The Fitness Business School – Getting Clarity

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here, and in this episode I want to take a little bit of time and talk with you about how to get clarity about where you want to go with your business. I spent plenty of time with my private clients, my mastermind members on this topic. And in fact, I sent over some notes to a client just the other day on how to do this. And I thought I would share a synopsis of those notes with you in this episode. So let’s get started.

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So let’s talk about how to get clarity when it comes to what you need to do to build your ideal business. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of just kind of doing what we do on a day to day basis and not really moving towards our goals or even really being clear about what the business we want to own looks like. So I sent over some notes to a client the other day, some questions that I use for myself, some questions I’ve used with other clients along the way, and I thought it might make for a good episode if I shared some of those thoughts and those questions with you. So let’s go ahead and kind of walk through this because getting clarity really allows you to focus and, you know, for lack of a better way of putting it – stay motivated, right? Putting guard rails around what you’re doing.

So you’re spending the time on the things that are important. So the first question I think we always want to ask is where do you want to go now for me, this encompasses what I consider my vision. You know, what I want to be known for and my specific objectives, which, you know, that’s how I’m going to personally measure success. So here are a few simple questions that you may want to ask yourself as you try to figure out your vision.

The first one is really, how good do you want to be? Now? I know that seems simple, but sometimes people don’t want to be great at everything. They’re okay with being good enough, right? It’s not necessarily their priority to be the best in their city or the best in their state or the best in the country or whatever else. So sometimes you have to decide how good do you want to be in a big picture sort of way, but then also in each specific facet of what you do, whether it be as a service provider, as a marketer, as an authority and have specific niche, I mean, there’s all sorts of things that we have to make decisions about. And, you know, the absence of making a decision, it’s still making a decision, our behaviors, our actions are deciding for us. And then, so how good do you want to be?

The second one? What are you actually providing? Right. So, so what kind of service are you going to provide? What kind of experience are you going to provide? Maybe most importantly, what kind of result are you going to provide? And then who do you serve? Who do you, you know, who is that target market? Who is that ideal client that you want to serve and, and really focus your efforts on. And then finally, what is the, the range of your business, whether that’s geography like who are you going to serve? What kind of market you’re going to serve locally, if you’re going to go online, if you’re going to have a hybrid type business. So what’s that kind of scope of your business.

And, you know, I think answering those questions start to, you know, it starts to give you some sort of narrowing, some sort of focus or guardrails, and then the objectives really become the measures of your success and your performance. So how, you’re, how you’re keeping score for lack of a better way of putting it. Now, I know for me coming from a competitive sports background, everything always had a scoreboard, right? Like there’s always a way to keep score. So, you know, I, I think you need to determine what you’re going to measure. Now, keep it simple and straightforward. You don’t need a dashboard with a hundred different metrics. You need to simplify and know what’s important and then decide how you’re going to measure it. And then you need to define what that specific target is for each measure. So, you know, if you know that a revenue number is important to you, how are you going to measure this specific revenue number? And then, you know, what’s the goal. We need to have a target, a goal to achieve if we’re trying to move towards something. And then the second piece of this is where are you now? So where are you relative to where you want to be? See, I think that it, a lot of people talk about having goals and, and, you know, having aspirations, whether or not they, they define it and get clear as a way to measure what it’s gonna look like to get there, or, you know, the milestones they need to meet along the way. Most of us aren’t necessarily self aware enough to know where we are right now.

So you need to define both the destination and the starting, if we’re going to be able to craft an accurate plan to, to really bridge that gap from, from where you’re beginning to where you’re trying to arrive at. You know, and then ultimately there are probably a bunch of little things standing between us and the ideal business that we want, but, you know, for the purposes of what we need to accomplish, there are always going to be those big rocks. You know, the, the whole 80 20 rule, the 20% of the things that we could do that are going to give us the most bang for the buck to move us towards the you know, move us towards the results, the furthest, the fastest. So in your business, you know, what has to change in your marketing to hit your goals, you know, and then maybe what has to change in your selling. So if we think in the way that I think about a business, you don’t attract, convert deliver. So what has to change in the attract part of things, your marketing is it who you’re marketing to the effort you’re putting into marketing the, the amount of money you’re spending on marketing, but what has to change with marketing, and then that selling process, what has to change when you’re converting a prospect? Are you pre-selling them enough? Are you following up enough? Is your sales process effective enough? Do you have confidence in what you’re selling and then maybe what has to change in your personnel to hit your goals? You know, do you have the right people on the bus and are they in the right seats? You know, I think a lot of us, you know, it’s very common in a small business for somebody to just hire because they don’t want to be alone. They want people around and they’re not necessarily hiring the best fit they’re hiring, just so they have some help. So they don’t feel like everything’s resting on their shoulders. So, you know, what has to change in your personnel and maybe, maybe it’s not having the wrong people. Maybe it’s how you’re empowering those people and how you’re facilitating or setting them up for their, you know, to achieve their own success.

And then, you know, what has to change in the experience that your providing to hit your goals? I mean, what has to change for you to wow, the people that you’re serving and make your business one that they rave about, and then kind of dovetailing with that. What has to change in the way that you’re actually helping people achieve the results that they want? So when I think about this, this is kind of a two part thing, right? The, the result is that destination, are they losing the weight they want to lose? Are they reaching their performance goals is, you know, are they feeling the way they want to feel that may be the destination, but is the journey one that they will want to continue on with, even after they’ve hit that milestone, because, you know, you know, as well as I do that, plenty of, plenty of times we’re chasing a moving target. You know, if maybe somebody wants to lose 10 pounds, well, when they get there, they’re like, you know what? I’d like to lose five more or, Hey, maybe now I want to get stronger. Well, if the experience wasn’t one that was pleasant and enjoyable for them, then they may continue to pursue that next goal. But they’re probably not going to pursue it with you. So you need to be able to check both boxes. You need to be able to help them get to where they want to go, but do it in a way that they want to still work with you long after they’ve hit that first milestone. And then what has to change in the way that you really manage your business in your finances to hit your goals.

And, you know, I understand that so many of us you know, we didn’t get into this industry with a business background. I know I certainly didn’t. I came into this feeling very overwhelmed by the thought of business in general. I thought of myself as a coach, I thought that I could sell because I had spent so much time recruiting, but when it came to the financial side of it and accounting and all that sort of stuff, it seemed very overwhelming to me. So maybe, maybe that’s an area that you need to brush up into just like I did. And it can make a mountain of difference in so, so many ways, you know, from, from your confidence as a business owner, to your profitability, as a business owner, and then that’s probably a pretty good segue to the last thing that you have to ask yourself. And that’s really what has to change in you because ultimately you being the driving force as a small business owner, as an entrepreneur, you know, you have to keep improving. It’s not enough to improve the tactics that you’re using or anything like that. But, you know, I mean, whether it be your own kind of self care or your own limiting beliefs or your ability to own your time and prioritize things, but what has to change in you to get to where you’re trying to go.

So ultimately I think we have to accept that if we want to go somewhere, different things have to change for us to get there with anything. And once you’ve written down these things that need to change, you know what, just go through, rank them in order of importance and starting at the top of the list, just start working through it, start working on what you need to do to get better. Who can help you get better, where you can learn or study to get better, because make no mistake, there’s nothing magical out there. I mean, there’s always a source for you to get better, but you have to decide that you’re willing to change. And then, you know, I mean, that’s our action plan when we figure out what we’re going to do to go from where we are, to where we aspire to be, once we’ve acknowledged, what needs to change now, just the execution of the strategies and tactics and plotting how we’re going to implement those. That’s, that’s how we set our priorities. That’s how we wake up every day. And once we get past those containers of time that are already out, like allocated to the things we’re already committed to like training clients or something like that, then the rest of our time has to be allocated towards those priorities, those things that we need to do to go from where we are to where we want to be. And, you know, if you think of it that way, you’re going to be so far ahead of the average person, because the average small business owner just gets up punches the clock. They’re not setting a specific benchmark. Something like, Hey, I’m going to increase my referrals by 20%, by implementing these three different referral systems or something like that. They’re not being that specific. They don’t have a plan. They don’t have time allocated to making that sort of improvement. But if you follow this simple little path, you will, and that will be a massive competitive advantage. So, you know, hopefully some of that stuff that I just walked through can help you gain some clarity. I know it threw a lot at you once. So feel free, go through go through this again, make sure that you dig into the, these tips because I know how much they’ve helped me and I know how much they can help you as well. Talk to you, soon.

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.