Fitness Business School – Creating Your Filter

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to talk with you about creating your filter. 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 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 recently I went to the American Baseball Coaches Association National Convention in, man, it was, it was really impressive. They, they held it in Nashville at the Opryland Hotel, and it, it brought me back a little bit because the first one of those I attended was all the way back in 1996 during my first full year as a
head college coach. And the events grown tremendously. The you know, the, the event I originally went to had fewer than 2000 people. This one had more than 8,500. The, the trade show went from being, you know, probably a couple rows of booths with, you know a limited number of people selling things like equipment and uniforms and that sort of stuff, to now, I mean, there was a never ending shortage of technology and tools and all that
stuff too. But attending events like that, it always serves as a, an interesting reminder to me that we need a filter. You know, you, you could go in and, you know, they have all these really successful coaches doing presentations on specific topics that, you know, extol their philosophy or tactics or drills
that they use in, in their program. And they, you know, they get an hour to share something that, you know, is just a condensed version of, you know, a much deeper topic usually. And then you walk around the trade show and, you know, there are different technology platforms and tools designed to, you
know, do a multitude of different things.

Everything from, you know, documenting things that, that go into strategy to communicating with recruits. I mean, there’s just so much to it. And it, it’s the same thing when you attend business events. If you’re in the fitness industry and you attend bigger events like Idea, or if you go to my favorite fitness
industry events that perform better events, and you know, you have all these wonderful speakers. And I even remember back gosh, it would’ve probably been, you know, gosh, a decade and a half ago, I took my VP of marketing and we went to a conference out in St. Louis. And, and he was super smart. He, he’s
a very, you know, successful entrepreneurial guy to this day. And, you know, every talk, he’d leave the talk and he’d come out and somebody would’ve presented, Hey, this is how we do webinars.

And next thing you know, it’s like, man, we gotta do webinars and we gotta reinvent our whole business model and do this or do that. And he probably did that eight or nine different times where he came out of a talk and it was, you know, he was persuaded by what was being shared in that talk. And he was just
ready to to just discard everything that had gotten us to the level of success we had already reached, which at that point was, was good. I mean, it was several million dollars a year and, and it was like, okay, let’s just get rid of this and replace it with this thing that I know one hour worth of information about.
And, you know, it’s, it that’s, I think that’s a challenge so many of us face, right? There’s more information, there’s more technology, there are more things available to us than ever before.

There are more experts saying that they can help us achieve whatever our goals are, gurus with, you know, different tactics or promises. There are software platforms that, you know, can solve problems that sometimes don’t even exist, I guess. So how do we filter through all of that? Well you know, I, I
think, and, and I say this kind of tongue in cheek because I get pulled down the rabbit hole occasionally as well, but I think that I, I’ve started to, to have a pretty good filtering mechanism in some ways, because I definitely am a little bit more old school in my approach to business development than some of the people who serve the fitness business owner community in, in various ways now, you know, agencies or experts or whatever. And when I say that, it’s, you know, I, I don’t necessarily jump to the latest tactic.

I’m not saying, oh, wait a minute, TikTok is popular, so everybody needs to shift all their marketing efforts to TikTok or whatever else. No, I, you know, I, I think that for me, I just have identified the things that business really is about in, in my mind. So from my viewpoint you know, it’s about people and the needs they have, the goals they want to achieve, the problems they wanna solve. It’s about creating relationships with people. It is about problem solving. I think that’s the biggest thing business is about, is about people and problem solving. You know, it, it it’s about things like creating a more convenient path to achievement for people, or, you know, the ease of use or the ease of execution for people. It it’s about allowing people or helping people to become more consistent. It’s allowing people to, to scale their, their efforts or, or leverage their time better.

Those are the things that, that I think business is, is about. So when I’m looking at new information, when I’m looking at new, you know, whether it be a course or attending an event or buying a software platform or, you know you know, it, it kind of has to go through that sort of filter. And, you know, if
there’s a technology that allows me to do some of that, you know, if it allows me to reach more people and it’s easy, easy to use, and I can be consistent with it, then man, I’m all in. It’s you know, but a lot of technology doesn’t do that. A lot of promises that marketers make or that you know, the or or, or
companies make, they don’t allow us to do it. A lot of times when we hear a speaker talk about a specific thing, we don’t have the context and understand how it fits into everything else that they do.

So when we grab it and try to put it in our business, it’s like a square ping, a round hole. I’ll give you an example of how, how I think about this and, and maybe this example will help you a little bit. To be, to be totally frank, I did not enjoy writing at all when I started writing my daily email at the time. I called
it a memo, actually, and maybe that’s what it is in general now. But I had tried to submit a couple articles to a trade publication before, and they were rejected. I revised him, rejected again. And so really, that was my only experience with, with, with much writing. I had studied some copywriting, but I
really just, you know, I wasn’t good at it. I was slow. I you know, I wasn’t comfortable, but I saw writing this daily memo as a vehicle that allowed me to connect people, like, or, you know, it, it allowed me to, to have more reach and it was kind of scalable and it created leverage, right?

I, at the time, you know, I owned two businesses that were two hours from one another, and so I could send out this memo that everybody would get. They were in different time zones, so it wasn’t like, you know, they all had to be on a conference call at the same time. I had a few people that I was doing a
little bit of consulting with. I mean, all told the first email went out to like 17 people, and that was like 14 of our staff and three clients. And you know, it, it wasn’t simple for me to do because it took a while for me to organize my thoughts and, and put them in some sort of coherent fashion, but it was a vehicle
that allowed me to reach all these people regardless of their schedule or geography. Whereas having a meeting required everybody to kind of sync things up.

And you know, I could create this thing that you know, I thought, Hey, no matter how many more people we add, I can still write the same thing and it, it is even more leveraged. And so, you know, I could develop relationships over time if I was kind of authentic in my communication if I just wrote like I
talk or just, you know, try to be as much me as I could. So, you know, and it wasn’t hard to ex execute. It was, okay, I’m gonna type it out in text. There’s not a bunch of fancy graphics, there’s not a lot to that, and so I’m just gonna send it. And man, I started writing and that’s like 8,000 emails ago, and I’m
still at it, right? So now back then, writing a a 250 word email probably took me 90 minutes.

And now 250 word email may take me nine minutes. So, you know, I mean, you get better at things, you have to be willing to be bad at ’em before you get good at ’em, or at least hopefully I’m good or better or whatever. But I share this because, man, there’s no shortage of stuff that’s gonna tug at your
attention software or different programs or different gurus or experts or tactics or platforms. And they all come with a cost, right? Like, you’re gonna have to invest time or money or effort or energy and probably some stress figuring things out or getting out of your, your comfort zone and trying new things.
And how do you sift through things? How do you implement new things? Well for me, what I have kind of arrived at is, you know, trying to figure out, Hey, is this going to help me accomplish what I’m trying to accomplish?

And you know, align with the things that are really important to me, the values. And, you know, and I say that because those two things kind of have to live in tandem. Something could help me make a lot more money, but if it doesn’t match up with my value structure, then it’s not a fit, right? So does it
make getting where I’m trying to go easier for me or my team? Is it, does it simplify stuff? So, you know, can I consolidate multiple things that I was doing? Is it faster? You know, has it allowed me to get to where I’m trying to go faster? Does it allow me to scale more if something, you know, if we were kind of
tapped out, is there a way to, to do things and make it more scalable? Or does it make the process more fun?

There are certain things that I think we all do that we kind of grit our teeth when we do ’em. That if I can eliminate that, even if it doesn’t save me a whole lot of time, if it makes me happier than have at it, does it solve a problem? Or is it just interesting or flashy or trendy or whatever else? And so if you use
something like this as your filter, like when you listen to a talk, when you look at software man, it’s gonna help you pick the right things for you, the right tools, the right coaching and support, and you’re not gonna have that hassle and frustration and expanse that usually drags people down because you
know, of those 8,500 people that attended that event that, that I was just at, I’m gonna guess that about 8,000 of ’em are at least 7,500 are going to have taken a boatload of notes and they’re going to have grabbed a bunch of information about various tools and technology at the trade show, and then they’re
gonna go home and they’re gonna do about 99.9% of what they were doing before they attended.

And that’s just normal. And having held hundreds of events and attended hundreds of events, that’s not a slight against them because that’s just common practice, right? So how do you still get better? How do you find things that help you improve without, you know, that that burden of stress and, you know, you
sift through, well, you have your filtering system like the one I just alluded to. It’s worked for me and I’m pretty sure it’ll work for you as well.

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