Fitness Business School – The 4 Stages of Business – 03 – Optimize and Systemize

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to talk to you about stage three in the four part series about the stages businesses go through. 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 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 once you’ve ascended from the grow stage, you move through launch and move through grow. The next stage that that we go through, at least in my
framework, is optimize and systemize. Now, in my opinion, this is where business starts to really be fun again, right in the beginning, we have that, that rush that when we’re getting started, we’re optimistic, we’re motivated. It’s fun. You get to feel like, oh, I’m doing something here that I’m dreaming about, you know?

But if you’re like me at all, there, there comes a point where it’s a lot on your shoulders. You get some overwhelm setting in, and you’re just probably just punched in the face with all the responsibilities about owning a business, right? And, there’s a lot to it. Let’s face it, especially in
our industry right now, competition’s pretty fierce. There’s there, there are just franchises popping up in every market, both training based franchises and low-cost health clubs. So there’s a lot of people spending a lot of money to be in high traffic real estate and they’re siphoning off some of the market. There’s a lot of people spending a lot of money to compete with us. Plus there’s just so much to do. I mean, as an independent fitness business owner, if that’s what you are,
you’ve got to design the programs and train the clients and then provide that kind of other 165 support for clients outside of sessions.

You’ve got to, create and manage ads and market. And, a lot of people manage their own websites, and maybe they try to get out in the community and network or do public speaking. They post on social media. They, they handle the administrative responsibilities. They manage the
finances. They, they’re the point person on the software. If they have any staff, they’re in charge of that. And so it’s easy to see how people get burned out. Now, hopefully you’re not at that point. Some people, they just take it on the chin and it’s just, they think of it as, Hey, this is just what I do. This is just the, the job I chose. But again, a lot of times if we think back to what we wanted our business to look like or what we kind of hoped we were going to be building or dreamed about when we started, a lot of times that’s not it, right? A lot of times we feel like at this it, at the growth stage, we feel like maybe we’re
running behind a little bit. The business kind of owns us as much as we own it, but see, at stage three it starts to get fun because now things are starting to feel more successful. You’re actually starting to feel like a business owner. Things are profitable. You could probably take some vacations or if you
want to take a long weekend, it’s no big deal. You could probably break away and make sure that if your kids have sporting events or activities at school, you can go be present at some of that stuff and you may even have been able to outsource some of the things that you don’t like doing or
delegate some of the things you don’t like doing. Maybe, you’ve handed, some of the financial stuff off to a bookkeeper instead of
you having to do bookkeeping as well as your responsibilities in the house.

A lot of people at that kind of earlier stage, they may use an accountant to do the taxes, but the day-today stuff, they’re handling all of it. And if that’s something you like and that’s something you enjoy, then great. But if it’s something that you feel like is drudgery, then, at this stage it’s kind of exciting
to be able to say, okay, somebody else can manage this, or somebody else can run my ads, or I can pay somebody else to do the cleaning. And what’s cool is this level of business, I think usually has some simple effective systems in place that allow growth to happen without really demanding more of you.
It’s not like, oh, you know what, if I add a client, then I have to extend my training schedule personally anymore. You kind of know your role in the business and hopefully you’ve been able to build somebody around your strengths and, yeah, you’re still heavily involved and you drive the vision and you’re probably training some sessions and you’re probably doing some of the selling and some of the marketing, if not all of, so, some piece of that. Like maybe you do all the
sales, but not all of the marketing. And I think if I kind of just take a look at a lot of businesses that I admire in our industry, they have a lot of elements of this. They may drift into that stage four a little bit, but I think a lot of the people that I really, that I think, man, they’ve built something they, they really are excited about are at stage three.

Because let’s face it, if you are passionate about coaching, then you probably do wanna do some of the coaching. You’re not just passionate about owning a fitness business in some cases. Sometimes it’s like, man, and I know in my case, my ideal business probably has a lot of elements of
stage four, but there’s definitely, I like to kind of have my hands in things a little bit more in some areas than a lot of stage four business owners. So, you may find yourself, even if you do ascend beyond this, still feeling like, some of that speaks to me there at stage three, if you’re like a lot of people in our industry who got into this due to, a love of actually being in the gym training. And, the businesses at this stage, typically, and like I said, the
the revenue stuff, it’s hard to pin it down exactly, because there’s so many different markets. But typically it’s that 20 to $40,000 a month for facilities range and then,10 to 20 for, for online or solopreneurs. And the biggest challenges at this stage, really where I see people kind of get stuck before
they kind of master the optimizing systemized stage is just moving from kind of wearing all the hats and doing everything to delegating more and elevating your role in the business not micromanaging, but actually setting people up to succeed and play their roles where they can take
ownership of those things in the business. So you can elevate to the role that you want. Because the people who I think master this stage, that’s where they sit. They are playing the role they want in the business. And, a lot of times that does mean, Hey, I’m doing some of the selling and the
managing and training, because if you only have one location, you probably need to do more than just be an owner.

You need to be involved in some of the operations if you wanna pay yourself well. And so having that systematic approach, optimizing the business so you can play your best role so you can pay yourself well, but so you have the freedom and the lifestyle that you want out of this, kind of
finding that balance. Those are the challenges we see here. Now, at this stage, the things that we want to have implemented are four to five offers. And some of those may be like upsells or backend offers. It may be okay, we’ve got supplements that we systematically offer. Maybe we’ve got nutrition coaching
that we offer. So it’s not just, Hey, I’ve got four to five different training, training offerings. It’s just four to five different ways to not only acquire clients, but to maximize the, the value of the clients and the value of those relationships.

There are two to three demonstration or conversion systems. So that’s not dramatically different, but there are five to six lead gen systems with one, two being paid. So it’s kind of settling in, okay, now we’ve got this consistent way to bring, new people into the pipeline. We’ve got different ways to follow up with those people, and we’ve got different offers to get more yeses from the people that we are communicating with. We start to install those tier two operating systems. So basically everything in the business has a system at this stage because now we have the ability to hand things off. And even if we can do something, we’re
not doing it because we’re the only one who can do it. We’ve installed some financial systems, so now there’s probably bookkeeping in place.
It’s not you just kind of flying by the seat of your pants and then you’ve optimized your role with team members to support you, right? So you’re playing the role you want.

Now, if you have those things in place, you can move to what I consider the final stage, and that’s what we call the scale stage. And so I’ll come back tomorrow with that. But if you feel like you’re at the optimized and systemized stage, send me an email at [email protected] and just put optimize in the subject
line and that’ll give me an idea of where you’re at, so I’ll know how to best serve you. See you back in the next episode, see you then.

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