 Question is from Rabri, if you're employed by a gym that provides you with leads and clients, is it inappropriate to also develop your training business outside of the club? Not everyone who wants to train with me wants to pay for the gym's membership. I'm glad I'm glad you picked it. Did you pick this one? I picked this one. Yeah, I'm glad you picked this one. So I think I think it's bad. Oh, well, I was just going to say, yeah, we'll talk about all you look at. Here's the thing when it comes to your career and your business, one of the most important things. Look, it's like fitness. When you look at your fitness goals, there's ways to get to a particular goal fast, and then there's ways to get to a goal with integrity, long term forever, long term success. A lot of it's determined on your integrity and your integrity is determined by the people around you who've worked with you. And if you're working for a gym that's providing you with leads and clients to maintain your integrity, if those clients want to hire you, you train them in that gym. You don't take them outside that gym because that's, you might get more clients and make more money in the short term, but I'm going to tell you something right now. In the long term, people will start to find out. It's a false, it's a false perception too. So I did this. Okay, so, and this was really important to me. So when I went through my 24 hour fitness career, there was a point about when I was 25-ish, somewhere around that range, where they started to put a ceiling on how much money we could make. And a guy like me hated that. One of the things I loved about that career was the more I worked, the more I sold, the more successful my club was, the more money I made. And I was very money motivated. And at one point, the company sold and changed and they put a ceiling on it. And they got to a point where no matter how much money I sold, no matter what I did, I could no longer make any more income. And I had at that point in my life, I got used to making a certain amount of money. I had the lifestyle that I liked, that I was used to. And I was like, what the fuck do I do? And it was forbidden, moonlighting was forbidden there. If they found out that you were training, you're fired for sure. And so I had this dilemma like, man, what do I do? Like, this is fucked. Like, I'm in this situation where they won't allow me to go there. And I'm like, you know what, I'm going to do it. And then I did it, which I'm not supposed to do. But when I did it, the thing that I said to myself before I did it is like, I am not going to pull from any leads from this gym. If I'm going to look outside and build a business that's separate, I don't want, I don't want to have anything to do with this. And it wasn't just for, it was for integrity reasons, because I definitely believe I have that. And that was a purpose. It also was because I wanted to prove that I could build the business without the company's assistant help. Because if I just pulled from all their leads, you have a false sense of how awesome you think you are. And that's what I meant by the fault. You have a false perception of the ability to really build a business because you're using this company that's probably paying money to advertise or drive leads or they have a storefront. And so people come in and you don't have to pay for that. And so then you start. I mean, how many times have you guys seen that? How many guys have had trainers that work for you? Right. That's awesome. That they could build a huge business, but all they're doing is pulling from the leads. Because all they look at is then how much is like getting carved off your paycheck? Right. And they don't look at like all the marketing materials, they don't look at like, the insurance umbrella that you're under. They don't look at like all these different leads coming in every single day coming to you. When you're out there on your own, man, it is a harsh reality. Well, that's not only is it harsh. I used to have this conversation a lot. This was a common conversation with trainers that worked for me. And that is that, to your point, Justin, 24-hour fitness used to spend $25 million a year in advertising and lead generation. And as the small person on the podium told here, the trainer who clocks in and gets paid their $25 to $50 an hour to train clients is going like, oh my God, I'm only getting half the money that the business is getting. And they don't do anything. They don't do anything. No, they do the most and fucking important thing. They get people to walk through that door. Because if they didn't walk through that door, where the fuck are you going to get them? The grocery store out on the street? You know how hard that is? That is unbelievable. That's the hardest part. It is the hardest part. By far. So by you poaching people that have already been driven into your gym, so you can hustle and make a little bit more money, I mean, one, I think it's not having integrity. And two, you really haven't built a business. I don't care if it's generating an extra 50 grand to 100 grand a year for you. If the leads are coming from the business that you're currently working from, you didn't build a business. And if they cut that off, because I've had trainers do this with like, I have tons of clients I've built on my own. I think I'm going to leave and go try on my own. And I know, yeah, I know how you're getting your clients. It's through the leads that the gym's generating. Then they go off on their own and they'll ask the grand total of six months. Because they no longer have those leads and no longer and clients drop off and then they're screwed. And now where are they going to go? They're not going to go back to the gym because the gym is like, screw you. You were taking all my trainers that were even considering going off and doing their own thing. If you haven't figured out how to be the number one guy or the number one girl in this facility, you're not going to do dick when you leave here. I'm sorry to tell you that, but if you can't figure it out with all the shit, all the hard stuff that you don't think is really hard being taken care of for you, a facility that with the equipment that somebody's servicing and taking care of, somebody's scanning to check in and welcome them in, running all the back end and systems and bookkeeping, somebody advertising, generating leads for you, having the lights on for X amount of hours, all the shit that you don't think about. That's why you make only 50%. I remember having that conversation with you. It's one of those things like I purposely shied away a lot of clients that were immediately going to follow me to the next gym. But I wanted to see if I could do it. The whole point of it was, how am I going to be able to keep building and sustaining my own business? If I'm doing this on my own, what does this new venture look like? I figured out right away, I had to be one of the trainers that was more professional, had everything together, had a website. None of these other trainers had their own website. There was so many steps I had to take. If I wasn't going to look at that and really assess what needed to happen for me to start generating my own leads in my own business, I would have been all comfortable with the 10 to 20 clients that I brought over and then that would have been in my whole business. And by the way, just because you are the top trainer in your gym, that still doesn't guarantee you're going to be successful. No, no. It's just a guarantee you're not going to be successful if you can't be the top trainer. And then you go off on your own. I can pretty much guarantee. It's still hard. I mean, I had many of my top guys or girls that work for me that were killing it in the facility go off and try and do it on their own and they just, they ended up coming back more often than not. They come back because it's, it's, there's a lot that you don't think about. So now there's a second part to this question, which is not everyone who wants to train me wants to pay for the gym's membership. Look, I'm going to tell you something right now. If you communicate to a client, if someone comes to you and says, Hey, look, I want to hire you, but I don't want to pay for the gym membership. But you know, so can we do this on the side and you tell them, you know, unfortunately I can't, I work for the gym. Um, I have an agreement with them. I only can train their client, the clients in here that communicates a great level of integrity out to the people who want, might want, might want to hire you. And I tell you what, that goes very far. Yeah. Remember your, remember your job as a personal trainer, your job as a trainer is to help people get to their fitness and health goals. And that means they have to trust you. And if you've already built kind of this facade that you're sneaky on the side type of deal, you're going to lose your power as a trainer as well. It's all built on integrity. All of it, 100% built on integrity. Well, if you're also struggling to convince somebody to spend an extra $30 a month, you got to become a better trainer. I'm sorry. I mean, if you, if you, if people's, you know, the reason why they're not signing up for you is because the $29.99 a month, they got to pay for the gym membership. Like what kind of value are you building in yourself? You ain't that good. No, you got to work on your skills. You don't have that much time to go outside the gym and like all that wasted time, like where you could just be stacking clients. Like, well, like just focus on that. No, that's actually a good point too. I think a lot of trainers don't realize that. Like, let's say you even equate to the same. Yeah. Let's say you train, you know, five people a day in that gym and then you have like two clients off site. The going back and forth between them kills a lot of time. It actually doesn't make you as much money as you think because of all the different locations that you're training people. It's not as awesome as it sounds. Especially since the, if you're really maximizing your time and trying to build your business, every extra minute that you can spend on your floor in a gym, which by the way is providing the leads for you. Okay. Right now you listen to this shit probably on the treadmill or inside your fucking gym right now. Look around. And there's probably 30 to 50 people in there right now that you didn't have to go get and they're right there for you to talk to. And if you're not talking to them and you're not getting those leads, you're already fucking missing out. That was one of my favorite things to do as a general manager is I would take my trainers in, we'd have conversations around this and they'd be like, but how do I, how do I get leads or whatever? And I'd point to the, my, my, my office window and I go look out there and then they'd be like, Oh, I know, but it's so hard. So I'd say, you know what, come with me. I used to do this all the time. I go, come with me and we walk out to the workout floor and within 30 minutes I'd booked them several goal assessments. And sometimes I'd actually get them a client right then on, right then in the form. It's easier there. You know, it's really hard. You got to convince them that fitness is a good idea. They already know like they want to, they're there, but they're not. It's a warm lead already. Try starting up a conversation with someone to do a goal assessment with you. That's in the grocery store at the Starbucks. Really though, I mean, you're out of shame. If you haven't done that before, you should, if you ever think about leaving a gym, like if you're a trainer listening right now, you're tired of your fucking corporate gym you work for and you're thinking about going private. I urge you to go to your local Safeway Starbucks and try and convince three to five people to come in the gym and do a free assessment with you. If you haven't fucking done that yet, you better learn to do that because it's a lot harder to drive people into your private facility or location you're working on than it is working for. Oh my God. I could park myself at the front desk and book 10 appointments within an hour easily at a gym. Boy, do that out in the real world. It's almost too easy. Very difficult.