Fitness Business School – Are You Evolving?

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and today’s episode, I want to talk about this simple question, are you evolving? 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
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Recently, I had a meeting with Matt Sizemore from my team and Matt handles the role of operations lead, if you will, like if there’s a COO and I’m not heavily into the whole title thing, but if there’s a COO in my world, it’s Matt. And what’s interesting is I think Matt is Great at what he does. And he’s also been behind the scenes for guys like Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson and Pat Beith doing lots of great work.

Jeremy Scott, he’s helped so many people with some of that offstage stuff. He’s an absolute rock star, but I also think he’s very representative of the team that we have. And we’ve got just an all star lineup. Of people who, whose accomplishments professionally rival and exceed those of 95 percent of the people parading themselves out there as experts in the industry.

And they’re all key contributors on our team, but they’re not always the front facing person is silly as it sounds. I’m the front facing person and I’m not exactly a cover model ready or anything like that. That’s probably why I’m doing a podcast here. I wanted to touch on that cause Matt was here.

We were talking about business and our next six week cycle. We operate in six week cycles. We don’t do quarterly planning. We do six week stuff just because it’s easier to wrap your arms around forecasting for six weeks and a host of other reasons. But one of the things that, you know, that I have learned over the years is your business is never going to sustainably outgrow you and your team.

It’s not that it can’t outgrow it temporarily because you can ride a wave of a singular marketing tactic and occasionally outgrow. Where you are at or where your team is for a brief period of time it’s very much like hearing about people winning the lottery and then losing it all within a matter of years because The yeah, they rode the wave a winning lottery ticket, but their wealth outgrew ability to manage it and so that incongruency aligned itself and they were back to financially where they were when they started or maybe even worse off.

And I think stuff like that matters now more than ever. See the normal stuff that people are talking about from a business coaching landscape it’s, I don’t have a better way to put it other than to say it’s just going to fail and I’m not really trying to beat the wet blanket here and make that a downer.

I’m just telling you that anybody who pays attention to the history of the fitness industry and what has been durable and what has not, Anybody who has looked across other industries and seen what worked and what didn’t can read the writing on the wall and they’re gonna, and it’s perfectly obvious that this whole approach that so many people are touting in the industry, it’s going to fail and it’s going to take a lot of people down with it.

This whole, Hey, how can we give you 50 new clients in however many weeks with no risk to you. And it’s, it is the same type of stuff that created the bubble for the real estate bubble where people are buying million dollar homes with 30,000 incomes because they were paying interest only. Mortgages or the whole check into cash stuff that had to get regulated.

It doesn’t work and it preys on desperation, but if you are paying attention, the sales cycle for buyers, for people who are coming into our programs is lengthened. People are more skeptical. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. I just think there are more discerning buyers because they’re more aware they are a little bit more educated. They have access to so much information at their fingertips and the race to the bottom when it comes to things like group training is on because franchises are Pouring money into group training, private equity is snapping up group training companies and pushing them further and further.

Earning a client requires more than it ever has. And frankly, some of the stuff that’s happening out there where Business owners are being sold a tactic and they’re buying that thinking it’s solving the problem. It’s a little bit like somebody thinking that the ab roller is going to make somebody fit and lean.

It’s just not, that’s not how it works. If you’re approaching things the way that you did in 2019, 2017, 2015, You’re skating on thin ice because the market is drastically different. If you’re falling for this kind of flood your gym with people for no risk offer, you’re probably torpedoing your business without even realizing it.

And this is not a new offer, by the way. This is an offer that existed many years ago. When I got into the fitness industry in the very early two thousands, this was an offer that was already dying out in that cycle, where there were. marketing companies that would go around and do something like that for gyms that were desperate on their last legs.

And the marketing companies would sap the last little bit of life out of them and profit and move on without ever having to sign a lease, without ever having to buy equipment. And that’s the same stuff that’s happening now. Look, the faster you accept this stuff is truth. you can fix it. The path forward for you as a business owner is to be better and to be different.

You can’t think that a cold lead is just going to blindly choose you the first time they see your ad on Facebook anymore. They know that they have options everywhere. Heck, they can drive down the street and see a half dozen to a dozen different training based options, not just fitness options, specialty programs like cycle bar or club Pilates or something like that, or group training programs like burn bootcamp or F45 or orange theory.

There are just no shortage of options. You can’t become better by hiring some. marketing company to come in and make a desperation play and try to add 50 to a hundred new members fast that you don’t really have the infrastructure to serve well and probably alienates the current clients you have and burns through The marketing opportunities you have selling people for pennies on the dollar and then you having to give up the bulk of that to the marketing company, you’re essentially just becoming really cheap labor for somebody else.

And that sort of stuff, it’s likely to be the final nail in people’s business coffin. The people that fall for these quick fix tactics are the people who are in desperation mode to begin with, right? Because they’re looking for a hail Mary instead of building a business. And they’re not tactics.

A healthy business is going to lean into, right? We’ve entered this new era of the fitness industry that I’m going to call like industry adolescence. When I started in this piece of the fitness industry, and I’m saying a coaching focused or training lane of the fitness industry, it was very immature. And frankly, I benefited from that a great deal because the health club, at that point was probably in adolescence or early adulthood at best.

Training was really a relatively new market. And that I think allowed me to gain traction as somebody who could consult for other people, do coaching, be seen as something of an expert. more quickly than you could in a more mature market. So I’m grateful for the stage it was at, but let’s face it at that point, I didn’t see any retired personal trainers around.

It was very much a first generation field. And because of that, you could use a lot of these direct marketing type approaches and a lot of these simpler tactics and it would work because You were one, the one person in your town doing what you did or one of a very few people doing what you did.

Consumers were relatively uninformed. It was really novel. And they, the ways that they would research and the amount of reviews online and their trust in what they would find online was limited. Now things are more mature in the market. So we have to educate and demonstrate to our prospects because they may wait for months before making a buying decision.

They may search around and explore and they know they have options, right? If you’re the only car brand in town, if people are gonna buy a car, they’re buying that. But when they have a bunch of different options available, then you don’t have any monopoly on things. And if you’re struggling right now, I’m going to encourage you to take a hard look and say, okay, how do I reinvent myself so I can become the best at what I do in my respective market?

And if that means making a little bit of a renovation to what you do, that’s fine. Reinvention is not a bad thing because if you wait, it’s only going to get tougher. Now, if you’re doing right now, I think your road to success is doubling down on becoming a better business owner. If you’re one of those people who are like, Hey, my business is solid.

It’s okay. It’s stable. And it’s built, like I get good word of mouth. I get referrals. My clients stay with me a long time, be a better business owner. Now focus on that is your next step. Just like for the struggling person, reinvention is probably your. Next right step. And if you’re doing really well, double down on what makes you different and start thinking like an entrepreneur and building wealth, don’t think like a solopreneur don’t drift back to what got you going in that early stage of business, because the reality is change and evolution aren’t optional.

And when I talk to people about business coaching and they say things like, ah, it’s too expensive, or I’m going to do this on my own man, I worry about those people and not because they’re not choosing me. There are other solutions and people out there that can help them and support them. But instead I worry about them because they’re not willing to evolve in a market that is definitely evolving, but you don’t get to stop time.

You don’t get to turn things back to to the old days there and bring back blockbuster and pay phones and that sort of stuff. You either jump on the train or maybe try to get ahead of it or you fall behind and if you fall behind, if you’re last to evolve, it’s like death by a thousand cuts. I’m not going to tell you any of this is easy and I think anybody who tells you it’s easy and makes it sound super easy.

Is this isn’t just being disingenuous. This is they’re a flat out liar because business building a great durable business is supposed to be hard. Doing anything that is uncommon is supposed to be hard, but that doesn’t mean it’s as complicated as people make it. It just means that you’ve got to persevere and you’ve got to be decisive and you’ve got to have focus and consistency because with the right model.

And a commitment to that focus and moving closer towards where you want rather than being distracted by everything that pops up, you can do it. And it may very well be the best opportunity to do it in recent memory because I believe that there’s definitely a kind of thinning of the herd in our market that we’re in the middle of.

Just like when Planet Fitness started to steamroll. A lot of the market was out there. A lot of the independently owned health clubs started to die away. You even saw guys who were consultants in the health club space that focused on those independent clubs shift to the personal training space because there were more independent operators they could consult with there.

We’re about to see the same thing here. So What’s great is if you do it, I think wealth is built. Fortunes are created in turbulent times. That’s it’s a cool opportunity for you, but you have to accept that the old approach isn’t really the new approach you need to lean into going forward. And it wasn’t all that long ago, probably 15 years where being an owner in our industry meant.

Staking a claim to a flat piece of grass in a public park and running a group on and those days have gone the way of those pay phones and blockbuster and music videos that used to be on MTV and all that fun stuff that was happening when I was younger. It’s a good thing. I think that change and evolution and commitment should be a prerequisite for It thins the market.

It weeds out the people who won’t do what it takes and it creates more opportunity for you. My, my request, my suggestion, my plea to you is adapt, evolve, and commit to being the best in your respective market. If you do, you’ll reap the rewards because of your choice.

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.