Fitness Business School – Have a “Success Destination”

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I want to talk with you about why having a destination is critical to your success. 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.

Just the other day, Holly had talked to me about a relative of hers that the, that had inquired about a kind of one of those crowd-sourced books, if you will,
like you know, a compilation book where a bunch of people write a chapter and, you know, she had presented it to Holly as something like, Hey, maybe you would want to do this. And the idea was that there would be over like 250 different collaborators on this, which seems more like you know, an
encyclopedia than a book to me.

But the premise that the person selling this book opportunity was kind of basing the offer on was, Hey, you’re gonna go be in front of 250 odd other women’s audiences and be part of this you know, big opportunity. And it had a pretty significant price tag. Like there was an early bird offer that seemed like it was over $3,000. And then later, like if you didn’t act early bird, you know, in the early bird deadline and joined later, it would be like over $5,000. And this book wasn’t even coming out for like another year, right? So you know, Holly did a little bit of research to just try to provide some feedback to the woman who had reached out. And, you know, the lady putting this offer together didn’t really have a big following of her own that she was gonna be able to kind of
seed the audience with.

And in all likelihood, the people that she was gonna be pitching this offer to didn’t, you know, they probably didn’t have big audiences themselves, and they were kind of reliant on this kind of crowd-sourced audience. And the problems were many with the idea. But, it’s so common. So that’s why I wanted to talk about it today. I wanted to kinda unpack this a little bit and help you understand how to vet opportunities because, you know, I think that we are presented with more
offers and opportunities than we’ve ever been presented with by like a multiple of a hundred. I mean, people are not only presenting ads, offers opportunities to you through traditional you know, like a Facebook ad or something like that. But there are all these different you know, advertising mediums
that, that are reaching us from podcasts to you know, the, the various streaming services that, that still have a commercial component to traditional just direct mail things.

I mean, people are putting things in front of you left and right, and it is very targeted. So if you’re entrepreneurial and you know, you’ve kind of established any footprint of, Hey, I want to go you know, grow a business, grow an audience you know, have any sort of following, whether or not you call
yourself a thought leader or a business owner. I mean, it’s all kind of, you know, whatever language you’ve kind of been indoctrinated to, like for me, you know, I see offers left and right, whether they’re built on the back of free Facebook groups, whether they’re ads, whether they’re webinar driven, it doesn’t matter. There are always things coming our way, and they’re all presented in a way that they sound like this wonderful way for you to move towards wherever you think you might aspire to go.

And in this case, you know, this sounded kind of appealing because I think the general consensus for the people that this woman putting this book off route for, would be like, Hey, I want to have more of a following. Now, the lady in question, like Holly’s relative, she has a book that I think she would
like to get more readers of, you know, a bigger audience with her message. And so she was thinking in terms of, well, hey, I can go piggyback this big big following. But the reality is, you know, if you’ve ever been around anything like that from an observational standpoint, if you’ve ever seen, you know, these
summits that have a hundred participants, if you’ve ever been to a health fair or a trade show, there may be a bunch of people that are, you know, that are attending that are seeing what’s happening.

But if you’ve got 249 other people that are vying for somebody’s attention, it’s really hard to kind of stand out and hold the, the audience’s attention all, or even get it in the first place because, you know, there’s just so much competition. It’s a bit of drinking from the fire hose for the viewer, the reader,
the listener, and it, it’s not, you know, the most efficient way to build a following by any stretch. But, you know, to take that particular offer, which I thought was probably really favorable for the person facilitating the collaboration of the book, if she can actually get buyers who don’t understand the mechanics of how that works or don’t really, you know, see what you know, what the reality of what she, what they’re gonna gain for their investment is you know, it’s gonna
work out for her.

Great if she can get, you know, even a hundred people to pay her, you know, $3,000. I mean, that’s a windfall of money for essentially serving as an editor. But maybe the more important way to view this was what, what Holly and I kind of talked about and what she shared with, with her relative was, so what’s the actual goal here? Do you know what your destination is? Because this is like any trip that somebody wants to take. You know, if you’re going to create a map to where you’re going, you kind of need to know where it is that you’re going, you need to have that destination. Then you reverse engineer a path. You know, just kind of setting out and driving randomly and hoping that you arrive at somewhere awesome is probably not the most efficient or effective route by any stretch.

And in many cases, you get lost. So better to think about, okay, what is the goal here? Is the goal to get more people to read the book? Is it the goal to get more people to buy the book? Is the goal to build a business on the back of the book, whatever that might have been for, for this woman? Then you craft
out a plan and determine what you are willing to invest to execute that plan. In this case, let’s say that she would have said, yeah, hey, I’m in, I’m gonna spend, you know, $3000, $3,500 on this project. Is that the best way to spend that $3,000 to achieve whatever this goal is? Well, until you know what the goal
is, you don’t know. So when you are thinking about, okay, there are all these different things coming my way, you know, I’ve got, let’s say that your goal is to add $50,000 to your business’ revenue in the next 12 months.

Well, there are no shortage of people that will offer you agency services or the, Hey, I’ll get you a hundred new members in your gym in 90 days. And all these different offers that it seems like pop up with great regularity, no shortage of those in our industry. But that’s not the only options available,
right? Like, because those are people offering coaching or a service or some sort of, you know, a course or something. But I mean, you can buy a book, you can execute on things that you already know you can, you know, there are all these different ways to get to the destination that, that you want to get to.
So you need to define what it is that you are trying to achieve. You need to understand, you know, what your capacity is to go and, and move towards this target.

Both like capacity in a, you know, in in a client management fr like from a client management standpoint, do you have the capacity for enough clients to get there at the prices you serve, but then also the capacity that you have to go and, you know, do work to move towards your goals? Like if, if it’s
a networking type path to, to generate clients, do you have the capacity to do that? So really I think of capacity as just space to execute both the client acquisition and the client service and experience components of that growth. So that’s, that’s the first thing we think about. Like, so do you have the
capacity to execute whatever your plan is? The second is, do you have the capability of executing whatever your plan is? And you know, so if you do have the capability of executing the plan that exists, like, okay, I’ve a path that I wanna follow to achieve the goals that that I’ve set out, then do
you know how to execute the plan?

Do you know how to go get clients? Do you know how to generate the leads necessary to do it? Do you know how to follow up with them to close sales? Do you have the right offer? Do you have the marketing tools and, and copy to, to generate that sort of business? Do you you know, do you have
the capability to serve the market that you wanna reach? So you know, there’s capacity, there’s capability, and if you don’t, where can you go find that? And then do you have the cash, right? Like, so in this case, there was a fee to essentially buy a faster route to reach the audience that she wanted to
reach. And, and in many cases that’s, you know, that’s ideally what coaching or agency work is you are investing cash instead of time to get a faster and higher likelihood outcome.

And, you know, so it’s some combination of those three, and I’m gonna talk about those three in a separate podcast. But if you don’t have a plan, then you don’t really know, okay, do, do I think that the offer in front of me do I think what this person is selling can actually help me get there? Because we
don’t know where there is. So when you are choosing between the multitude of offers that, that you are hit with, the first thing that you have to do is decide what your destination is. What is your desired outcome within a certain timeframe. So, and the reason I say that is if you let this stretch out to three
years, five years, whatever else, things change, it becomes too abstract and it’s hard to, to really gain clarity and focus. But if you know, hey, in the next 12 months I want to add that $50,000, then we can basically start to vet things and say, okay, is this the best decision based on my criteria?

Is this the best decision to help me get to where I’m trying to go based on my capacity, capability and the cash I have available? So you know, I kind of talked in a circle about that because I wanted to give you an example of just the, the offer that sounds kind of too good to be true for somebody who may not
be fully aware of how that sort of stuff works. And, you know, as somebody who’s probably got a little more experience with that, I could tell you that for the people buying for that reason, it’s gonna be a real letdown. Now if they’re buying for another reason, like, Hey, I just wanna be in this book with
these other women and maybe build a network, if there’s an opportunity to connect with them, maybe it’s useful, but for the purposes of building a following you know, it’s probably not gonna be a win.

So seeing that kind of offer, but then understanding that that’s one of thousands that, that this woman is gonna see, it’s probably just like the thousands that you’re gonna see. And if you want to build a great business, you’ve gotta be able to vet this stuff, because even if you’re not saying yes, it still takes
time while you investigate things and it still takes attention, and it’s all an opportunity cost. The more you spend thinking about this kind of magic bullet opportunity is time. You’re not spending actually executing towards achieving your goal. So being able to immediately kind of filter things out that, you
know, just are not going to be one of the solutions that help you get from where you are to where you wanna be in fact helps you move faster and more effectively towards where you want to go just by saying no.

And then it also allows you to say yes to the appropriate things that fit your particular circumstances and goals. So again, if you’ve not thought about where you want to be, I, in my mind, that’s where everything starts. Where would you like to be 12 months from today? And then all of your decisions, all
of your actions, all of your choices, the help that you lean into the programs that you offer can align with that and allow you to go faster than frankly, like 95% of the small businesses in our industry or any other industry ever go. So that’s how you vet opportunities.

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

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