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Google "how much does a private soccer trainer make" and you'll get Glassdoor telling you $44 to $67 an hour. That's employee thinking — and it's the reason most trainers stay broke.

Here's what trainers who run it like a business actually make. Real numbers, real coaches.

The real range

• $18,000/year — where Hector started his first year. Solo, no systems, selling sessions.
• $200,000+/year — where Hector ended up a few years later. Same coach, different business.
• $500,000/year — Coach Marcus. Started part-time. Fully implemented the model, now does half a million a year.
• $59,000 sales months — Brendon Vella, stacking record months back to back.
• $51,845 in a single month — Nick Aldiero. One month.
• $80,000/month — my highest-earning coaching client right now.

That's the range I've seen across training businesses: $18K a year on one end, half a million on the other.

What separates the two ends

It isn't coaching ability. The $40K-a-year trainer and the $200K-a-year trainer of...

Hector Cantele runs a private soccer training academy in Memphis, Tennessee. His first year in business, he did $18,000. A few years later, he was on pace to clear $200,000.

His coaching didn't change. The business around it did.

Here's his story, in his own words.

He was good at coaching. He had no business.

Hector is a former University of Memphis soccer player. When he started his academy, relationships got him clients — but everything else was improvised.

"I didn't have the tools to make my business more safe or more secure. I felt like I was doing things out of the box, out of the blue. I was not following a system."

It was just him. Ten to twelve sessions a week. No agreements, no payment system, no real way to talk to parents about what he was selling.

The shift: systems.

He joined my program in the spring of 2019. What he got wasn't motivation — it was infrastructure:

• A real payment setup
• Written agreements with players and parents
• How to set up and run camps
• H
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