Fitness Business School – Guaranteed Improvement

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk with you about how you can guarantee that you’re going to improve in your business. There there’s some things to think about in a process I want to walk you through. So we’ve got a lot to cover in this episode. 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.

So how do we improve? How do we avoid staying stagnant in what we’re doing? You know, there are, I’m sure there are plenty of different ways to approach this, but I wanted to share kind of the way that I walked through this, the process that I may take. And when I say process, it’s almost like it’s this sequential thing. It’s more or less, there are certain steps that I take or certain actions that I gravitate toward that I think allow me to, to keep seeing things through, through a new lens, allow me to keep evolving and not being stuck, always doing what, you know, what I’ve done in the past. So let me kind of walk you through the way that I’ve looked at this through the pandemic and some questions that I ask myself that, that allow me to keep evolving and the programs that we offer and, and really try to just come out ahead and use it as a silver lining in what’s been, you know, an otherwise pretty challenging time for, for so many people.

So the first question that I’ve asked myself that I would encourage you to ask yourself as well is, how did you adapt to serve the clients that you serve during the pandemic? I know in my business, you know, we went from having a lot of in-person live mastermind type meetings. In fact, I had just hosted a couple of meetings just weeks prior to having the you know, having the shutdown start to occur. And we went from probably being 50% live in person for our interaction. And then complementing that with the, the, the zooms where we’re, maybe I would see clients once a month on a zoom to really doubling down. And now we host between eight and 12 zooms every week for our clients. There are so many live touch points that we have. And you know, plus we, we integrated a, a more thorough check-in and accountability system. So no client would ever be kind of left to their own devices. We were going to reach out to them each and every week and just check in with them via email.

So the second question that I have, once I kind of just bullet point that out, and there were other things we changed, but you kind of get the point, right? There are things that we did to adapt on the fly to make sure that we were still serving our clients at a high level and addressing the things that they needed at the time. So I guess before I move forward, I’ll mention, you know, we also shifted from focusing on ideal business or just business growth to, okay. How do you deal with, you know, this, this shift to being online, how do you apply to get a PPP loan? How do you navigate the whole thing, like we started addressing other things in the business that we didn’t really always have to address. In fact, you know, I had clients deal with so much of the same stuff in the past. They would rely almost entirely on those in-person training sessions and they shifted to zoom. They would start to deal with other areas of the client’s lives that maybe they hadn’t focused on as much before, like stress. And, you know, there, there were just these shifts that they made to adapt to, to really continue to serve the clients that they had at a high level.

So the second question then I would pose to them and I would pose to you as well, is what did you learn? Well, I learned in my case, the, that frequency of touch point that frequency of contact is more valuable than I could have ever imagined. It’s not that everybody needs that, that kind of intensive interaction, that frequency of contact, but some people thrive with it. So if you offer more, then the people that don’t need as much can kind of pick out a card style and the people who do need that to keep them motivated, to keep them on track and build new behaviors, they can lean into it as frequently as they want. So I learned that for sure. And, you know, I learned that it’s just a really cool experience to be able to connect with people more than two or three times a year in person in, you know, in Louisville or in Florida, like we’ve done it at our meetings. I’ll tell you another thing that I learned is, you know, how valuable the done for you component of what we deliver can be for people just because of the stress that it takes off their shoulders. And it allows them to get back to coaching. I mean, we provide done, done for you email messages that clients can send out to, to their audience three days a week. We, we provide that for them and the, the burden that that’s taken off their shoulders to stay in contact with, with clients, with prospects. It’s just been tremendous. In fact you know, I think it, it’s not only saved these people so so much time, but it’s allowed them to do the things that they’re doing great at more frequently. So that, I mean, that’s one of the things that I learned. And I think that a lot of clients have learned that, you know, their clients really want to be valued and feel important and feel connected. And that some of the things that their service is about that allows them to stand out over kind of the, the, the big box facilities or the, the larger franchises or some of the online things, or just the touch points, the connection, the, the relationships. And so you know, I think a lot of our clients have learned that.

So the third question to, to facilitate improvement is okay, based on this, what we, what we did, what we learned, what are we going to keep or change? How will process our behavior, our deliverable be different moving forward. I know in my case we’ll continue to, to offer the frequency of zooms that we do, even when we can meet in person, you know, at the same frequency that we used to be able to meet him person. I know that we will double down and do even more done for you. We’re going to actually shift and start providing clients with weekly done for you. You promotional stuff for different facets of their business, and just try to make some of those areas easier on them for the people that want to take them and deploy them as is. Then it saves them mountains of time and stress for the people who want to kind of take them and amend the things that we provide. It gives them the opportunity to never have to stare at a blank page. They’re always halfway or two thirds of the way to the finish line on anything they’re going to do.

So, you know, those, those are really simple kind of observational starting points for, for things that are happening, kind of inside our own four walls that allow us to improve and not just default to what we’ve traditionally done, but there are other, you know, other ideas that I employ or other strategies I employ to continue to evolved the first that kind of comes to mind is, you know, what, or who am I studying both inside industry and outside industry. So I’ll tell you the only people that I really study inside the industry are the, the actual facilities themselves, the clients that I serve, or the people that I’ve worked with along the way that are really, really good at what they do. I study that and, and see what’s working. And one of the true benefits I have and kind of the seat that I have in the industry is, you know, we’ve got hundreds of clients that are parts of our program. So I’m getting kind of a a sample of the best of what’s happening everywhere, and I can bring it all together. So I study that I try to be super attentive, and I think it’s a huge advantage that I have spending time coaching clients every day, instead of kind of just sitting back and being an owner and not being as involved intimately clients, or just being a sales person or something like that. You know, that’s the thing in industry that I study, but then I try to study a lot of what’s going on outside our industry. I try to study you know, businesses is that are known for, you know, their service, like you know, like a Disney, but I study trends that are happening and I’m paying a lot of attention to like the recent IPO’s of Airbnb, or DashDash and just seeing, okay, what do people want? What is this indicative of?

What behaviors are people kind of gravitating towards moving forward? And, you know, I think that being myopic and studying in industry only can be a problem. I think that that’s been one of the things that I kind of learned by default, not growing up in the fitness industry, starting yeah. In more of the sports world. I didn’t come in with a preconceived notion of, Hey, this is how things have to be done in, because at the time I entered the fitness industry, there weren’t a lot of people doing business coaching. I mean, there were, there might’ve been a couple that I was aware of, but not the plethora of people that are pseudo gurus today. So I went outside of industry and I studied as much other stuff, business information, as I could, and as much customer service stuff, as I could, and as much direct response marketing stuff as I could. And that still kind of continues on today. I mean, my, my shelves are lined with books that, I mean, maybe 1% of comes from our industry and making sure that you’re studying and being exposed to new ideas and different ways of thinking I think is paramount. And that’s certainly another way to, to almost assure your improvement. Not that you’re going to pluck something from a different industry and deploy it as it is, but it’s going to get you to think differently. It’s going to get you to be more creative in your thought and maybe approach problem solving from a different perspective.

And then, you know, the next thing that I think of is, you know, always remembering the goals are right. Like, what are our goals, what our client’s goals, and, you know, what are we he actually doing to realize those things? I think that it’s important to recalibrate from time to time. It becomes so easy to be tactical and just try to get through, and Hey, I’m going to run this promotion this week, or I’ve got to write programs from these, for these clients. So I have them for next week. And just the stuff that we have to do to maintain where we are instead of periodically just looking at our vision and saying, okay, what are we doing? Are we closing the gap on where we want to be? Are you, or are you really moving towards those goals? Systematically, are you making sure your clients are moving towards their goals? Are you just hosting workouts? Are you just delivering something to, to maintain their subscription for another month? And I think if you run your business through this filter these five questions, you’re going to find that you’re, you’re going to really start to incrementally level up. I’m not going to say that you’re going to reinvent your business, but what you’re going to see happen is incremental improvement over and over and over both being observant of the things that you’ve done in the past and drawing from other areas to give you ideas on how to improve, always moving towards that beacon of what I call your ideal business, trying to gain ground on that, you know, week after week, day after day. So if you want to guarantee improvement, that’s it. I mean, it’s not a complicated process at all. Those five questions really kind of serve as my my framework to continue to improve my business. And I don’t think there’s anything magic about them, but what you didn’t hear there is what usually happens. And that’s just kind of get up and do what you’ve always done and hope for some result that is dramatically different. So hopefully that helps. And that’s how you can guarantee own improvement.

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.