Fitness Business School – The Economy of Time

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I wanna talk with you about time and the time economy. 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.

So this is something of a follow-up to me talking about what I consider like the attention economy and how much more valuable attention has become since I first got into the fitness industry. Well, on the kind of parallel to that, or running parallel to that is how time has become more valuable. Because, I mean, let’s face it, the things that hold true for our clients. So many things vying for our attention. People being bombarded from every angle with more information, like a hundred times more information than we would’ve been hit with two decades ago.

What’s relevant to them is relevant to us too. And so when we talk about not being able to focus and being distracted by shiny objects and not getting things to the finish line, all the things that are distracting to them are distracting to us. We’re not, you know, superheroes, we’re not cyborgs, we are not like
impervious to these same challenges. So how do we navigate that? How do we still move forward towards our goals and be successful as business owners? Well, I want to give you a couple things that I think about very regularly that I try to do in our business that I try to help our clients do and I think would
probably be pretty useful for you. So one thing is I am a big believer in investing in other people to do things that we wouldn’t consider our own unique ability.

So we can play our best role. So let me give you kind of a practical way of looking at this. Let’s say that you can hand off some tasks for $15 an hour, and sure there are things that you can hand off for less than that or whatever else, but let’s say you can hand ’em off for $15 dollars an hour and you replace them with
$50 an hour tasks. And yes, there are things that you may have able to do that are worth more than 50, but you get the idea, right? Like there’s this wonderful leverage, there’s this arbitrage that comes with being able to hand off these low, low RoI tasks and replace them with higher RoI tasks. You know this, it
improves our effective hourly rate. It in many cases is more fulfilling to us because we’re doing the things that are more valuable.

It, you know, it is more and more important because the more distractions that come our way, the less focused hours we’re actually working. So we wanna make each of those individual hours as valuable as possible. You know, that’s, I mean, it’s crucial because not only are there only 168 hours in a week, but I
mean, let’s face it, we’re sleeping, we’re distracted, we’ve got all these other things tugging at so many of those hours. We need to allocate our time to the things that are gonna move us towards our goals. And you know, yes, there are plenty of books and resources and courses and coaches out there to talk to you
about how to be focused and how to avoid distractions and how to, you know, use apps to shut off social media and all these other things. But until you figured all that out and until you’ve gotten really good at, you know, filtering out all the distractions, which would probably put you in the top 1% of the people on
earth, then you at minimum have to make sure that you are spending your time on more valuable things and offloading the things that could be done by somebody for a lower hourly rate.

So that is key. The second piece of this from a time standpoint that I think is really important is, you know, when you are playing your best role, you’re probably outsourcing things that still move you forward. So you can still make progress because like in the previous episode, the attention side of things,
let’s face it, if you need to be more consistent in more marketing channels, that would take more of your time. Like if you need to be showing up on multiple marketing channels to capture more attention share, or if you need to be running ads, then you need to be handing more things off. If you need to be sending
out emails, you probably need to be handing more things off. And the only way that we can do this profitably is by replacing it with higher ROI things for us, right?

A lot of people are like, well, I’m apprehensive to hire an assistant or pay somebody to run ads because it’s an expense. Well, yes, but if you’re paying $15 an hour for one and you’re making $50 an hour with the hour you would’ve spent doing it, then it is an expense that we will gladly take day after day, week
after week. In fact, we’ve integrated this into our business, we’ve started offering a virtual marketing assistant service at a really nominal rate because we want our people to hand things off, but realistically, they probably can’t hire people in their facility for, you know, a hundred bucks a week to go run all that
stuff, right? I mean, it’s just hard to find part-time help for that little one amount. And if you can then, wonderful, and we’ve kind of done the same thing with a partnered ad management service that we offer because, you know, we know that people have to get a greater attention share or at least maintain the
attention share that they would’ve had in the past as things become more crowded.

So how do we help people do that without spending 1500 hundred dollars a month on ad management? Well, these are problems that we know we have to solve, but we, you know, we do things internally where we provide accountability, where we do win the week, we help people narrow and say, clarify their
focus. Like my win the week group is on Mondays and it’s what are we gonna get done? What are the three core action items we’re gonna get done between now and next Monday? And then we’re gonna check in with ’em, we’re gonna text ’em during the course of the week and see how they’re doing, and
we’re gonna give them templates and we’re gonna give ’em resources to, to make it simpler for them to execute those things. Because if we can put blinders on and say, these are the things I have to focus on, these are my priorities, I’ve acknowledged it, I have external accountability helping me get it done, then
now we’re still gonna have clarity and action on our highest return activities.

So these are things that we are doing internally and you know, I’m not suggesting that, you know, you need to do it exactly that way, but I think you need to be sensitive to that with your clients. If you want them to do things, you need to give them more chances to be focused, to be consistent. You need to help
find ways to really simplify what’s going on in their world so they can execute the things you want them to execute. I mean, and you see retail outlets getting smarter with this, right? I mean, if we think about the convenience factor, it’s really built on time. It DoorDash and Uber Eats and all that built on time meal kits
at the local grocery store or Costco are built on this same premise, right? If we want people to, you know, execute a certain behavior, how do we make it easier for them to do that and do that consistently?

Because like, you don’t have to necessarily agree a hundred percent with my thinking, but I am a hundred percent sure that you’re gonna find more people scrolling than studying these days. You’re going to find that this time thing and this attention thing are real challenges that we have to navigate. And the nice thing for us is many people will not. Most people are not gonna be using this time to their advantage. They’re gonna complain about the fact that people are distracted. They’re gonna complain about the fact that people are, are unfocused. They’re going to complain that their posts don’t get the same response that they used to, or their website doesn’t get the same traffic that it did in years past. Personally, they’re going to probably struggle to get as much done because there are more things tugging at their attention. So if you are aware of this attention and time evolution, this kind of economy that is continually evolving and
changing, and if you’re aware of it and are taking steps to improve how you navigate it in both the way that you’re connecting with clients and then the way that you’re managing all of it for yourself, it’s going to be a competitive advantage for you.

Because most people aren’t, most people are just being reactive. They’re not strategically working to to adapt. They’re not saying, okay, how do I navigate the way the world is actually operating, the way the world’s gonna operate, the way that people spend their time, the way that they allocate their attention?
How do I do this? So listen to this episode again, if you need to go back and listen to the previous episode, get a handle on the way that people’s attention is actually being distributed or used, the way that people are investing their time and take advantage of that, get past this whole kind of curmudgeon
approach of complaining about it. Say, okay, this is who people are, this is how we’re gonna take advantage of it to make our business better, to make our life better, to earn more, and to have our ideal business.

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

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