Full Transcript
Welcome to the podcast. And in today’s episode we’re going to discuss a lesson that many business owners miss. The fact that you can’t have your ideal business while your building your ideal business. Stay tuned.
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.
I wanted to talk with you about a topic that I discussed with a client the other day. And it’s the understanding that you can’t have your ideal business while you’re building your ideal business. And I feel almost dumb in saying it because until yesterday, I had never actually articulated that out loud. It’s something I think I always intuitively believed. It’s something that I think is in some ways common sense. I mean we know that if you want a different outcome, you have to take a different path. You have to, you have to be willing to change. I mean there’s that old adage of the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. So I think I always intuitively kind of made too many assumptions that people got that. But it’s worth saying out loud, it’s worth remembering while we’re on the journey, while we’re engaged in the process that you can’t have your ideal business while you’re creating your ideal business.
So what do I mean by that? Well, once we get clear about where we’re trying to go, who we want to serve, the role we want to play in the business, what our business looks like, how we’re delivering a service, how much income we’re making, how many hours are we’re actually working? Once we kind of get clear about that, we have to understand that we can’t automatically leapfrog to that point, usually, right? It’s almost impossible to go from a business where you’re not happy, you’re not ecstatic about where you are, to to this point of being happy in all these different areas of your business overnight. We just can’t, we can’t do that and we have to understand that we’ve probably got to give up some things along the way to get to that point.
Now the first thing that I think we have to most likely give up is our comfort zone. We have to be willing to do some things differently if we expect that different outcome. We have to probably make changes like Daniel Meng made where he went from doing all one-on-one training in his facility, switching to semi-private and he actually took a little bit of a revenue dip. The first year that he was making that move, his profit stayed static, but his gross revenue went down a little bit before it jumped back up and the profit doubled.
I’m sure in the middle you’re thinking, man, we’re not making quite as much of money this month as we made last months of this. This makes you a little bit anxious and that’s just part of the process, right? We have to be willing to maybe step away from what what we’re comfortable doing. Another way to think about this is – let’s say that you want to hire an employee, and right now you know you’re making enough money that maybe financially you’re okay individually, but you know that if you have to pay an employee, it’s going to be a little bit before you can really reap the rewards of having that person on staff. Because you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta train them up. You’ve got to make this new role. So you may take a little bit of a pay cut for a brief period of time before you can now create that additional leverage that you’re trying to create when you hire somebody.
So how do we navigate that? Well, a lot of times it’s as simple as saying, “Oay, my goal is in the next 60 days, I’m going to have recouped my investment. I’m going to be making as much money myself or more while playing this new role. I’m going to be moving into this new seat or new new role in the business. And now I’ve got this other person that allows me to scale beyond where I could have on my own. So anything that we’re going to do, we’re going to fall into that.”
We’re going to be getting uncomfortable if it means shifting to a different format of training, you know, private to semi-private. If it means moving into our own location after subleasing, if it means hiring staff, even if it means paying yourself first, which seems kind of funny, right? Hey, I’m paying me. But maybe that means that you’re actually having to step into being a little bit more responsible and acting like a business owner instead of just being a fitness professional who happens to pay his bills through what comes in.
Then the last one is one that I deal with almost every time I get on a call with somebody who’s a prospective member in Ideal Business Academy or somebody who wants to join a mastermind group, is the discomfort of stepping away from their business for two or three days to come to a mastermind meeting because they’re the sun and their little universe there. And they can’t leave without thinking all the other planets are gonna die off without them being there. And really it’s kind of a stress test, right? You move away from the business and you have to set your business up in a way that it can without you there for two days. It forces you to work on the business instead of in the business. So it’s kind of this trial by fire or really kind of pushing you into the deep end of the pool.
But that’s uncomfortable. I’ve been there. In fact, investing in my first mastermind was super uncomfortable because it took such a big chunk of kind of my free cashflow or disposable income. So understand that the journey is not always going to be easy and comfortable. That’s why we talk so much about, “Hey, what are your wins for the week?” Winning the day so you can add some enjoyment and some happiness to the process. The process may not be giving you that end result immediately. You’re not going to get immediate gratification, but it doesn’t mean you can’t feel good about the journey. It doesn’t mean that it all has to be miserable. Yes, we need to celebrate those milestones and those incremental wins along the way, but know that you’re going to have to change something today to get something.
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.
