The fitness industry has nearly reached a staggering 100 billion dollar global industry, especially as more and more people begin to take an interest in their health. If you are passionate about health and fitness, or if you simply want a slice of the pie, you may be wondering how to start your own fitness business. Here a couple of tips if you’re thinking of opening a health-related shop.
1. Defining Your Brand
With a large industry like fitness, the market is almost completely saturated. You can no longer make a decent living as a simple fitness trainer when there are a thousand more experienced, cheaper, and more established trainers out there. To get the ball rolling, you need a selling point that differentiates you from the competition.
If you’re a physical trainer, what certifications can you get to prove your competence? Can you go straight to the client’s home or are you affiliated with a gym? What is your special fitness mindset that makes your program better than everyone else? Having an answer to these questions ensures that you stand out from the rest.
Even if you’re not a physical trainer, you still need to have something that makes you special. Whether you’re opening a yoga practice, a health shop, a gym, or a fitness club, find the one thing you can point to when people ask, “Why should I give you my money?”
2. Keeping it Clean
In today’s regulatory climate, keeping a clean facility or clean equipment is the difference between a booming business and a bankrupt one. You must have the right cleaning tools for your area, or people will not be willing to take a risk on you and your services. As a business, one of the best things you can do is to buy wholesale; find a company that manufactures the cleaning products you need and buy straight from them. That means towels, cleaning solution, antibacterial wipes, mops, and masks for you and your employees. This is especially important for fitness businesses where strangers are sweating (maybe vomiting, if they’re really out of shape) all over your facility or equipment.
If you buy towels, linens, mats, uniforms, or any other cloth material that may need washing, make sure you find a commercial laundry service to take care of it. You probably don’t have a large enough machine at home to take care of your business’s dirty laundry, so leaving it to the professionals is a great choice. For example, if you do commercial laundry at Liox Clean, a company based in New York, you can get laundry pick-up, folding, and same day service, all without doing a single load yourself.
3. Marketing
For any business, marketing is the only way to get people through the door. After all, if no one knows about your business, how can they spend their money there? As mentioned earlier, once you have your unique selling point (USP), you can start building your marketing around it to define your specific brand.
The simplest and cheapest thing you can do is start a social media campaign. Create a business Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to post and spread word of your new business. Bug your friends to get them to share and follow your page, and soon you’ll have a small bit of free awareness for your business.
In the future, once you’re starting to pick up business, you’ll need to branch out. Social media is great, but it’s only a small part of marketing as a whole. You may want to purchase a Google Ads profile, a Youtube Ads profile, and even a Facebook Ads profile to start getting your name out there.
Starting a business can be a frightening prospect. However, if you’re truly passionate about fitness and you’re willing to put in the work, starting a health business can be one of the most fun and fulfilling jobs out there.
