Effortless Gym Membership Invoice for Support that Boosts Your Efficiency

Gym membership invoice for Support

what's up guys Jeff from sort of healthier someone recently commented something on a video like how do you schedule your clients and collect payments my initial reaction to that comment was something like well I just do it duh that stuff is the easy part of the job the more I thought about it though the more I realized that scheduling clients and collecting payments was actually a great topic for a video both of these things seem simple on the surface but to be honest they're not not only that but if you can't efficiently schedule clients and collect payments literally nothing else matters you truly won't be able to make a living as an independent trainer if you get this part wrong so in this video I'll be sharing the tools and strategies that will best help you to schedule clients and get paid at various points in your training career whether you're just starting out as an independent trainer or you've got your own Studio I've got you covered before we get into all that please consider liking the video and subscribing to the channel if you haven't done so already that support really helps out the channel and that allows me to keep making free content for all of you thank you so much for the continued support everyone without you guys none of this would be possible so I'll be breaking today's video into three parts or three separate categories in the first part I'll be focusing on solopreneurs and how they should be scheduling their clients and collecting payments a solopreneur is just an entrepreneur who works alone which that's what you'd be as a trainer going independent I'll also be sharing what you should consider doing at later points in your career to grow your business and streamline your systems after that I'll just be going over some good General practices that I think pretty much all trainers should follow when it comes to scheduling and collecting payments so let's say that you've just decided that it's time to quit that mediocre gym job and go off on your own you'll be doing your own thing making your own rules or in other words running your own business how should you go about scheduling your clients well if we're being realistic at this point in time your objectives should be to one get the ball rolling and two keep your expenses low you're not going to be raking in the clients right away it's almost certainly going to be a slow build in the beginning because it will be a slow start and because you'll want to keep those overhead costs low you'll want to avoid the fancier options like Mind Body at this stage to be honest you might always want to avoid mind body but more on that later at this point where your business is newer or even if you've been around for a while but you're trying to keep things simple there really is no better option than Google Calendar I use Google Calendar for my entire first year in business and it works exactly like you'd expect it's simple and effective and it's free which really is amazing on Google Calendar you can set up things like reoccurring appointments which I'd highly recommend setting those up for clients whenever possible if a client wants to book their appointments week to week that's also easy on Google Calendar everything is drag and drop I'll be honest I don't even think there's a close second option for starting trainers when it comes to scheduling just go with Google Calendar when it comes to collecting payments in the beginning there's a few different options I've used a good handful of different things over the years but the two that work the best for me in the beginning were stripe and square for me stripe was the best when I was trying to sell something online which for a while I did give clients the option to pay for services online Honestly though square is probably the best when it comes to charging clients if you're running a very small in-person operation it's incredibly easy to use you can design packages and options quickly on your phone and then you can seamlessly charge your clients from there you can also get some really good metrics through the square website as well this makes doing your own taxes very easy which is huge when you run your own business of course it also makes it easy to see exactly how much money you're making and it helps you see which of your offerings are selling and which ones aren't if I could go back in time and give my past self some advice on all of this I'd have four things to say one use Google Calendar for scheduling until your business grows significantly two use stripe for online sales the 2.9 percent plus 30 Cent fee is much better than what she'll pay to use Square in the same way three use Square for in-person purchases and make sure you're using the swipe feature the swipe feature from square is incredibly easy to use and you only have to pay 2.6 percent of the transaction plus 10 cents this is significantly better than what you'd get with stripe swipes for charge people a processing fee if they're going to pay with a card I didn't do this initially and ate the cost of all those processing fees this adds up fast when you're selling thousands of dollars of personal training now I charge my clients a 2.5 percent fee if they pay by card this is legal to do in most places but check your local state laws before you do this yourself okay so now that we've covered how you should start out scheduling clients and collecting payments what should you do when your business starts to grow and I don't mean a tiny bit of growth I mean a substantial amount of growth first let me share a few things that I think would represent a significant amount of growth AKA stick with Google Calendar square and stripe if you're are not here yet one you'll be adding employees or other independent contractors to your operation soon two you're starting to add multiple services to your business we're talking things like small group training massage therapy assisted stretching Etc three you're very booked up and your clients are paying a fair price for your services and you need software that can help you streamline your business a bit if you work for yourself and you're experiencing any of those three things or you will be soon it's time to consider one of the specialized all-in-one options so we've got a few contenders to consider here mind body is probably the most well known in Fitness circles and for good reason it works very well you also have lesser known options like Acuity Wellness living vagaro and square actually has a scheduling app too I myself have used all five of these scheduling and payment processing softwares and there's really a few features that I look for in particular one the iPhone and Android app needs to be simple and easy to use if it takes too long to Fumble through menus and book my client further next session that's a deal breaker for me unfortunately when I tried out Wellness living back in 2019 and 2020 the app was a disaster it barely worked and it almost killed my business maybe it's better now but I still can't recommend it too I need a software that can send automated texts to clients 24 hours before their next appointment having those automated texts has been a game changer there's no doubt that clients canceled less when you have this scheduling feature built in this isn't built into squares app you have to pay extra for that which is kind of icky to me to be honest also they're keyed in transaction fee or stored credit card fee is fairly high so that also doesn't work for me either the third thing I want in a scheduling and payment collecting app is an affordable price tag running a small business is pretty costly there's always things that need to be addressed and I don't want my scheduling and payment software to be one of my biggest expenses unfortunately this is where mind body loses me as good as it is it's just significantly more expensive than the competition you're looking at 129 to 599 dollars monthly depending on what you need for a small Studio like mine with six trainers and a handful of different Services I'd be spending closer to the 599 dollars monthly at the end of the day I really can't justify that price because Acuity and vagaro seem just as good as my body but at a fraction of the cost either of these two will cost you around 25 to 100 monthly depending on what you need because of that these are my two top picks for scheduling and payment software I specifically played around with Acuity before making this video and I was pretty impressed it was very intuitive and overall a lot better than it used to be still think I prefer vegara a bit as it was designed for health and wellness businesses and because of that it just tends to work really well for them but at this point I'd recommend either one I've been using vagaro in my studio for about five years and it's been awesome the entire time it's great for scheduling clients and processing payments to be honest there's not really any downside to it and it's not expensive which is a nice bonus it's got my seal of approval and if you're going to be running a training studio with multiple trainers or workers this is the first application I try you won't be disappointed if you want to try it use my link Down Below in the video description you'll get a month for free and we'll both get some Figaro bucks too so hey that's pretty cool now that we've gone over what I think you should do to schedule clients and collect payments at various points in your career let's end this video by going over some good rules of thumb when it comes to collecting payments I want you to do these five things one be upfront about how much people owe you your price is your price two don't offer discounts if you want to offer a small student veteran or first responder discount that's cool but don't give General clients a discount ever three only have a few options when it comes to services or ways to pay too many options is confusing and overwhelming four make payments seem like no big deal regarding your prices don't ever say something like I know this seems like a lot but stay cool and calm about pricing your prices are where they are for a reason five automate as much as you can you're a trainer not a debt collector automate as many payments as possible apps like Figaro and many of the others make this easy enough now when it comes to scheduling I want you to do these five things one be firm in the hours that you want to work and the ones that you don't you're not a robot you'll need time off too two schedule your own workouts if you get busy enough you won't get your own workouts done unless you schedule them three have set rules for how your appointments work just a few things to think about do you have breaks between your sessions are your sessions always at the same times none of these things necessarily matter but you should have your own rules that work for you and your clients four have a cancellation and rescheduling policy in my studio if someone cancels less than 24 hours before their next appointment unless they have some kind of crazy emergency going on they do lose that session five set people up with reoccurring appointments whenever possible some people's schedules won't allow for recurring appointments but the more clients you have with set schedules the easier your life will be bonus confirm your clients next session time before they leave the facility you don't want to be spending tons of time texting back and forth with clients to make sure they have the right session time it's best to handle as much of that as you can while they're still in the facility so hopefully all of you watching got some good insights from all of this payment collecting and scheduling talk do any of you have questions about anything that we went over if you do make sure to leave those in the comments down below as always I will respond to you and if you haven't done so already please consider liking the video and subscribing to the channel because both of those things really do help the channel to grow and that does allow me to create more free content for all of you thanks for watching everyone and until next time stay sort of healthy