Fitness Business School – The Thing That Matters Most

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here and I want to talk about the thing that matters most when it comes to business. 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.

Now, if you’ve listened to this for any period of time, if you’re part of the podcast community here with me, or you’re part of my email community or coaching client or whatever else, nothing I’m going to say during this episode is going to come across as new or novel, but that doesn’t mean it’s probably not worth hearing and it’s that when it comes to business success, relationships matter most and it seems.

Simple. And I’m sure that if you’re listening to this and I’ve not run you off because you’re tired of me at this point, you probably buy into that to an extent because the people who don’t buy into it probably don’t enjoy me very much. Relationships are the foundation of what we do. If you think about the relationships you have with your clients, with your prospects, if you think about the relationships you have with your team, with your vendors, with all the other people in your life, whether it’s strategic alliance partners, or the people that aren’t in your business, but affect how you operate personally.

And so it impacts your business. Relationships are the epicenter of everything. And I will tell you that relationships earned and they’re things that have to be nurtured. They have to be cultivated, if you will, because. They’re not things that we should just take for granted. And I think a lot of times when we go into the market and we put out marketing and we wonder why people don’t jump, we don’t look at the fact that we’ve not earned that relationship yet.

We think that because we put out some well crafted piece of marketing material, people should just flood through our door, but the reality is. If we haven’t earned that relationship, then most people are not going to just flood through the door. A few may, because maybe they’re at a place in their life where they’re.

Ready to make a decision. And this is what they see, but a lot of times you have to earn that relationship and relationships have to be nurtured or they go dormant. I’m sure that there are plenty of people that you were friends with in elementary school that you are not close to now. And it’s because the, that relationship wasn’t nurtured.

If you think about little kids originally. A lot of times, their closest friends are friends by convenience. They’re in the neighborhood together, their parents are friends, and so they spend time together. But then later, as they get older, they become friends by common interest. Maybe they’re in the same schools or same sports teams or that sort of stuff.

And if you don’t nurture those relationships, then they dissipate. And in fact, it’s one of the things that, that I try to do on a continual basis. Now I’ve had the same best friends since fourth grade, and there’s probably not too many weeks where we haven’t talked in the last 40 years, but. In general, still, I went to the American Baseball Coaches Association convention a week before I record this podcast, and it is, in some ways, the equivalent of a class reunion for me in some cases.

People that I did things with. One of the guys that was on the baseball support staff with me for the 1996 Olympics, I saw him. I’ve not seen him in a decade. I saw another gentleman that I’ve not seen in a decade that he was a coach that when I was doing my research paper in grad school on under load and overload implement training for baseball.

He let me do research. On his team. So I wasn’t just using the team that I coached for my subjects. I’m not seeing him forever. I, there were any number of people that I have known for upwards of 20 years that they don’t live in Louisville. They don’t live within even a couple of hours of me in many cases.

So it’s an opportunity to stay connected. I stay connected with people that I coached decades ago, very regularly, because I know that relationships have to be nurtured. And it doesn’t mean that you run into somebody 30 years later and you don’t still feel a fond kind of feeling whenever you, when you see them, when you interact with them.

It’s not that it’s more of a. Yeah. Wait a minute. You weren’t an active part of their life for that long. You weren’t thinking about them. You’re just out of sight, out of mind. And I think that if you want to have a strong relationship in a close relationship, you have to nurture that. And the same holds true with your prospects, with your lead, somebody can opt in for your lead magnet.

But if you’re not following up with them, then why would they give you your attention when you make an offer? Or their attention when you make an offer, you don’t have a relationship, but if you’re adding value to their life on a consistent basis, if you’re giving them tips and insights and just giving them help from afar, almost taking ownership of being their coach, even if they’re not an active paying client, then you’ve got the foundation of a relationship.

If you have clients who left the gym, are you still reaching out to them now and staying connected? Because those relationships really can make your business a lot healthier and they can open plenty of doors. In fact, most of my business comes from people who’ve known me for more than a year and pretty much all of it other than people who’ve come through referrals.

So come through pre existing relationships with other people, almost everybody has known of me for longer than a year. And yeah, that means they were on my email list or listened to the podcast. And so they were part of my larger fitness business community. And I love it that way. I know some people are like, man, how do I get people to.

To buy instantly. I want people to buy when they feel that it’s the right time in the relationship. I want them to take that next step in the coach client relationship. When it makes sense for them, not just when it makes sense financially for me, because you’re going to have a better long term relationship.

If it operates that way. Now, how do we make sure that our relationships are the first thing is we’ve got to. Honor the other person. And honor may be a weird word for this sort of thing, but you got to understand that if you are granted some of their time and attention, you can’t waste it. So I think honor is a strong word by choice here.

We want to honor the other person’s attention, their time, because these are things that we’re not granted these things. It’s not something that we get automatically. So we want to be very respectful of it. And. Like when we get to spend time with somebody, we need to respect it. Don’t take it for granted when they’re reading something or listening to something or watching something, hopefully it’s something that’s making their life better because if it’s not, then they’re probably not coming back the next time.

So we need to honor that person, their time and think about them as an individual, everybody. That reads the emails you send out, watches the videos, listens to this podcast. They’re doing it as an individual. It’s not a collection of nameless faceless beings. It is an individual who’s doing this for their own reasons.

And so you need to be respectful of that each and every time. The second thing I would tell you is that with a relationship, I understand it’s a two way street, take. Responsibility for the continuation of it. Don’t just assume it continues. Don’t wait for the other person to call it. It’s why I don’t ever really want to just give away a business card.

I want to get a business card because I will take responsibility for the continuation of that relationship for the follow up and then don’t forget that everything’s about people, right? This is. Some people fall in love with the idea of process and process is wonderful, but process only works. If it is a benefit to the people.

So that’s why the whole process exists. It has to benefit the people, both sides of the equation. If we’re thinking about a business owner, right? Like the person you’re serving and the person doing the serving. So keep in mind that the relationships that you have, and frankly, your happiness as a business owner is going to.

Your happiness as business owner, the health of your business, all of it is going to be largely dictated by the relationships that you have and the quality of those relationships. So I would tell you the more you get focused on developing, nurturing, strengthening those relationships. The better your business will be.

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

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

One of of the things that we’ve been doing with our current clients is taking them through this Ideal Business diagnostic and really what it is, this checklist that allows you to pinpoint exactly what your business needs next so you can keep improving, keep growing, and build a business that you love to own, one that pays you well, one that allows you to have the impact you wanna have and one that allows you to have a lifestyle that you truly enjoy.

In this diagnostic, we walk through everything and we do an evaluation and can instantly pinpoint what you need to do next to build that business that you want. I’m going to extend this opportunity to get on with either me or my team and take you through this evaluation and fix your business’s most vital needs fast.

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.