Fitness Business Building By Pat Rigsby
I had a coaching call with a fitness pro the other day and I gave him some advice that I consider to be the best advice that I can give someone – but it comes with a disclaimer: it is also advice that I’m hesitant to give because it could potentially give someone the idea that they don’t have to ‘do the work’ – which obviously goes against everything that we teach.
So the advice that I gave him and that I’m going to give you now is this:
Determine your strengths – then build your fitness business around them.
So let me back up for a minute…
The fitness pro I was talking with already runs a strong business and has enjoyed some success in his marketing efforts. He told me that he knew that I was a fan of public speaking and networking but he hadn’t really done much with either of those marketing tactics. Instead of telling him that he needed to dive right into those two – because they are two of the most powerful ways available to any fitness pro to grow their business…I surprised him and told him not to do either of them.
Did my thoughts about public speaking or networking change? Of course not.
But after talking with him a bit and discovering that he had some other real strengths that he could leverage to generate more clients – and would clearly enjoy more – it was obvious that the best solution for him wasn’t going the networking and public speaking route.
He needed to play to his strengths.
So why is this scary for me to give this advice?
Because given to the wrong person, it can be misconstrued as a free pass to be lazy.
This particular fitness pro has already used social media and his writing skills successfully to grow his business. Suggesting more ways for him to leverage his use of social media and his writing talents even more makes sense – because he’s already proven that it has success for him.
But put that same advice in the wrong hands and you get a situation where someone who’s never proven that they can write worth a damn and haven’t had any success with social media now think they don’t have to ever get out from behind their computer to build a six-figure business.
In fact, back in our old Personal Trainer U. days there was a guy on the forum that did just that…he got on the forum and whined about how he’d written 3 articles and submitted them to article directories, put up a couple blog posts – and he didn’t have any clients to show for it. The economy was to blame. There was no way that trainers could be successful right now.
My response was simple: “How many prospects are in your home office right now? If the answer is *zero* – then get off your ass and go where they are.”
Needless to say – he didn’t post anymore.
But that’s my fear when dispensing this advice – people mistaking their strengths for what’s just easiest.
But I’ve believed that this approach was the best way to go for quite a while.
When I was coaching baseball, it took me a couple years to quit trying to be a clone of the coach that I admired most. My strengths were different than his. Once I realized that, I became a much better coach and our teams got much better.
I followed this same approach when it came to dealing with our opponents too – instead of worrying about detailed scouting reports and trying to exploit opponents weaknesses, I wanted our players to focus exclusively on playing to their strengths.
Heck – we’ve built an entire franchise around this approach. Allowing fitness professionals to play to their own individual strengths instead of trying to churn out cookie cutter businesses.
Now you may not think that this advice is anything special – but here’s why it is…
Once you determine your strengths, buy going all in and leveraging them to the maximum you’ve done 3 things:
- You’ve separated yourself from everyone else because you’re playing to your unique talents, assets, passions and skills.
- You just made running your business a lot more fun because you can focus more on doing what you’re best at – and feel confident that it’s a good choice.
- You just set out on the fastest route I know to build a powerhouse business.
Another way of putting this is ‘doing more of what’s working.’ Seems simple, right?
Well, most people don’t do it. They jump from one thing they’ve had some success with to something else that requires completely different talents or skills instead of finding more ways to utilize the strengths that led to the successes they’ve had.
To use our business as an example – one of our strengths is relationships. Really, everything that we’ve built has been founded on building relationships with fitness professionals and trying to provide the best solutions they need to build the Fitness Business they want.
So one we recognized that relationships were at the core of our business, we started to do things like:
- Hold more live events to spend more time in person with the fitness pros we serve.
- Do more coaching calls so we can learn more about the people we work with and how we can most effectively help them.
- Create a Customer Experience position on our team so we could make sure that we’re providing the best possible service to the people who trust us to help them grow their business.
- Build franchises so we could have a family-like relationship with a select group of fitness pros who shared the same values we do and what to work with us as closely as possible.
There are plenty of other examples, but you get the picture.
So how can you leverage your strengths to build your fitness business?
If you’re a relationship person, do more networking. Focus more on referrals. Create more complete solutions for the people that you already work with. Build a community in your business so strong that it attracts the type of clients you want more of.
If you’re great at writing, make sure you’ve got great copy on your site. Blog like crazy. Guest blog for local bloggers. Write a column for the local paper. Build out dozens of autoresponders. Send press releases every week. Send a great weekly newsletter. Write free special reports that you can get in the hands of prospects. Write direct mail sequences to send out in your area.
And that’s not even beginning to touch on how you can leverage your strengths as a coach to own a particular niche market.
So your goal should be this:
Figure out what your real strengths are. The things that you’ve proven that you’re better than the rest at – the things you’ve done well to grow your business. The things that you not only enjoy doing – but that produce results.
Once you’ve determined those strengths – figure out as many ways as you can to start leveraging them to build the business you want…and start implementing those ideas.
That’s how you can build a great fitness business that you’ll love owning.
