As you’ve probably read in one of my emails or blog posts, before I moved full-time into the fitness industry I was a College Baseball Coach & Strength Coach (not to mention Personal Trainer, Asst. Sports Information Director, Admissions Rep., Sports Sciences Instructor and PA Announcer…what can I say, I had to pay the bills.)
I took over a baseball program that had never had a winning season – and to make matters worse, the University had just decided to eliminate athletic scholarships and wouldn’t reinstate them until my 5th season as a head coach (when we got a whopping 1.7 scholarships…for a team that generally carried over 35 players.)
My first year we won 2 more games than we lost. My second year we went 27-16 and advanced to the post-season. The next 4 years we combined to win 152 games while losing only 57. We were nationally ranked each of those years and finished 5th at the World Series in 2000.
I enjoyed my time as a Baseball Coach. Our team had it’s share of success – but I also made a ton of mistakes. But since I’ve moved on to becoming a fitness entrepreneur, I can identify dozens of things I learned while coaching that directly relate to business. Here are the top 7:
- If You Can’t Sell, You Can’t Succeed.
- I don’t care how good a coach you are, if you can’t recruit talented players you’re not going to win. A couple of the best tactical coaches I know often struggled to compete against teams that were not as well coached – but had better players. And recruiting is selling – plain and simple.
Same thing applies to training – if you can’t get clients, it doesn’t really matter how good a trainer or coach that you are
- Be Different in Areas That It’s Tough To Be Better. I knew that I wasn’t going to beat the coaches I was competing against by being a better tactician. They had 5, 10, sometimes 20 years more experience than me. I also knew that I couldn’t recruit in the same way as my competitors that all offered scholarships while we didn’t.I had to find ways to do things differently. I had to approach our game strategy, practice strategy and training strategy differently. I had to approach recruiting differently. In business you should look for ways to be different too. Don’t look for ways to out-spend your competition on marketing – look for ways to do things differently. You can’t always better your competition when it’s apples to apples. Sometimes you need to make the comparison apples to oranges.
- Hustle Can Make Up For A Lot. We had awful resources. A pathetic budget. Heck, when we went to the World Series, the site’s local paper did an article making light of the fact that we didn’t even have home and road uniforms.But it didn’t matter. In fact it kind of played to our advantage. We practiced harder because we had a chip on our shoulder. I worked harder at recruiting because I knew we didn’t have the scholarships our competitors did. If you want something bad enough, you can find a way. You can out hustle, our work and out think your competition. You just have to be willing to do the work.
- The Program Is More Important Than The Individual. My budget to pay assistant coaches was $2000 per year. Needless to say, that leads to frequent turnover and inexperienced coaches. That’s when I embraced the importance of having a system. We couldn’t change things every year to accommodate new people and we couldn’t spend months trying to get people acclimated to how we did things. So we created a very detailed playbook, thoroughly outlined every practice and had systems for everything. If you want your business to grow, you’ve got to have systems for all of your core tasks. Without them you don’t own a business – it owns you.
- Recruit The Intangibles. Early on when I was recruiting, I didn’t have much to sell potential recruits on. No scholarships, no winning tradition…not even a University owned home field. Because of that I was forced to recruit players that often weren’t on everyone else’s radar – and that meant trying to find diamonds in the rough. What I found was that if I recruited the intangibles – hard work, desire, passion – the players could often eventually outperform those players that might have been a little faster or thrown a little harder. In business it’s often the same. You have your system so you don’t necessarily need the trainer with the best resume. You need the person that is willing to learn, has good people skills, works hard and is dependable. You can teach them or direct them to the right educational resources when it comes to what they need to know.
- It’s Easy To Be Average. Being Successful Takes A Lot Of Work. I remember being really frustrated most of my final season as a head coach. We won over 70% of our games that year. I never could grasp how coaches could be happy winning half their games – or less. But that’s what most people do. Both of the coaches that preceded at the University had losing records and the coach that followed me won half of his games. All of them had better circumstances – more scholarships money, better budgets, etc. – but didn’t have much if any success.Why? Because being average is easier. Recruiting takes time. Lots of time. Player development, practice planning, improving your system – it’s a lot of work. Business is no different. It’s easier to say “I’ll do it tomorrow.” It’s easier settling for doing ‘just enough to get by’ instead of doing those extra little detail things. If you want to be a success – you’ve got to be willing to go the extra mile.
- You’re Getting Better or Getting Worse – Every Day. Coaching college baseball was great because there are clear deadlines to measure how well we did our job.We couldn’t waste one day in recruiting, because that might be the day someone else got the player I was trying to sign.We couldn’t waste a day in practice because that first game was going to be one day closer tomorrow and we couldn’t get the wasted day back.Every day was important because the games – the way we measured success – weren’t going anywhere. If we weren’t at our best – we’d suffer for it. If we missed a day of preparation, our competition gained a slight edge on us. Every day mattered. Like it or not – business is the same. You’re moving closer to where you want to be – or you’re moving farther from your goals – with every passing day. Don’t forget it.
Dedicated to your success,
Pat Rigsby
Pat Rigsby is a Co-Owner of the International Youth Conditioning Association & the youth fitness franchise Athletic Revolution as well as a fitness industry consultant serving thousands of personal trainers and fitness entrepreneurs. Sign up for his fitness business free newsletter to discover proven marketing, sales and business strategies, along with blog updates, news, and more! While you’re at it, follow him on Twitter.
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Love the baseball analogy. Brought me back to my routs!!! Thanks