What Stops Fitness Businesses From Growing
Last night I had an interesting phone call with one of our new VIP clients.
This guy owns a couple studios, is doing VERY well with implementing the marketing, sales, and management systems we teach.
And he asked me one of the best questions I’ve been asked in some time.
(Which is instructive in itself to why this guy continues to grow at such a rapid pace.)
His question was:
“Sean, you’ve coached and worked with a lot of fitness professionals and studio owners that are at the point I am right now. What do you see separates those that plateau or go downhill from those that continue to grow to the really BIG time?”
As I thought about it, I came up with 2 things that I consistently see separate those who ‘kinda make it’ and those who ‘really make it.’
1. Your Head- I see a lot of folks that are crippled by their own ego. They think they’ve ‘arrived’ and they stop being the aggressive student they once used to be. They think they know it all now, and there isn’t a whole lot left they need to learn.
They kinda start ‘coasting’, which really means they allow all the momentum they’ve worked so hard to build to stall. And this gives their competitors time to close the gap.
This is a pretty sad scenario and one that is easily avoidable by surrounding yourself with the right support systems, people, and mastermind group that will continue to challenge you beyond what you ‘think’ you can do and what you ‘think’ is the end point in your destination.
When you surround yourself with a top group of winners, the competitive fire comes back. And new ideas, opportunities and directions for your business growth inevitably come out of the experience.
And you will discover there really is no ‘end point’. There are just continuing levels of growth and new and exciting challenges ahead… if you stay ‘open’ to them.
2. Infastructure- Being able to drive your ‘little’ business to become a ‘big’ business is one thing.
But what happens when you stop driving growth all by yourself?
Is your company structured so that it continues to grow whether you are present or not?
For most in this industry the answer is no.
They haven’t taken the time (nor learned how to have the patience) required to build a rock-solid team that works together seamlessly to consistently grow the business.
This is a combination of:
- The systems in your business- one thing to install them, quite another to refine them down so they work just the way they are supposed to. It takes consistent work and patience to go back to a job description for an employee, or a procedure outline for how a scenario is handled in your business, and consistently refine and update it over and over and over again. Most people don’t do this. They limp along with somewhat broken and ‘good enough’ systems. Only the best of the best have the discipline and patience to continually do the work required here.
- The people who work for you- Getting the right group of people working in your company isn’t easy. Often a new hire can fool you, and turn out to not be all that you hoped they would. So it’s generally a process of hiring staff, letting staff go, hiring staff, letting staff go, and so on… until you finally have a solid team of GREAT people working for you. And by ‘great’ I mean a team that has the right ‘people’ skills. You can’t train someone how to be a good person, how to have good values, how to have good ethics, how to care for people. You’ve got to hire those skills. Then everything else (the technical information and functions of the job) can all be trained.
Most people never push hard enough through the sifting and sorting process they must in order to get the right team of people in place.
Hiring new staff, firing the wrong staff… over and over again.. is not fun or easy. But it IS a very big key to success.
- The training you do in your company- practice makes perfect, and there is no substitute for time. Developing the right staff and growing them up just plain takes time. Time for you to train them, time for them to learn. And then time for it to all ‘gel’ together.
And the more you do, the more effective you staff will be able to perform when the sh*t hits the fan.
I’m talking about things like someone quits or you have to go out of town for a family emergency for a couple weeks. These are the types of events that would shut most little businesses down. But GREAT fitness businesses have the team so well trained, that they can quickly compensate for having a man (or woman) down and keep the train on the tracks.
Conclusion
So there you have it. Two big success factors that separate those who just break even every month from those that earn a great income and live a lifestyle they can be proud of.
If you haven’t download our new report or CD yet, then you can do so here: http://www.DuplicationCode.com
It filled with more information on the management side of taking your fitness business from good to great.
http://www.DuplicationCode.com