Patrick Rigsby on Marketing and Systemizing Your Health and Fitness Business

Here's an interview I did with Patrick Rigsby. When it comes to creating fitness business systems that bring in large amounts of revenue on autopilot, Patrick probably knows more than anyone. Plus he's a down-to-earth good ole' boy from Kentucky which makes him a fun guy to talk to…

Patrick, what do you do?
I kind of do a number of things. I am first and foremost a fitness professional myself. I own a personal training company with two locations in central Kentucky. I own a health club in central Kentucky as well, and a juice bar within a separate health club. So that’s the first component of my business. The second component is I’m a consultant essentially for anyone in the fitness industry, but primarily focusing on marketing personal training businesses and creating profit centers within health clubs. So I work with fitness professional and club owners alike to essentially help people build the personal training, weight management, profit center side of their business.

A lot of trainers and people in the fitness industry could really use something like that. Why do people hire a fitness professional?

It can be down to any one of several things: motivation, because they’ve just not been able to really inspire themselves to embark on a fitness program and stay the course; accountability, goes back to staying the course, they struggle with being consistent; or education, maybe they are truly inspired but they have difficulty sorting through the plethora of education that’s out there. I mean, there’s over 4000 diet book available now, not to mention countless things on the internet, infomercials coming across the television left and right. They need to be able to sift through and find out what’s really going to produce results.

They seek out fitness professionals primarily for those three reasons, or, I guess, at least for those three benefits. But essentially - it would take me the length of this whole interview to talk about what they hope to derive from that. But you can boil it down to enhancing their quality of life. And it may be improved health for one person, it may be better self-esteem for another. The variances are anywhere across the board, but for that person it’s enhancing their quality of life.

I know you’re a big fan of The E-Myth. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how that’s helped you and your business, and how other trainers can use that?

Well, The E-Myth has to be regarded as one of, if not the premier book in the business world in history. Michael Gerber is the author, and it is essentially, almost a blueprint for how a business owner can extract himself from being the day-to-day technician - the deliverer of services, the worker in a job - and move eventually from manager to business owner where most of the time can be spent working on the business instead of in the business.

For me, it was something that I read early on in my professional career. I read it and digested a little bit of it, but once I launched my own business, that’s when I re-read it and really embraced it. And I fear that a lot of fitness professionals, they’ve heard from one person or another, “Hey, you ought to read The E-Myth,” and they’ve taken it, but they haven’t applied the principles; they haven’t really taken it to heart, and they haven’t applied the strategies that Mr. Gerber imparts in the book - they haven’t applied them to their own business.

So, essentially, one of the key components of what I do in our business is in relation to fitness professionals rather than club owners - is help fitness professionals go from working exclusively in their business to working on their business. Essentially, when a fitness professional becomes self-employed, and they’re no longer an employee of a health club, or something like that - basically, all they’ve done is buy themselves a job. If they open a personal training studio, all they’ve done is buy themselves a job. And I try to help them create a means to distract themselves from spending all their time training clients.

So what are the principles in The E-Myth that trainers can use to step back from working so much in the business, and more on the business?

First and foremost, a personal trainer - even if they are an independent personal trainer, a one-man show, in-home trainer - the first thing they need to do is document everything they do to make their business what it is today. Obviously, people reading this book are serious about enhancing their career and moving forward, so I certainly expect that they enjoy some degree of success delivering results to clients. So the first step is documenting what you do to deliver those desired results to your clients.

Then you document how you acquire clients, your personal training marketing processes. Then you document your personal training sales process - how you perform an assessment, how you deliver sessions, how you may ask for a refund or an upgrade. And you document all these things in as detailed a fashion as you can conceivably do it, and basically spell it out so that any person who has a legitimate understanding of fitness can come in and deliver that same quality of service to your client. Obviously the personality’s going to be a little bit different, but everything else will remain the same. The same strategy would be used, the same script in the sales process will be used, the same marketing calendar can be used. And you document this in such a detailed fashion that it can be replicated over and over and over again.

I hate to use the McDonald’s example - I’ve been using it a lot in things that are right, because it’s a lot that McDonald’s - arguably one of the biggest problems we have as fitness professionals, the fast food industry - is so extraordinary at this. But that’s how you can be. I mean, you’re in California, I’m in Kentucky, and you know what? You can go into McDonald’s, order a Big Mac, and you can trust that it’s going to be delivered almost exactly the same where you are as where I am. In all likelihood in the same amount of time, in the same packaging, with the same wording when they wait on you at the register and when they deliver your food.

So, by being able to create the animated turn-key replicable system, essentially what you’ve done is allowed yourself the flexibility to bring in somebody else to be the technician some of the time. Or, perhaps that’s what you’re really passionate about, and you allow somebody else to come in and do the thing that you’re less passionate about. Maybe you don’t want to be the person who has to send the birthday cards to your clients, you don’t want to be the person who handles the bookkeeping, you don’t want to be the person who handles the billing side of things, whatever. But if you documented the way that you go about handling all these tasks, then you can bring in any competent person and in a matter of days, or even sometimes hours, they can be performing that task in the same efficient manner you were. So, that to me is the basis of where a trainer can really start to apply The E-Myth principle.

The second step is creating a plan, starting with the end in mind. Now, one of my pet peeves of personal trainers is they just don’t really have any idea where they’re going. They don’t have any direction. And I ask them a variation of the same question, “Are you going to be doing this when you’re 60 years old? Are you still going to be training 10 clients a day, an hour a time?”

And to a tee, they answer, “No.” Always they say no.

So I say, “How are you going to avoid that? What is your exit strategy?”

And to a man it’s always the same thing, “I don’t know.”

Michael Gerber essentially helps create some planning for the business owner so they have an exit strategy. And that’s one of the things we try to do for fitness professionals, begin with the end in mind. Work backwards from where you see your desired result being. Maybe it’s retiring from training at 55 years old and being able to create an exit strategy like a physical business, or a retirement account, or some investments that allow me to exit if I don’t have a physical business. Then I work backwards from that desired destination and step-by-step get back to the point where I’m at. Then I know the logical progression of steps I have to take to get to that desired end result.

So, those are two variations of where we really try to apply E-Myth’s principles to the fitness industry. I know I’ve dumped a lot of information in there all at once, so feel free to ask me any spin off questions, Chris.

How important is it to have plans, like a business plan, training plan, completion plans and so on?

For me, it is crucial. Every thing that you do within the confines of your business should be directing you towards that desired result. So if you have completion plans for each in particular task, obviously they’re moving you closer towards that exit strategy plan. If you have a business plan or - and obviously there are different types of business plans. There is a business plan that you might take to an investor or to a bank, and then there’s something that we at the Fitness Consulting Group refer to as the business action plan.

Your plan, as far as what you’re going to do on a yearly basis, what your objectives are - maybe it’s a year, maybe it’s a three year plan - what your objectives are and how you’re going to move towards those objectives over that span. Essentially, it’s more or less - if you’re long term exit strategy is your long term plan, then your business action plan would be your mid-range plan. Then you break it down, and you break it into the daily tasks.

All three completion plans, which are the day-to-day of how you run your business, feed into your short term and long term objectives. They need to be consistent. And I know this may be confusing to the reader, because I’m talking about all these different things simultaneously, but anything that you do can be broken down from - let’s use the analogy of a training client.

Say their long term goal is to lose 50 pounds, and they want to do that over the next 12 months. Maybe their short term goal would be to lose 6 pounds in the next 30 days. Well, the completion date would be, essentially their workout schedule, their training schedule. So they have a long term program design that’s broken down into periods [indistinct] or quarter by quarter schedule, and then it gets broken down into the daily workout.

And that is how we would view the business model. And we teach this stuff to our clients. Obviously, we know if you’re just flying by the seat of your pants and making up workouts as you go, you’re not going to be nearly as successful as if you have a plan that is structured and basically builds upon itself to reach a long term goal. And we preach this stuff to our clients, we preach that discipline and adherence to the plan; but when it comes to running our own business, we wake up in the morning wondering how we’re going to make enough money to pay our rent. And it just doesn’t work that way.
It all goes hand in hand. If you begin by documenting the things that you do as far as completion plans go, then it becomes so much easier because that’s already confident, that’s something you already know. Then you lay out a long term goal, “This is what I would like to see in my future.” Then you just work backwards to where you currently are. It’s not the daunting task it seems to be, but it’s not something we currently have experience with, so that’s why I used a fitness analogy - something we’re all well versed in.

I hope everyone reading this goes out and buys The E-Myth because that can really be life changing. Let me ask you about your flow chart. Your fitness consulting group, you have something called a flow chart. Can you tell us a little something about that?

That’s something that we’ve seen in other segments of the business world. Actually, internet business - we’ve seen something with a variation of that and we had already tried to compartmentalize the different segments of our business and businesses that we worked with, and evaluate each of those rather than try to just make broad segments looking at the big picture. It’s kind of like the old adage “you can’t see the forest through the trees.”

Well, you know, that’s how we felt like we and many business owners started out, so we would compartmentalize the different aspects of business. And what we did was we adapted a flow chart which broke down the different segments that each of us - as fitness professionals, regardless of if we are in-home trainers, if we have a studio, in-club trainers, if we own a business on the side (I have the personal training money making machine that we talk about, where you own the training rights to a health club).

Well, basically what it boils down to is a step-by-step process. The first segment of the flow chart is lead generation, which would encompass everything from advertising, marketing, publicity, anything like that would feed into the lead generation box.

The next box would be the sales process. These next two can be combined. A lot of times we view them as one, but depending on the business we may have to break them down into separate boxes. The second one would be the sales process: how do we convert the prospect into a paying client? And maybe that’s the funnel that you use, as far as if you do things with auto-responders, online marketing maybe, if your sales presentation - it can be any number of things, but it involves creating a compelling offer, a call to action. The ways that you can evaluate your sales process would fall into that box of the flow chart.

The next step - and it can be viewed as just a continuation of the previous step or, depending on the business it might have to be addressed completely separately - is the actual sales closing. Because for a lot of people, in our industry specifically, they’re afraid to ask for the sale. If that’s not the case they’re afraid to ask for the larger sale. They’re great at understanding why people should use the services of a personal trainer, but they’re afraid to ask for money. So the closing process is where we officially focus that next box.

Ideally, the sales process itself and the closing should only be seamless, but the reason we’ve identified them separately is, in reality in sales it’s yes or no, there is no maybe. And a lot of people get to that point and they leave clients in that “maybe” area - or perspective clients in that “maybe” area. So, a lot of the times we have to really address the actual closing process. Or perhaps their average package value is too small, or something like that, so we need to address that.

Step number four in the flow chart is the immediate up-sale. And we see this in virtually ever business outside of the fitness industry. From McDonald’s, or any other fast food chain, “would you like fries with that?” Or to if you go to the local cinema, “would you like to upsize for only 20 cents more?” Anywhere you go, regardless of whether it’s an infomercial on television to your local hair salon, they’re going to try to up-sell you at point of sale, because they know what everybody in the service industry should know. They know that the easiest time to make the sale is when somebody’s already making a purchase. They already are willing to give you their money, they’re already trusting you and making a choice to make a purchase - so sell them more of the same, sell them something that’s complimentary to what they’re already purchasing.

So having immediate up-sale at the point of sale is crucial, but it’s something in the fitness industry that typically goes ignored, especially in the personal training industry. And there are so many peripheral things that we can offer as trainers, be it nutrition coaching or weight management program; be it dietary supplements; be it complimentary retail products like [indistinct], pedometers, medicine balls. I mean, there’s so many different things that we can offer that we just ignore and we lose a lot of money on the table. So, we focus on that immediate up-sale.

The next step, the fifth step is back-end sales. And back-end sales are a combination of those products or services that I just talked about for immediate up-sales, or more of the same service. Perhaps you are upgrading your client, or selling them those peripheral services, you need to have a system and a strategy in place where you can increase the lifetime value of each of your clients. Because, if not, these people you’ve already build value with or rapport with, and have seen the benefits of your services - they are potentially your biggest customer your biggest client. All too often in our industry we’re worried about going and finding a new client instead of maximizing the lifetime value of our existing clients. We’re back in sales.

The last step would be regeneration. Regeneration is basically like Part A, Part B; it is retention and referrals. So, how do we have a client commit to working with us as long as possible, how do we keep them happy as a client in some way, shape, or form? So, how can we maximize the duration that they do business with us? And secondly, how can we leverage that client to send us more business - in, basically, referrals of friends, family members, co-workers, or anybody else that they may interact with. How can we take advantage of the goodwill we’ve built with them and turn that into new clients?

See, that cycle, it almost works out like a circle because now those referrals go back into lead generation. So we break down people’s businesses into each of those distinct different areas and evaluate each of those and decide, how can we improve this area, how can we improve that? Where are we falling short? What opportunities are we not capitalizing on? By doing that it becomes very clear and very obvious that - maybe a personal training business owner is doing very well in three of the six areas, but maybe three of them they’re working at 50 percent capacity, and we can instantly develop strategies that can increase their revenue by 25, 30, 35, maybe even 50 percent. So, it is a great way to evaluate a business and I would encourage anybody to plug their own business into that flow chart and do their own self-assessment.

That is great stuff. What is magnetic marketing, what are the principles, and how can trainers use that to build their business?

Magnetic marketing I think was a phrase coined by Dan Kennedy, certainly one of my favorite writers, favorite business minds. Basically, the concept of magnetic marketing is to, A) develop a funnel of pre-qualified, pre-disposed prospects to do business with you, so you’re working with a niche or target segment of the market instead of a very broad market and you’re using strategies like direct mail sequences or - anything from some sort of “how to,” to maybe a recorded message to pre-sell them on your services. Then the second component is: you only do business with those people that are pre-disposed and likely to buy.

So, magnetic marketing for me is pre-qualifying people only - a fitness professional might use an example. They might target a list of, say, only within a radius of five to seven miles of their physical business, that have a household income of $150,000. They may break the list down much more specifically than that, targeting women between the ages of 35 and 60, or whatever. And perhaps you send a direct mail sequence building a lot of value in what you have to offer. Maybe creating a - identifying a problem, agitating that problem, and providing - you are identifying yourself as the potential solution for that problem. And creating a strong call to action and having a very enticing offer.

Then a logical way to do it, a lot of people in the industry who’ve had success with it offering a three-step sequence of mailings where over the course of time that cumulative effect comes into play and eventually you hit that hot spot. You’ll find that time when the prospect is a little hungrier for what you have to offer. Maybe emotionally that’s the right time for them and you happened to send your sequence at just the right moment and now they’re pre-disposed to doing business with you; they’re pre-sold. They understand the value. They connect with what you do. And now there’s a much greater likelihood that that person’s going to want to do business with you.

Obviously, it’s the complete flip side of just dong a regular newspaper advertisement where there is no pre-qualifier. All that person has to do is have a pulse and they can read the newspaper. So that doesn’t pre-qualify them to be interested in doing business with you. It doesn’t pre-qualify them as being financially able to do business with you. And in reality, depending on the location, buying a newspaper advertisement - if you’re in a major market that newspaper might cover a radius where those people geographically couldn’t do business with you.

So, magnetic marketing is a much more targeted way to go and it is directed at people who are likely clients, and it pre-sells them so when they do take action the sales process then, in turn, is you becoming the assistant buyer, rather than you having to negotiate price and haggle with them. You’re just helping them choose which program is going to be most appropriate to solve their problem.

How can people get a hold of you, your website, your products?

The simplest thing to do is go to www.FitnessConsultingGroup.com. We offer a weekly newsletter called “The Fitness Riches Newsletter.” It is a free resource read by thousands of personal trainers worldwide, and essentially that’s going to be the easiest way for them to start interacting with use and start seeing what we can do. We offer a variety of business services that I’m not going to go into great detail about here, because they’re all listed on the site.

Make More and Work Less,

Chris McCombs

Personal Training Business and Fitness Marketing Specialist

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