Fitness Business School – The Power of Planning

Full Transcript

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

If there’s a single shortcut to making goal achievement easier, it’s definitely planning without thinking about all the different tactics and strategies that people talk about when it comes to marketing or selling or whatever else, frankly, execution is the name of the game. If you’re not implementing, if you’re not executing, you’re not taking action.

You just don’t make progress as somebody who has been intimately involved in planning since the summer of 1994. I’ve used a daily planner consistently since then. I’m going to give you a pretty straightforward approach to planning that I think if you adopt it. Will make achieving your goals easier. It will allow you to work less and accomplish more.

It’ll give you more clarity. It’ll allow you to fend off some of the shiny object stuff. And frankly, you’ll probably be a lot happier because you’ll be focused on things that are important to you rather than just being reactive to whatever comes your way. So I think the first step is starting with daily planning.

If you’re not planning at all, then start with daily planning. Ideally done the evening prior To the day you’re planning for, I like to do mine at the close of the day. I do it in the evening, actually, before I go to bed, because it allows me to clear my head, put a close the file on the day, so to speak, and I reflect on what got done are the things that need to carry over for tomorrow.

There are things that, that maybe I learned. Then I plan the upcoming day. I identify the containers of time that are already filled with obligations. Coaching sessions, appointments, taking the kids to a game, or running a baseball practice, or something like that. You get it. Once I’ve done that, I can see how much space is actually left.

And instead of letting that space go to whatever drops into my inbox or whoever happens to, to dial my phone. I plan to use it to move towards goals. And I would encourage you to do the same because if you can use that time to do one to three actionable things each day that move you towards. where you want to go, those things stack up and you’re going to make a lot of progress personally or professionally.

And then with whatever time’s left beyond those things, that’s when you manage the to do’s, the typically like the stuff that typically chews up a lot of people’s day. Repeat this day after day and you’re going to feel less overwhelmed. You’re going to see more accomplished And you’re just going to have a little bit more structure and you’re going to feel less scattered and reactive.

So after you do that, commit to what we call win the week. And for us, we use a win the week system with clients. There are other people out there who have their own kind of approach that. It is built on a weekly system that they charge a few hundred dollars for. We just include it in our coaching programs.

So the way when the week works is the day prior to your weekly cycle. So if you start on Monday, then on Sunday, you should be reviewing your previous week. How did you do with your weekly priorities? What wins did you have? Celebrate those, right? What did you learn? What needs to be a priority for the week ahead?

On Monday, you go into the week with a draft of what you feel like your top two to three priorities are for the upcoming week. Now, if you’re working with a coach, if you’re, I’m biased, but if you’re part of one of our win the week programs, if you’ve got somebody that you mastermind with, go ahead and work through those and see if those are in fact what you need to have and identify those as your priorities.

They’re not a draft anymore. They’re your priorities for the upcoming week. And remember your job is to set you up to succeed. So if you have a hectic week coming up, temper your expectations about what you can accomplish. And if you’ve got a blue sky week where you’ve got plenty of opportunity, you can ramp up your expectations.

And. Understand that you already have existing obligations to sustain where you are, right? Those are the things you’ve already committed to. So your priorities are the things that you are going to do to move forward beyond those current commitments, to move you past the status quo. And they can be small steps, but if you do those small steps week after week, they compound over time.

And that’s how we win the week. It’s pretty simple, but now we can break down. Those weekly targets, those weekly priorities into the daily actions that we’re taking that make up those, that daily planning. Now for us, and some people may do this from a quarterly perspective, but we use six week cycles and our six weeks are each one sixth of a six week cycle.

And for me, six week cycles are better than quarterly stuff because it’s easier for me to forecast to wrap my arms around what can actually be accomplished, to look at my schedule six weeks out and be clear about what availability or capacity we have. So we look at these six week cycles and we say, okay, this is how we ensure the bigger things get done.

The production goals, the projects and stilling processes, basically every seven weeks, because we have a buffer week to re to review and to refresh or reboot before we kick off the next cycle. We celebrate our wins. We go through our learning experiences. We decide if there’s anything we need to stop or start or continue.

Then we establish our six week goals, personal and professional. Typically we’re going to have three of each or up to three of each is maybe a better way to put it. You map out how you’re going to get in motion. And then we break things down into that win the week priority system that I alluded to. And then finally, once a year in December, we do our annual planning where we identify what we’re willing to commit to for the next 12 months.

We review just like we do on a daily, weekly, or six week cycle basis. We do our reset. We look ahead and we say, okay, we commit to the things that we. Deem important, motivating, but attainable in the next 12 months. And here’s what I love about all of this. You have built in resets every week when you need them.

You have many resets every day. So if you get off track, it’s fine. You can get right back on track. You have a simple framework that everything fits into, right? And if you think about it this way. It’s very much like what we do with training clients, right? Like they can’t achieve all their goals in one day.

You, you don’t get a bonus for doing 10 workouts in a day instead of the one that you’re doing. But you understand that consistency is going to win the race. If you want to really utilize a lot of the stuff that you likely already are teaching and building your business around for your clients, this is how you do it.

If you take this approach, you’re going to see. Your business grow, you’re going to see things get easier. I would strongly encourage you to just embrace it. That planning is the way.

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.