Hey My PT Hub family! We’re back for another short article, where we share a few top tips to help you get paid on time and grow your Personal Training and Online Coaching business.
Today’s topic: Clients not paying on time…
As a business owner, this has to be one of the more annoying things you deal with, right? 🙃
There are no two ways about it, when clients miss payments, it damages your cash flow. The extent of this damage depends on the size and scale of your business, as well as the volume and frequency of missed payments.
The good news is that there’s a couple of key remedies for this common problem, among personal trainers and online coaches alike.
Tip 1:
The best way to tackle this problem, as is the case with most of life’s problems, is to deal with it *before* it becomes a problem. You can begin doing this from the very first day of talking to or working with a new client.
For example, building a strong rapport with your clients, and instilling a *mutual* trust and respect for each other, will often be the only remedy you ever need.
Tip 2:
In addition to this, and especially for those clients that are routinely a little more difficult (despite having a good relationship with them); it’s always a good idea to have a clear and comprehensive ‘Terms of Service Agreement’ that all clients sign as part of your onboarding process.
This will help paint a clear picture of what your payment terms are, what happens when someone doesn’t pay and also gives you strong(er) reason to terminate their service immediately if/when things cross a certain boundary.
The third and final step:
The third and final step we’d recommend taking is to implement tools and systems that can help you do all this boring (and important) stuff on autopilot.
Using an automated payment provider, such as Stripe or GoCardless, can help bring your missed payments down to almost zero. They do this by capturing the clients billing details from their first payment, so that they can be charged again for next month’s payment without you (or them) lifting a finger.
Or, if you work on a more ad-hoc basis, you can automatically charge them again in the future for one-off payments, too. 💰
Our recommendation is to use a system like My PT Hub, which offers both payment processing (powered by Stripe) AND digital document signing in one single app – as well as an awful lot of other powerful features, too, of course. 😉
In Summary:
We could talk much more about each of these tips to help you get paid on time, but we wanted to share them with you quickly so that you can go ahead and implement them in your business if you haven’t already done so. Here’s a quick checklist for you to work with.
- – Build mutual trust, respect and rapport from day one
- – Have all clients sign and agree to a clear and comprehensive Terms of Service Agreement
- – Use tools & systems to automate payment processing and document signing in the future
If you have any particular questions, and you’d like our help, then please don’t hesitate to send us a message on any of our social media pages. You’ll find us on @fitmediaco everywhere.
Chat with you soon!
Jonah Cockshaw
FitMedia Co.
