Fitness Business School – Six-Week Cycles

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in this episode, I wanna talk with you about the magic of six week cycles. 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 end impact and improve their lifestyle. Be sure to listen to the end of this episode, because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

By now. You may know that I’m very much like this avid planner. I’ve been using a daily planner since
1994. I went to a Franklin Quest before it became Franklin Quest seminar, and started using a Franklin
quest planner in1994 and have used a similar type of planner, not necessarily that same brand ever since. We even provide planners for coaching clients that, that follow kind of a similar format, but are very specific to the fitness industry. And, you know, beyond the daily planning, you know, I’ve
always been somebody playing my week, the, you know, over the course of the weekend. And then
beyond that, I would try to find a rhythm for longer term planning. We’ve done what we called a
hundred day sprints for a long time. And they had you know, they, they had a lot of success and, and
what was nice with a hundred day sprint was like, okay, you’ve got this a hundred day mission that
you’re gonna set out on.

You can do three a year and still have some time to come up for air. And then is my business evolved? I
kind of ratcheted it back to, to two a year, but what I recognized with the a hundred day sprints was you
know, the a hundred day things seemed a little long for me, I’ve dabbled in things like, you know, Todd
Herman’s 90 day year. You know, I’ve seen, you know, the 12 week year that that’s very popular. There,
there are a lot of those that, that I have learned from, and I see as having tremendous value, but for me
what I would recognize with those longer kind of planning cycles was that somewhere about the halfway point, I’d lose steam. I’d, I’d be in full on sprint mode, then I’d need to take like a, a mini break, a vacation and recharge and come back.

And so the more I thought about it, I said, okay maybe six weeks is the right timeframe. You know, we’ve seen six week challenges be so popular in the fitness industry, but, and I remember the beginning
challenges that I saw were 12 or 16 weeks way back in the bill Phillips days and all that stuff. But we
settled on six weeks in, in the fitness industry for a lot of stuff and we’ve run our six week producer
challenges. And, and, and it just kind of felt like the six week cycle made more sense. And, and I had
learned, you know, in, in Taki Moore’s mastermind program, they, they moved to a six week cycle and,
and I really liked it. So you know, originally I thought of it as kind of a, a sprint, but what I recognized was sprint probably wasn’t the right word.

And that’s why I used the word cycle because you know, the nice thing about this six week span for
planning is that you can predict so much more effectively for me. I, I always struggled with thinking how much I could actually get done in 90 to a hundred days. You know, I, I would either overestimate how much I could accomplish or underestimate. I, I couldn’t predict it. Well, I, there were things that might change opportunities that might come along ideas. I might have market changes that might occur. And then through the pandemic understanding how rapidly things changed it, it helped me shorten that kind of time horizon that I wanted to plan plan for. So, so now I use the six week cycles and, and absolutely love them because sometimes the six week cycle feels like a sprint where it’s really production heavy, like the first, first, one of the year, maybe even the second, one of the year, one after school starts back in the fall, those feel like absolute sprint.

But when it comes to like the spring and summer, where in my household, we, there’s a lot of baseball
that I’m coaching that Alex is playing there’s vacations that we’re taking and doing things, you know, the both boys are out of school. You know, there there’s cycles that I can kind of forecast and say, well, Hey, we’re gonna go on vacation this week. And we got baseball tournament these week. So what’s realistic for me to get done over that next six week span. What can I actually ask of myself so I can set myself up to win? What can I ask of other people? What kind of things are gonna be happening on my team’s, you know, in my team’s world, like I, you know, we, we have people that they’re gonna be taking vacations too. So if I can look ahead and forecast a little bit more effectively, it allows me to plan not only that six week span more effectively, but you know, let’s say that, you know, for me, as I record this, I know I’ve got two week long vacations in this next six weeks.

My right hand guy, Matt Seymore is going to Europe for two weeks. I can be really
realistic about what we can get done there and know some of those things I need to pre-load. pre-Create
some of my daily emails, that sort of thing. But I also know that if that means we are a little slower in
like sales production during those, you know, during that six weeks, well, do I need to push a little
harder, the six weeks leading up to that, or the do I need to plan to push a little harder the six weeks
after that? And, and I think that’s where these six week cycles work so well, it’s not, you know, Hey, I
need to go as hard as I can for six weeks. Then I’m gonna come up for air for two weeks. And like this
sprint coast, sprint coast, sometimes it’s a sprint.

Sometimes it’s a jog. Sometimes you’re coasting, but you can look with the foresight to know, Hey, this
is what the next six weeks looks like. This is what I can accomplish. You know, these, you know, these
are the measurables I need to hit. This is the recurring revenue I need to be at. This is the number of
clients I need to hit. This is my retention rate. So I can look at this and, and have a pretty clear idea, but
then I can say, okay, what projects can I complete? Or at least how far can I move in certain projects in
that window? What processes can I install or improve in that six week span? So much easier to kind of
wrap my, my arms around it, because I don’t feel also like compelled to overschedule because I know
that, Hey, you know what, there’ll be a next six week cycle, right after that.

Whereas in that hundred or 90 day window, I’d feel like, well, Hey, if I have to wait till after this 90 days, that’s a long time. So I need to squeeze more in. Now, here, I can say, you know what? If it doesn’t fit in this block, I’ll put it in the next one. So if you are not planning in that way, if you were somebody who just says, Hey, I do my annual planning and then it’s all week to week. Or if you’re doing quarterly stuff, 90 day stuff, and you feel like it’s not a, a great fit for you. Give the six weeks cycle a try. It has been an absolute game changer for me. It it’s been something that made each six weeks, not only more productive, but more enjoyable, because it was a lot more realistic to, to, to plan what could be accomplished in that timeframe. So there were a lot more days, one, a lot more weeks, one. So there’s more momentum with this approach. You won’t burn out things. Won’t become monotonous, you’ll get more done, and frankly, you’ll have a better business. So give that six week cycle a try.

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