"Personal Trainer Business Plan"

Our first example is of a Personal Trainer assuming the following:

• Yearly Financial Goal of $50,000
• Salary of $50/Session
• 50 Weeks of Work, 2 Weeks of Vacation
• 5 Day Work Week

Our first step in your Personal Trainer Business Plan is to take the yearly financial goal and divide by 50 (the weeks of work). This gives us our weekly financial goal of $1,000.

We then take the weekly financial goal and divide it by $50 (the Personal Trainer's session rate). This gives us a weekly goal of 20 Personal Training sessions. Assuming a 5 day work week, that averages out to 4 Personal Training sessions per day. During the last week of the month, there are only 3 working days, resulting in a goal of 12 Personal Training sessions for that week.

Our cancellation rate is set at 20%. For the first four weeks of the month, we multiply .2 x 20, resulting in an expected 4 cancellations per week. For the last week of the month, we use .2 x 12, resulting in a loss of 3 Personal Training sessions.

In our Personal Trainer Business Plan example of January, Martin Luther King Day falls on the third Monday. This may or may not impact your business, but we will always plan for the worst case scenario. Our Public Holiday impact is set at 25%. Notice that we do not put a "1" in the Public Holiday column, but a "5", 25% of the goal of 20 Personal Training sessions.

The Total Projected Sessions Lost are found by adding up the totals in Cancellations, Public Holidays, School Holidays, and Vacation.

Take that figure and subtract it from the weekly goal of 20 Personal Training sessions. This is the figure you will place in the "Sessions Projected" column. Take a look again at Week #3. Even though we are shooting for a goal of 20 sessions, our expected cancellations and a Public Holiday may impact our business negatively by 9 sessions.

In order to make up for this expected decrease, we must overshoot our session goal or a better way to put it...over schedule. In our example, we've taken our original goal of 20 sessions and added the amount that we expect to lose to that figure. This is the number in the "New Session Goal" column.

Again, let's focus on Week #3. The New Session Goal for this week, considering the loss of 9 Personal Training sessions, becomes 31 total sessions. Is it possible? Yes. Is it fun to shoot for 31 sessions when your normal weekly goal is 20? No.

Example #2 shows the same Personal Trainer with the same goals and assumptions. However, in this example, we take the same 24 sessions lost over the course of the month and redistribute them evenly across each week of the month.

A goal of 25 sessions during Week #3 is certainly much more realistic than a goal of 31 Personal Training sessions.