Fitness Business School – A Big Shift

Full Transcript

Hey Pat here. And in this episode, we’re going to kick off a three part series about becoming a producer, making that transformation that you need to make that one shift to have the business that you want. So we’re going to cover a lot of ground in this three-part series, and you’re going to have some free tools and gifts to help you put this into action. 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.

About 16 years ago, I started my first business. I moved from being a college baseball coach into the fitness industry. I had zero business background. I was moving to a town that I literally knew zero people into a market that wasn’t exactly prime for personal training, a small town in central Kentucky with about 23,000 people. And so really what I needed to do. I needed to build around my strengths because I had kind of burned my boats. I didn’t have anywhere to turn back to. I didn’t have a secure job to go back to. I, I didn’t have a bunch of savings, anything like that. So I needed to come up with a plan that was gonna allow me to be successful.

So really what I did, I looked back at my background as a college baseball coach and saw that recruiting was the lifeblood of my success. You have to get good players in the door if you’re going to build a winning program in any sport, and this was going to be true in business as well. So I needed to set up a plan to generate leads consistently to follow up with them, to turn people into actual paying clients, because if I didn’t get paying clients, I wasn’t going to last. And so I set up a simple kind of scoreboard system and I gave myself very specific goals each and every day I needed to sell one thing daily. I needed to go get one new client each and every day. And I really kind of just reverse engineered how many leads I needed to get to do this. And I sat down connected with new prospects, turn these prospects into paying clients and delivered results that was going to allow my business to thrive. Now, all this may sound super simple to you, but really the, the magic here was I did it consistently and I kind of shifted into this producer mindset out of desperation. I didn’t have an alternative.

Like I said, I had zero money in the bank. I had a terrible credit score. I had nothing to fall back on. And this kind of point of desperation forced my hand to really shift into becoming what I’ve begun calling a producer. Now over that first 18 months in business, I went from zero clients to over 420 paying clients with over 95% of them on 12 month contracts. So went from zero security to a very stable, secure, and even lucrative business that allowed me to scale to my second location and really kind of moved me into doing business coaching and consulting to teach other people what I was doing so well successfully in this, maybe not exactly opportune market.

Now, fast forward, 16 years later, I’ve owned over 30 different businesses in the fitness industry. I’ve had everything from those offline local training businesses to fitness franchises that have won awards in entrepreneur magazine and through franchise business review. I’ve also coached many of the most successful fitness industry leaders in building their business. I’ve consulted with franchises, some of the biggest names, you know, even nine figure businesses. Now, the reason I tell you this is through probably talking to more independent fitness business owners than anybody else on the planet. In that past 16 years, by a significant margin, I have learned the difference between the people who build successful businesses, who build six figure, personal incomes, who build some degree of security and wealth well doing what they love, the shift isn’t Hey, who’s the better coach, who’s in the better market. The shift really is who becomes a producer who takes ownership of getting the results that they want. In fact, having done this for quite a while, I went through that first kind of economic downturn back in 2008, 2009, when about 30% of the businesses in our industry failed.

Now the difference then, not surprisingly, was the same type of thing. People who were being reactive, people who were focused on all the whoa that they were hearing in the news, the, the struggles they were having, the fact that their clients were leaving and it sent them into some sort of downward spiral. They didn’t have a plan to produce. They didn’t embrace the mindset to, and honestly each and every day they, they were regressing. They were moving backwards and it was almost like they were just playing defense. They had shifted away from playing any sort of offense in their business. Fast forward to today.

We’ve just experienced easily, the most traumatic business experience of my lifetime. It really kind of put what we experienced back in 2008, 2009 to shame. And the same thing happened. We had even more and even higher percentage of fitness businesses fail in this past 18 months in almost without exception reason for that failure could be rooted in this lack of a producer mindset. Sure. Some people dealt with circumstances that were just, you know, things that they couldn’t come back from. But I know personally from the clients that we actively coach, we had one go under one now in it industry where well over 30% of the business has failed. What was the difference? Well, in fact, that one business that went under that was in our clientele. They were a franchise and they weren’t allowed to embrace this kind of producer mindset and the things that we were employing to stay not only stay afloat, but we had many businesses enjoy their best year yet under these dire circumstances.

Now, I know I’ve kind of reinforced this whole producer mentality in this short video thus far, but you need to understand that if you are willing to make this shift and take ownership of your results, and this is very much not just a mindset, but a set of systems and tactics that you can deploy that frankly is probably a lot more simple than anything that you were seeing on Facebook. Anything these high ticket gurus are teaching you, everybody’s out here saying, Hey, we’re going to flood your business with all these leads. You’re going to be able to make this leap from this to that. And to date I’ve yet to meet somebody who was on the winning side of experiencing that as a client, right? Because that’s basically abandoning the producer mindset. It’s not taking responsibility for anything. You’re, you’re basically throwing a Hail Mary and hoping that somebody else can solve your problems because you’re unwilling to take responsibility for solving them yourself.

I’ve built seven different businesses that achieved seven or seven plus figure revenue in this industry. And every one of them has been built on this kind of producer mindset, producer mentality. The cool thing about it probably for you is your background may very well be similar to mine. You didn’t come into this with a business background. You weren’t somebody who had an MBA and really understood every nuance of kind of textbook driven business. So for me, I had to make this simple, everything had to be incredibly simplistic. The systems that I was going to execute, the tactics that I put into play each and every day, the things that I was teaching, the people that work under me in my business, worked with me leading businesses, that sort of stuff, all had to be dropped dead simple because I’m a realist. You know, I understand that I was busy. We were busy delivering results for the people that already were paying us to serve them. And there wasn’t countless hours each and every day to grow the business. So I had to make this as really kind of distilled down and easy to execute as possible for our team.

I taught that same thing to clients, to franchisees, and it’s helped thousands of business owners around the globe. In fact, a handful of years ago, we started this thing called the producer challenge. I had taken some of the things that I had worked with with clients privately, and just kind of packaged it up, leaned on teammates of mine to put something together that would allow people that might not be interacting with me on a daily basis in a one-on-one setting. I wanted to be able to deliver those same type of results to them in a group setting. Well, fast forward to today, the people participating in the producer challenge have generated over $17 million in new client revenue. They’ve generated several million dollars in monthly recurring revenue, just in this six week program that we put together executing super simple tactics in employing really kind of drop dead bare bones systems. And most importantly, taking responsibility in embracing their role as a producer, as a leader that is going to achieve results. So for the first time, since prior to the pandemic, we’re going to open up the doors on the producer challenge. We’re going to help fitness business owners. Like you start to play off offense again, we’re going to help you start to build the business that you want to generate the clientele that you want to generate the revenue that you want. Now you may be thinking, well, Hey, the landscape’s not great. You know, we’ve got this Delta variant and it’s kind of slowing down business, or I’m worried about what’s going to happen. Well, I need to break it to you. We’ve had clients have their best year yet in the past 12 months, I’ve told you about that already. During this video, you can succeed with the circumstances you have, but it’s going to take you shifting your mindset. It’s going to take you employing some of these drop dead simple tactics that we’re going to give you cut and paste tools that you can just swipe and deploy and put into action.

But it is going to take a commitment on your part. Okay. We are going to ask you to get a little bit out of your comfort zone. Just like you ask your clients to get out of their comfort zone, if they want something better for themselves. Hey, thanks for listening. We’ve got this three part series where we’re really focused on becoming a producer and hopefully Getting you to join us as partners in this upcoming producer challenge. So there’s a link below. If you’d like to learn more about the challenge, click it, and hopefully we can work together to help you build the business that you want.