Fitness Business School – The Overlooked Success Secret

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk with you about the success secret, that your likely overlooking it’s been a foundational element of any success that I’ve had professionally. And I’m sure that it’s going to have the same type of impact for you when you put it into action. 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.

Growing up in kind of an athletic environment or in the sports world, one of the things that I constantly heard from probably my, my early days playing sports on was this kind of commitment to repetition of the fundamentals. Repetition was, was everything right? The, the more reps you got in, the better you were going to be. And obviously, as, as I got older, I kind of learned that not all reps are created equal and you know, whatever you’re doing, you’re reinforcing. And you know, the, the thing about it is though it’s true, whatever you are doing, you’re reinforcing it. And you’re building on whether it be habits or skills, you know, the, the more that you practice, the more that you potentially can improve. And sure there are going to be people who may be listening to this. They want to debate and say, well, you know, the quality of practice is everything. Well, you know, if you’re not practicing, then we can’t really worry about quality. Like you have to do the thing before you do the thing.

Well, you have to do some repetitions before we’re improving the quality of the repetitions. And it’s amazing how, how little we talk about that in the business world. We, we search around for this perfect tactic. We want to grab the, the ad somebody else is doing. We want to have the perfect sales process or, you know, we’re, we’re looking for that magic bullet solution. When in all actuality practice is probably a much more certain answer. And it, it’s, it’s always, probably amazing to me, but also refreshing to me that all those things that I learned in my time in sports, they kind of cycle back and they, they matter in everyday life. They matter in being an entrepreneur. And, you know, I think a lot of people, they, they want to avoid doing the work. They want to avoid practice. You don’t ever really hear people talk about, Hey, I need to practice this thing. I need to get some reps in before I’m going to be good at something before I’ve earned the right to be successful. But in my mind, that’s exactly how it works.

You know, when people tell me they’re not good at it writing, I’m sorry. They haven’t written very much. If people are uncomfortable with public speaking, it’s probably people who have spoken in public very infrequently and the list goes on and on. I mean, if you want to get good at something, you’re going to have to practice, you’re going to have to put the reps in, but there’s more to it than that. Like, repetition is kind of the, the, the foundation of frequency, right? Like, so I send a daily email and have for 15 years without missing a day. And that frequency builds up a, a decent amount of trust with people. They know that in an industry where there are quote unquote gurus, that’s the word that I always get in my inbox. When somebody had a negative experience with somebody who’s a coach or a consultant, they call him a guru. Well, they, you know, they, they probably do and do much homework on that person, right. That person is probably somebody that they saw an ad about recently. And that person, if you looked at their Facebook business page that they’re running the ad from, it was probably created in 2020 or 2019, or maybe at the earliest 2018, but were they around five years ago? Were they around eight years ago? Were they around 10 years ago? Probably not. Right.

So for me, that repetition, that frequency has built up trust over time. In fact I did a kind of a brainstorming workshop a couple of weeks back, and some of my clients were on there along with people who, who may not have been clients, but were on my email list. And so they had heard about it and I asked the clients how long they had been receiving my emails before they became a client. And there was one person who had signed up immediately kind of as a referral. And then there was one person who said two months, and then the rest of them, like a dozen others people, it was two, two years, four years, five years, six months, nine months. I mean, there was nobody on average, right? Like, I mean, we’re talking about 12 to 15 people replied, I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 15. And there were only three people that it was less than a year. So that frequency, he created trust that repetition was a foundational element of building a business.

And we kind of know this, if you study advertising right here, things that, that say that people need to have their offer seen anywhere from seven to 21 times. And so if you’re running a radio spot, you want to run it at the same time. So the same people are likely in their car hearing it. You know, you, you, you want to make sure that the people see the message with enough frequency for it to stick, and that all comes back to repetition, right? Like if I’m sending emails, if I’m adding that little PS that you’ve likely seen at the end of every email, it’s not just about, Hey, whenever you’re ready, here’s an offer. And they’re just going to notice that PS for the first time today, and there was an offer, so I kind of synced up timing and they were ready that day. It’s also about seeing that offer over time so they can learn about it. They can think about it. You know, there, there there’s some awareness that has built up over time, but then, you know, repetition doesn’t end there in business. It’s not just, Hey, I need to, to, to stay with ads and, and keep putting stuff out there and keep kind of fine tuning it until somebody clicks, or I need to send my three or four emails a week.

I’ve trained hundreds of salespeople over the years and in my first training business, we had everybody on our team. If you were a trainer, you were selling training as well. We had kind of a single person that sold and, you know, and handed out clientele, everybody sold. And we had people that I think we’re very uncommon, the trouble with selling. We had people that probably had personalities or skill sets that most people would have said, Hey, that person’s not a great fit to be a salesperson. And every one of them sold at a high level, they converted it. We considered a very successful percentage and it all just came down to practice. We role-played sales every week. And so they got very comfortable in those conversations. And in fact, the role-playing was tougher than the actual sales consultation because they were with me. And as the sales trainer, I kind of knew the answers to the questions, right? The people they were going to sit down with were far less an expert in the topic than the, the actual salesperson.

So that practice, those repetitions really made all the difference. And then, you know, the same thing with referrals, people will say, well, you know what, man, I’m doing a great job with my clients and I don’t understand why they’re not referring more. Well, I mean, there are a few things that go into this. A they’re paying you to do a great job with them, not paying you so they can go become salespeople, but it’s usually the person that asked for referrals once or twice a year in only one format. So they don’t have a referral process that creates repetitions and create some variety with the client so that they may not be compelled to refer because you’re going to offer some sort of financial incentive, but maybe they’re compelled to share a Facebook posts because they’re eager to share valuable content with friends, without really having to ask anything to somebody, or maybe you’ve put out a great charity kind of offering where you’re going to do a charity workout and they can invite people, but we’re not getting enough reps there. So there’s not enough frequency or, you know, maybe it’s how often you coach your staff. People will, will come to mastermind meetings or people email me and say, man, I can’t get my staff to, to do this or that. Or my, my staff is really, you know, they’re, they’re not great at what we do and we’re just not good at hiring. So I’m just gonna scale things back and be a one person show again. Well, I mean, if you’re not coaching your people, if you’re not practicing and they’re not getting better, it’s probably not going to be a great environment to work in. Right.

So if you want to improve, you’ve got to practice the things that matter. But if, but if you do, what’s great about this is most people don’t, most people aren’t willing to do the repetitions. They’re not willing to be bad before. They’re good. They, they want immediate gratification and they’re not willing to put in the time or the effort and have the persistence to get good. So because of that, this sort of repetition based approach, this practice mentality becomes a really distinct competitive advantage because it’s something that most people Will do. And if you’re willing to do things that matter, that most people won’t do, you’re going to succeed.

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