Fitness Business School – Creating Leverage in Your Business

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk with you about creating more leverage. If you want success in your business, you need to leverage. So in this episode, we’re going to talk about the leverage shift. Let’s get started.

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All right, Let’s talk about leverage. Let’s talk about employing leverage in your business, and really there are four areas where you can create more leverage. So I’m going to run through those four areas and give you examples, almost like a little mini checklist in each area. So you can just look at your business and say, well, wait a minute, here’s an opportunity. Here’s something I can do more with. Some of these are going to seem like old hat for you. Some of them are going to seem like very much common sense, but the idea is to really see this as a filter, you’re taking your business through to identify opportunities that are either are untapped or under utilized.

So the first area we want to focus on is your service. So if you’re doing most of the service delivery yourself, we can certainly scale by adding staff and creating more leverage. We can duplicate our own service effort by adding in more people to provide those services. And beyond that, we can definitely bring on staff to do lower ROI activities so we can spend more time on the higher ROI services. So that’s number one, number two, having on demand solutions, whether it’s a deliverable asset, like an info product, or having on demand workouts that you’re providing as part of your kind of hybrid type of business, or even if you’re shifting online, just making sure that when a client wants to use your services to achieve their goals, they can do it conveniently probably any time anywhere. And then finally, you know, an obvious one, we’ve leaned on a lot in the industry over the past decade to create more leverage is offering group solutions, but you know, the obvious group solution, large group training or boot camps, it’s been throttled a little bit as of late, but we still have small group training as a potential option that I think has plenty of upside. We can do group training online. You can do group nutrition, coaching, really any service that want to provide almost anything outside of something like massage or something can be done in a group environment. So number one, first category service. We’ve got a number of things that we can do to create more leverage.

Now, number two, when we think about our clients, how can we create more leverage with the client? Well, if you’re not employing recurring billing now, that’s, that’s the most obvious one for years. I was a big advocate, probably the biggest advocate early on in the fitness industry, about 12 month agreements for personal training clients being new to the industry way back when you know, I didn’t have this preconceived notion of selling packages or series or whatever. So I just didn’t understand if a health club could sell a 12 month membership, why couldn’t a training business, because it was still the same type of person seeking the same type of outcome. So recurring billing. Now it may be a little bit tougher to get an annual membership from somebody, but you can certainly get something that auto renew. So you’re not spending time chasing chasing money from clients. You’re not spending time trying to convince them to renew. The default is that they renew and then they have to make the conscious decision to decide that they do not want to continue.

So that’s an easy way to create more leverage increasing your monthly client value. People talk a lot about lifetime client value, but lifetime client value is kind of this ever evolving animal, right? Every month that your client stays with you, their lifetime value increases. So a number that you can more easily quantify and focus on is the monthly client value. Look at the number of clients that you have, the amount of revenue that you generated, divide that revenue by those number of clients. And you see what each client on average is worth. If we can get that number to increase by raising rates, by solving problems more effectively, by providing ancillary things that move clients closer to their goals or move them to their goals faster, that’s going to increase, increase our monthly client value.

And then the third way that we can create leverage through our clients is to generate referrals. Everybody that you work with has other people in their lives that could potentially benefit from what you do. Are you doing an effective job in connecting with those people in your client’s life? Are you getting the number of introductions? Are you getting clients to invite people in to experience what you do? If you’re not on a consistent basis, there’s a huge opportunity to create more leverage in your business there.

All right, the third area where we can create some real leverage is through our marketing. So the beauty of some of the things that you do in marketing is you can just do them and do something once and create a lot of impact through that thing. So let’s think about the difference between having a one-on-one networking conversation with somebody versus doing a public speaking engagement in front of 50 people, right? You can give that same message. You can talk about the, the, the things that you can do to help people in the same way, but now, instead of getting one person’s attention and potentially one opportunity to follow up, you have 50. So that’s just the most simplistic way to understand leverage when it comes to marketing. But think about the impact an ad can have, like, let’s say that you run an ad on Facebook or Instagram. Now you create an ad once and it can be seen by literally tens of thousands of people. You can put your message, your business, the problems that you solve your expertise in front of tens of thousands of people by creating one, one piece of marketing, right? One advertising video, one, one advertising post. It is that simple. And if you figure one out, if you fine tune it and get it right, it’s something that you can run for an extended period of time and get a lot of mileage from now.

The second thing that I think of when it comes to leverage is creating an effective lead magnet. Now I know through the coaching programs that we have, we, we provide dozens of done for you, lead magnets, but in truth, the best possible lead magnet is something that is very specific to a, the target market that you serve. And then B the, the unique ways that you are the best possible person to help that, that prospect achieve their goals and solve their problems. So creating a lead magnet, I mean, you can get so much mileage out of that. I’ve, I’ve written books that, that I’ve used effectively, probably more than anything else as lead magnets that have really benefited me and my business and the people downloading them, the people reading them for years and years and years. So creating a lead magnet that allows you to make a good first impression with somebody and start a relationship provides massive leverage. Follow up is probably the most underappreciated form of leverage in the fitness industry. If you have a lead, the more up you do the better follow-up you do allows you to get more mileage, more value, leverage that lead more effectively. And then if you can find ways to follow up that are scalable, like email, follow-up like automated text message, followup, anything where you can do something once and get it in front of a lot of people or automate getting it in front of people. If we, the more we do of that, to the prospects, we have, the more valuable those prospects become. And so that’s huge leverage, and it’s a form of leverage that frankly in our industry is just not used nearly as much as it should be.

And then finally creating assets. It’s like not a balance sheet asset that your accountant would talk about, but an asset like writing an email newsletter, that’s really good. Well, you can turn around and put that in an auto-responder. You can recycle it and use it again. You can use it as a post in in social media. You can use it as a contribution to a book. You can use it as a script for a video. You could use it really in probably a half dozen different ways effectively, and think about everything that you do has that ability. You want to always create things instead of saying, okay, I just have to create some content and seeing it as some deadline driven thing, that’s disposable creating an asset that you’re going to be able to use time and time again, that has value that might be able to be re-purposed in different areas. So there are a few ideas for marketing leverage, and then finally the fourth one creating more time, leverage focusing on high ROI tasks. So are you identifying how much it would cost to pay somebody else to do the things that you’re doing? So it may cost you, you know, $40 to pay somebody to do a one-on-one training session, but it may cost you $15 to pay somebody to do an administrative task or $18 to pay somebody to come in and spend that hour cleaning the gym or something like that.

So when you’re looking at your personal tasks, well, are you focusing on the high ROI tasks? And are you always trying to trade up to doing things that really only you should be doing instead of the things that a number of people, a variety of people could be doing, and then kind of along those same lines, are you doing high energy tasks, things that energize you, things that allow you to generate more momentum that, that kind of foster you getting more done, because you may do things that sure you can do them, but if they drain you and it means overall, you get less done over the course of a day or the course of a week, then, you know, that’s, that’s not going to create the type of leverage. It’s not going to create the type of outcome you’re looking for. And then two that I talk about very frequently when it comes to time planning, making sure that you are proactively deciding how you’re going to be spending your time and then tracking, looking at how the things that you’re doing are producing.

A lot of people are apprehensive to track their numbers on much of anything, but tracking is one of those unheralded opportunities to create more leverage, to, to have more efficiency. Because if you see certain things are working really well, you put more of your time, money, resources into those things. If you see something isn’t working, then you either fix it or you abandoned it. So you want another really simple way to get more leverage from your time. So if we’re thinking about creating a shift to, to, to really have more leverage in our business, those four areas and that kind of simple checklist is what I would run through. I would ask myself about each of those things and saying, Hey, is there a way for me to do more of this? Am I doing this at all? Is there a way for me to do this better? Have I abandoned this or forgotten about this? Are there opportunities for me to put more of this into action and get more from the time that I’m investing? So some ideas on leverage. I know they’ve helped me. I’m sure they can help you too.

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.