Time to Grow Your Fitness Business

Find time to grow your fitness business = have more time

There’s never been a better time to be in the fitness business. If you want to grow your fitness business, however, and create a real business, not just a service, so you can also make a living and have a life you love, you’ve got to make the most of your time.

Everything you do takes time. In this post, I focus on marketing tasks but you could insert anything into this. If you don’t do the blog, articles, or newsletter for you task may be about creating a program, deciding the offer, organizing the space and the equipment needs, calculating the cost of running the program, etc.

Running out of time before … ideas and tasks?

Do you get to the end of the day with things still left on your to-do list?

Do you get to noon most days and already see you haven’t made a dent in the list of things you intended to do that day?

You were so happy to turn the calendar over and start fresh so you could throw away that old list of things you’ve been wanting to get done but haven’t! True or False?

Time is not just an obstacle for our clients. It’s a challenge for all of us. Getting organized or working more effectively tops a lot of our resolution lists. Then we get so caught up in it again that it slides and we find ourselves often in the same place again. Ideas are not the problem either. If you want to grow your fitness business you probably need to throw some out!

See if any of this feels familiar.

What Used to Work:

A yellow legal pad and a list you created. You crossed things off as they got done.

What Changed:

Your responsibilities increased. You diligently got that list done. Your legal pad list changed. It grew as things came flying at you. You had to manage not just the things you could control doing or not doing. There are an increasing number of things that depend on other people to get done. You’re checking to see if others have done their part and the project can move on to the next phase.

What Works Now:

You’re not sure! You just know what you’re doing now doesn’t!

For instance, on a typical Monday you once needed to write an article and send the draft. You had to do your own payroll, or maybe just your accounting, check it over and turn it in.

Now you’re earning more, reaching more people, in charge of a department or a business and there’s just more to do. Life is good, right? Except that its full of more moving parts. (And potentially you’re still trying to juggle one-on-one time? Ouch! Stop! If you’ve grown – at some point you either need to focus on things that are one-to-many or hire someone you train and trust and track what you would do if you didn’t make so much more per hour doing what you’re doing).

To grow your fitness business, at some point it stops being about what you love to do and starts being about what is the highest priority use of your time because it moves the needle or influences the bottom line most. Long term. You doing a one-on-one session helps one person for 30 minutes or an hour, (even though it may improve their life long term). You creating a launch for a program or training 5 trainers to train influences many lives, long term and improves your business bottom line far more. To grow your fitness business –and your freedom- you have to be using your time in the highest priority tasks.

Now, in that same scenario above, you need to collect the research for the article (maybe someone else did), assign the writing, review the article, approve the graphics to go with the article, make sure other departments or advertisers have their images and links to you, and that’s just for your blog. You need to request the stats for the first 24 hours once it’s posted, increase the boost if it’s doing well, see what kind of traffic you’ve got.

Whether because you’re growing your reach and you’ve increased your marketing savvy or because you’ve grown your team and you need to have them each doing their part but you’re responsible for checking the work, the offers, the programs, you… have a lot longer list.

Who doesn’t?

It’s one of the things we often forget when we want to earn more or get that promotion. We definitely are going to be doing more tasks.

But doesn’t it seem that some people are better at using their energy and time better? Let’s crack the code on all those tasks.

Getting organized to grow your fitness business

How to juggle tasks is the question. The yellow legal pad is a great tool for brainstorming. You won’t get an argument there. There’s more creativity from putting pen to paper than fingers on a keyboard. However, at some point more people have to see a project and know what they’re assigned to do.

You can use a Google spread sheet.

Then there are other tools like Asana, and Trello. I haven’t personally used either of these. They’ve both come up multiple times however in conversations with colleagues who are either entrepreneurs or project managers (or both). Here’s a recent comparison of those and another, Wrike, which I’ve used on a limited basis with a company I’ve used for website integration.

This is a good time to add that program launches or tasks that require so much dedicated time that it’s worthy of allocating time and staff to do it are things you would add to your project board or even hire a project manager for. Anyone writing a book today, for instance, hires someone to help with the launch of that book. The process starts a year from publication date. So while you’re new program may not require that timeline (a better way to go is often offer and sell it, then build it), the first time you build it, you’ll want to plan it out carefully so that it’s done well and you can change dates, and re-use for future launches.

I’ll admit I use Google spreadsheets because they are virtual but still simple. I know I’ve had projects that would have gone more smoothly with a more elaborate plan but I want to keep it simple. I can share a doc with anyone I need to for bigger projects. I can see who’s responsible for a task, what they need to do, and what needs to happen before and after. Even if you don’t have a staff but you have to outsource a certain part of something you’re doing, this is helpful.

You create goals, projects, and tasks. You focus on outcomes – starting with the end in mind – then create the list of things that will reach those outcomes.  That would include a marketing campaign (for every program you’re launching all year), and then the tasks that will make it happen (creating images, creating videos, writing blogs or collecting testimonials of past participants). This is the often forgotten part of making your programs a success! How are you going to market it? That component should take 60-70% of the time that creating the program did. Rarely does that happen.

Imagine…. if you’re saying to yourself, “I don’t have to do that, my programs are full, I have no time as it is, how could I serve more people?” You could dominate with a marketing campaign. You clearly have a good problem. You either train more soldiers like you and earn more on each of their productivity, or you begin working in groups or online or growing passive income with affiliate programs. That’s how you can increase your revenue without spending more time.

Confession

I am guilty of going to my outsourced support last minute way too often. I’m working on it! I haven’t sat down and planned. Planned the promotions, the blogs, videos that will be embedded in them, the webpage changes, or the addition of content. Even for a monthly task I know needs to be done, I left to the last minute too often in 2017.

Enter the Google sheet for Flipping 50. I now have a deadline every month. Weekly I can see that I’m on schedule for that deadline so that there’s no scramble. I have it all outlined. I have all my ideas dumped on there too and 7 out of 10 times they get scratched or dumped.

Grow your fitness business by throwing out ideas

If you’re an entrepreneur you too probably have a ton of great ideas. I for instance would love to do an app but as easy (today that’s true) as it would be to dive into that project, it’s something that when I put it on paper I can’t see how to monetize it for my audience. I can totally see how many questions and how much more customer service would grow from that kind of lead magnet. It would actually increase demands on my time or increase the need for managing staff (more time) such that right now, it’s got to remain an idea. You’ll grow your fitness business faster with a few really good ideas than you will distracted by many.

Action step to grow your business this year

You still have nearly 11 months. What are the two biggest projects that will move the needle most for you? In addition to meeting small growth over every month, what should you be focused on and dedicating small steps to in order to create something big?

1. List 5 projects you’ve been thinking about.
2. Pick the best 2.
3. Describe in specific monetary goals and or time how they could change things for your business.
4. Under these projects list 5-10 tasks that have to happen.
5. Describe who will do them (you, staff, outsource – even if you don’t know the name yet)
6. Determine a sensible timeline for those goals.

Right now you can pop what you have into a task management tool and you are already more organized and have more focus than you did a few minutes ago. This kind of planning time is key if you want to grow your business.

Admit it, it actually feels good, right?