Personal Trainer Rescheduling Policy Vs Cancellation Policy
“My first year and a half of being a PT where I had to pay rent, had my own business, I was able to make a lot of money. However, having no processes meant I didn’t know how much money I was bringing in, how they were paying me was all over the place, clients were on different pricing because if they couldn’t afford you know sixty dollars I’d say “what can you afford?”And they’d say “twenty dollars,” and I’d go “DONE! SOLD! Twenty dollars an hour, I’m in!”.
I had no cancellation policies, didn’t know anything about tax and when tax time came around I couldn’t pay it.”
Adriana’s lack of processes within her first year meant that she wasn’t able to tally her earnings accordingly, this was a huge eye opener for Adriana.
“I was in big financial stress, being in financial stress at 20 - 21 years old was mortifying, for me that was the biggest learning curve is, I could get the people in, but I had no processes at all.”
Adriana also went on to explain that after this learning curve she managed to apply processes and policies that fit with her business and molded to the needs of her clients rather than that of the business.
“But now I do, took me a while but I do, instead of a cancellation policy I actually have a rescheduling policy, so it’s very similar but from the mistakes that I did without having those policies was, I just found people were always going to cancel and depending on the reason for cancelling made it really difficult to have to tell someone “you owe me money”.“So having that rescheduling policy for me was so much easier because if your kid’s sick at 3am in the morning you’re not going to know if they’re all of a sudden going to have gastro, so you can’t turn around and say to your client, “Sorry doesn’t matter, you lost this session, you owe me money” it was“no problem, hope your kid’s ok, let’s look at moving you back to a 7am at Thursday because I know you’d want the mornings”and they’ll go “done, lock me in my kid will be fine, and the missus can take care of the kid or they can find a babysitter. So you still keep that personal relationship, and you’re not really focusing around your business, sorry, you’re not treating your business like a business, that really worked quite well for me.”
We touched more on how her rescheduling vs a cancellation policy managed her time and her finances better to which she added.
“You had to book in within that seven days, so if you cancelled on the tuesday or the wednesday we’ll say, you had seven days to the following tuesday or wednesday to book your session in. So the week after you would do say two session or if you had four session a week you’d push a little bit more and you might go two and two for the following week. So you never lose money and your same sessions are there.”
After our chat about how Adriana’s processes changed her business for the better we asked her what was the biggest frustration she had in the beginning of her journey. Her response was “Honestly admin, I didn’t want to sit at home and go through and set up all of the processes and procedures”. Collectively we all laughed and joked about the fact that her response would have made the perfect ad for Keepon.