Fitness Business School – Remodeling Your Model

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to talk with you about remodeling your model. 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 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 with most things, you know, the fitness industry has a lot of kind of follow the leader, right? When I was just getting started in the fitness industry, the curves was a very popular business. And so all of a sudden there are all these small boutique women’s only facilities that each of them had their own kind of little different twist or turn or variation. And then the next step in the process was, you know, anytime Fitness came into existence.

And next thing you know, there are a bunch of 24 hour gyms, and then it became boot camps, and there were all these variations of bootcamps. And there are currently, you know, so many people doing large group training in our industry that it, it’s become a, again, kind of this cannibalization landscape where
every new one that comes into the market, whether it’s franchised or you know, an independently owned one, it’s something that’s just kind of pulling away from an already saturated market. So it makes these incremental, kind of dense in everybody else’s business. And even if it’s not good,
that whole kind of shiny object nature of human beings, they, a few of them leave. In fact, I had a really smart business owner years ago that owned like 180 tanning salons. And since they’ve gotten into fitness and bunch of stuff, he told me that every time somebody just decided they were
gonna open up a little mom and shop Ting salon, even if it was in like the back of their convenience store, it’s not like that they weren’t ultimately gonna win out over that person, but there were, you know, they’d be 10 of that owners, friends and family that would leave their business to go to this other business.

And so it always just kind of chipped away and it made the, the landscape a little bit more daunting because the typical consumer isn’t always able to distinguish between the nuances of businesses, right? They don’t know the difference in many cases between like, let’s just use group training fitness businesses as an example. They don’t know the difference between F 45 and Burn Bootcamp and Fit Body Bootcamp and maybe even Orange Theory, right? Like, they don’t know the differences between those. And so, it comes down to which one’s closer to me, which ones to my friends go to, which one’s cheaper? And so, so one of the things that, that I kind of encourage people to look at is there something different about your model? Is there something different that makes you
distinguishable from the start? Do you have, you know, do you have a business model that you know consumers immediately know?

It’s a little bit different in the, the franchising world. I would tell you that, like I think, you know, Rick Mayo with Alloy has done a pretty cool job of making it feel different than most of the other franchised options out there. And having spent a lot of time in the franchising world, you know, I don’t know, that’s always easy because it’s not the safe play because everybody else is doing one thing, so you’re doing something different. But I think that they’ve figured out how to make a training experience feel more personal. They’ve pursued a little bit older demographic, you know, that 40 plus-ish demographic, and frankly, I don’t know the, the ins and outs of Alloy, but you know, that market would be like, if I were opening a local training business, that would be the market I would want to go after.

So I think that doing that sort of thing works. So how do you do this if you are a, an independent operator, if you have your own business, your own brand? Well, there, there are a couple easy ways to go. The first would be small group training is a, a really viable option because a lot of people’s large group
training ends up being small group training anyway. They don’t fill up, you know, yeah, they feel like, Hey, I’ve priced this, that if I get 30 people in the room, you know, I’m gonna make a lot of money, but they get six. So maybe you build your business around getting six and, you know, these small group
training businesses, they don’t necessarily need as big a footprint. Or you can run multiple sessions simultaneously if you have a little bit bigger footprint and can do it, but you can price in a little bit more premium way.

And what’s great is for the person who doesn’t necessarily want to be in a room full of 30 people, this is an appealing option that is less expensive per month, per session, whatever, than one-on-one training and still allows people to feel like they’re getting a personalized experience. I think that it is,
like, again, I don’t know that I’m the best barometer of this, but if I were gonna open up a training business locally, small group training would probably be my first choice. And it is easily the one that I think has the, the clearest path to delineating yourself from the competition. And I think what’s great
about it is you can kind of layer on something where maybe all of your marketing efforts, all of your social proof, everything else, maybe you are using that kind of 40 and over demographic as to who you’re marketing to, and it just narrows what you’re doing.

Instead of feeling like you’re casting such a big net, you get to talk about how you’re different. You get to speak to a specific type of person. They’re not super hard to find as far as what, whether buying lists or using Facebook ads or even doing neighborhood marketing or, you know, like what the real estate world
might call target farming. And, you know, just going and spending time marketing in neighborhoods and becoming a preeminent solution in those areas. So I think small group training would be a really interesting way if you’re looking for a way to update your model. I’ll tell you the other one that I think has plenty of potential that a lot of people don’t do. And you could do this in addition to something you’re doing or even reinvent what you’re doing and, and dive into it.

And it’s one-on-one in home training. I mean, we definitely live in a world where people like things delivered to them. They like convenience. There are ways to create some leverage and do things in certain neighborhoods at certain days or times because I mean, we see that with landscapers even, right? They
mow all the lawns in a particular neighborhood on a Tuesday. Well, you could certainly do things in that sort of fashion if you chose, you could use neighborhoods and social proof of people who live in those neighborhoods. That was something that we did periodically, and I thought it, it
was just such a powerful marketing tactic was, you know, using somebody’s neighbor as a case study when marketing to the remainder of that neighborhood. And, you know, that sort of thing I think works really well. And what’s nice about it, it is incredibly low overhead, right?

Like, we don’t need to sign a lease. We don’t need to have a whole lot of expensive equipment. You’re delivering stuff to people’s door, which certainly is in line with what people are gravitating to today. So if you are looking for a way to maybe update your model, this is pretty good. This is it. So there are plenty of other things you can do, but I just want to throw those two out there as a start to get your wheels turning and see how maybe you can find a way to stand out from the crowd and not blend in. With the vast array of franchise, large group training businesses and independent large group training businesses, it pretty much permeate every market.

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

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

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Again, an email to [email protected] with diagnostic in the subject line will get you scheduled and take you through this evaluation to help you build the business you want.