This week on the podcast I am joined by Charlie Reid. Charlie is a personal trainer in San Francisco who offers a custom-tailored approach to fitness. On this episode, Charlie shares how he got into personal training and how he built up a successful private personal training business. Charlie talks about the importance of being great at what you do, caring about your clients, and how being passionate are the keys to running a successful business in the personal training industry. We also talk about the overlaps between the personal training and yoga industry, and what yoga teachers can learn from Charlie’s business, and the personal training industry. Finally, we talk about the benefits of strength training as a yogi, and how to get started with a strength training practice.

Enjoy!

Discussed in this episode:

• How Charlies started his career working with The Egoscue Method and a major fitness club before taking his business private.
• How popular the advice to “find your niche” is, but how the best way to go about that is often not actively trying to set out a niche, but rather working with clients that you like and having a niche find you organically.
• For a private fitness business, having strong relationships with other fitness professionals who can refer clients to you (and vice versa) is very valuable. Those relationships help you learn to deliver a stronger service by learning from others and also lead to referrals.
• Another key part of building strong word of mouth is focusing on serving your clients. Working with clients for a limited time, referring clients to others, or giving your students a push to work through a self-practice will bring you a big benefit in the long term through goodwill.
• Having a passion for learning and putting helping your clients first will help you always evolve as a fitness professional. Don’t get stuck on your method, focus on creating value and you’ll always be growing.
• Charlie’s go-to nutrition resources:
  • https://examine.com/
  • https://www.dietvsdisease.org/
  • https://www.precisionnutrition.com/
• Integrating strength training and other fitness into a yoga practice as many people in yoga prioritize flexibility above the other aspects of mobility.
• And much more… Here’s the episode!

Connect with Charlie:

Want to join me on a tropical adventure in Costa Rica this fall? Meghan Pherrill and I are co-leading a retreat for yoga teachers at the beautiful Bodhi Tree Yoga Resort November 2-9, 2019 and we’d love for you to join us.

Learn more here!

This episode is brought to you by BeYogi. BeYogi is an online resource dedicated to providing yoga teachers and students with the inspiration and information and insurance they will need during every step of their yoga journey. BeYogi has drawn from their knowledge of the yoga world to not only create incredible content, but to also provide yoga and wellness professionals with the insurance coverage they will need to expand their careers. And, I don’t know about you but I know that I run into a lot of places that won’t let me teach or offer anything if I don’t have insurance, so this is definitely something that if you don’t have you’ll want. And they have incredible things like online teaching coverage so no matter what style you’re teaching or wherever you are in the world, give yourself a little peace of mind knowing that you are covered should something happen. Head on over to beyogi.com/mbom to learn more or to get coverage today.

The FavYogis app is back with new features for teachers that let you create and manage your own private classes while making payment and registration a breeze.

Do you have regular private clients? Make life easier with AUTO-PAY. Forget about remembering to Venmo. Use auto-pay to enable repeat payments and keep calendars in sync with classes. Google Calendar integration automatically updates teacher and student classes when you make changes

It’s STILL just your yoga; teachers add classes, students add teachers, and teachers and students stay connected.

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Has your yoga studio’s growth become stagnant? If you’re like many studio owners I talk to, you’ve tried every marketing tactic under the sun. You started a blog, you’re posting regularly on all the social media sites, running challenges, sending out newsletters blah blah blah. Long story short, you’re doing a TON of work… and barely paying the bills.

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