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Fitness app beefs up personal training business skills

Technology

A FREE business app for personal trainers has been launched to help transition inexperienced instructors into independent professionals.

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PT BIZ was designed in South Australia and provides an integrated mobile platform for trainers to establish and then run their own business.

It also works as a comprehensive management tool for experienced gym instructors and includes a schedule, member list and accounting assistant.

The app was officially launched in Australia last week and will be available in the United States and Canada early next year.

PT BIZ co-founder and CEO Eamon Pielow said current personal training programs lacked an informative business element, which was crucial to starting out in the fitness industry, an industry IBISWorld says is worth AU$2bn and continues to grow at almost 10 per cent a year.

He said the majority of trainers were self-employed and subcontracted to gyms where they had to pay rent and manage their own business through the gyms.

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“We’ve spoken with hundreds of personal trainers, clients of trainers, representatives from Fitness AustraliaAustralian Institute of FitnessAIPTIHRSA, Health club franchises owners, Fitness Directors, Boutique Personal Training Studios and many more.

“They would see people go through their three-month intensive course without business training and find out they’re thrown into a world where they need to learn to manage clients, constantly schedule sessions and organise finances.”organise finances.”

Pielow said the app would increase the efficiency of managing accounts and would give users the ability to export Excel spreadsheets to accountants directly from the app.

Where most other fitness apps use Adobe Cordova, which focuses on the integration of the program over multiple platforms, PT BIZ is specifically designed for mobile use.

It lets users sync all relevant contacts and clients from their iPhone or iPad into the app and make client profiles that hold general and medical information as well as their session history.

The app highlights available times throughout the day, allowing trainers and their clients to take advantage of last-minute cancellations.

Clients can accept debt/credit card payments directly from the app, without the need for Contactless Payment Terminals (CPTs).

Pielow and co-founder Ben Eblan originally pitched the app at MEGA 2013, an Adelaide-based early stage start-up program, where PT BIZ won awards for best pitch, best written business proposal and most customer-centric pitch.

“It has been a three-year journey with months of challenges along the way and as we have gone along we have had a large demand from the international market,” Pielow said.

“We wanted to design a simple, paperless program to fill a need. We also made it free to download, which a lot of other apps aren’t doing.”

PT BIZ can be downloaded on the Australian app store and will be internationally available next year. 

This is a Creative Commons story from The Lead South Australia, a news service providing stories about innovation in South Australia. Please feel free to use the story in any form of media. The story sources are linked in with the copy and all contacts are willing to talk further about the story. Copied to Clipboard

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