Fitness Business School – Ideal Business Rules – Ep 1 – Serve Your Ideal Clients

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to kick off a series. And when I say that, I’m not a hundred percent sure how many of these podcasts we’re gonna do in this series, but basically a series to help you create your ideal business. And I’m going to work through this in something of a sequence. And just kind of give you some guardrails. It’s something I’ve been reflecting on a lot lately. As you may have gathered through my emails and posts and stuff just had my 50th birthday and was looking at my business as a whole, the things that I love about it, and it’s really that I’ve been able to craft my own ideal business by helping others build theirs. The, the nice thing about this is you can have your ideal business. So I wanna work through that over the next several episodes. Let’s get to episode number one.

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.

Okay. So, like I said, in the introduction, you can have your ideal business. I know a lot of people suggest that kinda professional success, personal success, or like mutually exclusive things that you just have to grind. And you, you, you have to hustle until you practically retire, right? It, it is this you know, put your nose to the grindstone thing that frankly, you know, there, there’s an element of that in that early stage of your business, right? Like I think all of us have to really push super hard to build the business that we want, but ideally you should be building something that you can truly enjoy owning and operating. That doesn’t mean you’re not gonna have to work. I, I think that this idea of a lifestyle business where you, you kind of are, are not responsible for anything. I think that this isn’t a freedom thing. As much as it’s a flexibility, you can enjoy a lucrative income and a significant amount of personal flexibility will, will still having a meaningful impact in your career while still making a huge difference for the people that you serve. You can do all these things at the same time. You don’t need to make a choice of, Hey, I can either have a good home life or good work life. You can have. ’em Both, that’s what I call an ideal business, but it’s not gonna happen by accident.

So how do I know? Well, you know, I mean, I’ve built dozens of businesses over the past, almost two decades. I’ve built some that I felt like they owned me, that they just consumed, you know, either all of my time being in the moment doing work, or I just couldn’t turn off my brain thinking about them when I stepped away. But over time I kind of developed a, a, a formula or a set of kind of guidelines if you will, that should, you know, be, be of some use. If you want to build a business that you love owning, they’ve helped me. They’ll help you. And frankly, it can work whether you want to have a one-on-one training business, a boutique studio in-home training online, doesn’t really matter. I’ve had clients who’ve built wonderful businesses in each. So I’m gonna run you through probably, I don’t know, probably eight-ish rules guidelines here. And, and in this episode, we’ll, we’ll cover number one, the, the first one, I think you have to serve your ideal client.

Now, sometimes I think people kind of get this turned around. You know, when we open a business, we don’t necessarily have the luxury of serving this really narrow, defined target market. Most of the time, pretty much have to serve anybody willing to pay us, to train them so we can pay the bills. And that’s fine. I the idea here is over time, we get to refine that we come to learn about who we’re best at serving. We get clear about who we really enjoy coaching the most. And, and, you know, if you want to build your ideal business, you really have to hone in and narrow your focus so that you’re spending the majority of your time connecting with and serving those people. Those people you’d define as your ideal clients. So after that initial startup stage, typically what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna find yourself with a percentage of people you’d consider just rockstar clients, your ideal, the people that you really get fulfilled by serving and energized by working with. And you’re still gonna have some of those clients that are kind of just pay the bill clients, right. Well, what we’re trying to do is reverse engineer. How did we get those ones that we love working with? You know, how did you know, what did they want when they came to us? Where did we find them? What market, what marketing message was attractive to them? What marketing channels did we use to reach them?

Well, you know, if you have these people that you are wonderful at serving that you’re fulfilled by, by, by working with a again, that’s all we really have to do, right? We have to be able to reverse engineer where we found them. And a lot of people, man, they, they make this so, so complicated, right? They, they come up with this avatar that has all these kind of fictional characteristics and all these wonderful things that you know, that this person is a, a perfect human being, except for the one problem they have that somehow magically, you are the, the person that solves it. Well, your ideal clients, aren’t that person, but your ideal clients are real people that you get to work with each and every week. Learn as much as you can about them. Spend time with them, connect with them, and then reverse engineer. That process, start to think about like, go back and look at the questionnaire they filled out when they came in, talk to them about how they learned about you, figure out where they live, where they work, what groups they’re part of, what churches they attend. Do they have kids? What are their kids involved in? Now we know, Hey, let’s put our message. That’s attractive to that type of person in those, in, in those places where we find them and we are going to do great. And honestly, if you’ve got an offline business, that is the foundation of working with your ideal client, that’s how you find them. That’s how you build that. Now, if we have an online based business, we probably have to do a little bit more work than that simply because you know, local businesses you know, it, it’s not like your ideal clients are moving every couple of weeks as opposed to online.

You know, we may have to keep tinkering with things because the algorithms change or whatever else, but we can employ a lot of that same consistency, that same messaging and, and, you know, figure out what we want to, to put in front of a person that’s going to attract that right kind of person. Now, the last thing that I, that I’ll say about, you know, that, that kind of targeting is understand that when you are working in a local market, we don’t have to be quite as narrow when we’re being, you know, like when we’re targeting, as far as what we, you know, what we wanna work with, right? Like people with back pain. If we work with athletes just pitchers or something like that, like you may just say, Hey, I wanna work with, with athletes. If we’re in a local market, you can be a little broad because it’s already narrowed by geography by convenience.

Now, if we go online, we probably have to go a little bit more narrowed so we can be more specific in attracting the person we want to attract. You could say, Hey, I just work with hitters in baseball, or I just work with goalies and soccer or you know, I work with like Holly build a great business around busy moms of school, age kids who wanted to work out at home and get their pre-baby body back. Right. Kind of just get back into self-care you can narrow very specifically, but the, the analogy I, I, I always kind of use, or maybe the ex the better way to put it would be like the example you know, a long time ago, I had the privilege of working with a client who built a really robust, successful business, serving female hockey players. Now, if I wanted to build a local business around female hockey athletes, I, I couldn’t do it in Louisville, Kentucky. There just isn’t enough of that population here, right? There’s just not enough in this market. It’s not like a hot bed for, for hockey. Now, could I do that about, you know, for female soccer player? Sure. It, it, that is a really thriving market. You know, a, a lot of wonderful female athletes in that, in volleyball, in softball, and so many sports here, but not in hockey. And if I wanted to build this in hockey, I would either need to be in a market where there was a, a much denser population of people that I potentially could serve, or I would have to have an online component, or maybe even go entirely online to reach that population.

So that’s kind of what I’m getting at when we’re talking about narrowing your market, because remember convenience alone, narrows your market odds are, if you are 3, 4, 5 hours away from somebody they’re not gonna be able to come see you on a consistent basis. So the narrowing can be done for you in who you wanna serve. So I’ll sum this up and recap. The first rule of building your ideal business is to serve your ideal clients. People that you can really deliver a great result to people you enjoy working with and are energized by serving and people that you can connect with and market to on a consistent basis.

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