TIME IS FREE, BUT IT’S PRICELESS. YOU CAN’T OWN IT, BUT YOU CAN USE IT. YOU CAN’T KEEP IT, BUT
YOU CAN SPEND IT. ONCE YOU’VE LOST IT, YOU CAN NEVER GET IT BACK. – HARVEY MACKAY
Fitness trainers spend all this time working out package pricing for their prospects and calculating their income based on new sign-ups. They labor endlessly online to track metrics like website bounce rates or the time people spend on their websites. These metrics are all important ways of measuring how successful your business is, of course, but are you measuring the most important metric of all?
If you knew what your time was worth, maybe you’d think twice before shooting the sh*t with your coworker over coffee and donuts for 45 minutes instead of focusing on your business. If you knew what your time was worth, maybe you would tell your sister you really can’t talk during work hours when she calls to tell you about the latest “crisis” of being unable to find the right outfit for her work function. If you knew what your time was worth, you’d spend less time examining your physique in the mirror and more time out on the gym floor. If you knew what your time was worth, you would also know that it’s better to get rid of a client who wastes time than to fight to keep him or her.
Take your annual income and divide it by 2,080 (40 hours/week x 52 weeks/year) to get your hourly rate. So, for example, if you make $25,000 per year, your hourly rate would be $12. If you make $60,000 a year, your rate is $28 per hour. This number naturally doesn’t take into count vacation days or taxes, but getting a ballpark figure is the first step for taking your head out of your @$$ and making smart business decisions.
How many hours are you spending writing blogs for your website? Instead of racking your brain for 5 hours a week and wasting $60 to 140 of your time, why not just hire a professional blogger to do it for you for $25 – $50? Many business professionals are outsourcing the more time-consuming aspects of their business like social networking, web development and scheduling.
In addition to helping you know when to outsource, knowing your hourly rate will also help you decide what’s worth your time. Maybe in the past you’d have lunch with your clients while counseling them about nutrition. Now you realize that these freebies actually cost your hourly rate, so you should probably build nutrition counseling into your package pricing. Maybe you used to offer introductory rates for half your hourly rate. Tsk, tsk! Now you know better. You’ll find the whole world looks a little bit different when you value your time. Instead of spending your free time with a home renovation project, perhaps it’s better to spend your time doing what you do best and just pay a contractor to do what he does best.
Fitness marketing post by Sam Bakhtiar