Wouldn’t it be great to know that you had at least a baseline income coming your way each and every month, with no effort on your part? Of course it would.

In the fitness business, it seems like the first of every month is spent playing bill collector, but I’m going to tell you how you can skip all of that hassle and focus on the business of fitness, not banking.

We’ve already discussed the value of using EFT in some of our other posts but today I’m going to show you what you need to do to automate most of the billing for your fitness business.

When you have everybody set up on recurring billing, you’re starting every month with a base income. You already know that you’ll have X amount coming in. If you draw in new clients, then that just adds to the pile. When you do business by selling single sessions or small blocks, you constantly have to convince the client to keep buying. That’s stressful and it’s spending time maintaining your business rather than growing it.

Using EFT gets you away from all of that. It not only stabilizes your business by providing a predictable income stream, it also helps you to focus on long-term client goals instead of how you’re going to keep them coming back.

You may have to make a few modifications to the way that you run your fitness business, but trust me – you’ll be glad that you did.

Stop Selling Single Sessions or Small Blocks of Training
When you run your fitness business like this, you waste a ton of time just trying to re-sell the client when the end of the session or the end of the block is approaching. Instead of focusing on immediate goals, shift your focus to long-term results-oriented programs.

Not only is this in your financial best interest, but it’s also the best thing for your clients, too.

Establish goals and then develop different programs to meet those goals. For example, you may offer 6-month and 12-month programs and, based upon the goals that you help your client set, you may offer 1, 2 or 3 sessions for each program. Each package will have a set price, and that price will be broken down into monthly payments, withdrawn automatically via EFT.

Get Your Recurring Billing System Set Up
There are a couple of different ways that you can set up your recurring billing. If you’re going to be managing multiple trainers and clients, GetShape.com is a great program to use.

If you’re just billing for yourself or if you run shorter programs like boot camps, you can always use the ishoppingcart.com and authorize.net programs in combination to set up EFT for your fitness business. This combo will allow you to accept payments for your fitness business online and you can set recurring monthly prices. This all happens right on your site.

Either way, you need to set up a recurring billing system before you can actually do recurring billing. You can tell the system to bill for a set amount of time, or you can just set it to bill until you stop it. That’s how I do it.

Draft a Crystal-Clear Contract
Any time that you go pulling money from somebody’s bank account, you need to have an agreement with them to do so. Regardless of whether you do it on your site or on paper, the client needs to read, understand and sign the terms of your service agreement before they sign up.

You need to include billing dates and amounts, how long the recurring payment period is and what the client needs to do to stop the recurring billing. All of this will help keep your butt out of a sling in case of a dispute. Make sure before you institute your contract that it’s legal in your state.

Is EFT a Guarantee?
Nope, it sure isn’t, but it definitely beats chasing checks and re-selling your fitness business on a daily basis instead of doing the things that you really love to do. Clients are going to drop you and contracts will expire; it happens.

But if you use EFT, you’ll still have a relatively stable monthly income. It’s the only way that I do business, and if you’d rather spend your time doing what really matters, rather than constantly selling chasing money, then EFT is the only way to go.

This entry was posted on June 19, 2014 at 3:31 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 Uncategorized by Steve Hochman | No Comments Yet