Fitness Business School – What it Takes to Scale Your Fitness Business

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I wanna talk with you about what it takes to scale a fitness business. 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.

For years, I’ve tried to organize the way that I think about businesses into kind of different stages or categories. There’s that early stage business that usually has some revenues, some clientele, but it’s just getting out of the gate. And one of the easy ways that you organize your thinking on that is saying, okay, business is
under five or 10 grand a month in revenue, depending on what type of business it is. If it’s a facility based business, then probably under 10 grand. If it’s subleasing online, then maybe even under five grand a month. But it’s that early stage business that is largely just it. It’s being self-employed. It’s not necessarily
something that you would think of as a a true business. It’s somebody working for themselves as much as anything. And then that kind of second stage is where I think most independent fitness businesses fall that 10 to 20 or $25,000 a month range, which is a business I’m gonna talk about in a separate episode, where
I think you can have a, have a solid livelihood.

You can pay yourself relatively well, you can do a lot of things depending on how you set it up, but in that kind of window of business or in that kind of business, there’s definitely some things that, that are constraints. Unless you decide, okay, I’m going to scale and run this as a bigger business that is
system focused, that that relies on number numbers to drive decisions and not just emotion or impulse. There there things that I’m gonna delegate and outsourced. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about that type of business because I think that type of business, that 25, 20, 20 $5,000 a month up to probably even 80 to a hundred thousand dollars a month, that’s the business that if you want, if that’s the business you want to own, there are some things that I think are non-negotiables that have to be in place.

And for us, that’s the boardroom level business. That $250,000 to million dollar annually revenue type business versus the IBA business that falls in that a hundred, $120,000 a year to, to $250,000 a year mark. And to have that higher end business, the first thing that I would tell you you have to do is have some sort of strategic planning in place. You have to have a way to organize the way you do things. And usually that’s gonna mean clarifying your vision and making sure that the decisions that you’re making, the people you’re hiring are all in alignment with that you need some sort of, I think more short term planning
system in place. A lot of people use quarterly planning or 90 day planning. I tend to gravitate towards six week planning, but you need something that allows you to have specific benchmarks.

You’re trying to hit projects, you’re trying to accomplish some sort of way to move things forward, especially when you are not the only one doing the things. And then you, you need a way to track numbers, whether you’ve got a, a business scoreboard in place or some other kind of way to know, okay,
are we hitting, are whatever you wanna call ’em. I know some people call ’em KPIs, some people just call them their numbers, but whatever the metrics are that are indicative of you operating in the way that you want, operating in a way that is moving towards your goals, and then you probably actually have to have
a model, more of a framework for a business that other people can facilitate and execute on your behalf. Having programming that isn’t fly by the seat of your pants, having a schedule that somebody manages that, whether it’s you plugging in people’s individual schedule and who’s covering certain things, or you
even having somebody on your team, you gotta have operational systems in place.

You need to have a way to train your staff to onboard new people, to, to manage your finances and to systematically fill the pipeline with leads that ultimately become clients. Now, I mean, I know I’ve talked about a lot of these things in, in a real general sense, but that’s when, when I look at the
businesses that are just hanging out in that $15,000 a month range, usually the things that I just alluded to and a few other things that, that I would call operational systems for a lack of a more individually specific way of describing them. Those businesses don’t really have so much of that stuff. A lot of it is in
their head. They don’t track their numbers all that well. They may be haphazard about how they pay themselves. A lot of times they rely more on part-time employees.

And, and in many ways, I would tell you that’s totally fine. I mean, it’s your business. You get to decide what you want. But if you want to scale a business, this is the sort of stuff that you have to think about. You actually have to think in terms of business not training and somehow making money, providing
training. It’s okay, how do we operate a business? And this is the service we provide as a business. It’s really an identity shift. I think in, in many cases, you become an actual business owner. You actually have to think in terms of being a leader, managing other people, managing your systems, your
operations, your finances, and the thing that you’re selling is this service that helps people improve their health or their performance or their fitness. And the reason I wanted to touch on this is I think a lot of people will say, Hey, I wanna scale.

I want to grow. But they only see the, the highlight reel of what the growing actually involves, right? They see, Hey, I could get a bigger house or I could take more vacations, or I could drive a new car because these people that have these bigger businesses that generate this amount of revenue and this
amount of owner income, that’s what they do, which is totally fine. I mean, and there may be some truth to that, but as with a lot of things in the world that often operates around social media, but you see what people want you to see and you don’t necessarily understand what went into that. And by touching
on some of these things that go into scaling a business, I think you can get a little bit of a clearer picture in saying, okay, maybe that is what I want.

Maybe it isn’t. But you get to decide. You don’t just get to have a bigger business that produces more revenue and has more employees and serves more clients. You actually have to build that and operate it. And it’s a lot, a lot of changes from a business that you are the, the kind of center of the universe in that
you are the one providing the majority of the training sessions. You’re the one doing all the marketing. You’re the one doing all the selling. If you’re doing anything that, that you’re handing off to other people, it’s either, Hey, I’ve got an accountant, or maybe I get somebody to run some ads a little bit of the time, or
I’ve got some part-time employees who cover a few sessions. There’s this shift and I’m not suggesting for a moment that either of them is better than one or the other, right?

Like, it’s a choice. And I know for me, there’s a type of business I enjoy operating that is definitely not a corporate type of business that is the bigger kind of operation that has countless moving parts, and it’s big enough. I’ve always felt like if it requires an HR department, it’s probably too big for me to want to run it. It’s just not small, it’s not nimble, it’s not the people involved I can’t really have a relationship with. And, and so I know where my sweet spot is. And, and I would tell you that you may think, Hey, you know what, even after you’ve mentioned all that stuff, that’s what I want. That’s what I want to grow to. Wonderful. Then those are the things that you need to figure out how to put in place and, and manage as an owner if you want to scale a business.

And what’s great is there are different ways to go about that, right? I mean, in, in a very self-serving fashion, I’ll tell you, we have our scale program that is installing all those types of operating systems to run a business that can grow to seven figures or I would say low, mid seven figures. And that
type of infrastructure that we provide in the scale program would, would empower somebody to do that. Some franchises, not all, some franchises are really great at providing some of these same types of systems and stuff from an infrastructure standpoint. And if you have the, the desire to build that bigger
type of business, you’re gonna need these things because again, it’s not just do more of the same, that kind of concept of what got you here won’t get you there. That’s, I mean, that’s pretty true when it comes to making that jump from this business where you are the kind of primary driver in everything to
having a business that actually operates like a business.

I know that’s just a stream of consciousness about how to scale a business or what you need to consider. But after a few conversations in the past week with people who talked about wanting to scale, but really didn’t have any idea of all the components that went into it, I felt like this was a topic that more
people might need to learn about, might need to hear so they can make informed decisions. So if you wanna scale, this is it.

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

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

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