Fitness Business School – 5 Lessons to Make Your Business Better

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I want to talk with you about five simple lessons to make your business better. 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 to the end
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It’s probably an exaggeration when I say it, but I commonly tell people that I only really know a handful of things about growing a business. And I repeat a lot of the same concepts or maybe things that are one degree away from the same concept or something. Just the same handful of core concepts and I just repeat them over and over.

Because it’s what works. And I think too often people are chasing things that are new and novel and skip past the proven fundamentals, the proven concepts, this stuff that we know, same stuff in fitness, right? Eat supportively protein and produce, be more active, strength training, recovery. It’s, it is. not about what new exotic supplement somebody can take or this trendy new exercise or something like that.

It’s the fundamentals that work. And so I wanted to talk about five things that I find myself repeatedly coming back to that have worked the entire time I have owned businesses, which is 20 years now. And I feel rather confident that they’ll work for the next 20 years as well. And the first is you have to be great at what you do.

And I don’t think that enough people talk about this. I don’t think that the so called experts really drive this home enough. Now they’ll write it off by saying, we just assume you’re great at what you do and we focus on marketing or something. And I was like, that’s like assuming somebody is going to eat supportively when they’re at home and their goal is weight loss.

So we’ll just say, we’ll just assume you’re going to eat supportively. So we’re just going to focus on exercise. It’s, it just doesn’t work that way. So my thought is pretty simple. If somebody doesn’t generally invest in the idea of you being better at what you do, then they’re not really a coach. They’re a market.

They may be a marketer, right? Like they may be an agency type thing or something, but you know, it’s like somebody saying, we just assume the food is great at the restaurants. We’ll run the ads. Like, nah, let’s face it. You can’t outrun being inferior in what you deliver. Better to look at building from the inside out and saying, okay, be great at your craft.

It’s the foundation of what you do. If you’re building a training business, be great at training, be great at delivering an experience. It will magnify, it will multiply all the work that you do from marketing. It will make selling easier. It’ll make retention stronger. It’ll make generating referrals much simpler and the relationship value that you have with each client.

will grow exponentially. And if you ignore this and if you just say, okay, I’m just going to have a me too business, we’re just going to host workouts. If, if you aren’t committed to being the best in your market at a respective thing, then everything gets harder because your business becomes something of a revolving door.

The ways of differentiating don’t work. The social proof isn’t there. And, uh, It’s just a race that’s really hard to run because the market has gotten just completely more competitive. I wouldn’t call it completely saturated, but it’s saturated in certain verticals with certain models. And you need to differentiate by being great.

Number two is once you started with this great at what you do concept. In my mind, marketing and selling is really built around getting people to experience what you do, why you’re different, why you’re better. better how you’re going to help them, how you’re going to solve their problems, how you’re going to shorten the path or reduce the friction between where they are and where they want to be.

And I think of marketing is simply connecting and getting people to experience what you have to offer. I think of everybody in that light as a guest, whether they’re a paid guest or a free guest. A lot of times people think in terms of free when I use the word guest, but you know what hotels refer to.

customers as guests. Disney refers to customers as guests and those are anything but free. Think of people as a guest and the experience that you would want a guest to have. It’s not a transactional thing, right? It is an experience that you prepare for somebody and you want them to leave feeling a certain way, having received a certain type of care and service.

And so if, if you’re great at what you do, focus on getting more guests through the door. I think that’s the kind of first leg or the foundational piece of marketing. And frankly, there’s no long form sales page. There’s no webinar. There’s no, you know, no sales mechanism that is going to be as effective in helping somebody convince themselves and leaving them satisfied in a congruent way.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t be more persuasive. With marketing tactics, but usually those are preying on emotions and desperation and that sort of thing. So there there’s often some incongruence between how somebody is sold and how somebody is served the best possible way to have congruence between how somebody is sold and how they’re served is to let them experience what you do.

And that could be through some sort of shorter term, um, program with somebody. It could be through, I mean, it could be through an assessment. It’s not exactly a precise experience of what they’ll be doing on a daily basis, but they’ll get to work with you. They’ll get to spend time with you. They’ll understand more about you and it’s interactive, right?

It’s a conversation that it’s not just one way. And then the third thing that I would tell you that I focus at length on is coaching people through is maximizing the value of each relationship. And I don’t mean that solely in a monetary sense, the value is a value exchange. It is not the value to you.

And it’s probably why I get granular about language. And when people talk about High ticket. They’re only talking about one side of a transaction there. Nobody ever says, I’m going to go buy high ticket. There are plenty of people who say that are, they’re going to sell it, but nobody ever says, I want to go buy high ticket.

They’re not searching that on Amazon. Now they may be looking for things that are expensive, things that are tremendously valuable, but if we want to maximize the The long term success and durability of our business relationships are everything maximizing the relationships to the people you meet and bring in as clients and the people that open doors for you maximizing the relationship of the people that you serve through providing a genuine experience that is built around care and transformation and not transaction being a more complete solution focusing as much on connecting and keeping people feeling connected and important as you are on instructing and exercise.

And you know, again, that I don’t know that there is a simple singular tactic there that I’m trying to describe as much as an approach. And if you focus on transformations over transactions and if you focus on Think about how do I make this value exchange stronger? How do I make it more valuable to the person I’m serving?

And it’s more than fair to say, okay, if I make it more valuable to them, then I should be compensated better. And I think that’s how we should be thinking about this relationship value. We should be thinking in terms of elevating the impact of each relationship. And then maximizing the value of your time.

And I think this happens in a variety of ways. I might talk about maximizing the value of your time through using something like automatic members to create leverage, to be able to deploy things faster and not start from scratch to be able to automate things I may talk about maximizing the value of your time through creating systems and being, not just efficient, but effective.

I think that’s one of the easily overlooked things is people worry so much about systemizing things that they try to be so efficient. The most efficient thing that you can do is eliminate the things that don’t work. And so being effective and then systemizing it to make sure that whoever you want to hand things off to.

are fully capable of maximizing the value of your time through borrowing things that have been proven to work and adapting them to you. That doesn’t mean being a poor imitation of somebody else. It means not going through 25 different iterations of trial and error before arriving at a solution that you could have.

quickly. One of my favorite things to do is to learn from mentors, whether it’s reading a book and studying what somebody else did and compressing decades of time into me flipping through pages for a few days or investing very heavily with Mentors and being able to allow them to help customize some of their experiences to my situation.

Borrowing that stuff is like rocket fuel. And then maximizing the value of your time through tracking numbers, through making sure that you are getting feedback. There’s a scoreboard. So you do more of what works and less what doesn’t. And I think that’s another one that in our industry, we don’t gravitate towards because most people didn’t come to this from a business background.

They came to this from a coaching background, an interest in fitness. And so in turn, they shy away from numbers and thinking, I’m not a numbers person. I’m not a business person instead of saying, okay, this is a scoreboard. I want to win. So how do I do more of what’s working and less of what isn’t.

And then finally focusing on the fundamentals, which really is kind of what I just walked through, but focusing on stuff like this because it’s what works. And if you couple that with gaining clarity about what you want your business to be, which is really the, the foundation of building your ideal business, getting clarity about what you want, and maybe just as importantly what you don’t and then engineering around that and applying the fundamentals in a way that move you closer towards where you want to be in a consistent basis week after week.

And you know some of this stuff is just simple. Do what, do what you need to do week after week, be a good person, treat people well, focus on transformation versus transaction. It may not be the most creative stuff that, that grabs your attention in a Facebook ad or an Instagram post, but it will work over and over and fundamentals are the foundation of most.

Any success that you’re going to see, whether it’s in business or sport or life, there are just some things that are the bedrock that successes are built on. And if you start with that as the basis of what you do and build from there, I think for, for a lot of people, For almost all cases, success isn’t a matter of will it happen or will it not. It’s a matter of just how long it’ll take. It’s inevitable.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School.

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

One of of the things that we’ve been doing with our current clients is taking them through this Ideal Business diagnostic and really what it is, this checklist that allows you to pinpoint exactly what your business needs next so you can keep improving, keep growing, and build a business that you love to own, one that pays you well, one that allows you to have the impact you wanna have and one that allows you to have a lifestyle that you truly enjoy.

In this diagnostic, we walk through everything and we do an evaluation and can instantly pinpoint what you need to do next to build that business that you want. I’m going to extend this opportunity to get on with either me or my team and take you through this evaluation and fix your business’s most vital needs fast.

So if we take you through this, you’re gonna be able to make those vital changes that you need to finally have what I call your Ideal Business. If you’d be interested in going through this entirely free, risk-free diagnostic with us and learn what you already have in place, what you’re doing well and where are your greatest opportunities for rapid improvement are just shoot me an email with diagnostic in the subject line to [email protected].

Again, an email to [email protected] with diagnostic in the subject line will get
you scheduled and take you through this evaluation to help you build the business you want.