- Tier pay scheme creates extreme seasonality and huge fluctuations in salaries. In the winter months, you can likely deliver in excess of 30 sessions a week at above £25. However, in the summer months, as families go abroad, you have no security and are likely to drop down a tier or two as your weekly sessions could possibly drop below 20. With huge fluctuations in salary, you can expect to be earning less than £20 per hour compared to £25 previously at no fault of your own.
- Limited scope for development. New PT's especially have limited support other than a workshop upon signing with Virgin Active. The companies focus is fixated on sales and fails to register or recognise the importance of personal branding and longevity.
- Sale orientated, management consistently judge your performance on the number of sessions you deliver a week or a month. Whilst sales are an important metric, management encourages PT's to offer additional sessions alongside the packages offered to clients to entice a purchase. This means for what we call a '4-pack', four sessions at a fixed price, we are encouraged to offer 5 or six, with the additional sessions coming off our own back, not the companies.
- Political, I can speak with experience and suggest this does not apply to all Virgin Active's, however, in-house politics can intensely affect the leads you are given as a PT. Management, once a month, used to give a list of new members so that we could cold call and see if they were interested in PT sessions. However, these lists were always given to the 'favourite' PT to begin with who would take over 50% of the leads whilst the remaining were segregated among the rest of us. We had eight PT's in our team.
