We get to know Eric Wylie in this Trainer spotlight episode of FITLETE Radio.
GEORGE: Introduce yourself and tell us a little about what you do and your background.
My name is Eric Wiley, and I run Lakeside Health Coaching. I'm in Lakewood, Washington, which is a suburb of Tacoma. If you don't know anything about Washington, that's also a suburb of Seattle. So kind of point of reference, I'm about an hour south of Seattle. Now, as a trainer, I haven't been in this industry my entire career. I'm in my late 50s now. Prior to being in the fitness industry, I spent 25 years in the IT industry. My undergraduate is in management information systems. After spending 25 years there, I've jumped around careers a little bit. I worked in a guitar custom shop for almost 10 years. That was a nice diversion. But I got myself in shape during that time and decided I need to start over. Being in the IT industry, I see a lot of my fellow peers struggling with their health as well. So I started over as a trainer. I ultimately progressed over the last 12 years into my own business. Primarily, I work with business owners, business operators, founders. Most of them are retired or semi-retired now. And they come to me because they understand that I know what they've come through. And with that, it's really more a case of keep me ready to do anything. They've generally retired or they're retiring. They want to be able to go skiing, go hiking, go do whatever. They've worked really hard on their business in the past. And now it's time for them to work hard on themselves. That's where I come in. I did go back to school as well, and I got a master's in kinesiology. Part-time, I teach at the local university in the kinesiology department, teaching health sciences. That gives me a great connection with younger generations as well, so that I can always put into practice things I'm working with with older adults also work with younger adults. I enjoy working with the young and old. This is pretty cool stuff.
GEORGE: Tell me a funny or interesting story about yourself that help's us get to know you as a human.
Okay, George, I'm going to, this won't be my preferred story, but this is going to be my wife's preferred story. So if you spend much time at our house here and hang out with my wife, Carol, and I, sooner or later, this story is going to come up. It's clearly, it's her favorite story. And so I'm going to go with that. Carol and I, we have the good fortune of, we have a house here at Lakewood, Washington. We're on a, we're on a medium sized lake. And part of our property here is right up on the lake. And if you can imagine, we get a lot of waterfowl, geese, ducks, heron, eagles. It's like Wild Kingdom, which is really cool. But geese come in mass. Geese statistically poop about two pounds of poop a day. When you get a massive pile of them on your lawn, it's a big mess. So Carol's favorite story is I'm in the yard. I'm around on the side of the house doing the yard work. I've got my hedge trimmer and my weed eater. And of course, I've got my boots on and everything, and I'm covered head to toe. And I come around the corner and there is 50 geese. I'm not always that bright, so I get off my lawn and I start running towards the geese, trying to make a racket. I've got my weed eater and I've put the, thankfully I put the hedge trimmer down, but I'm running across the yard like a crazy man. Weed eater overhead. Get off my yard. It worked. Got rid of the geese. What I did not realize that my wife happened to be standing in the kitchen and looking out the window as this is occurring. And as I turn around now is laughing hysterically, literally in tears, falling on the floor because she's just seen the crazy old man yelling at the geese. Get off my lawn. At least I wasn't yelling at the neighbor kids. But come to my house. The lawn will be goose free.
GEORGE: What strategies do you use to attract and retain clients in your personal training business?
I think in my career, my age has actually been a benefit, my education has been a benefit. Prior to setting out on my own, I worked in a couple of different gyms and private studios. And in those studios, you know, the people that have the most disposable income tend to be people that are a little bit older. Younger trainers, a lot of times, don't have a connection with the older clients. That made it perfect for me. I'm their age, I'm close to their age, so I automatically got more of the middle-aged and older clients. That gave me a great foundation through those years on making connections through businesses. So when I went out on my own, it was really easy to connect and reach out and people in that strata already kind of knew who I was. And coincidentally, in our community, there is a very large golf and country club. Most of my clients have been members or are members of the country club. So there's already kind of a referred, we have a connection. I get most of my clients, by the way, from the country club. They're golfers. They know I've worked with their friends. They trust their friends. There's already a lot of built-in street cred by doing that. So I don't actually do a whole lot of marketing. 90% or more of my clients are word of mouth. And out of that 90%, almost 100% of them are coming from a business owner to a business owner or a country club member to another country club member. It's worked really good for me. I don't mind going and hanging out at the country club either. It's a good place to meet friends. Always great food, great drink. It's a good time. So it's worked out really well in connecting with like-minded people in an environment that they enjoy and thrive in.
GEORGE: What is your process for assessing a new client's fitness level and addressing their goals?
I think one of the things that I do that's different from a lot of trainers, and a lot of trainers are going to say, oh this is the horrible, this is bad, don't do this, don't ever do it. I don't worry about the one session, wonder session, let's wow them, get them to sign up on day one. I offer my clients two weeks. We train twice a week for two weeks so that I can get to know them and they can get to know me. There's less pressure. We treat it more as a diagnostic through that entire two weeks. When they first come in, we'll spend some time maybe on a treadmill just moving and talking and seeing how they move. I always go through with a PARQ ahead of time, getting some questionnaires filled out, finding out more about injuries, but really the first session is just kind of seeing how a person moves. Try a couple of things out. First session, second session don't tend to be really difficult sessions. I find the clients respond well to that. They come in and find out, you know, they'll respond that they felt great the next day. What's that about? I felt great the next day. You know, I'm not sore. Shouldn't I be sore? And that gives us some opportunity to talk about what is an effective session. How are we training? How are we working around any kind of injuries you might have and finding out your goals? And usually within that two weeks, you know, we can build a relationship. We know whether or not I want to work with them and I know whether or not they want to work with me. By the end of the two weeks, we have an actual plan that they're already committed to and they're bought into. And after that fourth session, at the end of the two weeks, it's just a matter of here's the membership signup form. Just go key your credit card in and we start and let's schedule your next week. With that approach, I have probably converted 80 to 90 percent of my trial clients and those that don't convert into clients, I can refer them to someone else. I can give them some kind of ideas. They know what to do next.
GEORGE: What certifications do you hold, and how do you stay updated on the latest fitness trends and research?
So my undergraduate is in management information systems. That's a business degree with a concentration in IT. Pretty atypical for someone in the fitness world, but as I mentioned earlier, spending 25 years in the IT industry gives me a different foundation than a lot of trainers. I also have a master's in kinesiology, leadership in kinesiology specifically. It's kind of a mix between a kinesiology degree and an MBA. Great again for connecting with business people. Outside of that formal degreed education, I have multiple NASM, personal trainer certification, behavior modification, corrective exercise, TRX certifications, FMS certifications, and right now I'm working on the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaches certification. That's taking quite a while, and that's pretty intense. So that's building me as a coach through those things. But staying up on fitness trends and research, teaching at the university is a powerful thing. I'm always talking to staff and faculty. I'm seeing the things that the students are working on. What are the things that are interesting to them? Great conversations with people that are a whole lot smarter than me. That gives me more of the educational background. And then I've got friends. I'm in a group called Lift the Bar, which is an international group of personal trainers. It's based out of the UK, and that is connecting me with hundreds of other trainers around the world on a daily basis. So it's great to see what people are sharing. So within all that, I think perhaps some of my most important things would actually be the Lift the Bar, being part of a group of other trainers, because I can't read everything. I can't see everything. But when something's brought in and shared with a large group of people, I'm able to find out and learn faster. And I think that's helped me stay ahead of some of the global gyms and some of the other trainers in the area.
GEORGE: How do you envision your personal training business evolving in the next few years?
Well, I'll step over to the kind of the secondary, the side gig first. Teaching at the university level, I think I'm probably only going to do that maybe another year, maybe two years. It fills up a lot of time and I don't teach summer school, so that gives me kind of summers off from that. But at my age, I'm in my late 50s. I've got, theoretically, less than 10 years left before I'm retiring. And retirement doesn't mean sitting around. That means working less. That means traveling more. That means going and doing more things while I am still able to do that. So I'm going to be slowly backing away from the teaching. Love it, but it's time to back away from that. From a Lakeside Health coaching perspective, I don't want to spend as many hours in the studio in person as that perhaps I have in the past. I'd like to travel while I can, while I have the resources, while I have the ability. So I've already started transitioning clients to a hybrid situation where they see me in person once a week, but I have an app for their smartphones that they received customized programming from. They can train at home, they can train in a mega gym, whatever it is. It's all set up for them. And then we also do some coaching calls. Coaching calls I can do from anywhere in the world. It's really only that one time a week session that I need to be in person. Well, if I'm doing that, I can stack, potentially, clients early in the week or late in the week and give myself opportunities to travel a little bit more often. The coaching calls, the online work, I can do from anywhere. I've got an internet connection. So that's the direction I'm moving, is more of a hybrid coaching environment. And I hope to continue doing that for probably at least the next five to ten years.
GEORGE: What do you think are the biggest challenges currently facing the fitness & personal training industry?
Well, I'm going to answer that question from two different perspectives because we really have two different perspectives. Well, we have more than two perspectives going. But if we're focusing on personal training, we have the perspective of the trainer and we have the perspective of the client. They're not always going to be the same. And unless we as trainers are really paying attention to our clients, we might miss some of their challenges. What I see with, particularly with my college students, it's a massive lack of commitment. They'll try something, get disinterested, want immediate results, quit, change, want to do something else. It is a real push for the younger generations to start and do something and continue through those tough parts. We want immediate gratification. We have a really short attention span that's getting worse. And we're so used to hopping from thing to thing to thing. We need consistency. So that's some of the biggest challenges is getting clients to buy into the desire and seeing the results that they will get from that consistency. From a trainer's perspective, I think resilience is one of those big challenges. And this is more perhaps a mental challenge than a business challenge. The business is always going to be there. There's always going to be disposable income. There's always going to be people wanting trainers, whether it's like in my case, older adults and business people, athletes, kids with parents. There's always opportunities there. But as a trainer, we need to be resilient to go through those changes. That's a mindset. The market's there. The people are there. Where are you looking? What are you doing to keep your business functioning, growing in the way that you want? Clients, commit. Trainers, be resilient. And you could also actually flip-flop those two answers either way.
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visit: https://lakesidehealthcoaching.com/
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