Fitness Business School – Your Vision for Your Business

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk with you about your vision. Instead of focusing entirely on the now, the things that we’re facing today, the challenges, the obstacles. I want to help you keep that vision out in front of you. That thing that motivates you, that beacon, that you’re moving towards. So you stay motivated. And so you make the most of every day, every task, everything that you’re doing. So you’re moving in the direction that you want to go. Let’s get stareted.

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.

So let’s talk about vision. So much of what I’m talking about in this podcast, so much of what we deal with you know, really on a daily basis is trying to solve problems, trying to give you strategies and tactics to move forward, to deal with what’s at hand, to, to have success in the now. But one of the things that I think that has posed a challenge during this pandemic is that people got so myopic thinking about today, thinking about, Hey, how am I going to navigate the challenges at hand? How am I going to keep my clients? Am I going to be able to get new clients? Am I going to have to shift to online? They lost sight of their vision.

Now when we start a business, we often have this grand vision of what we want it to be, how we want it to operate. And then we’re kind of smacked in the face with the reality. We, we get stuck in the day-to-day. We recognize that things may not be as simple as we envision them, right? Like it’s the old Mike Tyson thing. Everybody has a plan till they get hit in the mouth. Right. But I think that it’s important that we have a vision that helps kind of keep us focused. That helps keep us motivated. That runs beyond our annual goals, our annual plan.

So, you know, some people will talk about having a 10 year vision about having this grand vision that’s way down the road. Honestly, 10 years is such a long time. It, it seems really impractical to me. I mean, I have a 10 year old son and I can barely remember the world before having him in many cases, but you know, everything in my professional life has been a ten year or less kind of phase. My time as a college baseball coach, my first business, my you know, the, the turn from a small training business into a multi-company organization. And then my current business, helping people create what I call their ideal business. You take a sip. That’s why I had the pause right there so I can keep going. No, If we think about this, I mean, think about how much has changed just in the past year, how much has changed just in the past three to five years. So when I think about my vision, I tend to focus on kind of this three year window. Now you’re welcomed to look three to five years out. I would tell you to stay away from 10 years out. I mean, there’s so many things happening. Things are moving so fast with everything from artificial intelligence to the shift to e-commerce. And then obviously there’s certain things that come up that we can never predict. But I think 3 years is this nice medium where it’s close enough and clear enough that you can, you can envision it. It’s not, it’s not so abstract, but it’s far enough out that, you know, we’re not just dealing with the day-to-day, we’ve got time to make progress on things. Obviously with the current circumstances we’re facing, we’ve got some time to kind of normalize and settle back in to where people are operating in a more proactive and less reactive state. So my suggestion would be think about your vision in this kind of three-year window. Now understand that as the business owner, you’re the leader, it’s your job to set this vision in place. And maybe, You know, maybe you’ve got a small team. Maybe you don’t even have a team and you’re a solo-preneur. Maybe you have a larger team. It doesn’t really matter anybody that’s kind of on the train with you. They need to see this vision. They need to know what they’re a part of. Plus if they understand this vision, then we can align their role and their responsibility. So to make sure that the things they’re doing are kind of pulling the rope in the right direction. So it’s your job as a leader. And then, you know, we’re looking beyond this annual, we’re looking to this point where we can make a bigger impact. We can do bigger things. We can really achieve a lot. I mean, if you look at three to five-year snapshots of your life, of your professional life, so many things can be accomplished in that window.

I did this exercise the other day and sent it out to some clients and I, these five-year windows and said, okay, here are all the things that happen in this five-year span. And then here are all the things that happen in the next, and, you know, over this 10 or, well, 20 year block, I showed these different five year windows and you know, so much ground can be covered. So it allows us to think bigger to, to really kind of expand the things that we want to accomplish. The things that, that we think are possible. So as you put this together brick that I was taught years ago was to write it in the present tense. You should be standing in this future place saying, okay, you know what, three years from now, here’s what we are doing. Here’s what we have accomplished. Here’s where we are today as a company. Here’s where I am today as a person. So that’s a little bit of the foundational.

Now let’s talk practical. There are five categories that I kind of put things into boxes. If you will, when I’m crafting my vision, I don’t do it in the same way that I map out my annual goals, where I just list out like five goals and work down business five personal and break them down. This is more kind of buckets. If you will, where I basically say, okay, this is where we want to be in this area. This is where we want to be in that area.

So the first area or bucket, if you will, is me and the team. So basically my role professionally in the team I have around me, what do I want our culture to look like? What kind of role do I want to be playing in the business? You know, what kind of staff changes changes do I want to have in place? Like if I have a, a local training facility and currently maybe, you know I’m training clients and I’m serving the roles like the general manager and the sales person. Maybe I want to have a full time general manager in place, and I want to evolve my role. Maybe I want to move away from training, or maybe I feel like I’ve been moved away from training and I want to move back because I miss it. Whatever you want your role to be the way that you would describe the culture, the staff that you think you need to have in place to achieve, whatever it is that you want to achieve. If this three to five year kind of benchmark, if you will, that’s what I jot down. And I talk about it in the present tense. So I would say, okay, I have a full-time general manager who handles the day-to-day operations of running this business. That’s the way that I would state this for my vision. All right.

So that’s area number one, you and your professional and your team, and then area number two, your offerings, like what are you going to do to serve the target market that you want to serve? So look at what you have now, what would change, what would be different? How can you make the things that you’re doing now better? What might you want to add? What might you want to subtract from where you are today? You know, is there anything that you want to expand into? Are there, you know, this is where you might say, okay, I’m going to add a fully online component. I’m going to add an in-home component, or we’re going to phase out large group training, or we’re going to integrate it, nutrition, coaching, or wellness coaching. So this is where you’re just going to say, okay, this is what our offerings look like. If you’re going to change the way you deliver them, the way you price them, that’s where we’re going to really list this out and say, okay, we have a nutrition coaching program that allows clients to build healthy habits that lasts a lifetime. I mean, so we’re talking about it in the present tense, we’re giving some sort of clarity. So we know what we want this business to look like. All right.

So the third category would be our sales and marketing. Again, what would be different? What, what do we do now that we just want to improve? What do we want to add? What do we want to subtract? So are you going to hand off all of your Facebook advertising? Are you going to have a completely new referral program in place? Are you going to be sending a three day a week email? Are you going to be doing video? Are you going to write a book? You know, so are there things that you want to have in place that may be extend beyond the next 12 months? That may take a little bit of time to, to, to be able to fund the, maybe beyond what you can add to your plate right now? Well, this is where those go when it comes to selling and marketing.

And then the fourth bucket would be your impact. This is where I like to put down really quantifiable things, numbers that we can actually measure. So maybe you want to add 2,500 people to your email list. Maybe you want to hit a certain revenue benchmark or a profit benchmark, or a number of clients, or even a personal income benchmark. So if we’re talking about the impact that we’re going to have, you know, you may say, Hey, we will be, you know, I am serving 300 clients, actively 200 locally and 100 online. You may say, my business is generating $50,000 a month with a 30% profit margin. So that’s where we’re going to really start to dial in and quantify things that, you know, kind of fill in the blanks with some of the stuff we talked about in the first three buckets where we talked about, yeah, we want to improve this program, but you know, how do we make it successful by the measures of being a healthy business?

And then the fifth one would be your, you personally, and, you know, any personal goals that you have. So for me, you know, in that vision, I talked about me and my family and, you know, are there things that we want to do or are there places we want to go? Are there things that we want to change? I know. So, you know, if we look back a year you know, I might’ve said, Hey, we want to get a new house. I mean, we just moved, not too long and go but you know, getting a new house, sending your kid to college you know, taking vacations, maybe the time you’re spending with your family, maybe there are some personal goals that you have, personal development, health, anything like that, maybe there are things that you want to do with your spouse. Maybe they’re just bucket list items that you want to check off that maybe aren’t going to fit into your annual plan this year. So when I look at my vision, again, I don’t separate out the personal and professional. I understand that anything that I’m doing personally has to work in tandem. It has to work synergistically with the professional and vice versa. If I’m going to say, Hey, I want to grow my business by 500%. I have to understand that that’s going to curtail some of the personal side of things, because I’m not going to have as much time as much mental bandwidth. I’m going to be working a lot of hours. I’m going to be spending a lot of time when I’m not working, studying, and trying to improve my skillset to be better at work.

So, you know, we, we always look at these things together and I would encourage you, not just when we’re talking about goal setting, but when we’re talking about our vision to look at it that way too. Now with that in mind, you know, I only gave you and your like your family in my case one of those five categories or five buckets, if you will. But that doesn’t mean that every one of them is going to have the same number of items for me, usually they’re just as many personal items as there are professional in total. So there may be three items on each of those first four categories, but there may be 12 items on the personal side, combined with experiential stuff and security stuff. And just, you know, the things that I want to make sure that I’m operating my business in a way that allow to do so, that’s it, that’s your vision. And I thought this would be a really timely topic because obviously we’re in the middle of a lot of people doing their annual planning for the upcoming year. And I think it’s important that we don’t get shortsighted. I mean, obviously the circumstances we’re facing or continue to evolve and, you know, things are going to change. You know, when it comes to restrictions, when it comes to consumer behavior. And so I don’t want to be so shortsighted with everything that I’m doing, I still want to see that everything that I’m pursuing down the line, I can think bigger. I can still pursue my bigger goals. I don’t want to feel like I’m just punching the clock and getting by. So that’s how I approach vision. Again. I think this sort of thing helps me a bunch and I suspect you’ll enjoy going through the process. And I think it’ll help You too.

Thanks for listening. I’m giving away a bundle of my bestselling books, the ideal business formula, the fitness entrepreneur handbook in the path. All you have to do is go to patrigsby.com/podgift to get it. Also, make sure to subscribe to The Fitness Business School with Pat Rigsby so you don’t miss an episode and you get yourself on the fast track to creating your ideal business.