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Kaiser Serajuddin: Hey, what’s up? This is Kaiser. You’re of course listening to me on Super-Trainer and today I’ve got one of the top people in the fitness industry here on the phone with me. It’s Bedros Keuilian. What’s up, Bedros?
Bedros Keuilian: Hey, Kaiser. How are you, buddy? Thanks for having me.
Kaiser Serajuddin: Oh, it’s my pleasure, man. Yeah. So like I said, you’re one of the top dogs in this business and it’s not just from a training angle. I mean you did make your chops [Phonetic] as a trainer but now it’s from helping other trainers expand their businesses and just in general laying out the whole financial game plan for overall wealth. That’s what you’re known for. How did all this come about? How did all this happen?
Bedros Keuilian: That’s a good question. All this happened about probably 10 years ago when I was struggling to get my personal training business off the ground and I was fortunate enough where one of my clients who happened to be in the mortgage industry handed me a Tom Hopkins tape and Tom Hopkins for those who don’t know is one of those old school sales gurus and he talks about closing strategies and how to overcome objections and to me, that was like an “aha” moment.
It was like this awakening. Before, when I was lucky enough to sit across a prospect, I would literally vomit out a whole bunch of information and hope that that person in front of me would cling on to something, would resonate with something I said and say yes to an order.
Well, after listening to that tape and Tom Hopkins, I realized that people have emotional triggers and so on and they have hot buttons that if you can turn [0:01:54] [Indiscernible] through those hot buttons, you can move people through compliance into making a buying decision. So I went from being just a lousy sales person or a trainer who’s trying to be a lousy salesperson to what I call the insistent [Phonetic] buyer.
Well, that Tom Hopkins tape led to a Brian Tracy tape and books from Zig Ziglar and before you know it, two years have passed and I had two personal training location facilities and that morphed into a total of five and the trainers are coming out of the woodwork, asking me how I’ve got five facilities when they haven’t got one started. And it was around 1999, 2000 that I started writing the PT Business Course. It was just my step by step journey on how to market and how to sell personal training. From there, it all kind of snowballs into what we have today.
Kaiser Serajuddin: Yeah. Some pretty amazing stuff that you’re offering and yeah, that is a real major breakthrough once you realize it’s sales. A lot of this stuff, it can be broken down into a science and it can be learned and yeah, just for the general trainer, the trainers that I reached through my blog, you have some really good products for them, things to talk about, closing a sale. What do you have that can really help the trainer that’s still very hands-on, still face to face with his clients?
Bedros Keuilian: Yeah. The top two things for those face to face trainers is my PT Business Course which is literally kind of grassroots marketing. In other words, if you’re a trainer, you work in a gym. How to run a fishbowl – one of the ways when I did personal training inside of a gym, one of my main ways for getting clients was literally take the fishbowl, classic fishbowl in the women’s locker room that had a little [0:03:48] [Indiscernible]. What are the top three body parts you want to work out or you want to change? And then as you [Indiscernible] a week of personal training.
This never worked really well when I put a fishbowl in the men’s restroom because when you put a fishbowl in the men’s rest room, what do you want to change about your body, you get some very interesting comments.
Kaiser Serajuddin: Yeah, I can imagine.
Bedros Keuilian: Yeah, it was pretty colorful but man, it worked like gangbusters when we did this in the women’s room, in the women’s locker room, and we get 10 to 15 leads a week and we called everybody up and said one person would win a week and everybody else would win a free training session within that week but at the end of that training session, we put up a consultation. So that’s one thing that I covered in my PT Business Course.
Another thing I covered is what I call Belly to Belly [Phonetic] which is how to approach someone in a gym. You never want to approach him when they’re working out. You don’t want to screw up their workout but you will need to coach him to make that sale or at least to get that process going. So I cover the Belly to Belly [Phonetic] system.
Another great thing that I cover in there is what I call marker board promotion. I always put up little marker boards in the health club that I worked in and I would say 6:00 PM Wednesday night, we’re having an abs and butt class. It’s 20 minutes. We’re only taking on 15 people. Register here at the personal trainer desk and I have a little roster going and everybody – I go and take them through like 10 or 15 abs and butt exercises and then I say, “Hey, since you guys are all kind enough to show up, let me give each of you a one-on-one training session with me over the next week,” and again all those would lead up to sales.
So all of that grassroots stuff is in the PT Business Course and in it is also very high end marketing tactics like direct mail and internet marketing stuff and list generation and two-step marketing system. But the other thing that works really well because [0:05:39] [Indiscernible] got a market but you can’t close people. You’re going to have a lot of people walking away from you is my Close Clients DVD and that happens to be one of my hottest selling products and it’s literally the exact script and formula including the diagrams that I will draw to sell people on $3500 to $7000 training. And I think those would be a great system for anybody who’s just starting out in the industry or wants to kind of go from selling small blocks of sessions into this multi-thousand dollar program and doesn’t know where to start.
Kaiser Serajuddin: Yeah. I really have no problem bringing up your products or plugging any of your stuff because I’ve experienced some of them and I know what you’re about. I know it’s really real good, high quality stuff.
Now that’s good that you have info on trainers on how to cope with and kind of make their way in the health club setting because for a lot of us [Indiscernible] where we got our start and you kind of have to get your feet wet there. Now I’m the guy that helps people get out of there and to dump the gym and to get out on their own. Now you kind of take it to another level once they’re on their own and they’ve got themselves established and they know how to train clients and they have a full roster. They’re charging high rates. You help them reach that next level. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Bedros Keuilian: Yeah. It’s funny and maybe you’ve experienced this. I know I sure have when I was personal training. When I was making under $100,000 a year, it was almost this glass ceiling, man, where it seemed like gosh, $100,000 was unreachable. If I ever reached $100,000, I will have made it and to me, that six-figure mark was so incredible but I was always butting up against this glass ceiling.
Even when I left the gym and went out on my own, I was doing in-home personal training and this was before the whole boot camp craze, I just couldn’t hit that six-figure mark, the $100,000 mark. Interestingly, when I started charging more and started niching, in other words focusing on a very specific market and not being a personal trainer to everybody, I instantly broke through that glass barrier of $100,000 and something happened.
Once I was able to make $100,000, the next $100,000 came easier and then the next $100,000 after that came easier. It’s almost like I had a mental block. Looking back, I realized that it wasn’t anything other than my mental block of, “I’m not sure if I have what it takes to make $100,000.” It had nothing to do with my marketing or selling. I was probably putting all these barriers in front of me just to justify why I don’t deserve 100,000 bucks. But as soon as I broke through that glass ceiling, Kaiser, holy crap, the next $100,000, the $100,000 after that came quicker. Well …
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