Fitness Business School – Business Mistake #1 – Relying on Yesterday’s Business for Today’s Payday

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and I’m going to be putting together a short series of common challenges that I see fitness business owners face and how you can overcome them. So in today’s episode, we’re going to cover the first challenge, which is relying on yesterday’s business for today’s payday, got a lot to cover. So let’s get started.

Welcome to the fitness business school with Pat Rigsby, the podcast for fitness entrepreneurs who want to make more income, have greater impact, and enjoy more freedom in their ideal business. If you’d like an accelerated route to these goals, email me at [email protected] and put BGA in the subject line and I’ll get you all the details about our business growth accelerator program.

All right, in this episode, I want to talk with you about a big challenge that I see us face in our industry, and that’s relying on yesterday’s business to be our only source of today’s payday. Let me explain. So if we think about most small businesses, they’re generating more new business each and every day, whether it be a retail business or service businesses like plumbers or painters or something like that, whatever they did yesterday, doesn’t guarantee them any new business. Today we’ve become kind of complacent lazy with the emergence of recurring revenue based programs. Things that, you know, allow us to sign somebody up in January and have that person paying us month after month, even, you know, a year after year in some cases. And the reality is, you know, before we got these recurring revenue or EFT based programs, when we were selling packages, we had to kind of get after it and generate new business with a little more urgency than we do now.

Well, the reality is, especially in today’s landscape, where there is no assurance that somebody’s going to stay with us for 12 or 18 months. I mean, we’ve had so many things that are in upheaval and people are being, I think, condition to shift to more of a month to month membership rather than a longer term, six or 12 month membership. You know, we need to be what I would call open every day. So what does that mean for you? Well, it means that each and every week we should be generating new business each and every week we should be putting out marketing to generate new leads and we should be following up with those leads to turn them into actual prospective clients, to meet with them in success sessions, to move them into front end offers like challenges or month long programs. This idea of just sitting back and only kind of refilling our pipeline whenever business kinda slows down. Whenever we have some attrition, you know, it’s digging us a hole that becomes harder and harder to dig out of.

So if you want to overcome this challenge, here’s my suggestion to you treat your business just like a retail business would treat theirs. They don’t just shut everything down for months at a time when it comes to generating new business, they’re consistently trying to bring new people in the door. So what can you be doing? Well, you could certainly be putting marketing out there, whether it be offline or online, you know, online stuff, posting on social media, sharing, lead magnets, putting out great content that’s relevant to your target market. You could be still connecting and networking, asking for referrals, going out and speaking if that’s appropriate right now with, with the circumstances that we’re faced with doing offline advertising, even direct mail, there are a lot of things that we can do now, whether it be online ads or strategic alliances, that may be even better opportunities than they would have been eight or 10 months ago.

So continue to fill your pipeline with leads and then understand that everybody’s situation is different. Everybody’s circumstances are kind of, I guess, out of the ordinary for them right now. So be patient understand that even if their interest is their, their desire to really solve the problems that you can help them solve or achieve the goals that you can help them achieve. If that desire is there, that doesn’t mean the timing’s right for them. So follow up with them, send them emails two or three days a week, continue to post things on social media and keep connected with them so that when their timing is better, they’re going to be able to join up with you. They’re going to be able to come in and experience what you have to offer.

And then while you’re doing this followup keep offers in front of them. So if the timing does open up for them, now they know that you’re ready to bring in new business. They know that you can bring them on board, keep them aware of the different things that you have to offer right now, online, offline hybrid offerings. Keep those in front of them. I know I coach our clients and I personally use what we call a super signature. That basically is just a PS at the end of emails, to keep my offers in front of people, to keep our clients offers in front of people so that whenever that prospect is ready, it’s obvious to them how we can. And if you’re doing that, and I would recommend setting weekly goals or weekly targets, rather than putting off things and saying monthly or quarterly targets, you’re going to keep that pipeline moving. And you’re going to consistently generate a little bit of new business.

Now, does that mean that you can’t kind of put gas on the fire at certain times a year and have maybe more of an interval based approach where you’re going a little bit harder during peak seasons or when, you know, opportunities are you know, really dialed in for you? You know? Sure. We can definitely push a little harder, but during those slower periods or those periods that may be, we want to back off for our own kind of, you know, choices in life, whether we’re taking vacation or we’ve got kids and our priorities are there at the moment, that’s fine. We can have some back and forth. We can have an interval based approach, but even in those lower periods, we still need to be filling the pipeline and moving people into the business. We just may not be running challenges and promoting them quite as aggressively. We may not be spending quite as much on ads, but we’re still trying to move the business forward. And we’re not relying on things that happen last week, last month, last year, to carry us into the future. We’re setting ourselves up to succeed today and moving forward. So that’s the first in the series of how to overcome challenges. Hopefully you enjoyed it and we’ll have more in the next episode.

Thanks for listening. I’m giving away a bundle of my bestselling books, the ideal business formula, the fitness entrepreneur handbook in the path. All you have to do is go to patrigsby.com/podgift to get it. Also, make sure to subscribe to The Fitness Business School with Pat Rigsby so you don’t miss an episode and you get yourself on the fast track to creating your ideal business.