This article is excerpted from Fitness Business Wealth Proliferation Guide, a bonus gift you can only get with a subscription to Fitness Marketing Monthly.
Walk into a gym and ask a trainer how he’s doing. There’s a good chance you’ll get a one-word answer: “busy.” It’s become the default response, an odd combination of boasting and complaining. The trainer wants you to know he’s in demand, but he’s not really happy about it.
Nor should he be. Busyness isn’t a professional requirement, or anything to be proud of. It’s self-imposed, something trainers don’t choose so much as acquiesce to.
That’s why we created Fitness Marketing Monthly. We know way too many talented, ambitious fitness pros who fall into the busyness trap, and we want to help them get out.
Why does it happen so often? As we said, it makes a trainer feel important. If she’s working as hard as she can, she has an excuse for not progressing. People like her just the way she is! And if she makes an effort to move forward but things don’t go her way, well, it’s not her fault. She’s busy, after all. She’s hustling.
The last thing we want with Fitness Marketing Monthly is to teach you how to be more busy. Instead, we’re going to teach you how to get paid more, structure your time better, and increase demand in a way that lets you impact more people with the best possible quality of life for you and your family.
Our goal is to help you become less busy with every issue. We want you to stop trading time for money, living paycheck to paycheck, and never knowing how much you’re going to make each month.
As the legendary motivational speaker Jim Rohn once said,
“You don’t get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.”
Lots of good, honest, hard-working people get paid directly for their time. We mean no disrespect to them. But no one gets rich clocking in and clocking out. The wealthy get paid for the impact of their work, and how irreplaceable they are to those who pay them. It doesn’t matter how many hours they work. What matters is the value of what they do during those hours.
Business coach Dan Sullivan says there are two economies: the “time and effort economy” and the “results” economy.
Most trainers are stuck in the time and effort economy—the busyness trap. We can admire them for their work ethic. But at the same time, we can recognize that by following industry norms, they’ve allowed themselves to become laborers.
People like us have moved into the results economy. We know that small levers can swing big doors. We seek opportunities with the potential for disproportionately large returns on the time and money we invest.
The results economy requires a mindset shift from a reactive business to a proactive one. Instead of spending all your time and energy reacting to the whims of your clients, you must take, at a minimum, 30 minutes a day to focus on something else: proactive opportunities that create a new income stream, systematize your marketing, or develop intellectual property with long-term value.
To be honest, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes you’ll put a lot of effort into a strategy that doesn’t pan out. Other times you’ll expend little effort and get amazing results. The first time it happens feels magical. Imagine working for just a few minutes and getting leads and sales far beyond your expectations. Imagine turning on your computer one morning and seeing that your account has a lot more money than it did when you went to bed. It’s hard to describe this first-time feeling without getting goosebumps from the memory.
When you stop chasing hours and start pursuing results, you’ll discover how much more you can accomplish when you aren’t trying so hard to be busy.
I hope you enjoyed this short excerpt. Be sure to pick up the complete Fitness Marketing Collection here: Fitness Marketing Monthly
—Coach Jon
