Why Everyone is Wrong About Business Growth?

Pretty much everyone in the fitness and sports performance industry is wrong about how to approach growing their businesses.

They work from the ‘outside back in’ and the result is a business that is bland and boring to the market regardless of how great things are once someone becomes a client.

You may have fallen prey to this yourself.

• Do you deliver a training service that is better than the competition but you still haven’t cornered the market?

• Is the culture you’ve created something that your clients really enjoy but you don’t generate as much word of mouth business or as many referrals as you’d like?

• Are you delivering a really great overall experience, but you’ve still failed to really break through and see your business thrive like you feel it should?

If any of those sound like your business, then you’re likely falling into this ‘outside-in’ trap.

The ‘outside-in’ approach to business growth is simple: To the outside world your business looks like every other training business.

Your website doesn’t really reflect anything unique about your business, or worse yet, the points of differentiation are in ‘trainer speak’ so that they may seem to separate you from the competition in your eyes but all they do is confuse or bore the prospective client.

Your clients, your staff and maybe even you can’t clearly describe why your business is better than the competition in a way that is meaningful to someone who shows an interest.

You learn a new marketing tactic and you try to put it into action, but it never really gets the traction you’d like.

You aren’t able to command the fees you deserve because your prospects don’t understand why what you do is so uniquely valuable to them.

Your Winning Plan: Inside Out Business Building

If you can honestly say that things are really good once someone becomes a client, then your solution is simple…you need to build your business growth plan from the inside out.

Here’s your simple approach:

Step One: Identify Your Perfect Client

Determine your top 5-10 clients.

What do you like about them?

Are you the best solution for them?

Why did they choose you?

How are they similar?

Figure out who that Perfect Client is because they’re going to be whom you’re trying to connect with in everything you do moving forward.

Step Two: Determine What They Want

Once you have your Perfect Client identified, you need to determine their biggest problems, greatest wants or strongest needs.

This is what your Perfect Clients seek you out to solve or help with.

Step Three: Describe How You’re The Solution

You know who you help and what they need help with…now you need to be able to explain how you solve their problems or give them the help they need.

This is where you can describe your training process and the experience you deliver.

Not before (as most fitness pros do).

Step Four: What’s The BIG Result?

If someone that fits your perfect Client profile becomes a client – what’s the BIG result that they can expect to get?

You need to be able to articulate this clearly.

Step Five: Use The Answers To Build Your Marketing Platform

That’s really it.

You’ll take the answers to the previous four questions and put them together to build your marketing platform.

You’ll start to refine your message so that it speaks to that potential Perfect Client.

You’ll document Success Stories to reflect the results that you’re delivering to this market and use them on your website and in your marketing efforts.

And once you have that dialed in, you can really focus.

You can educate your clients and your team on how to talk about your business.

You will be able to be really selective about where and how to market because you’ll know exactly whom you’re trying to reach and finding them will be easy.

And the best part?

You’ll be speaking directly to them so they’ll see you as a specialist rather than just another training business.

Selling will become easier.

Referrals will come faster.

And prices can climb higher because you’ll become a destination rather than feeling like you’re always chasing prospects and hoping to convince them to give you a chance.

So that’s your competitive advantage, your edge.

You have a story to tell and a brand that is unique – just follow those five steps and unlock it for your market to see.

By Pat Rigsby