Fitness Business School – Focus on the Fundamentals

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby, and in this episode, I want to talk with you about a focus on the fundamentals. Now you may think, Hey, that’s kind of boring and I know what you’re going to talk about, but bear with me. I think you’re going to get a lot out of this episode. So let’s get started.

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Hey, Pat, here, and in this episode, I want to talk with you about focusing on the fundamentals. Now, if you are anything like me, maybe you’ve come from a competitive sports background where invariably coaches were always talking about being strong in the fundamentals. I know that was a big key to my success as a college baseball coach. And frankly it’s helped me tremendously throughout my professional life across the board, but let’s face it. There’s competition popping up in your market. And in mind it seems like almost on a daily basis in my market, there are kind of instant experts coming out here, touting their new found lead generation system or their business system that guarantees to flood your, your gym or your online training business with more clients than you could ever need in almost an instant. And these guys came out of nowhere and somehow this magic system is amazing, but man, that’s not exclusive to me. That’s, that’s the same thing that we see in, in your kind of competitive landscape. We’ve seen franchises pop up in every market, almost not just orange theory, but we see things like Cycle Bar, Club Pilates. We see all of these group training franchises that you know, are kind of high volume, not particularly expensive to the client businesses, but they rely on, you know, this system and then kind of maybe a little bit lower quality coaching than we’re probably accustomed to providing. Or we see these kind of a, kind of new to the industry coaches who seem to be a lot better at social media than they are actually delivering results to clients. And if they’re online, they can reach everywhere. They don’t have to be in your three, five, seven mile radius to impact your business. They’re now your competitor. Couple that with the stuff that we’re seeing with, you know, Mirror and Peloton and all those other kind of online virtual trainers and the marketplace is getting crowded across the board.

So, you know, what’s interesting about this is some of this, it really is just kind of this shiny object, right? It’s the stuff that I know that I have business owners, coaches come to me all the time. They say, well, I tried this and it sounded so good, but it didn’t work out. And I almost kind of chuckle internally. I mean, I don’t want to see anybody go waste money and put their livelihoods at stake, but I know that if they’re a client, I came to them talking about the same thing. I know what the response would be.

Let me give you an example of how, how this would be. If you had a client that came to you and they said, look, I just saw this great Facebook ad for this new program that promised to help me lose all the weight that I wanted to get in great shape, you know, have, have a flat stomach, have plenty of energy and improve my health. And I don’t need to do all this stuff. You’ve been talking about like strength train, or do my mobility work or do any sort of structured conditioning. I don’t need to eat healthy anymore. I don’t need to worry about my recovery and my sleep, all that stuff. Those fundamentals don’t need to concern myself with them at all anymore because this program promises that it’ll get me, the results will ignoring those. I mean, if somebody came to, you’d kind of be probably stuck between chastising them a little bit and saying, look, man, that’s a fraud that that’s a gimmick, it’s a scam. And then kind of laughing at how naive we can all be whenever something is over promised and under delivered. But your response when somebody wants to deviate from what we know works, you know, sometimes we’ve got to take our own advice, right? And we have to say, well, if it sounds too good to be true, it often is. And you know, when those Facebook ads pop up, when somebody says, man, I’m going to flood your gym with clients. And this person popped out of nowhere and you know, they got this magic bullet solution. You probably have to be a little bit skeptical, right? Because usually it’s not what it maybe promises to be. And when what’s great is we know the fundamentals work.

I mean, I’ve talked for years about attract, convert, deliver, and I’ve really built almost all of my businesses I’ve had over 30 businesses in health, fitness, sports, performance fields, offline and online. And it’s all kind of revolved around this fundamental approach of identifying who my target market is and figuring out where to find them and how do I get their attention and reach them. Right? And then I get them on this email newsletter that I’ve sent day after day for 15 years, I try to add value to their life. I try to make it easier for them to reach their goals and solve their problems. And then I mix in some offers, you know, and if you’re on my newsletter, you’ve seen, you know, there there’s some pieces, there are some direct offers, but I try to make sure that I’m adding as much value as I can so that, you know, this person sees that, you know what, he’s not just saying he can help. He’s helping me on a daily basis. And I make those offers and you know, a decent number of the people on the email list, they become paying clients. They say, look, I want to work with you more closely in a more interactive way. And you know, yeah, That’s worked time and time again to build dozens of businesses to six and you know, a number of them to seven figure levels. And it’s just this basic fundamental approach.

It’s the same stuff with service delivery, right? I mean, we make sure that we, we, we coach people, we make sure we teach things that are proven to give them the highest probability of success. You know, you’re not cutting corners. You’re actually caring about the clients you serve and being client centric. I mean, none of it’s rocket science and frankly if that was a requirement, I’d probably be in trouble, but you know, the fundamentals work and what’s great about it is it allows you to have confidence. It allows you to build on this bedrock foundation that is going to work time and time. Again. Sure. You may have to fine tune things. You may have to evolve things here and there, but we know the fundamental approach works for our clients. We know it works when it comes to growing our business. So, you know, really the discipline comes from us. We have to probably not be hypocritical and we have take our own advice and we have to stick to the things that work and be willing to persevere and have some consistence consistency. And if we do that over time, it’s going to work out in our favor. And it doesn’t really matter if it’s an offline business or an online business.

Honestly, the fundamentals of an online business are inherently the same. It’s a coaching business where we’re making a value exchange. Somebody is giving us not only their money, but their time and trust and attention in belief that we can help them go from where they are to where they aspire to be. And then we need In exchange for that to give them some live attention, live access to coaching. We need to give them some on demand stuff to support them when they can’t make it to the lot we need to make sure they feel cared for and important. We need to embrace them and bring them in and make them feel part of a community bigger than them that really lifts them up and makes them better. And then ultimately we need to hold them accountable. So they stay the course when bumps in the road arise, or when challenges come, th the things that have typically pulled them off track in the past, those are inherent in any good business, offline, online hybrid, you name it.

So if you follow the fundamentals, you’re going to be in good shape. I know that the shiny object stuff sounds great. And I’ll be the first to admit that there have been plenty of times in my life that you know, that kind of late night infomercial pitch sounded really, really good, but never has it worked out nearly as well as sticking to the things that are time tested, proven, and then sure, fine tuning them, updating them. When the market evolves a little bit, when the media changes a little bit, you know, no different than when Facebook advertising became a much more popular platform. And back in my early days of doing more direct mail and more print and more radio, you know, but the fundamentals of what I was saying and the people I was winning and reached that all stayed the same. So hopefully this is just a little bit of a refresher or reminder to you that the fundamentals are gonna win out. And frankly, they’re going to be here the next five years, the 10 years, 20 years, probably as long as any of us are in this industry, they’re going to work to build your business around them. And you’re going to set yourself up to succeed.

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.