Fitness Business School – Be Different to Win

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in this episode, I want to talk with you about how being different is a winning
strategy.

Welcome to the fitness business school podcast. The show for fitness business owners who want to grow their income, increase their end 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 back in my baseball coaching days, I determined that for me to build a successful baseball program at the university that I was coaching at Shawn state university in Portsmouth, Ohio, my, my hometown
actually I was gonna have to do things differently than the other coaches I was competing against. You
know, and you may have heard me tell stories relating to this before, but, you know, I, I got the head
coaching job when I was 23. So I was the youngest coach in the country. So clearly the people that I was competing against all had more experience than me, all of ’em did. Right. they almost without without exception all had better resources. You know, we played at a city own field that well it had some great history wasn’t really maintained very well. We, we, we had outdated, you know, the, the uniforms weren’t very good.

The equipment wasn’t very good. We practiced in a gymnasium. The budget was really, really low.
And the prior to me taking over there had been a very small athletic scholarship budget, which was now eliminated because the program, they, they wanted to go to a non-scholarship division, but there was gonna be this like five year transition time where we were gonna compete in a scholarship division
without scholarships. So not awesome. And you know, and I recognized very quickly, I’m like, man, I’ve gotta be different. I’ve got to you know, in the minute I understood that, Hey, I’ve gotta take a different approach. I can’t do things the way that everybody else does them. That that has more experience that have better resources that are maybe in a more populated market. So there are more players to draw from locally. Well, once I shifted everything and said, okay, we’re gonna do things differently, recruiting, we’re gonna do things different from a player development standpoint, from a game strategy standpoint, things got better quickly, you know, my first couple seasons we did okay.

But as, as I kind of figured this out by the third season, we were nationally competitive. Like we were you know, a nationally ranked program that really thrived in certain areas by my fifth season, we finished fifth in the country. And when we went to the world series, you know, there were like I think there were 10 teams at the world series and they had just re-instituted scholarships and we had a whopping 1.7 athletic scholarships for a team of 35 kids. The limit in that division was 12, every other, all other nine teams at the world series had 12.

You know, and we were able to do that because we just approached things differently than everybody
else. There was no chance that I was gonna be able to be better than all these other smart, better
resourced coaches by doing what they did and When I shifted to the fitness industry
You know, the, the same type of thing held true when, when I got in to the commercial side of the
fitness industry most people were selling one on one hour long sessions in either packages of six or 12 or 24. Or they were doing this thing that you know, a guy named Phil Kaplan had coined as a series where you’re just always prepaying your next one.

I didn’t understand why people needed to take that approach because if health clubs didn’t ask people
to prepay for the year entirely, if they said, Hey, we’re going to ask you to join on a subscription and you pay monthly. And if your car payment’s monthly and your mortgage, or your rent is monthly, then why wouldn’t we do the same thing with training?
And then in the market that I was in a small town in central Kentucky, that I felt, you know, I felt like I understood pretty well because I’d come from a small town, like, man, we did 30 minute sessions and I could have ’em warm up before the session. I could have, ’em do some of the conditioning after the session to make the price per session, less, less expensive, but our hourly rate actually, where we needed it to be and sell it on an annual subscription where people would commit for 12 months and heck within 18 months we had over 420 clients doing that.

You know, it was kind of the same thing with group training. You know, the, the idea that all the, you
know, training needed to be this one on one experience for the affluent.
I, I certainly wasn’t first to popularize that, but I was you know, I think, you know, I, with, with, with a
couple collaborators launched the first coaching program for boot camps. Now there was like an, a
license program, adventure boot camp that was already out there, but the first kind of coaching
program for bootcamp owners, that was just like, if you were gonna run an independent boot camp,
recognize that opportunity because everybody’s selling one on one. I think at the time, the average one-on-one rate was about $53 a session nationally. And, you know, people could join a boot camp for at the time. I, you know, under $20 a session now, heck sometimes it feels like, you know, 10, 11, $12 a session because the market’s pretty saturated. But you know, if I look back almost all the, the interesting things I’ve been able to do professionally it’s been really hinging on being different, the baseball program, launching that personal training business, launching a franchise where we allowed people to keep their entire, like, keep their own brand.

You know, that, that worked tremendously well. We got plenty of franchisees who wouldn’t have come
on board otherwise because they didn’t wanna give up their brand, their, their kind of individual
identity. And instead just selling it as, Hey, we’ll be the operating system behind you. Emailing seven
days a week for 17 years, there’s nobody else. Who’s crazy enough to do that. And then focusing on
helping people create their ideal business, rather than asking them to just follow my system and clone
what I do. You know, the list could go on and on, but you get the picture. Like if you want to be
successful, different is a pretty effective path. You don’t have to just clone what everybody else does
and be cheaper, right? If we look at, you know, like them or not, planet fitness looked at a, a health club
market that was very heavy into annual or even 24 month contracts charging higher prices for
essentially renting people access to stuff.

And they said, Hey, we’re going to tell people, they don’t have to make an annual commitment. We’re
gonna go cheaper and they’ve blown up like crazy. You know, Doug Spurling ha has built a wonderful
business being a small group provider. So, you know, he didn’t have to stick with the large group and be
like all the other boot camps out there, he could charge a little bit more, but it, it, but he could deliver
really high touch service. And he’s built a seven figure business in a town like 12,000 people. You know, Cressey Sports Performance, you know, with, with, with Eric and Pete, you know, who would’ve ever guessed that somebody could build a business that really centered around baseball in Massachusetts in a cold weather climate that became a destination. And you know, who, who would’ve ever considered that now, obviously it’s expanded where they’ve got the Florida location now and are
arguably the biggest name in baseball performance development, but you don’t have to do what
everybody else does.

You can say, Hey, I’m gonna play to my strengths. I’m gonna look at what, what happens in other
industries and see if I can translate that to our industry. I’m going to take some ideas that, that maybe
are effective and add different tweaks and twists to them to set myself apart. But if you have tried to
build a business that you feel like, Hey, I want to have something better, but you do everything in the
way that everybody else is doing them. You know, you’re kind of pulling the rope in different directions
simultaneously, if you want to be better, you can’t do things the same, right? Like, you know, we, we’ve
all heard the old adage that you know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over
and expecting a different result. Well, this, this is it. Like, this is the, the opportunity for you to be
different.

So I would tell you, there are plenty of episodes where I’ve covered all sorts of tactical ways that you can put this in action, go back through some of them. I, if you’d like to set up a time to talk, we can walk through how your version of different may look so you can build the business that you want. Or, you know, there are plenty of other people out there doing great work, sharing insight on how you can build a wonderful business. Take advantage of that. Look at some of the other things out there and say, okay, how can I build something that’s reflective of me? That’ll help me have the income, the impact, and the lifestyle that I want and deserve.

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