Fitness Business School – 144 – Fundamentals for Success in 2021

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And I’m back with episode number two in this five-part series about what you need to do to be successful going forward for the rest of 2021 and beyond. So let’s get to it.

Welcome to the fitness business school with Pat Rigsby, the podcast for fitness entrepreneurs who want to make more income, have greater impact, and enjoy more freedom in their ideal business. If you’d like an accelerated route to these goals, email me at [email protected] and put BGA in the subject line and I’ll get you all the details about our business growth accelerator program.

All right, we’re in episode number two of this five-part series, and the second leg of this is really focusing on the fundamentals and, you know, you may be thinking, Hey, let’s get to the tactics, let’s get to the magic formula. It’s going to bring you a success, but we started with mindset for a reason. And now we’re going to talk fundamentals, the things that you need to build around, because honestly, there are certain things that when it comes to our industry, that just aren’t going to change. They’re not going to change during the entire time you were in this industry and probably long after that. And that may seem strange considering the fact that things constantly change, right? Like the technology we use the things that we’re learning, the credentials that we have, the focus of how to best serve clients, that it’s always kind of changing and evolving the formats that are popular, the styles of business that are successful. It’s all kind of evolving, but if we really want to be successful over time, we want to think about the things that aren’t going to change and really lay our foundation there. So I’ve got a list and I’m gonna kind of work through here.

So the first thing that we know that’s not going to change is people are always gonna want to look better and feel better and really be a better version of themselves. I mean, we can look back to advertisements from over a hundred years ago and see that, you know, people wanting to be a better version of themselves. It has been kind of inherent for as long as anybody is. Anybody can probably tell, and that’s not going away. So we want to focus on the person that we’re serving. We want to focus on the desires that they have, and maybe the converse of that. We want to also kind of pay a great deal of attention to the things that they’re trying to escape, the things they’re trying to get away from. So if we, if we’re sensitive to this and we’re empathetic and we, we put our attention there, you know, we don’t have to spend as much time marketing a tactic or a tool or the next shiny object, because we know people are always going to want to be a better version of themselves. And if we’re tuned in to who our person, we’re going to know the language that they speak, we’re going to know the, the things that they care about, the things that they’re trying to escape from and the places that are trying to arrive to. So that’s the first thing that’s not going to change in your time as a business owner.

The second is people are always going to do better with accountability. They’re always going to be better off with somebody providing that external accountability that you know, that, that sort of you know, holding your hand approach to being successful. And this is not going to change either. I mean, we all do better with deadlines, right? I mean, if I look at my child Scholastic pursuits, right, they, they get projects done when there’s a deadline when there’s a due date. So we need to make sure that we’re providing accountability is if this was easy for people to change, if this was easy for people to get out of their comfort zone, the do it themselves, they, they wouldn’t need our help, but perhaps the most important thing that we can offer in this era where information is so readily available, people can learn all sorts of things and have access to all sorts of things at their fingertips. Pretty much on demand, the accountability to stay the course, the accountability, to persevere the accountability, to, to build new habits and adopt new behaviors. That’s, that’s something that people are always going to need, and the better you are providing it. And the more consistent you are with it, the better off your clients are going to be. And then you not kind of piggybacking that people always do better with coaching, right? I mean, for four years, we look back and we see people had mentors. They had, they, they did an apprenticeship when they learned a new profession, instead of maybe going to college some of the time. And that’s really just coaching. It’s, you know what? I’m going to teach you. I’m going to guide you. I’m going to motivate you. I’m going to inspire you. Whether we’re talking about kind of stern coaching or positive coaching or whatever we call it. Like people always do better when there’s that kind of mentorship.

That’s part of their experience. People always do better when they’re not just left to their own devices, figure it out. So if we’re coaching centric and maybe not program centric or tool centric, we’re going to be better off because the tools are not a differentiator most of the time, right? I mean, really all somebody needs is a valid credit card to, to really gain access to the thing that maybe the person using tools does to differentiate themselves. If you say, Hey, I’m a, I’m a kettlebell specialist and that’s, that’s our magic bullet. We train with kettlebells. Well, you know, I can call it perform better and order a bunch of kettlebells. And now I am too. And yeah, somebody else may have more experience. Somebody else may have better credentials, but let’s face it. The prospect, the client, they don’t know much of this. They’re not into the credentialing side of it. The way that we are. I mean, really all you have to do is think about it when you’re on the other side of the fence, when you are the consumer, how do you think about credentials? I mean, do you know what college your CPA went to? Do you know what culinary school, the chef at the last restaurant you went to attended? No, we don’t. We, we worry about the experienced, the result, the outcome. We worry about how people treat us. We worry about, you know, all those things as they relate to us, what’s in it for us.

So that’s where we need to place our focus as it relates to the clients we serve, and then let’s face it. People are always going to like convenience. People want things easy. I mean, if we think about businesses that have really kind of thrived over the past handful of years you know, Amazon is the first that comes to mind, things delivered to you conveniently, right? I mean, it went from, you know, Hey, I can order stuff online or it’ll be shipped to me to two day shipping to next day, shipping the same day, shipping everything being as convenient as possible. And then, you know, even if we think about Apple. Apple delivered a phone to our pocket, basically. So all the things that we could do in the past, we, you know, now it’s, everything’s right there at your fingertips. Again, convenience. We may not think of having our phone on us. It is convenience because it’s just part of what we do, but people always want things more you know, delivered to them or done for them in a more convenient fashion. And then, you know, I, I think a lot of us in our industry get caught up in pricing, right. And we think, okay, I need to be the cheapest people. Don’t just seek out the cheapest. People just want to feel like they got great value for the investment they made. And if you think about it in that way, you know, you don’t have to be the cheapest. It’s just, nobody wants to feel like I paid a hundred dollars for something. And it was only worth 50. They may feel very comfortable paying a hundred dollars for something that they felt like was worth 150 or 200. Right? So don’t feel like you have to win by being the cheapest. You don’t have to be planet fitness. You don’t have to be the Walmart of you know, of your marketplace. What you do need to do is make people feel like whatever they got, they, they received a great value for the investment that they made. And that investment probably goes beyond just the monetary side of it. It goes, it goes into time that they invested the, the effort, the, the emotional spend that they’ve made to get whatever result that they’re getting to get, you know, the, the feeling that they’re experiencing.

So make sure that, that we’re sensitive to, you know, the value somebody gets. So like when people talk to me about, Hey, I want to raise my rates. Well, part of this is just making sure that people still feel like it’s a bargain people. Aren’t going to balk it. Somebody’s raising the price by $10 a month. If they feel like, man, this is the best part of my day. This is the best part of my week. I wouldn’t give this up. I’d give up all these other things in my life, but I wouldn’t give this up. But if somebody already feels like, man, you know, that’s, that’s already probably teetering on not being a great deal for me. Then when we raise our rates, then that’s just an excuse for them to move on. And then, you know, people are always going to want to be part of a community. Not everybody, not everybody wants to. You know, I mean, not everybody wants the same community experience. So when I say that, don’t think that that means group trainings, the answer it’s just, people want to belong to something the, the, you know, allows them to feel important.

So think about that as kind of meshing together community and importance. Like people don’t mind, even introvert mean people don’t mind being part of a club. They just want a different experience from the club, right? They want solitude food or you know, they, they don’t want the, the high energy overwhelm of the crowd, that sort of thing, but they still, they want to belong to somewhere that values them. Everybody wants to belong to something that makes them feel important. We gravitate to places where we’re going to be treated well, where we feel valued, where we feel appreciated, where we’re acknowledged. And if you keep that in mind, if you can make this things that you do the best part of your client’s respective day, or at least kind of setting the tone for their day, it makes their day better. It’s kind of a springboard into the way they want to feel. And the, the daily experience they want to have, then you’re going to be in great shape. So those are the fundamentals, the kind of foundational elements we’ve covered mindset. We’ve covered the foundational elements. Next episode, we’re going to move into maybe more of the, the, the focal point of the service that you provide and how you’re going to, to, to kind of make sense sure. That you’re providing a service that’s attractive to prospects. And it really delivers for clients, not just in the result that they want, but through an experience they enjoy.

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