Attending a fitness conference this year? Taking a continuing education course? How well do you consider your goals and what you want to accomplish from the content you consume? In the world of fitness conference content and fitness association award winners it can be hard to distinguish between smoke and mirrors. Fitness Conference Reflect Reality? Is all that glitters, or has boobs and botox, really substantiated success you’re seeing? Or are you in fact seeing the evidence of marketing. The package is the surface. What’s inside that matters right? Before I go on, I have to say this, I’m a presenter at fitness conferences too. And you should look at me with the same scrutiny that you look at anyone else. I’ve presented internationally since 2000 for associations including IDEA, NSCA, CAN-FIT-PRO, ICAA, SCW, ABC, and Fitness Fest and MEDFIT, multiple times in many cases. I’ve also published articles for several of them and serve as Subject Matter Expert or advisory board member for others. Fitness Conference Content Alarms Taking advice from a presenter at a fitness conference talking about making money and programming can be tricky. Consider two very different skill sets. One skill set is the science and its practical application broken down into a daily and weekly action set that will get your clients or customers results. The second is the ability to make business decisions based on profit and loss, on profitability, and scalability of a program. There's More And yet a third is the ability to look at the much bigger picture of how many lives have a positive influence from the pursuit. Maybe a decision is okay if it’s purely for enjoyment and hobby-sake. If it’s a business that must pay the bills, support individuals and their families, and ultimately build a legacy not just have a spotlight and have fun, then there are different sets to apply and evaluate. Your Fitness Conference & Experts As a business leader – if only for yourself: someone who pays bills and taxes based not just on what you make but on what you keep – you need to be sure that you separate these two very carefully. I recommend that you look closely at the “back end” of any of your beloved presenters and do your homework. Learn from them, they are some of the best, and they are using science to relay programming to you. However, they may have no idea of how to actually implement a profitable program. How do you know? Ask these questions: Is this presenter doing what I’m doing or want to do? Is he/she running a profitable business using the tools and techniques they are teaching? Does that matter to me? What do I want and how do I define success? Is this content the main focus of the presenter’s business life outside of presenting at conferences? Is this the sole, exclusive content the way the presenter makes a living? Knowledge vs. Application Because although a university lecturer may be a wonderful teacher, that lecturer has a regular paycheck regardless of the job or effort they put in (until someone evaluates them of course!) And you, as an entrepreneur or someone working on commission, do not have that luxury. If you work as a manager of a department, the profitability of your program matters. This year more than ever, if the profit margin on your programs and services has not supported your business but has only been supported by it, you’re in a pickle right now. That just doesn’t work anymore. If you’ve created a department of personal training for instance that simply extends the life and success of a club’s members but really has no profit margin due to expenses and high commissions with too little revenue, without enough members continuing in, you have not created a sustainable model for this moment we’re in. We Don’t Celebrate Losses I’ll leave that touchy subject alone because it’s my educated guess that those trainers, managers, owners in that position right now are not listening to this episode. They’re in a place where survival, not up-lev