The Fitness Business School – The 5 Core Components

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here and in this episode we’re going to be talking about the five core components of what a great training business needs to look like now and is going to need to have in place in the future to succeed. 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.

Hey, thanks for listening. In this episode, I want to talk with you about the five core components of what a great training business needs to have in place, not only right now but moving forward. If you’re going to succeed in this new social landscape and this new economy, you’re not going to be able to get by with just hosting workouts and you know, basically being an exercise instructor. You’re not going to be able to get by with just having a transactional business. You’re going to need these five components if you’re going to meet the needs and really meet the expectations of the clients that you want to serve in the future.

So component number one is you’re going to need some sort of live training component. Now that may manifest itself in any number of different ways right now for a lot of people who are, um, you know, under some sort of restriction and can’t train people in person, that’s going to be a live streaming workout. They’re probably doing through Zoom or some other live streaming app. But it could be your in person training. It could be you going to people’s homes, it could be whatever you’re doing so that somebody can show up at a particular time and connect with you as a coach and hopefully even connect with other people that are participating. So there’s some accountability in some, you know, some, some live coaching, some peer support, and that’s going to be a piece of every successful training business moving forward.

Now, component number two is something that a lot of people didn’t have in place until recently, but it’s an on demand component of training. So one of the things that I think that we have have started to do as a society and really it’s probably not even accurate to say started, but we, we’ve really kind of picked up on the pace on wanting things extremely conveniently. Um, and that’s probably a bad way to put it, right? Like we want things to be delivered to us in a convenient fashion. So, um, if you think about things like DoorDash or Uber Eats, if you consider the, just the popularity of Amazon Prime, how things have grown to be delivered to us, like ButcherBox or the clothing type stuff where people can order and um, have all like a personal stylist deliver clothes to them. People want, um, convenience. They want what they want, when they want it. And so having an on demand component is something that I think is going to be almost in assessing it moving forward where you’ve got workouts that people can follow if they couldn’t make it to your scheduled work at at 10:00 AM, well they can do things when it’s convenient for them. They can do it at home, they could do it when they’re traveling, be it vacation or for work and you know, they’re still getting expert level coaching. In fact, I would suspect that, you know, there’s going to be this expectation on behalf of the client that you’re going to be providing them, not just you know, three workouts a week, but you’re probably going to be providing them some sort of on demand coaching or support that is going to serve whatever their activity needs are on a daily basis. Maybe you’re giving them mobility or recovery things to be doing on days in between their true training sessions. Maybe you’re providing, um, kind of a variety of workouts that they can use depending on the equipment or resources they have available to them at that time. But the, the on demand component of this allows them to stay connected to you. They stay engaged with you and keep moving towards their goals, even if there was an obstacle that prevented them from showing up to your live session. So it’s a win on both sides clearly. And you know, as we get to the accountability part of this, there’s even a way to weave in accountability. It doesn’t have to feel like they’re necessarily just buying an info product or a course or something like that where, um, yeah, they have access to it now, but there’s no real facilitation of them executing.

So we’ve got the live component, we’ve got the on demand component, and then the third would be there needs to be community. I think that the businesses that have thrived still in, in the current landscape had been the ones that have created this wonderful sense of community. I’ve had friends and clients of mine have their, their clientele rally around them. Not losing, um, in some cases losing no clients in some cases, losing just the clients that have faced some sort of real economic hardship to this point. Um, I mean, I saw videos yesterday of a friend and client of mine, Fred Zoller where his clients, like 50 different clients went by their house and did something of a parade, not unlike you’ve seen the birthday parades where people are showing up at somebody’s house and, um, you know, honking their horn and having decorations on their car, uh, wishing somebody a happy birthday. And that’s, you know, that’s a testament to that type of community that they’ve built. But, you know, we’ve seen people, um, do comedy nights. I know for my community, I even hosted a comedy night and hired Sinbad, a professional comedian to come on and hang out with us for a while. We’ve seen people do wind down Wednesdays or happy hours. We’ve seen people do coffee with a coach in the morning. This community, um, need is still going to be a part of what we do. It’s not going to be enough to just have a Facebook group and to post a few memes in there and post a few recipes. I mean, you’re gonna need to help create a tribe too. You’re going to be the leader, you’re going to be the one facilitating this, but you want to create a sense of connection amongst the people that belong to your business as clients. So having community would be number three.

Number four is – there needs to be a personal connection between you or your business, so a member of your team and the individual client. People want to feel important, they want to feel appreciated and they want to be acknowledged. They don’t want to just be a face in the crowd or a number or a transaction. So personal outreach, whether it’s just a text to check on somebody or acknowledging them by name. I mean some of it’s just the simplest little thing where you’rem you know, acknowledging and liking their posts, they feel, they feel seen or heard, if you will. And so making sure that each person is recognized as an individual and they feel cared for and connected with, that’s going to be paramount as well as you can imagine. Like people have had a lot of this personal connection and sense of community. I’m temporarily pulled away from them recently and so it’s obvious they want it more now than ever. This isn’t going to go away. They’re not going to change their expectations of wanting to feel connected and wanting to feel important, um, and wanting to be part of something they’re going to want that they sure they’re going to want to be outside their house and go in, engage in, in society and not just be, um, you know, on something that appears like house arrest, but they are going to still want this sense of connectedness.

And then finally, accountability. Accountability is something that, um, we’re going to have to provide if we want to keep people with us for the long haul. Now, accountability doesn’t mean micromanaging somebody, treating them like an employee, you know, managing every nuance of their macros or something like that. Accountability can be somebody knowing that somebody’s going to be doing your on demand workout and just checking in with them and asking how it went. Accountability could be checking in every week and saying, Hey, how did things go? What’s your plan for next week? What do you need help with? But you know, people need to know that you as their coach, you’re paying attention, that what they’re doing is important, that they’re not on their own, and this sense of accountability probably needs to reach beyond just, well, I saw the so-and-so client showed up at the training session today.

So if you have these five components in place, they’ll the live workouts either offline or online or a combination of both on demand training community, some sort of facilitated community that people get to be a part of, a sense of individual connection and then personal accountability. You’re going to be poised to succeed in the future. Now, this can manifest itself in so many different ways. There are menus probably within each of those five categories of how you could execute this, but you need to check all five boxes. If you check all five boxes, and if you’re proactively introducing new people to this on a consistent basis, you’re going to be set up to succeed in the future. And a lot of those small businesses that aren’t going to weather this storm storm aren’t gonna make it. They’re going to be the ones that had just gaping holes in some of these areas. So you know, take this start to work through it. Start to brainstorm how you can really develop all five components of this that best reflect you and the clients that you want to serve and you and your business are going to be in great shape moving forward.

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.