Fitness Business School – Mistakes Pat Has Made

Full Transcript

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

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One of the things that I always get a kick out of in social media, and maybe it’s the cynic in me is that people love to show their highlight reel. People absolutely are quick to show you pictures of them in fancy places, or the ones that maybe I enjoy a little bit less driving their fancy cars or walking up to a private jet or some of that other silliness.

But, most people aren’t super quick to unpack their mistakes. And as somebody who has been a business owner for two decades and a college baseball coach for the better part of a decade before that, I’ve got 30 years of mistakes and, Whenever I do like an email and I talk about the things that I’ve screwed up along the way, it’s always one of my most well received emails.

And so I thought if I were to maybe unpack a few of the mistakes I’ve made just over the past, probably 18 months or so from a professional standpoint, it might be useful to somebody just to, for no other reason than to understand that. That stuff’s just part of the journey and nobody’s batting a thousand.

Nobody is all success with no hiccups along the way. And so for me, if I were to say, okay here’s some of the things that perhaps I did. Wrong or maybe had blind spots about it may help you catch some of your own and it may also help you be at peace with the fact that each of us probably make some mistakes from time to time.

So I’ve got, I think a list of about six that I want to talk through today. And frankly, I could have probably come up with a list of 60, but it would be the longest podcast in history. So we won’t do that. The first thing that I would say is, A mistake I’ve made over the past probably 18 months is I overstaffed a little bit and some of that was just you know, I had the opportunity to hire a couple good people and didn’t really Have the right seats on the bus for them at the time and In a small business, I think we’re always looking for good people, right?

Like we always want to have good people. And I think I’ve been incredibly fortunate over the past decade or so to be able to surround myself with a small army of wonderful people, whether they were team members or outside vendors that are contributors to what we do. And when the opportunity for a couple people to come on board happened that I felt were really high quality potential contributors, I went ahead and jumped at that, but I didn’t.

have a great plan on how to best utilize their talents and skills. And it from a, like a payroll standpoint or whatever else like that. It was certainly palatable, but I don’t think It was my best work in setting somebody up to succeed. And as somebody who wrote a book on culture, I am well aware of the fact that if you can have a great person, if you don’t set them up to succeed, it’s hard for them to thrive.

Now, both of them actually went on and found careers that were probably beyond the scope of anything that I could have. created an environment that would allow them to do in the short term future. So it worked out great and I think that it was a positive thing for them to be involved and be introduced to some of what we do.

But it was still a wonderful reminder to me that even as somebody who I think is very people-centric and is very conscious of the importance of setting somebody up to succeed. I didn’t do it. I didn’t create a career track, if you will, that would empower somebody to thrive in their role. And I think they could have done more and had an even better experience.

Not to, but to be fair, no matter what that would have been, I think they would have probably both taken the jobs that were presented to them, that they moved on, no matter what. Cause it was going to probably double what I could. Pay them that it reminded me like, Hey, if I can get good people like this on the team, then it’s incumbent upon me to set them up to be successful.

The second thing that I’ve noticed, it was a mistake over the last 18 months or so was probably letting the competitive side of me Was probably letting the competitive side of me drift into kind of meeting the market where it was rather than setting the standard of how we want to represent ourself.

And to make that less vague, there, there are a lot of people out there in the industry in the business coaching, fitness expert, whatever you want to call it, industry that talk about, Hey, we’ll help you do a, B or C and really focus on the risk reversal side of things. And I, as somebody who has historically bet on myself a lot, really throughout my entire professional life, I’m probably confident enough to say, Hey, you know what?

We can deliver on this stuff. I’m happy to bet on myself and put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. And we did a lot of that during the pandemic. Man, we would let people in and we would do stuff where we only charged a percentage of their growth, or we would delay payments for an extended period of time because I bet on Our ability to deliver and it worked out great.

We had one client out of all the people we serve, several hundred people in a coaching environment, only one actually closed. And they were a franchise, they were part of a franchise that wouldn’t really give them any autonomy to do the stuff we were recommending. That kind of made them toe the line of, what the franchise did, which I had reason to believe that, Hey, we can do this stuff and it’ll work.

The problem is that, yeah, it works. I don’t know that if I’m trying to talk to people about creating their ideal business and building a business, they really want to. Love owning that is durable, that is fulfilling to them. That has an impact that allows them to build wealth. The things that I, that are really most important to me going out and leading with a message that’s probably a little more well suited to attract people that are in like dire straights or desperate or whatever else it’s just incongruent, right?

Yeah. You may be able to. Help some of those folks right the ship and dig themselves out of a hole a little bit, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to create their ideal business. That’s important to them. That’s something that resonates with them and not conveying a message that is appropriate for what we really want to drive home is the hallmark of our business.

And instead just saying, Hey, other people out in this market doing this, and I believe we can do it better. Is a mistake, right? It’s no different than somebody playing a sport and saying I’m going to go ahead and play the style of play that the other person plays just to show them I could do it.

Not my finest marketing hour by any stretch. Another thing that I probably haven’t done enough is not highlighting different segments of our community. I don’t know that I do a great job of sharing the social proof of the clients that we have. I don’t certainly don’t intentionally avoid doing it, but I also, I don’t want.

To spend all my time convincing somebody that, Oh, this person is doing a million dollars a year. So you can, because each person’s individual. And if that is inspirational to them, that’s great, but I definitely need to do better with that. And I haven’t done a good job of highlighting. What I would call like our top 20% of our clients, nearly enough.

We have so many people that have gone from $5,000 a month to $25,000 a month or gone from three or $400,000 a year to fast approaching a million dollars a year in business. And we don’t talk about that nearly as much as we should, but maybe just as importantly, we’ve got people that. We’re burning the candle at both ends and working 80 or 90 hours a week that are now taking, multiple vacations a year and able to go coach their kids sports teams.

We’ve got people who’ve, paid off all their debt and are, entirely debt free living in beautiful homes, taking vacations, sending kids to the schools they want to send them to. And I. gloss over that stuff and maybe touch on it here and there. But I also recognize that, man, seeing that and thinking back to the times that we would showcase that, like even in my first training business, we had this wonderful wall of fame of so many of the people were successful in our, Jim and there’d be before and afters and they’d talk about what those people did And they were not You know, they were not all cover model fit like they were regular people who achieved really Powerful transformations.

And in hindsight, that was probably more inspirational than anything that I could have said to people. It gave them more certainty or confidence that they could do it too. And I don’t think I do a good enough job with that. It’s something that I’ll say, Oh, I should do more of this, but then I don’t make it a priority for our team.

Same thing with our coaches, man. There’s so many people now in the fitness business landscape that have teams of people who are just salespeople that aren’t really coaches, or maybe they have coaches who were struggling business owners, or heck, maybe they didn’t even own a business at all and they just are willing to follow a checklist.

So they, they hire them that way. Whereas I’ve always tried to surround myself with entrepreneurial people who, instead of saying, Hey, I want to have a third location or whatever else, okay, no, I want to do this as a way to generate more revenue, but then also give me, it’s largely profit for our coaches and it’s flexible and they get to be around other business owners and they know that, The impact coaching has maybe had on them.

I look at the people that we have on our team and heck, we’ve got people like Justin Yule that has, he left working in a big box health club at lifetime fitness and built a training facility, almost seven figures, and then launched an online coaching business with his wife, Janelle, that is a six figure endeavor.

Fred Zoller’s built multiple businesses that have grown past a half million dollars a year and now the one that they, that he’s a partner in now is seven figure business. I talk about Holly periodically, I mean she’s sold millions of dollars worth of stuff. in the fitness for moms landscape, everything from coaching and membership sites to products.

And Doug Spurling probably is the one that, that I talk about the most since we run some programs that have a front facing component. He’s not just behind the scenes coaching, Doug’s not only built a seven figure gym, but he’s parlayed that into some serious wealth building activities with real estate.

And I’ve got these wonderful people on my team. Heck, behind the scenes guys like Matt Sizemore that he’s run launches and set up stuff for half the big names in, in the coaching industry. So man, I’ve got these people and I don’t even know that somebody comes into our program and in their first three or four months in the program, they recognize that, man, a lot of the people on this team are better than the supposed gurus that are out there.

It’s not just Pat and some of his assistant coaches. Any number of these guys are more accomplished in their own lanes than I am. I think that’s huge. And from maybe a front facing and maybe not as internal I don’t know that I like, like I said, meeting the market where it is. I don’t know that I’ve done a great job of always running ads or marketing to attract our ideal person is I’ve cast a little bit wider net. I’ve run mostly ads to my fitness entrepreneur handbook for years and I think we get some of the right people, but I don’t do a whole lot of separate marketing, just a little more laser focused to catch the right people.

And then I’ll tell you, maybe as important as any is, I don’t know that I’ve Over the last 18 months, I’ve done a great job of articulating on the front end, how different we are. The way that we do accountability and facilitate progress is I would argue that it’s not only different than anybody else in our industry.

I don’t know anybody else in the entire landscape of business coaching that does what we do when it comes to our win the week system where we facilitate progress week after week and break it down. So it’s almost automatic. And there are some things we do there and then accountability outreach that is not AI, it’s not automated.

It’s actual human outreach to connect with people and facilitate their success. It’s it’s one of a kind. And I’m sitting here talking about some of the stuff that sometimes I’m guilty of talking about things that are just not that different. Plenty of people can talk to somebody about an offer, an ad, but not everybody.

In fact, probably not hardly anybody actually is working arm in arm, partnering with somebody to make sure that they’re making progress and getting closer to their goals week after week. Those are some of the mistakes that I’ve made over the past year and a half. And like I said, I wanted to unpack those, not as some confessional as much as just to let you know Hey, I, if you’re listening to this, I’m very respectful of you giving me attention, but I don’t want you to think that it’s all just a highlight reel.

There are things that I learned, things that I’m trying to improve. And hopefully that may give you some grace in some of the own hiccups or bumps in the road that you face and may also show you that. Man, that’s just part of the journey, right? There are going to be failures and challenges and struggles, but that those are just speed bumps along the way towards where you’re trying to go.

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

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

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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.