Fitness Business School – Using Connection as a Driver

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I wanna talk with you about why connection is the driver for business success. Let’s get started.

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.

One of the cool things that I’ve seen happen with business owners over the years is they’ve become more focused on retaining clients, and they’ve started to really appreciate some of the stuff that you hear a lot in mainstream business circles about how much more it costs to acquire a new customer, client, or patient than it costs to retain one, tracking their numbers, doing some things like using softwares and really trying to build relationships with clients.

But sometimes I think that we let the pendulum swing so far in one direction that we miss out on some concepts that may provide a really cool opportunity. One of those is understanding that lifetime value isn’t necessarily the same thing as an unbroken membership. A lot of times people say, well, hey, I want my clients to stay consecutively for an average of two years or three years or whatever else. And, and hey, it’s great if people stay for a long time and, and never have any
interruption in their membership. But to me, the, the greater benefit is in having a true connection with somebody so that anytime that they’re training, they’re training with you, and hopefully they’re training a lot more frequently than when they’re not. Because let’s face it, it’s not a fail if you know you have a
client, but all of a sudden they’re gonna be gone for an entire summer and they have to stop their membership, that’s not a fail on your part.

Or maybe work takes them away for a series of months or, or life circumstances kind of cause them to stop. I mean, I spend a lot of time with a variety of different families, especially even in our youth baseball organization where, I mean, we’ve had parents who’ve been undergoing cancer treatments.
We’ve had parents who’ve had newborns, we’ve had parents with like five kids and people traveling great distances and job changes and all that sort of stuff. And seeing how the, the ups and downs and ebbs and flows of life actually happen. It’s not about us. If somebody says, look, I need to take a break, sometimes it is just, okay, this in its current structure with its current schedule can’t be a priority for me right now. It doesn’t mean that self-care is not a priority. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to exercise.

It just may mean that doing things in the way that we’re doing them at the schedule, we’re doing them, or even in some cases at the price I’m doing them based on people’s financial circumstances. Sometimes they need to take a pause. And, and I know that having done this on the, the business coaching side, but
still coaching I’ve got a number of people who were clients of mine from like 2006 to 2009 that are parts of programs right now. I’ve had people that were my first, second, third, fourth, and fifth individual, one-on-one private clients come back in the last three years and join group coaching programs, do one-on-one stuff with me by products. Some of those people who’ve been around for 90% of the time involved in things we’re doing some of them have come and
gone, and maybe they’ve been involved 50 or 60% of the time, but still, if you think about that, right?

Even somebody who’s involved 50% of the time, and as I record this it’s 2023, and somebody who would’ve arrived in like 2007, I mean, that’s 16 years. If I get somebody who’s just around 50% of the time, that’s eight years of time that we’ve spent together working together to help
them achieve their goals and solve their problems. I mean, that’s a pretty powerful relationship. And if you looked at it from an unbroken membership standpoint, maybe it’s not that impressive because there’d be pauses and stops and starts and people thinking, okay, well you know what? I need
something different. Or people getting caught up in shiny object syndrome and looking at this other thing and thinking it’s cool, or maybe just life changed and they didn’t feel like this could be something they could prioritize at the time.

And for me, that’s okay because I believe that connection truly has two parts in our industry. And I’m saying our industry as coaches, whether you’re coaching fitness, nutrition, a sports skill or business connection has two parts, relationships and results. Obviously, if you want long-term connection, you
have to be able to deliver results. They have to believe that you can truly help them solve problems and achieve goals. But then the second part of this is you, you have to be willing to build relationships with people. You have to be willing to care. And I think that you have to show up for people. You can’t only
be transactional and say, well, hey, I care about you as long as your credit card payment goes through, because that happens a lot, right? The tone changes the minute somebody stops paying or the minute the the credit card expires.

And man, I just don’t think that’s the way that things should be. I think the, that the reality is if somebody is your client and you genuinely care about them and they left on good terms, then we should continue to want to coach them and care about them. And that, that’s the way that I’ve approached this for as long as I can remember. I mean, I still regularly, like every week connect with at least one or two of the people who I coached in baseball over 20 years ago. I am here to help them and here to support them just as I would have then. Then o obviously the relationships change and the needs change, but that’s how you get people coming back. And, and just from a purely business standpoint, I mean, it’s silly for you to spend so much time acquiring a client, put so much
effort into bringing a client on board and, and spending the money to generate leads and move people through your pipeline and then not value them as much as you can.

So my suggestion to you is, unless somebody leaves in a fashion that you would never want them back, then you need to probably make sure that you’re viewing every time somebody says, Hey, I need to stop my membership. Yeah, we’re gonna try to win them back to continue, but if not, we need to make sure
that they leave feeling great about their experience. I mean, give them home workouts they can do on their own. Check in on them from time to time, not just when you’re selling them something, care about those people and you’re gonna see plenty of them come back. You’re gonna see it happen all the time. I see it very regularly when we reach out to people just to check in on them. It, it’s not uncommon for somebody to say, Hey, I was thinking about you. I felt like I needed to set up a call or come to a coaching session or something like that.

And it sparks that kind of interest, but it also helps them to understand that you do care about them as a person. And I think all of us want coaches that, that believe in us and care about us because that, I mean, in a very transactional industry, that’s a huge difference maker. So if you want to build a
better business, don’t just focus on retention. Yes, do focus on retention, but don’t only focus on retention, focus on building true connection and be okay if somebody comes and goes, but when they are training, they’re training with you.

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

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