Your Clients Care If You Are Profitable. Do You?
September 24, 2020
by Shannon Simmons

I’ll bet that you have clients that really love what you do. They understand the hard work you put into serving them, appreciate it, and prove it by sticking around and paying you month after month. Those are the clients you want and need more of, right?

And they may not say it, but they really do care if you are profitable. Why? Because these clients also understand that if you aren’t, you won’t be around very long to serve them and to keep them happy. 

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses that were running on razor thin margins are disappearing by the hundreds. Where I live, we have seen restaurants and shops close down because they just can’t make it on current income, and they had little to no reserves built up to withstand the current economic reality. 

It’s happening in the gym industry too. Gyms are closing down, never to reopen. That stinks for the owner, but it also stinks for the community they served. People NEED the service you have now more than ever. It is your responsibility to make sure you are here for the long term.

It is your responsibility to operate a business that is as profitable as it can be. 

Question #2 on the Profit Level of the Business Hierarchy of Needs is:

“Do you have healthy profit margins within each of your offerings and do you continually seek ways to improve them?”

In other words, are you charging enough for the service or services you provide?

When I am working with a client who is going through the “Pumpkin Planning” process, we analyze each service to determine how much it is really making the business. Some gym owner’s I work with have multiple service offerings; group training and semi-private for instance. All too often the pricing is really random, without understanding how it’s affecting the bottom line.

For instance if my group training offering is $99/mo and I can train 15 clients with one coach, that’s $1485 generated. If my semi-private is $300/mo and I can train 4 clients per coach, that’s $1200 generated. Even though semi-private costs 3 times as much it’s not generating as much income per session. And that’s not the only factor to consider. For example what is the time it takes to write semi-private programs vs. group? Are group instructors compensated differently than a semi-private coach? What other overhead considerations are there?

Often we set our prices based on what others in our area are doing, or what we perceive the market will bear, or based on some head trash we are dealing with around our value. Sure, you can consider those (the first two anyway), but they can’t and should not be the only way you determine your prices. Build your profit margins in right from the beginning. The Profit First system includes percentage targets for your Profit based on your sales income generated. For instance a healthy business doing between $500k and $1M a year should be generating 15% cash profit. Between $250k and $500k the target is 10%. If they aren’t there now, what is your plan for getting them there? Do you even know what your overall profit margin is, and then have you broken that down?

If you haven’t, you are not alone, and this is not an indictment on your character or your ability to run a business. The truth is that almost none of us have taken the time to figure it all out, because we are running around doing a thousand and one other things in our business.

And at some point, it’s going to come back to bite us. Like it has so many businesses over the past 6 months.

Here’s why healthy profit is so important in the context of the times we live in. When you have a healthy profit margin you can create a greater “business viability and survivability” margin. How much less stressful would your life have been over the last few months if you had 6 months of living and operating expenses saved up? That’s doesn’t just “happen”. You need a cash management system that puts every dollar you earn to work in the right places at the right time, and a plan to help you reach your targets. You really can’t afford to not put your Profit First any longer. It’s time to take action and build the profitable business you (and your clients) always wanted. We can help.