Fitness Business School – The Reality of Business Ownership

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to talk with you about the reality of business ownership. 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 till the end of this episode because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

That probably wasn’t like the most inviting lead to an episode or anything like that. I recently had a week or week and a half that reminded me of how other people maybe navigate some of the ups and downs that they perceive entrepreneurship to have. And basically a lot of people get emotionally kind of attached to the micro and start to ignore or at least kind of minimize the macro.

If they have somebody cancel today, then they get down. Or if they don’t get any new clients this week, then they’re discouraged. And the way that I think of it is if you have a process that is at all proven to be sound, then you should be measuring your outcomes by, okay, did I do what I needed to do to move the process forward, to execute the process? And the reason being is that progress isn’t linear. Results don’t always come with any sort of immediacy. Um,
let me give you an example. So over the last week and a half I’ve sent out the same number of emails that I always send out. We’ve done the same volume of promotional stuff that we always send out. Now, my, my personal focus has been on a lot of the infrastructure because we have been building something that I think is pretty awesome for our ideal business accelerator, boardroom and sprint clients.

This roadmap that has 60 plus checklists for every task that you could do, just making it paint by number simple, probably simpler than any franchise that at least I’ve seen in the fitness industry. So I’ve been focused on the actual deliverable side of things from my mentality standpoint. But the actual execution we’ve still done everything that we always do to fill the pipeline, move people through the pipeline, but we haven’t had probably the same volume of new
business in that span that we might have been having for the previous two or three months. And you just kinda, at least in my mind, you just stay the course. You just keep moving along, moving along. And then yesterday hit and we got a new consulting client tentatively had a handshake agreement for a big project that potentially not just a consulting deal, but actually a brand partnership that could potentially add over a hundred businesses to what we do and really allow to enter a new market.

Now that’s not finalized, but later today I actually have a call with an executive from this corporation to see if we can finalize some stuff. And then had an executive from a multi-billion dollar company reach out yesterday to meet about a consulting proposal, and then brought on two new clients in one of our coaching programs and had a couple other people basically say, okay, I’m ready to start. We just didn’t do the call yet, but we scheduled calls to
get them enrolled. And, and all that happened in a day. And, that to me is often how this works. You can’t be so attached to the, the ups and downs the day before. Nothing really happened that would’ve been considered like new business generation that you’d have seen a result of.

But what people don’t pay attention to are all the work that was done to prime the pump, all the work that was done to, to move people through this proverbial pipeline. And I think the people who struggle with entrepreneurship, at least from a, an emotional standpoint and a self-induced stress
standpoint, are the ones that can’t ride that wave and understand that it’s not, Hey, I’m good at this. I’m bad at this. All the memes or whatever that you see online, it, to me, coming from a baseball background, that would kind of be like somebody has one bad at bat and they think, well, I’m a
bad hitter, and or somebody gets one bad grade on a quiz, not even a test, a quiz at school, and they’re like, oh, I’m not a good student, I’m not smart.

And you’ve got a bigger history to draw from. You’ve got a bigger sample size to, to make your assessment with. Now that doesn’t mean that every process is right. I mean, there are times that if I see, okay, this process is not yielding the outcome that I want, then I’ve gotta go back and reinvent
the process. But, I don’t make that assessment because we had one day or even one bad week in selling, I may put some things under the microscope and say, well, hey, is this still working the way that it worked when things were going well? If you are one of those people who really gets caught
up in the emotional side of stuff and find yourself being discouraged or down or frustrated when you have a slow week and let self-doubt creep in and, and you let your yourself kind of feel like, Hey, maybe maybe I’m not good at this.

Maybe I’m a bad business owner, that sort of thing. My recommendation is initially start by saying, okay, am I doing the thing that need to be done that yield the outcome that I want? And if you can say either yes, or even I think so, right? Because I mean, sometimes maybe we’re unsure, then that should
hopefully bring you a little bit more confidence. If somebody’s saying, Hey, I want to get a job, but they don’t wanna apply for any jobs and they’re out looking, then the answer is no, they’re not doing the things that need to be done. But if you’re doing the legwork, if you’re putting
in the time and effort in things that have a probability of success, then, then that’s number one. The second thing that I’d do if I still had self-doubt, would be to look in my own kind of history or look back at my own resume and say, wait a minute, have I had success before?

Have things that I’ve done before worked out due to my behaviors due to my actions? And if the answer again is yes, you probably have earned the right to not doubt yourself. You can always kinda say, what, historically, I can solve problems. I can fix things. I can do things that generate results. So even if this is a kind of a temporary little blip on the radar, that’s fine. It’s no big deal. It’s not some indictment against your capability as an owner. And then if you can look at those things, and then the third thing that I’d look at is give it a little bit of a time horizon and say, okay, if if this doesn’t work for two, three weeks, you
know, then sure it needs to be under the microscope.

If I haven’t even started looking at that point and believe that you’re gonna be able to find a solution. The the great thing about the landscape that we’re in today professionally, and we are definitely in a different landscape than we’ve been in the past. I don’t know that it’s better or worse, it’s just different.
But the great thing about it from my perspective, it at least one of the things that stand out and are really relevant to what we’re talking about here is good information solutions are probably easier to find than they’ve ever been. Now, you may have to sort through stuff, but this isn’t like when I would’ve
been growing up and if I wanna go learn something, I gotta go to the public library, use a library card, check out a book, because there was no bookstore that would’ve had any, you know, meaningful library of books in my hometown.

I would’ve had to search it that way. Now, I mean, you can pick up your phone and find answers. You can ask some AI tool to help search for answers on your behalf. You can listen to podcasts like this, that earlier on in my business career I drove to Connecticut from Kentucky, like, it was like a 16 hour drive to attend an event where people did presentations that probably didn’t deliver as much substances as you could get from just listening to these short 15 or less minute podcast episodes that are free and you can carry around in your pocket. So the solutions are here, and I’m not even talking about paid coaching. I’m not saying, you know, Hey, joining our program, yes, you can borrow things from franchises to business coaching to info products down the line and, and get more turnkey solutions.

You get things customized and really kind of modified to fit you. You can get problem, you can get a partner in problem solving, basically. So you are that close to answers always. But I see it all the time. There are people that I work with that the biggest obstacle isn’t the tactical stuff. It’s not the how, it’s them getting out of their own way because they spend half of their time kind of emotionally beaten down or self-doubt so they don’t get anything done because they’re
kind of wallowing in self-pity. And that may sound harsh, but sometimes we have to fix us before we can fix the business. And so if you are questioning, if you are uncertain, I mean, the reality realities of entrepreneurship are that everything isn’t the same. You don’t get the same paycheck
every week.

You don’t work the same number of hours every week. You don’t have the same reports due every week or whatever else you are, I mean, there’s gonna be some ebb and flow, there’s gonna be some seasonality. There’s going to be weeks where things go great and weeks where things struggle. And you’re gonna have to remember the ones that went great when you’re in the middle of the struggle. But if you can accept the big picture, if you can look at this in a macro sense and
know that solutions are close by and that you are in more control in this environment than you are in most corporate settings, then things get much, much easier. So that’s the reality of entrepreneurship. Now, I’m not gonna tell you it’s for everybody. I’ve got plenty of people that I’m close to friends, family members that they would struggle with writing that way. But that’s kind of the price you pay for all the upsides of being a business owner.

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

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