There are any number of mistakes that new entrepreneurs can – and will - make when starting a fitness boot camp. Most of them are fairly minor things that can be counted as part of the learning curve. What you really want to avoid are mistakes that cost you serious money or growth in the beginning.

My years running Fit Body Boot Camps and working closely with both Bedros and the FBBC owners has taught me that there are two really significant and really damaging mistakes to avoid at all costs when you’re starting a fitness boot camp. It could take months or even years to make up the lost opportunities and revenue.

Trying to be a fitness generalist

There are all kinds of fitness generalists in your area. The last thing you want to do is be one of them. There are a couple of really important reasons for this. First of all, if you’re a generalist, you have to compete in a field of many. Some competition will be well-established in the community or have big national brand names. All of them will be offering the very same thing you’re offering, which is general fitness help. Do you really want to enter this market?

Secondly, finding a niche or specialty market (such as athletes, new moms or Baby Boomers) means two very important things to your bottom line: a) You can target your marketing, which makes it more effective and less expensive and b) people are willing to pay more for the services of a specialist.

Let’s say you identify your target niche as middle-aged women. When you approach them as a specialist in anti-aging and metabolism boosting nutrition and hormone balance through exercise and nutrition, you suddenly become much more valuable than Bob over at Big Box Fitness.

Don’t try to be all trainers to all people. Start out targeting a specific group of people who want and need your specific areas of expertise and you’ll spend less time marketing and your marketing returns will be much higher.

Trying to make things too perfect, too fancy, too complicated.

When you’re just starting out, your absolute, bottom-line focus has to be on getting clients in the door and giving them a great experience and great results. That’s what makes you money, that’s what gets you referrals and that’s what builds your fitness boot camp up as the solution that everybody’s looking for.

Having a smoothie bar in your place is nice, but it doesn’t mean anything if no one is there to get a smoothie. You need an accounting program that is simple to learn and use. You don’t need to come up with the next great marketing innovation, you need to use proven marketing methods that are already getting great results for other fitness boot camps. One of the things that’s so great about FBBC is all the trial and error has already been done and the boot camp business model has been honed and tweaked by the best of the best.

There’s nothing wrong with being a perfectionist, either, but you need to focus that perfectionism where it will do you the most good. That means creating an amazing experience for every client who walks through the door. It means committing to marketing your business efficiently and for your specific niche. It means learning the best sales and closing techniques so well that they become second nature.

Starting a fitness boot camp is a huge deal. Believe in what you’re doing. But the best thing you can do is to keep it simple: targeted marketing for a specific group using your expertise and fulfilling a need for that market.

This entry was posted on July 3, 2014 at 10:56 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Boot Camp Strategies, How To Start a Fitness Boot Camp Business by Steve Hochman | No Comments Yet