How To Calculate Personal Training Client Capacity and Revenue

This week, Matt and Rick discuss a simple formula for determining your personal training client capacity and revenue forecast.

In the last podcast, we covered Dunbar’s Number: The Ideal Number of Members for a Gym and why it is important. We follow up with the approach we use at Alloy to determine the ideal client capacity in a personal training fitness model. In the Alloy Franchise model, we have been using a formula to calculate the ideal number of personal training clients based on the capacity of the gym.

We also will review the percentage of capacity that is actually attainable in a gym. Most gym owners will often paint a rosy picture of being always full, but this is not always the reality.

We start with our first metric and why we use a rule of 75 square feet per person to have adequate space to train clients. Flexibility is important when training to allow storage and the use of different training equipment every day like kettlebells, dumbbells, sandbags, and cardio equipment. We base the 75 square feet per person metric on efficient equipment storage, good programming, and a good room layout for efficient training.

Alloy Franchises use the small group personal training business model with six clients working out with one personal training coach. The maximum capacity formula starts with how many client sessions we offer each week. Sessions are one hour and client sessions are 40 to 50 minutes, which provides a little padding for coaches to transition clients at a more relaxed pace. Each member goes through sessions at their own pace. Beginners may be a little slower and do less volume, while advanced clients might be quicker and do more volume. The basic customer experience needs to be about 45 minutes for value. So plan on between 40 and 50 minutes for each session.

Now we calculate the hours we train at 10 hours a day, Monday through Friday, so on weekdays we have 50 hours available. Then on Saturdays we open for five hours, to make the total week of hourly sessions available to be 55 hours a week. We don’t have training hours on Sunday, but if you wanted to increase capacity, you could open on Sunday. We’ve always been able to get all of our clients serviced in the Monday to Saturday hours. It is nice for the trainers to have the day off on Sunday.

Take the 55 sessions a week, then we use an average of 4.3 weeks in a month to get 236.5 sessions for a month. Remember that the Alloy small group training model is six clients with one coach. So we’ll take the 236.5 sessions and multiply it times six, which gives us 1,419 total time slots available in a one month time period.

Alloy has three basic memberships with a finite amount of space and time slots. We base the memberships on working out 1, 2 or 3 times a week. To keep this simple, we will use 2 times a week, that is 8 times a month. So now we take that 1419 total time slots and divide it by eight and that gives us a maximum membership at 100% efficiency with every hour booked to be a max of 177 people.

Now, gym owners know not everyone is going to show up all the time to hit 100% maximum capacity. So we use a conservative goal of 80% scheduling efficiency. That means every session has five out of the six slots booked. That’s great efficiency. Now apply the 80% efficiency to the 177 clients and the Alloy goal is a maximum capacity of 142 clients.

Not everyone is always going to hit 80%. So your maximum capacity might be a more conservative number of 130 people. That would be less than 80% capacity, which is certainly doable using 10 hours a day (during the week, five hours on the weekends, six clients to one trainer capacity, operating at a little less than 80% efficiency, which is absolutely doable.

Finally, to determine the revenue this Alloy model would produce, take the membership value based on your number of clients. For example, take the eight times a month at $299 with a capacity of 130 clients, then that puts you at roughly 38k a month in revenue. That is the basic formula to determine client capacity in the Alloy personal training model.

Key Takeaways