Fitness Business School – Commitment and Congruency

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I want to talk with you about congruency. 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 till the end of this episode because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

I spend a lot of time with business owners each and every week individually on group Zoom, sometimes in live settings. And it’s so common that people will say, well, I want clients who are committed. I want people who are serious and committed and all this stuff. And I kind of grin when they
say that because what they want isn’t really congruent with how they behave on average. And, you know, and I’m sure that some people are gonna listen to this and take it the wrong way or, I mean, I don’t even know if it’s taking it the wrong way, taking it in a way that I’m not trying to share it.

But if I think about what I want, then I have to decide, well, I, what I’m willing to invest to get that everything’s a trade, right? Like everything that we do, there’s a, an exchange. And all too often I hear people when they hire an ad agency, they hire somebody to run Facebook ads, and they want immediate gratification. They want people who see the ad and it’s click to sale, right? Like, that person clicks the ad, inserts credit card and they’ve got a client. So they want immediate
gratification, yet they want to attract prospects that are not in that kind of immediate gratification mentality. Or when they do their marketing they’re not willing to follow up at all. There’s no, it’s like, Hey, these people are tire kickers. They’re not serious, they’re not willing to make the commitment to get the result.

And, and I always find that to be, I just, it’s incongruent. If I want somebody to commit to me, I have to be willing to commit to that person, right? I have to be willing to invest in this marketing relationship to show them that I can help to demonstrate to, to build trust, to build relationship equity,
to meet them early enough on in this relationship that they can get to know me and feel like, Hey, this is finally the right place for me. This is finally the right person to help me go from where I am to where I wanna be. And we’re definitely in a stage of our industry that that’s a little different than when I got into
the industry. When I got into the industry, most of the people who came into the training businesses that I owned, or the ones that I coached, or even early on in my days as a franchisor, so many of those clients had never experienced a trainer before.

They may have been a member at a big box gym and had a free training session, but never actually worked with a trainer in an ongoing way, never had a coach in an ongoing fashion. And so their expectations might have been a little bit different than today’s person that usually has belonged
somewhere, usually has experienced something. And so if we are going to ask people to be committed, well, we need to be able to earn that commitment. From my perspective, and that’s the other side of this too, is we want people to not only be committed, we want them to be committed to us, and we
need to earn that, right? Like it there. For me, this is a little bit like just any sort of relationship. I wouldn’t expect somebody to go out on a first date with somebody and feel, totally comfortable saying, yeah, let’s get married.

Let’s be together for the next 50 years. Instead of saying, no, I’m going into this to see if this person’s a good fit for the next date. And I, I think that in the business landscape, we want the rewards without putting in the work, without putting in the effort. And we are thinking, well,
sure, I’m working hard, man. I invested to open this facility. I bought this equipment. I’m paying this staff, I’m working long hours. But that’s not about the individual. That’s not the investment in the individual relationship. And so if we want that relationship to be a committed one, if we want it to be
long term, then that’s something that we, we have to commit to being long term people. We have to be willing to invest early in the relationship and be willing to follow up and nurture that relationship over time.

When somebody comes into the, the business, we have to be somebody that’s worthy of a commitment. Like, if, if we’re gonna say, Hey, this person needs to be committed, and what we really mean is they need to be committed to us, then we have to be commitment worthy. We have to do
something that’s different than what everybody else does. We have to do something that’s discernibly better for that client. Better is very subjective. When, when we talk about being better or being different, better for one person isn’t necessarily better for somebody else. For, like, a lot of people make decisions based on convenience. Well, what’s more convenient for me may not be more convenient for somebody who lives four miles away. So better isn’t the same for everybody, but if we’re asking somebody to make a commitment, we need it to be better for them.

And I think that we have a world of sameness in our industry where people, they, they don’t do things that are necessarily better for the client, but they expect the client to have some undying loyalty to them. And they expect that client not to move on to the next shiny object, not to join the next discount
provider, or not to enroll in the next person’s founder’s rate or pre-sale or something like that, to get a better rate for essentially what amounts to the same service. So if you want something from a client, if you want to be a long-term provider for the people that you serve, you have to be a long-term person. I,
I kind of laugh about this when somebody talks to me about, Hey, I worked with this business coach, or I worked with that business coach, and there are people that I’ve just not heard of at this stage because they’ve been in the industry for 18 months.

And, and I’m, and I’m like, okay, but when you talk to me, you want to build a business that has some longevity and you want to get more of the right clients that aren’t the short term people. Like, Hey, well, yeah, they brought in people, but they weren’t the right fit for my business. I’m like, well, you hired
somebody who’s been in the industry for 18 months, so what would they know about long-term business? What would they know about creating longevity in anything? And I mean, we’ve seen that for ages and ages. We’ve seen plenty of people who were here 10 years ago that disappeared
and are nowhere to be found now. So you need to be congruent with your actions. If you say you want something, you have to decide, am I congruent in the way that I’m operating, the way that I’m thinking, and the way that I’m behaving, the choices I’m making, the, the systems I’m installing, the approach to
marketing that I’m taking.

Because if I’m not, I’m not gonna get the outcome that I want. And that’s a tough truth for, for some people to hear, but it’s also the same thing that so many people teach, right? Most people would say that you can’t have a pie of ice cream every day and deserve to have a flat stomach and
deserve to look the way you wanna look and feel the way, way you wanna feel. If you’re not gonna be consistent with exercise, and you’re not gonna be consistent with some sort of, supportive nutritional plan, well then the, the results that you get are congruent with the way that you operate.
Well, that’s what we teach. We teach people to modify behavior to get a different outcome. Well, sometimes we have to look in the mirror and say, this applies to us too.

So if you want to have clients who are committed, you’ve gotta be willing to commit to them. If you want them to stay without looking out to the next shiny object, then you have to give them a reason to stay. If you want to build a long-term business, then you have to operate with a long-term approach.
Again, it’s not complicated, it’s congruency. And with without congruency, we’re not gonna have long term success.

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

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