Fitness Business School – The 4 Stages of Business – 02 – Growth

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, we’re gonna be covering part two of the four part series about the stages of business, the four stages of business that I think all of us aspire to ascend through when we’re building our ideal business. 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 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.

So today I wanna talk with you about what I call stage two, the grow stage. Now, if you’ve graduated the launch stage and you, you started to have a little bit of
traction, you probably feel like, Hey, my business has gotten to a point where it is paying the bills and maybe even a little bit of profit.
I’m not scrambling feeling like I’m gonna overdraft, uh, every month, and I’m not kinda holding off, paying one thing because I need money to come in from another. So you’re past that kind of stress and anxiety as long as you kind of keep your foot on the gas, right? Like, as long as you are
the one doing everything, keeping all the balls in the air, you may have even gotten a little bit of help. Maybe you’ve hired a part-time coach to cover a few hours or maybe to, come in and train some additional one-on-one clients if that’s your model, because you have more demand that’s applied during some peak hours. Maybe you’ve got a couple part-time coaches, maybe you even have, a little bit of part-time admin help. Maybe a client started to help you out, or perhaps, you don’t have any of the part-time stuff and you just got a full-time person helping you.

So there’s one person kind of tagging along for the ride. But the reality is, these, these folks are probably just taking the overflow, right? Like, they’re just help. They’re, not really responsible for any area in the business. They’re not, people that you are necessarily like delegating real roles to. It’s more or less just, Hey, there’s some people I can’t train. Can you train ’em? There’s some sessions I can’t train. Do you want to train ’em and they’re just there to offload
some stuff. So, because there’s just not any more of you to go around and and it’s tight. You feel like you’re a, a lot of times kinda stuck in that no man’s land where it’s like, well, I would like to make more, but I’ve gotta pay this person enough to keep ’em here.

And, and honestly, if I were to kind of look at not just small businesses in our industry, but small businesses in general, a lot of small businesses kind of settle in right here. In fact, if I think about my dad’s business, I’ve referenced that in a couple episodes and some emails, he’s owned an auto repair business for 38 years. It’s kind of just there now as almost like a hobby, something for him to do where he takes on a couple jobs each week and ends out it, it’s as much social
and mental stimulation as it is, something to drive profits. But when, during the, the 25 years that it, or 30 years that it really was in full operations, it, it probably settled in, in this stage. It was one of those things where, uh, money could cause a lot of stress. And if you have a
couple bad months, things start to get tight. Yeah, maybe you’ve got a little bit of money put away, but it’s not like you could go on sabbatical for a year and just everything would be good client generation is still kind of hit and miss. Maybe you found a couple things at work when you have time to
do ’em or when you’re consistent or maybe you ride the wave of when challenges are really hot or when even if you’ve been around for a little bit when Groupon or living social was big. And so, you kind of played that hot hand for a little bit, but you personally can’t take your foot off the gas because everything runs through you. And that’s tough, right? Like, because I, if you slow down everything else, uh, really is I mean, it all is on your shoulders. You’re the one kind of with all the balls in the air. And so, well, in some ways it’s successful because obviously with the failure rate of small businesses, business is hard.

So if you’re able to keep something a around for five, 10, I referenced my dad’s business like 38 years, even at that stage, there’s something to be proud of, but it’s also pretty exhausting, there’s not a whole lot of opportunity for vacations or days off. You probably don’t have the, the flexibility, especially in our industry where we often are training during the hours that kind of bookend when people’s typical work schedule is, if you’ve got a family, you
probably don’t get to be as present as you’d like for some things. And you probably feel like you’re a little bit on call because you don’t wanna, you
know, do anything. Or a client you feel like, okay, these clients, if they need me, I have to be there because I can’t afford to lose clients. Now, I, if you are, like, my dad was, he ended out, he bought his, he owned his building, which in small towns, that seems like it’s a more achievable thing because like, the cost of the space wasn’t gonna be any more than, than rent was or something like that. Maybe you’ve done a good job and you’ve put away some
money or something like that. So maybe, you do have some security at this stage and you could certainly create a, a career about this, and there’s some perks to it, right?

Like, there are definitely some perks to being able to stay at stage two and, you are kind of running your own race. You get to be your own boss. If you’re, if you’re decent with, with your finances, you can probably do a lot of the things that somebody would do in a, a stable job except maybe not take the, the vacations and that sort of stuff. But, it’s still probably not what a lot of us dreamed about when we said, okay, I want to own my own business. I wanna build something
that I’m really, really excited about owning. Now, again, a couple things to think about at this stage. Typical business revenue is like 10 to $20,000, a month. And, and again, this, this can fluctuate depending on what, where you’re at. If you’re in LA or Manhattan, those numbers are probably higher,
because all the costs are gonna be higher, right?

So, and if you’re a solo printer or an online business, it’s probably five to 10,000 a month. And then at this stage, the challenges that tend to, come up very continually with people, the ones I hear the most are needing some systems that predictably can get clients, those things that attract and convert, new business, the challenges of beginning to grow a team and setting them up to succeed. Because usually the first couple hires a lot of people make at this stage,
they’re hiring out of desperation. Like, Hey, I need some help. So I hire somebody, but I don’t really train ’em very well, and so they struggle, and then I just throw my hands up in the air and take it back on myself, and then I start to doubt my ability to bring employees on that I’m the only one who can do
things.

And so, that’s a challenge to, to actually learn how to grow a team and set them up to succeed. And then, starting to actually be proactive with taking control of your time and doing annual planning and what we, we do, whether you’re doing like that, that intermittent planning, like we coach people to do six week cycles, some people may say 90 day cycles or whatever, but, planning and then daily planning. And so being very proactive with your time, so you get to
maybe get more value for what you are, uh, what you’re investing from a a time standpoint. Now, the things that we talked about at this stage that, that we want to implement. So again, like I said in the first episode of this series, this is what we would do with a client. This is, stuff that I would recommend,
even if you’re not a client from things to think about. If you want to ascend beyond the growth stage, you probably need two to three offers. If
you’re generating leads, if, if you just have one offer, a lot of times people can become numb to that. So you gotta have a couple different ways that you can cycle through things. A couple different ways to fit people in. You probably need to have two to three of those demonstrations slash conversion
systems where you can layer them, because not everybody is going to respond to the same thing. Not everybody, has the same communication style, same preferences. So this is a way to, to make more progress moving that relationship forward. Here, instead of having like the three lead generation
systems like we had to get to the growth stage, we probably need to, to grow this to four to five lead generation systems.

And at least one of those needs to be paid traffic paste. Now that could be Facebook ads, it could be Google Ads, it could be some sort of local paid traffic, but something where you can be very specific in marketing to a targeted audience and know you got some confidence in reaching them.
Like I said, for us, we would coach people to operate on six week cycles and start to do more specific planning. We would in, like, we would install what I call tier one operating systems. So some of the basic systems that you would need people to run. So when I think of tier one stuff, it, it’s more like,
okay, whatever role I’m going to be able to hand off to somebody else, the systems they would need to execute that, right? So it’s not necessarily, Hey, I’ve got my entire business systemized. You’re just kind of systemizing the things that would be on somebody else’s plate. So you’re kind of
being, deliberate about how you do it and doing just a handful of things at a time. And then at this stage, you should be adding one to two team members. You should be getting comfortable handing a little bit of stuff off because it’s the only way that you’re gonna be able to ascend to that next stage. So
those are the things we wanna have in place, and if we do, then we can move to that third stage, what I call optimize and systemize. So I’ll be back in the next episode with that. But do me a favor. If you feel like you’re at the growth stage, shoot me an email at [email protected] with the subject line Grow.
I think it’ll help me help you even more.

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