If you’re like a lot of fitness business owners, you’re probably asking the wrong question when it comes to growing and scaling a successful business.
And this wrong question might just be sabotaging your business and dooming it to failure without you even knowing it.
The wrong question is…
‘How do I get more clients?’
As a mentor to fitness business owners, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard ‘if I could just get more clients/members all my problems would be solved’. And aside from a small handful of business owners I work with who are at capacity and have waiting lists, more clients and members is the number one wish most people have.
So if ‘how do I get more clients or members’ is the wrong question, what’s a better question to ask?
To find out, we need to dig a bit deeper to find out the real root of the problem in your business.
We need to ask why.
As a fitness professional, you might already be familiar with the concept of the ‘five whys’. It’s a great tool to help get to the reason reasons and motivations people have for exercise. It often looks something like this…
A client comes to you and tells you they want to exercise.
You ask them, ‘Why do you want to exercise?’
They reply, ‘I want to lose weight.’
Why do you want to lose weight?
‘I want to feel more confident in my appearance.’
Why do you want to feel more confident in your appearance?
‘It will help me feel better about myself and improve my self-esteem.’
Why do you want to improve your self-esteem?
‘I want to feel happier and more comfortable in social situations.’
Why do you want to feel happier and more comfortable in social situations?
‘I value connections with others, and I want to live a fulfilling life where I feel good about myself.’
So let’s do some digging into the root cause of the problems in your fitness business.
Remember, that incorrect question was ‘how do I get more clients?’
‘Why do you need more clients or members?’
‘Because the business isn’t making enough money’.
‘Why do you need the business to make more money?’
‘Because I want the business to be able to provide the financial means for me to a full and good life.’
Ok, so now we’re getting somewhere. The problem isn’t that you need more clients and members, it’s that you need the business to make more money.
So the right question to ask is ‘how can my business generate me more profit’.
And the most obvious way to do this is to get more paying customers. But this is such a superficial, surface-level solution. It immediately comes to mind because we simply pull out our calculator and multiply the number of clients we have by how much they pay each month. More clients, more money.
And because this is the most obvious way, this is where most people focus their attention.
It’s a quirk of human psychology that once we find a solution to a problem, we stop looking.
Herbert Simon, the computer scientist, economist, and cognitive psychologist calls this ‘satisficing’, the human tendency to settle for a solution that meets minimum criteria rather than continuing to search for the optimal one. People tend to stop their search once they find a solution that’s ‘good enough’ for their needs, even if a better solution might exist if we dig a little deeper.
We see this when people buy a home. As soon as they find a house that meets their basic, minimum criteria, they stop looking.
What are the chances that the very first option to solve the problem of needing a great place to live is the best possible option? Pretty slim.
Just like it’s unlikely that the very first question people ask to build a better business ‘how do I get more customers?’, is the right question.
Let’s revisit the better question, ‘how can my business generate me more profit?’.
Now, my purpose today isn’t to answer this question, but to encourage you to ask better questions. But to get your creative juices flowing I will give you some potential answers – some things you can do to generate more profit that don’t involve just getting more clients and members.
- Increase prices, earn more from each customer.
- Improve your retention, less departures is better than more arrivals.
- Look at other health products or services that your clients spend their money on. Can you provide these services in house? If they’re spending money, it may as well be with you.
- Change your business model, maybe semi private will generate more profit that Personal Training?
- Streamline your operations to minimise overheads. Profit is about reducing expenditure, not just increasing revenue.
There are countless more options, but you can’t arrive at them if you’re not asking the right question.
And the best businesses I know don’t focus on a single tactic to increase profit – they have a broad, overarching strategy that involves multiple approaches.
Hopefully this list gives you a sense of optimism that there is a better way. I bet that 80% of the stress in your business is related to trying to get more clients and members. Wouldn’t it be great if you could remove that stress by focusing on one of these alternatives for growth.
Now, I glossed over something earlier, and I owe it to you to circle back to it.
I posed the question, ‘why do you need the business to make more money?’.
And the answer was, ‘because I want the business to be able to provide the financial means for me to a full and good life.’
This is the answer to the ‘final why’. And that’s the thought I’ll leave you with. What does a full and good life mean for you, and how can your business help you live that life?
