Fitness Business School – The Direct Path to Business Success

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here again with another episode of the fitness business school. And today we’re going to talk about the most direct path to building the business you want. 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 to the end of this episode because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

Last week I had the opportunity to go and speak at a local training facility where the owners had their team in and we talked about my journey in entrepreneurship and we talked about what I, his.

Seen it take people to build the business. They want to build the career that they want, and create that ideal business that I so often talk about and just having been in the market. This facilities in over really the entire duration of their existence. I moved to Louisville about the same time that they started their business.

They’ve just been the kind of poster child for consistent improvement, consistent progress. And I see that so often I see so many owners that have built wonderful businesses, just basically stacking up year after year of incremental progress. Now, sure sometimes they figure one thing out and it allows them to make a big leap.

They may go from doing 200, 000 a year in gross revenue to 500, 000 a year in gross revenue because they figured out how to optimize their model or a new advertising channel, or they finally hired some staff so they could scale. And that’s usually sandwiched between a lot of years of 10, 12, 15 percent growth.

Instead of this stuff that you see on social media posts, when people are promoting their agency or people are promoting their high ticket program where it’s Hey, this person was destitute and they were making 3,000 a month. And now all of a sudden they’re a millionaire. I’ve been doing this a long time.

I’ve been coaching business owners for almost 20 years now. I’ve owned over 30 different businesses in that 20 year span. Everything from local training businesses to franchises with almost 300 locations. And. The number of people that I’ve seen go from just a bare bones startup to a half million dollars a year in gross revenue or 250,000 a year in personal income in a year or 18 months, I can probably count on one hand and of those people, I don’t know that any of them have really sustained the business in the way Long term and continue to grow because yeah, you can catch lightning in a bottle or ride, ride a wave of a new marketing tactic, the way that people did way back early on in my journey when the outdoor bootcamp thing really took hold and you could open a business that was going to be really high profit.

It was different than one on one training. So it offered a solution at a really early stage. reasonable, at least comparatively speaking price point. So you’d see people launch stuff then and all of a sudden they’d be making 10, a month. And it worked until it didn’t, right? Because the market got pretty quick because there just wasn’t a big barrier to entry or when Groupon was at its peak and you would see people sell 500, 800, a thousand.

We had a few people do over 1200 Groupon’s in one three, four day offering and they’d flood their gym. And then they’d either regress or their infrastructure wasn’t set up. And so the gross revenue might’ve gone up, but their profit really didn’t escalate much at all. , that stuff that, that looks great in a, in an ad or on a site.

Sales page or a social media post. It’s not usually the reality of it. I can’t tell you the number of desperate calls I have received from business owners who did something like the original kind of gym launch, lose 20 and six challenge and we’re on their last gasp because they were bankruptcy because it just, yeah, I mean they were a testimonial, right?

A post on somebody’s page and they flooded their gym with new people for a challenge and collected a bunch of deposits. But then the aftermath. Maybe it’s because of the non disparagement clauses and some people’s coaching contracts or something like that. The aftermath never really comes to light, right?

Like those people just die off quietly. They see their good loyal clients. to dissipate because the cultures change and there’s this flood of new people who are just, they’re almost like a gym vacation. They’re a tourist, right? And there’s the unsaid fact that it’s a thousand dollars a week for coaching.

And then it’s another thousand dollars in ad spend. Even if you collect a decent amount of money, that doesn’t mean you profit it at all. And so people run up credit card bills, they’re paying their 22 percent interest and then they look up and they’re like, man, it, it seemed good because I had a lot of new people walk through the door for a while, but now I’m paying the price.

So the best businesses that, that’s not how they were built. That’s not how they operate. The best businesses that, are the people that week after week, month after month, year after year made continual, consistent improvement. They installed a new system. They optimized a new process or optimize something that was already in place. They kept refining their model. They built a brand and a reputation in the market as a premium provider. They started to slowly escalate their prices because the value they were providing was better. The reputation was stronger and. Before you know it, they became a category of one.

They were the standout in their category. And frankly, the, like the gym that I’m talking about that I went and spent time with last week, that’s what they become for like semi private training in the Louisville market. And it didn’t happen overnight. It was just a continual, compounding of, good hires, successful implementation, doing good work, treating people well.

And if you look around, I think you’re going to find that to be true with most every great business that is in this market, almost without exception, Doug Spurling and I do a separate podcast, the wealthy fitness entrepreneur, where we talk with more, more advanced business owners, people who already have some traction in the market.

So we don’t spend as much time on getting over that hump and that launch and growth stage. It’s more about scale and wealth building and leadership and the businesses that we see. When we talked there, the businesses that are members of our boardroom group, Doug’s business before he had a really lucrative exit, they all operated that way.

They all just consistently got better over time. And it would be the, since I use so many baseball analogies, it would be like, man, just they continually hit single and double after single and double and every now and again. Something they would install, something that they would work on would be a home run, but it wasn’t like they just sat back and waited for the grand slam.

And so many people that are early on in their business journey, or they’ve been stuck in floundering around for a few years. They’re just trying to find that one grand slam instead of saying, I’m just going to commit to this. And six weeks from now, I’m going to be a little bit better than I am right now.

Six months from now, I’m going to be, even more improved than I am right now. And then a year from now, I’m going to gain a lot of ground towards having the business that I want. And as I do many times in these podcasts, I tie it back to what you do with clients. What you do with clients is basically Say, you know what, if you want to lose 40 pounds, then there may not be a solution to get you to lose 40 pounds today, but we can lose it one or two pounds at a time.

Workout after workout, compounding solid week of supportive nutrition after solid week of supportive nutrition. Making sure that we do the little things right. We recover, we make sure that we’re being active when we’re outside the gym. It’s all these little things that compound over time. And then you have this improvement of body composition, improvement in self confidence, improvement in overall health.

And it’s sustainable. It’s now really their identity because they earned it and they did it over time. So they really became one with the process. And that’s the same thing that’s going to work for you if you want to improve your business. So if you’ve been waiting around for that magic Facebook ad or that, that offer, that’s going to change everything.

The thing that’s going to change everything is you can Like you committing to consistent continual improvement and moving closer to the business you want.

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

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

One of of the things that we’ve been doing with our current clients is taking them through this Ideal Business diagnostic and really what it is, this checklist that allows you to pinpoint exactly what your business needs next so you can keep improving, keep growing, and build a business that you love to own, one that pays you well, one that allows you to have the impact you wanna have and one that allows you to have a lifestyle that you truly enjoy.

In this diagnostic, we walk through everything and we do an evaluation and can instantly pinpoint what you need to do next to build that business that you want. I’m going to extend this opportunity to get on with either me or my team and take you through this evaluation and fix your business’s most vital needs fast.

So if we take you through this, you’re gonna be able to make those vital changes that you need to finally have what I call your Ideal Business. If you’d be interested in going through this entirely free, risk-free diagnostic with us and learn what you already have in place, what you’re doing well and where are your greatest opportunities for rapid improvement are just shoot me an email with diagnostic in the subject line to [email protected].

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.