Fitness Business School – Getting More Done with a Team

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I wanna talk with you about getting more done. 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 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.

One of the common topics that has been coming up as of late with a lot of the business owners that we work with, especially the business owners that have gotten a little bit of traction, is the challenges that they face when it comes to, to hiring. A lot of them have kind of felt like, okay, wait a minute. I can’t hire the help I need, or whatever else. And so I wanted to kind of talk through that for a couple minutes and give you a couple different ways to, to look at growing your team.

The first thing that I would tell you is that historically I have hired just a whole lot of people. I mean, at this point, I’ve probably hired a couple hundred people for the various businesses that, that I’ve led. And, I think I’ve had my greatest success in hiring when I have prioritized the character traits I wanted in somebody over the resume or experience they had. That doesn’t mean that you ignore the experience, the resume, the education, that that’s not at all what I’m
suggesting. It’s more of, a lot of the, the things that I have found over time to be true have been like, if you hire somebody who has the character traits of the right candidate, you can usually expedite the education for that person. You can usually get them up to speed, because let’s face it, they
may have a broad education that they’re only gonna be using 10 or 20% of in your business.

Well, we can kind of spoon feed that 10 or 20% and, and just focus on the things they would need to know to play the role you’re asking them to. And I think a lot of people ignore that, right? Like they, they overlook that, or, somebody has this robust education with a bunch of certifications or a degree an extensive work history. And, so much of it not only might not be relevant, but it may actually be things that they need to quote unquote unlearn, right? Like a different way of doing things that isn’t congruent with the way that you operate. So I tend to look for people who have the right people skills, if it’s gonna be that type of, of
job people that are eager and, I mean, for lack of a better word to define it, hungry, right?

Like people who are excited about the opportunity, people who have displayed the ability to be be on time or punctual people who are team players, those sorts of things are the general things that I would look for. And then depending on the role, are you looking for somebody who has a few certain skills or personality traits? Like is it a detailed person? Because the job you’re asking them to do is that Now once you get past that, you can start to move people through the education you need them to know. Obviously, the way that I’ve always looked at this is if I’m hiring, there must be something that’s working because I’ve got more demand than I have supply available. So the way that we do things is the things that I want this person to know.

I remember early on in my first training business that I owned, we had a position come available. At that point, we were probably, 150 clients in, so we hadn’t,
certainly hadn’t crested, but we were growing pretty quickly. And I had a gentleman who had been a head strength coach at a division one university, and he was fired come in. And during his interview, he was quick to tell me all the things that he, he would go reinvent about how we did. And the
thing that kept going through my mind was, you’re the one who’s unemployed, so maybe what we’re doing doesn’t need to be completely reinvented. Maybe you need to learn some of what we are doing. And then, I mean, we’re always eager to have contributions from people that can make things better, but you have to believe that, hey, this is our way, is what we’re gonna teach somebody.

So even if they have the most extensive resume on the planet, we’re probably still gonna have to teach them our process. We’re gonna have to teach them the way that we deliver and experience the way that, that we program or whatever else. So, so that’s the first piece of this. The, the second piece of this is there’s this common kind of complaint that I hear that, hey, this generation is they don’t wanna work as much, or they’re not eager. And it kind of makes me laugh, right? Because I, I can recall when I was in college coming outta college, people who would’ve been my age now kind of saying the same thing about that
generation and, just kind of tracing back. Every generation operates differently than the one before it.

And that’s just evolution, right? Like, it’s just progress. And, yes, people now maybe look for different things and career opportunities and are not motivated the exact same way that we were. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t want to be involved in things and make a difference and have a
career path that that’s fulfilling. What it usually means is you just can’t be a bad boss anymore above all else because they have other options available, right? Like there, there are opportunities that they can do that are anything from driving for DoorDash or Uber and not feeling like they have
the traditional boss and traditional job and they get to make more of their own schedule to doing things online. Like they’re just not limited by the same set of constraints that, that somebody my age might have been getting into the workforce.

And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think that that makes us evolve as business owners and leaders because, I mean, we can complain about whatever we want, but this is, this is what’s available. This is the landscape that we’re in now. And if you’re trying to play by a playbook that was relevant 15
years ago in so many things, you’re gonna be outdated. You’re gonna be antiquated, and it’s just not gonna work. It’s not just in the hiring landscape. So I think that’s another piece of this is understanding that a lot of times we have to evolve as leaders and be more people focused rather than always asking
people to conform to us. And I think that’s society as a whole. I’m involved in the hiring of a baseball coach at the university that, that I coached at. And one of the things that I think that is very, very true is the way that you would coach today’s young athletes is very different than the way that you
would’ve coached athletes when I was coaching at the collegiate level or when I was a player.

Even before that it was just a different landscape. And it doesn’t mean that the kids aren’t just as good and that the kids don’t have just as many problems. In fact, they probably have more challenges today. So you have to evolve and adapt and I’ve talked about this in so many other episodes. Adapting is one of the, the biggest traits that we need if we’re gonna be successful as a business owner. And this is just one more way to illustrate that. So when you’re thinking
about the hiring process, understand that the way that we are bringing people in and getting them to be a valuable part of a team doesn’t look the same, is it might have looked when somebody my age was getting in the workforce, the next thing that I wanted to touch on is just that when somebody says, well, hey, I’m really busy and I can’t find a great coach.

Well, you’re probably busy doing a variety of things, so you don’t always have to delegate that. Are there other things that you can do? And in fact, many of the other things that you could delegate are things that you could probably pay less per hour. And if you’re just truly interested in buying your time
back because you feel like you’re spread too thin can you delegate some of the, the basic marketing things like social media posting, sending out emails? Can you, hire out for administrative things? Can you hire out things like, like cleaning? Can you hire out the data entry stuff, bookkeeping? And if you’re somebody who’s making $50 an hour to coach people, well, you can certainly hire out some of the things I just alluded to for less than $50 an hour. And your time, you
know, your effective hourly rate actually becomes more, it goes up.

And some of those things with even better is now you’re not limited by geography. I mean, I know in my case, I have two people who work with me outside of Holly in any way, shape or form that live in Louisville of the roughly 20 people that that work with me in some fashion. Only two of them, outside of Holly, who plays an integral role in what we do, only two of the, two of the remaining 20 are in Louisville. So many other people make a huge contribution to what we do that are nowhere close to here. They’re anywhere from a few hours away to halfway across the world. And you have to identify, okay, what jobs am I doing if you feel like, Hey, I’m busy, I need help. Well, there are other things outside of training that you can hand off to other people that
still save you time can probably be outsourced at a reasonable rate to somebody that’s probably highly skilled in those areas, or at least more skilled in those areas than you would be.

So that’s the, the next thing, the final thing that I would tell you is in my experience hiring, like I said, hiring probably in the neighborhood of 200 people and interviewing at this point, I’m sure over a thousand, when people say, Hey, I can’t good get good applicants or whatever else, you know, there definitely may be fewer people in the, the market for what you’re offering right now than there have been in the past. But the first place that I start, and almost without exception, I would say 95% of the people that I’ve hired over time have come through some sort of relationship, whether they’ve been clients of mine, whether they’ve been, people introduced to me through people that I already have a relationship with. It’s not always first degree relationships. It’s not always
people that it may be somebody that a client knows, a friend knows, a colleague knows, but so that’s the first place that I look because I am looking for those intangibles.

I’m looking for those character traits, the things that I want in somebody that isn’t necessarily always experienced base. So, I would be far more likely for me to say, Hey Paul, I’m looking for somebody for this type of job. Do you know anybody? Or if you think of anybody that might be interested in this sort of thing, could you introduce me? And I’ve had far more success with that than doing general postings here and there. Ironically enough, Paul, of the people who
are involved in what we do now, Paul was probably the only one who didn’t come through a preexisting relationship. So way to go Paul but just a few tips on getting some help, getting some additional support. Cause I know that’s a challenge for people, so I wanted to present maybe some different ways to look at it and potentially solve the problem so that you can spend more of your time doing the things that you’re great at, the things you’re excited about, playing your best role and building your ideal business.

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

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