The Lounge with Mike Gorski

The interview

MG Fitlife Pro Mike Gorski is a Registered Dietitian and Personal Trainer in Wisconsin. His extensive knowledge of physical fitness, friendly demeanor, and emphasis on healthy eating makes him a great asset to our PocketSuite Pro community. Mike talks to CEO, Chinwe Onyeagoro and Managing Editor, Sean Litteljohn about what inspires him and how Bratwursts can fit into a sensible diet.

What are your best tips for aspiring trainers?

As a trainer, you can’t think of your job as just someone who gives out workouts. People can find workouts online. It’s about the relationships that you build with your clients and what you can do for them. So you’ve gotta keep that relationship alive. If someone doesn’t like you, you could have the greatest workouts ever, but if you’re not a halfway fun person to spend like 45 minutes to an hour with you’re not going to do very well.

How do you keep progressing in this career?

Keep building your communication skills, building your personal skills, if you’ve gotten into training, it’s because you do care about people and you’ve got to take that to the next level.

Words to live by?

“If you can’t show your value, you’re swimming upstream.”

Something trainers need to know?

It’s not the sexiest answer, but I think something that a lot of trainers learn quickly and you have to be comfortable with is sales. That was the hardest thing for me. And there’s still times where that’s definitely a weaker point of mine. We’re passionate about exercise, we’re passionate about fitness, we read about it, we read about nutrition. We don’t know sales. Like the pressure to sell and keep like finding pain points with people. That’s not my style.

Lessons you have learned?

I think there’s still a lot of misconceptions about personal training where it’s just, Oh, you’re a trainer, you just yell at people or you make them so sore that they can’t walk.

I think every trainer wants to show how good their workouts are and we’ll all show you a tough workout. You learn very quickly like that’s going to turn a lot of people off. There are people who enjoy that. But overall it’s learning how to communicate the message of health and wellness and fitness, not just inside the gym but outside the gym. And that comes from continuing education, continuing to learn, always having the white belt mentality. You’re always a rookie in everything.

What are the components of this business?

It’s a three-pronged approach. I would say. There’s the business side of it, there’s the actual like training side of it and then there’s the personality side of it. You know, you could easily make a triangle and you have to be strong in all three of those. You could be super strong in one of those and really weak in the other two. And unfortunately it’s going to be a much harder uphill battle for you.

How do you get referrals?

I would say at a grassroots level, again, back to how you treat your clients, your clients are always going to be your best referrals because you have that social proof with them. It’s a one-to-one connection. You know, they tell a friend, “Hey, I’ve been working with this guy and I really like him.” That friend is likely going to sign up. That’s actually a relatively easy sale, right? Versus a cold sale where you put an ad on Facebook and there’s a billion trainers out there and they’re like, “Well why should I trust this guy?

Something to remember?

You better take damn good care of your clients. Darn good.

How did you find PocketSuite?

When I started my business, I was looking for a company that could do automatic payments through set up subscriptions and I found a company through my personal training certification. It was an ad in one of their magazines. So I signed up for that service and it was terrible. It was awful. It had so many glitches. It was just infuriating and I was not getting payments coming through. The scheduling part wasn’t working and so I was back and forth with it. This is not a good start to my business because I wanted something like PocketSuite. This other company was terrible. I won’t throw them under the bus, but I actually don’t even think they exist anymore. The guy that I was emailing, who worked for that company told me about PocketSuite.

Your favorite quote?

My favorite quote? “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”- Viktor E. Frankl

The Lounge Q+A: Mike Gorski, Personal Trainer

Fitness Trainer & Bodybuilder

When I started my business, I was looking for a company that could do automatic payments through set up subscriptions.

Mike Gorski