Fitness Business School – Create Your Ideal Business

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in this episode, I want to talk with you about creating your ideal business. 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.

So recently we had kind of a fun re-branding with our business growth accelerator program and we re-branded it, the ideal business accelerator, which in many ways is just kind of circling back to where we were with the ideal business academy pre-pandemic. So I wanted to give you a little bit of backstory to this, so you understand what the ideal business is and what that means for the people that we serve. And, you know, maybe what it means for you as a listener of this podcast. So back at the end of 2014, I sold my stake in a collect of businesses, an organization that had everything from education companies to franchising down the line. And I had spent a decade building that and growing it. But admittedly, the last couple years of being a co-owner are there, it, it just, you know, it wasn’t a lot of fun. It was you know, I’d kind of been building something that was a success that maybe you don’t enjoy, which I think a lot of people get there. They get really caught up in bigger, but not necessarily better. And I spent some time kind of, you know, once I knew that I was gonna move to a next stage of my professional life I spent some time thinking about what I wanted that to look like. And at the time I had a 12 year old and a three year old, and I just kind of thought about how quickly the 12 year old went from three to 12 in that previous window of time where we were growing that other business. And I said, you know, I, I want to be very present as they get older. I want to be able to build a business that allows me the flexibility, not necessarily the freedom. I tend to be hesitant to use that word because I think freedom implies freedom from responsibility and any business comes with a, a meaningful amount of responsibility, but flexibility to kind of do it on my terms where I wanted to do it.

If we wanted to go out of town, if we wanted to you know, if I wanted to you know, drop off my, my, my kids pick ’em up at school, whatever we were gonna do there. And, you know, so I wanted to do that, but I, I, I had these kind of characteristics of a business that I, that I wanted to build. And so, you know, the beginning of 2015, I, I coined this phrase that I’ve since trademarked called the ideal business and really it, it was an act acronym for independent, distinctive, enjoyable, authentic, and lucrative. So I I’ll give you a little bit of context to that and then tell you why we circled back to the ideal business accelerator. So independent means it’s just controlled by you, you know, that why you went into in this to, to be in control of your own destiny, you want the autonomy to build the business you want having been very heavily involved in the franchising world, founding two franchises consulting with a half dozen others, even being a franchisee of another one.

You know, sometimes it, it kind of drips you of your independence, not always some franchises are great about that. And to be honest, if you’re somebody who gets a lot of joy of being, you know, from the operator side of things, but not necessarily from the creator side, you can still have some independence as a franchisee, but for me, I like to create the, the ideation. So independent was very meaningful to me. And then distinctive kind of builds on that, right? The dictionary says distinctive means having like a special quality or style. So I think that most of the, that I admire that, that I think are extraordinary businesses. They, they are distinctive, they stand out, they they’re, they’re kind of unique. They’re, they’re distinctive. And if I think about the people that I admire most in the fitness industry, they’re definitely kind of, kind of different, right? The Cresty sports performance you know, Mike, Mike Boyles conditioning, pat beats athletes, acceleration you know, Todd Durkin’s business, you know, the Cosgrove’s business, all these businesses that I think are, are, are really kind of unique. And, and more recently, like, you know, as I’ve paid attention to play, this is like Spurling fitness is, is unique. It’s different, you know, the these businesses now they, other people may model them, but they didn’t just say, Hey, we’re just gonna clone, you know, a franchise or something like that. And so distinctive for me was very much that way. I, I wanted something to be kind of unique. The third enjoyable now that this probably was very much a reaction to where, where I had been professionally. I, I didn’t really enjoy the, the last leg of my journey with my, my other companies. And I wanted to build something that I really loved owning.

So, you know, if we’re gonna spend thousands of hours owning a business, it should be enjoyable, right? Like not every minute of it, but most of it should be fun. It should be fun owning and operating and creating and connecting and coaching. And, you know, if you’re gonna spend most of, you know, most of your daily time, there at least a lot of it, you, you should probably want to be there. And, and honestly, I felt very confident in building what is now my current business. I’m like, man, if I can build something as big as I had built the previous one, then I can build something better that I enjoy. Or at least better for me. Authentic kind of plays along that, right. My ideal business is isn’t your ideal business. It’s reflective of me, my beliefs, my values just as yours should be. And if you’re gonna love it, it probably can’t just be a clone of somebody else’s thing, right? Like it can’t be a replication of somebody else’s version of ideal because they have different beliefs and value. And you know, they’re, they’re at a different season of life, in some cases for me. If it’s reflective of me, it’s gotta be really family friendly. It’s gotta be something that allows me to deal with, you know, probably in eclectic collection of clients. Like I love the variety of working with, of, you know, some clients that have group businesses, some clients that have, semi-private some clients that have one on one, some online clients, people, you know, we, we’ve got people from all corners of not just north America, but you know, across the globe, we’ve got people who are a little more seasoned like myself. We’ve got younger people who are, you know, in the first part of their business journey. And I think that for me, that’s, you know, when I’m thinking about my authentic business, there is some variety. And then finally I mean, it’s a business. So the business has to be lucrative, whatever that means you, you need to be able to enjoy a financial livelihood that is fair compensation for the, the amount of impact you’re having the work you’re doing.

And, and I think an ideal business should be all that and more, and, you know, with when I started my current business, we, we had a, basically three coaching programs. We had the ideal business academy. We had the ideal business mastermind, which was kind of like a more maybe a two, like if IBA was like the undergrad program the ideal business mastermind was like the graduate level program. And then we had the online mastermind, which is essentially just the ideal business mastermind, but focused on people who had online businesses. Well, all that was great. The first domino for a lot of people coming into the ideal business academy was that they needed to generate more revenue. They needed to get more clientele. So we launched the business growth accelerator as basically a, an on ramp. Like, Hey, we’re gonna segment this out. We’re gonna work on this one piece, get it dialed in, and then help you create the systems, the, the optimization to, to what you want your business to be all that. And then the pandemic hit. And we kind of really put a lot of emphasis on BGA during the pandemic because, you know, people just needed to be able to, to pay the bills they needed to be able to bring in clients. And so that became our focal point and we just kind of circled the RA wagon, so to speak there. But now that, you know, people have kind of settled in and clients are coming back into offline businesses. People aren’t as restricted as to what they can do in most cases. We, we wanted to kind of get back to focusing on the people building the, of business they want. So we just kind of merged, I, you know, the ideal business academy and business growth accelerator, knowing that the first step, again, for most people is, Hey, we’ve gotta get you the, the financial foundation to optimize things, to play your best role, to hire a team, to, to, to really create the, the business and the life that you want. And so it’s been fun. It’s kind of come full circle, but I guess the, the other takeaway about all this is, you know, I think for the last seven-ish years, I’ve had my ideal business, but you notice the, the way that I’ve just described it, it’s not been static. It’s been this kind of living, breathing thing that’s evolved based on circumstances, based on the, the, the way the market is. I don’t divide up online mastermind versus offline now because so many people’s businesses are kind of a blend, a hybrid of both. You know, and I think that that’s part of the fun is, you know, we, we all keep growing.

We all keep moving, but you know, for me, the one kind of beacon there is I don’t want to just help people get more clients for, you know, grow for growth sake, because I know that just getting bigger is a business. Wasn’t the answer for me. So I want to help people who are kind of pursuing in the same thing they want better. And so that’s where the ideal business stuff goes. We’re gonna help people grow for sure, but we’re gonna help them grow in a direction that gives them the, the type of clientele they want. The, you know, the, to play the role in the business, they wanna play the livelihood they want to earn. It’s not just top line revenue, but it’s actually personal income and wealth building. So, you know, they, they’re not always kind of saying, man, I’m supporting all these people, but I’m not supporting me. So that’s kind of the backstory on ideal business. I know I talked through a bunch of it, but I, I figured that since, you know, you’ll probably be hearing about me or seeing me promoting the ideal business accelerator say, well, how’s that different than the other? Well, I wanted to give you a little bit of understanding that it’s not all that different, but it’s always focused on building the business that you want.

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