energizes me, where one on one by comparison bores me to tears. It's faster-paced, there's less chatter, it pays more, the clients get faster results, and it's only 8 weeks, so I get a fresh batch of faces with every new group... Great for someone with my ADD.

[Phaedrus49er]

Sounds oddly similar to teaching.

[jvernacchio]

Originally Posted by Phaedrus49er

Sounds oddly similar to teaching.

No doubt. I hit the wall just about every time in teaching right about now. Thank goodness for summer vacation! Its not bad this year though I have had a great bunch of kids this year.

[ark]

Originally Posted by Phaedrus49er

Sounds oddly similar to teaching.

I was thinking the same thing! I'm a teacher and some days/weeks/months I feel like I need a major career change. I love working with children, but right when I'm feeling that I need a change, something wonderful happens in the classroom and I get re-charged.

[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.

[bryanc]

Originally Posted by 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.

That's exactly how I feel right now. Four more years to go! *insane giggle*

[kuri]

Great post JP. Your lessons will not be lost on me.

In my short time in the industry I've already seen quite a few trainers get burned out and either quit or become bitter towards everyone - and clients soon go away.

To answer your initial questions no I haven't hit burnout, mainly because I've learned from past experience and other trainers like yourself and so set a few rules:

1. I no longer train on weekends. Did it for awhile and it started to take a toll.

2. No more than 8 clients a day - and I keep them blocked together.

3. No more than 4 back to back.

4. I don't schedule any before 9am nor after 9pm. Family time won't take a back seat.

In doing so I'm happier and I'm sure my clients can tell. And the good clients always find away to work out a good schedule.

[Ian Kay]

Originally Posted by kuri

And the good clients always find away to work out a good schedule.

Exactly! Three of my best clients are always paid and booked a month ahead of time, so as to grab the best slot in the times I provide (for me, that's 11am-9pm, M-F and 11-5 on Sat).

I don't do mornings, because I'm a bear in the mornings. Even when I was an infant, my mother tells me I was up until 1am and slept late.

I've learned a bit about controlling the day, too. I'm not so popular as to be booked all 6 days every week... so this Friday for instance, I'm insisting that anybody else who wants to book has to do so in the evening, because I have a 6 and a 7 already down. In other words, I won't come in at 11am for one client, then come back to the gym 6 hours later. Funny how obvious that is, but even just 8-9 months ago I would've done the 11am, just to get the client in.

Slowly but surely, I'm forming a more workable, convenient and effective system.

[Willie]

Originally Posted by jvernacchio

No doubt. I hit the wall just about every time in teaching right about now. Thank goodness for summer vacation! Its not bad this year though I have had a great bunch of kids this year.

I am a teacher too, and train on the side. I don't burn out, but I think there are two things that keep me going:
1. I always know that a vacation from school is just around the corner
2. I don't rely on the trainer income, so when someone cancels, I feel free to use that time to reorganize, rest, or get some other work done.

It IS hard, though, especially when you depend on a pretty fickle client base as your means of income.

[ivey]

My burnout doesn't come from the training. I love that side of it, although I've only been doing it a couple of years now. Maybe that will change. My burnout comes from management and the stress of numbers numbers numbers. If you hit 7k in sales, they think you should have done 8. If you hit 8, they think you should have done 9. It never seems to be enough. On top of that are the qualifiers you have to hit to earn your top training hour percentage. First is the overall sales number. Then you also have to have at least $750 of that number be in supplements. And finally, you have to have 5 trainer guests come in with your pass in hand. If they don't have the pass, you don't get credit. And you have to keep an eye on that, because if someone comes in with your pass they won't put them on the guest log right away. If they can't upsell the person into a full membership, they will often just toss your pass and not log them in as a guest. Their closing numbers stay high, and you get screwed.

Another stress comes from being a single dad, and hating the fact that my son is home by himself until I can get in sometime after 8pm. Then having to make sure he's eaten and homework is done and things are set for the next day. I recently resigned the weekend manager position because I simply wasn't spending enough time with him and it was starting to affect his school and attitude.

So, after some deliberation, I've decided to look for opportunities within physical therapy/sports performance clinics. There are a TON of these type of places in the Phoenix area. I may not have the possibility of making as much money as I could in a commercial setting, but I believe that I will enjoy it a lot more. And I believe the experience could be invaluable.

[chrism]

I have totally burned out myself... here's my burnout story actually

I finally got to the point where I just hired a bunch of other trainers to do all the training for me.

The keys for me are delegating, delegating and delegating.

Plus outsourcing just about everything that doesn't need to be done by me personally

Focusing on marketing is also huge, In fact setting up marketing systems is one of the few things I DON'T outsource.

I know some trainers do well not training early morning hours.

Meditation and snack breaks can help a lot. Plus keeping down time to down time and not allowing yourself to work at all when you're on your own free time.

Like I said, I've burned out hard and found the simple fact at getting really good at marketing and delegating to be one of the keys for me.

Chris
KickBackLife.com

[Jean-Paul]

Hm... I have to ask. What did you go to jail for?

Other than that, I can really relate to your experience. I delegate almost everything, but part of that has to do with growing my business enough to be able to afford support staff, which in turn actually increases my sales. I do still train an early bootcamp, but that's because I enjoy it. Other than that, I have a pretty full staff of trainers handling a pretty large (and growing) number of clients.

I hope you actually plan to stick around, and not just to pimp for your site. Your experience might prove helpful to all the trainers who read this forum.

[chrism]

Originally Posted by Jean-Paul

Hm... I have to ask. What did you go to jail for?

Oh I had a little side business... it's actually legal in California now. I don't do ANYTHING like that these days though. I have 2 little kids now and I need to be a good example

Yeah it's pretty cool today

9 trainers
Personal assistant
Small team of people overseas doing some low end and tech type work for me
And a wife who helps me do a lot of the little things
Various barter clients

I don't know what I'd do without them man

I can't stand doing anything technical or anything that has to do with admin or repetitive stuff. Luckily there's other people who are WAY better at that than me.

That book the E-myth is what lit the fire under my butt to stop training and just systematize and outsource practically EVERYTHING

That training can really be a burner, fun as hell but man can it get old

Chris
Blog
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[Jean-Paul]

Gotta agree with you on the E-Myth. Probably the most important book written about business EVER! The effect it had on me was nothing less than profound. It changed my perspective forever, and I started looking at ways to express myself into my business creatively instead of extending myself into my business. Much better to manage from 30,000 feet as I like to say.