What’s the difference?

Yesterday at a team meeting I had a little coaching activity with my trainers.

 

I asked them if they cared about their clients and if so what things they did to show their clients that they care.

 

If you can’t say yes to caring about your clients it’s time for a career change, but how you express that is interesting.

 

You see even my trainers get complacent or comfortable, some of the answers were things like:

 

Giving them the service and value they expect, individualizing their training approach to what the client needs, understanding the clients expectations and setting appropriate goals and being on time.

 

Now these are all great things but then I asked them to identify whether each one met or exceeded the client’s expectations.

 

I think you see what I’m getting at is each item above is really only the basic expectation that should no matter what be part of our service.

 

A few answers that were given that I feel do fall into the “exceeds expectations category” were:

 

Sending extra text messages between appointments, working out outside the gym with a group of clients on a weekend, going the extra mile to send flowers at a time of grief or on a special occasion, sharing my own story to reinforce my client’s enthusiasm to commit.

 

Coincidentally these trainers also generate far more referrals and have fuller schedules than some of my other trainers.

 

Here’s my point, nothing above has anything to do with trainer skill, it has nothing to do with how much each person works. The primary difference is their way of thinking and addressing a common problem.

 

As an entrepreneur we face the same thing.

 

It’s easy to be bogged down working all the time, feeling like we’re doing a lot, but still struggling.

 

Yet other trainers make massive strides forward and become more and more successful.

 

The truth is the same as in my trainer example above, it has nothing to do with skill, contacts, how hard you work, or how much you work and everything to do with how you think.

 

I’m going to share my biggest weakness with you, I bet some of you can relate.

 

I grew up in a poor family, woe is me I had very little, the real problem with that is it conditioned me to think with scarcity. It conditioned me to believe that I had to work harder, that I couldn’t trust or rely on others, that it was wasteful to pay others for things that I could do myself.

 

By comparison my friend, mentor and colleague Bedros Keuilian who also grew up with nothing (in fact far worse than my own story) now runs multiple 7-figure generating corporations and he started as a simply trainer just as you and I.

 

It’s because of his guidance that my mindset has shifted slowly (I’m very stubborn slow learner) to realize that the answer to growing the business you want is not to work more, its not to work harder but rather to identify the little things (like the trainer examples above) that catapult you forward at lightning speed.

 

You can do this to, here what you need to learn:

 

  • To document systems that make it easier, cheaper and faster to repeat similar tasks and quickly evaluate the performance of your business.
  • To understand how marketing channels produce on a consistent basis and have a action plan that allows you to rinse and repeat rather than always creating.
  • To be fearless to “draw a line in the sand” and determine the value of an hour of your time and then delegate all tasks that you can pay someone less than that hourly amount to complete.

 

I never dreamed I’d be where I am today and now that I am I know how much more is possible and just how fast it can happen.

 

I now have coaching clients that have started from zero and exceeded six figures in 60 days, I’ve helped people buy their first home, stop living in their gym, hire teams in months, turned a 400 sq/ft basement business into multiple six-figures, helped multiple trainers move from sub-contract to their own studios and more.

 

We’ve repeated this plan so often it’s becoming more and more predictable and consistent to the point that I know if you’re still reading all of this you can do it too!

 

All it takes is one thing, the willingness to think different, trust in your peers, and take action.


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