Fitness Business School – Being “On Stage”

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I wanna talk with you about the concept of being on stage. There’s a lot to dig into, and it’s going to help you build a much better business. 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 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 if you’ve been around the podcast or my emails or anything else for any period of time, you, you’re probably well
aware of the fact that I am a Disney fan and our family makes a lot of trips there for any number of reasons. Just the, the convenience factor, the, the all inclusive type experiential stuff. And selfishly for me, I get to learn a lot from the way that they operate, the way that they do business, the way that they think, all of that. And one of the things that I love is this concept of onstage verse offstage. And for me, that applies so much in our business. It applies so much with how we have to show up when clients walk through the door. Because one of the things that, that I think we probably lose sight of, because this is our world, and we have to be responsible for all of it. We have to be responsible for on stage, off stage, what the stage looks like, everything in between. And, you
know, I think we as owners do our best to show up and, make it a great experience for the client. But, after observing a couple businesses lately that I’m doing a little bit of work with, I noticed that team members were kind of inconsistent with showing up on stage.

So I wanted to just unpack this a little bit and talk about things that I noticed, things that we should be aware of, and how to be better and, all the kind of cascading benefits that come with that. So the first thing that I would tell you is when somebody in your business is going to encounter clients, we
need to think of them as a performer. I know we think of them as a coach, but they’re basically filling a role, they’re playing a role, and, there’s a character they need to be in order to execute this at the highest level. And I don’t know if you’ve thought about it this way or not, but I think of it very much like an, an actor or performer or whatever else. I mean, we’re not asking them to completely detach from being themselves, but we are very cognizant of the fact that
they have to play a role when they’re, on stage when they’re engaging clients they, they need to leave a a lot of their personal, concerns, worries, issues, whatever else off stage they have to show up and, be energetic, be engaging, make eye contact, have good people skills.

They need to represent your business and whatever your expectations are when it comes to appearance and posture and grooming and all that other stuff that is something that everybody chooses for their business in their own way. And, they need to, make sure that they’re kind of checking the energy box, the expertise box in the connection box every day when they show up. So the, the energy side of it, I think we all understand that intuitively,
but it, it’s wise to remember that people come to us in many cases for, that, that immediate gratification, we think about the long term benefit in many cases, right? Like, hey, they’re gonna lose weight, they’re gonna get healthier, all that. But in so many ways, we need to be that best part of
somebody’s day.

We need to be, somebody that they look forward to seeing somebody that provides them personal attention, somebody that they feel like makes them better. They need to leave with a sense of accomplishment. And, so our, our coaches need to bring that energy. They need to display their expertise. If, if they’re just an instructor, then, clients can get that anywhere. And if we’re looking for a point of differentiation, our coaches have to be better than coaches at other
places. And they need to facilitate connection, not just connection between the, the team and the clients. But, by doing partner things and connecting one another and making new people feel welcome and introduced to the group, they need to be the facilitator of that kind of team building
mentality. And so their, their job definitely is to both connect with people individually, but then also to facilitate the community building that we want to happen. So people have these threads of connection with other clients, and that’s gonna help with retention, that’s gonna help with show rates, it’s gonna help with generating better results. One of the things I noticed when I went in and was shadowing a business, I went in and participated in their program. You
know, I was doing some consulting for the franchise, at the franchise level, and then went in kind of undercover, if you will, for a month. And I recognized how quickly just doing a partner type of thing where I had kind of kept to myself in many ways, but then, as soon as I got introduced to somebody as a partner from that, from that point forward, I felt like, I needed to say hi to that person every time I came in.

We made small talk and, and that I, I saw that repeating itself over and over things that I probably took for granted. I think we need to catch more people doing things right. I think that, culturally at this stage of the game, I don’t know that people want to come and get a bunch of constructive criticism because they probably deal with that in other parts of their life. They’re coming for direction to get better. But then also, we need to catch them doing things right and give
them positive feedback. Because so often their goals require more of a long-term commitment. So we need to give them those immediate wins. And so when they accomplish something new, as simple as, Hey, you, you saw their, their technique on an exercise that improved, we need to let them know, we
need to make sure that we become, or at least make our best effort, it being the best part of that person’s day, every opportunity we can.

And I would tell you that we probably need to do more when it comes to, if we’re presenting programming, we need to give the why behind things. Now if you’ve heard me talk about how I may coach a staff, I’m big on teaching them the why, because I want them to kind of read between the
lines. I want them to be able to make decisions and provide guidance in the gray areas. And if they understand the why, they’re better equipped to do that. But we want people to understand why we’re choosing certain exercises, why we may be sequencing certain things in the order they are, or why
we’re doing partner things or however that goes. Then we teach them what we’re doing and you know, and we cue them on things. But I think we should also also share common mistakes.

And I think the bookends of those four ideas, the, the why and the sharing common mistakes kind of helped to serve as a little bit of a moat against competition. Because I know that the average gym does not do that. The average gym would never go to that trouble. They would put a workout on a board on the wall, and they would just say, say, go do things. And they, they would course correct as they go after maybe a demonstration. But if, if you’re teaching somebody the why, they become a better client, a more educated client, they feel kind of, like there’s a little bit of status. Like, I, you know what, I understand this stuff, and they associate you with that knowledge.

But then also the, the common mistakes part, well, we’re giving them the opportunity to now delineate in another way between us and average providers.
So if we show them like, Hey, here are common mistakes, or here’s how people may be, cue this wrong, or, here’s how people put, ask people to do this exercise when they’re not necessarily ready to do it. Then they can, they can see that, they can notice it when they’re in other settings. And then finally, I would tell you for from an onstage standpoint, there need to be what I would call hello and goodbye touchpoints. When somebody walks in, we need to greet them. They need to know they’re in the right place. All too often a lot of our businesses, we don’t have the luxury of almost having like a front desk person. So the minute somebody notices somebody, they need to make eye contact and greet them and if you have a front desk person, they can’t be staring at
their phone.

They have to be locked in. They have to be greeting people, they have to be warm and engaging. And the same thing with a goodbye. Like, we need to make sure that people feel noticed. We need to make sure people feel appreciated. And it’s too, too easy to just kinda let people float in and let people float
out almost unnoticed. Instead of that, that grand recognition that you’re here, we’re excited that you’re here, we’re happy that, that you’re with us. And then when they’re leaving, we’re proud of what they accomplished, and we look forward to seeing them the next time. I promise you that the people
who kind of just become gradually more invisible over time and their show rates drop over time, this isn’t happening in their world at this level, right? They’re not, they’re, they’re not going un unnoticed a well, they are probably going unnoticed. They are probably kind of drifting in and out. There’s not this, Hey man, I’ll see you on Wednesday, type of thing. It’s one of those things that I think our industry, the, the smart businesses in our industry have started to notice that leading indicator of attrition being, how frequently somebody comes in the gym, you’ll hear numbers like, if they’re less than nine
sessions a month or eight sessions a month or whatever, that starts to be kind of a yellow or even red flag type of thing. Well, for me, we want to focus more on not just, oh, how do we pull somebody in the gym one extra session and focus just as much, if not more, on how do we make this such a great experience for them? They can’t, they, they feel detached.

They feel like they miss something if they’re not coming. And that’s what this onstage mentality is. Now, I would tell you this is not the simplest thing to execute. It requires a lot of staff training. It requires expectations, standards. It re requires you modeling this type of behavior and reinforcing it every
chance you get. But if you do, you’re going to be that unicorn in, in your market. Nobody else is gonna be doing this at this level or at least a fraction of the people, one, 2% at most, nationally or maybe even internationally in our industry, do this in this way. So this is just a wonderful opportunity for you to stand out from the crowd and build a better business.

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