Fitness Business School – 10k or More Monthly

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby and in today’s episode, I wanna talk with you about what you need in place to get to $10,000 a month or more. 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 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.

I spend a lot of time trying to simplify things and just find ways to both organize them in my own mind, and then ultimately for the people that I serve. And one of the things that I have seen over the years is, you know, I, there’s this kind of group groupings that you see that are pretty common with people who come into our ecosystem that are business owners or just kind of on, on that, on-ramp to becoming a business owner.

There, there are people in what I call the launch stage that are typically doing less than $10,000 a month. You know, there, there are some variables. If they’re in a really, really expensive market, they may be doing a little bit more than that, but still be in that launch stage. There are people in what I think
of as kind of this grow stage where they’re focused on growing, profiting, systemizing their business, and that’s that 10 to $25,000 a month-ish range. And then there’s, you know, the, the business owner that’s above $25,000 a month looking to scale and optimize their business. Well, you know, obviously as
you move up that, that pyramid, the volume of people at each stage diminishes a little bit. There’s always more people in the under 10k a month stage. Just because, you know, a lot of people never make it out of there.

A lot of people start and stop. You know, but what I wanted to do was to, to give you a blueprint, or at least, you know, as much of that as you could probably do in the context of a podcast of what you need to have in place to get to 10k months consistently as a fitness business owner. And that, you
know, there are a couple things that are really, really basic. There are the need to have you know, a business model that you’re driving people into, like, how am I going to serve clients? How am I going to deliver you know, results for the people that I want? Basically, how do I want to organize our, you know,
my service? Am I gonna be one-on-one semi-private, small group, large group? Now, typically one of those, it’s gonna be one of those, serving is your core.

Now, when you’re under 10k, you may kind of cobble things together, you’re probably not strategically using more than one of those at a time, but you may be doing small group, but then you got a little bit of downtime in the middle of the day, and you do a couple one-on-one sessions to, to pick up
a little bit extra cash. Like, so that’s how that typically works. So we need a model to drive people into, and then we need a venue to deliver this model, right? Like if we’re talking about your facility subleasing in-home training travel training where you’re going to other people’s homes for training if
you’re doing something online, but we need a you know, a local or online platform to deliver the model. And then we need a way to manage the model. We need a scheduling and billing software.

You know, and because we are talking about, you know, up to $10,000 a month, it’s a significant amount of money. So like, we need a billing software. This isn’t, Hey, I’m just gonna collect checks and ask people to Venmo me or whatever else. You can get away with that if you’re doing a couple thousand
dollars a month as a side hustle. But if you are trying to set a foundation, you need to have some sort of mechanism to create recurring monthly revenue. So once we have those in place, right, like that’s what I consider like that base foundation, then we need to establish a brand position, a promise, if you
will. Like, we need people to know who we serve and what we help them accomplish. Now you know, it doesn’t have to be really distilled down, especially if you’re in a local market, because some of it is dictated by geography, by proximity, right?

Like, you, you don’t need to be a hyper specialist when some people, you know, in fact, most people when it comes to general fitness are looking for convenience. So, you know, you need to, to be clear though, okay, I work with athletes, I work with fat loss clients, I work with people who are over the age
of 50. You just need to have this, you know, brand positioning so you know who to market to, and people know how to articulate ref, you know, what your business is about, who you can refer to, like, you know, who they should refer to you, all those types of things, right? Like, so it, it serves as a
narrowing mechanism for you, but it also serves as kind of that core tenant of all the marketing that you’re gonna do. So your brand positioning, your promise, again, it doesn’t have to be perfectly articulated at this stage of the game where, you know, some people, they get really hung up on a
tagline.

People don’t choose a business based on a tagline. They choose a business based on its ability to solve a problem and help somebody achieve a goal. So as long as you can articulate that and make it clear, it doesn’t have to be pithy. It doesn’t have to be condensed down to 20 or fewer words, something like
that. But it does need to be pretty clear who you help and what you help them accomplish. And then you need a strong core offering. So when I say a strong core offering, I mean, I already talked about the model, but you know, people need to know what they’re signing up for. They need to know what they’re
gonna get. So I think of this strong core program as, okay, this is how I’m going to bring clients in and deliver this dream country result through an experience they enjoy.

Now, it may be a two part program where there’s you know, some sort of on-ramp, a six week challenge, a 30 day test drive, a a love it or leave it offer or whatever, but then it rolls into something ongoing because we do want a recurring revenue focused business model. We want something that
people continue on with, not just some episodic thing where we’re just stacking one challenge after the next challenge with no backend. So we need a strong core program. Ideally, we’ve created a strong core program that, you know, has profitable pricing that allows us to deliver a, a really solid experience, all
those things. But you know, I mean, I’m guessing if you’re listening to this, you’ve already thought about this. You know, you can look at most every successful business and you can say, Hey, this is the main thing they sell.

And, you know, that’s what we’re trying to identify with this strong core program. Then we need to kind of working from the inside out. We need a demonstration and conversion system. Now, when I think of a demonstration and conversion system you know, I use email marketing as kind of the, you know, the core demonstration conversion system that, that I have. I send daily emails. There’s a, a PS like a super signature. There are invitations to other things throughout the course of the week. Usually there are periodic deadline driven offers. We give all the tools necessary to do that to, to our coaching clients, so
they can just basically, you know, implement this turnkey system because we need a way to take those leads that we come in contact with. We need, you know, we all need a way to turn those leads into paying clients because, you know, as much as we would love for them to immediately just walk through
the door, credit card in hand, desire sky high, they’re ready to go.

A lot of times, in fact, most times I would tell you that people are interested in something before they’re fully ready to commit to it. And so as somebody goes through this discovery stage, if you will, we need to have a demonstration conversion system that lets them see how we can help positions us through
that brand promise, that positioning that that I talked about a moment ago positions us as the right fit for them, positions us as somebody who can help them go from where they are to where they want to be. We tell our clients three days a week is fine. I use text emails. You certainly don’t have to, you could
link out to a podcast like, just like I’m doing this episode, I could do the same thing that I could, you know, that I do now, but I could send an email that said, Hey, learn about how to go from zero to 10k or to get beyond 10k a month in this latest episode of the podcast.

You can check it out here, link to the podcast, and then have a signature and whatever your PS super signature type stuff is, and you’ve got a demonstration and conversion system. So whatever mechanism you want to educate, motivate, and demonstrate how you can help, whether it’s text, whether it’s
video, whether it’s audio I, I would still tell you without question, use email as a conduit to get more distribution. So we have that, we have this kind of bridge from new lead to paying client, now we’ve gotta figure out how to generate new leads. Well, I think you need to have three lead generations just
systems to start. A lot of people probably hear that and they’re like, man, that’s a lot. That’s, you know, I don’t know, you know, I don’t even have one thing that I’d call a good system. But a system is just something that we have a consistent or replicable way of executing, right?

So the first thing that I would tell you, what we do internally with clients we tell them to use a connection database, to create a connection database and do a database outreach. I, I think of this as prospecting, like before the internet came around and people decided to call everything different
names. You just prospected. Like if you worked at a health pub that was part of your job, you prospected, well, I think of the connection database as structured warm prospecting. So you’re not having to talk to cold leads. You’re not having to feel like an intruder cold calling, knocking on doors
randomly. So we use a connection database as a prospecting tool, and that’s number one. And that’s awesome because frankly, I’ve seen businesses grow to beyond 10 k leveraging just that single system, and it doesn’t really cost any money to execute it.

Now, there are different ways to do it. We teach what we call our connect 100 approach. We teach a hundred cups approach. We teach and ask for advice approach. There, there are a number of things that we do there, but the most important part is I would have a warm prospect outreach system in place. The
second thing I would have in place is some sort of online system. Now you know, it doesn’t, at this stage of the game, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a paid traffic system, though it could be, it could be a paid system, but at minimum we want to instill something else where we’re consistent. That could be organic
marketing on Facebook, it could be creating a YouTube video a week to start to build up a presence on that platform. It could be doing you know, choosing LinkedIn is your platform, and connecting and creating content distribution there, it, it doesn’t really matter which platform you choose from.

My preference, it’s more about, okay, we know who our person is and we know what we wanna say. Where’s the, the most obvious place that we can find them and reach them with some consistency? We want to be in that place, right? That, that is the hallmark of marketing. You could have the best message
in the world, but if that message isn’t being delivered in a place where your people are located, like you could have the best brand promise, the strongest offer in the world, and if it’s on a billboard in the middle of the desert, it doesn’t really matter. So we need to be where they are. And so I think by
doing something on an online platform, an organic platform, it gives us the ability to do it in a more flexible way. Because a lot of times in this early stage under 10k type of business model you’re wearing a lot of hats.

Your schedule is kind of erratic and everything else. So this gives us a way to build our relationships, build our database in a, in a flexible fashion. It’s not time sensitive in that, it’s not like going to networking meetings where there’s a specific time, a specific place that you have to be. If you wanna make this online lead generation approach even stronger, I might encourage you to even consider a Facebook group. So you’re building an asset and not just creating a process. So that’s the online, offline, I would pick one offline lead generation system and get good at it. Maybe you
know, maybe it is networking. I think for a lot of early stage business owners, that would be the wisest pick because networking can occur in so many different fashions. It can be structured networking, attending Chamber of Commerce or BNI or Affinity group type of events.

It can be more organic, it can be getting introductions from people that, you know, I I think that networking is kind of a Swiss army knife-esque lead generation approach. But I mean, you can do other stuff. You could say, Hey, I want to use public speaking as my offline lead generation system. I’m going
to use direct mail. I’m going to use strategic alliances, but I think you need to pick one. And I do think that it needs to be an offline one instead of just defaulting to everything online, because the sales cycle is faster with online relationships that you build because you’re moving that relationship forward faster.
If you think about post on social media and email marketing, all that stuff, you can still build a wonderful relationship. It just takes a lot more time. It’s a lot more fragmented. I mean, if you think about one 20 minute conversation with a person face-to-face probably gets you closer to somebody coming in to do a
trial of your services or experience what you have to offer than 20 emails do.

So make sure you have that. Now the last thing that I’ll tell you I think needs to be in place to get to 10k consistently is creating two, what I would call attraction assets. An attraction asset is something that doesn’t require daily daily maintenance, but it’s something that’s working for you or has the
potential to work for you on an ongoing basis. The two attraction assets I would tell people to typically focus on are a Google business listing, making sure it’s really strong because it’s where people will find you. A lot of people will think, man, I need a website, I need this and that you know, I mean, people
aren’t just gonna randomly stumble across your website, but they will randomly stumble across your Google business listing if they are searching for anything in this general field at all.

If you’re doing a good job with it. The second attraction asset probably needs to come from a menu of either you know, a lead magnet or a website. One of those two things. The other thing that you could theoretically say is, Hey, if I’m gonna make LinkedIn my, you know, one of my lead generation systems,
then building out a really strong LinkedIn profile could be an initial attraction asset. But basically that attraction asset is a tool that allows people to learn about you, that allows people to spread the word about you allows people to find you, and it’s not you necessarily having to facilitate that connection. Not
that we don’t want to, because, you know, I run ads to lead magnets all the time, but, you know, you could ask clients to share a lead magnet and they can go distribute it as much as they want.

You could have a LinkedIn profile and people can search it if they meet you at a networking event. So there are some core things that I think need to be in place. I would say from my perspective, most people if I were starting out, would be, it would be a Google business listing and a lead magnet, because
the lead magnet is something you just give away with whatever lead generation system you’re using. So hopefully that narrowed some things down. So those are the things you need in place to get to 10k. Now, obviously, the unsaid part of this is it’s not just what you have, it’s what you do. So yes, you
may have these things in place, but if you are not working the systems, if you are not executing your lead generation systems, if you’re not executing your follow up, you know, having a plan mapped out is a very little value, right?

You have to be the person executing it. That’s why we coach people on this stuff on a weekly basis, just like you coach clients, it’s very much like you could map out the perfect training plan for a client, but if they’re not executing it, they’re not gonna get the results. But that’s really all you need to
have a 10k a month business consistently. And you know, for some of you listening to this, you may think, man, 10k a month, I blew past that a long time ago. No problem. But if you are like a lot of the people that we see in that third stage at scale and optimize, you may be looking at, okay, how do I start
a second location? How do I you know, create an online business as a secondary income stream? How do I start an info marketing business?

You know, those things need to be in place for you to hit the ground running. And sure, you’ve had some success building this initial thing, but if you’re trying to be, you know, in two places at once, starting a second business, this gives you kind of a checklist for what you need to get that second kind of business
or profit center off the ground. So that’s how you get to 10 k a month, your launch blueprint step by step.

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