The Fitness Business School – The One Thing You Can Do For Your Fitness Business

Full Transcript

Hey, in today’s episode we’re going to be answering a question that’s really a variation of a question that many fitness professionals get regularly. If I could only do one thing to get results, what would I do? Well, we’re going to take that and spin it and make it the business growth version of that and talk about if I could only do one thing to grow my business, what would that one thing be? So let’s get into 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.

Recently a question was posed to me about what would I do if I could only do one thing to grow my business? And it was prefaced with that kind of normal take that fitness professionals get all the time. Like if I could only do one exercise, if I can only do choose one diet or take one supplement as if any real success comes built on the foundation of a single thing. The reality is there’s no one thing that’s gonna solve all your problems. There’s no one thing that’s going to take you from where you are to where you want to be. Probably the better question asked is how can I simplify things? So I’m only doing the things that truly matter that I’m only spending my time on the things that have the greatest return on investment that had the greatest return on time, on effort, on money. And if we think of it that way, it’s a much better question because a lot of times people, not just in our industry, but everywhere, they spend their time on things that don’t move the needle very much.

So how do we really take that question? What should I be spending my time on? If I have limited time, if I can only do a few things, what should I be doing? Well, I would tell you in my experience, the things that matter most in moving a business needle, so to speak, and growing in business over time, the things that matter most are the things that we’re gonna be doing consistently. Those behaviors or habits we’re going to be showing up day after day, week after week, literally year after year. Sure. You can find tactics that that work for a little while. Trends that you can piggy back, um, marketing channels that are new and effective, but over time, all that stuff kind of levels out. So what are the things that are going to be working five years from now, are going to be working seven, eight, 10 years from now? Well, you know, those things that you can do consistently, the habits if you will. Um, the first of which is deliver a great service, deliver a great experience.

Now I know that’s going to seem simple and trivial, but the reality is if you want to stand out in a crowded marketplace, you have to do great work. Okay? You have to do great work. Whether it’s, um, great work for a very narrow group of people. So you’re a specialist and you have that very narrow niche market or you have to do great work just for whoever you’re choosing to serve in a way that keeps them staying longer and helps them to become ambassadors for your business, whether it’s becoming case studies of how you’ve helped them, referral-providing clients, strategic alliance partners for the ones that have their own audience. There are a variety of ways that those people can really help you grow your business, but they’re not going to help you if what you’re doing when you’re serving them isn’t extraordinary. So showing up and delivering your best day after day, actually caring about the clients that you’ve serve in treating them in a way that frankly, they’re probably not getting from a lot of the businesses that have become popular in our industry as of late. Look, I have no, um, you know, no real distaste for franchising. I founded two franchises. I was an owner or a franchisee of a franchise business. I think franchising is fine, but franchising isn’t really designed to be personal. It’s not designed to be a relationship business. It’s usually not designed to be, um, a high touch, high experience, high result business. It’s more of how do we build a system to run efficiently that’s scalable. And so you can kind of shift the other direction. You can say, okay, every time there are clients inside my facility, I have to be on, I have to deliver. Not just a great result, but I have to deliver a show. I have to deliver an experience that they’re going to find to be memorable that they’re going to walk out of here and become ambassadors for. So that’s number one. If we’re trying to think about something that we can do consistently over time.

Number two is trying to multiply the clients that we have, multiply them months that they stay with us or multiply the people that we have taking. Okay, we have a new client that comes in. How do we turn that client into two, into three, into four people who we can serve? Who can we, who we can help reach their goals, whether it’s their family members, whether it’s their friends, whether it’s their coworkers. There are other people in their life that we can reach and serve and now we have an in. We have a foot in the door. We’re not just running this cold ad or making a cold call to somebody. We actually are using this relationship to open the door to a new relationship. How can we do that consistently over time where we can ask for referrals and we can make it easy for our clients to refer, whether it’s bring a friend opportunities, charity opportunities, or just asking them to share things on social media, showcasing their success and marketing that so other people in their life can see the transformation they’ve made so they can get the recognition that they deserve. But also when that person’s choosing, they’re going to likely choose something that somebody that they’re friends with has already had a positive experience with. So that’s the second thing that we can do consistently.

The third thing that we can do consistently is follow up with our prospects. We can follow up continually with anybody who comes into our kind of ecosystem, if you will, and has said, I’m interested. When we can follow up with them and educate them, we can share success stories, we can let them feel like they get to know us. So they trust us and like us and we follow up with them until the point where they’re ready to come in and experience what we do. And then the last thing that I would tell you that you could be doing very consistently is thinking of how simple business really is, right? Really what we’re doing is helping somebody get the result they want through an experience they enjoy and we’re exposed exposing more people to that experience and helping them understand how we can deliver that result for them. So we just need to get more guests to come in and experience what we do.

Look, no matter what type of sales message you have out there, what kind of ads you’re running, what your website looks like, whatever you’re putting on social media, there is nothing that is going to sell what you have to offer, like actually experiencing what you have to offer. So the more people you get to come in your door and experience firsthand how you’re different, how you actually care more for the people that you serve, how you connect with them, how you meet them, where they are to help build that bridge to where they want to be and how you treat them like not just another face in the crowd but somebody who you care about and somebody who your now saying, look, I want to be your partner in this journey to take you to where you want to go. If you can create that experience time and time again, if you’re just treating every new guest is somebody you want to say, Hey, I’m going to bring you in and put my best foot forward. If you’re doing that over and over, business growth isn’t going to be a challenge for you. It’s going to be something that you’re going to see kind of snowball over and before long you’re going to have other people out there being an ambassador for you as well. They’re going to be singing your praises without you even asking, but it starts with taking this consistent approach from doing the things that matter day in, day out. Do that if you’re going to get great results.

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.