Fitness Business School – Be Adaptable Be Successful

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I want to talk with you about being adaptable in order to be successful. 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.

I remember when I was early on in my baseball coaching career, I always felt, man, when I get my systems down, I’ll be set thinking that it was going to be this finished product. And I even fell into that trap again when I was starting a business thinking, Hey, I’ll document these systems.

And they’re just going to live forever as if things don’t evolve and things don’t change. And I think the older you get, hopefully the wiser you get, you start to see that you are continually having to adapt, whether it’s adapting in order to stay relevant and marketable. You think about what, as I record this, we’re onto iPhone number 15.

Or maybe it’s adapting because the entire business landscape that you operate in has changed. You have to be adaptable. If you want to be successful, I’ve looked at just thousands and thousands of business over time. I’ve had tens of thousands of customers or members or clients in the last 19 years is a business owner and business coach.

And there are so few businesses that have stayed the course for 10, 15, 20 years and haven’t evolved and haven’t adapted. And I even looked on the small town I grew up in there. There are a number of businesses. Heck, my dad’s business is. 39 years old as I record this and mind you, it’s winded down and it almost operates a little more like a hobby now, but it evolved and adapted in some ways over time.

And frankly, if it would have adapted more, it would have grown faster and grown more. So if you want to have sustainable success. You’re going to have to be adaptable. So I want to give you three, three focal points as you do that. The first thing, and this may sound like almost the opposite of what I just said is you have to build around things that won’t change.

You build around the things that either don’t change or change the slowest. And what I mean by that is, man, I can show you advertisements from the late 1800s about people wanting to look better and improve their self care, that sort of thing. So human desires, it’s not that they don’t evolve over time, but they definitely evolve slower than like technology.

So building around stuff. The people side of things, building around the fact that people are always going to want things more conveniently. People are always going to benefit from more accountability and consistency. People are always going to do better with coaching and without coaching. That’s always going to be a part of what, what is going on.

People are going to want to feel connected. They’re going to want. Personalized attention and feel important and valued. Start with those types of things and build around that. Think about the person you want to serve as the kind of epicenter of what you’re building. And you’re going to be far better off than if you start at some other point or place.

Then the second thing that we want to focus on is how we, Adapt to the current circumstances that we’re operating in and the technology that is available to us and the circumstances we’re operating in could be the competition that you’re in. Obviously during the pandemic, we experienced some really extreme circumstances and a lot of people that had wonderfully robust.

Offline businesses had to move exclusively online. So that was the extreme version of being adaptable, but heck, I only had one active client that closed during that time because they adapted to the circumstances at hand and your circumstances may change based on. Staffing or the circumstances that you’re experiencing in life.

Maybe your goals have changed. Maybe the, what you want out of a business has changed. I see. The way that people operate based on circumstances before they have a family versus after they have a family. I see how that evolves. So adapt to those circumstances and adapt to the technology that’s available to you.

When I started my first business, an iPhone wasn’t a thing, right? Facebook wasn’t a thing. And it would be foolish for us not to leverage technology that people weave into their everyday life. Because that’s, if it makes somebody’s life easier, if it makes it more convenient, if it allows them to better stay connected, then.

We should be leveraging that. Now I am not only from a stock market perspective, an investor in various technology companies, but I am an investor and a partner in a couple different, not publicly traded technology company. So I am a big advocate of tech. I am not. However, a big believer in technology just for technology sake.

I think that we should be using technology to solve problems, achieve goals, make life easier, make life better. And so when you find technology that can do that for you or for your clients or for your team, then we want to be adaptable. So adapt to your circumstances and adapt to the technology at hand.

And then I think that. We have to improve when better information or greater wisdom is present. And it’s a little bit like when people set their annual goals and we do our best year ever annual goal planning and have for about a decade. For clients and I invariably, I tell people to write their goals in pencil when people do their three year plans or five year plans again, put things in pencil because it would be really a shame if six months from today.

You didn’t have better information, more information. If you didn’t have greater wisdom than you have now, because you should be learning, you should be noticing things. You should be evolving and improving as a business owner, as an expert. You there are all the various avenues that you should be learning and improving in.

And. You reserve the right, or at least you should reserve the right, to use that information to course correct, to call audibles, to change. What you’re doing, whether it’s changing your goals or how you’re pursuing your goals, better information should only make us better. It should either reinforce what we’re doing, or it should give us a better way to do things or.

Better thing to do in general. So if you want to be successful, you’ve got to be adaptable there. There’s no glory in saying this is how I’ve always done it for 20 years. In fact, in many cases saying this is how I’ve always done it is death by a thousand cuts because the market. On average, we’ll be adaptable.

And so our goal is to stay at the front end of that. And if we don’t, then we’re going to see people leave us behind because not only is the business side of the market. But the consumer side is as well. And if you’re not adapting with them, then it is going to certainly end in divorce. So adaptability is in my opinion, it’s not even a secret weapon for success. It’s a necessity for success.

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.