Fitness Business School – Consistency Leads to Results in 2021

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in this episode, we’re up to number five in the five-part series about really succeeding throughout the rest of 2021 and beyond. So last of the group, let’s get to it.

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.

The previous four episodes, we’ve talked about mindset, we’ve talked about the fundamentals. If you will, we’ve talked about being client centric, and then we’ve talked about kind of building what I consider your conversion machine, taking those prospects that you have and turning them into clients consistently so that you can really have a pipeline that feeds your business month after month, instead of ever having to have that kind of up and down. That feeling of desperation that I, I think emotional struggle, we’ve all seen the infographics of like life as an entrepreneur. That’s, you know, really high highs and really low lows all on the same day and to, to a degree that’s kind of part of the thing, right? That’s part of the journey, but I don’t think it has to be as extreme as a lot of people paint it. And sometimes it’s just setting up systems that allow you to be more consistent and consistency in my mind is the name of the game.

If you have a consistent approach that you’re continually trying to make incremental improvements to, you’re going to see good results. And sure there are going to be some laws and some peaks, but it’s not going to be as extreme and it’s not going to cause you as much stress. And so really the last leg of this five-part series is having an audience like we all need to build our own audience. And I think of an audience is almost like your neighborhood to market to, and that’s what so many local small businesses start out as right? Like I grew up in a small town and I know there were, you know, there was a grocery store that was kind of in our neighborhood before kind of the, the Kroger’s took over every, every small town like that before we had Walmart and that sort of thing. I remember going to like the little neighborhood grocery store, where there was you know, the, the, the guy had, you know, it was the meat cutter and there was somebody over in the produce section there, you know, it was people that kinda knew you by name and even knew the things that you were going to order. And they would build their business around that neighborhood. And, you know, so many small businesses in small towns started that. I mean, they just really kind of hung their hat on being the solution for that specific neighborhood.

Well, now that people have so many more choices, people have so many more options available to them, whether it be offline or online, you know, the way that we construct our neighborhood is different, but the mindset is still the same, right? Like those people in the neighborhood mindset often chose because of convenience. Hey, this is close. This is local and comfort. We know people there. So we have a relationship. And if the neighborhood business did things right, they became pretty client-centric because they knew that that was their livelihood. If I alienate the people who live, you know, within the mile or two of here, I don’t really have anybody else to go to. So there were all these kind of inherent qualities of neighborhood businesses as well. If you’re building your audience, you’re essentially building your own neighborhood, but you’re building a neighborhood based on interest or desire instead of geography. Now. Sure. Some of us still, like there are businesses that I may go to in my local area because of convenience because of geography, but in various believe the businesses that do really well because of geography in my local area, certainly like they always have competitors sooner rather than later, because somebody sees the opportunity and the next person comes along and says, Hey, I’m going to jump into, and this mix. So, you know, winning by, by convenience, alone, by, you know, by proximity is probably temporary. It, I mean, you’re going to have to find a different way to, to, to cultivate your neighborhood. And if you think about this, I mean, there’s a reason why nobody builds a gym in the middle of like the desolate wasteland in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the forest. They go where the people are. So in our world, we want to kind of bring the people to us. We want to cultivate our own neighborhood based on the desires of the people that we potentially can help or the interests that those people have. And a lot of that comes with us, putting things out in the marketplace with great consistency that gets people to raise their hand because is what you may or may not notice. Or at least maybe you don’t think of it this way. Is there like visible prospects and invisible prospects, visible prospects, are those people that man, we kind of know who they are and you can do the visible prospect thing by just renting a list, right? Like, I mean, we can do it in the business to business world. I could do a rental list of all the people certified by some organization, or you could get a list of all of them, people that live in certain subdivisions or something like that. But invisible might be people who would have an interest in what you want, but there may be not easy to fine, easy to quantify because they’re, they’re unaware of you. You’re unaware of them. So what we want to do is put out things that really get somebody to raise their hand and say, okay, this is my desire. I want to escape this problem, solve this problem. I want to reach this goal, achieve this outcome. I have an interest in this thing, like if you work with runners or endurance athletes, then we need the people who are endurance athletes to raise their hands. If you know, you help people do home workouts and the time they have the body they want, then we need to put something out to get those people, to raise their hand that are interested in those things. And I know we can, it cast a wide net and just say, okay, people who are interested in some sort of healthy eating, be it a particular type of nutrition or a seasonal, you know, a healthy grilling guide or a kind of specific thing or something like that. We can do things that, that cast that kind of wide net. We can do things that are even more specific, like a specific desire, like people that want to lose a certain amount of weight or people that want to achieve a certain performance goal. But we need to find a way to aggregate our own audience. Now, where do we house this audience and email list? Private Facebook group are probably the two, two places to go with that. My recommendation is both, not just one. I think that if we get people on an email list, we ask them to join our free private Facebook group. If we get people in a free private Facebook group, we ask them to join our email list because we want to be able to connect with people and get their attention in a way that works for them.

Right now, I, I send a lot of emails. I do email is my primary communication mechanism, but I have other ways that I connect with people, right? So you can lean on one is the primary, but we want to have another way that just kind of reinforces our message. And if you think about it, like think when somebody is running for office, like just local office, like they want to be a County commissioner, they want to be the mayor. They want to be on a school board or something like that. Thinking about all the different things that they’re doing. I mean, they’ve got yard signs, I’ve got a Facebook page there they’re running ads. They may be going knocking on doors. They’ve got people out there marketing on their behalf. There are all these things that they’re doing well. We kind of need to do the same thing, but specific to our person, their desires, their goals, the problems they want to see. And if you build up this neighborhood, if you up this kind of community of people, then that’s when we move them into that pipeline that we talked about in the fourth kind of piece of this series, we move them into that pipeline. But so many people that I talked to they’re like, well, Hey, I’ve got my pipeline. I’m sending out my emails. I’m sending out my, my engagement offers or deadline-driven offers, but I’m not getting a whole lot back like, well, you’re, you’re sending it to like 80 people and you’re getting like a 20% open rate. So like 16 people saw it. Whereas, you know, I mean you, if you’ve ever paid any any attention to door to door salesman, even the average door to door salesman, knocks on, I believe 18 doors per sale. You know, so, you know, we, we just have to understand that, you know, there, there, there’s kind of this numbers game that we’re playing. And so we need to build up a meaningful audience if we’re going to have any degree of success because not everybody’s ready today, not everybody’s paying attention today, not everybody who has an interest is going to take action. So the more people that we’re reaching, the more likely that people are coming out of the, the prospect pipeline and becoming clients each month. So, you know, what kind of things can we do? Well, I mean, you know, obviously you can make organic posts on social media. You can put out YouTube videos, you can do all sorts of, you know, listings free, like any free option for listing that you have, like directories any sorts of things that are kind of today’s yellow pages. If you will, we can, we can ask clients to invite people in. We can ask clients to share the things that we’re sharing on social media. We can go connect with local affinity groups, changed their commerce PTA’s church groups parent groups for youth sports or whatever else we can form strategic alliances with other businesses that might serve a similar type of target market, but are non-competitive. There are so many different ways that we can reach people. We can. I mean, ultimately we want to be in a place where we can do paid advertising to build our network, our, our neighborhood, if you will, because it’s the most predictable of all of the options, right? It is the thing that if we get it dialed in and we know, Hey, I can spend, you know, X number of dollars that ultimately yield a client, then we want to be able to do that and kind of rinse and repeat. But for a lot of people, you know, they’re, they’re starting out and maybe they don’t have the budget for that. Well, we can always trade time for money or money for time, right? If you want to essentially pay for a solution, you probably can spend less time doing it. If you don’t have the budget to do it, you can do things organically. You can go out and network with people face to face. You can make a lot more posts on social media. You can really, you know, digging in and, and yeah, and sit down with every client that you have and asked for introductions.

There are so many things that you do that if you understand this is a numbers game and you’re doing a little bit more each and every day, and you’re, you’re going to start to, to see that, you know, it compounds over time because, you know, you never know when the one thing that you do, the one connection you make may open up a series of new doors or the one lead magnet that you put out may be the one that generates a windfall of clients at a much more favorable price, or it’s the one that your clients are great at sharing with the people in their lives. I mean, you, you, you just don’t know until you, you actually go out and test some things. And that’s just part of being a business owner. You have to build an audience, you have to have people to serve and serve profitably. So if you are not going out and connecting with new people each and every day, whether it be paid organic, whether it, you directly doing it or through referrals or whatever else, if you’re not adding people to that quote unquote neighborhood each and every day, you’re losing ground because ultimately, you know, we are going have attrition. We are going to have people who are in that pipeline, stop paying attention. So we’re always having to kind of refill. We’re always having to, you know, if we want to think of this as a farming process where we’re, we’re nurturing, right. And we’re always having to reseed, we’re having to bring new people in. So that’s the fifth leg of the process that is, is the that the five kind of pieces of the puzzle. You need to have a place if you want to succeed in, you know, 2021 and beyond because you know, we’re going to see people going back into the gyms that may be a more normal rate when it comes to the fall. We’re going to see you know, schools having full capacity. We’re going to see people kind of getting out and working in traditional workplaces more.

And yet it’s not going to look exactly like it looked in 2019, but it’s definitely going to look a lot more or like what we can expect going forward beyond the fall then. And it’s looked for maybe the past 12 to 14 months. So we have to be ready because the thing about it is there’s more competition than there’s ever been. You know, the, the pandemic created, or at least accepted or eight at a whole new arena of competitors. And then right before the pandemic, we just saw this explosion of training based franchises coming into the market. So it’s going to be a densely populated marketplace. It’s going to be a really competitive marketplace. So you need to be able to check all kind of five of these boxes, if you will, if you’re going to expect to go out and thrive in this ever evolving landscape. But if you do, and I think this is the right time for you, because I think that, you know, the, the, the typical fitness consumer is maybe more aware than they’ve ever been when it comes to you know, the fact that, you know, exercise is not only great for the aesthetic side of stuff, but for, you know, staying healthy for mental health, for immune systems, like all of it, it is more you know, a more aware marketplace than we’ve ever had. And we can capitalize on that if we’re client centric, if we’re sticking to the fundamentals and we’re providing a great service that we’re keeping in front of all those people that we can potentially help.

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