Fitness Business School – 323 – How a Great Business Actually Works

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And I wanna talk with you about the way things actually work if you wanna build a great business, 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.

A few days ago, I was talking with a business owner who who’s done fine. He’s definitely
got a solid business, but he’s been challenged or has struggled to, to break through and build what we
would consider his ideal business. And like many people that business owner he’s spent a
disproportionate amount of time focusing on choosing the tactics. He’s going to deploy what add to run
or what text message to send, or, um, should we be using this, you know, this hip hinge exercise or that
hip hinge exercise.
And he’s not looking at his business as an owner, nearly in the way that he should. So we kind of walk
through what I think the sequence of your own kind of CEO role in your business should look like, or
maybe this prior priority list or hierarchy of what we need to do to set ourselves up to succeed, not just
today, but in building the business that we wanna build. So the first thing that most people skim over I is
really what I consider the foundational element. This is the thing that everything else in
your business is built on, and that is owning your time. If you are not controlling your time, you are
invariably going to be cutting the value of that time, significantly. It, it’s not uncommon to see people’s
effective hourly rate.

So the amount of money may they make for the time that they spend working, you
know, be a third or a quarter of what it should be because they have not owned their time.
They’ve just been reactive to things. So if you are not controlling your time to make sure that you are
allocating your, your personal energy, your personal space, to the things that matter most for your
goals, then, you know, you you’ve really put a low ceiling on the potential for your business. So once
we’ve gotten a hold of our time, once we’ve really started, you know, taking control of that. And as a
side note, this is why we do planning as part of our coaching program.

That’s a weekly thing, you know,
how are we planning our week? How are we planning our day? And we’ll get into that more in a
moment. But if you are not making that a focal point, you know, you’re, you’re essentially going into
business with one arm tied behind your back. So that’s first, the second thing that we need to do is
define our vision.
What is success for us? Because that has to be that north star, that, that we’re always trying to move
towards when we’re making decisions. So, you know, except the fact that anything, when it comes to
this, we’re probably writing in pencil, right? Because the further along you get your vision evolves, the
more your circumstances may change your vision evolves, but we need to start with a vision because
when we’re hiring, when we’re making decisions, everything needs to be aligned with that vision, if
we’re actually going to have success. So that second, the third thing that we do is craft our annual plan
in, in our business. We do annual planning in December, both for my own business. And we do
annual planning events with our clients where we map out what the upcoming year is, is gonna look like
for us. What are our priorities?
What do we want to achieve? What did we learn from the previous year that we need to either discard
or, um, and, and replace, or, or replicate and, and build on. So we need to craft our annual plan again,
like I mentioned, this is in pencil because let’s face it. If you’re doing an annual plan and you’re thinking
about, Hey, what am I gonna be doing in October? And it’s currently December of the previous year
there. You only have so much insight as to what that October is gonna look
like. And, and I think so many people began to understand this idea when we were kind of in the teeth
of PA the pandemic, it was hard to think, well, what’s it gonna look like six months, nine months from
now? Heck sometimes we didn’t know it was gonna look like, look like a week from now, but we went to craft our annual plan.

Then, you know, as part of that, or in tandem with that, we need to select the strategies we are going to
be employing. You know how we’re going to connect with prospects, how we’re going to convert those
prospects to clients, how we’re going to coach those people to achieve the results they want and, and
how we’re gonna scale this business so that we are having more impact. We’re having the opportunity
to play our best role. And we’re earning the type of income we’ll enjoying the lifestyle we want. So we
need our strategies to, to kind of be at the, at, at the root of that annual plan, what is going to be our
strategic approach. We’re not just cobbling things together. Then we break things down to our six week
plan. We’ve done a hundred day sprints. We’ve done quarterly planning, 12 week planning, all that stuff.

It it’s all fine, but for me, six weeks is a better fit because six weeks is easier for me to forecast. It’s easier for me to be realistic and predicting what we can actually accomplish, what our current priorities are and what they’re gonna be for the next 42 days when I’ve done longer things, it always felt like I had to
recalibrate in the middle. So we started to just say, look, we’re gonna break these up into two. Instead
of recalibrating in the middle, it’s worked out better. My guess is it would work out better for you. And
at that point, we’re really making sure we’re choosing the tactics that we can deploy, that we are going
to be deploying during that six weeks to, um, execute the strategies, to reach the goals on our annual
plan and to help move us toward the vision. Then at a more granular level, every either Friday or
Sunday, depends on your preference in my world.
I do it on Sundays, but I know my wife, I know a couple of our coaches. They do their planning for the
upcoming week on Friday. Um, plan your week, decide what you’re going to do when to make sure that
you’re executing the things that are high priority for you. We do a win the week session every week with
clients. And then finally, every evening we recap our day, we review what happened. Then we plan the
upcoming day. So we win the day. And that’s the kind of sequence of events. Now, if that feels like a lot
to you, I get it. But understand that owning your time is a habit. It may not be the way that you
approach things now, but it’s a habit that will make you better at everything. If you embrace it, defining
your vision, is that thing that should be getting you really excited and, and making sure that you’re
building a business that you love instead of building a business that you just tolerate, right?
We don’t want to just create a job. We want to build something that’s fulfilling to us that allows us to
have the impact that we want to have to enjoy the income that we want and deserve, and to, you know,
have the lifestyle that we wanna lead, whether it is playing the role we want in business, or having a
certain type of flexibility in our schedule. But, you know, we want that vision to again, be that beacon
for us. And then after that, it’s just breaking things down in a manageable fashion. So you know what to
spend your time on. So every day you can feel like you made incremental progress towards where you
want to go. And, you know, we, we start kind of at that bigger picture with the annual, but we break it
all the way down to the daily and we start with the tactics, but then we figure out, or we start with the
strategy and then we figure out what tactics fit into executing that strategy.
So hopefully, you know, when you think about maybe why your business is stuck or why you can’t break
past a plateau, this gives you a little bit of insight. Maybe your, your glossing over parts of this, maybe
you’re omitting parts of this entirely. And you’re defaulting to just choosing tactics and being
reactive. And, you know, and, and there’s the ceiling to how high that will allow you to climb. So if you’re
not taking this approach, I would recommend, you may put your business back under the microscope.
You spend a little bit of time dialing this in, and it may just be the most rewarding thing that you do.

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 fitness business owner they almost always ask me, “How can I get more leads or how can I get more leads and client?”

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