Fitness Business School – Scale with Systems

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk with you about how implementing systems are critical if you want to free up your time and scale your business. 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 impact and improve their lifestyle. Be sure to listen til the end of this episode, because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

When I talk to business owners, one of the most common words, a buzzword that I regularly hear is systems, right? They say, “I need to implement systems. I need to put systems into my business. I need to document systems.” But in truth, they don’t really have a clear handle on what that means or what that looks like almost without exception. It just is this basically way for them to compartmentalize this idea of, “Hey, things are kind of chaotic. I don’t feel like I can hand something off. I’m stuck doing tasks that are below what I feel like my pay grade should be, or I’m spending too much time on work. And I don’t have any way to hand things off in any predictable fashion.” And I get it, trust me. I’ve been somebody who has really kind of gravitated to a system like approach from day one in business. In fact, even before business.

When I was a college baseball coach, I had to put together a really extensive playbook. In fact, here’s a copy of it. 136 pages of documented basically how we did everything from the way that we warmed up players, to the way that we condition, to how we ran the basis. And the rationale was simple. Every year, we’d have a new kind of set of players coming in and a set of players graduating. But more importantly than that, because I coached at a small college where my assisting coaching budget was $2,000 total. Basically I had continual turnover for assistant coaches. I’d have people that, you know, came in, were finishing a degree. People might have been coaching in high school and just wanted to kind of get their feet wet and build out their resume and get into the college game. So I needed a uniform way to get people involved and really not have to reinvent the wheel every year. And that was where my systematic approach kind of came from.

And so when I started my first training business, we had an operations manual from day one. We had a way of doing things from day one. The way that we sold training, the way that we designed programs, the way that we answered the phone or up-skilled client or upsold clients into nutritional supplements or additional sessions or anything like that. There was a very systematic approach to this. And I think what I came to recognize very quickly was this was uncommon. But the good news for you is, you already have a system of doing things. You just probably don’t know it. The nice thing is a system is basically just kind of a habit that we’re trying to instill in somebody that this becomes their way of operating. And so you’ve got a way that you operate now. You’ve got a best way that you answer the phone or a best practice for how you sell or even to make it kind of even more simplistic, a best way that you come in and open up for the day, you know, unlock the door, turn off the alarm, turn on the lights, or even take out the trash.

There’s what we call best practices for everything. But odds are, you’ve never documented it. And so you’ve never put it in some kind of clean package to hand off to somebody else. So when you feel like, “Hey, I need to hire somebody.” And let’s face it. We’ve all hired with this mentality of desperation, right? Like, “Hey, I’m overwhelmed or somebody quit. And I don’t wanna have to pick up all their work. So I’ve gotta hire somebody.” And so we throw some money at the situation. We get somebody in and breathe a sigh of relief. But we don’t set that person up to succeed. We don’t give them the tools, the coaching, we don’t show them what being great at this job we’re asking them to do looks like, and then we wonder why they struggle. We say, “Man, I can’t hire people. This is always gonna be a small operation. I can’t delegate to anybody else. It’s always gonna be me that has to do everything.” It’s not true. It’s not true at all. Basically what you need to do as a business owner is define what being good in the job or in the task that you’re gonna ask somebody else to do looks like. They need to know what success looks like in this situation. And then we’re gonna document how we do that thing, right? How we would do that job, how we would design a program, how we would assess a client, how we would answer the phone. We’re gonna document it. And then we’re gonna hand them this documentation. We’re gonna coach them to do it. We’re gonna demonstrate us doing it. And if we do that, they’re gonna figure it out, right? They’re gonna know how to do this. And we do this all the time with clients, right? We give them a warm up and eventually they know how to do the warm-up. We take them through and cue them through exercises. They know how to do the exercises. We do this with ourselves. Everything operates this way. But as business owners, we make it much harder than it needs to be.

We had a mastermind meeting just a couple of weeks ago. One of our mastermind members came in. He had built his own house. Now he had somebody else do the electric and plumbing, but basically everything else he did himself. He learned how to do it on YouTube, everything. He didn’t have somebody come in and coach him up. He had a system to follow where somebody said, “Do A, B, C, and D.” And they demonstrated it being done. And he was able to pick up on that and build a house. If he can do that, I know you can teach somebody to answer the phone, or take out the trash or set up a training session in a way that frees you up, that takes some of the work off your plate and allows you to delegate and elevate, to earning more and working less. So if you don’t have systems in your business, understand, it’s a choice. You have the knowledge in your head. You’re doing things that have worked. And really all we’re trying to do is download that knowledge and impart it on somebody else. If you do that, you’re gonna find your ability to grow into being a business owner instead of just being self-employed is gonna multiply. So make sure that you think about, “Okay, how do I do this?” You document it.

There are a number of ways to document it. I showed you a typed out playbook that I had. I told you about a YouTube video that my client watched to build a house. I mean, there are plenty of ways to document. And then we hand it to somebody and we coach them on it. Just like we’d coach a client on a training program. We don’t just hand them a training program and say, “Good luck.” We coach them to execute it. We course correct along the way. We update it to make sure that they’re on track to reach their goals. We do that same thing for our team. And you’re gonna see your business thrive. You’re gonna see your best role start to materialize, and you’re gonna see your income increase.

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