Fitness Business School – Avoid This Big Mistake

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in this episode, I wanna talk with you about a big mistake that so many business owners make and I’m gonna help you avoid. So 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.

One of the things that I see so many early and intermediate stage business owners do that, that really I think, sends them down the wrong path is they, they get caught up in this pursuit of bigger and having owned over 30 businesses in the health, fitness, sports performance industry, coach, thousands of business owners, I can tell you that bigger is not necessarily better, better is better. And that doesn’t mean that you can’t keep scaling and keep growing and build a better business. But what it does mean is that bigger is not going to assure you of this path to, to having something better. And, you know, one of, of the, the lessons I think I learned early on from a marketing legend, Dan Kennedy was, you know, there’s, there’s nothing worse than building a success that makes you miserable. And by, by success, I would say, you know, this business that on the outside looks really, really impressive. It, it, it’s tied to these big gross revenue numbers. In fact, for many of us, our self worth, you know, we can drift into allowing our self worth to be tied to these bigger numbers, revenue number of locations, the size of your team, you know, or on a micro scale, how many followers do you have on a social media platform, or how many likes you get on a post?

And in all honesty, I’ve never seen a small business owner being able to directly link the, you know, the, the bigger number to the greater amount of success. I mean, I, I think on Facebook, I probably have, I don’t know, maybe 6,000 6,500 quote unquote followers, fans, whatever you’d call ’em on my business page. And there’s zero correlation between that number and the, the amount of success I might have in in fact you know I, I, I say this kinda tongue in cheek, like currently my wife has about 10 times as many fans or followers on that platform as I do. And my business is probably 10 X the size of hers at this stage of both of our journeys. So, I mean, there’s an inverse relationship almost, and, you know, but that’s just easy to count. It’s easy to show off. So one of the best lessons I learned was disassociating these vanity metrics with my definition of success. You know, at one point I, I was really caught up in, Hey, I wanna be in entrepreneur magazine and their franchise 500 when I got into franchising. That was, that was a big target. That was a big goal.

And, you know, thousands of hours went into growing a franchise and ultimately two franchise organizations. And it was just bigger, bigger, bigger, and, and bring more people in the, and, and all this stuff. And, you know, I, I look up and, you know, 3, 4, 5 years in not only was, you know, one of the, the franchises listed in this franchise 500, but there were actually two and they were both I think one was 1 93 in the five franchise, 500 and another was 2 73 or something like that. So they weren’t even just creeping in the, the bottom of the list. I mean, these are the supposedly the top franchises in, in, in the country. And, and I remember opening that magazine and seeing that, and it being most hollow victory ever, it was, you know, there was no joy in it. It was like, oh, okay, that’s done. And you know, that may have been an indication of bigger, but it wasn’t better. And, and I remember two separate business client, business coaching clients that I had you know, a few years back that had these wonderful businesses where they were kind of an owner operator. Both in both cases, they were paying themselves a nice, nice wage. They you know, we’re in a position that they were gonna be financially secure. They had great margins and both of them got really caught up in expansion in these vanity numbers. And in both cases, I remember them probably five times-ing their gross revenue. And in one of those in is the, the, the actual personal income, the guy was making stayed exactly the same. And in one, the, the personal income went down about 10%.

But think about that, that, I mean, five X, the number of clients that they were having to serve five X, the amount of variables they were having to navigate significantly bigger staffs to manage all these other headaches that came along with this, but they weren’t making more money. They were just taking on more responsibility, bigger leases, all of that stuff. So, you know, understand that bigger isn’t necessarily better now, does that mean that you shouldn’t strive to grow? Not at all, but I, I think that we should understand that, you know, three times-ing gross revenue numbers doesn’t assure you of a, a three X and personal income. It certainly doesn’t assure you of a three X in lifestyle, like the quality of your life lifestyle or time available or anything like that. In fact I remember when I disassociated the vanity metrics and just focused on building my quote unquote ideal business you know, I think that the top line revenue, when I sold my stake in one business and just started fresh, it, the top line revenue was, was much, much smaller, but my personal income significantly increased and my hours worked significantly decreased because it became a pursuit of better, not just bigger.

So that’s, that’s the big takeaway in this episode is yes, you know, you, you need to grow, but growth isn’t necessarily top line numbers. Growth can be personal income. It can be growth and improved schedule growth in the, the type of impact that you’re having. We all need that forward progress. We need that growth. I think as, as business owners, as entrepreneurs Norris, I think that we’re motivated by that, but it shouldn’t always be the pursuit of bigger. And once you embrace that, I think you’re gonna be much happier with your business. And you’re probably gonna get the actual results that you’re looking for That May not come directly from having that higher top line number.

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