Fitness Business School – Start with the End in Mind

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I wanna talk with you about starting with the end in mind. 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 till the end of this episode because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

When I get stuck about something I want to do with a program or some changes that I wanna make, because I’ve talked about this in other episodes, if we’re not
evolving, then we’re losing ground. We’re ultimately gonna back ourselves into a struggle. So, you know, I’m continually trying to figure out ways to evolve and improve the business that I have, the programs that we offer.

And one of the things that I do that I know has helped so many clients that I’ve had the privilege of working with is to think about the end result that somebody wants, that that dream come true result delivered through an experience somebody enjoys. And that’s, that’s usually not the way that people put together programs. That’s usually not the way that people do it. So I want to talk to you about how I approach this and see I’ll give you an example of how, how I recently did that, and then we’ll kind of walk through a quick way to install the same sort of thinking into what you’re doing. So recently we knew we wanted to reopen a program that helped people grow their business in a relatively short timeframe. So we had done something like this pre pandemic and so we just basically reintroduced what we call the business growth sprint.

And the dream come true result that, that I looked at from that first moment was, okay, people wanted to have a surge in revenue, whether it is monthly recurring revenue or cash collected depending on their business model, everybody’s not the same because we don’t really have a one size fits all approach. So when we would look at this yeah, they wanted more money, but it’s not just that they want something that’s not this kind of one shot deal. They want to have something that is proven to be able to continue to produce for them. They want to be able to solve that problem for their business in the way that maybe they believe they’ve solved other pieces of their business. Like, you know, okay, we’ve got a consistent approach to how we run training sessions or something like that.

Well, they wanted a system or a plan to not only create this new surge in revenue that might create some breathing room for them, or allow them to add some staff or just give them some confidence that, hey, I’m on the right track. But also the confidence and predictability of, Hey, I’ve got
this thing that works and now I just have to keep executing the thing. And fine tuning it over time is the circumstances around me evolve. But those were the things that were the dream come true result. But then I start to look and say, well, what’s holding them back? What’s preventing them from doing this? You know, why aren’t they there right now? And there are a number of things that go into it, right? There’s the capacity to do it.

Most of the people that, that I work with are already pretty busy. You know, they’ve already got a business that maybe takes more time than it should to operate because it’s not systematic. They’re spread out. They’re wearing a lot of different hats. So they don’t have a ton of time to not only learn new things, but then to, to go and build things, building assets, building systems, that sort of stuff. So we had to figure out a way to address that time factor. We had to figure
out, okay, how do we meet these people where they are? Because so many programs that are out there, they almost act as if, hey, you know what? This is your full-time job. Don’t actually worry about fulfilling the obligations you’ve already committed to. This is your only obligation. And there, that’s one of the
reasons they don’t work.

Even some of the things that somebody might be teaching may be really sound, but if somebody can’t execute, it doesn’t matter. So there was that piece of it, and then there was the, that, that kind of piece of it where it’s like puzzle pieces that don’t fit together. You know, there, there’s not really a one size fits
all approach if you’re talking about independent business owners. That’s why franchising as a franchisor in many ways, it’s easier. Basically, it’s, Hey, here’s the, the set of plays that we run, and you are now contractually obligated to run those. That’s the only option, right? So for the franchisor, there’s this
consistency. There’s just figuring out one proof of concept, making sure it works, and then everybody at house two kind of wedge themselves into that one kind of approach. Well, what we have done, working with a variety of different business owners, right?

Group training, business owners, one-on-one, business owners, studio, online, you name it. You know, we’ve gotta figure out how to adapt to that individual person, both the client that they want the client they wanna serve, the resources they have, the capacity they have, and in many cases their current skillset and confidence level. And that doesn’t even begin to talk about like their budget or anything like that, because I think some of those things are pretty fluid.
They change over time. But, so if we’re gonna meet this person where they are to get them this dream come true result, there are all these considerations we had to address. So we said, okay, we are going to create the marketing assets for people. We’re gonna interview them, we’re gonna help them develop their
marketing message who they are, who they help, their why, every piece of it.

So it can kind of be, disseminated through all the different marketing avenues they have, whether it’s sales pages or videos or long form emails or short social posts or whatever. And so we help extract that message and shape that for them. We’d create sales pages for them. We’d even build
them out in marketing software that’s in the program, because these were all points of friction. These were all hey, not only do people know what to do, they need to have the things kind of delivered to them to execute. And you may be thinking, well, yeah, that’s a lot or whatever, but it’s a little bit like what a gym does, right? Like somebody designs a program for you. If you’ve got a good training business, the program’s designed for you, the equipment is provided
to execute the program.

It’s not like, Hey, we’re giving you this program, you can come to our gym, but you have to bring your own equipment. And so we basically thought of it that way, like, how do we lower the friction to make it easy for somebody to, to do this? And then another common thing that
we hear from people a lot is overwhelm. So we have monthly what we consider kind of a win the week where people have a very limited number of action items that we work with them to design that they can realistically execute in the time they have with the resources they have. And we just do it week
after week and we track it and we hold them accountable to doing it because we know that over time, those three action items compound. And before you know it, they’ve taken 150 steps over the course of the year to improve their business to grow.

And this becomes a new behavior for them, right? It’s simple behavior change. So when I looked at this, it’s very much the way that we would train, train a client in a private or semiprivate setting. It’s not large group training where everybody kind of adapts to the same program. It is very much small group, or I mean, it’s very much semi-private or one-on-one esque, but we had to know, okay, what’s the desired outcome? What’s the dream come true result? So we start there, then
we look at the person that we’re, we’re working with, and we try to assess that person, and then we create a roadmap. We reverse engineer the plan, and then we coach somebody and we course correct along the way. So all of that sounds pretty simple, right? That’s how we approach all of the
things that we do.

We start at the end and then we try to figure out like, what, what could prevent the people that are gonna be in this program from getting to where they’re trying to go? And that’s kind of my segue to talk about how you can put this into action for yourself. Well, when people come to you, there are some
unsaid things and there’s some said things that they want, right? And notice I said I led with the, hey, they can add $4,000 a month in recurring revenue or 20,000 in cash collected. I don’t know if I gave the denomination when I started the episode, but that’s basically the numbers we guarantee for somebody. Well, the, the guaranteed amount is kind of irrelevant, right? It doesn’t probably matter if it’s 3,500 or 5,000 or whatever. If we can predictably get somebody to have
that kind of growth, and we’re doing it in a systematic way, then reaching certain benchmarks becomes almost inevitable.

So in your case, those are obvious things, right? Somebody’s gonna tell you they want weight loss, or somebody’s gonna tell you they want some sort of specific performance gain or something like that. But then what are the other things that, that they actually want that maybe aren’t great at articulating or
that you found that people really wanted over time that maybe they weren’t even aware of at this stage of their journey? And that’s where I talked about, well, they also want this predictable system that keeps yielding results for them in a way that that fits them. I don’t know that that’s what
most people come to this program and ask me for when I do calls to discuss people joining the Sprint program. But that’s what a lot of people want. And that’s one of the most valuable things that they find as soon as they get in it, is that they’re building a system around them.

And in your case, that may be this consistent habit of self self-care, this consistent investment in themselves, this sense of accomplishment that they get every day, things that are inherent in your program. But we probably need to articulate better, and we probably need to make
sure that that box is if you think these are the important things for somebody, then yeah, there’s a weight loss thing. But weight loss can be achieved in any number of ways, right? Performance gains can be achieved in any number of ways. So what about this program? Do you also want to be true?
What about this? Do you want somebody to feel like is gonna be this lasting kind of benefit? And is it that sense of accomplishment? Is it this kind of balanced way to regularly move towards their goals and have this new habit that they, that they can seamlessly fit into their life and love being part of their life?

Well, then we have to build it that way. And those two things are not necessarily always paired together. Like in the business world, the quickest way for me to go get somebody a bunch of revenue, if I didn’t care about the long-term issues associated with it, would be to do a big paid in full campaign and
discount things like crazy. So it’s just this no-brainer offer that leaves a lot of scorched earth behind because there’s now there’s no recurring revenue and we got a bunch of people paying a fraction of what the service is worth and all that stuff. So there’s that side on the business end of things on the training side. Well, I mean, man, we can do some incredibly awful deprivation based diet that somebody has no chance of sticking too long, long term, both from a tolerance standpoint and from an actual health standpoint.

We can ask somebody to have some extreme approach to fitness that would, would make even the crazy stuff that might have happened on the Biggest Loser Sea tame. And you know, and we know that that’s not the path that we want to go to get the outcome that we want. So what do we actually want as
the result? Who are the people that we serve? And how do we make this a, a, a straightforward plan to get them to where they want to go, being a realist about who they are? How do we solve their problems? And I would tell you a couple things that I see that are, are low hanging fruit for so many
fitness businesses. One is to do kind of what we are doing in our coaching program is to provide more accountability between the big events. In your case, the big events may be training sessions.

In our case it may be one-on-one calls or designing certain elements of things that they’re gonna execute or that sort of thing. So what kind of accountability to keep people on track can you provide that is scalable? And number two is being adaptable to meeting people where they are
instead thinking that everybody is exactly the same and the exact same approach is gonna work for each and every person that walks through your door. To me, those are tremendous opportunities that keep you from becoming a complete commodity, which make no mistake, I am 100% convinced that the
group training landscape is on the path to being a commodity. Because it’s a race to who can provide a large group service the cheapest. And there are so many ways that people can probably still be profitable and cut costs over what’s happening at Orange Theory or F 45 or whatever, just with
the choice of real estate, with the use of some of the TV coaching, the way that an F45 may approach things.

There, there are all sorts of ways that we can shave off some of the, the overhead to make, make it easier for somebody to sell this stuff at 49 or $69 a month. And if you don’t wanna be caught up in that race to the bottom, then you have to think about how you can do things in a way that make you
different than all the rest. And I think shifting away from saying, you know what, we host workouts, what can we tack onto the workouts to make them more valuable? Hey, let’s give somebody nutrition software. Hey, let’s give somebody a T-shirt and instead think of it from the end, like, what’s the person
want? And then maybe what will the person want that we can anticipate that they don’t know because they’re not an expert in this, but we are. And we build from there.

We start at the end, we work backwards. And if we take this approach, man, you want to talk about building something that people love and building something that people kind of have tunnel vision with because it’s so different than everything else. This is the way. So if you want to build a better business, my recommendation to you is start at the end and work your way back.

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

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