Fitness Business School – Never Go Without a Guide

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in this episode I want to talk with you about why you should never go without a guide. Let’s get to It.

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.

If you’ve listened to any number of these episodes, you probably gathered that I was a college baseball coach for the first leg of my professional life. I, I was a college baseball coach at strength coach taught the university, did a little bit of stuff and sports information. And in, in the admissions department, I did lessons. I ran camps. I, I trained some people on the side. I did a little bit of everything, but really the, you know, my identity, I think at the time I was the youngest college baseball coach in the country from 1995 to 1997. And, you know, you may be listening to this saying, wow, that was a long time ago. I was in diapers or something who knows. Right. But at the time, you know, the, the university probably not in one of their proudest moments, hired me at the rip old age of 23 and I was woefully unprepared.

And didn’t really have any real understanding of how to be a successful head coach. You know, I had had head coaches, I had been an assistant coach for a year. I had spent a summer working in the front office of an in independent professional baseball team and even helping coach there. But you know, being the person charge is very different than being the person taking instructions from the person who’s in charge. And so the first thing that I did was go out and try to seek mentors. I, I was lucky enough that through some mutual connections you know, my best friends had played at Indiana university. I had a, a couple of my local mentors in the, the baseball world who had a good relationship with him. He became a mentor gentleman named Bob Morgan, who was a very successful college baseball coach for, you know, 20 odd years. And I think maybe 18 or 19 at Indiana university. But you know, I, I went to people I, I went to work camps at programs that I felt like were, were really successful and places like Miami, Florida, and or university of Miami in Florida LSU, Notre Dame, Georgia tech.

And I tried to learn from these coaches because I didn’t, you know, I didn’t come up in a program like that where these guys were kind of the, the pinnacle in, in that respective field at the time I, when I wanted to become you know, early on like that first week as a coach, I, I knew that strength and conditioning was gonna play a really big part in what we did. I as a way to differentiate ourselves with the limited resources we had, I called Louis Simmons, who, who actually just passed away here in the past week as I record this and asked him questions about strength. Well, I asked him one question about strength and conditioning, and then he proceeded to talk for the next hour and 20 minutes and, you know, but he was eager to help. And, and, you know, I was very fortunate in that. I found a lot of people who were eager to, to offer me some guidance. And then I tried to compliment that listening to audio books listening to any sort of online like recordings of seminars.

I read a lot of books. You know, I, I remember calling a, a gentleman who is one of the most well he’s pat since passed away, but a gentleman who was one of the most well regarded coaches of any amateur sport ever Gordy Gill, lesbian him spending almost an hour with me on the phone. And you know, so having these mentors at that point, it, it helped me tremendously. And I, and I also recognized probably by my, the end of my second season as a head coach, that the right answer wasn’t gonna to become a clone of any of them. It was to learn from all of them and apply it to my own strengths and my own circumstances, my own situation. And then when I got into business you know, I first started out trying to study a little bit of what was going on and the commercial in this industry, because I didn’t didn’t have an extensive background there. I’d always worked in a university setting and just kind of done a little bit of moonlighting doing training and that sort of thing. But you know, I studied copywriting. I studied direct response marketing because I knew I needed to recruit from my experience as a, as a college coach. So I found mentors in that arena studied a gentleman, Roy Roy Williams started to study Dan Kennedy even found Ryan Lee, who is still a, a, a friend that I am greatly appreciative of his early influence on me and went to, you know, took a, a team to Ryan Lee bootcamp now. So I did recognize very quickly that, you know, maybe I, I was ahead of the game at that point in some areas because the person talking about sales on stage was in the greater New York area. And I had sold more training in the middle of Kentucky in a small town in the past week than he had sold in the past month that he was talking about during his speech.

So I knew I needed to go find mentorship outside of the industry too, and started studying other fields, service professionals, experts in other arenas. I joined a mastermind within my I think it was my second year as a business owner. And it was definitely outta my budget at the time. And I, I was lucky enough to have a, you know, a couple other guys in the group that, that were maybe feeling like it was a, a stretch financially. So we all split, you know, a hotel room. And I, I know I drew the short straw, slept on the floor and, and, and, you know, but I, but I knew that if I wanted to go asked her, if I wanted to increase the speed of my progress and reduce the, the, the bumps in the road, the friction, and cut the stress that it was gonna place on me, I needed to go study other people. Now, it, like I said, it didn’t take me long to get outside of the industry because there weren’t a lot of people doing coaching in the industry at the time. And aside from Ryan Lee, and then my, you know, my friend, Eric, Ruth, who, who taught a lot on the marketing side of it, the other people teaching, I didn’t really align with their approach. And so you know, so I went and found other guides because I knew I wasn’t going to do this as well as I wanted to. If I didn’t have somebody to steer me, I’d learned that in my time as a college coach and you know, and I’ve stuck with that ever since.

And in fact, I’ve been, I’ve had a coach or been in a mastermind pretty much every year, since my second year as a business owner. And so that was what 2005. And, you know, I’ve, I I’ve, I’m sure achieved things that I would’ve never thought to, that I could achieve and, and avoided a lot the pitfalls and obstacles that a lot of people run into because I, I saw that as an investment that was going to be more important to me than any other investment that I could probably make making myself better, because I was going to be able to leverage myself constantly, you know, I mean, getting a, a space that was gonna be 10 or 20% better, wasn’t gonna be as valuable to me as making myself 10 or 20% better. So you know, you, haven’t embraced the idea of leaning on somebody for a guy, you know, as a guide or multiple people as a guide, you know, I, I would encourage you to rethink it. And obviously you, you understand the value of, of that sort of thing, because that’s what you do professionally for other people.

And, you know, it’s not that we’re not fully capable of learning things on our own and cobbling ideas together and sorting through information and all that stuff, but for the same reasons clients come to you it’s probably a, a, a useful exercise for you to, to do the same in the areas that you wanna improve, whether that’s becoming better at your craft, whether that’s becoming better as a business owner you know, or any other area that you seek improvement in, there’s somebody out there who can share some, some insight with you who can who, who can help you avoid some of the obstacles. And, you know, the last thing I’ll remind you of, and I touched on this earlier is that doesn’t mean you have to be them. I would tell you that you probably have to share some values with them, right? Because if, if they approached building a great business in their eyes in a way that it doesn’t align with your values it’s gonna be bad fit. And then you’ve got to feel like, Hey, I can connect with this person. It’s somebody I’m eager to learn from because I’ve, you know, I, I’ve been around a lot of, a lot of really smart people that I just didn’t connect with their way of doing things.

And I’ve met plenty of people who were financially successful, but maybe for lack of a better way of putting it, maybe ethically bankrupt. And, you know, as long as you find those two me, you know, those two things meshing up, then you’ll be able to adapt everything else, right. It doesn’t have to be, Hey, I I’ve seen this training facility over here and I wanna model exactly what they do. No, you, you just need somebody that can help you get to where you want to go and do it in a way that causes you less stress avoids all those, you know, bumps in the road and allows you to get there faster than you would’ve on your own.

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