Fitness Business School – Guarantees

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here. And this is the fifth of a six part series about what we’re doing in our business and how you can apply it to yours when it comes to improving, when it comes to growing, when it comes to building your ideal business. And today I’m going to talk about something that I think is underappreciated in the fitness industry. And it is the use of guarantees. We guarantee a certain level of results in programs and have for a great number of years. And I’m going to tell you how and how you can apply it in your business in this episode,

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 til the end of this episode, because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

Guarantees. They are tremendously popular in the direct response marketing world. They’re popular in the retail world, right? There are all sorts of performance guarantees. You know, you have a warranty for this thing or that thing. You, you, you know, you buy a car, there’s a warranty on the drive train. If you, you know, you buy most anything, there there’s a year warranty on this or that in the fitness industry, however, most people are super hesitant to use a guarantee. They you know, they, they kind of default to the way of thinking that, Hey, my, you know, my clients are only under my direct supervision three or four hours a week. How can I guarantee the results? I don’t know what they’re doing in the hours. They’re not with me. And you know, I, I get it. I understand. And I think that that’s one way to look at it, but I think there’s probably a better way to look at it. Now, in my current business, we offer a performance guarantee. Well, first we let people come in right now.

We’re we’re testing a 30 day test drive where somebody can experience the entire program, like our flagship program, business growth accelerator, 30 days, no financial investment, no credit card on file, no auto renewal, no, no obligation to continue at all. So you know, that it’s just really a demonstration of value that leads to an offer if it’s going to be a good fit. So I think, you know, that that’s an interesting way that we start the program, but then when somebody actually comes on board, the way our fee structure is set up, we guarantee that they will add specific amounts of new business before we either start their billing or increase their billing, because we have a tiered billing structure that, that allows them to pay less the shorter, the period of time they’ve been in the program, because they haven’t been able to really reap all the compounding effects of being in the program, you know, month one or two. And then over time it compounds and then the fee increases provided they’ve hit those financial benchmarks. For us, you know, if they hit $750 a month in new business or new recurring revenue, depending on what their business model is, we tend to steer people towards recurring revenue, but it’s not a must.

Then we start a billing structure of, you know, $199 for the first two months, 2 99 for the next two months. But before we raise it to the next tier, which is 4 99, they have to have added at least $1,500 a month in new revenue. The idea of being people are adding far more than we’re charging this. Isn’t just, Hey, it covers the cost of the program. This is we’ve more than covered the cost of the program. You put some money in your pocket and you’ve covered the fee of the program and we have to do it in advance. It isn’t a promise of a future result. And that sort of guarantee, I think goes against most everything that people see out there in the kind of high ticket landscape that, that, that is kind of I think taking over the, the coaching world at the moment. And for me, that’s great because it forces our hand to find ways to deliver better results. If we want to keep more people paying, then we have to continually find ways to do a better job.

We have to continually find ways to improve how we onboard people, how we coach them. We’ve got to find ways to make it easier for people to implement and execute. And so it is clearly like the, the, the motivator, the driving force that allows us to, to improve month after month. I mean, there is no getting complacent because there’s always room to grow and improve. We know that if we want to get paid, we have to deliver. And I think that’s a fun and kind of motivating challenge for me. And for fortunately I have a team that’s really leaned into it. Now you may think, well, Hey, that’s great. That’s a monetary thing. I I’ll, before I get into how I’ve applied this in actual fitness businesses offline, before I will tell you that my coaching world is probably not dramatically different than yours. You know, I, I mean, I’m coaching everybody virtually, like everybody are, we, we hold quarterly in-person mastermind meetings. So that means, you know, if I’m as lucky as lucky gets, I may see people in person about eight days a year.

So there’s a lot of distance between us. People have their own lives. They’re not, you know, this isn’t a franchise, they are not legally obligated to follow my specific system. There, I can’t audit them, which is something that you could do as a franchise owner. There are so many things that prevent me from essentially micromanaging them not to mention. That’s not really my, my personality. I love working with motivated business owners, so I don’t want to micromanage somebody. So you know, so I, I deal with some of the same stuff that, that of fitness business owners serving fitness consumers would deal with in that I can’t do it for them, or at least I choose not to. I’m, I’m not there selling on somebody’s behalf. I’m not an agency doing marketing on their behalf. I’m coaching them and providing them tools and templates and systems to make it a high probability that they’re going to get the results that we want. Not much different than when I had a training business. We guaranteed results and offered them money. 100% money back guarantee, no matter how much they paid. And everybody was on 12 month programs with us almost without exception, like over 90% of our clients were on 12 month programs. So somebody could come to me on month 11 and get all 11 payments back. If we hadn’t held up our end of the bargain. And, you know, did, did everybody get the results that they probably were hoping for from day one? No, but we had clear expectations upfront and we said, this is what we’re going to do for you. This is what we expect you to do as part of this program. So we spelled that stuff out and we provided as much coaching and support and structure and, you know, templates that made it easier for them to execute. We did all that stuff that we possibly could. And over time we, we had, well over 1200 different clients go through our training program. When we offered this guarantee, we didn’t offer this from day one. This was something we, we implemented, but we had well over 1200 people through the program. When we offered a complete money back guarantee, we had one person ask for a refund based on the guarantee.

Now we issued a few other refunds for people who paid in full and then moved and that sort of thing. But as far as one person ever asking about their money back based on the guarantee I mean, that was it. And honestly I would have considered it a win if we would have had 50 people ask for their money back because how many other people join the program? Because they had confidence because we were willing to kind of, you know, I guess put our money where our mouth was so to speak. And it forced us in that same way to find better solutions, instead of saying, well, these people can’t execute what we’re doing. We had to find better ways to do what we’re doing to make it easier for them to execute and stay consistent.

We had to find better ways to problem solve. So when your putting together a program, whether it be something like a pilot program or a front end offer a challenge or an ongoing long-term program, I think a guarantee is powerful. I think it breeds confidence. It alleviates fear and concern on the part of the consumer. I think it forces us to do a better job and to not get complacent. And it always results in more sales. And to be, to be honest, it results in more net profit. Even if you do issue a couple of refunds. So if you were not using a guarantee, I would strongly encourage you to find a way to, to at least put that into like a front end offer or a challenge in your program, because it will get more people in the door to experience what you do and how you can help. Now, if you’d like to see how we’re putting this into play and take advantage of our guarantee, which really eliminates all the risk and all the, the financial concern you know, shoot me an email [email protected] and you can go through our 30 day test drive and, you know, do the, the, no out-of-pocket no credit card, no anything trial of VGA that I alluded to at the beginning of the episode, and you can learn how all this works firsthand and see how you can apply it in your business.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the fitness business school. Before you go. I have a quick announcement. When I first connect with a new fitness business owner, they almost always ask me, “How can I get more clients and earn more money?” Well, I have an exclusive offer for you as a listener of this podcast, and it’s going to help you do just that. As a listener of this show, you can test drive our Business Growth Accelerator coaching program for 30 days free of charge.

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