How Can A Virtual Assistant Help My Personal Training Business?

As mentioned earlier this week; based on a question I asked on the My Business Is Fitness Facebook page, I decided to contact Lara Thomas from E - Assistant Services who specializes in helping fitness professionals just like you by taking away a lot of the mundane chores of running a small business so you can focus on things that MAKE YOU MONEY.

Lara has put together an awesome post and included a brief case study of one particular personal training business that she has worked closely with to take it to another level.

How can a Virtual Assistant help my personal training business?

Well let’s start at the beginning. Many of you are probably wondering what a Virtual Assistant is?

A Virtual Assistant is an individual who provides administrative, secretarial, business and marketing support to small business owners and entrepreneurs. Work is carried out 'virtually' from our own office, so it doesn’t matter where you are, we can still help you.

There is no need to provide office space, equipment or software – we have our own. All tasks are performed under timed conditions, so you just pay for 100% productive time dedicated to you, not our lunch breaks, sick days etc.

I’ve been running my Virtual Assistant business for about 18 months now and I got into it after having my little girl and being faced with the choice of either having to go back to work full time for my employer or not at all. I opted for not at all and so the search began for my future career that would fit in around my family.

In my search I stumbled upon an advert from another Virtual Assistant needing help. After spending 6 months working for her I realised that I could take my 17 years of experience working as both a Personal Assistant and Marketing Professional, in a wide variety of industries and start my own Virtual Assistant business.

Fast forward 18 months and here I am running e-assistant services and I love it!

I work with a wide variety of clients and no two days are the same; I’m my own boss and I love being able to help other business owners to streamline their procedures and help take some of the administrative pressure off so that they have the time to grow their business.

While I work with lots of different clients my favourite by far are my personal training businesses.

This side of things began for me when my personal trainer suggested that we start a reciprocal agreement, whereby I help him with his business and I get free training with him. That was around 9 months ago and I now find myself wanting to build up this side of my business because it genuinely interests and excites me.

I’ve helped my trainer and others to grow and streamline their Personal Training businesses (and reached my goal weight in the process!). I would love to spread the word about Virtual Assistants and their benefits to Personal Trainers. After all, you didn’t get into this business to spend your time tied to a desk, performing administration and marketing tasks, you got into it to be out there doing what you’re best at, training your clients.

You’re probably wondering how a Virtual Assistant (VA) can help you and your business so here are just a few examples of tasks that we perform for my trainer’s business, Inner West Boxing and Personal Training (IWBPT):

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – IWBPT already had a good website but it just wasn’t performing very well for them. When searching on Google they were coming in around page 4 and as we all know people very rarely go past page 2.

E-assistant services (EAS) worked their magic on the website and its listings. IWBPT now finds itself on page one for the majority of search terms that they deem to be important to their business.

Advertising – EAS has ensured that IWBPT are listed on around 15 different free listings online. It’s an excellent way of spreading the word regarding your business for no extra cost and it also helps drive traffic to your website.

Client experience – have you considered your client’s overall experience? How do you and your business present to them? What are their first impressions of you? EAS can help you to look at this and streamline your client procedures to ensure that they have 100% confidence in you, as the owner of your Personal Training business, and can’t wait to tell their friends about you.

Social Media Marketing – Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin - whilst you are probably more than aware that you should be representing your business in these arenas, you more than likely just don’t have the time to establish and upkeep your profiles in these areas.

A VA can help you to set up your profiles, pages, etc, and then either assist with getting you started using them or completely manage this for you. Social media accounts need a constant level of attention and maintenance in order to work properly for you and a VA can help with that.

EAS liaises with IWBPT on a weekly basis to nut out content for it’s social media accounts and then that’s the end of IWBPT’s involvement. EAS manages the broadcasting of this content throughout the week for IWBPT and monitors the accounts for interaction that needs any attention.

Expenses tracking – it’s around this time of year that business owners across the country start to look to their in comings and outgoings in relation to their tax returns.

Imagine how much easier your life would be if you could pick up your neatly filed receipts, before emailing an easy to follow expenses spreadsheet to your accountant for you both to go over in your meeting.

Well IWBPT have just that, every month they forward all their receipts to us, we log them in a spreadsheet, arrange them in date order for the month and then file them away. When end of financial year comes, we send IWBPT their completed expenses spreadsheet and present them with all their receipts, filed month by month and in date order. Their meeting with their accountant should be an absolute breeze.

Research – a VA can perform all sorts of research for you. When IWBPT wanted to get promotional flyers printed up, EAS went away and found three competitive quotes for getting the job done before going back to IWBPT with their findings.

IWBPT just had to decide from the easy to follow table of findings, which company they wanted to give their business to. Once they had decided, EAS placed the order for them and arranged for delivery. Easy.

Marketing – as time goes by and EAS becomes more and more involved in IWBPT’s business, we are able to help them by coming up with new ideas for marketing and streamlining the business. We very much feel like IWBPT are not just our clients, we are colleagues in the same business.

Their success is our success.

I asked IWBPT to give us their feedback on how using the services of EAS had helped improve their business and they said that in the 10 months that they had been using us their business had evolved into a Personal Training Business that is now competitive in the market.

They have improved their time management skills, have a greater awareness of their strengths and weaknesses and their SEO has improved ten fold. They also now have more time to spend with their family. They would recommend using a VA to any other trainer wanting to improve and grow their business.

So now you’ve read about just a few of the ways that a VA could help your Personal Training business but you’re probably wondering how much all this is going to cost you?

How much you spend is completely up to you. You can buy an hour by hour package or EAS also offer a number of different options from a 5 hour package to a 40 hour package and we’ve also put together a special Personal Trainer package.

You buy the package you want and then it’s up to you when you use this time. Buy a 5 hour package and use it over the next 6 months if that is what suits you; it’s up to you and what you can afford. The more time you buy however, the more cost effective it is.

So what are you waiting for, enhance your business by utilising the services of a Virtual Assistant today!

Thank you Lara and thank you to Box Train for the inside scoop!

You can contact Lara direct on the details below to find out EXACTLY how E-Assistant Services can help your buisiness and if you mention this post you will receive a 15% discount!

T - +61 (0) 2 8005 0519
M - +61 (0) 423 491855
E - lara@eassistantservices.com
W - www.eassistantservices.com
Skype - eassistworldwide

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