Fitness Business School – Planning Your Upcoming Year

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and I want to give you a few tips to plan your upcoming year. So 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.

As I’m recording this, it is kind of the beginning of the window time that I start to plan my upcoming year. We do a big annual planning event in early December for clients and, you know, we open it up a little bit to non-clients if we have a few seats available. And I’m always trying to get the bulk of my planning done before we do that. That way I have most of December to either kind of get infrastructure things in motion and to kind of dial it down as you get closer to Christmas. And then we, we tend to go to Florida pretty much every year after Christmas leading into the new year. So for me, there’s this kind of overarching kind of philosophical time about the upcoming year where I’m thinking about, okay, what went well the previous year? What do I want more of? What do I want to change before I get into the strategy and tactics of things? So I thought I would talk to you a little bit about some things that I’ve noticed with plenty of the clients that I serve that, that I think might be valuable to you and, you know, you are planning for the upcoming 2023 campaign. So the first one
is, man, so much of what you accomplish is more about what you say no to than what you say yes to.

And that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t say yes to an ample number of things. It’s just, I think a lot of times we say yes to a lot of mediocrity, right? We say yes to a, a lot of reactive things and we, you know, and, and we don’t have enough space to, to work on the things that move us forward, the furthest or the fastest. And so if, if you reflect on your previous year, like how much of your time did you spend on just saying yes to a bunch of things that never had much lasting impact versus how much time did you spend on those things where you were creating assets for your business, creating you know, programs or marketing campaigns where you were staff trainings, you were building up somebody else, how much of your time were you de designing strategy? And so, so I
think just understanding that we probably have to say no more, and I’ll get more into planning a little bit later as we go through this cause that’s always a big piece of the puzzle, but just understanding that, you know, it, it’s kind of like the, the world we live in now is very different in many regards from the world
we lived in that I probably, you know, grew up in when we had phones that were connected by a cord to the wall and had the little circular dial and that sort of thing.

And, you know, the fact that we’re we’re kind of tethered to communication at all times with our cell phone, I think hi has made this even more of a problem than it would’ve been in the past. Because just because somebody has the opportunity to reach out to you or ask of you when it’s convenient for them, doesn’t mean it’s convenient for you. So you need to respond when it’s convenient for you or respond in a way that aligns with what your goals are. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t wanna be helpful and you don’t wanna be kind and you don’t wanna be supportive of other people. But, you know, there’s a balancing act and a lot of this is that kind of cliche, put your oxygen mask on first thing that if you wanna be better for everybody else around you, then you probably have to take care of your stuff. So make sure that you’re saying no, or at least not right now, to some of those things that don’t move you forward. So that’s first and foremost. The second, and this is something that I think that, that I try diligently to do, but it’s something that I also have to remind myself of on a continual basis, is I need to think more like a customer or a prospect or a client. And, and I use those interchangeably here, even though they’re not interchangeable, simply because I think they’re plenty of times that I get to play that role for other businesses, right? Like I’m all, I’m a consumer of e everybody from theme parks or hotels to a dentist, to an insurance agent or whatever else. So, you know, anytime I’m on that side of the fence, I need to be paying attention to it. I need to be thinking about, okay, what am I looking for to make a decision? How do I feel like this person’s treating me? What would make this a better consumer experience? And you know, once we do that, we can think about, okay, what does the person that we are trying to serve really want? What is their life like? What would I be thinking if I were in their shoes? What my fears, concerns, expectations, or obligations be? What am I asking of that person? And then how can I make this whole process better or more convenient or easier or more enjoyable? And, and obviously there’s a lot more that goes into it, but I think again, if we’re starting from this 40,000 foot view, there has to be this kind of decision to, to say, look, I am going to be more client and prospect focused. And that doesn’t
mean just, Hey, I’m gonna try to add more bells and whistles for the people that I serve.

It means I’m going to try to understand my business through their lens so I can make my better, my business better for them. And then again, kind of a recalibration thing for me, I talk a lot about our kind of three core units of business that connect, convert, and coach mentality. And you know, if you’re
listening to this and you’re not coaching, but you deliver something else, then it’s kind of connect, convert, deliver. And there have been plenty of business instances and even the substance nutrition business that, that I’m a partner in. You know, that’s a deliver part instead of a coach part. But, you
know, thinking about the business through that lens, you know, I, I think just making sure that, that I’m auditing things. Am I connecting with great prospects, right? Am I connecting with the right people? Am I putting the right foot forward to get them in? Am I starting them out with this, you know, kind of positive first experience from a convert standpoint, am I following up educating and motivating them and demonstrating how I can help? And am I doing it in multiple ways? And honestly, I mean, that’s what this podcast is, right? Like it’s a demonstration thing. I’m, I am giving you feedback I’d probably give you, if you were sitting in front of me. It’s just, it would be more personalized and customized to you.

So it would be very specific and relevant to your unique situation and goals. And, you know, am I coaching people until they pay me to coach ’em so I can bridge that gap from where they are to where they want to be and help them move from being interested to being ready? And then from a coaching or delivery standpoint, am I delivering a dream come true result through an experience the person I’m serving enjoys now? Is there more to it? Sure. But that’s the, the kind of big lens that we go through. And then we start to ask, well, why do we do things the way we do it? you know, what are we currently doing? What
should we be doing? How can we be better at it? And, and really dial those things in, in each of those categories, because I think from, from my perspective, there’s that kind of three unit framework, and then we scale that. So scale comes after, and it’s almost like this you know, this blanket that goes
on top of this because you, you don’t want to jump to scale before you have these, right? So, you know, for me, this is just a way to organize my thinking. So it’s not just this massive to-do list. It, it allows me to kind of categorize things and say, well, what am I doing in this area? How’s it working? And you know what, what’s kind of cool too is for me, just the visual, and I don’t know if this would help you or not, but it does me, is it’s like a relay race, right? Like there’s a handoff at each stage, the connect stage, they do their job, and then they hand the baton to the convert stage, and then the convert stage does its job and then it hands off to the coach stage. And for me, that just simplifies and it helps me make this, this piece where, okay, how do I make each leg of the race, you know, each
piece of it work better, and then how do I make the handoff better? How do I make that transition better? And then, you know, I touched on this earlier, you know, am I doing my planning the way that I need to do it?

I’ve done planning in a variety of different formats in some regards, but then a very common format for a long time. So I’ve used a daily paper planner with a, a way to create a hierarchy of priorities. I guess we’re going into the 20th year, so that doesn’t really change a whole lot. And there are ways that I
probably do it better in ways that I probably drift where, you know, the more specific I am, the better I allocate appropriate amounts of time to each respective task that I can always kind of tighten back up if I drift from that. But then bigger picture planning the way that, you know, I, I’ve shifted over
the years from doing a hundred day sprints or quarterly or 12 week cycles to now six week cycles because I think they’re easier for me to wrap my arms around and understand what can realistically be accomplished and do some things sequentially rather than simultaneously.

So if you’re not planning, I think, man, if you were gonna make one resolution, so to speak, that would be the one. Because if you control your time, everything else gets easier. Everything without exception, everything gets easier. So planning, making sure you’re effective with daily planning, making sure you’re
week like effective with weekly, people ask us very regularly like, Hey, can we see an annual marketing calendar? I’m like, are you planning your day? Because if you’re not planning your day, we probably don’t need to strain 365 of them together and do it that way. And then, and this may sound a little bit callous, but you know, I, I wanna look and say, am I surrounding myself with the right people? Am I surrounding myself with people who are energy takers or energy givers? You know, am I putting myself in a situation where, you know, the people I’m bringing into my world, are they making me happy? Are they causing me stress? Am I putting myself in an environment that’s not the one that I need to be in? And, you know, I’ve been super fortunate. I’ve had the same team pretty much for the past seven-ish years since I started my current business, pat rigsby.com, and well, that, you know, nothing lasts forever, and I don’t have that expectation. I think that it’s a reflection on how seriously I take the bringing on of the right person rather than just the right resume and then finally, you know, making sure that I have the right rhythm of work, and if you wanna call it recovery or rest or vacations or play or whatever else, just that balance of personal and professional, making sure that my schedule is reflective of that. So as I start to plan, I tend to try to plan most of the personal stuff first. And I understand that that’s a, you know, that’s a luxury and that’s something that I really worked strategically to get to over the years. But I do think that the more you try to plan in that way, and the more you actually control your time, the more that becomes a reality. And that doesn’t mean that I do more personal than work, it just means that I’m not just filling in the personal where there are gaps left over. It means that I’m gonna plan family vacations as early in the process as I, as I possibly can do it. I’m
going to look for times that maybe we’re gonna be doing long weekends or since, you know, I coach and Holly is kind of like the, the team mom for Alex’s travel baseball team. We plan a lot of that stuff early. And so I’m always kind of starting with that the same way that I would put somebody’s training session
in the calendar because I feel like, hey, if I can allocate a specific block of time to somebody just because they’re paying me, I can certainly allocate a specific block of time to my family.

And so I think just organizing your thinking on that and how you’re gonna navigate it and what your strategy is with it, I think it’s, it, it is super important. So just some, some, like I said, kind of global views of how I’m starting to get ready for my annual planning. And I take it very seriously because, you know,
I, I think that so much of success is setting yourself up to succeed, not just kind of showing up and hoping things work out. So this is the first step, and then it starts to get a little more systematic and granular as I dig into it. But I need to know kind of the big picture of where I’m trying to go before I try to
craft a roadmap to get there. So hopefully that’s a, some help to you. Hopefully that kind of way of thinking is useful. And hopefully your ride alongside me as we plan to make the upcoming year our best one yet. So talk to you soon.

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