We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sam Ditzell. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sam below.
Sam, appreciate you joining us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.
We as trainers and coaches get a bad rap in our industry, and for good reason: too many clients get injured on our watch. Injured clients get stuck into what I call “PT Ping-Pong” patterning. Here’s how it works: client overtrains under the guidance of a trainer/coach – client gets injured – client sees physical therapist and gets better – client returns to trainer, overtrains, and gets re-injured…rinse and repeat. Too many clients have completed this process several times before I ever see them for a consultation. Understandably, these potential clients are frustrated and very wary of hiring another personal trainer. They don’t want to return to exercise without expert supervision, but their insurance coverage for physical therapy has run out. They are in a holding pattern of fitness purgatory, and they don’t know where to turn. Our strategy is to combine the best aspects of Personal Training and Physical Therapy to keep the clients free from injury and give them a much better outcome. Our trainers work closely with our physical therapists, manual therapists, and acupuncturists to develop this client programming. Rather than pounding on people’s bodies, we focus on the long game for our clients: functional quality of life, freedom from injury, and a holistic improvement in health.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I knew personal training was my path, ever since high school. I was shocked to discover that I could actually major in training at UT. My goal was to change people’s lives by rebuilding their physiques: muscling them up, leaning them down, and helping them “look” better. After graduation I hit a wall, because I wasn’t training pro athletes or young body builders; I was working with clients twice my age who had jobs, kids, stress, poor diets, and INJURIES. If I beat them up like 20 year olds they would break down and have pain. I had to learn to build people up, make their bodies more resilient, and help them “feel” better. This shift in focus change the tack of my entire career, and led to the founding of Austin Fitness Clinic. Our goal is to bring together the best practitioners from several fields (physical therapy, training, manual therapy, acupuncture, yoga, and Pilates) to get the best outcome for our clients. If clients are resilient and injury-free, their lives improve drastically: they sleep better, have less pain, and just feel better. Aesthetic changes do come with time and effort, but not at the expense of injury and pain.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Nobody in my industry will ever forget 2020. It felt like we were all hurtling around a corner, coming off our best year in 2019, and then came full speed up to the edge of a cliff. Three trainers quit immediately, clients started cancelling appointments, and everyone was terrified. We had 20 practitioners in our clinic with families to support, and none of them could work remotely. I had to come up with a strategy fast, and so we scrambled. Luckily, we have several physicians and epidemiologists as clients/colleagues. We also coordinated with an aerosolized virologist at Virginia Tech who just so happened to moonlight as a fitness coach. These experts helped us develop a plan to keep our business open and keep the clients healthy. After about 3 weeks, the phone started to ring with new clients and it hasn’t stopped. Since we were the only studio and clinic operating in town, nobody had any place else to go. People were still getting injured, having pain, and needing exercise more than ever. Our business was swamped with new clients. 2020 ended up being the best year our business has ever had.
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
The stupidest thing I’ve done as a business owner was increase ad spending into the maw of a recession. It was late 2007, and everything was awful (none of my millennial trainers remember it). The economy in Austin came to a standstill. A ton of clients got laid off or saw large drops in business. Everyone was cutting expenses in an effort to survive until the turnaround. I figured what the hell, I’ll be the contrarian, and I boosted add spending as every other business was cutting to the bone. All my clients thought I was an idiot and would run out of capital and have to close down. Soon the only trainer/therapist ads being seen were ours, and business went bananas. I figured it was probably just luck, and the only way to test my strategy was to wait for the next recession and try again. I promised myself and my staff that we would lean into the next recession and come out swinging. In 2020, we got our chance. Same strategy; same result. We boosted ads, increased our hours, and watched the business expand 30% while other fitness studios were shutting down.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.austinfitnessclinic.com
- Youtube: @austinfitnessclinic857