Latest / The Side Hustle Career Podcast with Fexingo: Second Income, Freelancing While Employed / How a Personal Trainer Built a 5000 Monthly Side Hustle in Fitness Business Consulting
Transcript
- Lucas: So let me set the scene. Marcus is a personal trainer at a big-box gym — you know, the kind with rows of treadmills, a pool in the back, and a membership model built on volume rather than intimacy. Luna: Right, the classic chain gym. He's been there for years, probably grinding through back to back sessions. Lucas: Exactly. But last year, Marcus started helping a friend who runs a small boutique studio — maybe three instructors, thirty regulars — figure out why clients were churning after six months. And he realized his day-job knowledge was actually more valuable in that smaller setting. Luna: Because the big gym has all the systems already built. The boutique studio is just a couple of people trying to keep the lights on. Lucas: That's the gap. So Marcus built a side hustle around it — fitness business consulting — and now he's pulling in about $5,000 a month on retainer from three boutique studios. He hasn't left his training job. He just works a few evenings a week on this. Luna: Honestly, if today helped you think about your own side hustle path, that's the kind of moment where listener support keeps this show ad-free. If it was worth a coffee to you, there's a link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, completely. So let's unpack how Marcus actually did it. The first thing he noticed was that the boutique studio had no system for tracking class attendance relative to membership type. Luna: Meaning they didn't know whether their unlimited members were actually coming, or if their drop-in clients were being squeezed out at peak times. Lucas: Right. Marcus had spent years in a gym where attendance data was automatically fed into a corporate dashboard. He could run a report in thirty seconds. The boutique was using a spreadsheet updated once a week by the owner's teenage daughter. Luna: So his first offer was essentially: I'll set up a proper attendance tracking system and give you a weekly report. That's a low-friction entry point. Lucas: Exactly. He charged $500 to build the initial spreadsheet with conditional formatting and pivot tables, then $250 a month to maintain it and send a summary every Monday. That first client took about ten hours upfront, then two hours a month. Luna: What was the retention problem he solved next? Lucas: So the studio had a decent new-client acquisition funnel — Instagram ads, local partnerships — but people would sign up for a month, maybe two, then cancel. Marcus looked at the data and saw a pattern: cancellations spiked right after the third class. Luna: Interesting. So not a pricing issue, but an engagement issue early on. Lucas: Exactly. At the big gym, new members were pushed into a '30-day challenge' with scheduled check-ins. The boutique had nothing like that. So Marcus designed a five-class onboarding sequence: a welcome email, a quick form to set a goal, a check-in after class two, and a small reward after class five. Luna: Did that actually move the needle? Lucas: Over three months, the studio's six-month retention rate went from 42 percent to 68 percent. That's a massive jump for a small business. The owner estimated it was worth about $1,200 a month in retained revenue. Luna: So Marcus could point to a concrete ROI when he pitched the next client. That's the kind of proof that justifies a higher retainer. Lucas: Exactly. His second client came from a referral — another boutique owner who heard about the retention work. That client had a different issue: class pricing. Luna: Which is a tough one. You don't want to scare people off, but you also need to cover your costs. Lucas: Right. The second studio was charging $18 per drop-in class, but their actual cost per class — rent, instructor pay, equipment — was about $22 per person at their average attendance. They were losing money on every class that wasn't a package sale. Luna: So Marcus had to find a pricing model that worked without just raising the drop-in rate to $25 overnight. Lucas: He looked at how the big gym priced its personal training packages — high per-session cost but a bulk discount that locks people in. So he introduced a three-tier system: $22 for single drop-in, $18 per class for a ten-class pack, and $15 per class for a monthly unlimited pass. Luna: And the unlimited pass becomes the anchor. You're basically training people to buy the highest margin option. Lucas: Exactly. Within two months, 60 percent of the studio's clients shifted to the unlimited pass. Revenue per client went up by about 30 percent. Marcus charged $1,000 upfront for the pricing analysis and implementation, then $300 a month to monitor and adjust. Luna: So now he's got two retainer clients. How did he land the third? Lucas: The third one came from a Facebook group for boutique fitness owners. Marcus had started posting case studies — anonymized, but with real numbers — about retention and pricing. One owner messaged him saying, 'I have the exact same problems. Can you help?' Luna: That's a great example of building authority through content, not cold outreach. Lucas: Exactly. That third client needed help with staff scheduling. They had three instructors but they were overstaffing evening classes and understaffing weekend mornings. Marcus built a simple scheduling tool in Google Sheets that matched instructor availability to historical demand. Luna: So he's basically applying operations management principles he learned at the big gym, but repackaged for a smaller context. Lucas: That's the whole play. The big gym has a corporate ops team that designs these systems. Marcus just learned them by osmosis. And now he's selling that knowledge back to studios that can't afford a full-time ops person. Luna: So the key takeaway for our listeners is: look at what your employer does well at scale, and ask who else needs that same capability in a smaller, cheaper package. Lucas: Exactly. And you don't need to be a consultant before you start. Marcus literally started with a spreadsheet and a friend's studio. Now he's making $5,000 a month with three clients and he's only working about eight hours a week on it. Luna: That's a pretty good return on the time investment. Especially since his day job hasn't changed at all. Lucas: Right. And he's careful about non-compete clauses. His gym's policy only restricts training clients directly — consulting for other fitness businesses is a gray area, but he checked with a lawyer and got the green light. Luna: That's a smart move. Always worth the couple hundred bucks for a consult to avoid a legal headache later. Lucas: Absolutely. So if you're working in any kind of specialized field — fitness, healthcare, logistics, whatever — ask yourself: what systems do I use every day that a smaller business in the same industry doesn't have access to? Luna: And can I package that into a monthly retainer? Because that's the model that really scales. Lucas: Exactly. Marcus started with a $500 project fee, then moved to $250 a month for ongoing work. Now his average retainer is $1,700 per client. That's the growth path. Luna: I love that he didn't try to be everything to everyone. He just picked one type of client and one problem at a time. Lucas: Right. And each solved problem became a case study that sold the next engagement. That's a virtuous cycle. Luna: So for someone listening who's a personal trainer, or even a manager at a big-box gym, the path is clear: find one boutique studio, offer to solve one specific problem for free or cheap, prove the value, then charge. Lucas: And don't be afraid to use the templates and frameworks you already know. Marcus didn't invent anything new. He just repackaged what his employer already paid to develop. That's not stealing — that's efficiency. Luna: Yeah, I think a lot of people underestimate how much their daily work knowledge is worth to someone outside their immediate bubble. Lucas: Exactly. So if you're sitting on a skill that feels mundane to you — scheduling, pricing, customer retention — take a look at who in your industry is too small to have that built in. That's your side hustle. Luna: And it might start with just one coffee conversation, like Marcus had with his friend. Lucas: Exactly. That's the whole idea. Alright, that's it for today. We'll be back next week with another story of someone who turned their day job into a second income. Luna: See you then.