Fitness Business School – Virtual Business Coaching – Connecting

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in this episode. I want to kind of kick off a series of what I would do if I were your business coach. And so we’re gonna go through kind of step by step and talk about different facets of your business and some things that I would walk through and try to optimize specific fit to your business. So we’ve got a lot to unpack. 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 til the end of this episode, because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

So I thought this might be kind of a neat way to get things going for 2022 and just kind of take, take the role of being your business coach through kind of the lens of this podcast. And you know, it’s funny because I feel like a lot of experts don’t really give a whole lot of valuable stuff when, you know, in their marketing and anything that they put out there, it’s kind of all the secrets are behind the curtain, so to speak and for, you know, the low, low price of 15, $20,000, you can have access to some of them. Well, I think we’re gonna do it a different way for the next few episodes. And I’m just going to take you through some, some things that I would coach you to do, knowing that, you know, as a listener, each, each listener’s business is, is different and they, they have their own kind of unique individuality. They have their own goals, the business owners have different strengths.

So when you are listening to this, understand that, you know, there’s some constraints that I’m working within to, to, to come up with this, but I could tell you, like, if I’m your coach, these are things that may have had to be adapted, you know, 10, 20% for, for some business owners. But I would say that the vast majority of the great businesses that I’ve worked with have kind of leaned into this stuff. And, you know, I’ve been doing business coaching for fitness business owners for about 17 years now. And so this isn’t all like 17 year old stuff, but it’s definitely the culmination of what I’ve seen work. And especially what I’m seeing work right now, and help people be poised to not only be successful in 2022 and beyond. So during this episode, I’m gonna talk with you about the connect unit.

So when I think about coaching businesses, I, I break it into three units. I break it into connect, convert, and coach. Now in the past, I used to call connect, attract, but I, I felt like that kind of implied the, you could just be like magnetically attractive and people just flock you without you having to proactively go do the work. And I felt like connect was a better word to be reflective of us being the ones, having to play offense. We’re the ones having to go out and make it happen. So when it comes to connect, connect, and convert should be thought of as separate kind of functions. Most of the time connecting with somebody new is different than moving that person from being a you know, a, a lead directly to a client, they go kind of from a lead. So for me, a lead would be somebody who, you know, opts into an email list. They join a free Facebook group. They give you permission to text them. They join your connection database, but is somebody giving you permission to follow up with them? Who has an interest in maybe the problems you solve, the goals you help people achieve.

They may, they may not be interested right now in taking action though. So for the connect unit, our, our goal is to populate our, our list, our audience of people, so that we can have these people to follow up with, to educate, to motivate, to, to move to that kind of prospect and ultimately client stage a business now understand that getting somebody’s attention and connecting with them cold is one of the hardest things that we do most people in your area are probably kind of invisible to you, and you’re probably kind of invisible to them. So we need to understand that this is, this is difficult. This isn’t just, Hey, I put it out and everybody will flock to me. No, I need to proactively focus on a single target market and create content and great lead magnets to speak specifically to the person I wanna serve. And, and I can, can’t emphasize that enough.

Now, your specifically, maybe, you know, somebody who lives within a certain radius of your facility, if you’re offline, it may be you know, a, a demographic that wants to solve a specific problem offline or online, but, but, but understand you are not for all people. And the more you kind of embrace the idea of going narrow, the, the better off you’re gonna be and the faster you’re gonna grow. So we want to create content lead magnets that speak directly to the problems. The prospect that we wanna serve, that this lead is trying to solve, or the goal they want to achieve. And it could be a book. It could be checklists. It could be, you know, a, a little program. It could be gift cards, it could be quiz. It could be any number of things, but it has to be perceived as highly valuable by them. You know, I see people all the time say, Hey, subscribe to my newsletter. I don’t think we’re valuing people’s attention. The way that we should attention is a currency. That probably is every bit as valuable as money. And I’ll give you a good example.

How many books or books on Kindle have you bought? And you’ve not. So your time and attention was more valuable to you than the money was. So, so keep that in mind. Now, I will tell you that for most of the successful businesses, not all, but most that, that I work with, ultimately they get to a point where lead generation is part of what they do because that, you know, that that agency, or that ad the, you know, the they’re able to basically have something working for them to generate leads. That’s kind of like this mini employee, if you will generating leads 24 7, 365. So that’s part of what we want to do. And if you can’t pay for it, then you have to think, you know, I’m gonna invest at least 60 minutes a day in list building. I’m going to spend 60 minutes a day in connecting with new people, whether it’s going out networking, whether it’s public speaking, whether it’s doing stuff online, organic, but you have to understand that you buy your audience. And that’s a good thing. We want there to be a barrier to entry because it Wes out the people who aren’t willing to invest the money or the time. Now we want to think in terms of the finance financial side of this, at least for fitness businesses, this is a kind of a good rule of thumb. Don’t, don’t think as much as, Hey, I’m going to allocate 8% of my budget to marketing as much as, Hey, my goal is to be able to break even within 30 days on the money that I spend. Now, if your cash flow is great, it can be longer than that.

But if you spend a hundred dollars this month on leads, then from that kind of pool of leads, that that hundred dollars created, you want to be at least break, even in your return on investment from that group, having collected at least a hundred dollars. Now, again, rule of thumb, there, there there’s more to it than that. Now I will tell you that for local businesses, in my experience, your goal should be to have a list of at least about 10 times your desired client base. So if you want a hundred clients and would like to have a local email list of at least about a thousand people. Now, if we’ve got an online business people that use this methodology, I think if they’re gonna earn you half million dollars a year in gross revenue, almost all of them have 20, 25,000 person email lists. If email marketing is a core part of their strategy, but if not, then they’re gonna have that kind of audience in some other platform in a, a Facebook group. And you know, multiples of that is, you know, their, their Instagram audience, whoever it is now, speaking of these other audiences social media audiences are wonderful. They’re, they’re great, but understand that you don’t control the platform. So my goal is to augment and a list with one other kind of channel to connect with, with these leads that ultimately we wanna become prospects. So we, another channel that we can educate and motivate through and make offers for me personally, free Facebook group works out pretty well. That way the podcast kind of works out that way. We, we do a couple things. My suggestion is better to be really good at one than water yourself down and do multiple. So get, get your, build your email list and then compliment it, Hey, I’m gonna follow up via text, or I’m gonna follow up the free Facebook group some other way that you can connect and, and commit to being really good at that one channel.

And what’s great is let’s say that you choose Facebook. Well then maybe your organic marketing approach and your advertising approach are gonna be on that platform platform as well. And it allows you just to full focus your efforts, because it it’s so much better to be great at one social media channel, rather than water yourself down and try to be, you know, proficient at three or four. And our goal is to make sure that everybody that we’re connecting with on is also joining our email list. So we’re not at the mercy of the platform, should something change, should our access change should the way they operate change. And then we’ve got the best of both worlds. We can meet people on the platforms they use, but we also can connect with them through our email list, which is always gonna be a, a great channel for relationship building and selling. Now, when it comes to offline you know, speaking, presenting, networking, their they’re really high powered lead generation mechanisms because you’re, you’re getting to pre-sale, you’re kind of getting to move somebody along that convert continuum in that first interaction, which is amazing. I mean, you get to not only connect with these new people, but you know, you get to build a relationship with them. You get to position yourself as an authority. You get to provide some, some education, some problem solving, but understand that if you are going to do things like public speaking and strategic alliances and networking you know, the, the burden falls to us to collect the contact information.

We need to take charge of the follow up. We need to not be the person that just says, well, if I put it out there, they’ll find me. If I give them my business card, they’ll follow up. So we have to be the ones to facilitate that. And the last thing that I will say about lead generation tactically is things like strategic alliances and networking and public speaking and direct mail. My experience is they are probably gonna provide you more of a direct ROI. If you have an offline business, then a lot of the online stuff that people feel focus on. And some of that simply is because so many people have kind of vacated using those tactics and, and, and pursuing new business that way, that there’s even more opportunity there than there would’ve been five or 10 years ago. Last thing that I’ll say before we wrap up what I would do, if I was coaching on lead generation is we have to track everything. We need to know what our targets are for the month for the number of leads we want to add to whatever kind of mechanisms we’re using, email list, Facebook groups, whatever. And we want to know what our actuals are. So we want to know, okay, is it working the way that it needs, needs to work? If not, what do I need to improve, or do I need to replace something tracking our numbers is gonna give us feedback. It’s gonna save us time. It’s gonna keep us from spending a lot of time and money on things that don’t work. So if you’ve been kind of averse to tracking, now’s the time to change that.

So kind of summarizing track everything. We want to have one online or one paid approach to lead generation one, what we’ll call organic, whether it’s online or offline approach. And then I’ll talk more in, in a later episode about referrals, but we want to have one referral mechanism. I’d rather you have those three things than 10 things that you poured a lot less effort into individually. So track ’em all have those. And then we’ll talk in the next episode about how you start to convert those leads Along this path to becoming clients.

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