Fitness Business School – The Places I’ve Learned Important Lessons

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here an in today’s episode. I want to talk with you about the places that I learned the lessons that allowed me to get better. Let’s get to it.

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For whatever reason, I was recently thinking back to things that, that we did in the various stages of my kind of early career. And it dawned on me that none of them really came from spending a whole lot of time looking in my current market or looking even through the lens of my industry, or at least the part of the industry that I was.

Really heavily tied to, and I know that’s an abstract way of leading off. So let me give you some specifics. So just starting back to my time as a college baseball coach, my first couple of years, we won more games than we lost, but we were pretty ordinary. And so I started looking at people, teams, organizations that had made a leap and really looked outside of the college baseball world to figure that out. I looked and saw that when I remember reading about Nebraska football getting really good by making strength and conditioning a priority and still all the people we were competing against hadn’t made it a true progressive priority, they dabbled in it, but they had not made it.

Is important a part of their program as bunk coverages or first and third defenses or something like that. And so looking outside the industry, that way, the way that we approached how we played, I looked at even more there. There’s a lot more out there about college football and college basketball than there was about college baseball.

So I looked at even people like BYU. Hey. Edwards became the head coach there. And I know this is so off topic for some of you guys, but, and they just started throwing the ball like crazy. And it allowed them to springboard into being a really good program, even though they were not one of the historic kind of blue blood programs in college football.

And so I thought, man, how could we do that in baseball? I looked at some marketing stuff and saw how really average businesses grew substantially by getting better at like direct response marketing. So I totally transformed how we marketed things and started writing basically sales letters to recruits.

Notice I didn’t say, Oh, I just went around and borrowed from all the other small college baseball programs around the landscape, because frankly, We had worse resources than we had no scholarships. My first four years, we had 1.7 the last two years in a division that allowed for 12 and all the good teams had 12 and there were a bunch of other resource disadvantages we had that I won’t get into because it’s beyond the scope of the podcast.

But when I started my first training business, everybody was doing hour long sessions and they were. They were charging for packages. So it was like prepay and buy 12, a 12 pack, a 24 pack, a 36 pack of sessions. And it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense at all, because the need to have that much disposable income to pay for that upfront and the value exchange favoring just the one person that was the seller, you got all the money upfront before you had ever delivered anything.

So I thought about, okay, the things that are more common because training, at least in the first market that I was in, there might’ve been a dozen people in that community that had ever hired a personal trainer and I’m like, how do you make this more normal? How do you make this a far more normalized thing?

And I thought about all the ways that. People who were in that kind of middle class landscape paid for things, whether it was a mortgage or a car payment or a gym membership or whatever else. I’m like, it’s all essentially a monthly payment plan, right? It’s all financed out. It’s not, Hey, prepay for the year.

And you can have this thing now. Yeah. Somebody may go through finding a finance company in the dealership receives the full payment. Upfront, but the consumer is financing out. They’re amortizing the payments over time. And notice, I didn’t say I borrowed this from another personal trading business because frankly, they weren’t doing it.

In fact, when I brought it to people who were. The more well known leaders in that landscape, they told me I was crazy. And I’m like, if that’s how almost all of society pays for their car and their house, it’s not that crazy that they would want everything else to be on this monthly payment plan too. And if I think back to, I know like small group training has become very common.

And I know my colleague and partner on a lot of things, Doug Spurling, Has become a huge kind of pillar in that corner of the industry where he built a wonderful business and got a seven figure exit out of a small group training business. We did small group training in, I think probably starting in 2006.

But we just had a small space, about 800 square feet, 800 square foot room in a health club. And I had trained small groups of athletes for years. When I was coaching baseball, we had what we called specialty sessions because kids had different class times and we didn’t have that much practice, indoor practice space.

We would bring in four to six at a time. We’ll just do the same thing here. And we called it team training. We didn’t call it small group training at time, borrowed it from my experience in sports, and then dealt with the necessity of having just a smaller footprint. How do we make the most of it?

Even when I got into franchising the way that. It is traditionally approached is very much a sell the sell a territory and the franchisee then has to secure a building. They do a build out, they get equipment and there’s this pretty significant lag, sometimes six to 12 months of a lag for somebody to have the rights and then eventually get open.

In fact, there had been any number of franchises that sold territory rights. And never opened the majority of them. I remember a very popular fitness franchise back way back earlier on in my career, like 2008, 2009, and they sold like the rights to 200 locations that never got open and it allowed the owner to get a big exit, but it left franchisees holding the bag there.

For me, I thought about this differently and I looked okay. Maybe nobody’s done this in the fitness industry, but if you look at some of these places like Midas muffler shops, and I grew up working in a garage, I was familiar with that landscape. People like that did a lot of conversions. They’d take these mom and pop auto repair businesses and they would convert them to their brand.

And so we brought conversions to the fitness industry and to the best of my knowledge, I was the first to bring traditional. Bring conversions to an industry that are only really experienced traditional franchising and, or at least at scale and one year sold 116 franchises and got them all open within a 12 month window because they were largely conversions and that’s unheard of.

I, the reason I tell you this is I think so many people get into this kind of incestual way of growing their business and they just try to copy what’s going on in their industry and it’s really tough to stand out if you’re just doing what everybody else is doing. And if you look around in your market, everybody’s priced the same and everybody’s.

Doing large group training, then maybe that’s a clue that you shouldn’t do that. Maybe it’s a clue that you have to step out of the box a little bit and do something different. And there are any number of ways to differentiate yourself. It’s not just in the format that you train or the pricing you use.

It could be in how you market, it could be. Who you market to, it could certainly be a client experience thing. There are any number of ways that you can differentiate yourself. I see so many people in our industry that. They fall for these, they’ll fall for an ad where somebody says, we did this. And so we’re going to sell it to you and you can do it now.

Not realizing that maybe the reason they’re doing that is because it’s on fumes and they, it worked for them because they were a first adopter early on. And then it burned out and stopped working. So now they’re trying to milk a little bit more money out of it. So they’re going to sell it to you. But if you want to differentiate yourself in the market, it starts by being okay with being different.

It starts by saying, I can aggregate good ideas. In ways other than just borrowing somebody’s playing apples for apples. And that doesn’t mean you should learn from other people. Hopefully you’re learning from this podcast, but you have to be able to adapt it to you, your circumstances, your market.

I think that’s been one of the biggest blessings of my time as a business coach is I never fell into that trap of saying, Hey, I have this facility, so just do it like we do. Even when my first info product I did with Eric Ruth, where we documented exactly what we did in our training business and sold it to people.

I, I knew that out of the gate coming from baseball, knowing. What worked in one school with one set of resources and one market wasn’t going to work exactly the same in another market. I knew the same thing in business. So when somebody’s Hey, I’m in this major metropolitan area and we do this and blah, blah, blah.

And you’re in a small town in the middle of Kentucky, you can learn from them, but you cannot borrow what they do apples for apples and think that it has a chance of working the same. I would encourage you learn where you can, sometimes that’s outside of our industry and understand

that anything that you learn has to be adapted to the resources you have, the circumstances, the That you’re immersed in, the goals that you’re trying to achieve, and really you, as an owner, what you’re willing and excited about executing.

If you figure that out, take it from my experience, most of what I learned had never touched the fitness industry when I applied it in the fitness industry. And at least most of the things that worked really well, that’s where they came from. And frankly, the handful of times that I’ve tried to borrow an idea that worked in the industry and just say, Hey, I can do that.

And I’ll just do it better because I’ve got more experience, better track record. It’s never worked out as well as the other stuff did. Just some insight on how I learned the things that I learned that worked for me, and I think it’ll work for you too.

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

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