Fitness Business School – Simple Systems Roadmap

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to talk with you about the simple systems roadmap. 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.

So what happens when you don’t have the right systems in your business? Well, the business relies on you. Your  people make mistakes. Your business can’t grow or scale. And if you do try to do anything to expand just creates chaos. It creates more stress. You know, you, you can’t go on vacation and at truly be on vacation because things are, you know, always one step away from disaster. So you’re always gonna be worrying about that, even if you can get away.

And ultimately, if you ever do want to exit, you know, your business isn’t sellable at all. But the flip side is what happens if you have the right systems in your business? Well, your business runs in a far more systematic fashion. You know, maybe, maybe even autopilot. I, I have clients, I have friends that, that
have businesses that run very much on autopilot. The, the team members you bring on are productive, they’re efficient, and they’re happier because they’re good at their role and they know what’s expected of them. When you expand your, you’re becoming more profitable rather than simply just taking on
more hours to work, and you’ve got a, an asset that gives you some freedom, it gives you some latitude to, you know, scale in other ways. You know, duplicate yourself into multiple locations, into franchising or licensing, package up your intellectual property, and sell it as another avenue to, to generate revenue.

And frankly, you can even sell the business. So how do you make a business systematic, but do it easily? Because one of the things that, that I think that I try to focus on in our, you know, in, in our coaching is I’m very much a realist of what I think is reasonable for somebody to do with all the other things on their
plate. I think a lot of coaching programs or systems ask a client or some, you know, who, whoever they’re selling their service to, to come in and essentially put everything else on hold in their life, almost like they operate in a vacuum and they don’t have anything else on their plate. Well, I think
that I’m probably just the opposite. I recognize that pretty much everybody that I serve has a pretty full plate. They often are not only the owner of a business, but they’re the day-to-day operator doing the, you know, some of the service delivery, doing the administrative, the managerial, the, the sales
stuff.

And, you know, all the hats that a potential owner could wear, they wear along with, you know, having a life. A lot of the people that I serve you know, are, have, have families. They’ve got responsibilities or obligations outside of their business. And so if I’m gonna say, well, hey, you should be
installing systems, then, you know, I mean, they can’t just put everything else on hold and do this. So, the way that I think of it is like, you, you, you should probably apply the 80 20 rule to building your systems. Trying to fix everything at once is way too hard. So, you know, start by picking the 20% of the
systems or processes or activities in your business that are giving you the most headaches. And then list those, those things from the most problematic to the least problematic.

And then work on one system a week. And you know what, within, you know, 90 to 120 days, you’re going to have resolved most of the headaches that you have. So, so how do you go about this in practice, right? Like, I mean, you can get out a sheet of paper or open up a document on your computer
and you can list out the things that happen it on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis in your business, right? Like, you know, all those things. You’re not talking about the random episodic things we’re talking about the things that happen with regularity in your business. Everything from how you answer the phone and
you know how the, the trash gets taken out to how a session is delivered, or how a client is communicated with between sessions, list all those things out. That’s the first, first step, right?

We want to do this kind of brain dump, if you will, to, to get all of those on paper. Now, pick the 20% of those that are giving you the most headaches right now. And so, so that’s gonna take this list down from 20 or 30 things to, you know, a handful and then put ’em in order. Put ’em in order. Okay? This is, is the
most problematic down to this is the least of the five or six things here from a problematic standpoint. Now, what we are going to do to, to get this into motion is really simple. If it is an offline task, you are going to have a team member or a significant other, or I, if you don’t have either of those and you are
completely solo, pay a client, they’re going to take out a phone, they’re going to video you doing the task in the way that you want it done, well, you’re describing what is being done.

Now, that’s the basis of this, right? Like, that’s the raw material. If it’s an online task, you’re going to use some sort of screen capture software like Loom or, or, or something, and you’re going to just perform the task on your computer while describing what you are doing and recording it with this
screen capture software. That’s the raw material for an online option. So those are the ways that, that we start, right? And, and let’s face it, if we’re going to systemize something and hand it off to somebody else, we are in a day and age where people learn by video far more frequently and probably far better
than they do by simply reading texts. So we’re gonna take that video and we’re gonna put it in a folder on Google Drive, or if you have somewhere else you prefer to house stuff, that’s just the simplest and it’s free, but we put it on a folder in Google Drive, you wanna take it up a notch.

Use a simple software to create a transcription, whether it’s something like Timmy or one of these other AI softwares, or heck, you could probably even use ChatGPT at this point, and I’m gonna transcribe the video and you’re going to just edit in that video, that transcription. You’re just gonna edit it out and
create a bullet point checklist of the key steps, and you can add that as a document to compliment the video, not to replace the video, not to serve as something as valuable as the video. It’s simply like the notes on a podcast or something like that, right? Like, it helps somebody know where to find something
in the video. It helps them maybe study more effectively if they look for those things as they’re watching the video. But now we have a system, and frankly, that’s the bulk of it.

Now, sure, if you need to add in forms or templates or anything else that somebody’s going to need to execute that system. So if there’s a program designed template, then you probably need a link to that, that template, wherever you’re housing the video. But that’s it, that’s what we need. And as a guy that
has written operations manuals for local businesses for licenses and two different franchises, this is so much better. It’s so much more effective because it’s easy for somebody to define what they need. It’s delivered in a format that is better for them to both consume and understand it’s not gonna collect dust.
And now you have this documented series of steps to hand off to somebody else. You can delegate it to team members, you can teach them, you can ask them to review something. I mean, this is something I do with some of my youth baseball players.

I’ll send ’em a video of something before we’re gonna practice it so they have an idea of how to understand it. And then, you know, you can create KPIs to measure their performance of somebody’s effectiveness to, to essentially, you know, keep them meeting the standard that you want. And then we
have the, you know, we have the ever, you know, probably ever apparent need to continually revise and update things because things aren’t static, we’re not ever done. You’re always gonna find a better way. You’re an entrepreneur, you’re a business owner, you’re somebody who is driven to improve. So you’re
always gonna find a better way to do things. And when that better way presents itself and it, it’s better enough that there’s a need, then you go ahead and update the system. But now we’ve got a system for our business that frankly, is better than a lot of franchises provide their franchisees.

And you’ve done it with nothing but a smartphone or some free software on your computer, and you’ve been able to do it in a matter of weeks. You’ve put together this wonderful library of systems that makes your business more profitable, makes your life easier, and makes everything more scalable. So that’s
system simplified.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School. Now, before you go, I have a quick announcement:

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