Matt Roberts: How To Create Your Own Personal Training Brand

Introduction

The very best personal trainers have one trait in common. They all have a strong brand.

Good branding helps trainers attract thousands of clients, earn money from anywhere in the world, and build successful businesses that grow in value. But what actually is a brand?

Having worked in the health and fitness industry for almost 30 years, Matt Roberts has built his own world-class personal training business and brand from scratch.

In  this video, Matt shares the lessons he learned along the way, including how to get your brand off the ground, what your brand should stand for, and the mistakes he made early on.

Or, if you’d prefer, you can read what Matt had to say below…

What is a brand?

Creating a brand and understanding what a brand is can determine whether your company is successful or not successful. However, rarely is it taught in personal training courses. So, what exactly is a brand?

I’ll start with my brand and my ‘M logo’. We put my logo onto every part of the company’s letters, flyers, on the front door, and on the staff T-shirts. That is what you see. That is our logo. That is our brand.

When you see an Apple device, what does the Apple logo stand for? When you buy a car, what does the BMW symbol stand for? What does it mean to you? Branding is all around us. It is the most powerful thing in the world in business and marketing.

Brands have different values. Let’s start with the cultural values of what the brand is. As a company owner, I know why I started my company. It came from a point of being passionate about training. I love getting results. I was a sprinter in the past. I loved learning how to run faster, how to perform better, and how I could achieve the maximum level of performance.

As a teenager, that expanded to understanding what made the body work. I studied to become a personal trainer, started my own company, and opened centres for personal training only. So, the culture behind what I do was about performance, body enhancement, and how to make sure we embellish what we do to a phenomenal degree and make our bodies perform to their full potential. Your culture comes from a personal start point.

Examples of great brands

Even for a multinational company like Starbucks, the first thing they did was sell one cup of coffee. One cup of coffee from their very root point – back in the ’60s – to get the best beans, bought from the best location, and deliver it the way it should be. That was their unique proposition.

Go to a more extreme end of that: look at the McDonald’s brand and company logo and branding. What is that? Even that started by selling you one burger. But their logo is synonymous with that company. The big golden M. What does it say to you?

Even the clown – Ronald McDonald – their character. He’s not the person who started the company, of course. But he is their logo and their branding. You become attached to what that thing represents. It gives you an idea of what that company is.

The cultural values come from a solid start point. When you buy a Porsche, it has a background of being a strong sports car company, with a really strong route of ensuring they are delivering a sports car product with the highest identity. Same for Ferrari. Same for BMW. Same for Apple.

When you buy an Apple device, you know Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak wanted to make sure they were delivering a product that already existed in the personal computer market years ago, but they made it accessible to a broader number of people.

That was their culture. That was their start point. They were there to ensure they were giving this thing that they loved a chance to grow and be spread to a broad audience. The culture they developed over the years never changed from that.

It was about making the devices they created always accessible, always open, always engaging above everything else. The money was a side product. Cultural values matter, because it comes from a point where we really feel the passion growing. Without that cultural value in a company, we cannot define how to make it grow and the customer probably won’t understand where we come from.

The internal perception of your business

The internal perception of your company is very important. If you have employees working in a company, what is their perception of being inside that brand? Does it make them feel special and empowered? Does it make them feel like they have got a position in the industry? Does it give them a platform to grow? You must understand how your employees (and yourself) view your company. It is vital for your confidence and self-concept as a brand.

If you view your company as being in a tough place, you are not getting new clients, and business is slow, it may be that your internal perception of the brand is poor.

You’re viewing your own brand as being a low-grade entity. But by ensuring we keep this level of perception up by presenting new ideas and information, our internal perception for all people linked to the brand remains strong, positive, and easier to move forwards.

Without that, it crumbles from the base very quickly. So, make sure you are creating a culture, from the cultural point you started at, where all of our people who touch the brand internally believe in that culture. They know what the founder wanted. If you understand that, you can then ensure that ‘outside layer’ of the company is based on good foundations.

The external perception of your business

We do not decide what our brand is. I can only decide what my logo looks like and what my business does. What I do in the media, on my blog, and in my gyms is simply what I do. But that is not my brand. The consumer decides what the brand is.

If a consumer decides the experience they have by training with us, reading my books, or seeing my TV appearances are poor, they will quickly decide what my brand stands for. And that’s why brands crumble quickly.

Right now, Apple are rising and rising exponentially. Ten years ago, Google was a nothing brand. Now, it’s one of the biggest firms in the world. Amazon, ten years ago, did not really exist. Now, it is the biggest brand in the world.

It is your job as a company owner to understand how you want your brand to be perceived. Ask yourself the question: What is “brand you”? You are the epitome of your brand.

How does your brand make people feel?

The reason why it is important is this: when you’re using a brand, think about how it makes you feel. For those who are lucky enough to have flown first class in an airline – when you sit down in the business lounge or the first-class lounge waiting, how do you feel? You feel good. You feel uplifted. It gives you a better sense of yourself.

For some people, that gives a vision of themselves beyond their current circumstances. When you sit down on the flight itself, in your big luxury seat, legs extended, knowing that everyone else behind you is on a smaller seat, you feel special. When you buy a luxury product, as expensive as it might be, that’s actually part of the reason you buy it.

You might go and buy a Louis Vuitton bag. It is just a bag. It carries the same gear as the £20 bag you can buy somewhere else. So why did you buy that bag? The reason you bought it was to make yourself feel good. You have bought this bag and made a decision that is good for you. Your personal training brand should have the same appeal.

The reflective quality of your brand

The reflective quality of a brand gives you enormous power. If your clients walk away thinking “Everyone knows I made a good decision training with this business” – the reflective quality is very strong.

Reflective qualities in the consumer mean they will tell more people about their experiences. The more people they tell, the more your customer base grows, and the higher you can raise your prices. Reflective qualities define the biggest part of how your company has a chance of growing and succeeding as a brand. It all boils down to how people feel.

People make decisions through rational thinking, passion, and the reflective qualities of a brand. They might overspend on an item because the reflective qualities it gives them makes them feel good. Good enough to justify the additional expense. As a trainer, creating that reflective quality, that need to spend more, makes us successful.

Know your audience

If you want to attract and retain personal training clients, you must represent those people. If you know your audience is high-earning individuals, but you don’t represent them, it’s very hard to live up to their expectations. If your client wants to run marathons, but you can’t run yourself, then brand “you” does not match brand “them.”

If you only want to lift weights and your client wants to lose weight, your two brands might not align. It might be that you understand and empathise with their needs so effectively, the brand gap does not actually matter. It really depends on your client.

So, branding yourself is very important. How you communicate, what you do, and what your skill sets are. Know your strengths and broadcast them. Know your weaknesses and work on them. And finally understand what your clients are looking for.

When I first started my company 23 years ago, I spent money going to the best hotel just to sit, have a cup of tea, and breathe in the experience. I went to the best service providers in all areas. I would go to a private doctor or a healthcare specialist just to have a consultation and feel what it is like to understand my consumer.

I knew I was trying to appeal to a 45–50-year-old with high net worth, who drives a nice car, and goes on holiday to nice places. I needed to understand that life so I could tap into it, work on my brand, and use my knowledge to appeal to these people and earn money from it.

Ultimately, we see hundreds of brands every day. The brand is not your logo. It is not what you wear. It is not what you do or own. It is everything you stand for and how people perceive your brand. That’s why it is so important to get it right.

If you want more tips, advice, and real-world lessons on growing your personal training company, our business skills CPD course builds on your personal training qualification to help you grow your brand.