Brian Grasso on Using Speaking to Market Your Fitness Business

Chris McCombs (CM): Brian, who are you and what do you do?

Brian Grasso (BG): Well, Chris, I guess I’m currently the CEO and founder of the International Youth Conditioning Association. We are an educational firm, I suppose, that resides in the fitness industry here and we were incepted about four years ago now. And over the last four years we've — I guess I initiated it. I collected just a stellar board of directors and some of the best who's who there is in the industry regarding respective specialties such as nutrition and bio-motor skill development and motor skill development, etc.

And so our original initial task was to develop an educational profile, a certification, that really instructed personal trainers, strength coaches, and coaches — for that matter the world over — on how to best train and develop young athletes. I saw a huge hole in our industry in that particular demographic and was really displeased with a lot of direction our industry was going in terms of quick fixes and pushing kids too young and too hard.

So that was the original conception behind the IYCA and it's since branched out to have an absolute mind of its own to other things including development of facilities and creating jobs for people who are certified through the IYCA. We're working with organizations in Zambia, Africa; in Auckland, New Zealand; and really all over the world. So that encompasses a great deal of my time right now to spearhead the initiatives of that organization.

And I’m also beginning an initiative on a brand new organization that actually, Chris, I haven't talked to anybody about yet. So you and your listeners are the first ones to hear, but I've started an organization called Youth Obesity Solution [ph] and it's going to be starkly different than the contemporary means of just diet and exercise suggestions to kids and their parents as a means of losing weight. It's a real look at the introspective considerations on our society as to why kids are overweight or obese and what the real solutions are. So the long and short of it is that's my specialty and my area of expertise in this industry.

CM: Brian, I know you've done really well with some public speaking. How can fitness professionals and personal training business owners use public speaking to build their businesses?

BG: You know, that's a really good question. Public speaking can serve as the cornerstone of a lot of your business dynamic, and I think the industry is swinging a little bit, Chris, to a lot of online initiatives. And let me clarify that. I think online initiatives are fantastic. I do a lot of online stuff myself or, I suppose more appropriately, I have my staff do it because I'm not terribly technically savvy, but I think online — the online medium has made the world a much smaller place and allows for great information to be disseminated amongst interested parties who are looking for information at a much easier rate.

Having said that, the crux of most personal trainers and strength coaches business is local initiatives. Very few people aspire from a vision standpoint and even fewer are able to create or establish any perspective vision they may have had of some kind of national, or even international, interest. They make it very difficult, or they find it very difficult to produce that on a tangible level. So having said that, your immediate customer base is your local area, and there's no better way to become a credible expert and to become an established recognizable figure in the interest of helping people in whatever your specialty is, helping them in their problems and their concerns, than through public speaking.

So public speaking for me has always been the cornerstone of marketing plans and business development. I've been doing it for a long, long time and I've established a lot of things that are right and wrong of how you do it. But the long and short of is that public speaking should be considered one of the primary facets of your business development, especially as it relates to your local market.

CM: How did you get started with public speaking? Like, how did you book your first engagements? Where did you do your first speeches at? And thing like that?

BG: It's important to say that I really, really am happy with the fact you're asking about process and procedure because I think the industry is in a bit of an unsettled, unfixed place right now because a lot of younger trainers are looking to really make a mark with their services and genuinely want to help a lot of people. And there's also other trainers who either [inaudible] with that or perhaps as an absolute are looking to make as much of a return financially speaking as they can in their fitness and training careers, which I have no problem with either.

My only concern is that we really have to build ourselves up as a credible service provider before we start really worrying about how many people came to our seminars, how much money I'm making, or anything else. The bottom line is we have to want to try and help people. That has to be a motivation. From there you become credible. From there you start earning some dollars.

So the fact you're asking how I started and staged in, to be honest, Chris, I’m thrilled with. What I did to begin with — I made a lot of mistakes at the beginning, but I really just went local. I went to libraries and park districts, or park and recreation associations, and I talked about the fact — the manager or the staff who I was discussing this with who was on duty at the time — that I was a local trainer, I was a local expert, I suppose, in my niche, my demographic, of the fitness industry and I'd like to know how much it might cost me to rent a room in the library or a small conference room in the park district, given that I was a local person who was not looking to make a tremendous profit off of the venture, but more looking to service the community. And that's an important part because if you're really looking to make public speaking part of your foundation for marketing and your business development, you have to be willing to accept some truths.

One of the truths in terms of most people, Chris, is that they're not great speakers yet. And I think that's an undeniable reality that we have to face head on. I faced it head on, I would say about 10 or 11 years ago now, is that I really desired to be a speaker. I really desired to be able to speak to an audience and touch them in their lives in a way that was both uniform to the entire audience, but specific enough to each person in the audience. And what I found is that's an amazingly difficult skill to obtain. So I wasn't looking to profit. I really wasn't even looking to gain clientele. I was looking to improve my speaking capacity. I was looking to become a better orator, looking to become a better purveyor of a message. And so I walked into the beginning of my speaking career with little expectation aside from getting better at a skill that I knew was going to serve me in time.

So that's how I started. I went to local governmental agencies like libraries and park districts, worked out a fee per hour of rental for one of the rooms, given that I was a local business purveyor. And then I went from there to start drumming up people to come to the actual presentation. And that was little more than sending out a basic localized press release and heading to my local Starbucks and Caribou Coffees and libraries and anywhere else that would let me post signage for free. And that's how I started.

CM: So what steps would you put for a fitness professional who wants to get started himself? Are there some books he should read? How should he really work on his speaking skills and to get the topics he wants to go over and book the engagements and things like that? Can you give any kind of step-by-step?

BG: I definitely can. You asked three different things, man, they were perfect. So I'm going to touch on all of them.

CM: Awesome.

BG: How to become a great speaker, there are some great books. But in that what I found to be most effective was to practice. And so it was not uncommon for me to patrol up and down my living room delivering a seminar to myself, there's actually nobody whatsoever. And I'm sure it looked ridiculous and I did it and practiced when I went home because it probably did look very ridiculous.

But when I got more comfortable with the delivery of the message I would then take it to my office and I'd deliver it to one of my associates; and that was also very uncomfortable because what fitness professionals who are beginning to speak are going to find out very quickly that small audiences are much more stressful than large audiences because you either — less of a demographic there. So in a large audience undoubtedly some people will be very connected with your message. You can tell by their facial expressions, their eyes light up, they nod their head. So in the absence of having one of those people you have no choice but to talk directly to the only three or four people in your audience and if one or any of them are not on the same page with you it becomes a very daunting task, even if it's a small audience, to regain your credibility and deliver that message with as much vigor as you wanted to.

So I started delivering the message to one or two staff members, or co-workers at the time, and asking for honest feedback. And I really wanted to enlist what they thought of my presentation style first and foremost, much more than the message itself. Sometimes I would just memorize two or three paragraphs of a book and I would present that. I was much more concerned with my delivery, my ability to convey emotion and a message, in the verbal, spoken word, more so than the message at the time. And I gleaned feedback. I wanted to hear what people said, and it was hard to hear sometimes because you don't always want to be told what you're not good at, but it was an important milestone for me to learn from an actual audience what I was good and not good at.

And then I would videotape myself. I would videotape myself in my living room. I would videotape myself in the office. When I gave small seminars locally I would videotape, or have one of my co-workers, videotape it for me at the back of the room. I wanted to see what I was doing, how I looked.

And understand that by no means am I suggesting that I'm the greatest public speaker in the entire world. I mean, everything's a work in progress. I want to keep learning more. I desire to learn more of how to convey a message better. But those are the steps I went through to become a better speaker and then once I had a better handle on that, my presentation style, I started really looking at my methods because that's the next step.

Once you become captivating in the way you can present an idea, you then must become succinct in actually presenting the idea. And that was a hard one, Chris. That was a hard one to take all these things I wanted to say and put them to tangible form so that the audience participant or attendee would actually glean something from what I was trying to convey to them. And, again, that was the root of it all was helping humanity; that was my whole purpose of wanting to become a better speaker, so that my audience was not walking away with a good message that was incumbent on me to make the message better.

So you start from square one. You start with the boldness of everything. Everything you want to say, put it down on paper. And then start sub-condensing it and sub-categorizing it and it just starts to work itself into a more manageable nuance, or manageable slide perhaps of a PowerPoint or LCD projector. Then start delivering it and then glean more feedback.

And the last question you asked was in regards to how you get yourself booked. I believe it was how do you get people into the seats and how do you get booked? Well for me the greatest thing on a local level is word of mouth. And I think that fitness trainers have become under siege a lot recently by some credible and not so credible people in and around our industry who are suggesting you buy this book or this DVD or this system on PR or how to become a credible expert.

The best way to become a credible expert is to become a credible expert. I mean, be credible. Work on your message, work on your presentation, work on your training philosophies. Understand what you're talking about so no one in your area can really match you word for word in terms of what you know about your respective demographic. Now, my area of expertise is youth, youth athletes and youth fitness participants. And I would wager there's no one in the world who's as qualified as I am. Not at all out of cocky or any sort of gregarious feel, just in all humility I studied it, researched it, presented it, learned from it, and actually contributed more in the last 12 years than anybody else has. So the best way to become a credible expert is to work on becoming credible.

Once you start producing results, once you start to really hone your presentation skills and your message, watch, word of mouth in your community is going to skyrocket. And every time that beats a press release, that beats media, that beats marketing, it beats everything because the consumers at large are inundated with press releases. And believe it or not, as much as we all love to be on TV or get quoted in the newspaper, consumers are quite desensitized to that. They see people on TV all the time. They see people being quoted in the newspaper all the time. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, because it's not, it's a great thing, but you want real life consumers to trust you as a credible expert, have their next door neighbor tell them that you're fantastic. That's credibility. That is marketing. And so the way you do that is you get good at what you do, you become credible, you polish your presentation, you polish your message, and then once you get that rolling you start boldly asking for attendees to go out and do the word of mouth for you.

Perhaps if you own a training business, Chris, you say, "Thanks for coming to my seminar. I'm going to give you two free training sessions in exchange for you coming and hearing my message." And at the end of that second training session you say really nicely and really with a great deal of integrity and credibility, "Thank you so much for coming to my presentation. I hope you've learned something. I really hope I've taught you some stuff over this seminar and these two sessions. You would do me a great service if you could sort of let your friends know. And if you want to keep training with me, if three of your friends call me and say, 'Hey, Diane referred me,' then Diane I'm going to train you for a month for free."

So build a credibility; build it all from the ground up, and then go ahead and start propagating word of mouth by design, not by chance. And I think sometimes fitness professionals do the vice versa. They start with the marketing, they start with the e-books, they start with the DVDs long before they're credible, long before they're polished and they have to work from the other direction upwards.

CM: How should fitness professionals go about converting their attendees into clients? Or how can they profit from the actual speeches?

BG: Well I just touched on that to a great deal, perhaps offer training packages or even freebies to potential attendees for attending your seminars. There's an adage in our industry that I couldn't disagree more with which is, "Don't give away anything for free because it devalues your service." And I think that's completely erroneous and it's not true, at least in my experience it's not true.

I'm worth a lot; my time is worth a great deal to me, to my family, and to everybody else. So I'm very close-guarded, I suppose, on how many hours I work and what I put my interests into. So you're certainly not going to find anybody more concerned about time for money or worth of a potential person than I am in the industry. But having said that, one of the greatest misnomers is that somehow a freebie devalues your service potentially to a customer base and we have to begin to realize that that's miscategorized. It's only devaluing if you allow it to be so.

See, people in this day and age, consumers want to be serviced. They deserve to be serviced. If you drive to any main street in America you're going to find billboards and signs for special offers on every McDonalds, Wendy's, Jiffy Lube, Target, anything you think of you're going to find sales oriented signs along the streets. Again, consumers are desensitized to that so you have to look from a different direction or a different angle.

My angle was always I want to service people first and foremost. There's no question about that. I want to gain a control or an entrance into this marketplace where I become a trusted, trustworthy, credible figure. And the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to over deliver so much at the onset and I'm going to instill in my potential customers the ability to want to tell all their friends about it that I’m going to have this incredible circular effort of referrals going on all around me, all because I was willing to put forth a couple hours of my time for what ended up to be no money in exchange for that time, but what lead to a huge bonus, a huge referral system around me.

And so, that's how I go about instructing young fitness trainers to perhaps look to the back end in terms of padding their own personal training clientele by using public speaking. Back end sales, or back of the room sales, are also great but that's kind of a few rungs up the ladder. Again, it's credibility first, and then you start looking at paid events where people actually pay to see you speak, and then you start looking at having back room sales. Usually in that order, although not always, but usually in that order. So back of the room sales are great, but again, it's a process; it takes time to get there.

In the interim, if you're looking to build your training business offer public services for free; get people involved in your customer care to the nth degree, perhaps for free; get them talking about you, and your business is off and away to the races.

CM: That is awesome. Right there, that is awesome wisdom. What would you say to those who are scared of public speaking?

BG: Well I was. I was brutally scared of public speaking. As you can tell now I’m a bit of a windbag and I probably don't — I don't shut up when I should, Chris, as you can tell by the 10 minutes of each answer I'm giving to you here. But I was deathly afraid of public speaking, so much so that when I would actually — let me just take you two or three years into my public speaking career.

When I started getting offers to speak at actual industry conferences and I would accept them because that was a great honor, and still is a great honor, I would feel really professional in that fact that I was issued plane tickets and a hotel reservation and I'd take a cab to the airport and I would take the plane tickets that the event organizer had emailed me via those electronic tickets. I'd give them to the person, go through, get on the plane; I felt all professional, like I was being brought — I was the expert being brought to this location to speak. And then I'd get to the hotel room and that's about where I'd stay for the next 18 hours until I had to go to the event and speak. I wouldn't sleep a wink that night because I was deathly afraid to perform in public.

And I was deathly afraid for two reasons. First of all, I didn't find myself to be a great orator, I didn't find myself to be a great speaker, and I thought that the audience would see through that. I was also always afraid of the one, I guess jackass I always suspected was going to be in the audience calling me on all the different things he or she disagreed with me on, and that use to tear me up at night.

So the long and short of it is — I speak all over the world now and it's making 35 percent of my business I do from speaking and state engagements and reciprocal business partnerships through speaking. And I was terrified. So if there are people who are listening you're a little nervous or scared to speak, yeah, absolutely, so was I, so think nothing of it. The way I got better was I practiced. And what I mean by that was I put on more local events. I got myself booked or I arranged my own public speaking opportunities every chance I could possibly get, whether I was with a local used sports organization or if I had created an event for myself at a local library or whatever — I did everything I possibly could to be put on stage, so to speak. I even — I was even offered jobs by used sport organizations that I turned down because I didn't have the time for the commitment, but I basically talked them into letting me do educational presentations for the coaching staff instead. And it worked. And over the years I've done over 5000 speaking engagements now and after all that you just become very callous of the whole situation and you continue to develop.

And that's the bottom line is that when you walk into public speaking as a desire to get better and to deliver a message to help people, your desire to want to get better never stops. Even where I am now, I have only reached the tip of the iceberg of where I want to go in terms of being able to command a 20,000 seat stadium and have every single person walk out of that stadium thinking, "Man, that was fantastic. That was the best speech I ever heard." That's what I want for myself and I’m no where near there yet and I've been doing it for 12 years. So it's okay, be afraid, but be willing to get better, have desire to get better, because that's the only way it's going to happen.

CM: Let me ask you a question. How big was your first engagement and how large are some of the engagements you do now?

BG: My first engagement was four people and it was actually one of the most beneficial ones I ever gave. As a matter of fact, when I talk to young, budding speakers who want to get better at this I always tell them that the small audience is the most terrifying but also the most rewarding because when you're speaking to 20 or more people certainly you can take some questions afterwards and certainly you may take some questions in the middle, but you're still talking to a reasonably large group whose problems, specific problems, might not be — they're not being identified precisely by your topic or your message. So if they ask questions, great, you can help them on that. But a lot of people don't ask questions; they say "thank you" and then leave.

In a small group of three, four, even two, you have the sole attention of these people. So as you're giving a message I always say to young speakers, "Ask them, 'Is this what you need to hear? What's going on in your life that this can be better served for?'" And then redesign it on the fly. You know, if somebody brings up the point that they like your message but it doesn't really hit home for them because their problems are different, ask them what their problems are and then specify your message to that problem. That's the beauty of small audiences.

Large audiences — well this past Ryan Lee's boot camp where it was, I guess, over 350 people. And that's pretty much as big as it's gotten for me so far. I've had a few audiences of my own that were into the mid-100's range, but more often than not my average audience is between 40 and 70 I'd say is about average. So I guess that's a long-winded answer to your question.

CM: Let me ask you this. I know in my own success, and a few other trainers I know, that mindset has been the most important thing, if not — one of the most important things, if not the most important thing. What kind of mindset do you go about with your business and how important has it been with you?

BG: Now if you were hoping I'd answer that succinctly and quickly, you're — I might have to be more long-winded than I've already been on that one. That's a great question, Chris.

CM: Do you have the time for it? Honestly it's been so paramount to my own success. I literally used to sit there and just visualize my phone ringing and people signing up and then, it was so weird, because a few days later I would be calling my wife telling her, "I just signed five contracts. We just added $2000 a month to our income." And it would literally be de ja vu of a few days earlier. And now with stuff like What the Bleep Do We Know? and The Secret, this kind of mindset's really getting popular. The trainers I know who are making six-figure incomes they all have the mindset and they're doing some — whether it's affirmations or visualizations or just positive thinking, or they're into the law of attraction, or they're reading the old Napoleon Hill Think And Grow Rich stuff, but they're using it in their careers.

How do you use it? Because I know you touched on it at the Ryan Lee thing. I'd like to get a little more from you because there is a section of the manual here on mindset, actually a huge section, and I'd really like your answer on the PTU thing. I'd like to get a little more from you on that.

BG: It's everything to me. It really is. The passion you have about it comes through over the phone right, so it's wonderful to hear you so passionate and understanding about it. There's three relative professionals in our industry right now who are either — perhaps four — but there's people that reject it out of hand as coincidental, or a non-factor, or against a certain set of beliefs they already hold to be true, and that's fine and wonderful for them. Then there's the professional like yourself who clearly understands it and uses it to great success, and that's wonderful as well. And then, to me, there's the remaining professionals, which is the ones that perhaps just skim the surface on it and they're very excited about it and they talk about it, but I think there's a missing ingredient sometimes.

I think there certainly is a time delay, at least in my life there's been a time delay on my vision capacity and the tangibility of that vision actually occurring. So time delay is real but I still hear and see a lot of trainers in the industry who I think are missing some crucial steps. And I don't — trust me, I don't say that to act as though I know something more than anybody else. I’m just trying to sort of give my side to the equation. But I have a bit of a secret solution I use. Chris, you'll recognize this immediately. I just put it in contemporary terms that make sense to me.

You have to have a vision and the vision has to be lofty as far as I'm concerned. Through and with the IYCA the world that views sports and fitness and change forever inside of 10 years; this is a promise and guarantee I make, and that is the vision. And I can extrapolate all the nuances of how we're going to use or how I'm going to initiate that vision through all these different mediums for the next three hours. But just understand, you have to have a vision and it has to be lofty. And I say that because more often than not in North America we're conditioned not to be lofty in what we believe we can do with our lives. So that's the first step, create the vision.

Second step for me is you have to be grateful for where you are. You have to really understand where you are why you're there and I think that — you mentioned The Secret — The Secret and even Napoleon Hill discusses gratitude, but to me it took me a long time to figure out exactly what I was to be grateful for. And when I got a handle on it I was really excited about that because I don't believe The Secret was being ambiguous, maybe I'm just thick skulled and it took some time to sink in, but this is the part I think a lot of trainers in our industry need to hear perhaps a little bigger.

What I've taken that to mean, in terms of being grateful, you are who are by design. And whatever design you believe that to be is exactly what it is. I'm not being religious, spiritual, or anything else here, I believe that religious can make up their own minds what the design is or where it emanates from for their own lives. But you're where you are by design and that design is in need of you to do a few things. It's to be self-introspective. It's to be very self-reflective as to why you're there. What lessons do you need to obtain or understand better given your current surroundings?

Secondly, your vision has some tangibility to it, but in order to make it tangible you likely either have to develop a new skill set, such as becoming a better public speaker, or improve on an existing skill set you possess but perhaps only in partial form. So you have to be, again, introspective to see here's where I am, here's what my skill set is, here's where my abilities are, here's my vision, where's the bridge? What do I have to get better at in order to see that vision come into reality? And I think of the vision itself as the guide tool, but how you bridge to get that vision into tangible form is your ability to be grateful for where you are and understand that you are where you are because there's things you need to do with your life in order to make that vision a real commodity, an actual concrete physicality.

So that's why I think there's perhaps a little misplay in the industry at large is that we hold onto the vision and we believe that the power of positive thinking in our mindset towards the vision is the entity that matters. But to me I really broke free with this stuff when I realized, "I am here and I have to adopt a grateful reason as to why I'm here." And that reason, I finally figured out, was that I had to develop skills and abilities that I didn't have in order to bring my visions into real form.

So once you've done that your next step is to have faith and conviction that you will develop all the skills that you need in order to bring those visions into reality and faith and conviction that those visions will come into reality. That's a multi-layer step for me.

And then fourth and finally, with your faith and conviction, with your gratitude and new found understanding as to where you are, why you're here, and what you need to take from this situation, and with your vision in mind, you have to execute purposeful action every day. And always, always, always that vision has to be on your mind. And I say that because I don't really get meditative. I don't go into a quiet place and close my eyes and visualize a whole lot.

And, Chris, I think I heard you say you do, and I think that's wonderful because I used to do that. But as my own ability I realized I didn't need that as much. I think it's a wonderful thing to do though. But to me the vision was created so concretely in my head I had such gratitude for where I was, even in relation to what my vision was and how far away I still might be from it, I showed great gratitude for the lessons I was finally learning. I had great faith and conviction that it was all going to work out the way I saw it. And so when I forth my daily tasks and I do all my little daily tasks, no matter how large or how small, that vision is always in my head. It's nothing I have to close my eyes and see, it directs me. And that because I took the time. I took the time to build those four steps. With great care I crafted them extremely explicitly and, frankly, it was probably the most fun and rewarding project I've ever done in my entire life.

So that's my overall mantra of how I use mindset in my life and a varying degree of tools. I like to journal every morning. I don't often say this because I'm frankly a little embarrassed of it, but I guess it's a good thing for people to hear. I love to write. I actually adore writing books, writing short stanzas, etc. So every morning I read a chapter of my favorite book and I think of what that message meant to me, today, in relation to my vision, in relation to my gratitude, in relation to my faith and conviction; and so I write a two page article or story to myself of what that meant. Aside from that I have vision tools, like vision boards and reality boards, in every site line around my desk. So those are the physical things I use everyday to maintain the mindset, but that greater four-point system is how I developed the mindset to begin with.

CM: That's a very well thought out system.

BG: And a very long-winded explanation. I apologize again.

CM: No. It was — this is great content, awesome content. That was very eloquently put and that's beautiful. Let me ask you a question. I want to play off something again real quick that was in the PTU interview because I was so impressed with the content you gave on that. And this is something — a skill I've been honing myself for the past year or two is time management. You have so much on your plate with the speaking and with your certification company and all that stuff going on. How do you manage your time? Is there anything you've figured out? Because it still is a challenge for me. I right now actually don't even train. I have other people doing all the training for me, but I know with a lot of trainers they're training 30-40 hours a week and they might only have an extra 5-20 hours a week to focus on their marketing and approving their business and systemizing things and calls and emails and management and delegating and all that. Is there any kind of system you use? What do you do?

BG: You know, I'm really enjoying this interview. I get asked to do a lot of interviews and I try to do as many as I can without question. But your question content is fantastic and I'm really enjoying this interview a lot, so I just want to leave that with you.

CM: Thank you.

BG: Time management is a tool, isn't it? It's such a pain sometimes to manage all the projects and, yeah, my schedule is lofty. It's most definitely lofty. There's three companies I own. They're the same demographic but with their own respective initiatives. I'm moving to New Zealand for a year in three months from now.

CM: Nice.

BG: Yeah. There's a great number of things on my plate and from the outside looking in sometimes it looks like a big wad of chaos. But there's a chaos theory, right? The more things are chaotic, the more organization there is to them.

I used to be a very type A personality. Everything had to be exactly organized in its place. I've learned to relax on that and, to be honest, that's my number one way to answer your question. Let it flow. I think that mindset and vision and gratitude and faith and conviction and purposeful action, when you develop and really hone all of those — and, again I want to build my own skills much more deeply than I have now even — but when you hone a degree of skill of that stuff there's a measure of letting go that you are enabled with. And that's my greatest time management skill is that I see my vision, and I have all those four-point steps in order in my head and my emotions, and so because of that nothing spooks me anymore.

When I get really busy or when things go a little — to be less prioritized even though they were important last week, I used to get really critical of myself or critical of our business dealings at large and start getting down on things. But my vision no longer takes a hit, so to speak, when things don't work out exactly the way I want them to. To me it's just a step in the process and I’m grateful having just learned something I just learned about maybe I stacked too much on my plate. So when you become good at this mindset stuff I think time management becomes much more orderly all by itself. That's the first thing.

Second thing, and understand I live in a bit of a Perfect Storm with respect to what my next idea is. I don't have children of my own, and God willing I will one day. I certainly want many of them. I have a wonderful girlfriend that works with me, managing director of all the online initiatives we do all through my company. So it's easy to mix business and pleasure with my particular life situation and I don't have children. And I understand that's a huge, huge [inaudible] focus. But having said that, 14 or 15 hour days are part of six days a week for me.

But it's interesting, I wrote — one of the articles, one of the little essays I wrote just a few days ago — I told you every morning I write — was called "The True Love of Life." And it was a reference to the fact that a lot of naysayers will tell you that when you work that much you're only focused on one thing and that your health is going to suffer or something else is going to suffer. But when you find your passion in life, when you find your calling, 15 hours will feel like two.

And that's my second reality to time management is that I have a tremendous work ethic and that I love what I do on such a level, it's such a passion of mine that I can put in 15 hours every day legitimately, and still live a great life. I still work out every day. I still see my girlfriend all the time. We still hold hands and go for walks. We take one day off a week and go to the movies and have dinner. We have a wonderful life together. So nothing is sacrificed. And that's the other reality, so that's my second, I suppose part of time management, is when you truly find your passion and your calling you're going to find a way to get it done. Right now my writing schedule for one of the books I’m writing is 11:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. every day, five days a week, because that's the only time it fit. But I’m so passionate about that book I can't wait until 11:00 every night because I want to see what I come up with next. So that's kind of the reality of it all for me, mindset and passion equals opportunity. And you'll find a way.

I suppose the last thing, which is the more concrete, real thing that people can identify with now, is hire great staff. I have an amazing — I have the best staff in the world, the very best staff in the world. I have an online coordinator for all three companies. I have an executive director who runs the day to day operations of the IYCA. I have an amazing support administrative team whose sole job it is to make sure our customers are being taken care of and that the customer service is to the quality that I want it to be, because I’m a real stickler on that.

These are not expensive hirees at all. I know the conception is that Brian's got $1 million in the bank so he can pay $30,000. That's not true. I don't pay $30,000 to anybody. I find unique ways of developing relationships. The IYCA has a tremendous potential in terms of both helping people and being a financially rich company, I suppose, because of all the initiatives we're doing. Because of that, I can hire people on for percentages of profits, for percentages of ownership, for percentages of royalties. And that's what I've done. I've not sought capital dollars to pay a large staff. I refuse to give up any ownership of the company that I have because I want the quality to remain controlled an remain in my hands. And because of that I haven't needed to go and find capital dollars, I've just found an eclectical way of creatively bringing on staff through trading and bargaining and brokering different ways to designing contracts.

And I think, although that's a more concrete example than the mindset and the work ethic and the passion, it goes back to those things because if I didn't have the mindset down and didn't have the passion down I might have been stopped cold by the notion that I needed to hire staff and didn't have or didn't want to spend the money for it. But the mindset allows you to create opportunities of hiring people who can support your business and make money themselves. And it works out all around.

CM: Brian, I want to thank you so much. This has been a great interview. The answers just flow from you. I've done around, I don't know, 40 of these interviews, somewhere around there, and the answers flow from you better than just about anybody I've talked to.

BG: I appreciate that. That means a lot. Thank you.

CM: It's extremely impressive. Where can people learn more about you, your products, your services, and things like that?

BG: The best place right now is probably through the IYCA website which is www.IYCA.org. My own personal homepage is www.DevelopingAthletics.com. And those are probably the best ways to get a hold of me or see what I'm up to.

This has been a personal fitness training marketing interview by health club and gym marketing specialist Chris McCombs