Fitness Business School – 3 Things Successful Business Owners Do

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to talk with you about three things that the best business owners do. 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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As I’m recording this, I am fast approaching my 52nd birthday. And so usually each year around this time, I start to go back through my notes and look at things that happened over the past year, thoughts that came up, lessons that kind of maybe reemerged in my life, new things that I learned, observations that I made, and I think it serves as a, just a clarifying period for me that.

That allows me to say, okay I need more of these things. I need a little bit less of this in my world. I need to focus in these areas. And I collect a bunch of notes. I share them in various formats and emails on my website in social media posts, but I wanted to take three of those ideas and talk about them in this podcast, three things that I think that I’ve seen.

The best business owners do time and time again, over the last 20 years in this industry. And the first one is they always are in proximity to other high achievers. They’re in mastermind groups. They attend events. They socialize with people who not only can add value to their experience, right?

People that are going to make them better, but people that probably share some of the same values and same objectives in life. And. I think having that proximity to other high achievers allows them to see what’s possible. It allows them to raise their standards. Of expectation and kind of normalize things that maybe average business owners don’t feel is normal.

Whether that the type of marketing that they do, the advertising spin that they make, the willingness to hire and delegate thoughts on scaling, just so many things that, that maybe the average or typical small business owner may have a passing knowledge of, or may do erratically that proximity to other high achievers.

It normalizes so much of this stuff and it also, it stretches you, right? We just recently had somebody who joined our boardroom group and they had been a private client for some time. They had a, it’s a husband and wife. They have a wonderful business. They’ve grown substantially, at least two X, maybe more in the time we’d worked together privately, but just in the first, maybe six weeks of being in the boardroom group.

I think that their expectations changed completely. I think they’re seeing what was possible from other business owners and maybe what was normal from other business owners really expanded. And in, in the entrepreneurial world, sometimes that can be tough, right? Especially if you’re in a business landscape where you don’t Interact with a whole lot of your competitors in your market.

So you don’t really know the behind the scenes stuff. You don’t really know what’s possible, what’s realistic, what you should be striving for, and you’re on an Island. So I think the proximity to other successful, high achieving owners and people who likely share some of the same values and characteristics that you do.

I think that is number one. I think that the best business owners that I have seen time and time again, It have been that way. They’ve been in the room. They study other people who achieve at a high level. I know that Doug Spurling and I have recently released a more, I guess you would call it a private podcast.

It’s a podcast for people who are a little further along in their business journey, a little more successful. And so we could focus on things that would be specifically relevant to them. So it’s almost that same premise. But some of the people who opted in and wanted access to that podcast, cause you had to fill out a form to get it.

They’re like a who’s who in the industry. And it’s just a testament to. The things that they value, the things that, that they’re committed to immersing themselves in. So I think that’s number one, that proximity, either physical proximity or just that virtual proximity, who you’re surrounding yourself with.

So that, that’s a big one that I see. I can’t think of more than one or two owners that I’ve seen over the last 20 years who didn’t really adhere to that. The second is just a deep focus on the fundamentals and I know I talk about this a lot in the various forums that I communicate, but it’s not that the best owners don’t do some unique things.

They don’t do things that are different than the market, but it’s always rooted in some sort of fundamental foundation. They’re consistent with all the things that matter, whether it’s marketing or staff training or the way that they. Try to deliver the programming or create the experience for clients.

They are just always good at that stuff. And strangely, when I look at people who may not have ascended to that high performer kind of level, it’s not that they’re unaware of these things. It’s not that the idea of. Having a monthly marketing plan that you’re consistent in executing is foreign to them.

It’s just that they’re erratic. They don’t do it. It’s not that staff training is this foreign concept. It’s just that they’ll find a million reasons why they can’t go. It’s not that learning and improving aren’t things that they’ve done some of. It’s that they just don’t, they don’t consistently attend events.

They don’t consistently Study and improve in areas that they can springboard them forward. They just dance in and out of the things that the best business owners just do time and time again. I have known people who in our industry have just been really consistent for a decade and a half. It just doing great work, being a recognized pillar in their community.

Following up and putting out great, valuable educational content and demonstrating how they can help over and over. And it just compounds over time. They are just amazing at looking at that kind of compounding effect and just going day after day or week after week and committing to doing good work and often great work, and it’s not that they’re chasing, Oh, how do I master the latest, greatest social media fad, or how do I reinvent my training program?

Because I went to this one seminar. It’s that they’re always aggregating ways to improve and just stacking things on layer after layer to build a better business. And I think that if I were to look at the people who I think have been okay, they built okay businesses. They’re not on the verge of collapse, but it’s a, but it’s a struggle.

And it’s it’s always high stress and they feel like they probably just not ever could. Fully turn the corner and built something durable and that allows them to build wealth. And they’re not too worried about competition anymore. They’ve not gotten to that point yet. It’s not that they didn’t know.

It’s that they just didn’t adhere to the fundamentals and focus on them over and over until they had created so much separation from all the average businesses in their market that there was never going to be an opportunity for that average business to fully catch up. And then the third thing that I’ll talk about with kind of a common characteristic or common trait of the best business owners is.

They think more like a real investor and less like a day trader. They, I don’t think that the best business owners just are expecting an immediate ROI from everything that they do. They’re expecting long term returns. They. Aren’t just going to change everything on a whim, but they’re going to study new things and learn how to stay one step ahead, but they’re going to think them through and they’re going to stress test them and make sure that they merit becoming an integral part of a business.

They think much more like a Warren Buffett than some penny stock day trader in that approach. It’s okay. I’m going to build these things into my business. And hold them longterm. And the only way that I’m going to discard those things is if I find a better way. And I think that so many business owners do think like day traders where it’s like, Oh, I’m going to run this, but I’m only going to do it if I get an immediate gratification, or I’m going to, I saw some social media posts or I went to some event and I saw one presentation and I’m just going to.

Throw everything out the window that we used to do. I had a gentleman who used to work for me in marketing for the first, during the first leg of being in business, three, four, five years, he originally came on and ran like personal training in my first health club. And then evolved into a more managerial role there.

Then got involved in all the online stuff we did. I remember going to Dan Kennedy. Super conference in the Midwest and would go in, there’d be a presentation and he’d come out of this presentation and he would want to reinvent everything that we did. It’d be like, Oh, this guy’s talking about webinars. We have to do webinars or this guy’s talking about this approach.

We have to do that. And I’m like, each of the first four speakers, we do more revenue than, so I don’t know that we have to discard anything we can learn from them. We can see if it fits our model, but we’re not going to just discard everything we do and take a flyer on something else. But you see a lot of people who are just looking for that magic bullet, that one kind of quick hit that they think is going to transform everything, even though it contradicts everything that they teach as a coach, right?

It contradicts everything about what they teach when it comes to exercise and nutrition and recovery. And building a lifestyle that leads to long term results and better health. And

it’s something that I think the best in the industry are rooted in. They’re, they think like an investor and they understand that, okay, this, it’s back to what I said in the second thought was that, that compounding that goes on, that if I do this and I keep getting better at this, and if I’m committed to it, over time, it’s going to create such a competitive advantage that I’m going to become a category of one in my respective market.

So those are three things that I think have been just separators, but common characteristics of these high achieving business owners. They’re not only commonalities, but they’re, it’s why they’re high achieving business owners. It’s. It’s always interesting that the people that I talked to that they’ve seen social media posts of big numbers and gaudy revenue statistics or whatever else, and they get caught up in that.

And they think that this one thing is what did it all for somebody. And it’s never one thing. It’s always a way of operating. It’s always a way of thinking. It’s always rooted in consistency. See. Almost without exception, not just from the business owners that I’ve had in coaching programs that I’ve had as private clients, but even from an observational standpoint with the other businesses that I’ve just seen from afar in our industry, they, they’ve all the best ones have all followed that same trajectory.

So there’s a lesson there. If you want to build a great business, that is a great business, five years from now, 10 years from now, maybe 15 years from now as well. Then focus on the things that I just talked about and start to discard the or at least stop paying attention to all that shiny object stuff.

And if you do, you’re going to find yourself starting to reap some of the rewards of that consistency and that compounding. And before you know it, you’re going to have the best business in your market, just like the people that I’m talking about.

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

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