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In fitness services/products, as with all businesses, there will always be tradeoffs. A very smart way of conceptualising this is with the ' good / fast / cheap ' venn diagram.
First let's define these terms and how they relate to the fitness industry.
Good
A 'good' fitness service/product is one that actually gets us to our goals. However, most people will also care that this includes:
An enjoyable process
Sustainable results
Great customer service and coaching
Fast
Fairly straightforward: the service/product gets us to our goals quickly, or as quickly as is possible.
However, this is where fitness differs from many other businesses, because results are not permanent. For example, it's easy to compare two carpenter's abilities to build you a table. Once the thing is made, the job is 100% done, and so long as the quality is the same, you'll want the guy who can build it in a week as opposed to a month.
Fitness on the other hand, tends to have a strong correlation between permanent results and longer time periods permitted to reach them. A faster result is not inherently better if we got there in an unsustainable manner.
Therefore when we say fast, we really mean as fast as is possible for a fitness result. Usually we are talking weeks, months or even longer (depending on the goal).
Cheap
The most straightforward of all. How much dough did you have to shell out.
The key thing to remember for this point is that 'cheap' is relative to the fitness industry itself. If you're measuring what's cheap compared to going buying a bottle of coke in the shop, everything in fitness is going to seem expensive.
In fitness, you could pay anywhere from €30 for gym membership, to thousands for high level coaching.
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Now, a principle that is always the case in fitness, is that you cannot have good, fast and and cheap all in one service. If both the seller and the buyer are to be sufficiently compensated, only two can be provided. Let's look at intersections to see how this plays out.
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Fast and Cheap
Services that get you less than good results, but quickly and at minimal expense to you. By less than good, we mean that you have achieved less than you wanted to, and/or getting some shitty service and unsustainable results.
This is where we find things like most fitness classes, 6 week transformations, 'detox cleanses' etc.
This is also home to those dumb little fitness gadgets that give you quick placebo effects, but fail to actually fix your problems (massage guns, ice baths, foam rollers, etc.).
People will argue that these products 'meet people' where they're at, in the hopes they may decide to choose a more sustainable approach. That may well be true, but there are some very unsafe methods in this part of the industry.
Good and Cheap
A good and cheap business is slow at getting you where you want to be. Not in the 'slow and steady wins the race' kind of way. More like 'I'm paying to make no progress' kind of way.
Coaches in this category are spread thin, because they don't value their time and expertise, so they have to work with a lot of people at once to make a living. Buyers who look for this type of service ironically contribute to the slowness of their results, because they have not invested enough to want to really work hard.
What happens when you try to provide a service that's good and cheap is one or both of the following:
The business/coach not prioritising you, because they have to work with so many people due to their super low rates. Hence it takes forever to reach your goals.
You as a buyer/client not actually using the thing after paying for it, because you simply haven't paid enough to value it and don't have enough skin in the game. (see: any coach who's ever given a friend a programme for free)
To draw from my own experience starting out as a PT, charging lower rates was far worse for both myself and my clients. I didn't work as hard because I didn't feel I was being sufficiently compensated, and because they would treat my time frivolously because it was so cheap. It's hard to give 100% to someone who cancels every other session at the last minute.
The clients would get worse results because they didn't feel the need to justify their investment, and they also didn't get a sense my time was valuable. When I started charging more, everything improved for both parties (and people amazingly stopped getting sick for their sessions as often ).
Good and Fast
This is where coaching services reside. I'm going to finish this article with an apocryphal story about a plumber and his customer:
A man called a plumber to his home to solve a problem with one of his pipes. The plumber looked around and listened for about 10 minutes. He then grabbed a pipe wrench and hit a pipe three or four times in the same place.
The problem was solved.
The plumber then handed the man his bill. The man was shocked to see an invoice for $200.
“How on earth can you charge €200 for simply banging on a pipe three or four times with a pipe wrench? I demand you itemise this bill.”
The plumber took the invoice from the man, recalculated it, and handed it back. The invoice read:
Item one: Hitting the pipe with a pipe wrench €2.00
Item two: Knowing to hit the pipe with the pipe wrench €99
Item three: Knowing where and how to hit it €99.
Coaching is expensive because you are paying for someone else to give you a solution that they invested years to learn.
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