From Coach To Business

We dive into the question of when you should take the leap from working for others to starting your own business. We also outline the rest of the season and share our origin stories.

Finding your market isn't about having a complicated business plan or doing a bunch of demographic research - it's about understanding who is paying for your services and where they came from. Then, once you understand that, you can try to find more people like that and tailor your services so that you are helping your clients solve actual, burning problems.

It's time to lawyer up. We have Todd's business partner Kevin Slaughter on this episode. Kevin is a partner and Levenfeld Perkins in Chicago, and he gives us answers to many of the common questions about employees vs contractors, if it's ok to offer nutrition coaching, and whether or not waivers actually do anything. We also lay out many of the things that business owners need to think about when getting started. Even though you may think that you will always be best friends with your partners, that you will never need to raise money, and that you will always want to own a fitness business, things change. And, if you don't have a solid corporate structure in place with a clear operating agreement, you can find yourself in a nightmare scenario.

Accounting can be opaque and confusing: Are coaches employees or contractors? Should you form an LLC or another type of corporation? What if you have partners? And what the heck is a "pass-through" entity anyway? It's ok if you don't know the answers to these questions, but - if you just push them off and say you'll "figure it out" later - you can put yourself in a pretty bad position. We talk with Joe Morad from Miller Cooper to understand what the key things are that a fitness business owner needs to set up from the start so that they have a solid system surrounding the finances for their business.

Marketing is the juicy stuff, right? Most fitness business owners need to "get people in the door," and having a solid marketing strategy is a surefire way to do so. But, it's not just about Facebook advertising or having sick professional photos on your Instagram. How should you think about what marketing strategies to pursue? And, how do you align your marketing strategy with the product you're delivering in your business?

People can get caught up in marketing tools and can bounce between them without having a plan - but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be aware of all of the different options out there. We give a framework for thinking about how to prioritize things like networking, strategic partnerships, social media, email marketing, and advertising. And, we explain why different business models and different niches may have success with certain strategies that are not appropriate for your market.

Copywriting is one of the highest leverage skills that any business owner can have, as it helps you communicate with potential clients in language that they understand and that speaks to problems that they're actually trying to solve. Writing doesn't need to be like your expository essay assignments in high school. Nor should it be in the weeds with all of the features and bells and whistles that you love about your program. Instead, it's about deeply understanding what your clients want from your services - and what fears and hesitations they have that will make them stay home rather than coming to check you out. We brought on Will Hoekenga to discuss the details of copywriting. Will has worked with many big names in the online business space (you can hear him regularly on the Growth Tools podcast here), and has also created a bunch of really valuable content over the years on his blog.

Sales can be an uncomfortable process, and Todd and Brandon both have many shameful and awkward experiences with attempting to sell their coaching services. However, if you think of sales as a conversation where your goal is to deeply understand your client's problems and guide them to the services that will help them solve those problems, sales can move from an "icky" feeling to an opportunity to connect and truly help someone.

Just like anything else worth learning, mastering sales takes a lot of reps. Lachlan Rowston from The Mind Muscle Project and Creature Fitness has been in the trenches selling gym memberships for awhile, and he's had many different sales mentors throughout that process. We get the breakdown from Lachlan on how his sales process has evolved over the years, and what the most important things are for coaches to focus on when selling.

It doesn't matter how much you're getting done if you're not getting the right things done. While everyone loves to-do list apps and neat little time-saving hacks, the hard work is figuring out what to actually work. In this episode, we break down how to think about your priorities and how to make sure that you're constantly moving the most important work forward.

Alright, now we get to dig into the tips, tricks and hacks that people love. While it's much more important to choose the right things to work on, we still have to get stuff done. And, like any small business owner, we both have way more on our plates than is realistic to accomplish. So, if we can figure out ways to do things more efficiently, that's a huge win. In this episode, we break down the most important aspects of productivity, and we give frameworks for thinking about how to build your own productivity system. It's not just about using a specific app or automating certain tasks with Zapier - it's about building something simple that works, and adding to it as you go

On this episode, we bring on productivity expert and all-around digital knowledge mastermind Tiago Forte. Tiago has a background in the Getting Things Done methodology, and he has also developed a variety of his own frameworks for thinking about digital organization. Tiago has also done a lot of thinking about how to outsource a lot of the boring work that our brains are not particularly well-suited for to software so that we can be more creative, more effective, and more efficient.

It's not enough to just get people in your doors. Once they show up, you have to do a great job of providing an excellent service. And, "churn" (aka monthly turnover) is the secret killer of most fitness businesses. If you aren't able to get a handle on your churn, you can be out of business even if you're adding dozens of clients per month. We talk with Juliet Starrett, one of the wisest and most-seasoned business owners in the CrossFit Game, about how San Francisco CrossFit dials in the client experience at all stages in order to maximize retention.

Data tracking is something that can quickly get out of control and become overwhelming. Just like most things in business, though, there's a need to "earn" complexity before getting involved in complicated systems. The reality is that most businesses have some simple key metrics that can give a solid picture of what's going on. For fitness businesses, that's usually going to be something like monthly revenue, monthly recurring revenue, and number of recurring clients. We can also create a simple system to track the onboarding process for new clients. As we grow, we may need to add more to this process, but it's key to set things up such that you are actually using them.

In this season, we've gone through all kinds of ways to strategize, prioritize, and execute on the most important things to start and grow your fitness business. However, sometimes you're just not getting things done. And, in that case, the most important thing to do may be to look inward and figure out what's preventing you from moving forward. On this episode, we have The Alpha Hippie himself Angelo Sisco breaking down the ways that the ways that we get in our own way - and what to do about them.