The Fitness Business School – What Should You Be Selling?

Full Transcript

Hey Pat here, and in this episode, I want to talk with you about what you should be selling moving forward and how maybe that’s different than what you’ve been selling in the past. We’ve got a lot to unpack here. 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.

All right, we’re in a period of flux in the fitness industry, which may be a really, really powerful opportunity for you to remodel or reinvent what you’re doing because let’s face it. Things are changing right now. Some businesses have yet to be open. At least their offline facilities have yet to be reopened. Some businesses are open, but they’re functioning at a lower capacity. There’s been some discord in CrossFit, one of the bigger players in the fitness space. I mean, there’s just a lot of things happening and the reality is there. There’s going to be some businesses left in the wake of this change, but you can really use this as a springboard to, to improve, to grow, to, to build a better business model. But a lot of that hinges on what your going to be selling, moving forward.

See, in the past, basically most fitness businesses have said, this is our program – come be a part of it. We’re doing training. You know what? Monday through Saturday here are the time slots come attend these sessions. Sure. We’ve got a private Facebook group where we’ll keep you connected, but really it’s memes and recipes and not a lot of interaction. So it’s more or less somebody joining a more interactive health club in many ways. And you know, I know that a lot of fitness business owners will push back at that. And they’ll say, we’ve got this great community. And you know, we’ve got this wonderful culture. But the reality is a lot of the businesses that I’ve seen over the past several months, they’ve really just relied on moving the classes online and not doing anything to build connections, to strengthen relationships, to make clients feel important and recognized and connected. And they’ve seen a mass exodus of the people that they serve because, you know, when you’re just a transactional business, when you’re a business is just essentially renting people, access to attend workouts or renting people access to a 10 day Facebook group. And there aren’t personal connections, it’s a commodity and they can go find things like that elsewhere. And you know, it’s probably not going to be sold at the price point successfully that it has been sold out in the past.

And that’s nothing new if you kind of turn back the clock a little bit and look at the first bootcamps that came out. I know Adventure Bootcamp was a big brand at that point. And, you know, Adventure Bootcamps, people were joining for $299 a month for just bootcamp to come five days a week and train outdoors – limited equipment. And now that sort of offering typically is seen for, you know, under $149 a month. So it’s already decreased by half and it’s going to keep decreasing from that point, unless you’re doing more because let’s face it. I think consumers have been maybe enlightened awakened during this whole pandemic and the businesses that have done a great job, staying connected with their clients in other ways, not just hosting workouts, but providing on demand workouts, reaching out and having personal connections, hosting interactive things, whether it be comedy nights or happy hours, or you know, coffee with the coach, doing things to make people feel like they’re actually really part of a close knit community. Those businesses have found a way to maybe evolve and improve. So when you think about what you’re going to be selling, moving forward, that’s the question, are you going to just sell a program? In fact, I’ve had any number of people say, well, I just want to design on demand programs and sell those.

The problem is it’s just not an easy model to do. It sounds great in theory, do it once you don’t really have to support it ongoing, but let’s face it like Stanford did some research a while back and only 5% of the people who enrolled in online courses that were on demand that were not facilitated by an instructor, only 5% of them actually completed the course. So thinking that this is going to be your sustainable business model with the volume that we typically sell in the fitness industry you know, it’s not gonna be as easy as, Hey, I’m going to go sell somebody $49 a month and I’ll give them access to a workout and they can just stay on this indefinitely. Cause it’s such a good deal. If they’re not using it, they’re not going to keep paying for it. They want coaching and that’s your competitive advantage. They can read access to stuff, very inexpensively. They can get home exercise equipment, do it on their own, get workouts off YouTube, get workouts out of magazines. The thing that’s going to set you apart is coaching. The thing that’s going to set you apart is this personal aspect of personal training. Whether it’s one-on-one semiprivate small group, large group, doesn’t matter. People need to feel the personal touch in what you’re doing.

So what can we do to make this work? Well, the first thing that we can do is make it client centric. We can ask the client where they want to go. We can really kind of figure out where they are as their starting points. So that’s this journey that they’re going on. And we craft a plan to do it together, where, where their advisor, their mentor, their guide, and we’re helping them along this journey. And then at that point we can kind of retrofit it to them. We can say, Hey, do you want to train primarily at the gym? Do you want to train primarily at home? Sometimes that’s going to be self explanatory. If you’re trying to work with somebody who’s not close to you geographically, then it’s probably going to be primarily virtual, but that’s okay. You can still coach them live. You can still interact with them online, through zoom, through FaceTime, through through Hangouts, whatever you need to do. You can still have a live interactive experience. That’s going to provide connection and accountability and make them feel important. And one of the things that I think that we miss when we’re coaching clients, a lot of the time is understanding that one of our key jobs is just problem. Solving people sometimes just struggle getting out of their own way. And you can provide solutions to problems that might derail them if they’re just left to their own devices. So you may give them a program and just do problem solving every week with them so they can stay on track or if they fall off track, they can get back on track. So basically what we need to do moving forward is saying, okay, how can I better serve my clients? How can I provide a training program that is client centric?

And it’s not just about the workout. It’s not just about the equipment or the facility. It’s about the client. How can I help them go from where they are to where they aspire to be? How can I retrofit what I’m doing to better serve them? How can I include a live experience? How can I include some on demand stuff? So if they can’t make something live, they can still be consistent. They can still have more touch points with us because more touchpoints means better results and better retention. How can I make them feel connected? How can I make them feel important? How can I foster a community of these like-minded goal oriented people that can lift each other up and support one another? And how can I provide some accountability that doesn’t have to be micromanaging somebody’s life. It can be just making sure that they know that I care that I’m paying attention and moving them towards their goals. So if they fall off track, they know that there’s somebody watching. So it’s not being overlooked. It’s not this anonymous thing. If you were putting together a program that encompasses all of that, you’re going to be recession resistant. You’re going to be pandemic resistant, frankly. You’re probably going to be competition resistant because that’s what people want. And if you can solve their problems, if you can be that, that person that helps them go from where they are to where they aspire to be, they’re not going to chase the next shiny object. They’re not going to worry about all these new kind of at home online type tools that that are coming down the line that are following that path that Peloton started. They’re not going to do that. They’re not going that way because there’s nothing that’s going to compare apples to apples with what you do.

So that’s it. If you’re trying to figure out what you’re going to sell, moving forward, that’s where I think you need to go. And I think that if you do, you’re going to be tough to beat.

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.