Fitness Business School – Building a Successful Online Business Pt 1

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here, and in today’s episode I wanna talk with you about building an online business. 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.

One of the more common topics I see people show an interest in is building an online business. Now, sometimes I think that you know it, it’s because they believe it would be easier, or that they would just be able to create things like create training programs or email sequences or whatever else, and kind of be hands off. Sometimes it’s just because they like the idea of being able to serve a broader market or  a broader audience beyond their local geography.

Sometimes it’s because they have a very defined problem that they solve a very, maybe a smaller window of people locally, and they think that they need to be able to reach more people to build a viable business that way. And then in, in some cases, it’s just because they want the flexibility or maybe some of the lower fixed overhead that comes with that. Well, I’ve been doing online work in some way, shape, or form since about 2005, which probably puts me in a group of maybe 1% of the people doing online stuff today. So, I’ve kind of seen this well before Facebook, and long before all the ways that people talk about building an online business today. And at this point I’ve owned, I would say, over 25 businesses that primarily did online business, some B2C or business to consumer, some business to business owner.

And there, there are some things that I’ve picked up along the way that I think are useful regardless of what you want to do when it comes to building an online business. I know a lot of my clients think of this as like a virtual second location. They say, okay, I’ve built one physical location. I don’t want to have two
or three or four physical locations, but I still want to grow my revenue. I still wanna grow my income and I want to do it while staying within the fitness industry, while others have built just these truly remarkable online businesses. And I’ve had clients who’ve built those online businesses even into the high eight figures and I believe and had one consulting client that had a almost exclusively online business at nine figures. So, the scope of the type of business opportunities that are out there is pretty staggering.

So let give you some really practical things that can help you. And, depending on what you want out of your online coaching business, some of these may be kind of irrelevant at the moment, but at least a few of these tips or suggestions I think will be very useful for you. The first is really one of the mistakes that people make when they think about, okay, I have to do something completely different online than offline, is they’re like, well, I don’t have a niche market or niche market, depending on how you choose to pronounce it with a local business. They said, no, I serve everybody. And that’s actually untrue. Like your kind of way of narrowing down the audience that you serve is by geography. It’s by proximity and convenience. So typically, if somebody’s gonna come train with you
in person, they’re going to be within seven to 10 minute drive time.

If it’s an adult fitness business, I mean, there’s certainly exceptions. I’ve been a member of places where it’s been a 15 minute drive time, but you don’t see a lot of adult fitness businesses where people come in and train consistently driving more than 30 minutes, even in rural areas where you don’t have as many
things in a mile or two proximity to you. So you’ve already narrowed in that way. So basically what we’re doing if we’re trying to go online is saying, how do I, if I’m taking away that constraint, how do I add another one so I can actually filter out people and make the offer I’m making, make the
advertising, I’m doing everything a little more targeted so I’m not trying to reach everybody and in turn not really being specific or super relevant to anyone. So figuring out how you’re gonna narrow whether it is by an expanded geography, which I think is an interesting way, I’ve seen a lot
of people do business say, lemme give you an example.

Let’s say that you train baseball players and you are in Louisville, Kentucky, and you want to do distance coaching or remote coaching for baseball players, but you’d like them to come in and it makes sense for them to come in and do an assessment with you in person and do periodic assessments, you
know, every eight to 12 weeks. Then you probably want to go after people within a three hour drive time. And so maybe that’s your radius, that’s who you market to, that’s who you advertise to. That’s where you go to travel organizations and try to build relationships with directors and coaches. That’s
where you join Facebook groups that, that kind of aggregate those people. That’s where you target any ads to lead magnets, anything like that. So if you’re in Louisville, Nashville, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, even Columbus, Ohio, the kind of outer edge of that, those would all be within that kind of
radius.

And so there’s a big population base that you could draw from, and you just kind of start in that middle and work your way out. But it’s, it’s something where you now have a way to narrow things so you’re not just throwing money at people that have a low probability of doing business with you. That’s
one of the great things about online business is that it’s not that there’s not overhead, right? It’s not that you don’t have cost associated with doing business. It’s more of a, they’re variable, right? You don’t have to commit to three years of a contract of running Facebook ads. You don’t have to do anything like that
the same way you would with a lease of a facility locally. So it allows you and to spend money, but to kinda retool, regroup, and target it in ways that make the most possible sense for you.

So you figure out an offer in, in a small kind of way, and you scale the offer so you know that you’ve gotta have a starting point. How am I gonna get clients? Because the biggest mistake when people say, well, the reason I love this online stuff is, I can reach everybody. I’m like, well,
if you pay any attention to the way that humans actually operate these days, getting somebody’s attention and maintaining somebody’s attention is harder than ever because there are more things competing for their attention than there have ever been by easily a multiple of a hundred, if not a
multiple of a thousand YouTube shorts that people scroll through, one after the next constant things in your Facebook news feed a million different streaming channels and, and unlimited number of shows on those channels.

There’s so many things competing for somebody’s attention. You still have to be, like, in my opinion, you have to be better than you’ve ever been at narrowing and making sure that you’re getting a, a small group of people’s attention. Now, when I started doing stuff online, admittedly it was a little bit simpler the way
that I got to do some things online. We had a local business in Kentucky, the percentage of our clients, probably 2010 to 20% of our clients were either stationed at Fort Knox or they were spouses of people stationed at Fort Knox. And so whenever they got moved to a different base or
something like that, we wanted to keep them as clients. So we would design programs and say, okay, you an go do this on post. You could go do this at the gym where you are going to now be residing.

And so we design a program, we’d email it to ’em, we’d say, okay, we can get on the phone and walk through things. I didn’t have the luxury of Zoom or any of these other really easy video platforms, so it was essentially type it out and email it and do phone calls that way. And it was remote
coaching, and it, frankly, it was pretty effective. And before long had several thousand dollars a month coming in from remote coaching, and it was just trying to hang on to people who’d been local. But over time, we were able to expand that to next, the next level, right? And it was
friends, family members of people that were clients. And that was an easy kind of second step that we didn’t have to go advertise. We were getting referrals, we were getting people that we could serve that were introduced to us in a positive way.

And then for me, with my background as a baseball coach and a strength coach, I would get a few athletes here and there that I would end out designing programs for usually high school age or middle school age kids that were sons or daughters of friends of mine. And so being able to do some
of that stuff that way, that was like phase one of the online business. And I think that most anybody that has a local business could do that and add four figures a month to their business. If we’re thinking about what online business at Stage One looks, stage two for us when it comes to business to consumer was my
wife’s business. So Holly was a really popular trainer in our business. She trained a number of people, but a bigger than, bigger percentage than like 50, like probably two thirds were moms.

And she had a nutrition coaching program that she ran for us that sold out every round that we did it. And that was good for the, the health of the business, but not necessarily bad or not necessarily good for her as a mom of a kid in preschool, right? I mean, literally Tyler, the bus for preschool would
pick him up and drop him off at the gym and so the idea of saying, okay, let’s package up the stuff you’re doing for busy moms and sell it as an ebook, came up and we enlisted the help of somebody who already was kind of in that world because I was starting to dabble in the business to
business world in online coaching and doing some consulting and sharing what was working in our training business because it had gone well.

And so we enlisted a friend who was doing more in the consumer side, but he was mainly targeting men and said, Hey, can you help us with strategy? Can you help us with some connections for joint ventures or affiliates to go out and promote this and tell us what’s been working with
you? And he did, and we gave him a royalty and that took off to be like the initial launch, her ebook Fit Yummy Mummy, which actually came from a campaign that Nordstrom’s ran this Yummy Mummy campaign. They, the idea that, well, we took it and ran this specific to moms, and the
initial launch was low five figures. And all of a sudden there was a desire by Holly to start doing some coaching and support on the back end of that and take these people where this ebook was like a front end offer, whether it’s like you running your 28 day program or a challenge or something like that.

That was her front end offer. And then she sold ongoing memberships on the back end. And before long she had several hundred, eventually well over 800 paying members in a membership site. She had a DVD of the month club, she had a paid newsletter at one point. She did over 25 different
information products like fitness products or nutrition products or whatever for moms. And it all started with this simple idea of saying, okay, this is something that I do really well locally, that has a defined market that addresses a very specific need. Busy moms who don’t have a lot of time and wanna
get the body they used to have in the time that they currently have available. And it was really effective. Now, I will say that us being able to expedite some of these things, the learning curve, figure out some of this stuff, get introductions to people through this kind of strategic alliance partner, really made this a, a
much faster process.

So don’t, I mean, one of those other mistakes that, that people make when it comes to trying to build an online business is to say, okay, I want to have something valuable, but I don’t wanna spend any money. And that usually isn’t true. I mean, businesses, there’s a point of entry and most people, it’s not that it can’t
be bootstrapped, it’s just that most people don’t have the patience and perseverance to spend a year or two years building it from scratch and doing it all grassroots or organic. And you, you gotta find a way there. I mean, to be fair to, to Holly, I don’t know that her attention span would ha have been what it was, and her focus would’ve been what it was. If there wasn’t that initial launch that that really got things going, and there were these clients or customers coming in that she had to serve, I can’t imagine that she was going to just put out content to try to build an audience for 12 to 24 months.

So you just have to decide, okay, am I willing to invest? Because if I were building an offline business, I would invest in equipment, I would invest in a build out of a facility. I may be investing in staff, I may be in investing in a host of other things from software to insurance to whatever. Well, my recommendation
for you is, think of this like a business that you would be doing offline with plenty of other upside, right? Like the flexibility, the overhead that isn’t fixed lots of things that, that make it advantageous, but be willing to invest some money in building it, because having some skin in the game is a
huge differentiator. I mean, one of those unsaid things about online business is most people just like when some people say, well, I can’t work at home.

It’s kind of the same thing. When you have a brick and mortar facility and you have a session that starts at six every morning. You’ve got an appointment, you’ve got somewhere to be, you got a lease to pay that bills come due every month. And so that accountability keeps you in motion a lot of times, and it keeps
you kind of focused and on the path. Whereas online, if you don’t have that, it’s a little bit tougher. So having some skin in the game, I think is a big deal. So, so those were two kind of simple ways that, that we were able to get online that I think there are a lot of lessons to draw from. Now what one of the cool
things that I’ve recognized though along the way is I think a lot of people start at the wrong end of this.

They’re like, oh, I wanna be internet famous. I wanna have this big following on Instagram, or I want to have a big audience on TikTok. And it’s not, that isn’t tremendously valuable, but they overlook the opportunity right in front of them. Most of us can go open our cell phone,
open our email contacts, and open our social contacts that we have on Facebook, whether it’s a thousand or 2000 or 4,000 or whatever it is. And cumulatively, almost always, you’re gonna have at least a thousand, if not a couple thousand people to reach out to between those kind of three buckets. Well start
there. Go get paid to figure things out. Go build up a track record, build up some success stories, get some case studies, figure out what your offer is going to be, offer it for a really discounted rate.

And I mean, it can be free, but I would recommend a little bit of skin in the game just so you get more compliance and talk to people, talk to your friends and say, Hey, I’m thinking about doing this. What would I need to do to make it a total no-brainer for you? And let them tell you, let them
tell you the problems that they’re trying to solve. Let them tell you the things that, that they need to overcome or address. Figure that stuff out and then craft that offer accordingly. Sell it to them as, Hey, I’ll give you 50% off. I’ll even give you 75% off if you’ll be my case study. You promise to
commit to all this. And now we’re building this as we go, and we’re getting paid to build it. So there’s commitment on their part, there’s commitment on our part.

‘Cause We are getting paid. There’s some accountability there. We document every step of the way. Now we’ve got some social proof, we can roll this out on a bigger scale. And realistically I mean, you can build an online business in that format, charging 20 people two to $500 a month and make, somewhere in that 50 to a hundred thousand dollars annually gross revenue range, which with the margins you would have by not having to spend a bunch on paid advertising and not
having a ton of fixed overhead. I mean, that’s as much as a lot of people net from single site locations. So, that’s an easy way that you can get started. Now, I’ve run through a bunch of online stuff. I’m gonna go ahead and carry this into a second episode about building a successful online business because I mean, there are ways to do it. It’s certainly simpler than a lot of people make it, but there are pitfalls you need to avoid. There are things
you need to focus on. And if you want to build a profitable, successful online business, the tips that I’ve shared in this episode and the next episode will help you get there.

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

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

One of of the things that we’ve been doing with our current clients is taking them through this Ideal Business diagnostic and really what it is, this checklist that allows you to pinpoint exactly what your business needs next so you can keep improving, keep growing, and build a business that you love to own, one that pays you well, one that allows you to have the impact you wanna have and one that allows you to have a lifestyle that you truly enjoy.

In this diagnostic, we walk through everything and we do an evaluation and can instantly pinpoint what you need to do next to build that business that you want. I’m going to extend this opportunity to get on with either me or my team and take you through this evaluation and fix your business’s most vital needs fast.

So if we take you through this, you’re gonna be able to make those vital changes that you need to finally have what I call your Ideal Business. If you’d be interested in going through this entirely free, risk-free diagnostic with us and learn what you already have in place, what you’re doing well and where are your greatest opportunities for rapid improvement are just shoot me an email with diagnostic in the subject line to [email protected].

Again, an email to [email protected] with diagnostic in the subject line will get you scheduled and take you through this evaluation to help you build the business you want.