Fitness Business School – What It Takes to Win

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I wanna talk with you about what it takes to win. So 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 end 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.

So as I kind of get into this episode, it’s probably going to sound a little bit like name dropping or whatever else, but you’ll understand in a minute if you bear with me where I’m going with this. So, throughout the time that I’ve been working in either the fitness industry or the other things that I’ve
done during my kind of career path as a business coach, as a consultant, as a franchise, or I’ve had the good fortune to work with any number of people in some, some pretty cool formats.

I mean, early on, you know, I hosted some big live events, and I had guys like Joel Marion and Mike Boyle and Justin Goff, and you know, plenty of other people come and speak. And some of those guys have built, like, I mean, built eight, nine-figure businesses. When we, when we had those events later on when I founded a franchise organization, I mean, we had Cressey Sports Performance as a franchisee. We had Ifast with Mike Robertson, Bill Hartman, we had Vince Gabriel, we had Luca Hocaver, we had Molly Galbraith, they were franchisees. I’ve done coaching consulting with Precision Nutrition,
Perform Better, Iron Tribe Fitness, the Camp Transformation Centers, if you’re not familiar with that they’ve got a hundred locations you know, Coach Catalyst, KNY, you know, a bunch of successful companies that, that have a lot of, you know, a lot of impact in the industry I’ve done consulting for. I’ve partnered with Nick Nanton on projects who’s won any number of crazy amounts of awarding awards, including like over 20 Emmys for creating documentaries. I mean, heck,
the guy who’s on the cover of Success Magazine this month, Lewis Howes came to speak in an event of mine for free.

So we, you know, we’ve had a lot of stuff that, that I’ve been able to be around. And I, when I tell you this about these folks you know, I’m not suggesting that I had some profound impact on their success or whatever else. A and some of ’em have gone, you know, I was able to maybe help
them along the way, and they’ve just gone on to these bigger things and they’ve done such a cool, you know, kind of a cool array of stuff all over the spectrum.

And I’m not, you know, there are so many other people that I’ve missed in discussing this. You know, guys like, you know, collaborating with Eric Ruth on stuff, Alwyn Cosgrove on stuff, you know, Mike Roussell and I are doing some cool stuff now in the nutrition world you know, these top achievers, and I’ve only
used people’s names here that are kind of front facing in the industry that you wouldn’t know because there are just as many super impressive people that are in coaching programs or have been in coaching programs that you know, that you wouldn’t know because they’re just doing incredible work either
behind the scenes or in their local market that are, you know, just top flight, high achievers and every sense of the word. And so what got me thinking about this was, I, you know, I was in Florida hosting the boardroom mastermind meeting that we had with some of our, again, high achievers, and Doug
Spurling and I run that.

And it, you know, it’s just, it reminded me of how those people that, that I just shared and, and the other people that, you know, maybe you don’t know, but I know how successful they are. They all kind of share these same traits. You know, the people that may be winning professionally and hopefully
they’re winning personally. I mean, I don’t profess to know every facet of these people’s lives, but I know that the, you know, these guys are doing some great things professionally and, you know, they all share so many of the same traits, even though if you look at any one of them, they’re distinctly different
than the others. And maybe what they’re doing, you know, maybe the target market they’re serving or the format that they do things through even the things that, that they are doing, whether it’s a franchise or a certification or it’s coaching, you know, professional athletes or doing business coaching
or any of that stuff man, they all are just different than the average person.

And I say that knowing that, I don’t know that that’s like what they were all was hardwired to be. I just think that that’s what they’ve become. They have have higher expectations of themself, right? They know every day that they’ve got to produce results, they take a lot of personal responsibility. They go out there and they take responsibility from moving the needle on whatever is important in their business. Now, it, it’s not like this perfect tactical thing where every one of them is moving the needle in the same way on the same stuff. Because what somebody is doing that’s a business coach may be different than what they’re doing if they’re focused on consumers. What Nick Nanton is doing, creating Emmy winning documentaries like the Dickie V documentary that I got to be a
part of as an executive producer. Like they, those are different things tactically, but I promise you they’re always doing the important
things, and they’re never saying, oh, I didn’t have time for that, or I’ll get to it next week. It’s always, they protect their time, their energy in a way that they’re not
spending their time doing the, the lowest items on the totem pole. And it’s not that they’re above that or whatever else, they just know where they’re trying to go, and they do the things necessary to get there. And so they have just a different standard for themselves, a different bar that they, they set. You
know, my buddy and longtime friend, collaborator, everything, Justin Yule, he does something during our annual planning meetings where he, he basically sets out this objective with people who come and we, we identify like what their best month was in the previous year, or maybe the average of their three
best month.

I mean, you know, but they’re setting this bar of what their higher levels of performance are, and then that becomes the floor. The goal of that for the upcoming year is like, that’s the floor. Like, you don’t, you know, you can get there, you know, you’re capable of doing this. Now don’t go below it anymore.
And that’s what I think has happened with so many of the people that, that I’ve got to work with. And that’s why I shared to some of those people, because I try to be a student of the successful people that I’m, that I’m around, whether it’s people I’ve got to, to speak beside people, I’ve got to partner with people I’ve got to coach. Man, you can always learn and see why they are as successful as they are if you’re willing to actually pay attention.

But see, I think most people pay attention to the wrong stuff. You know, they you know, they’ll look at Eric Cressey and Pete Dupois with Cressey’s Sports Performance and, you know, Eric’s been more front facing. Pete is doing cool stuff, sharing now and doing some coaching. So you
know, it’s good because I know how, how smart he is and how much impact he has. They may say, well, those guys train baseball players, I’m gonna train baseball players. Or they may say, well, hey, I’ve seen the Vince or Luca or Alicia do business coaching, so I’m gonna get into that because those guys are
successful. Or you know, Mike Robertson’s created a certification, or Molly’s created a certification, so I’m gonna do that. Instead of thinking, well, how do they do it? Not what are they doing?

And that’s the secret, because there are plenty of people who flop in all of those areas. There are far in fact, there are infinitely more people who flop in all of those areas than than succeed. So you need to be thinking about like, okay, who were they when they started? What are the things that they’ve done to
get to where they’re going? What, what kind of perseverance did they have? How committed were they? Because what you’ll find is it’s not all exactly the same. Like, you don’t need to deliver the exact same type of content that an Eric Cressey would, but you need to focus on the consistency and the
quality of his work. You need to focus on how much effort somebody’s putting in to, you know, to connect with their market, to, to develop their market, to serve their market. And then you can start to worry about the, the tactical ways that they build a business around that, because the, you know, Hey,
I’m gonna do small group training, because that’s what Doug Spurling does.

Well, you know, there are plenty of people who do small group training and make less than $10,000 a month instead of doing a, a million dollars a, a year like Doug does. So maybe you need to peek behind the curtain and say, man, what is Doug doing to get there? What has he done to build a business that
essentially, other than doing a team meeting, which I have to laugh, since he just zooms into at this point, he doesn’t even attend live, even though he lives like 10 minutes from his gym. You know it, how did he get to that point? Don’t think about where he is. Think about what he did to get there, and that’s
it. It’s, that’s the standard. Think about how they do things. Think about what you are willing to do. I mean, everything comes with a trade, right?

Everything requires an exchange. And you gotta decide if that those are the things you want to trade for. What are, are you willing to trade away? Are you willing to trade away your excuses? Are you willing to trade away scrolling social media? Are you willing to trade away being able to blame other people? Are
you willing to trade away you know, being inconsistent and actually embracing things like, you know, discipline and patience and drive and all those characteristics that everybody that I just talked about has. So now I, I’m gonna tell you that the obvious answer from most of us whenever we, we hear
something like this comes down to one or two things, right? It’s either heck yes, or you know, they just kind of blow it off and say, well, that’s not, you know, that’s all fluff.

And I want to know the Facebook ad that somebody’s running, or I want to know their funnel, or something like that. And I promise you, it’s not the ad, it’s not the funnel, because all of that stuff is fleeting. All that stuff’s super temporary. The things that worked two years ago don’t work. Now. The
things that work 10 years ago don’t work now in the exact same ways they did, then what matters is the, the underpinning of it all, because I’ve seen people build great businesses and have to pivot multiple times and never blink because they just knew that they were gonna get it done. I mean, Molly, I mentioned was a, you know, she was a franchisee. She co-owned a gym that was a franchisee. She held a little event in Lexington. She came down, she spoke at our event and she pivoted because I think she found something she was more excited about, more passionate about, and she’s
done great work there.

You know, I think that most of the, the people that I have en encountered, they’re not doing things exactly like they did five or 10 years ago. And that’s part of their greatness, is they are you know, not married to one path. They’re married to the best path for them with the information they currently
have, and they got more information than they had three or four, five years ago. So if you want to win, man, there’s so many people out there you can learn from. Just focus on the right things and don’t exclusively try to focus on, you know, the, the people who are speaking it perform better. The people
who have big social media followings. I can tell you, there are plenty of people that I see in our boardroom group that I admire just as much as I admire any of the people that I just just shared.

But they’re just doing things that may be aren’t marketed to, to us, right? They’re doing things that are specific to their local markets or specific to the people that they try to serve, and they’re just as good at it, and they are doing it because of those same exact traits. So that’s the takeaway. If you wanna win,
those are the things you need to focus on. And if you focus on that, you know, the, the tactical stuff can be interchangeable and you’ll figure it out. All these guys have, and they’ve all figured out different paths and, and you will too. And as always, if I can help you shoot me a message, [email protected],
and you know, I’m happy to talk about how I can help you unlock your own unique path to winning.

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