Fitness Business School – The Power of Live Connections

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I want to talk with you about the power of live connections. 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.

I know I’ve talked about this in previous episodes, but frankly, I probably talk about a lot of the same topics in a number of episodes. And some of the things just keep coming back around. And it’s so important. It’s so meaningful. And. It’s wonderful to be reminded when those big difference makers are put right in front of you.

So recently I went to a convention, actually it was the fast pitch coaches association. Convention, which I go to the baseball, the American Baseball Coach Association convention with some regularity, not every year, but a lot of years and have been going to that. The first one I went to was in 1996 in Nashville and have gone a number of times since.

This is the first of the fast pitch coaches association events that I’ve gone to. And really, I just, I went to the trade show. There’s a company that I am involved with as an advisor and a stakeholder in, and they had a booth. And so I got to spend some time with the, one of the co founders and really just.

Get to know more of him in a way that you probably don’t get to, to connect when you’re always doing things remote, you get to know more about how people perceive the product, in this case, software. And. Yeah, you get to learn more about that target market. And frankly, I’ve been around softball, but all of those in kind of small doses of watched our college football team when I was a college baseball coach and they were good and successful and I got to see what they did and who they played.

And then some friends, daughters that would play softball, I’d be around that a little bit, but in general, I’ve spent the bulk of my time around baseball, having boys in our household and, but it was really cool because Many of the vendors are vendors at both and they’re vendors at the baseball events, the softball events.

And so connecting with some of those people, seeing some people that I’ve known from other events that I’ve gone to, heck, there was a, there’s a gentleman who represents major league baseball and their venue at Vero beach, the Dodger town. He was a host at events that we went to when I was. An assistant coach.

So all the way dating back to 1994. And so I originally met him then and have known him for now 30 years. So seeing people like that, making new connections, which is probably just as cool because I could fill out a form. I could look at somebody’s website, even hop on a call and I’m not going to have nearly the depth of connection that I would have by spending some time face to face with some of these guys with.

Some of these wonderful startup companies, and I can learn more about them. Some of these companies that seem very big based on their web presence have 5, 6, 7 employees total. But so it’s cool to get to see a lot of the people who are doing the work behind the scenes that they’re building really interesting things, retail things, software things.

And. I think that is just some of the magic of being live at places. And then we did our annual planning event early here in, in December. And people got to be in the same room. We catered lunch. We had food, we ate together. People got to do the informal kind of hangout time, not just the structured presentation stuff that you’d probably get if you’re just doing it on zoom or watching a replay or something like that.

And. And I’m sure that the people who come live to that sort of thing have a more robust experience than the people who just do it online. And the people who do it online aren’t really making connections with the other people attending online like the people here were making. If you’re not spending time in the company of other people, if all you’re trying to do Is be behind your computer.

Even if you’re in an offline business, if you’re not getting outside of your own gym, if the only way that you’re trying to market is behind a computer, you’re probably cutting your progress by 75 or even a hundred percent. You can shorten sales cycles. You can expedite relationships. You can. Make sure that future calls get answered.

Emails get responded to because you’re not cold messaging anymore. You can build strategic alliances. You can strengthen relationships. You can get public speaking opportunities. You can open new doors. There are all these things that you can do with these in person conversations that just are not available to you.

If you were trying to do everything in a remote fashion, I encourage you. Go get in the room, go get out of your own way. And. You’re going to have a lot of people who listen to this podcast. Heck y’all, I’ll have a lot of clients who’ll say, I can’t do that wrong answer. What the truth is, we won’t do it.

Because I’ve had people come to our live events and sleep in their car until we pick them up a hotel room to stay in. I’ve had people bunk in with others. Heck, the first mastermind I belonged to, we split a room with three people and I slept on the floor. The people will find a way if it’s important to them.

And maybe you have a client. Fair enough. You know what? Reschedule a client if it’s that important, but take responsibility. Say, okay, this is what I’m choosing because if you want to be a business owner, responsibility is like prerequisite number one. So if you aren’t attending something more often than not, It’s a won’t, it’s not a can’t.

Now, sometimes it makes all the sense in the world. There are things that I won’t do because we have family things scheduled. It’s not that I can’t do it. It’s that I’m choosing to go to the family thing first. There, there are things that business owners won’t do because it may be expensive or maybe they’d have to drive instead of fly and it’d be tedious.

In order to save the money or it’s because they don’t want to schedule reschedule a client or something like that, because they may not make as much money immediately. Even if attending might be the precursor to them making three times as much money in total. If you are not getting in the room, the better answer is, To figure out how you can get in the room rather than rationalize why you’re not going places, why you’re not connecting with people live.

If it’s not important to you, you’ll always find an excuse. If it is important to you, you will always find a way. So if you want to build a better business, get outside your four walls, go connect with other people. And you’re going to see things grow exponentially. In fact, if you’re listening to this, like I’m recording this in early, mid December, if you’re listening to this and you’re establishing those goals for 2024, I would encourage you to build some.

Something of a goal around how much you can connect with other people in person, whether it’s peer to peer stuff and business coaching type stuff and being in the room and that setting, or if it’s local networking and relationship building that way in order to get a stronger foothold in your community, the more personal connections you make, the faster and stronger your business will grow.

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

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