Fitness Business School – Seasonality and Sprints

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I wanna talk with you about seasonality and sprint. 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.

One thing that we’ve taken to doing over the last few years is kind of changing the way that we plan and organize our time. A lot of people gravitate to doing things on a quarterly calendar. A gentleman that I’m friends with, Todd Herman, created this wonderful program called the 90 Day Year that I think is amazing. But for me, I tend to do best if I think of things in terms of six week cycles. And the reason that works for me is basically we’ve got eight, six week cycles during the course of a year.

And in my case, I tend to probably operate more on like seven, six week cycles. So there’s like a little bit of a buffer in between them, right? So there’s like a transition week between those cycles. And my logic is that it’s just how my life operates, how the people that I’m around the bus, the business owners, my
family, their lives tend to operate a little bit more that way than just slicing the year into four pieces. And the beauty of it for me is it’s far easier for me to be a realist in projecting what I can accomplish in four weeks, what’ll be relevant in six weeks, what my schedule looks like in less than two months. And it is for
me to think way farther ahead and, and I tell you, like thinking two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, in that six week cycle, not everything has a six week deadline, right?

Like some are things like, what am I doing in the next two weeks? What am I doing in the next three weeks, four weeks? But we can see things far more clearly the closer they come. I mean, that’s just the nature of life, right? Like if somebody is walking towards you, it’s easier to make out the details the closer
they get. So that’s how we tend to operate. And we’ve put this in our coaching programs. I mean, we give people planners to use. We run six weeks cycle planning sessions where we guide them through how to plan the next six weeks. And what’s great is even if somebody’s been off track for a little bit, there’s
always a new six week cycle coming up that’s not too far down the road road that they can kind of get back on track and get a reset.

So the six week cycles I think have been absolutely wonderful for me, for my business, and for the people around me. Now, the thing that that I kind of touched on when I introduced this episode is there’s the six week cycles, and then there’s what I call a sprint. So during the course of the year, there are probably two
windows of time that I would consider myself in like sprint mode, the season of life that I’m in when school starts back for the boys. And as I record this, I mean, Tyler’s entering his senior year in college. Alex just started seventh grade. And so about the time they’re starting back with school or the typical
school year starts, I start a six week cycle. And realistically they’re probably gonna be like two in a row that I would consider sprints, where it is a really strong focus on locking in, having a consistent routine, growing the business, driving people into programs, because I know that’s also on the mind of the people
we serve.

And I think that it’s always important for us to be in tune with that. I mean, you can sell whatever you want to people, but if they’re not in buying mode, it doesn’t matter. I mean, selling Christmas decorations in May is probably not a great way to run a business. And if you can sync up with the behavior of the
market that you have and your behaviors line up accordingly, then there’s far more opportunity for you. So we, we get into sprint mode. For us school typically starts in August. I know some people get into to school and it starts in September. Somewhere in August is the first of usually what amounts to a couple
six week sprints in a row where it is, things are done with more urgency, there’s more of a strong push, and there’s probably an a more kind of systematic routine of getting down, getting better at something, getting things done with consistency.

Now, the opposite of that, there are still six week cycles going on in my business during the middle of the summer, during that window between Thanksgiving, new Year’s. But those cycles look different. I’m adapting to that season of life where there’s not a, the routine is less consistent. The daily schedule is more
in flux. And I do that because that’s the way that life works for me and those people that I’m closest to. It’s not, I’m not a big believer in planning something that just doesn’t line up with any sort of actual path to achievement. I think that you can write stuff out and it’s like people who write goals and say, you know
what? We’re going to add a million dollars to our top line revenue this year, but their business did $15,000 last year. Like I’m a big believer in realistic goals that you can see a path to attainment that is clear as long as you’re willing to go the distance on the path.

And so the cycles line up with the way that I know that I’m gonna operate. I know that during the summer we’re gonna have more baseball and vacations and a different sort of schedule during that Thanksgiving, Christmas kind of break time. We’re gonna have different schedules with holidays and travel and
spending time with family members and that sort of stuff. And so we adapt accordingly. And it doesn’t mean you don’t work, it doesn’t, but it also means that you plan for the environment you’re gonna be in and you try to spend your time maybe improving stuff. You’re in sprint mode for revenue production, new
client acquisition in maybe September and October. Then maybe during the that June, July, August window, that’s when we’re tightening things up and working on system installation. And that’s how we try to approach things. We work on the things during the times that make the most sense.

I know that when I travel, I tend to do a lot more creative writing. So I’ll write things like promotional copy for programs and that sort of thing, ’cause it syncs with the way that I operate. So I wanted to roll this out because really because of a couple things. Number one, just giving you a different way to think about
planning, just not necessarily thinking, Hey, I’ve gotta do things quarterly. Even if it’s hard to forecast that far down the line and you don’t get a handle on it, there’s no reason to keep kind of beating your head against the wall if it doesn’t work for you. I know it just didn’t work for me at the level that I wanted to,
and this works so much better. And then the second is, if you would like help in crafting out what your next six week plan would look like, I’m gonna take a few people who are not currently clients and help them go through our planning process and sketch out an appropriate six week plan for them.

So just shoot me an email at [email protected] with plan and the subject line, and we’ll set up a time where we can work on a plan together.

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.