 Hey, what's up, everybody? It's Coach Swift from Make Money Coaching Sports, and I'm one of the success coaches here. Today, I'm going to talk to you about some of the biggest mistakes I made when starting my sports form and training business. Okay. The first one, and it's one we really preach against in our accelerator program, is taking money as you go. Okay, so in the beginning, I was getting several kids to football field and track. They reach them or their parents or each enemy, $20, whether cash or check. Okay? The video is fun because I was always getting like eight 10 kids, so for an hour of work, that's easy, right? That's awesome. But the mistake with that is eventually when life does get busy with a lot of them, there's always something else that comes up that now it goes from your expecting 10 kids to you only get two, okay? 40 bucks in one hour, okay? Not a lot of people make that, but as trainers, we definitely have the power to make more than that in an hour. So if I could go back, I would have electronic payments and not only would I have electronic payments for that session, I would have, this ties into mistake number two is I would have more sessions up front paid for, okay? Or a monthly subscription that gets them, you know, two, three times a week and on top of that is there was times when I was too busy chasing the clients and their friends that I was going to be going to a different site to meet them and it, once again, would go from 10 people down to two and I just wasted all that gas and I traveled, changed up my schedule for this on weekends and you know, I was never very assertive with how I wanted my business to go from taking payments at least a month at a time. For however many hours in that month to establishing my schedule, my location, okay? I let parents have too much say. In the beginning, I thought it was good because it was flexible for everybody, okay? Some people, they love the flexibility and it does have its own power, but with a lot of that, the customer has too much control, okay? So those are the biggest mistakes I've made right there was not taking money ahead of time, not getting electronically subscribed, changing locations and then I would also say, oh, here's a big one, okay? Getting phone calls, texts or emails and the person say, okay, let me discuss this with my spouse and we'll call you back. They don't always call back. Just a little FYI, they don't and I may have thought that, well, they're gonna call back. They hit me up. They seem really interested. Even if they are really interested, things happen. If you don't follow up, then you will lose contact with them and eventually and a scary one week goes by and then next, you know, it's three months later and they're in your just now talking again, okay? So that's lost income on the table every time. It's a better business practice for you to have a follow-up, re-establish a meeting. On top of this, I will add another mistake and that is anytime somebody would DM me or text me, hey, what are your prices? Instead of getting them on a phone call, which you will learn when you sign up for our accelerated accelerator program, I would simply just type, tell them the price, tell them what I did and that was it, okay? That's a hit or miss. Some people are down, but they're not really down, if that makes sense. So the best thing is just like on here to create a call to action, schedule a phone call, discuss their kid on the phone, even before you hit a session. I do that now and I get people who I will send a link while on the phone and next, you know, I get a credit card confirmation that payment was received. Okay. And that's before they ever come and see me. And there's a lot of power to this. It means now that you have them on the books, you're not putting your schedules aside for that time slot, whether you do one-on-one, one-on-two or groups just for this kid to come in, you know, for an evaluation or meeting. If you get them to pay before they play, life's a lot better. Okay. You have the influence over everything. Of course, you'll be a person of your word. If they paid for a certain amount of time, you want to make sure that you do everything to help them get that time in the right, you know, in the same month, basically, if you can. So those are my biggest mistakes, not getting money up front, not having it auto drafted every month, every three months up front, every year, like some coaches in here do, and then not being, not taking the initiative to follow up on my own and waiting on them to come back to me and then not getting them on a phone call, instead just trying to have a long drawn out texting and direct messaging. Okay. So those are the biggest mistakes right there. It doesn't sound like a lot, but people, once again, they get busy. They forget their checkbooks. They forget their cash. Um, things come up that they now weigh, well, I didn't pay this guy yet. We don't owe for a session. We can just disregard his session, not show up. And then you start having like I did where 10 kids turned into two kids. Then you have a potential of five people signing up in a week and none of them do because you didn't follow up with any of them. And you got to wait two months for them. Okay. So these are all mistakes that we will go over when you sign up with our accelerator program. Okay. Will you make a million bucks? Can't tell you that. Okay. Depends on how much work you put in and how much smart choices you make, but you can at least minimize how much losses you have from letting all these things happen. Okay. I could have made a little bit more money, had a little less stress, better sleep, not a million bucks, but enough to have a better piece of mind. Okay. And I don't want y'all to go through that. And I see a lot of coaches do it. I see coaches who they even train for $80 a session and it's all dropping because they don't know how to get people to get four to eight sessions. And they don't know, they don't do auto draft. They are too busy playing with a schedule and location or they have three locations and they don't just stick to, you know, one for certain people. And so they're all over town and everything is too crazy every day. Every day has too many variables. Nothing ever stays the same enough to where they can build. They're just going to be chasing money all the time versus a quarterback trainer in my area that I've given clients to and he's given me clients. He had his days of certain fields he was going to be at, the times. Okay. There's no negotiation on this. And, you know, he was charging, I was doing $20 drop-ins. He was charging three times as much as I was per kid. And he would have four to 10 kids in there. Okay. So even if the minimum showed up, that's really awesome money. Okay. It's a slow time of year. That's really awesome money for one hour. Okay. And he's running basically the camp model throughout the whole entire year and he's still doing it. I've been doing this for seven years independent. He's probably 10, 11 years independent and he's still the guy south of Austin, Texas. Okay. So hit me up. Let's get on a phone call, talk about things you have been doing right. Things you don't know if you're doing right or wrong and how we in our program will correct these things so that you can have the better peace of mind, make more money and do this job better so that you can just work on helping kids. Okay. You don't have to play accountant all day and or phone receptionists. Okay. So once again, you can email me at footperformance training at gmail.com or give me a call at 210-414-3077. All right. Once again, talk to y'all soon. This is Jim Swift, success coach at Make Money Coaching Sports.