Fitness Business School – Tighten Your Business’ Foundation

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I wanted to share some of my early stage business lessons, really from my first four or five years as a business owner. So if that’s the stage of business you’re in, or you feel like you want to go back and tighten the foundation of your already mature business, you’re going to love what we cover in this episode.

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You know, in hindsight, there are plenty of lessons from my first four to five years as a business owner. Things that that I did that were probably both good and bad and you know, really just set the stage for a lot of what has gone on since, and I figured I’d pass all that along because really it all started back in the fall of like 2004. And since then I’ve owned co-own over 30 different businesses in the fitness, health, sports performance industry, and been involved in any number of other business endeavors as a consultant, as an advisor. And, you know, all of that really started with a lot of these foundational lessons. So, so here are a few takeaways that I think are are, are paramount that, that I learned early on. And the first one is really a focus on selling. And, you know, even from the first week that that I was in business and had a staff, we did sales training every week at minimum with everybody on the team. In fact, I did additional one-on-one sales training with anybody who was wanting to sell more because we were grooming our entire team to be able to sit down and do consultative selling with any prospect.

Now, because that first business that I had was in a health club where we subleased and we own the training and retail rights within the club, there were already some leads coming in. Now, the second business I owned was a health club with a training and retail business inside. But you know, in that first one, there were leads coming in and we probably were able to spend a little more time doing selling than we were on lead generation. Sure. We needed to generate leads within the facility, but the leads within the facility were you know, I mean, they were in some ways already qualified. We just had to get them to be willing to sit down with us. And, you know, we got, we got really good at sales. We had people you’d never imagine could sell, sitting down and closing 50% of the people that they connected with that were just traditional health club members. Right? So we’re not talking about people with substantial amounts of disposable income on average, not people who Hey, it, in most cases, most of the people that we worked with that was their first experience ever with a personal trainer yet, you know, because our, our team trained very regularly and they became comfortable with selling and they believed in what we did.

And honestly, because I think it probably helped, I believed in them, right? Like I believed that they could do this and that gave them confidence. And in the moments that maybe they, they, they had their confidence start to wane. In fact, one of those employees got so much from our sales training that once we sold that business and he went to work somewhere else, he’d still come directly to me for sales training. And he still comes for business advice for a business that he currently owns. And it just was a culture that it was rooted in this mentality that until somebody became a client, there was really a pretty low ceiling too, as to how much help we could provide. So it was incumbent upon us to put our best foot forward and try to sell people so we could provide more help. So that was the first thing, really understanding that the first domino in business was really getting a client.

The second was, was staff training. And, you know, we you know, as I mentioned, we had once a week sales training, but we had once a week staff training from that first week, we were in business as well would address things that went well, any timely concerns, then we’d teach something. There would be you know, it, it, it could be queuing exercises, the, it could be greeting new clients and onboarding them. It could be any number of things that really were part of that client experience, whether it was actual on the floor type of programming or more of the soft skills and the, the experiential components. And we worked on this stuff each and every week. And we, you know, we were fortunate. We had great staff retention, our trainers bought in, they kept improving. And I think this was a big part of it. They weren’t just kind of left to their own devices.

We made them feel like they were part of something bigger. And then the third kind of lesson I learned early on was systems should be installed or started to be developed from day one. I mean, honestly, I didn’t start a business to be a one person, one main show. You know, I knew that I needed systems and I had had plenty of practice with them during my time as a baseball coach, because, you know, I had a very structured playbook because we had a really meager assistant coaching budget. So I would basically have to rely on a lot of people who were just finishing up their degree to be assistant coaches for a season before they moved on. And I carried on this kind of that this systems is a mechanism for developing a sense of continuity into being a business owner. And we had systems from, you know, for everything from program design to how we up-sold supplements or ancillary programs. And I think this allowed us to probably increase our revenue by at least 20% over what the norm was in the, you know, in, in the industry at the time, because it improved retention, we generated more value per client. We generated more referrals. And a lot of it just had to do, because we didn’t just do those things when we felt like it, it became an all the time thing. Cause we had a really strong system in place for it. And then the next kind of piece of the puzzle I learned early on was this concept of collaboration. A lot of times business owners feel like they’re out on an island and you know, they, they got to do everything themselves. And, you know, early on when I, you know, started to have some success in the offline world, I, I knew I wanted to create an online type of business. I had gone to a Ryan Lee bootcamp very early on and it just kind of opened my eyes to the fact that I didn’t need to be limited by geography in building a business. And so I wanted to, you know, start to create something online and I just thought, okay, I’m going to document what I, you know, what, what I did well, what our business did well. So I, my original product was the personal training money machine where I collaborated with Eric Ruth. I had never created an information product. Eric had plenty of experience with that. He had an audience and I had, you know, intellectual property. I had a proven approach that worked and we launched it and it, it, it did great. And, you know, fortunately to this day, gosh, I mean, well over 15 years later now, Eric and I are still good friends.

The second product that I created was an ebook titled fitness riches. That was a collaborative effort where I had a bunch of prominent people in the fitness industry, each contribute a chapter to this ebook. Eric was one of them, Bill Hartman, Alan Cosgrove, they were each contributors. And both of these kind of online products programs, they, they allowed me to grow my online presence in different ways and combine, they really set the stage for everything that I’ve done as a business coach, as a consultant, as an educator to fitness professionals, since, I mean, in truth, they were probably like that first domino in the fact that you’re hearing this right now, because that’s just how my shift began to do serving this community in this fashion. And, you know, I mean, it reminded me if you’re not collaborating, you’re going slower than you could or should be going. And being a training business in a health club was another reminder, right? Like, I mean, instead of later on, we had our own health club with a training business inside of it being a training business inside a health club means, you know, we, we had to be very collaborative. We had to forge a, a winning relationship with not just the club owners that were technically our landlords, but, but the staff.

So they would, you know, when people had questions, they would send them towards us when people needed support, they would route them for a session. And you know, this, this whole stage of my career is when this idea of what’s in it for them first really clicked with me. You know, I couldn’t just say, Hey, your members are gonna get better results if they train with us because the sales reps didn’t care, you know, they didn’t care at all. They were paid for, you know, they, they were paid for getting a new member, not for retention or client results. I mean, I’d buy him lunch. I would do whatever I could to support them. And it reminded me that if you give first, then a lot more doors are going to be open to you along the way. And then maybe the, the, the next real lesson that I learned was, you know, fitness, probably in many ways, I recognized early on coming from a you know, a different arena coming from a college environment where, you know, I was the head baseball coach and then had responsibilities, the head strength coach, too. I was very focused on results.

I wasn’t focused on, well, Hey, we’re just going to go do these drills. I mean, honestly, if we didn’t win games, then whatever we did, wasn’t good enough. Right. So when I got into fitness and it looked like everybody just sold hour long sessions and packages, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me because there were a lot of things that played into somebody’s success that, you know, it wasn’t just them getting a session, especially if you didn’t control the frequency at which those sessions were used. But you know, this, this really helped me understand that we needed to sell nutrition a lot, because if somebody came to us wanting to lose weight, you know, coming to train with us two hours a week, wasn’t going to have nearly as much impact on their results is what they ate for the entire week. So we sold a lot of nutrition, nutrition, coaching supplements. We had a smoothie bar. We were even a licensee of a large nutrition coaching business and of their 1200 gyms. We were the top selling licensee and number of months. In fact, my wife, Holly ran the nutrition coaching program and really kind of reinvented it to make it better. We had upsells for supplements every month. We had event driven nutrition or supplement promotions. We used a lot of social proof and, you know, even 15 years later, I don’t see nearly enough businesses understanding that if we’re selling a result, then we can’t only deliver like 20% of the things that drive that result we need to deliver more. And then the, the next lesson that, that I learned was this concept of scaling. You know, I opened my second location. It was about two hours away from the first location. And, you know, we also had a corporate business with a few clients, but the idea originally was, Hey, there’s going to be about a dozen locations.

And, you know, throughout, you know, throughout the, the general region that I live in and, you know, I learned very quickly that, you know, you had, if you weren’t going to be on site all the time, you needed even stronger systems, you needed standards of performance to hold people accountable. Scaling is largely about setting the people up to succeed when you’re not around and holding them accountable to those standards and know that second location had good systems. We did a morning huddle since it was you know, a distance away that allowed for daily connections. So people didn’t feel like they were on an island and it just was a reminder, you know, you need a scale ready, ready model. If you expect to expand. And you know, you, you probably need to give yourself plenty of margin for error when it comes to costs and, and budget, whale hire will train your staff relentlessly and hold people accountable book. Because a lot of times when people try to scale offline, they, they think what worked the first place is going to work the second place.

Well, what they lose sight of is in the first place, you were like, they’re 70 hours a week, and you could cover up all the blemishes, all the mistakes through your own effort, sweat equity, all that stuff. And then the last lesson I wanted to share from, you know, the early stage of my my, my professional life or my business owner life, I guess, is that I’m a big fan of bootstrapping. And a lot of people think, well, Hey, you need a ton of money to make money. You need to go out and get investor money or a big business loan. I’ve only ever had one business loan for, for, for one of the business side businesses that I’ve owned. And that was that second location because it was more of a traditional health club and, you know, a lot of equipment and that sort of thing. The first location was started with 2,500 bucks and a lot of sweat equity, even the second location. And Holly and I were painting gym walls. The day after we got married, we were living in a basement. So it was still probably about as bootstrapped as it could be in that, in that kind of environment.

And then even online, my initial audience building list building, everybody says why I need to run Facebook ads or whatever else mine came from writing articles doing those collaborative products. I talked about just kind of hustling constantly. And I think there’s so much to be said for starting things on a shoe string and maybe being just a little bit hungry, right? For me, failing was never really an option because of a variety of reasons.

You know, I mean, having a, a young family and not, you know, and feeling the responsibility of that to really being unwilling, to ever let anybody say, I told you, so, Hey, you should’ve just gone back to being a baseball coach, but without having money that meant I had to, to just hustle and work and push. And, you know, I think that honestly, it probably helped me stay focused because there was always more to do instead of dwelling on the parts of things that weren’t going well. And I think that I value the wins more. I know I did then, and I continue to the income more and I probably vet the expenses better because money wasn’t this abundant thing early on. And I believe most of the time that if you can’t make money with minimal investment with you know, a, you know, without unlimited budgets, then you probably aren’t the right person to make money with a big investment, right? Like you will be too frivolous. You won’t understand ROI any of those sorts of things nearly as well as you should seem to many business owners with, you know, Hey, I’m going to go start a studio because I’ve got a handful of clients that are going to back me, and then they just blow the money. Personally, I’d rather start on a shoestring. So there are a number of lessons. I know this was a little longer than a lot of episodes, but there were a number of lessons that I learned early on that, you know, I don’t know that everybody has that same luxury of kind of learning those things and, and, and being observant about them and documenting them. So rather than you have to make them the same mistakes I did hopefully you can learn from some of the things that I learned and it can help you build a stronger foundation and accelerate your journey.

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