Fitness Business School – How To Be Mediocre

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I want to talk with you about how to be mediocre. Let’s get to it.

Welcome to the Fitness Business School podcast, the show for fitness business owners who want to grow their income, increase their impact and improve their lifestyle. Be sure to listen to the end of this episode because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

Professionally, I’ve had essentially three different legs of my professional life. My first kind of leg was the time I spent as a college baseball coach. The second was the time I spent building a network of businesses, an organization that Was a parent company to a host of businesses. And then the third leg has been focused predominantly on coaching and consulting with business owners.

And along the way I’ve recognized in my own experience, and then just from observation the way we’ve always done things is the fastest path to mediocrity. If I think about my time as a college baseball coach, my, my first couple of seasons, we won a little bit more than we lost. I was very young. I was the youngest head coach in the country, 23, 24 years old during those couple of seasons.

And I don’t know that I had the confidence to go and break away. We just did what everybody else was doing and approached everything from recruiting to strategy to player development, the same as everybody else. And then I. Recognize that, wait a minute, if I’m doing things the way that everybody else is doing them, I’ve got no scholarships.

The competition does. I’ve got the lowest budget in the conference. I’ve got less resources, less experience. There’s no way I beat other people doing things the way that they’re doing them with those kinds of things. Anchors or hindrances. And only when I stepped away and decided to approach things differently, did our program really start to thrive and become nationally competitive.

And then when I started my first training business, the norm in the industry was mostly personal training being sold in packages, Hey, by a four pack or a 12 pack or a 24 pack or 48 pack of sessions prepay. Every session is an hour long. And everything looked the same. Everything was really designed in that format.

And in the health club world, which was the dominant kind of player in the fitness space at that time, it seemed like a win was if somebody could get even a 3 percent penetration rate in the health club of clients doing personal training. That was the gold standard. Not coming from that environment, not cutting my teeth there, recognizing that, wait a minute, these people bought 12, 18, 24 month gym memberships and they were on a subscription and gyms have thousand, 2000, 5, 000 members.

Why wouldn’t I try to embrace some of that same mentality? And we started selling 12 month training memberships. In fact, Of the 400 plus clients we got during our first 18 months, over 90 percent of them were on 12 month memberships and it was all recurring revenue was all a subscription to, to make the fee structure more palatable instead of being able to prepay since everybody else, it just seemed like common sense at the time, right?

Like everybody else on average paid their bills, monthly car payments, mortgage, rent, whatever it was. Because that’s how their cash flow worked. It’s not like they got their salary all in one lump sum at the beginning of the year and just doled it out from there. So to me, that just made sense. We got involved with a nutrition coaching licensing program, and it was all one on one to that point.

And so we were the first person. Person nationwide to launch group nutrition coaching. And those things allowed us to build a really successful business in a small market in central Kentucky, which wasn’t exactly what I would call a fitness hot bed. And then when I got into. Franchising. I had a network of businesses that were in coaching programs or membership sites or whatever else that didn’t really want to give up their own identity.

We did what we called unbranded franchising, where they could say part of the, our franchises network part powered by our franchise and just provide the systems and the infrastructure and the support and kind of that internal behind the scenes operating system, and then let them co brand or even rebrand all the front facing stuff, the marketing materials.

And it allowed us to grow a franchise from zero to 116 units in year one. And. That was almost unheard of. And because we were selling conversions, it’s not like I was the only person selling conversions, but there were, to my knowledge, I only could find two other franchise organizations that had grown any kind of significant level that worked on taking existing businesses, existing operators and converting them to franchisees.

And to me, it seemed like a An easy opportunity to get a franchise up and running instead of, Hey, let’s sell something to somebody who’s not in business, make sure they can go secure financing. Maybe in six to 12 months, they’ll be open and actually be able to be in business. So approaching that differently, right?

Me sending a daily email. For 19 years, me, I tend to opt for what I call mid tier pricing instead of being the quote unquote high ticket or only selling. Really inexpensive products. I tend to try to sit in the middle because I want to make sure that at all times I’m providing what I think and hope is 10 times the value of what I charge.

I don’t want to care about being the most expensive in my market. I care about providing the best value exchange. I want somebody to get great value for what they pay. So I focused there first. So the reason I tell you all this is. I’ve approached all these things doing things differently. My, my good friend and colleague, Doug Sperling built a tremendous business, a seven figure business in a town of 12, 000 people by doing small group training, not large group, not one on one, not the two most common models in the industry.

By doing small group training, by doing things differently. If I look at people like Eric Cressy sports performance, they were completely approaching things differently, both with the way that they built the initial location in Hudson, Massachusetts, and. Made it a destination for baseball and doing individualized programming instead of cookie cutter stuff.

And then the second location in Florida has become this all encompassing environment where not only can people go. And train the string training side of stuff that they get to do everything about player development all under one roof. So if you think about the way that people have done things, they just the best people deviate from the norm.

And that’s why I strongly encourage people to build their ideal business. And that doesn’t mean you can’t use. and model things. I’m not saying you always have to start from a blank canvas. I’m a big Walt Disney fan. And so I’ve studied for example, the origins of Disneyland. It’s not like. They started from a completely blank canvas.

He sent his entire team. And then he went along in some cases around to all the different amusement parks they could find around the country. They went to other sorts of entertainment, attractions, and venues. And they tried to take the best of everything and combine it into what they wanted. And then they borrowed a lot of the things that they had learned from being a movie studio and an animation business.

And put this together. So none of the things that I did is, as I mentioned, when I talked about the subscription model, and some of that seems old news when I say, Oh yeah, Hey, do it on a subscription. In 2004, nobody did it on a subscription. Now that’s the default, but it wasn’t like I came up with that idea.

I just said, I borrowed it from the health club model. I borrowed group training from the fact that there are a lot of group or the group coaching. I borrowed it from a lot of other. A lot of other group offerings, whether it was being a college strength coach or coaching people in baseball and doing things in a team environment or seeing that people could do all sorts of exercise classes in that setting, the unbranded or co branded franchising really, it was just mashing two things together, a franchise and business coaching.

Take ideas and combine those ideas and come up with something new, something better, because if you do it the way that it’s always been done, you’re almost tethered to mediocrity. It’s almost impossible to break free because It’s hard to carve out a brand new identity. You’re never able to easily differentiate.

And the only time people can get under the hood and clearly see how you’re different as if by experiencing it a lot. And that’s not the front facing piece of this. So if you want. To be better. If you want to avoid mediocrity, be willing to be a little bit different. That’s the fastest path to success. And it’s the most sustainable path to building and owning and operating the business you want.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School.

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

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So if we take you through this, you’re gonna be able to make those vital changes that you need to finally have what I call your Ideal Business. If you’d be interested in going through this entirely free, risk-free diagnostic with us and learn what you already have in place, what you’re doing well and where are your greatest opportunities for rapid improvement are just shoot me an email with diagnostic in the subject line to [email protected].

Again, an email to [email protected] with diagnostic in the subject line will get
you scheduled and take you through this evaluation to help you build the business you want.