Fitness Business School – 6 Deadly Mistakes of Fitness Business Owners

Full Transcript

Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk to you about the six deadly mistakes that fitness business owners make. I know that sounds pretty dramatic, but I think you’ll really click with this and understand it and more importantly, learn from it so you can avoid them in this episode.

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.

Let’s be honest, nobody wants to make mistakes. It’s not a, it’s not something that we look forward to, but really, you know, mistakes are just part of the process. Failure is just part of the process and getting to where we want to go. So if you can learn from somebody else’s mistakes, so you can avoid those. So you can kind of stand on the shoulders of somebody else. You’re going to be better off. So I wanted to share with you six things that I see business owners in our industry really get bogged down with some people, man. They, they struggle with all these and others. It’s just one or two of them that really hold them back from breaking through and seeing the results they want.

So mistake number one is not attracting prospects, right? Like not generating leads really consistently, you know, not being magnetic in getting people to, to show an interest in what we have to offer. So, you know, everybody needs more leads in our, in our industry, but a lot of times people are just reactive. They, they mistake having referral systems for what they actually have is just a little bit of positive word of mouth. And that’s not predictable. It’s not consistent. They do episodic advertising instead of being consistent with it. So mistake number one is not consistently attracting leads or attracting prospects with, with a message that is going to get the right people in the door. So, you know, the, the fix is pretty simple. Put your best stuff out there. So it gets your prospect to raise their hand and start moving towards you. And if we do that, then it just becomes a follow-up and conversion thing. So number one, not having a consistent plan to attract prospects or attract leads.

Number two, not converting those, those prospects or leads into paying clients. And I think this kind of dovetails in with the previous one pretty obviously, but so of the way that we operate is immediate gratification based, right? Even if we get a lead from our website or we get somebody to respond to a Facebook ad, if they don’t buy within the first 72 hours, we kind of write them off as being less than serious as being a bad fit for what we do. And we just move on. But you know, we’re not far following up and helping people make a great informed decision. We’re not building fans. We’re not positioning ourselves as an authority. So people need to trust you. They need to know that you can help solve their problem. They need to know that if they’re choosing you, they’re putting a lot of trust in the fact that you can help them go from where they are to where they want to be. So if you’re not following up consistently, if you’re not pulling good marketing content out there that that really addresses the hot buttons your prospects have, that really helps them see that you can and will help them achieve their goals and solve their problems. And if you don’t have a dependable, consistent sales process, you’re making every lead that you get less valuable. You’re, you’re paying more to get new clients because you’re converting fewer, the leads that you get yet. So, you know, instead of spending $5, there’s a lead and converting one out of 10 leads to becoming a client. Maybe we’re spending $5 a lead and converting one out of 20. So we’re paying twice as much, right? And that’s not, that’s not going to set you up for success in business. So the first two, right? We’re not attracting enough, leads enough qualified prospects. Number two, we’re not converting prospects to clients.

Number three, we just don’t understand the people that we serve. We get so caught up in the, the things that we do, our process, the tools that we use, we talk about things in the way that’s important to us, the language that we use internally in our industry. And we lose sight of the person that, that we want to serve. We lose sight of the things that they’re feeling, the things that they’re experiencing, the lives that they lead, the goals that they have, the problems they are trying to solve, you know, where this whole exercise fitness health thing fits into their life. We lose sight of the fact that that just because this has been important to us for quite some time, it’s a new thing for them. Or maybe it’s something that they’re bringing back that they weren’t successful with before we lose sight of the fact that they may have to rearrange their whole world to, to be successful with what we do, adding and workouts, changing their nutrition, doing things differently with their family breaking habits that have been around for decades. So one of the biggest, maybe of the six that I mentioned, maybe the biggest mistake that kills business owners is just not being dialed in and in tune with our prospects. All right.

So number four, not having any less average. And, you know, I, I hesitate to, to, to just right this office saying trading time for money, right? Trading your hour for one person’s dollars, because ultimately any hour we invest in our business is going to be trading, you know, trading that time for the return on the investment of time we’re putting in. But so many people, they just don’t have any leverage, right? They don’t have a plan in place where maybe, you know, they’ve empowered other people to provide services for them. Maybe they’re training more than one person at a time. Maybe they’re documenting the things that they do. And they’re selling it to people who aren’t locally utilizing their services. You could be coaching somebody who’s across the country, virtually with online training. You can be documenting your things and selling it to other trainers or coaches. But if you’re not creating some sort of leverage in your business and you’re not getting basically paid in an increasing way for the time that you were investing, if you’re not getting paid, perhaps in multiple ways for the things that you do, you’re missing out. And what it’s going to do is lead to burnout. It’s going to lead for resentment of this business that you were so passionate about starting because you feel like you’re just on this never ending hamster wheel. You know, my, my dad, his own, I owned an auto repair business for, gosh, I guess at this point, fast approaching 40 years. And he, yeah, he is the quintessential time for money guy. Like his work, his manual labor traded for one car being repaired over and over and over. And so I remember as a, is a kid, we wouldn’t go on vacations that he was working six and a half days, days a week, long hours, very stressful. And only until later when, when he had some leverage and when he had some money put away, could he kind of back off a little bit, bit, you know, I don’t think most of us want to wait to where in our sixties to slow down. So if you want to accelerate this, if you want to start to, to enjoy being a business owner more and not feel like you’re owned by your business, you have to find some level bridge in what you were doing. All right. So we’ve got not attracting prospects, not converting them to clients, not understanding those prospects and no leverage.

Next up, we’re wearing too many hats, right? We are the Jack of all trades, the master of none. And as a startup is a new business owner. There’s no way around that. That’s just kind of the way it goes for most of us, especially if you’re like me and you had to bootstrap all your businesses that you started. Right? But okay, time, we have to delegate and elevate. We’ve got to be able to hand off some of those lower dollar activities and spend our time doing the more lucrative activities, the things that are in our zone of genius, if you will, the playing the best role in the business, not playing every role in the business. There are things that you can hand off, $10, $15, $17 an hour task. You can hand off to somebody else that may be great at those things may look doing them. And you can replace that with things that pay you 50 75, a hundred, $150 an hour, and create a lot more value for your time. You could easily offload some of the things that cause you burn out and stress. That’s a lot of the problem in our industry is people may love coaching, but they, they don’t hand off the things that they don’t love. And eventually they kind of get burned out. I remember back when I was coaching college baseball, aye, aye, aye. I kind of looked up maybe five or six years into this. And I said, man, like 15% of what I do is basically ball. And it, it was a little bit different heartening. And at that point I was getting some burnout six, seven years in. And, and that was a big reason why I still love going to practice. I still love the games. I love the competitiveness. I love their relationship w with the players, but I love fundraising. No. Did I love having to figure out things like meal money for trips and that sort of stuff? No. So understanding that as you move on in your business, you can’t wear every hat. You can’t play every role. If you’re behaving like a startup five years in something’s wrong. So that’s the fifth one.

And then number six, poor retention, not retaining enough of our clients. And just to give you a, a nice baseline number. I think anything below 90% retention month over month is probably a number that we need to, to put under the microscope and say, how do we improve it now? Does that mean you have a broken business? If you’ve got 93% retention? No, but what it means is you’ve got opportunity to improve. You’ve got like, that’s a leverage point for you where you could definitely see more profit and, and, and have a healthier business with a few simple fixes. But a lot of people don’t track those numbers, right? They think, well, Hey, we retain everybody because they see the faces that come in and they keep coming in and they lose track of those people who may not be showing up and then just fall off. So if you’re not paying attention to retention, you’re going to struggle because we we’ve all heard very numbers from, Hey, it costs seven times as much to 15 times as much to acquire a new client. Is it cost to retain one? I don’t know what the exact number is. I’ve been hearing numbers like that way back ever since I was a college baseball coach and recognize that the best recruiting I could do was to make sure my freshmen became sophomores and sophomores became juniors and moved up the ladder instead of always chasing the new recruit. And the thing, the thing that I did recognize very simply was, you know what? It definitely is better for all parties. If we retain the people that we have, if we retain people, we’re definitely not going to have to spend as much on marketing. We’re going to get people better results. We’re going to be more likely to generate referrals. We’re going to have a better culture in our business. So making retention a priority and thinking, Hey, I need to lift my retention numbers. Two, three, 4%. It may not seem like a big deal, but I promise it can transform a business if you get it right. So there are six deadly mistakes that, that really cut the legs out from under business owners. And if you’re dealing with any of those, understand that, you know, they, they don’t have to be the death blow to a business, but they’re red flags. There are things that need to be addressed because if you don’t have all these things fixed, if you don’t have this dialed in, you’re never going to have the business you want. So look at those mistakes and if you need help in addressing any of them, reach out, we’re just an email.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School. And 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 clients?” Well, I have an exclusive offer for you and it’s going to help you do just that. As a listener of this show, you can test drive Fitness Lead Academy for six full weeks for just a dollar. Fitness Lead Academy is a one of a kind program where you get done-for-you marketing tools and coaching to attract more qualified prospects and convert them into paying clients. Imagine having three marketing emails written for you each and every week for easy-to-deploy promotions provided to you that are proven to convert and they’re ready to use and proven ads and social media posts given to you each and every month as well. Plus you have access to three weekly live video coaching sessions to help you with everything from dialing in your brand to navigating things like building funnels and getting ads approved. You get all of this and more when you join Fitness Lead Academy. And to prove that FLA can serve you as your virtual marketing department and not only save you plenty of time, but also consistently bring you more leads and clients, you can get access to the entire coaching program for six full weeks. Again, for just $1. If it delivers for you in the way that I expect it will, you can continue on for just $199 a month. So basically, just one additional client each month and you’re ROI positive. And I’m sure that if you apply what we give you, you’re going to get more than just one additional client each month. And you’re going to likely save at least 10 hours a month to take advantage of this special offer. Just go to TestDriveFLA.com to try it out for six full weeks. If it’s not what you’re looking for, you can cancel it any time.

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