Fitness Business School – The Secret to Growing Your Business

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to talk with you about the secret no one seems to grasp when it comes to growing your business. 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 I want to give you this secret that it seems like really very few people tend to grasp when it comes to what’s actually happening, whether it’s you in your market with clients or me and, the fitness business coaching or business coaching in general landscape.

But I need to give you a little bit of a history lesson to, to help it make sense. So the. The time that I got into the fitness industry it was very much a cell packages, one on one training, hour long sessions. So you’re buying blocks of of training sessions. Most of it was done inside big box health clubs or in high end retail space.

Premium studios that was sold largely to affluent people. And really the people who were the supposed experts, the coaches, the gurus in the industry at the time they, they just touted these tactics. They might try to teach you their way to, to deploy these tactics and kind of fine tune how to do it.

But it was a tactic and tactics have a pretty short shelf life, right? And the secret that I recognized when I got into this, because I came to it fresh. I didn’t come from the health club world. I didn’t grow up career wise in personal training. I came from coaching college baseball, coaching, being a strength and conditioning coach, working at a university.

And so I got into this. Really trying to learn how to think just the same way that I would try to learn how to build a baseball program. And it wasn’t about one singular drill or something like that. It was about how to think about the whole and then use the tactics to, to support this way of thinking, to, to enact this kind of thought process and execute it.

And. And, once I dove into the industry, I thought, man, this is everywhere. This is everything that’s going on is married to singular tactics. And you would quickly recognize the people who hitched their wagon to a specific tactic, they may ride that wave for a little bit, but when the tactic kind of lost steam, then you saw them really start to struggle.

And, we saw it with the one on one model when the economy changed way back. And I know this is an antiquated thing, 2008, 2009, those people who are all packaged one on one, so they’re selling expensive services struggled, but the people who Understood the concept no, we’re here to coach people.

We’re here to help people get results. So we have to find a format that allows them to do that with the circumstances they’re experiencing. They dove into like bootcamps and group training and those thrive, even in challenging economic times. And we saw it with Groupon, right? People grew businesses like crazy because of Groupon.

But if that was their only way to get clients, man, they, they hit a wall as soon as that kind of dried up and then, we saw it. I don’t know if you’d remember this, but there was a time when, you’d see people run these ads or even like boosted posts to a woofoo form to fill up their transformation challenge and that worked like crazy.

You’d see people filling up a challenge in, two or three days. And then the lose 20 and six thing became so prominent and, and that was originated by a client of mine, Sam Bakhtiar, who has since passed away, but Sam was a genius. He was brilliant. He figured out the market that I’d work in and people like gym launch adapted it, borrowed it, whatever you’d like to call it.

And it worked for a little while, but the businesses that like, Hey, that’s the one tool in the toolbox. When that started to dry up and maybe the market didn’t really love the bait and switch thing. It, you saw them closing facilities. I saw more than a handful go bankrupt because of it.

And, it reinforced to me that yeah, tactics are great in the short term and so many people that do coaching business coaching they hitched themselves to this singular idea or this singular concept and. You’ll see it with people who like to tout this, Oh, wait a minute.

I’m in the trenches. I’m a gym owner. And so I’m going to teach you exactly what I do. That’s great. If you’re that person and you’re in their market and you’re serving the same clientele and you have the same personality traits, the same strengths or advantages that they have, then yeah, you can borrow that concept and transplant it, and it probably works fine, but.

If, the, this kind of mentality of, Hey, I’ve got a hammer. So everything looks like a nail. You probably have to have more tools. If you’re transplanting an idea from, the New York metropolitan area to middle America. Like you can’t just take things verbatim and if all you’re doing is saying, this is the way that we do it, this is the only way you can operate doesn’t work so well.

Same thing with people who say, Hey, we’re great at running Facebook ads or we’re great at, this, this type of marketing flow or this type of this type of advertising mechanism. And. People that, that marry themselves to this one singular idea or tactic in the coaching world, it’s even dicier, right?

Because usually they do that retro, retroactively, or maybe they’re the right way to think about it is they do it after like they start to tout it because there’s some evidence that it worked, but by the time they start touting it, it’s dried up a little bit, so they’re trying to extract some benefit from it later.

We see it a lot with people who they have that kind of, I’ll bring, 50 or 100 clients in your gym in 30 days or whatever else. And yeah, it may have worked, they may have been able to ride the wave of some concept that they were an early adopter of, but it doesn’t really work now.

And so a few years ago, to be fair, probably about a decade ago, this became so, so obvious to me that this was like the same game that almost everybody was playing. It was very much follow the leader. It’s going to be. I’m going to attach myself to this one tactic and it would dries up. Maybe I’ll try to reinvent myself or whatever else.

Or I’ll move on to a different market because I’ve burned out this market. And it just, for whatever reason, it hit me and it’s you know what? The great coaches that I get to work with, the people who really are adept at delivering results to their clients, they, they think this way too.

They think about, How do we need to think versus being so tactical? They don’t get attached to a singular exercise or drill. They don’t get attached to, oh, this one supplement’s a cure all, or eat this one food and you’ll lose weight. In fact, they turn their nose up at it because they understand that, yeah, they, if you understand how to think, then, you can use.

These tactics or an appropriate supplement or the right nutrition to your advantage. But you have to actually understand what we’re trying to accomplish. And a few years back, I really tried to lock in what I did on helping under helping owners understand how to think about building the business that they want to own instead of cobbling together one tactic at a time and thinking that was going to be the magic bullet.

To go from where they are to where they want to be. And it’s if you get, get to that point, it should be a game changer. And so I need to throw a disclaimer out at this point in the podcast. Again I didn’t invent this idea. I just I mentioned it, like I borrowed this concept from my experience as a baseball coach, from watching the great coaches in our industry.

Whether it’s a, an Eric Cressey or a Mike Boyle or whoever, think about what they’re actually trying to accomplish and then select the right tactics, the right methods, the right the, really the right processes or systems or whatever, and lay them over. The way they were thinking in order to create the outcome they wanted.

And when I saw this, it was like the most obvious thing in the world. And so since then, it’s okay, we want to help people understand how to think. And I try to do this in this podcast. I’m telling you how to think about this now. Frankly, I think that if you listen to the podcast, if you read my newsletters even if you never invest a penny with me in coaching, you’re still going to understand how to think better than most of the people who are out there selling coaching, because you’re going to know how to use their particular tactic and actually fit it in with what you’re trying to accomplish rather than just.

Trying to adapt everything you do to this specific tactic and thinking that’s the magic bullet to get to where you want to go. And, we’ve tried to do this by understanding how, the prospect, the consumer, the client, how they actually think, how they behave, what their buying cycle looks like, what their client journey or prospect journey and then client journey actually looks like versus.

What we wish it looked like we’re dealing with the reality here. We, we want to think about systems, but not just, Oh yes, you need systems and here’s this system for this or this system for that, but understanding what you’re trying to accomplish as a business owner, what role systems play, how you need to not only install them, but how you need to actually make them come to life to get the outcome you want as a business owner, which is typically to.

Allow you to move your role into one that, that is more optimal for you. Allows you to scale the business, allows you to have a business that operates in some ways without you, or at least can operate without you if necessity dictates that, and even makes your business

more valuable if you want to sell.

So if you understand how to think about those things and what you’re trying to accomplish, then picking and installing the systems can make sense. But if you just grab something off the shelf. And hope it’s just going to be the band aid to cure all. It just doesn’t really work. And, I think we try to do that with most everything.

The way that we help you think about marketing, the way we help you think about the conversion process or journey, the way we help you think about client experience and systems. And it’s it’s one of those things that I hopefully you are watching or listening to this and you’re thinking, man, you know what, that was so obvious.

I don’t know why that wasn’t so readily apparent before, if this is a new concept to you and maybe you’ve already embraced it, but it should be that, right? Because it’s what you do with clients. You don’t just say, Oh, you know what? I’m going to hitch our entire training success to doing split squats.

No, it’s where does the split squat fit into our program to help our clients achieve their goals? And, I think when you understand this, it gives you this incredible power as a business owner. When you say, okay, I’m going to focus first on these concepts, how to think, how to have the right the late Charlie Munger would constantly talk about business models, or about mental models.

Because if you had the right mental models, it would help you understand decisions and tactics and strategies and business so much better and help you understand what’s right, what’s wrong, how things fit. And that’s what we’re trying to do here. We need to understand the underlying why we’re doing things.

We need to understand where we’re doing things. So basically the market that we’re serving instead of diving straight into the how, right? If you have those. The why and the where then, we can do, we can really do some things right. And the where is associated with the who, right?

Like the market you want to serve dictates some of these other things. Like some people will tell you. Hey, you only want to sell this premium priced offering. And if the market is right, if the people you’re serving, if that’s the right solution for them, that’s fine. But you know what, there are far more Toyota Camrys being sold than Rolls Royces and somebody is making a whole lot of money selling Toyota Camrys.

So if you find the market that. The mid tier solution is the best option for it. If that happens to be the market you’re serving, then you have to understand instead of trying to fit this square peg into this round hole. So that’s the secret that I think that so many people gloss over. And and I would just encourage you to spend less time chasing tactics the same way that I would encourage you to spend less time thinking that there’s Magic exercise, a magic food, a magic supplement, and odds are is the caliber coach that I expect that you are, you don’t do that.

You, you’ve graduated past that and understand that there’s no one magic exercise that solves every problem. The same is true. The business side of what you do, if you understand how to think and how to operate as a business owner, if you understand those foundational things, you have the right kind of, the right structure, the right foundation, the right mentality in place, then, Hey, if there’s a tactic that somebody’s offering that catches your eye and you think, Hey, I understand that I understand how that fits in with my business, then use it, deploy it.

But you’re deploying it. In the way that fits you versus adapting you to fit it. And that may be the most, like I said, empowering kind of power giving thing that you can have as a business owner, because if you think, you’re going to, it’s not uncommon, you’re going to buy a product or join a program and you’re going to say, man.

I’m a couple of ticks ahead of this person on this topic, actually, because I understand this at a level that, that’s deeper than what they’re sharing. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t still derive value from it. I get value from pretty much anywhere and everywhere. But it means you’re not at the mercy of of a certain tactic being the save the day thing for your business.

And the last thing that I’ll say on this topic, and you see it in the fitness, like the business to consumer side, you’ll see it with these kind of magic bullet solutions there. We see it with a side, Barry stuff and everything for weight loss, but you’ll see, experts, gurus, coaches, whoever kind of peddling their tactic is the cure all.

And they prey on desperation. And desperation can come in one of two forms, right? Like desperation can come from somebody who’s truly desperate and they feel like, Hey, I’m struggling. I need to throw this hail Mary and fix things and cure things. And I need, if I could only get over that hump and do that everything would be better.

I would be in a better place. And so they prey on that, or they prey on people that, that have had some success and some ambition. Have ambition, but then they see these other people that are maybe a little bit further ahead of where they are in their eyes. And they’re probably only seeing the highlight reel.

They’re seeing testimonials or they’re seeing what’s shown on social media. And they’re like if they’re doing this thing. I’m having this kind of sense of desperation because I’m, it’s a self imposed thing. I feel wait a minute, I should be further along. I should be doing better than this.

And they did this, so I should do it, man. People are going to prey on that emotional side of this. And so if you have this strong foundation of how to think and a deeper understanding of everything that goes into building the business you want and everything that goes into the market you’re trying to serve.

It allows you to vet those things and choose. And again, that doesn’t mean that you can’t use some of them to your advantage, but you’re not at the mercy of, fancy marketing. You’re not at the mercy of somebody who’s one size fits all tactic that frankly doesn’t fit much of anybody without some.

Retrofitting or I guess course correction. So hopefully, I know this is not this, the, this thing that you can just go and implement today in your business. And I get that, but it’s more important because if you have this, it makes all those things that you go and implement better, it makes them more effective.

It means you won’t spend as much wasted time on things that didn’t work or. Even maybe worse you won’t spend time on creating a business and an employing tactics that lead you to somewhere, frankly, you don’t want to be because I’ve had a business that by many. Many measures was a success from gross revenue to receiving awards and a big reach.

And if you’d have told me, 10 years prior that I could have achieved those things and had that kind of personal income. I’d have been thrilled, but they were the wrong metrics and it was the wrong path. And you create this kind of self imposed prison of a success that you don’t really like, but you got some golden handcuffs and it took a lot to redirect and move in a direction allowed me to have a business that I love and work with clients that, that I absolutely adore and have the in.

Income that provides financial security and opportunity in the present. But, it is lifestyle friendly and allows you to have an impact that you feel like, man, this is a legacy I want to have, and I don’t think you arrive at those places by accident, but you also don’t arrive there by cobbling together random tactics and hoping to get to a precise destination.

I know I, I dug deep on this one, but if you understand how to think, that’s the secret to building the business that you want.

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.