Below is a weekly email I sent to my team to explain the idea of reverse engineering any goal, I thought you might find value in it’s application personally or even to your team so I thought I’d repost for you here!
Enjoy!
Do you use reverse engineering in your life?
If not you should, and it’s a great concept to understand and be able to teach friends, family and especially our clients.
Reverse engineering is just as Stephen Covey (author of the 7 Habits books) would put it, “beginning with the end in mind.”
Most commonly people might think of this in terms of money or finances, and certainly in my crazy entrepreneurial world it’s a way I use reverse engineering frequently; but it’s so much more than that.
It can and should be used for any goal.
Why?
Simple, what’s the only thing that stops us from reaching any goal? (Finances, fitness, personal, any goal.)
FEAR.
Yup that’s it. We can be too intimidated to start, too stressed out about the work or how hard it will be, or fearful because we fail one or more times along the way (or have previously failed in our attempts to reach the goal.)
Reverse engineering helps absolve fear by shoring up another thing I’m a big fan of talking about with you and hour clients; and that’s confidence.
You know what I’m talking about, that when the step or next task is so small or easy that we’re not afraid motivation or action comes easy because well it appears easy.
Now what feels easy to you may not to me and vice versa, which is where reverse engineering comes in.
Step 1: What’s the big outcome you want? (ex. Buy a new car/lose 30 lbs)
Step 2: What time frame do you want this to happen in? (ex. 6 months/12 weeks)
Step 3: Break down to next increment. (ex. each month I need to earn an additional $500/each week I need to lose 2.5lbs)
Step 4: Break it down to next smaller increment until it feels easy.
Ex.
I need to earn and additional $125/week, I work an average of 30 hours so I’d need to earn about $4.25 an hour more or increase my working hours by 5-8 / I need to lose only 0.35lbs/day)
Does it feel small enough to you yet, if not break it down further or begin creating a plan.
Ex.
Earnings
Could I talk to my teammates and offer to take some extra shifts?
Do I have a skill or hobby that I’m good at and could pick up a freelance project on the side?
What could I do to add enough value to increase my earnings by an additional $4.25 an hour?
Every testimonial/before and after we publish helps increase our reputation, every new Google/Facebook review we get helps someone on the fence make a decision, every new person that has a great workout has a chance to sign up, every new person you get to come workout the first time has a 50/50 chance of deciding to stay.
Every person you talk to about staying longer has a better than 50% chance of deciding to stay. Have a look at the “Levels in your job description” for ideas on how you can quickly achieve this. Could I speak to 3 people per day about continuing and basically “1-2” memberships per week? Or find 1-2 new people per week to try a workout by asking daily on my personal social media? Does that seem easy and sustainable?
(Now boys and girls, full transparency, I mention this because I want you to choose this one, as selfishly it’s the one that can help me the most, but there’s also a bigger reason. This is the one where if we all work together the results/potential are limitless so selfishly it should appeal to you too!)
Could I learn about something new and start building a passive or additional income?
Last year I became curious about Amazon, in September I sold $184 on Amazon all things I bought in clearance bins with less than $100 of starting capital, in October that was $1994 with a profit of $330, last month we sold nearly $40,000 on Amazon! Now I wish I could say you could grow like that with $100 to invest but that isn’t true. But my point is that anyone could easily generate $300-500/month on Amazon with 5-10 hours/month worth of effort and I will even teach you how.)
Could you dedicate 1 hour/day Monday-Friday to learn about how to sell on Amazon and another 3-4 hours/week to go and shop for things to sell? Does that seem easy and sustainable?
Fitness
0.35lbs of fat = 1430 calories of energy.
30 minutes of boot camp = approx. 400 calories
Reducing daily calorie consumption by 10% = approx. 180 calories
Reducing starchy carbohydrates and replacing with fibrous to increase energy utilization during digestion = approx. 150 calories
To me this is about the maximum that seems “easy” and might be overwhelming already for many, so we must re-evaluate the goal, if it took 16-18 weeks to lose 30lbs would you still be satisfied? Does the above seem simple? Only works if you can answer yes to both!
Anyways, that’s my attempt to teach you the power of reverse engineering, it can work for anything like: setting dedicated working hours or working less, like improving your relationships with others, like accomplishing any big milestone in your financial life, and even spirituality or emotional growth.
Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help!
Yesterday I was hosting a weekly video coaching call for some of my clients and I was teaching about why people fail when it comes to selling personal training to a group.
For the record, I was slow to adopt group selling, to me I always connected best with people one-on-one and felt I’d never be able to connect the same way to a group…which would lead to no one making a decision, me letting them down, and ultimately them not embracing change.
In short I was afraid everyone was going to lose.
But the thing is, it’s just a matter of understand people and behaviour, and more importantly being a real person.
Watch this 4 minute video and I explain exactly why most selling situations (group and one-on-one) fail before they even begin and exactly how to setup your next one for instant success (and I promise you you’re going to feel more genuine and relaxed doing it.)
If you liked this, I have a treat for you, just like I teach in the video, it’s all about establishing relationships, I have a gift for you. (I want to help you with selling more personal training programs or boot camp or really any kind of service!)
I’ve decided to make my give my wholes sales program away for free for a while in hopes I can help you and who knows maybe you’ll want to talk to me about your business some time.
Does it make you crazy when you spend your hard earned money on marketing and the leads don’t convert?
Below are 5 tips you can implement today that will help you convert more leads each and every month, resulting in more money for your business!
Hi, I’m Jennifer Byrne, I’m Cabel’s manager at his South Edmonton Fit Body Boot Camp location. I’ve learned a lot during my time here about how this business works, Cabel has shown me the little things that make a fitness business work, here’s my five big takeaways that have allowed us to grow significantly while everyone in our region has been talking doom and gloom about the “worst economy for this region, possibly ever!”
1) Respond Faster
Go to your public Facebook fan-page right now. Is the “Green Badge” on ? Does it say 100% response rate ? If it doesn’t, it should. What’s the time it takes you to respond ? You should aim for 15 minutes or less.
Do you use the Pages Manager app for Facebook ? Do you respond to your Facebook messages and comments within an acceptable amount of time ? What is an acceptable amount of time ? I always ensure to respond to messages as soon as they come in ( unless I’m driving or sleeping ). As a consumer, when I’m researching a new company I’m much more likely to reach out to a business that responds in 1 hour or less than one that takes 24 hours to respond !
This applies to your emails as well. A client question should never go unanswered for more than 1 business day.
2) Contact your leads often, in multiple ways
First question is do you track your leads?
If the answer to that question is no, you should enter your name in Cabel’s optin on the front page to get his sales report, or visit www.howtosellfitness.net and get his sales training course; this is the exact training we use to train all of our new managers.
If you don’t know how many people are coming through your doors, how do you know how many you’re converting?
If you don’t know the names, phone numbers and email addresses of the people coming to check your place out, how will you ever follow up with them?
Once you’re tracking all the leads that come to you through your various marketing channels the fun begins.
You start texting, calling, emailing every couple of days.
I know what you’re thinking ” Won’t that get annoying to my prospective clients? ” the short answer to that is YES! That’s not a bad thing though. It shows them that you care.
How busy is your life?
Pretty busy I bet.
How often do you see an email or a text and think I’ll answer that later, and never answer it?
That’s what’s happening to your leads. They want to make a change, but it’s not a priority yet.
You have to be in the front of their mind all the time, and then one day a switch will go off.
They’ll come through your door and say to you “I’ve been getting your texts and emails for weeks and I finally decided to take the first step.”
If you hadn’t reached out to them as often as you did, they may have never walked through your doors.
3) Show your clients and your new leads that you care ( and really mean it )
If you’re in this industry I already know that you want to change lives. You want to help people. But how do you show them that you genuinely care about them?
First step is to take an interest in them.
What do they love?
What are their hobbies?
Make a little note of it in a book somewhere and remember to ask them about it.
I don’t know about you but when I go to a new hair dresser and then go back 8 or 12 weeks later and they remember details about me, I’m sold. I’m coming back time and time again. It feels good.
Can you think of a time that it meant a lot to you when a business remembered details about you?
Have community events.
Have customer appreciation nights.
Come to work with a smile on your face every day.
Greet people immediately when they walk through your doors
Celebrate victories and goals with your clients with photos or have a client of the week board. Show the people you care and they’ll continuously return.
4) Find a way to relate to your new leads
Find a way to get on their level. You’re the expert now, but you weren’t always that way.
Share a quick personal story with your leads or on your social media channels to show people that you’re human too.
Share your struggles.
Be real. Do you have a weight loss story? Share it!
Have you ever struggled to gain weight? Share that story!
Have you lost a family member to obesity related disease? Share your why.
Share with your clients why you’re passionate about what you do.
5) Be you.
This kind of encompasses all the other points. Be you. Be passionate. Be caring. Be transparent. Be kind. Be honest. Be real.
People want to trust the people they do business with, and the only way to have peoples trust is to earn it.
How would you start a successful fitness business if you were just starting over.
Not how I would start one today with all the resources now at my disposal, but to rewind the clock and with all the knowledge (from all the painful mistakes I’ve made) how would I start out today (currently 2017) with limited resources?
The good news is, it’s cheaper and easier than ever. You have so much direct control over things that we never used to have, you can control expenses better than ever before and new customers are just a few clicks away!
In this video I share with your some of my thoughts of exactly how I would do it, I hope this gives you some direction.
What do you think? Did this video give you some ideas?
One of the things I’ve found is; that it’s easy to keep gathering information, it can be a pretty scary thing to actually go out and do it.
Something that seemed so simple suddenly becomes scary, or a lot more complicated.
Our industry is built on the fact that as people, as human beings, we need each other; we need support, community, confidence and accountability.
I love helping people, I love helping fitness professionals help more people, maybe I can help you.
From time to time I take on a few private coaching clients, if after watching the video above, if you’re serious about taking big action in your business maybe I can help you. Quite often I help fitness pros add $5000, 10,000, $15,000 a month in additional revenue in 60-90 days. If you’d like to know more about private coaching send me a message here.
Competition is fierce these days, having a strong point of differentiation is continually growing to be more difficult. Our approach is simple, help our clients develop such strong relationships not only with us but with one another that they never want to leave!
This isn’t as difficult as you think, this video will explain some of the systematic practices that have helped us do this (and some just so happen to really enhance your online authority and make all of your digital marketing efforts work better!)
Want to know my secret to getting handfuls of prospects from my email campaigns and Facebook campaigns?
There’s lots we can all learn about copywriting, in fact I’d argue you and I will spend our whole life learning. Just to be so-so copywriter’s at best.
We’re trainers, coaches, we understand the body. But we also understand people.
“Business” often intimidates us, sales is scary, and we negatively reinforce ourselves with fear thinking, “I don’t know what to do to get more clients.”
The curse I find is most of us way over think things when it comes to business. We’re worried about the right sale, the best offer to run at this time of year, what offer to run after we’ve done, this, this and that.
The list goes one.
Unfortunately it seems we wind up not seeing the forest for the trees.
Ever feel like that?
Here’s a little secret.
And you’re experiencing it right now in this blog post. What, huh?
I’ve found my best and most consistent marketing results by considering the following before I ever start writing the promotion.
What is my prospect likely to be feeling right now?
What are they likely to be thinking about at this point in time?
Example. As I write this it’s November, two weeks before US Thanksgiving.
My American colleagues are likely thinking about the coming holiday, the food they’ll eat, the shopping and deals on Black Friday, and all the exciting times to come with Christmas.
In Canada we’re beginning to think about the coming Christmas holidays, those Christmas parties, the late nights, the great food, the “little black dress” and how out of shape we’re going to be come January.
So that’s what I’m going to write my promotion about.
The offer is the least important part, it’s more important to think about, “how will I connect with the reader?”
Can I get them nodding their head in agreement or thinking about how they relate?
Does this make sense to you?
Gotcha!
If I can connect with them, if I can give them the feeling that I understand them or the feeling that I can peer into their mind I can get them to the next line.
It’s through this relationship on the page that I only hope to keep reinforcing in their own mind the thoughts they’ve already had.
That it’s time to change, it’s time to take control.
That it would feel great to look great in that “little black dress,” that by taking action now the New Year’s Resolution will stick and be a success for once.
The offer is the least important, if all of these other things make sense to them then the offer only needs to “fit” and feel good too.
Adding the elements of social proof, schedule information, directions, and of course a money back guarantee will further the cause but none of that matters if they don’t read past the first line.
