Fitness Business School – 30 Day Test Drive

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here and we’re going to kick off a six part series on what we’re doing to improve and grow our business and how you can apply it to yours. We’re going to go step by step unpacking, one different strategy or tactic we’re employing that is really helping to improve our business. And I’m going to teach you how to implement it in yours. So 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 impact and improve their lifestyle. Be sure to listen til the end of this episode, because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

During my professional life, I’ve always been interested in learning from others. I’ve been really excited about finding mentors and teachers and trying to learn from them too, to kind of shortcut my path towards reaching my goals. Now that means I’ve bought plenty of books and courses. I’ve been part of mastermind groups since about 2006. I’ve gone to event after event to learn. But honestly, one of the most powerful ways that I’ve learned is just through observation, because it’s amazing how many times you’ll buy a course from somebody. And it’ll outline this kind of, I think, vanilla path towards doing something, accomplishing some, some tasks, reaching some goal, and it will seem very disconnected from what the instructor, what the, the mentor is actually doing themselves to grow their own business.

So I thought over the next several episodes, I would just unpack one by one, some things that we’re doing internally in our business, rather than say, Hey, you should do this. I’m going to say, Hey, this is what we’re doing. This is why, and this is how you can implement it in your own operation. So the first thing that we’re going to do is touch on something that we’re testing right now called a 30 day test drive. Now we’re letting people come into our business growth accelerator coaching program. So kind of our flagship program and do a 30 day test drive. They don’t have to pay any fee. There’s no obligation to continue. We don’t even take a credit card during that 30 day trial. And we’re doing this in, in, in many ways to, to get somebody kind of into our ecosystem to, to understand, appreciate and become part of our culture and actually start seeing results. And I think it’s a big differentiator for us because most people in our industry basically kind of do the opposite. They say, pay me a significant sum of money upfront or commit to a really significant financial obligation up front. And then we’ll start helping you we’ll start serving you. And so the, the, the balance kind of gets out of whack. It’s all one sided where somebody delivered all their value ie the client who’s paid. And then the, the other party, you, the coach starts to deliver their value.

So for me, this is not a new concept. I did this for really the entire time that I’ve been a business owner. I did it with my first training business. I did it with my first health club. I’ve offered free and $1 trials for things throughout, because I’ve always felt like, okay, if we do a good job, if we really deliver, then we’re going to keep a decent percentage of the people who come on board. And I’m not, prequalifying through mechanisms that are a bad fit, right? A lot of times people try to pre-qualify by demographic or by by, by some promise of how much they’re willing to invest or household income or something. Whereas for me, the biggest qualifier is, Hey, will they actually do the program? And are they going to get results? Because if they are the money, part of, it’s probably not going to be much of a problem because, Hey, they’re going to be generating more revenue and B, they’re going to clearly see the value in what we do now, when we bring in more people like this, when we cast a wider net, sure. There’s going to be, you know, some people who just don’t make it, they’re just not ready. They’re not committed. They’re not maybe in the right place for them. But I, I personally would rather cast the wider net and find more of the right. People will maybe also spending a little bit of time sorting through some people who may not be a great fit, then overqualified people by the wrong metrics, and then leave out a lot of people that we could have helped that could have thrived in the program that we have to offer.

And I know that’s very different than the way a lot of people approach this, but I’ve always felt like my strength. And in turn, my program, strength has been coaching. And so I think that we probably can help people who may not have done well in other environments, in other programs, in other courses, we can help them do well, because the way we approach things is different. Now I will say that I had to let go of, or maybe didn’t even ever really worry about having the highest conversion rate when somebody talks about, Hey, I convert 95% of my prospects or whatever else. I’ve always found that to be kind of an unimpressive number, because means that there were probably a lot of people that they could have gotten that they didn’t invite into actually go through their sales or conversion process. And I I’ve always thought of that as kind of being an order taker. It’s like the per the person at the drive through at Chick-fil-A has like a hundred percent close rate, right? Because there’s not there. There’s not any sort of filtering. There’s not a wide net at somebody who’s already made their decision and they’re coming in with credit card in hand. So for me, I would rather impact more people. I I’m hopeful that my professional legacy is kind of that impacting more people, helping more people. And this is a wonderful way to do that. Now it comes with its own set of challenges. You have to be better at onboarding. You have to probably have a, a very high touch way of coaching to facilitate people, kind of getting acclimated to what you’re doing, because you may be dealing with more volume than usual, but for me, it’s worked out great. How can you apply this in your business, which is probably the most important piece of this puzzle?

The first thing that I would tell you is understand that the way that you qualify prospects is not just about their financial means. I’ve sold so much training to people early on in my career that I would have never guessed, had the means to pay for it, but their desire was off the charts. Really, for me, the most important qualifier is desire. If the desire is there more often than not, people will find a way. And so you have to think about the way the, that you bring people in and understand that, you know, you, if you’re going to take this approach, desire is really a big qualifier for you. And if somebody is willing to give you their time and their effort, and they’re going to work hard and they’re committed, then more often than not, not always, but more often than not, they’re going to find a way to ultimately, you know, pay you to be part of the program. Long-Term. So you’re going to have to kind of shift that mindset. Second. You’ve gotta be okay with the, the result delivery part of this. You’ve got to believe that your culture, your environment, your program, it’s going to deliver meaningful results to this person, so that they’re going to want to stay engaged. They’re going to want to stay on board. And that doesn’t mean some crazy amount of fat loss in a really unreasonable timeframe or anything like that. But they’re definitely gonna have to be able to feel the difference in being part of your program, other programs they may have experienced. And then you need to have a strong process in place to not only onboard people, but to convert them. You don’t want it to just be haphazard. You don’t want it to just be you know, Hey, they’re going to like it so, well, hopefully they’re going to come to me and say, they want to stay.

No, you have to have a conversion process. So that there’s a systematic way that you take these people that are experiencing the, the, the actual service delivery and, and move. As many of them is as appropriate to being paying clients. And finally, you need to make the financial side of this work. So in my business cash flows. Okay. you know, we, we already had a meaningful number of people paying to be part of the program and it wasn’t one-on-one coaching. So that worked, but, you know, if you’re doing a group training model, you could probably do something very similar to what we’re doing. If you’re doing something semi-private or one-on-one, you probably want to scale it back and do something shorter or something with a low investment. I guess the key here is understanding that the qualifier is not just financial it’s time and commitment and effort and desire. And I’m getting all of those, but financial upfront, even if you lower the financial bar up front, you can still check all those boxes and just make the finance side a little bit less of a barrier. Now, the cool thing about this that I didn’t mention is that this isn’t just you putting your best foot forward. And you know, it hoping that casting this wider net brings in more clients. It is also essentially like a tryout for you. You get to see if people are going to fit. If they’re not going to be a good fit for your culture, if they’re not going to be somebody that you think lifts others up in your program, and that you can help and everything else, you’ve got this really confined in our case 30 day window, that you can sort through that you’re not obligated to keep anybody around.

People will always talk about firing clients. And I think many of us have experienced that, and it’s no matter what, it’s not pleasant, right? So I would rather have this kind of try out window and just see if people are a fit on both sides. And if they are, they continue on, everybody kind of knows what to expect. And everybody’s happy. I think you can put that to play in your business as well. So 30 day test drive, you can manipulate the timeframe. You may be able to add a small fee. We’ve done $1 trials and different things like we’ve done lower cost trials. We’ve done stuff where people paid it at a posit that was refundable, all sorts of things to just mitigate the financial risk on their part. It’s worked for us. It’s worked for me in training businesses and health club environments as well. So I think it’s probably something that can work for you as well. Plus if you’d be interested in experiencing our 30 day test drive on the inside, not only for your own business growth, but to unpack what we do and see how you can emulate it. Shoot me an email at [email protected] and I’ll get you all the details.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the fitness business school. Before you go. I have a quick announcement. When I first connect with a new fitness business owner, they almost always ask me, “How can I get more clients and earn more money?” Well, I have an exclusive offer for you as a listener of this podcast, and it’s going to help you do just that. As a listener of this show, you can test drive our Business Growth Accelerator coaching program for 30 days free of charge.

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