What’s Your Mission?

Why are you a fitness professional? I’m sure it’s because you want to change peoples lives, to help people feel better about themselves and to make a difference in one person or the world as we know it.

If your clients came to you with similar weight loss goals would that be good enough? I suspect it wouldn’t. If that puzzles you re-read the statement above and acknowledge now how general that statement really is.

Get passionate and declare a mission to grow your business.

Over the last few years we’ve had a huge push to establish strong team culture at One-to-1 Fitness. Not only is culture important for managing internal relationships that hold our team together but has also lead to the vision of our public mission that keeps all of us focused each day on growing the business and making a difference.

Our public mission is: Inspire more than 10,000 local individuals to reach their fitness and weight loss goals by 2015.

Now this is no easy task given that our whole city is just 86,000 people, but then who says all of these people have to be local? I don’t know how we will track this goal or if it’s something we can truly achieve, but we’ll try.

This message proves as a powerful descriptor for our marketing and more. For one there is no way we can train 10,000 people at One-to-1 Fitness. It forces us to go beyond our customer and ramp up our efforts to ensure the knowledge of what we do is available to our community. Things like our “3 Week Home Fat Loss Course” have become powerful opt-ins increasing our list and helping many in our community in their efforts to get in better shape.

On our marketing materials it leaves the impression of greater purpose to our prospects rather than just a sale.

A scientific study tested an idea of human behavior. Every day for a period a college student attempted to cut in a long line with no reason given. The reactions to this were very negative and even quite hostile. By comparison over the same length of time another student was asked to cut into the same line but prior to doing so asked the individuals providing the reason that they were really late and letting them in was going to save them grief or personal pain. By comparison the individual that provided the reason was allowed to cut in line more often than not.

Our basic behavior is to accept a reason, our acceptance helps to breakdown some of the natural walls associated with sales or promotion.