← Mondays with Matt
Mondays with Matt
Why Online Coaching Beats In-Person Coaching: The Freedom, Efficiency, & Value Advantage
00:24:03
Is online coaching actually better than in-person coaching? In this episode of the Barbell Logic Coaching Success Series, Matt Reynolds shares why online coaching offers unmatched freedom, better financial efficiency, and stronger client results...
Loading summary
Transcript6 lines
- [00:01]
Barbell Logic
Do you think that expert strength coaching is out of your budget? Barbell Logic just announced something brand new that may be just right for you. Group coaching. It's the same high quality coaching we're known for, but now in small focused groups, you get weekly programming feedback from a coach and a private group chat for support and accountability. And here's the best part. For a limited time, you can join for just $99 a month for your first three months. Choose a group that fits your go schedule. Whether you're a busy parent, returning lifter, or if you're chasing aesthetics alongside strength, we have a group that you will love. Don't wait. This special launch offer ends on June 16th. Head to barbell-logic.com group to find your group and get started. Today.
- [01:00]
Matt Reynolds
You'Re listening to the Build your business podcast powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear. I'm Matt Reynolds and I'm his brother Chris Reynolds. Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom together. I'm your host, Matt Reynolds. Hope you guys are having a great Friday. I want to dive right in today on a topic that Nikki and Andrew and I talked about a couple years ago on the Barbalogic podcast. But I want to really focus it towards coaches today. And that's why I believe that online coaching is actually better than in person coaching. And I realize that that's gonna ruffle some feathers probably and I wanna give some background to that story and so that you understand why I believe that now. So most of you know that I have, gosh, I have spent probably as many hours as anybody who's ever lived doing in person coaching. I was the head strength coach of a 5A high school in Missouri for 10 years and I coached on average 65 kids a day every afternoon or before school or after school. You can imagine one how much that refined my eye as a coach. And so the last thing I want to do is give some sort of idea that in person coaching is not valuable because I think it is valuable and I still do it some and I certainly still love to coach things like seminars and one offs and people that come in from out of town and actually had a good buddy in stayed with us the last few days. I'm actually getting ready to hop on a plane and go to Alaska for the next couple of weeks to work with some of the EOD guys and I'm going to work with them in person. Right. So this is really more about kind of taking a long term view of coaching and the advantages I think that online coaching brings over in person coaching. And so first, I don't want to say that you shouldn't be in person coach as a growing coach if you're a relatively new coach. I think that there is clear value in doing in person coaching. I think it refines your eye in real time. I think that it forces you to make corrections in real time where you don't have any do overs, you can't hit stop on the screen recorder or things like that. I think those things are really important. And so I coached many thousands of hours over the 10 years that I coached as a head coach for a big high school. And then of course I started strong gym and I ran that from 2008 through 2015. And I had personal training clients all during that time. I also ran kind of a strength focused boot camp, so kind of group coaching early in the morning that we would do or we would do strength coaching and then we would do kind of crossfit style conditioning at the end of that just to make sure that it was mostly kind of soccer moms that they got sweaty and they felt like they were coming to, they felt like they got a bunch of exercise in. And so. But the thing that I've noticed over the years in doing online coaching, and this is really a testament to the way technology has grown, is that online coaching, number one, provides tremendous freedom to both the coach and the client. Right. One of the big problems you have as a client is that you often don't have access to a good coach if you live, you've heard me say this before. If you live in rural America, if you're think about some of these military guys that were coaching, they're stationed God knows where and they don't have access to a good coach. And so online coaching gives them access to a good coach from anywhere in the world. And so that's number one. So it gives you access to a great coach from a client perspective. Number two, online coaching is always cheaper than in person coaching, so the price point is better. And then number three is that it's the freedom from the schedule and the location for both the client and the coach. And so the client can now train anytime they want, anywhere they want, with the equipment they have. They can train in their home gym and still get coaching, which you can't do for personal training. You've got to go to the gym the trainer is at. And likewise the coach or the trainer can do their coaching from anywhere that they have WI fi. They Have Internet, right? So again, I'm assuming that I'm going to have Internet in Alaska, that it's not a third world country. Although for many of us here in the US it sort of maybe feels that way. So I guess we'll find out when I get out there. But as long as I have basic good Internet at the hotel, I can do online coaching. And so, you know, it's Central Standard Time here in Missouri. I'm going to be in Alaska time, which is another hour behind Pacific Standard. And it doesn't matter because I can coach anytime I want. So I'm not in bondage to the schedule or in bondage to the location. I can leave, I can go on vacation with my family and I can coach, I can go on a business trip to coach these amazing EOD American soldiers. And I can still coach. I can coach them wherever they are, from my home, from my chair in my office. And so there's a tremendous amount of freedom that comes with online coaching versus in person coaching for both the client and the coach. So that's number one. I think that freedom aspect is the single biggest driver of why online coaching can be better or often is better than in person coaching. And so that's huge. I can't begin to tell you how much freedom I feel. I loved my job at Strong Gym when I went and coached my clients. But don't get me wrong, there were lots of times where the alarm went off at four in the morning. And you guys know I like getting up early. But when there's an alarm set for four in the morning and I had to be at the gym at 5 and start coaching my first client at 5 and then coach another client at 6 and coach another client at 7. And then what often happens is you don't have a client at 8, you know, maybe you don't have a client at 9. Okay, now I've got another client at 10. I don't have a client at 11. I'd have some clients at noon with maybe a lunch break kind of executive crew would come in. You start to think about your efficiency and your dollar per hour and you realize it doesn't really matter what you're charging dollar per hour for in person coaching, it's how long are you there? How long is it? What does that 4am to 5am window look like? Well, it looks like I've got to get up and take a shower and put on the Strong Gym polo and drive with my commute to Strong Gym and get there and open the gym and turn all the lights on. And I'm not getting paid for any of that stuff. Right? And so we come back to some of the things we've talked about over the last several weeks. That's essentially waste. It was important things to do, but the clients weren't paying for that. They're not paying for me to turn the lights on in the gym and make sure the gym is all clean and ready and set up and turn the music on and do the stuff, get ready, take the shower, put on the clothes, do the commute. They're not paying for my commute. They're not paying for the gas to get there. That's all of those things. So to me, the number one reason that online coaching is better than in person coaching is the freedom it provides both the client and the coach. Number two is the financial changes it provides for both the client and the coach. Again, it's one of the few places I've seen on earth that becomes a financial win win for both the coach and the client. Because online coaching tends to cost about a third of what in person coaching costs. And again, coming back to previous episodes, like things I talked about, like last week, where if you're not actually breaking down technique, you're not actually coaching. So let's literally compare apples to apples. Where if someone hired me in person, I'm there to certainly do their programming, but I'm also primarily there to coach their technique. Right? I'm coaching every set of every rep in in person coaching and online coaching. I'm there to also coach their technique and do their programming. But often I'm really just coaching that kind of final set of the main lifts and then as well as some of their accessory and supplemental stuff. And so they still get the benefit of the technique coaching, but they get it when it really matters. They get it at the last set when there's fatigue is finally kicked in. It raises the standard for them of they hit record, they're fatigued, they've already done their first two sets of squats. Now they're gonna do their third set of squats and they're gonna send that to me. They still get the benefit of that technique coaching, but they don't have to tie it into a specific schedule or specific location. So they get the benefit of the coaching without the inflexibility of the schedule and location, they can train anywhere they want. On top of that, continuing with this kind of flexibility theme for a minute, I coach a ton of clients who are executives and travel all the time, actually got A guy, man. If you're listening to this, shout out to Dan. That's his first name. He actually sat next to me on the plane several weeks ago, runs a marketing company and we got to talking about coaching. He knew who I was. He's like, I know you. You're Matt Reynolds from Barbalogic. And we talked a little bit on the plane. Then he signed up. And one of the reasons he hadn't done it is because the guy literally travels every single week. So he's home on the weekends all the time. He's got a great gym at home, he trains heavy at home on the weekends. And then he's in hotel gyms. And some of those hotel gyms are great. Sometimes he has access to barbells, and other times the hotel gyms are the typical sort of. I've got dumbbells up to 40s or 50s and a bench and then like treadmills. We can still train. And so the other thing that I saw from my in person clients is that even the ones that were very, very dedicated, you get to this time of year. Here we are at the end of August. This will come out kind of early September, I think. And so, you know, going into Labor Day, you can see the consistency of your clients go down because either A, they go on vacation and they don't train, and so there's no accountability, there's a loss in consistency, or B, you go on vacation and they don't train. Right. And even if they do train while they're on vacation or while you're on vacation and you're an in person coach, you don't get paid because you don't get to actually coach their technique. And so with online coaching now, it doesn't matter where the client is, they can go on vacation. I've had clients that go on cruises. I have clients that, you know, go on vacation. I have military clients that get deployed, that get stationed at new Air Force bases. And we can continue to coach them no matter what. And so they continue to get the vast majority of the value from the in person coaching via online, with the total flexibility to be able to do it anywhere they want, anytime they want. And when I say with the equipment they have, I literally mean even if that's at a hotel gym, I literally mean sometimes that is, I don't have a hotel gym. I'm staying in an Airbnb. I need to do body weight work. That's fine. We can do that, right? We can do air squats and we can do sit ups. And we can do pushups and we can do chair dips and we can go do sprints in the sand on the beach. And while I understand that that's not really the way we would consider like, it's not strength training. They're not adding weight to the squat or the deadlift at those times. It maintains consistency. And for us, you've heard us say a million times, form and consistency are what it's all about. Now, how big is form when you're doing air squats and pushups and whatnot? Well, it's less important, but the consistency becomes important. So we established the habit of training in online coaching far better than we do for in person coaching. My most dedicated clients in in person coaching still missed all the time, especially this time of year, because they go on vacation. Listen, the type of people that can afford 5, 6, 7, 8, $900 a month to pay a trainer travels more often. They go on the cruises, they go to the resorts, they often are executives and they work and they do business travel. And now we can do all of those things. We can still train no matter what. And that consistency leads to a better efficacy in helping them reach their goals. Whether that goal is to gain strength and mass, whether it's to lose weight, like whatever that thing is. And again, Nikki and Andrew talked about this last week. You know, we can't do both at the same time, but we certainly can maintain consistency regardless. And so are you a personal trainer.
- [12:11]
Turnkey Coach
Or strength coach struggling to find new clients? Turnkey Coach has the free resource for you. The Business of Coaching Workshop provides marketing strategies, client retention techniques and methods of leveraging social media from expert coaches to help you focus on creating and scaling a thriving coaching practice. Our next series, running in March and April, covers client acquisition. Go to Turnkey Coach BOC to register for the workshop that is Turnkey Coach BOC to learn practical actions you can take to grow your business today. Register now.
- [12:56]
Matt Reynolds
Foreign.
- [13:02]
Hey everyone, it's Matt Reynolds and I've got exciting news. The audiobook version of my new book Undoing Urgency is officially live. If you're a business owner who's tired of hustle culture and wants to build something sustainable, this book is absolutely for you. But also we've had scores of five star reviews from non business owners, normal everyday people who receive tremendous value from this book because it helped them stop drowning in urgency and focus on the things that really matter in their life. I share in the book the mindset, shifts and practical tools that help me ascend escape the constant pressure of Urgency and create a business that actually supports my life, not the other way around. You can grab the audiobook now@ undoingurgency.com or just search Undoing Urgency on Amazon or your favorite audiobook platform. Go check it out and let's keep building better.
- [14:20]
That's another huge advantage of online coaching over in person coaching. And so these are some of the things that I love. And then really the last thing is, and this is really due to the technological advancement of really just many programming softwares out there. But certainly the thing that we've tried to focus primarily on with Turnkey Coach is that we now have spent an enormous amount of time making sure that one we maximize for the relationship building of the coach client relationship. Right? Again, we don't just offer programming. Again, we don't do technique feedback typed. It's not written word. It's screen recording, right? It's you picture in picture. It's. They can see your face, they can hear your voice. You're talking to them like you're doing a call with them, like you're, like you're in person with them or like you're doing a zoom call with them in a synchronous manner. But it's not synchronous, it's asynchronous. Yet you still talk to them as if you're having a conversation with them, as if you expect them, you're asking rhetorical questions, as if you expect them to answer. So I just literally broke down a bunch of videos this morning. There's a one touch button on Turnkey Coach. I start recording my screen. They get to see their squats, they get to see their deadlifts. These are things they never get to do in in person coaching. They have to hear your coaching cues. They have to try to feel what it feels like. And by the way, that doesn't change because when they do online coaching, they still have to try to feel what it feels like and get the form right. But then they get to follow up with that and they get to actually see their videos. They actually get to see what I see. I don't watch their videos ahead of time and then record. I watch it for the first time and I'm recording as I'm watching it the first time because I want them to hear the process, process in my brain of what I'm seeing, right? So as they start to deadlift on the first rep and their shoulders shoot forward, their hips pop up and their shoulders shoot for them, I start giving them that coaching cue like, oh, let's hold the shoulders back, pull back on the bar as it gets heavy in your hands. And then if they do that and they fix it on rep 2, it's almost like you congratulate them. Like they listened to you for rep one. They didn't. But you also then can recognize like, oh, you're doing great at actually feeling that this was a thing that needs to get fixed. And so they felt, oh, I felt my shoulders go forward, I felt my hips pop up and I need to hold my shoulders back and keep my hips down a little bit more, like whatever that thing is. And I think that that doesn't only add to one, the building of the relationship between the client and coach. Cause you're actually speaking to your clients, but it also refines the eye of the client. And as we talked through and again, Nikki and Andrew talked about this week, about the client journey or the client map, we saw so many of our clients that got strong, changed their life for the better. They saw quality of life improvement, and they then want to start coaching. The best thing you can do to start refining your eye as an online coach is to be an online client because you see your own videos and then you hear a professional coach break down those videos and you get to see what they see. Like, you could actually go back and watch your videos before you hear the breakdown and see the breakdown of those videos from your coach. And you can think to yourself, oh, I get this all the time. The client says, I went back and watched the video. It looks like I actually went a little too deep in my squat. I relaxed my hamstrings a little bit, or the weight got forward a little bit, or this thing happened, or my elbows kicked out early on the bench press. And then I can give them this sort of encouragement and give them some like, yeah, that's exactly what I saw too. This is great. You're refining your coaching eye. Hey, this is a great reason for you to maybe start looking at the Academy and Coaching101 and start to refine your coaching eye so that you can do this. The same thing I'm doing for you, you can now do for your family, for your spouse, for your friends, for those things as well. So the other part of this is that it adds the visual aspect and this is connected to what I just talked about. It adds the visual aspect to the coaching. There really isn't a visual aspect to in person coaching. Right. They hear things. There's auditory coaching. That's the cues that they hear. And then there's the feel of this, the tactile cues, right? The both the feelings feeling that they get. So as they go into a squat, for example, they don't want to feel themselves bounce off their knee tendons. They want to feel the tightness at the top of their hamstrings at the ischial tuberosity, or they want to feel the tightness on the inside of their thighs and their adductors. And you can not only help them feel that, but then you can actually show them what that looks like. Like, oh, see this rep, you relaxed your hamstrings a little bit and bounced off your knees. But on this one, you bounced off the muscle of the posterior chain, which is really, really important. And so these are all reasons that I think that's number one. Freedom is by far the number one thing. Freedom for the client and freedom for the coach. Price better for the client. And I don't even think I addressed this, but we addressed it so much in other podcasts. The efficiency for coaching as a coach, instead of coaching for an hour session that you charge 50 to $100 for, even more, you're able to make, I think our coaches make about $26 per video per workout breakdown. And that workout breakdown takes two minutes. And so you make 26 bucks in two minutes. And so you didn't make a hundred dollars for the Coach, you made $26 for that session. But rather than taking an hour where 80% of that hour is downtime, rest between the sets, you just get to move through the sets and still give them all the important coaching. And so the coach makes for far more money per hour from an efficiency standpoint. The client pays way less per hour or less per month from a financial standpoint. And yet you get really all the benefits that you get from in person coaching. Now I will say the one thing that you don't get, the one thing that you don't get in online coaching versus in person coaching, is for those people that really need an atmosphere. You're in a great gym. I think a lot about like strength, union and the stuff that Jordan Next level barbell Jordan Stanton, one of our coaches got a handful of gyms out in the Portland area. They really focus on community and atmosphere. If you need community and atmosphere, then in person coaching is often really important. But I would also argue and one of the things that we've done with turnkey coach is our target demographic. Our primary number one target demographic for turnkey coach are those burned out gym owners who are there all the time. By the way, that's not Jordan. He loves what he's doing right now. Although he's utilizing Turnkey Coach because he sees the value in it over the other software companies. But with Turnkey Coach, one of the things we'll have with people is that if you're a burned out coach, you can still turn your gym into a 24 hour gym. Move your in person clients to online clients, leverage turnkey coach as a coach. They still get the great atmosphere in that gym. You could even have certain hours that are like, you know, Saturday mornings at 10am or Monday evenings or Wednesday evenings or whatever at 5:30 when people get off work so that the gym is still full of people. But rather than actually having to coach them in person, they just, they record their videos, they get their online coaching. Or you could do a combination of both, right? Like you could come in and coach as a in person coach on Saturday mornings. We did this all the time at strong. We would just have big group training on Saturday mornings. We would train heavy and then we would do like some sort of strongman events, we'd set up some sort of medley and everybody, we'd go out in the parking lot and do the stuff and it was a blast. And you fulfilled the community aspect. But the whole rest of the week you could be doing online coaching with your clients during the week. And so you can also offer a hybrid model which I think is perfectly fine as well. So again, for those of you that are in person coaching all the time, the downside is you can't really scale it, right? You can have 12 or 13 or 14 in person coaching clients. And I don't know how many of you have ever tried to have like 20 in person coaching classes. You can't. 20 in person coaching clients is often 50, 60 plus hours of coaching a week. You just cannot do that. And to scale it means that just add more clients. It's impossible. And so the only way you can really scale in person is to train up other assistant coaches underneath. You let them coach in person and you take a cut as the owner. And it's actually far more complicated. Online coaching, you can easily coach 35, 45, 55 clients in person for a fraction of the time it would take to coach 10 clients in person. Right. You can coach online, which is a tremendous advantage. So with online coaching, the added freedoms, the improvement in financials for both the client and the coach, the if done right, and I really think turnkey coach is the only one that does this, we optimize for the client coach relationship. Because we do all the backend business work so that you don't have to spend all the time doing that stuff. And you can just focus on literally coaching and building the relationship with your clients. And the added consistency and accountability of they can train anywhere, even if they're on vacation, even if you're on vacation, even if they're in a hotel, even if they're not at your gym. As well as the refined coaching eye that your clients get from watching their own videos or watching you watch their videos and give them feedback are all reasons that I think online coaching is far better than in person coaching. We saw as Covid hit, we watched a ton of our coaches at Barbalogic who lived in major metropolitan areas were very expensive, right, to live in. They moved out of those areas and into rural areas, and maybe it was only, you know, 30 minutes, 40 minutes away from that same metro, so they could still get into the metro and still, you know, have fun in the city. But we saw a lot of people, you know, they moved to Oklahoma or they moved to Missouri or Iowa and far cheaper cost of living. And again, my buddy that was just here from Phoenix, he came and saw our house and he was like, wow, you have a beautiful home. I'm like, yeah, it's Springfield, Missouri. The dollar goes a long way here. You can make essentially international expert level money living anywhere in the world, living somewhere rural where the cost of living is much lower. And so all of these are massive advantages to online coaching over in person coaching. And again, that's not to say in person coaching is not valuable. I think it is. I think there's a skill that needs to be learned and how to coach in person in real time with clients, how to learn how to build those relationships in the downtime and the rest periods. I think those are all important. But if you're somebody that feels like, man, I don't know how to scale this and I'm sort of getting stuck and I'm here all the time, and when my clients leave, I don't know what to do. A great transition process is to move them to the hybrid model, coach them in person once a week and coach them online the rest of the week. And we can do that right through turnkey coach, right? You can set up a plan that's like, you know, one time a week in person, you know, three workouts a week online, and you get the best of both worlds. And for some of those clients or those same clients, if they go on vacation, you just coach them online four times. A week, that week, because they're actually not there and not available to come in person or you go on vacation, you can still get paid. And so it's just an advantage all the way around. And so I think it's, at this point, technology has allowed us to really provide all the same value and then some beyond what in person coaching does. And so that's why I believe that online coaching is better than in person coaching. And I know I'm skewed, right, because I own Barbalogic online coaching. But I'm also somebody who's come out of that background where I've coached in person for 20 years before I did this. And I can see what a tremendous value it is for both myself and my clients from this freedom perspective, from a financial perspective, from an accountability perspective, et cetera. So if you get value from this again, if you ever want to talk about these things, you can reach out to me. My email is easy to find on the Barbelogic website. You can go to the staff page, look at Matt Reynolds, you can find my email, shoot me an email. I'm happy I will will respond to your email within 24 hours, no matter what. You can also go to Turnkey Coach at this point and you can sign up to be an online coach. Through Turnkey Coach. You pay nothing until you get paid, right? So you don't pay, you don't just start a subscription model. If you don't have any clients, we don't charge you based on a chunk of clients. You don't pay a price for like 0 to 15 clients. You only pay for the clients that you have. So if you have two clients or three clients, you only pay for two or three clients. The price beats every other software out there across the board. The price is better for Turnkey Coach and it's a far better service and so a far better platform. We do everything on the backend. It's turnkey. We just let you coach. We can do everything else. So it's not really just a software, just a programming software platform. It's a complete online coaching platform. So we'd love for you to take a look at that at Turnkey Coach. If you got value from this, we'd love to get a five star review you on Apple podcasts or on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast. And we'll see you guys next Friday Sat.