The Fitness Business School – The Biggest Opportunity You Are Missing

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here, and in this episode, I want to talk with you about maybe the biggest missed opportunity that I see to build your business, to improve your productivity, and really just get better results all together in probably less time and that’s planning. So let’s get to it.

Welcome to the fitness business school with Pat Rigsby, the podcast for fitness entrepreneurs who want to make more income, have greater impact, and enjoy more freedom in their ideal business. If you’d like an accelerated route to these goals, email me at [email protected] and put BGA in the subject line and I’ll get you all the details about our business growth accelerator program.

So the other day I was spending some time with some clients on a video call and we talked about opportunities, the highest leverage opportunities, really the easiest opportunities to implement that would have the biggest kind of ROI, biggest bang for the buck. And it didn’t take me very long to, to get to planning on the list. There might be two things that I would say that somebody could do that would be kind of an immediate gratification thing that would come before becoming a plainer, using planning as part of what you do to make sure that you’re spending your time on the things that move you forward. In fact, I would be willing to say that you are at minimum doubling tripling, even maybe quadrupling your chances of success, if you were planning your time strategically and following your plan. So I wanted to just take a few minutes on this episode to talk with you about what I think effective, but simplistic planning looks like.

So the first thing that I would tell you is in my experience, having kind of been a planner for, gosh, I guess now about 25 years, 26 years, something like that planning your day, the evening prior is step one. It allows you to kind of reflect on the day that you just had figure out what you know, what worked, what didn’t, you can take a look at the day ahead before you’re kind of in the middle of it, with things being put on your plate. And it also kind of serves as a way to clear your head. So you’re not trying to remember things and you’re not trying to, to hang on to ideas that keep you up at night.

So planning your day, the evening prior, the first thing that I would recommend you do is look at the things that you are already obligated to. Now, this is pretty simple, right? You’ve got training sessions that you know, that you have to be at, you know how long those take so we can block those off. And when we’re blocking those off, we need to allocate the appropriate amount of time. If, if the training session is from 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM, but you actually have to start set up for the training session at five 50, then we need to be allocating that extra 10 minutes. We need to make sure that we’re allocating the appropriate amount of time for anything that we’re doing, but other things that we’re already obligated to. I mean, if we’ve got family and we’re taking our kids to school or picking them up or taking them to soccer practice, that’s part of it. If we’ve got a staff training, that’s part of it.

Anything that we already have committed time to that in my mind sustains where we are in our business and our life. We allocate time to that. First we go ahead. We document that, that way. We have a clear snapshot of the time that’s actually left to do the things that can move us forward. So let’s say that we map all that out and we’ve got two hours left. Then we know, Hey, this two hours is the only time we have available to make progress on the things that we need to do to take our business from where we are, to where we aspire to be.

Now with that, we’re going to look at really what our big picture goals are, what, what our vision is, what we’re trying to accomplish, whether it be our annual goals, or then hopefully broken down into quarterly goals and even weekly targets. So for me, the simplest place to start is always saying, okay, we’ve got no more than three priorities or what you may call rocks or high priority tasks, whatever you’d like to call them. But I just call it my big three every day. And we’ve got no more than three because honestly, if you could knock out three, a day, five days a week throughout the bulk of the year, you’re going to be light years ahead of not only where you are, but where your competition is because very few people have that sort of focus and that sort of commitment. So what are your three?

I would say if you’re not sure one of them should be focused on this attract unit that I talked about, but basically lead generation, but don’t just put lead generation. We have to be very specific about what we’re going to do in the time that we have available. The second one would be focused on lead conversion, we’re selling. And again, we can’t put selling, we have to say what we’re going to actually do. And then the third, well, that could be kind of this, this kind of wild card that you can use as you wish. Whether like for me, it’s usually a family oriented thing that I’ll have as a priority there. But you know, if, if are in a season of life, a season of business, that it needs to be something for the deliver or service experience unit of your business, do that. If you’ve got a different project you’re working on, you know, you’re filming videos to build out your online library, do that.

But so when we allocate time to those three tasks, whatever they are, the first thing that we need to do is make sure we’re very specific about what we’re trying to accomplish. So it’s not going to say, Hey, I’m going to focus on lead generation. It may mean that, okay, I’m going to write three pages for a new lead magnet report that I’m going to use for lead generation. And I’ve got 60 minutes to write those three pages. It may mean I’m going to go ask five of my clients for a referral or text 10 of my clients and ask them for a referral. But we want to be very specific about the task we’re going to accomplish. So it’s binary. We know we did it or we didn’t, and we want to make sure that we’ve overestimated how long it’s going to take. So if you think that you could write three pages in 30 minutes, if everything was lined up and you know, you were in this good writing rhythm, great overestimate, give yourself 45, give yourself 60. You can always find something else to do that’s productive with that time. If you make progress in the way that would be optimal, you might finish four pages. You might finish five, but so we get that one done. The second one, maybe it’s conversion. Maybe we’re writing our newsletter with the super signature. Maybe we’re sending out an engagement email. Some of the stuff that I talked about very regularly with clients. And you probably heard me talk about on this podcast before, same thing, overestimate, how long it’s going to take, not just to do the writing, but do you have to put it in your email software? Do you have to queue it up? Do you have to test it to make sure it’s formatted in the way that it looks so make sure that you’ve allocated enough time to accomplish everything that you intend to accomplish there. We want to set ourselves up to succeed. And then in that third wild card kind of area, put another priority, personal or professional allocate, whatever time it takes to accomplish that task. And now we’ve got, that’s our focal point. Those are the things that we need to get done today to feel like we won the day. Because for me, the most kind of important metric for you to build a better business is number of days one. And it’s subjective. You get to decide what a one day is or when one day isn’t, but if you’re not making progress towards your goals, we’re kind of just spinning our wheels. And in many cases, we’re losing ground.

Now I understand you’ve got obligations that you’re already committed to like training sessions. You’ve got your big three. There are other to do’s on your list. The rest of the time that you have available in that day can go to those other two dues. You can put those, Hey, I’ve got to go to the post office or, you know what? I need to return this call, or I need to enter this into you know, my, my online software, those are tasks that they don’t require as much time as much thought. And there are certainly things that probably need to get done, but they’re not the things that move you towards achieving your vision, your ideal business. Now, if you do that, this, then at the end of the day today, you get to look back and you reflect just like we did the evening prior, we get to look back and reflect and say, okay, what did I get done? What did I not get done? How could I have made this more effective? How could I have been more efficient with my time? How could I have been clear in what my goal was? Did I not allocate enough time to a task? And it allows you to just improve day after day, not only in accomplishing tasks, but figuring out what works, how long those things take, where you should be spending your time. So you get incrementally productive with every passing day.

It’s five minutes a day to map out your plan for tomorrow. If you keep your planner handy. And when I say planner, I mean an analog planner, right? Like we’re writing in a physical planner, you keep it handy. You review it periodically throughout the day. You check off the things when you accomplish them. So you get that kind of small feeling of gratification, that small feeling of victory. And you’re going to find yourself becoming so much more effective because instead of just reacting to whatever comes your way and letting other people control your time, you get to decide what’s important. You get to decide where you allocate your time and you really get to determine whether or not you’re moving towards your goals. So that’s it. If you want a way to improve your business, that’s not some sort of hack or trick or gimmick or funnel or ad. This is it. Start planning your time, start using it better. If you do, the results will be incredible.

Thanks for listening. I’m giving away a bundle of my bestselling books, the ideal business formula, the fitness entrepreneur handbook in the path. All you have to do is go to patrigsby.com/podgift to get it. Also, make sure to subscribe to The Fitness Business School with Pat Rigsby so you don’t miss an episode and you get yourself on the fast track to creating your ideal business.