The health club industry and hiring personal trainers!

What Benefits Does Having Personal Trainers Who Are Employees Have to Offer?
As a gym owner, your clients expect you to provide them with access to a personal trainers who will help them reach their fitness goals. The only real problem you face is deciding whether you are going to be better off hiring full time personal trainers or if independent contractors who pay you for the use of your facilities makes a better choice. One thing you should take into consideration before you make your decision is the size of your gym and the number of members you have or expect to have in the near future.
If you are running a smaller gym that has few members, you are likely to find that an independent contractor is your best choice. In many cases these personal trainers will work out of more than one gym. This helps you by allowing you to provide the services your members want, but at the same time keeping your costs down to a bare minimum, usually not much more than an office and access to clean towels for the showers.
On the other hand, if you operate a larger gym, with a larger membership base, hiring one or more full time personal trainers can be to your advantage. This will allow you to set up a schedule whereby you have one or more trainers on duty at all hours for your members. While this is going to cost you for things like salaries and insurance, you can easily recoup these costs by charging extra fees for their services. You can even offer your members one free session to let them see how much they can gain from the services of a personal trainer. This often results in a number of members signing up for further services.
What about Loyalty?
A question that often occurs when the subject of what type of personal trainer to use comes up is one of loyalty. This is a bit of a double entendre here as you have to look not only at the loyalty of your personal trainers, but of your members as well. If you have independent contractors and they move on to another gym, you might well lose a number of your paying members along with your personal trainer. However statistics show that when you lose a personal trainer who is a paid employee, you are far less likely to lose many members as they will simply switch to using another of the trainers on your staff.
Should You Use a Personal Trainer Who Is an Independent Contractor?
It is very important as a gym owner that you know the difference between an independent contractor and an employee personal trainer. If you do not and your trainer learns the laws and uses his knowledge to create a mass of legal woes for you that can result in fines and legal costs you cannot afford. To put this into the simplest terms possible, as a gym owner or for that matter a personal trainer, you need to know what the differences between the two classifications are before you make your final decision.