5 Success Tips for Personal Trainers and Coaches Samuli Jyrkinen, the CEO of Vahva Fitness, shares tips on how personal trainers and coaches can make more and become more successful in their field

With over 500,000 subscribers on YouTube and hundreds of thousands of followers on other social media platforms, Vahva Fitness is one of the more successful fitness companies in the world. While the average personal trainer makes an average salary, Samuli Jyrkinen shares valuable tips on how personal trainers and coaches can double and sometimes even triple their yearly income.

Specialize and out-improve your competition

"When you look at medical doctors, the highest paid professionals in the field are always the surgeons and specialists. The more specialised your skillset becomes, the more money you will make. This same principle applies to fitness as well. In order to stand out from your competition and be in high demand, you must curve your specialised niche."

"Not only this, you must constantly be specialising further and improving your skillset even further to stay ahead of your competition. Never stop learning, never stop improving and you will eventually become the highest-paid professional in your field. When you are the most qualified and respected figure in your field, success comes to you. This is why it has been easy to work with my business partner Eero Westerberg; he utilised these principles and became the best in his field."

Provide premium services or products

"One of the easiest ways to make more money is to provide better services and products for your clients. Think of bigger and better packages that will help your clients more. That is the way: think how you can help your clients more and do that. By providing premium services you can instantly increase the price and many of your clients will be happy with the new service because they will get better results. Higher prices attract more affluent customers who rather pay more for better service than pay little for less."

"You also need to provide more offers and think of different ways to serve your clients. Different discounts, packages and offers work. The more offers you make, the more money you will make."

Leverage technology, automation and systems

"Whether you work online or offline, the first thing you must learn to leverage is social media. It's the best way to get leads, new clients, period. In addition to social media, my company also utilises everything else from ads, organic marketing, SEO, webinars, email workflows and free online courses to attract high-quality leads."

"Once you build a system to attract leads, you must build systems and automation to take care of them. At Vahva Fitness, we have automatised nearly everything by minimising live human interaction through email, software and automation services. This has turned the business into a real business that generates profits almost passively. Every personal trainer and coach can potentially utilise these methods as well."

Set clear boundaries and expectations for your clients

"If you want to be happy with your work and running a business, you must set clear boundaries and expectations for your clients. The easiest way to avoid refunds and disappointed customers is to set clear expectations for them beforehand. You do this by being honest in your marketing and how you describe your products or services."

"Likewise, by setting clear boundaries you will make sure every client is a pleasure to work with. We have made many friends with our clients and although you can be friends with your clients, you don't need to be if that's not what you want. Your job is to give them what they buy and not be like their boyfriend or girlfriend and deal with their emotional drama in the middle of the night."

Understand that time is an essential part of the recipe

"Success is like baking a cake - it takes time and you can't speed it up. There's a perfect temperature and time to make the perfect cake. You try to bake it too fast and it will burn. If you don't have enough heat, it won't bake at all. While it may take 30 minutes to bake a good cake, it might take 15 months before you get friction with your business."

"For us, it took 9 months to get profitable. For 9 months we basically worked without pay and were only losing money. After 3 years we were making 6 figures. After 5 years we hit 7 figures and the business has gone up since."

"Resilience and being either too smart or too tough to quit are crucial elements of success. As long as you keep going forward and focus on specialisation and improvement, you will make it. How long it takes depends on you and the market but if success is something you truly want, you will not quit."