Fitness Business School – Using Expectations to Your Advantage

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk with you about expectations and more specifically expectations and how they relate to growing your business. Sometimes I think people really let expectations get in the way of progress. And in this episode, I’m going to teach you how to avoid that and use them to your advantage. So let’s go get started.

Welcome to the fitness business school with Pat Rigsby, the podcast for fitness entrepreneurs who want to make more income, have greater impact, and enjoy more freedom in their ideal business. If you’d like an accelerated route to these goals, email me at [email protected] and put BGA in the subject line and I’ll get you all the details about our business growth accelerator program.

When I think about growing my business, when I think about clients growing their business, it really kind of comes down to creating more value, more, more value for the same people or value for more people in most of us kind of lean towards the latter, right? We think about, okay, I need more clients. I need more people in the door, but our expectations are really kind of broken. So I wanted to help you maybe get some clarity on this and set yourself up to be in a positive frame of mind because when it comes to doing things that may not be in our comfort zone. And I know for a lot of us marketing, follow-up selling, that’s not our favorite thing about our business. A lot of times, you know, we love coaching. We love connecting with people. We love serving people, but we don’t love the marketing side of it. And so if we’ve got misplaced expectations, if we are thinking about things the wrong way and things don’t go well, it kind of sends us into this downward spiral. It sends us into this place where we don’t feel like we’re successful. So we kind of shift back and do the things that we are good at, that we are excited about. So like, when I think about getting in front of a new audience, my expectations are pretty conservative. So like if I go speak at a perform better event or in any event, really you know, I go in, I talk about the things that, that I’m good at helping people to create their ideal business, grow their business in a way that’s sustainable, that’s focused on the fundamentals that you know, that’s really authentic to them that they’re going to be happy about owning.

Well, I know that maybe 10 to 15% of the people attending that event, connect with that message, right? Those are my right people. And hopefully for the, of the, you know, 85 to 90%, I can provide some value I can help, but they probably just don’t connect with me. Maybe that they don’t like the slow pace of the way I talk or my accent. Maybe they don’t think that I, my approach is flashy enough or, you know you know, really applies to them. It can be any number of reasons, but you, it took a them wow, for me to shift away from thinking, man, I need to win them all. Now. I just, you know, I want the right people, not just more people. I want people I’d welcome into my home office and be excited about working with not just more people to buy. And it’s helped me a lot. It’s given me a lot of clarity and it’s also made going out and doing public speaking and marketing a lot lower pressure. And that’s what I wanted to, to kind of impart on you. So in the zip code that I live in there are in the neighborhood of 34,000 people, right in a zip code is probably a pretty good barometer about like people that it’s convenient for to come train with you. It’s not exact, it’s not precise, but it’s a, it’s a good starting point. And you know it, if all of those 34,000 people wanted to walk into somebody’s business, they, they wouldn’t stand a chance of being able to serve them. In fact, if you’re listening to this podcast, odds are, you couldn’t handle it. If 10% of them walked in and wanted to be your client, you wouldn’t have the space. You wouldn’t have the equipment. You wouldn’t have the coaches, it’d be overwhelming to you. Now, you may be thinking, well, I’d figure it out or whatever else.

But the point is that we don’t need a hundred percent. We don’t need 10. I mean, if you got 1% of the people in this zip code to come in and become your client, that’s 340 people, 340 people. If they were paying you even a hundred, a hundred dollars a month, which is significantly less than my average client charges. But even if they were paying you a hundred dollars a month, $34,000 a month in monthly rent, right? So we’ve got a business that is generating, okay, almost a half million dollars a year based on 1% of the population in that zip code. And, and that’s kind of the key here, right? Like of the people who opt into your email list that you follow up with, you’re not going to get the majority of the people that you send out a direct mail piece to you run a Facebook ad to you’re not to get the majority. If you go to a networking event, if you attend a chamber of commerce event, if you go to a health fair, most people are not coming in. Most people in the United States don’t belong to a fitness facility. In fact, you know, the numbers typically vary, but the last pre COVID numbers I saw about 84% of people did not belong to a fitness facility. Okay? So most people, this isn’t their thing right now. And of those 16% of people that do based on those a little bit, dated statistics. Well, they, they belong to health clubs and rec centers and Orange Theory and F45 and Club Pilates and CycleBar and your business. So if we think about it in those terms, like we don’t need the majority. We need our own small little segment. When I used that 10 to 15% that, you know, I referenced early on. If I go and do public speaking, that’s 10 to 15% of people who are in the fitness industry and care about self-improvement. They care about professional development. So that’s already pretty narrowed, right? Like that’s a smaller segment of the population. It’s not just people that have a certification. It’s not anybody who works in the fitness industry. It’s not even business owners, specifically. It’s people that actually made it a point to walk into a talk that I was doing. I’m looking at only getting 10 to 15% of the audience.

So hopefully you recognize that man, you don’t have to get them all. You want the right people, not just more people. And if you don’t get them all, that’s fine. It’s totally fine. You need to have realistic expectations that if you go out there and get two new clients a week, that’s a hundred clients a year, right? I mean 104 clients a year that you can build a great business with that. And if every client over the course of a year can introduce you in some way, bring them, bring the person in as a guest, introduce you on social media, ask somebody to come to a charity event. Something like that. If every person that you bring in each of those 100 people bring in somebody new, introduce you to somebody new. Now we’re getting of the right people in our business can multiply in a really, really meaningful way. And I think that’s really important. So before I wrap up this episode about expectations, I want to kind of bring it home and tie it into what a lot of people are experiencing.

As we start to get back to a little bit of normalcy when it comes to restrictions and being able to have people come in the gym and really trying to get our business back to where it was or beyond. I have a lot of people tell me, well, Hey, I lost 20 clients. I lost 40 clients. I lost 50 clients. They’ll tell me this, thinking that, okay, I need to get back 20, 40, 50 people. And they think of it in terms of all that, right? And so with that sort of expectation, they’re setting themselves up to fail. They’re setting themselves up to be frustrated and disappointed and depressed, rest and miserable. And the thing about it is each of those people that left left for their own reasons they left, because maybe they weren’t comfortable with, you know, the, the, the shift to training through zoom or whatever platform you chose to use the restrictions that you were under the stress in their own life, job changes any number of reasons. They had their own reasons and they’re valid to them, but they left as an individual. You didn’t have 50 people lock arms and walk out the door into hand them saying, okay, we’re just all leaving at once. That’s not how they left and that’s not how they’re coming back. So we need, need to set our expectations in a way that, you know, I can go get some of those people back one at a time, an individual, I can invite them back. I can welcome them with open arms. I can make sure that they know that they’re valued and appreciated. And then for new people, I can welcome them in. I can do the same. So set your expectations up in a way too, to really give you more minimum and help you feel confident and excited about what you’re doing and what’s possible. And if that means that it’s going to take you several months to get back to where you were, you know what, I’ll be fine because you survived the previous year, year and a half, almost two years, you can thrive on that heels of this. You can do this and do it the right way and do it in a way that doesn’t drag you down like an anchor. You can do it in a way that you feel good about, feel positive about, and sets you up to not only get back to where you were, but to exceed that. So understand that a lot of times, realistic expectations really are a foundation of your success.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School. And before you go, I have a quick announcement. When I first connect with a fitness business owner, they almost always ask me, “How can I get more leads or how can I get more clients?” Well, I have an exclusive offer for you and it’s going to help you do just that. As a listener of this show, you can test drive Fitness Lead Academy for six full weeks for just a dollar. Fitness Lead Academy is a one of a kind program where you get done-for-you marketing tools and coaching to attract more qualified prospects and convert them into paying clients. Imagine having three marketing emails written for you each and every week for easy-to-deploy promotions provided to you that are proven to convert and they’re ready to use and proven ads and social media posts given to you each and every month as well. Plus you have access to three weekly live video coaching sessions to help you with everything from dialing in your brand to navigating things like building funnels and getting ads approved. You get all of this and more when you join Fitness Lead Academy. And to prove that FLA can serve you as your virtual marketing department and not only save you plenty of time, but also consistently bring you more leads and clients, you can get access to the entire coaching program for six full weeks. Again, for just $1. If it delivers for you in the way that I expect it will, you can continue on for just $199 a month. So basically, just one additional client each month and you’re ROI positive. And I’m sure that if you apply what we give you, you’re going to get more than just one additional client each month. And you’re going to likely save at least 10 hours a month to take advantage of this special offer. Just go to TestDriveFLA.com to try it out for six full weeks. If it’s not what you’re looking for, you can cancel it any time.

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