The Fitness Business School – Avoid Becoming a Commodity

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here and this episode I want to talk with you about how you can avoid becoming a commodity. I’ve got a lot to share on this. So let’s 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.

Today I wanted to talk with you about really avoiding this trap of becoming a commodity. If you noticed in the health club world for the longest time, joining a health club required a much steeper commitment, right? Like there was this ask of committing for, um, you know, 18, 24, 36 months. There was a big enrollment fee. There was a membership due, um, of, you know, $39, $59, $79 a month. And essentially you were just renting access to the stuff that they offered. There wasn’t really a service component. Sure they hosted a few classes here and there, but you know, it wasn’t as if the instructor was doing anything customized to you, the member. So you were renting access to some free weights, some select authorized equipment, some cardio and you know, whatever other amenities that they offered. But Planet Fitness and a few other um, smaller chains came along and they, they kind of turn, turned the whole industry on, you know, on its head. They said, Hey, no, renting access to equipment shouldn’t cost you this much and it shouldn’t be this, um, commitment focused. Basically you’re going to pay about what you’d pay if you’d buy some home exercise equipment and finance it out, you’re going to pay us $10, $15, $20 a month depending on which package you choose. And there’s not going to be some long-term commitment and you’re going to have access to this stuff 24 hours a day. And it really transformed the whole health club world because you know, now these, these other clubs were largely being exposed for charging more than the value they were providing in exchange.

And, you know, that’s really how that industry has evolved altogether. But that’s not the only one that I’ve noticed over the last few years. Kind of follow this path to just being a commodity early on in the online or internet marketing space. Um, you know, membership sites were all the rage. In fact, to date I’ve had about 40 different recurring revenue programs and, and a number of them have been membership sites. I think my first membership site that I had, started in 2007. And early on those low costs, you know, $19, $29 under $49 a month, membership sites were very popular, but really what they were providing was, um, you know, access to information and access to some sort of forum. But then in recent times, information is everywhere. There’s no shortage of information. There’s no, uh, limit to what you can find from YouTube to Medium. Um, really all you have to do is look, uh, in any social media feed and there’s going to be links out to information, more than you would ever want or probably could consume. And then Facebook groups are um, really everywhere. I mean there you probably could open up your Facebook page and notice that you belong to dozens of groups that you may not even remember how you subscribed. So, you know, it’s made this whole idea of a low cost membership site a bit more of a commodity as well.

And in both of those cases it was just, okay, you’re paying this fee for access to stuff. It’s not, um, you know, it’s not this instance where anybody’s specifically coaching you or helping you. It’s not this situation where somebody’s solving a problem for you. And my guess is moving forward in the fitness industry, workouts are largely going to be viewed the same way. This idea that somebody is going to pay $150 to $200 a month to attend workout in a fitness facility where maybe they were asked about their goals on day one by whoever sold them their membership, but they’ve never been asked again, in fact, the person usually instructing the class has never been informed about each member’s goal, so they don’t even know what those goals are. The goals were just assessed as a means of selling the membership not as a means of delivering on value. And you know, now I think because of people being forced to stay at home and exploring other ways to access workouts, they’ve come to find that access to workouts, you know, it’s, it’s pretty much unlimited. You can find free workouts on YouTube. You can find any number of extremely low cost programs or portals on the app store there. There’s no need for somebody to pay $150 to $200 a month just to have access to, um, an in-person or a library of workouts anymore. So I suspect what we’re going to find is that people who relegate their business model to just being that are going to have that price point continually force down and you’re going to see it creep down towards that $49 to $79 a month range over the next couple of years.

Because, you know, the marketplace as a whole is, is smart. They’re going to figure out that, you know, there’s no reason in the world that I should be making some sort of 12 month commitment for $179 a month to attend a class instructed by somebody who doesn’t really know anything about me and maybe doesn’t care a whole lot about me. So, you know, yes, you can probably interpret that is, I’m overgeneralizing or talking about the extreme case, but largely there, there’s a lot of truth in that.

So how do you compete? How do you avoid being seen as a commodity? Well, I think you have to shift to really getting back to helping people achieve the goals that they want to achieve and get results that truly make them happy through an experience that they enjoy that makes them feel important. So you’ve got to get back to this kind of format that I’ve talked about over the last month or so. This combination of those five core components of service delivery, this live delivery component where yes, if somebody wants to be interactive with a coach, if somebody wants that kind of appointment for accountability, it’s there. Some on demand services that way, you know, people can still move towards their goals in a very convenient fashion, community so people can have a sense of belonging, a sense of being part of something, you know, that feeling of being a member of a tribe, if you will, personal connection. People want to feel important. They want to feel recognized. They don’t want to just be a face in the crowd or a number. So you being able to provide that. And then finally, um, some semblance of accountability. Whereas in the traditional kind of group training model, accountability was simply somebody is going to show up for a class or they’re not. And if they don’t show up for a while, we’ll chase them because we don’t want them to cancel. But there are so many other ways that accountability can be infused into what you do.

So, you know, as you think about this and as you think about the goals that people have, there are so many things that you could do to help move them towards those goals. I mean, imagine setting up a weekly 20 minute appointment with a client and just troubleshooting the things that are happening in their life to make sure that they’re adopting new habits, that they’re staying active, that they’re, um, you know, making healthy choices, that they’re able to solve the problems that are standing in their way from moving where they are to where they want to be. Well, if your doing that, if you’re really addressing somebody’s individual needs and so they can feel like these problems that they personally are having that they feel are unique to them, it doesn’t really matter if they are or aren’t unique. If they feel that these problems are unique to them. Well you can solve these and be seen as somebody who is truly a coach, not just an exercise instructor, not just a workout host, but somebody who is moving them from this place they’re trying to escape from to this destination they’re trying to arrive at, I guess.

So just a way to think about how you want to shape your business moving forward. And you know, that may be one of the, the silver linings through all of this, uh, the, the we’ve been dealing with or navigating is that it’s given us an opportunity to, um, you know, really see the impact that we can have on somebody if we’re really attentive to them and trying, um, our, our best to stay connected with them and addressing it as much of their, their need is we possibly can rather than just loading stuff up on a membership site and thinking that’s enough. Because frankly it’s not going to be if, you know, if you’re thinking, Hey, the online side of my business is I’m just going to add a membership component to my business and I’ll give people access to some workouts and then they’re gonna find that tremendously valuable. Take it from me. Somebody who’s had dozens of membership sites, they’re not going to log in nearly as much as you think. They’re not going to find as much value in that as you might expect. They need you, they need coaching, they need support, they need guidance. And if you’re willing to provide that, you can always escape being seen as a commodity, but if you’re not willing to provide that, you will soon be price.

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.