My road to becoming a personal trainer in Annapolis and owning an in-home personal training company was not the easiest of roads. Perhaps it’s best to start from the very beginning.
As a child growing up in New York, exercise and fitness weren’t necessarily mainstream. We’re going back about 30 years now, where fitness facilities and gyms were not located around every corner. Nonetheless, I grew up in a family where my father was very into exercise and fitness. Our basement was littered with free weight machines and exercise equipment with posters on the wall for motivation.
My father would go down to the basement with my two older brothers and take them through workouts most of which they were not motivated to perform. I remember being a little boy and asking my father if I could work out only to hear him say that I was too young. It was then that I was bitten by the exercise bug and knew that the iron was a place for me.
As I became older, I began to research and read whatever I could get my hands on about exercise and fitness. My main goal was to put on muscle seeing as though I was a skinny kid. Sports were a major part of my life, so exercise and fitness were just a natural hand in glove fit.
My journey with the iron began at 13 and would never die from that day where I first started. I went on to college where I studied exercise science and Physiology and decided that being a personal trainer was the right career path. However, upon graduation I came to realize a harsh truth.
For how glamorized muscles and fitness were in the magazines, what I did not know is how hard it was to make a living in the exercise and fitness field. Nonetheless armed with my college degree and a CPE certification, I forged ahead determined to make a living in the fitness game.
Sadly, what I did experience was numerous years of wiping down equipment and being paid very little for the sporadic personal training sessions I did perform. There was always the fitness director who would constantly demand you to make more sales and pressure you into talking to every gym-goer that walked through the door.
I knew that this wasn’t the life for me and fortunately enough I began working at a new facility, a personal training studio. The studio was great and personal training sessions were abundant and I was training 5 to 6 personal training sessions a day. Sounds great right? Wrong.
Although I was finally training which is what I loved to do, the pay that I was receiving was substantially below what was necessary to live comfortably. Unfortunately, in most commercial gyms, personal trainers are paid very little and the gym takes home most of the pay. I found myself working all day long with very little take-home and tons of frustration. What could I do?
Finally, I decided that I wanted to start my own business. I was going to start an in-home personal training company and I was going to work for myself making the client the most important priority and working my butt off to succeed. I read countless books on marketing and decided to throw caution to the wind.
It wasn’t easy but slowly and surely, I started building up my own clientele. I developed a website and I learned SEO in order to market myself on the search engines. I put out flyers, I did door hangers, anything I could to try to market my vision, in-home personal training. The gym isn’t for everybody and time is the number one reason not to work out, so I knew that this was an idea that could benefit many.
Forging forward my clientele began to build, and clients kept on calling. I had finally got to the point where I had enough clientele and decided to hire trainers in order to satisfy the demand. Fast forward 13 years and I own Every Body’s Personal Trainer, the number one in-home personal training company on the East Coast. Every day I get to do what I love in addition to running a business in an industry that I love.
There is nothing better than enjoying what you do for a living, and the people you work with. Building a business certainly is not easy, but with persistence, hard work and overtime, it can be achieved.
