Stories that Move Mountains: Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations

Example 1: Personal Trainer

My name is Marina. After spending years as a pharmacy technician and medical administrator, I wanted a new lease on life. I looked around to find something I could be passionate about and decided to go back to college for a two-year degree as a certified personal trainer. As I found out though, the problem with passion is that it might not pay too well. I talked with a number of different gyms but found that working for them was really only a last resort. While the gym would collect $50 for an hour of my time, I would earn only about $15 of that, and then still have to cover my travel costs, other business costs, and pay taxes.

So I decided to look into opening my own small training studio, where customers would come just for personal training. I had a good knowledge of how to run a business, and a husband with great business experience who could help. There is a lot of complexity to opening a studio. Setting up accounts, doing marketing and sales, online and offline advertising, and renewing the billings every month was daunting.

Many times, I wondered aloud if there was just some company that would do some of this grunt work for me. Every day I was spending trying to set up a studio was another day when I couldn't focus on the reason I was doing all this — to be a personal fitness trainer.

So with my husband, I started to consider a radical new idea: Why not create a service that allows personal trainers to set up their own training studio as part ...