Fitness Business School – The Flywheel Effect

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to talk with you about the flywheel effect. 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.

So way back when I was starting off my entrepreneurial career, I read the book good to great by Jim Collins, and it was this wonderful book that kind of illustrated why some companies struggled or failed and others went on to great success. And one of the concepts he talked about was the flywheel effect, which is you start to turn the flywheel and it’s hard and it’s this slow grind and eventually momentum picks up and before you know it, things start to, to really kind of start moving at full speed and obviously that’s a, an oversimplification, but this idea of it being this kind of Grind and you having to put in a lot of effort for a little progress early on.

But if you persevere and accept that progress doesn’t happen all at once, the results aren’t instantaneous and that you just keep doing the important work and eventually this compound effect. Leads itself to, to, to generating momentum. And then month after month, week after week, maybe even day after day, you start to see some real meaningful progress.

Well, the other day we were hosting our boardroom call, which is our group of top level fitness entrepreneurs. And we talked to a husband and wife business owner, and they in the last year had added 50 percent more clients. And during that same day, one of the other members had checked in and said, since 2021, he had tripled his business.

And if I’m going back and kind of reverse engineering what happened for them, it was very much that flywheel effect. They, it wasn’t one simple advertising campaign. It wasn’t one simple marketing tactic. They weren’t one funnel away. It was the compound effect of implementing one system at a time, improving one process.

Whether it was something that brought in new clients or something that helped create a better client experience or improve retention or in increased profitability and step by step these things were installed and they began to compound and then you look up and I know the husband wife business team indicated that just in 2024 and as I record this is late May They had more new clients in 2024 in less than half a year than they’ve had in a full year at any point previously.

And I think that is such a, just kind of such a powerful example what they’ve accomplished, what the business owner who tripled since 2021 had accomplished. Because it’s the opposite of the way that most people respond to a desire to improve. And we could be talking about people who are trying to lose weight or people who are trying to grow a business.

Most people, they expect this one tactic to make all the difference. They expect this one strategy to, to be the springboard to success. And, and maybe expect is an unfair word. Maybe it’s hope, right? Maybe it’s that they’re hoping that it’s this one thing that will change everything. And it’s It’s an easy sell because the person doing the marketing, the person selling that one thing, they’re preying on this deep desire, this optimism, this hope.

And in some cases, they’re preying on some desperation because maybe people have struggled or failed in the past. Maybe they had put in a lot of time or effort or energy or invested money and things hadn’t worked out the way they wanted. But the reality is almost every success And certainly almost every lasting success comes from this kind of flywheel effect, this kind of compounded effort and implementation or installation week after week, month after month.

And if you think about it, if you’re a fitness business owner, if you’re a sports performance business owner, when somebody comes to you with goals in mind and they present this kind of magic bullet solution to you. They said, well, I just want to do this one thing. This one thing will change everything.

It’ll, I just need to take this pill and I’ll lose weight. I just need to do this throwing program and my velocity will go up by 15 miles an hour. I mean, some of these things that I think that we as professionals are quick to caution people against, we kind of fall for when they’re presented to us to help us reach our goals to help us move forward faster. And I mean, we’ve seen it time and time again. We’ve seen people who maybe they even were able to kind of ride away temporarily, whether it was way back when Groupon was at its peak or when the lose 26 challenge kind of took the market by storm in some ways, and you’d jump on that bandwagon and maybe it worked, but if it worked, it didn’t last, right?

Because you hadn’t built on a solid foundation, hadn’t built the infrastructure to support it. And so you regressed back to where you were. It’s almost like all those horror stories you hear about people who are broke and win the lottery. And then within a couple of years, they’re back to where they were and maybe even worse off prior to winning because If you don’t do the thing that are, that I think are kind of woven into this flywheel effect, the hey, I’m going to build from the ground up in the beginning, I’m going to install these things and maybe each of them individually in the beginning don’t yield a bunch of gratification or instinct gratification, right?

They’re not improving the way that you get clients to maybe attend more frequently or doing something that increases retention by a couple points. That may not show up in some dramatic change in your bank account in the first couple months. But then as you start to do stuff with referrals, as you start to do stuff with marketing and different things on the front end.

Now that, that 5 or 10 percent lift on the back end where clients are staying longer, maybe you can charge a little bit more, that turns into big numbers and especially compounded with the front end work. I mean, it can be transformative for a business. It can be transformative for a life because of what the business is yielding for the owner.

And I think that it just comes down to a decision. It comes down to this decision. Hey, am I going to be willing to kind of put my head down and do the work? Whether the work takes one year, two year, three year. I mean, even if you are incredibly far off, if you are in a real kind of just beginner elementary stage of a business, or you’ve dug yourself a hole.

No matter what, you’re no more than three years away from implementing stuff step by step or installing these systems and starting to build a really strong foundation and having a really solid business that can provide you financial security, can have a meaningful impact in your community, can support a quality lifestyle.

Yeah. Yeah. Even if you are that far off in, in three years time, but man, you present the idea of three years time to somebody and they’re like, no, give me the three day option. I need the immediate gratification. Right. But we know that’s not the answer. So my recommendation to you is. Study those who’ve done well, right?

There, there aren’t a whole lot of people that have had any sort of lasting success, uh, that have had any sort of durability that were an overnight success, that just one thing made all the difference for them. I mean, pretty much all the people that I admire in business are people that were willing to kind of have that perseverance and that, that, that willingness to.

To kind of put in the work and install things one on one because, or one, one item at a time because they believed in what they were doing and they knew that, Hey, if I do this and then the next thing, the next thing, then the next thing, these incremental steps that I’m taking towards my goal will compound.

And before you know it, I’ll have this momentum and it’ll all be working in my favor and I’ll be able to do things a year from now, two years from now that. You know, we’ll see improvements, new client growth, new revenue increases in a week that might’ve taken us two months previously, but you gotta do the work on the front end.

And that’s not the stuff that makes the highlight reels, right? Like that’s not the stuff people talk about on social media because it’s not sexy. It doesn’t sell. It’s not the stuff that I think that we instinctively gravitate to because we see other people. In the market. And we say, well, you know what?

I know as much about training as them. I can deliver results as good as them. Maybe I’m the same age as them. And so, Hey, I put in the time I need to, to pick up the pace here. And so we rationalize, well, why I need to do it faster instead of saying, you know what, this person did it, it took them a little bit of time and they did with a strong fundamental approach that.

It is going to transcend market shifts. It’s going to transcend turbulence when it comes to what platforms are popular, how you’re advertising, what market preferences are, and those businesses last. I mean, I look at the businesses that were healthy in 2019 and are healthy in 2024. And none of them were built on a foundation of sand, right?

And so many of our clients really, I mean, we had one client closed during the pandemic and they were a franchise that was not, they didn’t have the latitude to, to be adaptable, to install some different things, to be successful. And I mean, it’s amazing because the people that really use that as an opportunity to be more client centric, to install better internal systems, to do better in, in making sure that clients were having that other one 65, that their retention was

important.

And when they were able to go kind of turn on the faucet again and push more leads into the business. Get more people into the pipeline. They had this really strong infrastructure and they just, they saw their business multiply. So if you’re not leaning towards this kind of flywheel approach, if you found yourself over the last couple of years, just bouncing from tactic to tactic, hoping this one thing will make all the difference, let me kind of nudge you one more time to Say, okay, where am I going to be a year from now?

Where am I going to be 18 months from now? And if I do things the right way and install this new system or optimize that system week after week, how much different is my business going to look? How much stronger and sounder am I going to be? And frankly, by doing that and layering things on one at a time and not being dependent on one promotion or marketing tactic to get people in the door, not being dependent.

On just hoping it, Oh, wait a minute. Clients will enjoy it. So they’ll stay and they’ll pay and they’ll refer. And instead saying, no, you know what, we’re going to plug every hole. We’re going to make sure that the, that this whole thing is airtight. Imagine how much different your business will be and think about how much better it will be prepared to, to move into that period beyond, right.

Instead of always feeling like. Hey, I’m always just trying to keep my head above water and hoping to put out the next fire and get through the week or the month. Having this strong foundation, it means that you’re prepared for whatever comes next. And at the same time, you’re building wealth, you’re having an impact, and you’re enjoying life in the moment.

To me, that, that kind of flywheel effect, the results that it produces sounds pretty good. Hopefully it does to you too.

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

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

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Again, an email to [email protected] with diagnostic in the subject line will get
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