Fitness Business School – An Unexpected Observation

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to talk with you about an unexpected observation. 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 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.

So recently I was talking with some people about my time as a college baseball coach and It’s now into year 32 of me coaching baseball, the beginning of my journey, it’s a backwards approach, right? I’m coaching youth baseball, travel baseball now, but I started out as a college coach instead of maybe the way that it would normally happen in reverse.

And during my time as a coach for the first couple of years, I was the youngest head coach in the country. We were very progressive in a lot of the things that we did. We were very. Early adopters of being very aggressive in our strength and conditioning program and trying to approach it from a real progressive mentality.

The way that we approach player development and the strategies we use in baseball were against the grain at the time. And if you look at that and the success that it had way back when, you’d think, man, that’s innovative and progressive and high risk and all that stuff. And then today I would say how quickly it seems like it goes and you become the older, Seasoned guy that it’s maybe a little bit more mentoresque or father figureesque or whatever in the industry and I’m the one that people talk about Maybe being consistent and adhering to fundamentals or whatever else and maybe not thought of in the way of Innovative or progressive or whatever.

And when I was talking through this with friend the other day, the interesting thing about it is my allegiance has been entirely around. What worked, and it’s not that I was really eager to go try things that nobody else was doing in baseball, just for the sake of being different or unique. It’s not that I try to get people to build a durable client pipeline because I want to be this kind of stoic, fundamentally focused person.

It’s. That I really am agnostic to tactics, and I want to spend time on what works. I want to help people find the most direct route to the outcome that they want. And if I think back to my time early on as a business owner, we did 30 minute sessions when nobody else was doing 30 minute sessions. We did 12 month, Contracts for subscription or recurring revenue programs when everybody else was selling packages.

And I had the most visible consultants in the industry, both tell me I was crazy and certainly didn’t do it in that plight of fashion because we were doing things in that way when I was out selling franchises, I sold 116 franchises the first year I personally was selling them. And. Of the 116, like 114 of them were conversions, which is not the normal way that people sell franchises.

There are some wonderful franchises out there now that they all are from the ground up franchises. So a different approach in franchising. When I started talking about creating an ideal business, It was very different from the norm of what people are doing, where everybody was suggesting, Hey, just do exactly what I do.

I was saying, no, how about you become the best version of yourself? And I think that for me, in none of those cases was I married to the idea of being different. It was okay with all of the time I put in, the research I put in, the time I spend with players or later on, or at the time other coaches, mentors, the time I study, And later on in business, what I, the time I’d spend with clients or prospects are in the market.

And again, continuing to study, I would just arrive at what I thought gave us the best chance of success. And that has been the common thread throughout. And hopefully that’s a mentality that’ll last forever. Like I don’t, I will give. different advice based on their personality and their circumstances.

And I don’t think that’s normal, right? I think most people that do business coaching in this industry basically say, this is the way to do it. And. It’s my way or the highway. And frankly, I think that’s a load of crap. I think that if you just go pick out five different leaders, success stories, and any specific corner of business, you’re going to see that all five of them do some things differently.

So it’s just a bold place lie to say that there’s only one way to do it. And so for me, that just seemed like an obvious truth and I wanted to build around things that are obvious truths. So if I find somebody that they’ve got certain strengths and skills and aptitudes, we want to build around that because it gives them the highest probability of success.

I don’t want. Everybody to send a daily written email because I send a daily written email. I can tell you if I was as big a personality on camera as the, some of the people in the industry, I’d probably do more video if I had a clear. System and strategy that I believed in that worked doing. Any number of other things.

If there was a way for me to build a business that I wanted using Instagram as a driver, and that was the fastest path and the most likely path to where I wanted to go. Cool. I’d try to figure that out. But, I think that was an interesting observation because I’ve been the one going through this journey and I would hear like when people would talk about me when.

When they’re describing me during my time as a baseball coach, or maybe when I get introduced on a podcast or when somebody is describing me, I was on a call with a guy that, that I respect a lot in the internet marketing world. And he was explaining me to somebody else on that call. And a lot of it was the consistency and fundamentals.

And he’s been doing this for a long time or whatever else. And. Just earlier that day, I had heard about the innovation and creativity as a baseball coach. And you think about those two really contrasting kind of perspectives. And I’m like, no, really, it’s just a pursuit of what works and a relentless kind of continual drive to learn better ways to find things that work.

And I think that’s probably one of the things that I want to impart on you as a business owner is that you don’t necessarily have to be different. And you don’t have to chase the next shiny object, but you certainly don’t have to send an email every day, or even three times a week for 18 years to be successful.

There are different ways to do it. What you have to do is find a way that works and gives you the highest probability of success, and then you’ve got to pursue it. relentlessly. You’ve got to be driven. You’ve got to have perseverance when you hit obstacles, bumps in the road. And if you do, that’s how you’re going to be successful.

Not because if you’re a baseball coach, you’re the person that, you focus entirely on a team that hits doubles and home runs versus somebody else who plays small ball. If you’re a team a training business, man, you can do great doing one on one semi private small group or large group, but you have to figure out what’s going to work for you.

What’s going to work in your circumstances with your skills, your personality and your market and what you’re willing to commit to. Because frankly, that commitment piece may be the biggest piece of all. If you’re not going to be committed to it, and you’re just going to always be looking out the corner of your eye, chasing the next shiny object.

You can have the best plan in the world and it’s not going to work very well. So just an observation from my own kind of convoluted experience and it just struck me yesterday and I thought, man, you know what, I want to talk about this on a podcast because I think that sometimes people, they have these surface level observations about.

Others or what works or whatever else. And the reality is plenty of things work and what may be what we see front facing, isn’t what’s driving us internally. All right. Just a different take on a podcast, but thought it might be some valuable insight. Yeah. There’s an observation about figuring out what works for you.

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

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