As the business world becomes more aware of the significant positive correlation between employee health and employee productivity, corporate wellness programs will become a standard. Fortunately for you as a fitness professional, the human resources department of most corporations are ill-equipped to make educated decisions on fitness equipment, exercise classes, employee exercise tracking, and exercise program adherence. This is where you come in.
Your first task, before approaching a corporation to offer your services, is to gather data that provides convincing evidence for the efficacy of a corporate wellness program. This job is easy, because most CEO’s have read it in the paper, most HR directors have seen the research, and most employees know that basically, “exercise is good”. Nonetheless, you must come prepared.
So here are some three excellent resources to do your research:
http://employeewellness.blogspot.com/ – UP TO DATE INFORMATION AND NEWS
http://welcoa.org – FANTASTIC .PDF RESOURCES
http://wellnessquotes.com – COMPARISONS OF CORPORATE WELLNESS PROGRAMS
Once you have gathered your data, you must create a system for your corporate wellness program. There are many variations, including employee fitness testing, employee wellness seminars, group personal training, individual personal training, executive health “perks”, fitness classes and corporate gym design.
You can then take the data, and put it into an attractive cover letter and presentation for the HR department of your targeted corporation. Deliver a package that presents both the research and your proposed list of corporate wellness services. In one day, I delivered 8 corporate wellness proposals in one small city in Washington state. Within 2 months, I was training 2 executives at one corporation, teaching a monthly wellness seminar at three corporations, and overseeing the entire monthly fitness evaluations procedure at another business site. That was well worth 2 hours of driving and delivering.
In chapter 9 of the book Train For Top Dollar, I present exact fee and business structures for developing your pricing and services. You can feel free to simply copy and paste from the book into your corporate proposal. Here is one service from the Offsite Training chapter:
Corporate Group Personal Training Package – for 4 weeks, a corporate group of 8-12 employees can work with a fitness and diet expert at the corporate site gym or health facility. The entire group meets with a personal trainer for a group exercise program once a week for 1 hour. Each participant also receives a 25% discount on a monthly individual personal training membership. Price: $2100
Remember that when you approach a corporation, YOU are the expert. The business world knows very little about fitness. You have powerful leverage in this age of reduced health insurance premiums for healthy employees. The sky is the limit!
If you ever want to see a reader’s feedback 🙂 , I rate this post for four from five. Detailed info, but I have to go to that damn yahoo to find the missed parts. Thank you, anyway!
Ben,
Just a quick follow up on your post…It’s been my experience that “education based marketing” works best in the corporate setting. Establish a relationship that allows you to educate them through the process, while setting yourself up as the logical choice to fill their needs. I’ve got some other thoughts that I’ll follow up on later…
Another strategy is to “crawl before you walk”. What I mean by that is to begin the relationship building process by offering free lunch-n-learns on a wide variety of subjects, or designing their office gym and doing orientations for new employees…you slowly begin to earn their trust and develop a long term relationship that can lead to much bigger things. I know this from personal experience, and the key is get them to understand that corporate wellness is an “investment”, not an expense.
I am meeting with an administrator at a Clinic to discuss starting a pilot wellness program. I worked at a small business for a year doing one-on-one training and employee wellness (salary position). I believe I was compensated properly the first few months but at the end of the year realized I was greatly underpaid. This is partly why I’m moving on to another company. I believe this clinic has the funds to pay me appropriatly. My question for you is, how do I figure a salary for wellness and personal training at such a large company? I want to charge per session for one-on-one and per person for group sessions. To start, they will not have a workout facility but will in about a year or two. For now they would have me train in unused office space. Could you give me any advice on how to propose my services to them based on your experiences working in corporate wellness? Thanks so much!
Joy
Great question Joy! I’ll address in the next podcast….