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Being a Successful Fitness Entrepreneur: Your Unfair Advantage

May 2, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 9 Comments

I’m going to let you in on something that most every ultra successful fitness entrepreneur knows – but they’ll never tell you…

… They have a secret advantage.

Most every person that’s achieved any sort of real success in any field of business has some sort of secret advantage. They look for ways to make sure that they have a head start in every situation.

They have no interest in fighting fair.

I’m not talking about doing something underhanded… by now you know that’s not how we work here. What I’m talking about is that a successful fitness entrepreneur looks for advantages that give them the upper hand from the start.

I know, I’ve been vague so far, so let me give you a few examples:

The Easiest Way To Get Fitness Referrals

April 27, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 6 Comments

A Guest Post On Fitness Referrals By Paul Reddick

You can probably remember the last 3 people who said something nice to you about your fitness business, right?

Do you have them in your mind now?

Maybe they told you…

- How much weight they lost?
- What an inspiration you are to them?
- How much they enjoy training with you?

If you’re like me you would put on your best “aww shucks” and say something like …

“My pleasure”
“Thanks so much”
“That means a lot”

Well, like me, you’ll have to change that. Like, NOW!

Building A Personal Training Business: The 10X Factor

April 26, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 33 Comments

Let’s face it, building a personal training business – building any business for that matter – isn’t easy.

How do you separate yourself from the competition? The countless health clubs, bootcamps and other personal trainers in your area? How do you compete with P90X, fitness magazines and every infomercial under the sun that promise incredible results in a hurry and have multi-million dollar marketing budgets behind them?

Well if you’re looking for the easy route – the magic bullet to building a personal training business – this isn’t the place for you.

There are plenty of other people out there that will give you the sizzle. They’ll make it sound like you never have to lift a finger and success will fall right in your lap. Work 4 hours a week and earn multiple six figures.

You don’t believe that crap, do you? I hope not.

Success isn’t easy. Building a training business, or any other business, is hard. But you shouldn’t want it to be easy. You shouldn’t want everyone to be able to do it.

That just makes it ordinary. Average.

And I don’t want to settle for any part of being average… and neither should you.

So I’m going to give you my Magic Formula for building a personal training business:

Screen shot 2011 04 25 at 11.44.02 PM Building A Personal Training Business: The 10X Factor

The 10X Factor for Personal Training Business Success

Rapid Fire Fitness Marketing Tactics – Part 4

April 19, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 2 Comments

Rapid Fire Fitness Marketing Tactics– The Final Installment

Here’s the final installment in our Rapid Fire Fitness Marketing Tactics Series. Art McDermott, Kyle Harrod and Todd Lowder each share some of their best stuff. If you missed the other installments here are the links to those….

Part1, Part2, Part 3

art Rapid Fire Fitness Marketing Tactics – Part 4

Fitness Marketing Tactic: School of the Month/ Biggest Loser By Art McDermott

The first thing we did when deciding on whether this would be a good promotion to run was we mentioned it to some of the teacher who we already had as members to our boot camp. This not only informed them of the idea so we could get their reaction, but also got them to go back to the teachers at their school and market the idea for us to build up a following even before officially announcing it.

We then got in touch with the head HR person in Andover and pitched our idea to her. We had a nice little presentation for her explaining all the actual benefits of having the teacher take part in the contest.

After that we got in touch with all the nurses and explained how the contest would work and the part they would play. We limited their role into simply having to take the weights of their school’s participants day 1 and the last day, stressing we would do the rest of the work.

Fitness Marketing Tactics Rapid Fire – Part Three

April 17, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 6 Comments

Fitness Marketing Tactics Rapid Fire - Part Three

Here’s the third installment in the Rapid Fire Fitness Marketing Tactics Series. If you missed the first 2 posts you can find them by clicking on part 1, and part 2. Enjoy!

Bring a Friend Cheat Sheet by Ben Warstler

Bring clients into your camps faster than any other marketing method

Bring a friend campaigns are vital to your fitness business for many reasons. For our program there are no other strategies that work better and we’ve been doing it since the beginning. Here is a quick reference guide or ‘cheat sheet’ on key points to Bring a Friend campaigns

Set up a week each bootcamp session as the designated ‘bring a friend’ week. Campers will expect it to happen each month and will be drawing up clients every week up to the ‘bring a friend’ week. Our Bring a Friend Week is always the third week of a session.
When a friend comes in, treat them like they are a client already (that is the expectation).

My Favorite Way To Take A Personal Training Business Online

April 5, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 10 Comments

Making a Local Personal Training Business Global

There are plenty of ways people build an online personal training business. Some just search out a hot niche and try to position themselves as a pseudo-expert there.

Some jump from market to market, hoping to strike it rich.

Some just play follow the leader and do what they see others making money at.

But my favorite way to take a training business online is simple:

Take what you do well locally and share it globally.

local online My Favorite Way To Take A Personal Training Business Online

As far as I’m concerned – if you haven’t proven you can do something locally, you probably shouldn’t be promoting yourself as an expert about that topic online.

Let me tell you how this worked with my wife Holly…

Fitness Marketing: Gaining the Extra Edge

March 27, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 4 Comments

Gaining the Extra Edge: Pat’s Essential Fitness Marketing Strategies

extra 2 197x300 Fitness Marketing: Gaining the Extra Edge

One of the books that I’m reading right now is The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First.

It’s about how a new ownership group and management team turned around the Tampa Bay Rays. If you’re not a baseball fan, the Rays were pretty much the laughing stock of Major League Baseball. They were one of the worst teams in baseball, they had a terrible relationship with their community and drew hardly any fans – and to top it off, they play in the most competitive division in all of baseball with the Yankees and Red Sox.

Within 3 years of taking over the team, they won the American League Championship.

How’d they do it? The same way that you can explode your fitness business.

Finding value where your competitors aren’t looking.

They did everything from changing the team name from Devil Rays to Rays to improve branding and offer free parking to improve customer relationships to seeking out different ways to find undervalued players that could help them win.

They looked for a small edge any place they could find one.

Heck – Vegas was built on this: the House Advantage.

So how can you get the extra edge over your competition? Here are a few ideas:

Quad vs. Hip Dominant

March 15, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 3 Comments

Pat here. When I was coaching college baseball, I recognized early on that successful programs were built on 2 things:

Great Coaching
Great Recruiting

You might be ok if you were really proficient at one but not the other – but you’d never be great.

In fact – some of the best teachers of the game I encountered didn’t win nearly as frequently as the guys who might have been 10% worse as teachers – but were much better recruiters.

When I left coaching and went into business I quickly found a lot of similarities.

If you want to run a great business you need to be proficient at training and at marketing / selling.

If you neglect either you’ll really limit your success.

With that in mind I periodically ask friends of mine that are at the top of the profession to share insights on training. Some ‘gurus’ may try to tell you that being a great trainer isn’t important…being a great marketer is all it takes.

Bullshit.

Being a great trainer or coach is the foundation of a successful fitness business and Mike Robertson is living proof. Mike, along with his partner Bill Hartman, own one of Men’s Health’s Top 10 Gyms in the U.S. and their primary driver is delivering a great service. This leads to great retention, tons of referrals and it makes all other marketing much more effective.

So you can look at this guest post one of two ways. You can view it as a training post – and it’s a great one. Or you can view it as a fitness marketing post – because if you become a better trainer or coach, your marketing just got a lot easier.

OK – here’s Mike:

How to Develop Your Fitness Niche

March 6, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 10 Comments

Eric Cressey Reports on Intelligently Developing your Fitness Niche

Five months ago, I wrote an article called How to Find Your Fitness Niche – and it was one of the more popular posts in my site’s history. I realized after writing it, though, that I never bothered to talk about how I developed the niche I was in once I discovered it.

If you didn’t read the original installment, definitely check it out now. However, as a brief background, about 80-85% of our clients at Cressey Performance are baseball players. This past off-season, we had 44 professional players travel from all over the country to train in snowy Hudson, MA. So, you could say that my dream “niche” came true. Here are some of the strategies we employed along the way.

1. Don’t go for the big fish right away.

People are always blown away when I tell them that I started out with training high school baseball players, not big leaguers. That’s the truth, though; a few younger guys got great results, won a state championship, earned D1 scholarships, and – in the case of one – receive state player of the year honors. My phone started ringing off the hook when some of those results were featured in the Boston Globe.

Want A Great Fitness Business? Act Small To Grow Big

March 3, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 21 Comments

Why it Pays to Think Small When It Comes to Growing a Fitness Business

Remember where you came from.

It’s something that you hear almost all self made success stories recite – and it’s something you need to embrace if you want to build a truly successful fitness business.

When we initially started our business, Nick and I had another business partner. He was a nice guy, but he wanted to act big while we were just beginning. He wanted fancy fitness business cards, cool stationery and a bunch of other stuff that had little if any bearing on our success.

fish Want A Great Fitness Business? Act Small To Grow Big