The Fitness Business School – Navigating the COVID19 Business Landscape

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And I wanted to give you a few success tips, things that I’ve been sharing with my clients on how to navigate the landscape that we’re faced with right now and the landscape that we’re probably going to be faced with here in the foreseeable future. So let’s get to it.

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 today I’ve got six different tips, things that I’ve been talking with my own clients about things that you can do that are probably going to give you a higher probability of success. The first one is something that seems like common sense to me, but I see so much kind of railing against it online that I thought it was worth mentioning. And it’s look, don’t vent. Don’t argue, don’t play pretend scientist on social media. There’s, there’s not really any upside for people in our industry to do that. Sure. You may get a few people who, who align with your way of thinking or are happy to pacify you in the moment. But there are people watching that are going to say, look, I don’t want to do business with that person. Or there are people saying, you know what, I’m going to adjust. I am to make me feel better. I don’t need to listen to them to just make them feel better, right? They’re going for their own you know, their, their own self gain. So understand that there’s just no upside for you. I mean, find a peer group, find people that you can exchange thoughts with vent with. I mean, if you’re in Facebook groups, if you’re in coaching groups, you can, you can kind of bounce back and forth some of this stuff with them, but don’t, don’t use some impulsive social media post to, to vent. And then, and out essentially losing a significant amount of business over the long haul about it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have your own opinions, your own viewpoints. Of course you should. But understand that as a business owner, we’re kind of always on display and what we do can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways. So just don’t give people the opportunity to misinterpret or misconstrue anything.

Number two, we need to adapt, right? Like that’s one of the things that we have that most small businesses or most businesses in general, don’t have the ability to do, right? I mean, my dentist can’t go and start doing dental work virtually. If they were to get shut down again, franchise can’t reinvent themselves as quickly as they solo operation, big box health clubs have hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in equipment for people to come in and use. And their model does not lend itself to distance work. I mean, we’re just in a unique position in that we can adapt. We can become hybrid. We can start to offer outdoor stuff we can do in home stuff. If that’s something that kind of suits our professional appetite, we can do any number of things. You’ve got to be adaptable. You can’t think, Hey, I’m just going to stick with my 2019 business model. And eventually we’ll get back to that. That’s not the way business works, right? Business continues to move forward. Society continues to move forward. I imagine being the person who says, look, I’m just going to go ahead and I’m never adapting to smartphones. I’m just going to tie myself to landlines forever. You know, it’s just not the way that this is going to happen. So people now have been exposed to online training, to hybrid training, to things, being delivered to them, being more convenient. We need to adapt to where the market’s going and really where the market is right now. So be adaptable. It’s one of your greatest potential competitive advantages.

Number three, do more than is required. Like when it comes to what your city is mandating, when it comes to cleanliness or safety do more than the bare minimum show people, document what you’re doing, make sure that it’s visible. We want people to understand that they are our first priority. We are client centric, their safety, their health, their wellness, their confidence. Those are all things at the top of our priority list at all times. So do more than is required on the same side of that do more than is required when it comes to staying connected with your clients in between training sessions, if you were forced to re-close, if you’ve not been able to open in the first place, those touch points are what keep people coming back. They’re what keep people connected because let’s face it. If you letting this be just about the, the equipment, the tool, even the exact structure of your end gym workout. When that’s taken away temporarily, we’ve lost the one common thread we have between us and the client. So do more than is expected. The gyms, the business owners that I’ve seen seen have the best success. The first time around when, when this whole thing kind of took shape and people weren’t allowed to go into facilities at all. We’re the ones who treated their clients is if that client individually was the difference between the business succeeding or not a lot of personal outreach, a lot of options to stay connected. Keep that in mind. I’m not saying you have to do everything that you did. You probably learned the first time through what we experienced and found some of the things that work better than others, but stick with the things that, that are going to really show the people that you serve, that you are over-delivering.

And then the fourth thing is accept that everybody’s on their own clock and everybody has kind of their own viewpoint. And that means that if somebody is not ready to come back in the gym, when you’re open, that’s okay, they can come back and on their terms and you’re going to serve them in the way that they want to be served until then, if somebody is not ready to join when you’re marketing and you just need to follow up, understand that everybody’s on their own clock. Some people are trying to find things to do where they’re staying outside more often than not. Some people just aren’t ready to make a financial commitment to something you’re not that doesn’t make them a bad fit. It doesn’t make them a tire kicker. Really what it makes them is somebody committed to their own values and their own beliefs, and really what’s going on in their own life.

So you need to continue to market to them. You need to continue to serve the ones who’ve been your clients, follow up with them and be okay to adapt to the way that they feel and to the timeline that they’re on. If you do that, you’re going to garner the biggest possible market share and then build your list and nurture it. This way is probably the best list building opportunity that we’ve had in the fitness industry in the past five years, I mean, cost per lead is down viewership of platforms like Facebook or Instagram is significantly up. We can get in front of people and build a list, more cost effectively. We can get our clients to share the things that we’re putting out because they’re online more. We can get strategic Alliance partners to work with us because, you know, they’re probably a little bit more open-minded to business growth opportunities. There are more opportunities to build your list and then potentially follow up with them than we’ve had in a long, long time take advantage of it.

And then finally, if you’ve not thought about securing some of the disaster relief funding, whether it’s PPP or EDI L talk with your accountant, explore those options. I mean, those things are there for us to use, I mean, we pay taxes, we contribute, we do things that certainly kind of fund where this money is originating. We need to make sure that we’re taking advantage of this stuff. If it’s going to put us in a better position to succeed moving forward, if it’s going to give us a little bit of breathing room, if it’s not going to put a like, I mean, for example, somebody putting off rent and having to pay a 10% premium because they’ve delayed rent when they could go out and get a loan at 3.75%, it just doesn’t make financial sense for us to pay that 10% premium or put things on credit cards. We’re going to be paying 18, 19, 20% interest. If we can get financing, that’s going to be less expensive. Not telling you to go out here and max out all your loan options available to you or anything like that, but explore them. And you don’t talk with your account and talk with a financial planner, understand the math and make sure that your setting yourself up do play from a position of strength.

So there are six different success tips that I think at least a couple of them are probably going to be useful to you. And I know a number of them have been useful to my clients. So apply them, use them. If you have questions, let me know.

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.