Fitness Business School – The Key to Reaching Your Goals

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in this episode. I want to talk with you about what might just be the biggest key in moving forward towards your goals. It’s going to be a little bit different than what you’re expecting. So let’s get to it.

Welcome to The Fitness Business School podcast – the show for fitness business owners who want to grow their income, increase their impact and improve their lifestyle. Be sure to listen til the end of this episode, because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

So what’s the biggest key to moving forward. Right? I kind of built that up in the intro, but the biggest key to moving forward is to stop moving backward. And I know it’s too simple, right? But stay with me. I learned this initially when I was coaching college baseball, if you’ve ever been really like around college sports at all, everyone gets really excited about whoever the new recruits are, this new recruiting class of freshmen coming in. And, you know, honestly, when I got started about like involving college sports, I was no different. I thought, Hey, there’s this excitement and novelty, you have all these new people coming in.

But what I soon recognized was the most important recruiting I could do was to keep retaining and developing the players that I had because they were already a little bit more mature. They, they already had plenty of hours invested in them to that point. So I was going to be losing all this ground that we had already covered and having to start from scratch with new people. And so if I lost a player who’s adding value to the program, it was a massive step backwards. And you know, I think that when, when I’ve gotten into the business world early on, for whatever reason, I kind of gravitated towards studying Warren buffet, who’s arguably the greatest investor in history. And his number one rule of investing is don’t lose money. And again, it’s, don’t go backwards, right? Don’t lose ground that you’ve already gained. And you were steps backwards basically mean that you have taken fewer steps forward to see real progress. In fact, when I see businesses struggle, it’s often because they just they’re their turnover machines, right? They don’t retain clients well, they have a lot of staff turnover and I work hard to avoid that, you know, so, so I’m not trying to always have to dig myself out of a hole that that constant turnover creates and like the, the retention for our coaching programs knock on wood. It’s very good. And so maybe I only have to add, you know, a handful of people every month to get where I want to go. If we’re not losing a bunch of people where others may lose nine and feel like, Hey, I’ve got to add 10 to, to just gain any ground. Right. And if you think about there’s, you know, that, that mentality, you know, it’s, it’s simple, but man, is it effective if you keep the people that you have, you know, you don’t have to always spend that time bringing in somebody new and doctrinated them to the culture that you have. And, you know, there, there’s just so much to be said for, for that kind of stability, that kind of peace of mind to, there’s not as much stress involved with constantly having to replace outgoing people. And you know, it, it, in fact, since I’ve started my current business, which originated in 2015 and you know, I had been involved in a number of businesses as an owner, a co-owner for a decade prior to that. And since I started my new business in 2015, I have had no attrition from my team. Now we’ve added a few people, but I’ve had zero people leave to this point now, is that going to last forever? No. I mean, I’ve got wonderful ambitious people in my team that if at some point they’re so good at what they do, they’re going to be opportunities that somebody is going to find another opportunity. That’s more appealing. But the fact that they’ve been there since day one, not only do we get to rest easier without this constant turnover, but the clients that we serve connect with us better, they have a sense of stability that isn’t present when you’re constantly introducing new staff members, new coaches, and, you know, frankly, I think that’s probably where if I look at how the things that I may have been able to, to do better, or my business may have been able to do better than our opponents, our competitors, if you will.

And this kind of fitness business coaching landscape that may be is big as any of them, because all the rest of them are constantly, it seems like having a revolving door of the actual people who have interaction with clients. And, you know, if you, if there is no stability, if there is no continuity, you don’t get depth. Everybody’s always starting at surface level and we want depth of relationship. So we, because we get to serve people better if we know them better, right. And if you’re constantly starting over, not a good thing. And you know, I think that is a kind of a universal kind of law in our, in our kind of service and relationship type of business is that the better your relationships are the deeper they are, the longer they last, the better off you’re going to be. So see more stability has this compound effect. You’re spending less time and money on finding new people, whether it’s clients or hiring and training new people on your team. And you’re going to have better retention of clients. If your team stays longer, you’re going to have more referrals.

If your clients stay longer. In other words, this unwillingness to go backwards, actually propels you forward. And I don’t care whether or not we’re talking about plugging the drains when it comes to things like business expenses or, you know, or retaining your staff or whatever else. Like if you can find ways to kind of close those areas, the, that you feel like maybe I’m regressing a little bit and tighten those up. So you’re at least holding ground, man. It makes all the difference in the world. In fact, the old saying kind of goes when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing that you need to do is stop digging, right? And so there are probably areas of your business. And I know there have been plenty of areas of mine where, you know, maybe for whatever reason, we’ve drifted on something, we’ve lost sight of something. We’ve we we’ve been digging and digging and digging and you know, maybe, maybe the first job isn’t, Hey, let’s go chase the next shiny object. It’s no, let’s fix the foundation. So any progress that we’re making doesn’t leak out. So how can you limit this backward movement in your business?

First, I might look at incoming and outgoing money, right? Are you getting the ROI for what you’re spending? If not figure out how to improve the ROI or look at places, you can cut some expenses second, how can you retain and improve your team? We’re you know, I mean, we’re in a unique field. We’re probably never going to see the retention that many other service type of businesses have. And there are plenty of valid reasons for this hand. Let’s face it, the, the hiring landscape is more challenging than it’s probably been during my lifetime. So this isn’t an easy thing. So if you’ve got people who have potential, how can we, how can we set them up to succeed? Because this can fall to us. We can be better at finding the right people, but more importantly, empowering those people to be successful. And then finally, how, how can you be more attentive to retention? How can you better retain your clients? You know, I mean, getting that staffing part improved is a huge step, but what else can you do now? Those aren’t the only areas that we can stop taking steps backwards, but start there take fewer steps backwards in those three areas. And you will be well on your way to moving forward faster.

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