Fitness Business School – Virtual Business Coaching – Quick Business Fixes

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in this episode, I’m going to continue to play the role of being your business coach. And we’re gonna address a few different things. Some opportunities to fix businesses that come across my desk very regularly. And I think at least one or two of these are gonna be really useful to you. So let’s get started.

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 this episode is the last of this series of what, what we would do if I were your business coach. And it’s kind of a catchall because, you know, there are a lot of things that I’ll I’ll work with with people that, you know, you just, you, you spend some time with somebody, you, you dig in and you start to go through your discovery and learn about them. And you’ll see these glaring opportunities where you can fix one thing and it changes almost everything else. And that’s some of the stuff that, that I wanna talk about today. And the first one I is time, like just most people that, that I encounter, they, they don’t use their time. Well, they don’t think about how they invest their time. So let me give you a few benchmarks because I, I think a realistic expectation of how long things take and being able to plan accordingly, mitigate some stress. It makes you more so, so let’s let let’s look at this from a, a, a kind of what you can expect. I, if you’re going to be growing your business standpoint, the, the first is, you know, I, if you are not an experienced writer, but you’re gonna write email news letters and that sort of thing, you, you should probably allocate one hour for every email that email newsletter you’re gonna write counting the, writing, the formatting, the testing to make sure it goes out and looks the way you want and the sending.

So, you know, if you’re plotting this into your, your planner, that’s how much time is I, I think realistic for you to, to allocate to that task. I, I think as a business owner, you probably should expect to spend 30 to 60 minutes per day on social media, playing offense, promoting your business, not consuming social media, if that’s one of the channels that you’re gonna use to grow, like, so if you’re doing posts, if you’re managing a, a free Facebook group, any of that sort of thing you know, you need to slot that in a lot of people, they’ll, they’ll assign these tasks to themselves. They’ll say, well, I need to write an email or I need to go post on social, but they, they don’t allocate appropriate amounts of time to it. So it doesn’t get done and their business doesn’t grow. So now can we shortcut this? Sure. I mean, you can you, you can use done for you content. You can customize done for you content and, and you can shortcut some of that, but that’s what to expect. If you’re gonna do a sales consultation, we should allocate an hour for that in general. I, I think you should expect to spend five to eight hours per week on lead in sales management. If you are outsourcing some lead generation to a team member, like you’re delegating to them, or you’re paying an ad agency or something like that, and then probably eight to 15 hours a week, if you are doing it all. And if you feel like those numbers are too high, then you’re not thinking like a business owner.

You’re thinking like a coach who would like to have a business, but isn’t ready to invest the time in having a business. You’re just kind of thinking maybe self-employed which totally fine self-employed is not that like, that’s not a negative, it’s just, you have to understand that it takes what it takes. And so if you want to grow a, a real, you know, a, a business that provides a, a, you know, a, a really good income for the, this field, this profession, then, you know, these are the numbers that you probably need to, to, to work with. Some ways that you can keep your numbers, number of hours working in general, that the way you can keep that number manageable first delegate what you can and pay for it with higher return activities.

So think about like, if you could do one training session that pays you $75, that buys you five hours of $15 an hour labor. And, you know, a lot of people don’t think of that kind of arbitrage, but that’s, that’s a real powerful way to create leverage, like not doing, you know, it’s not that you’re not working. It’s like, Hey, I can work for one hour and buy five hours of someone else’s time. Well, now we’re getting five extra hours of things done. We should be tracking everything that we can and identifying bottlenecks so we can improve them. A lot of people think the tracking is, is tedious and they don’t wanna do it. But what they’re missing is tracking is really just a way to find the efficiencies in your business. So you can do things in less time spending less money and get the same type of return eliminating low ROI activities. I mean, one of the smartest things that you could probably do as a business owner is learn to say no, and you, if you are not saying no to some things understand that it means you’re saying no to some things. And what I mean by that is if you say yes to everything you’re saying no to doing any one of those things at your peak potential, right? Because we can’t do everything incredibly well. We spread ourselves too thin. So make sure that you’re saying no to some things. And typically those are those low ROI activities, or at least low fulfillment activities. You know, another thing with time, and this is something I’ve probably been telling business owners for at least 16 or 17 years now is plan your day, the evening prior and establish your priorities.

If you’re not planning your day, a lot of the other stuff that we’ve gone through for this kind of business coaching series is, is moot because you’re not gonna be able to do it consistent. And then, you know, in truth, your daily schedule is gonna tell you if you’re on the right track, right. If you are not scheduling growth activities, and you’re just doing maintenance ones, you’re gonna stay where you are, or you may even see some incremental decrease in what’s happening because you’re not replacing the business that that just naturally leaves. All right. A few other simple notes pay yourself first. I, I think that almost all of the businesses that I encounter independent service businesses are almost always seen better as like a cash business than a cash out business. And so what I mean is you are almost always gonna end out with a better outcome. If you are paying yourself first and you’re investing some money along the way, then if you just think, Hey, I’m gonna wait till the end cash out and sell my business and that’ll fund everything. The amount of money you’d make from selling at the end. I, I can’t imagine too many scenarios that if you would’ve just invested that in a simple, basic way, like index funds, that the amount of money that you have at that benchmark down the line that, that milestone 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, I, I can’t imagine that the pay yourself first and invest a little bit along the way doesn’t produce far, far more than trying to cash out at the end. And, and then here’s a simple one. It’s your business.

You started this for your own self-Interest in one way, shape or form. And if you can’t pay you after the startup phase, the business is broken. Like this idea that I’m just gonna take the scraps of what’s left. That’s a flawed business. So you need to go put your business under the microscope and make sure you can pay yourself. You know, another thing that I would recommend to most people is having multiple revenue streams. That doesn’t mean you need to have everything, but my suggestion would be to have at least a couple, because if one thing kind of slows down or becomes throttled by outside influences or is seasonal, then we’ve got something else that can ramp up. So, I mean, we’ve got all sorts of options in our industry group training. Semi-Private one on one, we could do one on one in a home we could do hybrid training. We could do online only we could rate nutrition, coaching, or some sort of wellness coaching we could sell supplements. We could do choose a second kind of niche market. You know, maybe you work with athletes and adults. You could do corporate fitness. And, and I see personally, I see investing in, in a retirement account is like, like an additional revenue stream that you don’t actually have to manage.

So you know, there, there are a few different things to, to choose from. Everybody’s gonna have their own kind of best path. And so I’m not gonna be prescriptive and tell you which ones during this, because, you know, in a, an into visual coaching session, constructing the right model to be part of what we’d do, but this at least gives you kind of a menu to, to begin with and then retention. I, I think, you know, everybody talks about, Hey, I need more leads. I need more leads. That’s the bottleneck in my business, but in truth you know, if business is all going out the back door, then the, you know, the new leads aren’t gonna save us, right? They’re not gonna build our business. They may sustain it, or like allow us to maintain where we’re at. But in my mind, if you have adult fitness business under 200 clients, you need to retain at least 95% of your clients month over month. You know, as you get bigger or if you’re running a sports performance business, those metrics may change a little bit because there’s some seasonality with the sports performance side clearly.

And then with a bigger business, you know, that that number may creep a little because people don’t have as much personal attention in a lot of cases, not all. So what can we do to improve retention? Well, we definitely can make sure that we’ve integrated what we call the other one sixty five and serve people during the hours. They’re not in our facility. We can have a hybrid style offering where people are connected to us and see us as their coach every day, all day. It’s not just come attend a session we’re hosting remind yourself that the people that are more engaged stay, the people who are less engaged leave and be okay with moving people down the ladder and selling them, like allowing them to migrate to something that may be a little bit less expensive and keeping them active rather than trying to reactivate them, reactivations will never convert as well as down cells. And then finally kind of piecing some of your marketing altogether understand that having what we would call like a paid approach, a, an organic approach and a referral approach. You should probably be doing one or two of these at like each simultaneously. And again, if that sounds like a lot takes what it takes, and you need to make sure that you are getting your message in front of the people that you wanna serve with some consistency, so that when they’re ready, you’re the obvious choice.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School. Before you go, I have a quick announcement. When I first connect with a fitness business owners, they almost always asked me, how can I get more clients or make more money? Well, I have an exclusive offer for you, and it’s gonna help you do just that. As a listener of this show, you can test drive our business growth accelerator coaching program for FREE.

BGA is a one of a kind program where you get done-for-you marketing tools and a level of coaching that is unmatched in our industry to help you attract more qualified prospects and convert them into paying clients, ultimately making you more revenue and personal income.

Imagine having every tool template ads, script you need all proven to convert in, ready to use. Plus you have access to over 10 weekly live video coaching sessions to help you with everything from dialing in your ads, to mastering your mindset. You get all of this and more when you joined BGA and to help you succeed, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m going to let you test drive BGA at zero cost.

If it delivers for you in the way that I expect – it more than it pays for itself, and you’ll probably want to stay. If not, you’re out nothing and have a library of proven tools and resources to keep.

To take advantage of this special offer. Just email me [email protected] and put test drive in the subject line, and I’ll get you all the details.