Fitness Business School – The Truth About Business Coaching

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I want to talk with you about business coaching and the truth. Most people don’t know. 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.

Recently, I’ve seen a kind of a spike in FTC settlements with businesses that do business coaching, where the FTC basically comes after them for falsified earnings claims or testimonials, or basically they’re saying they are misrepresenting the work that they’re doing.

And. It always seems like this is a rollercoaster like thing, it dies down for a while and then it picks back up and what’s interesting to me, isn’t so much about the exact cases. Of who got caught and who didn’t, because it’s probably a little bit like speeding, right? There are plenty of people doing some things that may not be exactly the way that would encourage people to do them, but only a percentage of them are getting caught.

But what’s been interesting is when you unpack it and you look at the businesses that have, I guess for lack of a better way of putting it, gotten caught. They share some elements or traits that, that are a, I think, hints or lessons that we could learn from that. I think it’s very appropriate not only for our business, but it allows you to maybe put anybody you might.

personally do business with under the microscope as well. And what I think is the number one thing that I noticed is there, there’s this kind of a division of business where the businesses that have Higher integrity, if you will, are really focused on helping people. And they see potential clients as potential partners.

They see people that they’re gonna partner with and there’s gonna be a value exchange, and there’s going to be this kind of. congruency in the journey people are going to take. They see that, okay, yeah, this person needs to pay me. There needs to be a value exchange, but I need to make sure that I’m holding up my end of the bargain in that value exchange.

And if I’m not, then this person shouldn’t have some obligation to stick around. In fact, I’m probably gonna have to refund them if I’m not making my best effort to deliver on my promises or whatever else, and frankly, in the business coaching world, though. Those types of people are definitely less common than the alternative, but frankly, in the fitness world, it’s always been that way to health clubs that used to require you to send a letter certified mail when you were going to cancel and show all this proof of moving.

Hey, you have to have utility bills and all this other stuff where you’re going. And. Man, they didn’t seem nearly as concerned about the people who are actually coming and showing up though. Yeah, if you don’t want to show up, if you want to leave, man, you got to dot every I, cross every T. You guys are gonna have to be fully engaged, but if you’re showing up not getting results, they don’t really care.

The other things that I’ve noticed is Some of these businesses that have really strong and aggressive sales teams, that’s where part of the problem lies. And I’ve always understood this as a, is a, is something I wanted to avoid when I sold franchises, I sold all of our franchise locations, every franchisee, I was the gatekeeper even today.

Almost without exception, our sales have run through people who are actually the ones doing the coaching as well as the selling. Now there are instances where I’m comfortable letting somebody else do a little bit of the selling because I am. Very tie tied to that person. They have integrity and then the way their compensation is set up.

If somebody is a bad fit, bad experience, then the compensation would be limited. And the reason I tell you that is if somebody is a commission sales rep and they’re. Their motivation, their incentive is largely to get a yes, because their commission is based on getting the yes. And if your business is built on serving a client and retaining a client, then your livelihood is largely about getting the right people, not just yeses.

And there’s this kind of, I think, friction between those two, two positions. And That’s why commission sales reps can, they’re doing what they’re paid to do. They’re doing what they’re asked to do. I have no misgivings about commission sales reps and frankly, I’ve done a little bit of that, but. If that’s what their incentive is, that’s how they pay the bills.

That’s what they’re going to do. And it’s not necessarily congruent with you being getting the right fit in the program, somebody you can help somebody that it’s going to fit your culture, somebody that’s going to buy into what you do, and I think we see that in business in general, it’s sometimes we get so desperate that we jump it, Hey, let’s get yeses.

And we don’t think about, is this, yes, a plus for my business and neutral for my business or a minus. And then one other thing that I’ve noticed with the business coaching, issues that have come up as of late, and I’ve talked about this before, and I’ve even written emails about it is where a lot of business coaches even would.

Lean on some sort of outside financing, coach financing, or telling people to go get home equity loans to run there to do things. And years ago, I even shopped a business coaching program and I had somebody who’s below half my age. Selling me on the phone. Actually, I believe it was on zoom at that point and telling me that, Hey, you know what?

If you’re serious about this, you need to do this. They didn’t ask me a thing about my financial situation. They didn’t ask me what kind of financial obligations I had. They didn’t ask me if I had debt. A family that I was going to have to pay tuition for kids in school or whatever else it was. If you’re serious about this, you’ll come up with the money.

And then that kind of subtle hint of, Hey, we’ve had people go through this financing solution or go get home equity. And because those people are committed. And I thought, man, that’s a, it’s pretty desperate. I don’t know that it’s ethical for somebody to say, you need to go seek this solution without understanding any sort of the financial situation somebody’s in.

And, but I see trainers do the same thing. They’ll say, this person isn’t committed because they want to invest this amount of money. I’m like, man, do you know their personal financial situation? Do what kind of. Interest rate they have on the mortgage at their house. Do you know What the kids tuition is if they pay tuition at school?

Do you know if they have to pay for child care? There are so many variables that we I don’t even want to say we lose sight of it’s we don’t care about if it’s not Related to our goal. Our goal is in a vacuum sometimes. I know that’s a winding road talking about this, but I think that Every time this stuff rears its head and we see people get in trouble man, I am I’m not ever going to come from a position of this like holier than thou thing where I’ve not made mistakes and I’ve not done anything wrong.

And so I’m not really here to judge a person that gets in trouble. Cause like I said, there are plenty of people who don’t get in trouble and are doing the same things or worse. But what I do know is when this happens, it pulls back the curtain on a lot of things that are actually very commonplace misrepresented claims, high pressure selling.

The lack of concern, almost like seeing prospects as people you conquer, not people that you coach or help. And. Just not really having any sort of alignment with the people that you’re supposed to be serving. And we’re going to keep seeing this. We’re going to keep seeing these guys that say, we’re going to flood your gym with these people or those people.

And I think that people that are desperate in our industry, gym owners that see these ads, Hey, we’ll flood your gym with a hundred, 200, 300 people. They’re in this position where they’re not even asking, how does that work? Why would I do that? What are the potential negative consequences of it? If it actually did work and how much am I on the hook for?

I used to see this with a very prominent business coaching company that had a no disparagement clause in their contract because yeah, they’ll throw all the testimonials up there. They’ll tell you about all the success stories that they had. But I spoke with over a dozen businesses that closed because of being in their coaching program, paying 1, 000 a week and having to spend all this money on ads and all this other stuff to run their system.

And it left so much scorched earth in their community that even if they stopped there, there was no goodwill to be had in their community and they just couldn’t survive. There, there are plenty of solutions out there and that’s a good thing. That is a. Really good thing. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that there’s more competition in the fitness industry.

I don’t think there’s a bad, it’s a bad thing. There’s more competition in the business coaching landscape, but it also means that more Options to choose from requires us to probably have better filtering mechanisms in order to make the right choice. Because if we don’t, some of this stuff can have a really negative impact.

Like I said, there have been people that have gone down the wrong path of business coaching and it’s bankrupted them. It’s really done detrimental things to their life because of the hole it dug for them financially, just like in the fitness world, somebody having a negative experience in a fitness environment can really paint a bleak picture for them of what a good fitness situation could actually do to help.

And so they give up, they throw in the towel and that can be really detrimental in their life in so many ways. So understand that some of this is just a reminder of. If you actually want to help, you have to make sure that the way that you operate is helping. You can’t just rationalize what we do this way because of these reasons.

Now, if you’re seeing clients as somebody partner with somebody that’s your ally, then you got to treat them accordingly. And sometimes that’s going to cause. Cause some short term losses, but overall it’s going to cause lots of longterm gain. So just maybe just a recap on a lot of what I’ve been seeing the last few weeks in the business coaching industry that hopefully can help you not only.

Understand that side of things and vet your decisions better that way, but also help you in your own business and how you want to be viewed and how you want to operate so that you can serve the clients you want to serve and build the business you want to own.

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

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