Fitness Business School – Thriving in the New Hiring Landscape

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And in today’s episode I want to talk with you about how to navigate and thrive in the new hiring landscape. 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.

At least once a week, I have conversations or I’m in a mastermind group talking with business owners about how the hiring landscape has changed, how it’s tougher to find good employees, how young people may not necessarily be o of the caliber employees are ready to work at the
level they might have been a few years ago. And, and a number of things that, that I think have really kinda become magnified since the the pandemic.

And I think that there is some truth to what they’re saying. I think that there’s probably a little bit of a narrow perspective in the way that a lot of people talk about it. So I wanted to unpack some thoughts about how you can not only navigate this kind of new hiring landscape, but how you can actually thrive in
it. So the first thing that I would tell you is that it is different. It, there is no doubt that hiring employees, bringing in people as interns and trying to graduate them to being employees, all of that is different than it might have been 5, 10, 15 years ago. And I guess from my perspective, I’m not terribly surprised by
that, and I’m not really upset by it because plenty of other things are different too. Everything evolves in a business landscape. I mean, maybe for people who’ve only been doing this for a short window of time, do they see this as the big change?

But since I opened my first training business, we’ve had the advent of social media, we’ve had the launch of the iPhone, we’ve had things like deal the day sites. We’ve had so much business being driven by things like Facebook ads, text messaging has become a really viable marketing channel. I mean, there’s so
many things that, that, that have evolved in that side of things. And I’m sure that five years into my journey as a business owner, there were plenty of other business owners saying, man, this market’s changing and the things that used to work don’t work now. And I think that’s business. I think that if
you’re not adaptable, you’re going to struggle. Now, that being said I always find myself rooted in what I consider the fundamentals. There may be a better way to articulate that, but there are things that I think are kind of guiding principles or ideas that I always adhere to.

But I think that as business evolves, you have to adapt those fundamentals to market preferences to the way that people navigate the world, the other opportunities available to them. And that’s a big one. So if we think about how things are continually changing, and if you’re open to accepting that things
are continually changing and they’re not exclusive to the hiring landscape, then I think what I have to say about your opportunities to hire going forward are, it could be really helpful and potentially a competitive advantage for you. So the first thing that I would say is there are different and
often more appealing opportunities to young prospective employees than there have been in the past. And that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily, quote unquote better jobs. It means that they may be more appealing to what’s important to that person in their current stage of life.

So if you think about the simple things like work at home, opportunities that people can be remote workers. If you think about the fact that somebody could go drive for Uber or Lyft or DoorDash and make money and not feel like they have a quote unquote bad boss or work the hours they choose or
sit around and listen to music or scroll through their phone while they’re waiting on a delivery to take and drop off at somebody’s house. So maybe they don’t have to, to interact with people. I mean, there are more people trying to hire and have been since the, the end of the pandemic than there
have been at any other time during my time in the business world. I mean, I can’t drive a mile without seeing signs. Not only that people are aggressively hiring, but that people are paying more than they used to.

That people are like, a lot of people are offering, Hey, get a check the same day, the your first day of employment. It’s not like, Hey, you gotta work two weeks to to, to get a paycheck. I mean, businesses are adapting around us too. I mean, it stands to reason the way that we approached it in the past isn’t going to
work exactly the same. So what does that mean for us? Well, the first thing that I would tell you is the idea of bringing somebody in and saying, Hey, you’re just gonna have to, to earn your way up the ladder and you’re gonna have to work the worst shifts for the worst pay. And you not create an environment
that’s inviting for that person. Probably is only going to work if they don’t have other options available to them. If they do have other options available to them, there are other people who are going to create a more appealing or inviting work environment.

Now, you may be somebody, there are plenty of people. I’m 51 as I record this. There are plenty of people my age who like to be nostalgic and think back, well, hey, this is how it used to be, or this is how it was in my day. I mean, I would tell you, get over it. It’s, I mean, this is the landscape that we’re in, just like the
landscape my parents grew up in, just like the landscape their parents grew up in. All were different and probably more, in many ways, more forgiving and welcoming as time passed, adapt, create a better work environment for people. Now again, there’s the supply and demand factor. I see plenty of jobs
out there where they’ve created a great, a great demand and there aren’t as many jobs available. I mean, there are plenty of companies, whether it be high-end training, like top of the pyramid training businesses like Cressey Sports performance or IFAST or whatever else where they’re still gonna get a lot
more applications for internships than they will have spots available.

If you want to go work in professional baseball or any professional sport, there’s still gonna be a lot more applicants than jobs available. If you want to go get a crack as a lowly paid assistant coach to forge a career in college sports, there are, you’re gonna have to work for bad pay and long hours and all
that stuff. And so the supply and demand thing still is true, but if there’s not that much demand, then we’re gonna have to adapt. We are going to have to say, okay, do we have to pay more than we’ve paid in the past? And if so, you’re gonna have to evolve your business, your business model accordingly. Do we need
to shift to an environment where we need fewer employees? If you’ve traditionally been somebody who did one-on-one or semi-private, maybe you need to switch to small group.

Are there things that we do in-house that could be done in a remote fashion so we ca can cast a bigger net? Can we outsource or delegate things, whether it be admin work or bookkeeping work or marketing work that maybe previously we used to do in house. So again, we can cast a bigger net. We can, we can
probably hire people to do $10 an hour work that, or maybe 10 hours a week work that we couldn’t find somebody locally to do. If we’re trying to go get interns, we have to make it a better intern environment. We have to show that people are going to get paid, they’re going to learn and become better at what
they’re doing while they’re there. I mean, when I first started this, a lot of, there were a lot of zero pay. You’re just getting college credit.

Come stand around and clean equipment type of internships now. I mean, you have to deliver something of value if you’re gonna get better candidates. So in, in short, you have to create a more inviting atmosphere. You have to probably look for ways to get more applicants in the door, whether it’s
making it more appealing in what you’re providing or creating a setting where you’re not bound by geography or you can outsource to people that provide these services for a living. I mean if you were trying to hire an internal bookkeeper, you can always find somebody virtually to or remote to do
bookkeeping. You can delegate a lot of the, virtually all of the online marketing can be done in that fashion too. So not everything has to be hired in the way that you used to hire. You can streamline a lot of things.

But then the other side of this, and I don’t know your unique situation, but a lot of times, frankly, people that they were self-employed and now they’re becoming employers and they’re just not very good bosses. They’re not somebody you would want to work for. They’re not creating a culture and
environment that somebody would want to work in. And the these are skills that you’re gonna have to develop. It’s a desire you’re gonna have. It’s no different than coaching. I’ve always thought that in our industry, we have the potential to be truly wonderful employers because we are used to coaching in an
environment that hopefully we’re creating a positive client experience. We are helping people become better versions of themselves. We’re helping them achieve their goals. All these things are applicable to the employees that you hire as well.

But you have to be willing to do it. You have to be willing to say, okay, I’m going to create a setting where we are going to have the, the best possible work environment. And that may not sound super appealing. And you may just kind of brush it off and say, well, I’m paying these people to do a job. Well,
if that’s working for you, great. But if it’s not, then perhaps we have to take a different approach. So if you want to succeed in the current employee employer landscape, those are some of the changes that you have to make. The last change, I will tell you that you probably want to at least consider is saying, okay, how
do I hire somebody that has the character traits, the personality traits, the the soft skills that, that I need and create the systems that they just have to execute?

Because I mean, go anywhere, go to a restaurant, go to any retail store there, there’s somebody working right there, there’s somebody working there, there are people working the win the window at McDonald’s. There are people working the window at Chick-fil-A there are people checking you out at, at retail
establishments. There, there are people working other places. And in most cases, these are not people that come with tons of prerequisite experience specific to that industry, but they, the business is created an environment that person can be a valuable employee because they have the system around them. They
have the framework around them. They’ve built an infrastructure that allows that employee to contribute without having four or five years of experience doing that specific thing. So that’s the other piece of this, can you make your business more systematic so that somebody who’s competent and has the desire and
the people skills to work can come in and, and do things?

And I’ve seen plenty of people that have, when we were at Doug’s Spurling’s gym for a boardroom meeting, they’ve got tablets on, on the equipment where people can see, see the workouts that I think that there are opportunities for us to make some of the people that we hire, if we have to, we can make
them instructors, we can make them facilitators. They don’t have to be people with 10 or 15 years of experience. Now, is that optimal? No. But if, if that’s the market that you’re in, if that’s the hiring environment that you’re in, then you have to adapt or you get left behind. So hopefully some of those
ideas or some of those thoughts or things that help you navigate the hiring landscape going forward, because some people are gonna win in this market. Some people always win in every market. And I want you to be one of those people. I want your business to be one of those businesses that thrive. And if you get it right, it’s a business that can potentially scale, whether it is multiple locations, licensing or franchising or coaching other people to
do it. So build this now. Use these tips, watch your business grow.

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

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