Before, during, and after university, turned me into a bean counter. I spent my life in lycra. I was an aerobics instructor (yes, aerobics: 4 state titles, 1 national title, and a Reebok sponsorship that lasted longer than most marriages!), a personal trainer, a gym owner, a rep for an international sports brand, a major sponsor of the AFL, NRL, NBL, Ironman, and V8 Supercars, and a director of a handful of sport brands including the Gold Coast Titans.
So, I’ve spent about 40 years with one foot in a squat rack and the other in a spreadsheet, and here’s the thing I’ve noticed: the music changed, the leotards – mercifully – changed, the equipment went from chrome to matte black and back again. But the money problems that trainers, studio owners, and gym operators face have not changed one bit.
I’ve seen a lot of talented people leave this industry, and it was rarely because they were bad at fitness. It was usually because nobody told them about the business stuff until it was already on fire. This is my attempt to tell you early. And each section ends with something you can do this week.
Feast, famine, and the January stampede
Every industry has a season. Mine is tax time, when the phones melt for three months and then go quiet enough to hear the fridge hum. Yours is January, when every person in the country who ate a wheel of brie on Boxing Day turns up wanting a 12-week transformation, followed by the great Easter evaporation, the winter slump, and the December “I’ll start again in the new year” churn.
The problem isn’t the seasonality. It’s that most operators budget like the January version of their business is the real one. Then the tax bill lands in a quiet month and there’s nothing there to pay it with.
Open a second business bank account, call it TAX, and every time money hits your main account, sweep a fixed percentage across before you touch a cent. For most sole trader PTs, 25-30% of profit is a sensible starting point (your accountant can tighten that). It’s the financial equivalent of putting your runners by the door the night before. Then pull up 12 months of income and write down your 3 worst months. That’s your true baseline. Budget to that number and treat the January surge as a bonus you bank rather than a lifestyle you fund. If you sell 10-session packs, the pre-Christmas window is your friend: cash collected in December for sessions delivered in a quiet February smooths the whole curve.
The ABN does not make them a contractor
This one keeps me up at night on behalf of gym owners. A trainer works your floor, wears your shirt, uses your equipment, works the hours you set, and invoices you from an ABN. You call them a contractor. The ATO very often calls them an employee, and the ATO wins that argument roughly every time.
The bit that really stings is super. Even someone who is a legitimate contractor may still be owed superannuation if you’re paying them mainly for their labour. The super guarantee is now 12%, and from 1 July 2026 it must be paid at the same time as wages under the payday super rules, not quarterly. Discover three years of unpaid super in an audit and you’re looking at the shortfall, interest, and penalties, on trainers who may not even work for you anymore.
List every person you pay. For each one, ask these five honest questions:
- ‘Do I control how, when, and where they work?’
- ‘Are they paid for their time rather than a result?’
- ‘Can they send someone else in their place?’
- ‘Do they carry their own commercial risk and insurance?’
- ‘Do they run their own business with other clients?’
Mostly “no” means they’re probably an employee, whatever the invoice says. If you run a rent-a-space model where trainers pay you for access and bill their own clients, congratulations, that’s much cleaner, but put it in a written agreement. A handshake is not a document you can show an auditor.
Failed direct debits and the art of not chasing money
Direct debit failures are the silent killer of studio cashflow. A card expires, a payment bounces, and nobody notices for six weeks because you were training clients from 6am to 7pm. Multiply that by 30 members and you’ve got a month’s rent floating in the ether.
Set your payment platform to retry failed payments automatically (most will retry two to three times over a week if you turn it on). Then build a three-touch sequence: a friendly automated text on day 1, an email on day 3, and a personal call on day 7. Most people aren’t dodging you; they’ve just changed cards. And put a “pause, don’t cancel” option in your membership terms. A member who pauses for a month usually comes back. A member who cancels has to rejoin, and rejoining feels like starting a diet on a Monday.
Your business is not your wallet
Roughly half the new clients I meet are running their business through a personal account, and they’re not the only ones. Half of the small businesses in Australia do it. The result is that you have no idea what the business actually earns. The Coles shop, the new tyres, and three client payments all sit in one account.
One business bank account, one business card, and pay yourself a regular amount on a set day like a wage. New rule for the household: if the receipt is in your name and the business didn’t need it, the business didn’t buy it. Within a month you’ll know your real profit for the first time, and that number changes everything from pricing to whether you can afford a second trainer.
What's actually deductible (and what's just activewear)
Here’s where the fitness industry gets creative, and where the ATO has got quite specific. The ATO literally publishes guidance for fitness instructors, which tells you how often they’ve had this argument.
Broadly: PT insurance, professional memberships, upskilling courses that build on your existing qualification, equipment, and business software are all deductible. Your car is deductible when you’re driving between client sites or to a gym you don’t normally work from, but the trip from home to your first regular location generally isn’t (there’s a bulky equipment exception, so if you’re hauling a car full of kettlebells, talk to someone). A home studio can be claimed proportionately if it’s a dedicated space.
- PT insurance
- Professional memberships
- Upskilling courses
- Equipment
- Business software
- Driving between client sites
- A dedicated home studio (proportionately)
- Activewear (unless a compulsory, logo'd uniform)
- Supplements and protein
- Home to your first regular location
- The course that got you into the industry
Then the disappointments. Activewear is generally not deductible. It’s conventional clothing, even if you only ever wear it to work, unless it’s a compulsory, logo’d uniform. Supplements and protein are private, no matter how much they contribute to your credibility. And the course that got you into the industry in the first place is usually not deductible either; the ones after it are.
For gear, anything under the instant asset write-off threshold can be claimed outright in the year you buy it, and anything over it gets depreciated over its effective life. That threshold has been changed so many times by so many governments that I refuse to print a number here; check the current figure before you sign for that new treadmill row.
Download a receipt-capture app (we use and love Dext, package it in for all of our clients and bloody well insist they use it) and adopt the rule “photograph it or it didn’t happen.” Then start a 12-week car logbook. Twelve weeks of slightly annoying admin gives you a business-use percentage that lasts five years.
A quick word on audits
Just this week I helped a new gym owner through a messy audit. I won’t give details, but I’ll tell you the theme: every single thing above that had been left for “later” was the thing the ATO wanted to see. Contractor arrangements, mixed accounts, missing receipts, GST on merch. None of it was dishonest. All of it was avoidable. Keep your records for five years, keep them tidy, and you’ll find that audits are mostly boring, which is exactly what you want them to be.
