 Next question is from Soforall Training. Did you have any strategies in your personal training business to create efficiency or automation when working with and managing a lot of clients at once? This is a good question because in some ways automation improves your service and your value and in other ways I've seen trainers automate and it reduce the value that they provide clients. So I think it's smart if you want to be a really effective trainer. What I mean by effective is you really change people's lives. You really get them to create a lifelong good relationship with exercise and nutrition. If that's what you want to do, you should automate the business side of what you're doing which is managing their payments, managing when they're paying, they're scheduling, that kind of stuff but never automate their training or their nutrition because then you lose the individualization and you lose the on-the-fly ability to manage and change as people's feelings and attitudes and lifestyle type of change. I've seen trainers automate everything and then it becomes nothing more than just... I've seen a couple different strategies like in order to be more efficient a lot of times they'll end up doing small groups, they'll stack some of their clients together but you have to realize just inevitably your service is going to go down just a bit because you're not hyper-focused on the individual. Now you have a couple people to account for and it might work for a while but it just depends on your business model. Maybe that's part of your business model. Maybe even group training is something you're trying to lead into. I went the other direction. I went in reducing and providing more value and so I started looking at the price point that I was putting out for each client and that became sort of a barrier so that way I could slow down a bit, provide better service and then I got a better result out of my client because there's more buy-in and plus my business flourished. I'd love you to explain how you did it. I love the way you charged your client because the traditional model is clients buy packages of sessions so like 10 sessions for $1,000 or 20 sessions for whatever but you did it so that they paid you monthly, right? Yeah, they paid monthly a flat fee and basically I gave them two options so that way they're either part-time or they're full-time and so this requires them to commit to any of scheduled days that were marked in the calendar that they show up or they don't show up. I'm going to be there and if I'm not there I'm paying them back and I'm pro-rating it or whatever that is but it takes the accountability it puts it back on the client and that way too I can have consistent revenue each month that I can account for. So part-time would be like I pay this much and I can come see you two days a week. It's like two to three times per week versus full-time I was going up with four to five times a week. I think that's really brilliant. So I love this question and there's been like several things in my career that I think I got better at as far as my organization and how do I manage so many you know scaling up on how many clients from 10 to 20 to 30 plus. The best thing that I ever did and it took me along this wasn't even that long ago it was just shortly before mine pumps started did I really get this and the reason why I was able to do this is because we are now this is why I love all the tools and the apps and things like that. Now to Sally's point I agree fully automating some things like that that just they need a personal touch are so important and you may you know you may decrease the value in your service if you try and automate everything but what I used to do as a trainer is I used to do all the legwork the tracking the writing down the you know I was the one doing all that and I flipped that on its head towards the end of my career and I began holding them responsible to deliver all that information to me that was a huge game changer for me as far as time suck it also weeded out the not serious clients if you were not willing to weigh yourself in the morning at night you were not willing to add put your food in your in your food app every single night if you were not willing to track your steps every single day for me and you log all of that information and then deliver it to me then you weren't I wasn't going to train you if you did all those things it made my job extremely easy then I all I had to do was sit down a session a week see where where her weight has gone up or down and what she exactly ate look at her food logs and then we can in one session I could critique that entire week I could educate and teach I can drive the programming from there do I need to increase intensity do I need to lower and modify it do I need to increase steps from there do I need to bump up her calories and she had to do all the tracking for me I didn't do any of it and you bring it to me and then that allowed me to take on way more people than the old version where I'm writing everything down I'm measuring everything I'm weighing and doing all these things I'm the one who's like writing the diets out and the plans out like nah I got away from all that when we talked on the podcast a long time ago I talked about how I used to make clients track their food for a week or two before I would even start their session and that was first to get are you even serious enough to track your food for a week if you're even considering working with me and a lot of people honestly that weeds out like 50% 50% of people won't even and I always know they're not that serious like I'm not even charging you yet and I can't even get you to write out your food for a week and you're telling me you really want to learn and you really want to figure this out like no that client's going to cause is going to be so much work for me to try and help them if they can't even help themselves for the first week so that right there really really help now this this speaks to the experienced trainer who has a lot of value and has the ability to still have a business while weeding people out right now the new trainer might not have that luxury that's I mean that's that's the thing that's why a question like this I like a question like this but you have to understand there's there that's why I met there's when you first started yeah you took every everybody I took every it didn't matter the time become more efficient didn't matter how inconsistent you were I need I need the experience I need to build my book and that's a good thing too right like if you're just getting started as a trainer you don't want to come off as pompous and like oh I only take the serious people I don't know what you're doing yeah you don't know what the fuck you're doing anyways you need practice you need practice you need headaches you need all that bullshit you know like Gary V says each shit for nine years go through all that process for a while then when you get that down then you can start to do things like this where you like Justin moved to a super high class people that are spending top dollar not happened for a while yeah you couldn't do that and you're like everybody for years yeah you're one you can't say oh you can only work with me if you have five or seven grand budget a month like yeah get out of here no not a lot of trainers can do that you got to wait till you figure it out you get the timing you know all the nuances involved and then you you start looking back at what what's going to benefit my business the most how can I structure that how can I get buy-in from you know potential new new prospects and and and then you go from there I do believe though even if you're a new trainer you can move in the direction that I'm talking about you just might be a little more flexible on still taking somebody right so maybe where I'm more of a hard ass from so I'm sorry I'm not even going to take you maybe you still take them and try and move and move them along and you learn from them and they learn from you but you definitely can I mean we have all these tools now it's not that expensive to get something that tracks your steps there is my fitness pal fat secret apps that are super easy to use most everybody has access to like a scale I mean we all can text back and forth so easily so we can now and this wasn't like this 20 years ago 20 years ago we didn't have all this we had binders and files and we had to write everything down like a lot of this stuff can be tracked right in your phone and you should you put a lot of the responsibility because here's the deal well they learn from it and they also have to do this the rest of their life they can do this the rest of their life at one point or another they got to learn to start doing this yeah and what you mean by the rest of your life by the way for listeners like oh my god I have to add my food up every no no no you do for you do at first to learn what's in food after a little while though you can tell what's in the chicken breast and know where you're getting your carbs and you can it just to bring to have a baseline first yeah just you're going to school for a little while that's right yeah my strategy was a little bit different towards the end I similar though right I still took almost anybody who wanted to hire me but if they weren't consistent didn't show up I just took them off the schedule and I tell them that say look here's the deal you missed two workouts it seems like it's real tough for you to show up right now so I'm going to take you off the schedule but you because I have other people I can put I can put in that time you let me know when you're ready to come back and that usually would weed people out or they would start to show up and be a little more consistent the reason why that was my strategy was I tried to meet people where they were because I found that I actually found success when I would get the occasional client who didn't want to do anything else but show up once a week I don't want to do anything else but I'll show up once a week and over time I had a few clients that I did this with over time they came two days a week three days a week did it on their own and then they started to really make those changes but yeah if you're showing those signs of whatever obviously I'm not going to waste my time and so I just say well okay you know I used to do that text them listen you know you missed another workout or 20 minutes late I'm going to take you off the schedule you know let me know I'm going to put someone else there you let me know when you're ready to come back and usually they would come back sometimes they'd never hear from them again in which case you know you're weeding them out