Are You Building A Fitness Facility Without Knowing This
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Hey coaches athletes. My name is Michael Hughes functional movement specialist and founder of Demelza. Edu I typically talk a lot about movement on this channel. But as more more of our MDM students are looking to build their own facilities, I wanted to switch it up a little bit today, and share a bit about the struggles and lessons that I’ve learned from building my own fitness facilities. Now, before I dive into that, please make sure to like and subscribe to our channel for new perspectives on movement, training, the fitness industry in whole, and how to integrate your movement education with effective and efficient business practices, I really appreciate your support, as we’re trying to put all of what we have into this channel to share and reach as many movement practitioners as possible. Now, someone who’s been training for the past 15 plus years, I’ve spent the last decade building a seven figure fitness facility. And I’ve learned countless lessons, no question that I really can’t possibly fit into one video. So I want to narrow it down to like an essential three that I think you should definitely know, before starting your fitness business and building your own facility. We can go into more videos later on the things that you find the most interesting, or gaps that you would like us to fill on our perspectives and our lessons. So let’s dive right into this. And here’s the first one, it’s the most critical one, and one I can probably talk on for at least an hour. So I’m going to do my best to keep it concise is you have to have a clear vision of your dream of what you want to build of what you want to establish and what you want to offer to the athletes of today. So they can be an amazing movement bodies tomorrow. And then you have to have an absolute resilience SNESs to make that happen, you have to be steadfast, that that is what you’re going to do. And I made this with the most purest of heart is that you’re gonna get people saying, No, you won’t do that. You can’t, you shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t go start a fitness facility, like, you’re gonna make money, like, you’re gonna just give your life away, you know, like, you’re never gonna take a vacation, all these things that people who have never started a business never done that will say there’s so many roadblocks in front of you. And that’s all true. But when you want to create something, and you want to offer the world, something that’s not currently being offered, from your perspective, you have to say to yourself, I’m going to do it, and there’s nothing that’s going to stop me. Quick little story for you. I remember starting out in this town of San Luis Obispo, I was supposed to live here for a few months, really because I was going to transition off to grad school. Here I am, you know, 15 plus years later. And I went in to get a job as a personal trainer, I knew I wanted to kind of keep my my my money making potential coming in as I was going to go to physical therapy school. And I remember walking to the kind of the big box gym here in town. And I said, Hey, I’d like to job as a trainer as a trainer, and college, you know, all certified and ready to go. And they said, great. I’m so glad that you’re here. But we’re full. We don’t we don’t we’re not taking on any more trainers to train our members. I remember kind of feeling that resistance. But I knew what I wanted to do. I knew that I still wanted to train in condition for a short period of time is a very short vision. And I didn’t take no for an answer. I said, Well, what if I just stand in the lobby and pass out business cards and build a free offering, then if they say yes to long term training, then I can now actually get paid for that in your facility. And they looked at me with the kind of a space like you would really do that you’d really work for free. Until you got someone to pay you. I’m like yes, of course I would. To me, it was a no brainer. It’s like this is what it’s going to take. If you’re saying no. And I know this is going to be my field for the rest of my life, my my career, why am I going to how am I going to go work at a retail store flipping burgers, whatever the case is, when I know this is what I want and had that resiliency to keep pushing. So you’re going to have to have that. So long story short, they actually said yes, you can do that. And remember, just sent by my palm pilot, remember those little things and just start standing there just chat with people literally chatting with people and say hey, I’m going to trainer town, etc, etc. Let’s let’s let me show you what we can get done together. And here we are later. A million dollar fitness facility. Staff of over a dozen and fitness facility the sizes through 13,000 square feet. Resiliency is a key piece but a vision that you’re not going to let go of ever. I remember when we’re building this facility that I’m in now, and I’m just an actual a filming studio inside of our facility. And I remember one of our clients, you know, big time lawyer in town and he’s you know, walking through your space and he’s like, you’re going to open up in two weeks from now like, where is everything? Like this is still a construction zone. I remember saying to myself, Oh, we’re gonna get it done. We’re gonna get it done. There’s there’s no question that we’ll be ready to go by opening day. And it’s again that it’s that choice in your head that you are the only thing that stopping yourself, the world is actually designed to, to give you the opportunities as long as you can put yourself in front of them. And so enough, two weeks later, we opened and he came up to me says, I can’t believe you did it, I can’t believe it. Now what I had to do to make those things a step very late, and work into, well pretty much not sleep one of the nights, but it was about the vision that I wasn’t going to stop, I wasn’t going to let a lake provided permit from the city, stop me from what I was going to do. And there’s a whole other video I can go on, just on understanding permits, if you’re going to open up your own your own business, but I’ll let that be throw some comments down if you want to know more about that down. Alright, the second thing you’re going to have to know and have to have before you start your your fitness business, is you’re going to have to build your skill set in business, while you’re still building your skill set as a practitioner of movement. As a trainer, you’re gonna have to blend those two, we have an amazing industry right now we’re having an amazing, amazing list of passionate trainers that don’t know a lick about business. And it takes them a few months takes them a few years into their career of of going into this but then they realize how much time it takes to understand the fact of business work is not training and conditioning work. In fact, a mentor of mine said, Michael, all businesses are 80% the same. Every business shares 80% of the uniqueness of just simply running a business, it’s only 20% of the job is actually uniquely does something different for its industry, your skill set or outcome. Meaning that you’re only probably 20, spending 20% on this craft and the skill of what you’re providing the product, when in reality, you’re still missing 80% of what actually sustains the skill set to be prolonged for the overall goal of your career, and the longevity of that. So I’m going to talk to you about some responsibilities of being an entrepreneur, which if you’re a trainer, you are automatically an entrepreneur, even if you work inside of a big box gym, because you still have to push yourself, they may pay you they may pay your payroll tax, they may turn the lights on and off, they may have the cleaners come in by yourself to manage your own schedule. And that’s something that is a great thing to just start with. But as you start to open up your own business, you have to understand that there’s so many hidden factors that are insignificant to just a layperson. But they’re game stoppers in terms of getting your foot through the door. And that’s from policies and regulations to legal and finance, all the way from the accounting aspects into the software’s in the back end operational systems that if you don’t have you’re going to be struggling with and we have a future video coming out talking about those systems as understandings that what makes the 80% that business work fluently and efficiently that you can actually not burn out as a long term trainer who wants to make a career? Yes, a career in this industry, helping people live their best movement lives.
So few things I want to give you is how you know how can you build that business skill set and still build your practitioner skill set? hire coaches, right? Seems so like, oh, yeah, I’m a coach. People hire me to help them. Yeah, yeah. How about you go hire business consultants, business coaches exactly what I did. It’s exactly what I did. I give so much credit for that business consulting firm that, you know, honestly, they didn’t do a whole lot of work. For me. I couldn’t afford high end consulting, but I could afford education. I remember going to their offices once per week. And coming out of those things like I just unwrapped information that I didn’t even know existed about how to run a business. And yes, it was a lot to take on. But it was at resiliency, that if I’m going to figure it out, I’m going to work only half of my day training clients because the other half has to be towards working on the business. And that’s those tough decisions you have to make saying I’m not gonna I’m actually going to decrease my revenue for the next several months so I can increase my business acumen. So we can eventually jump to the next tier of business. And that’s a huge piece that a lot of trainers are are missing. So there’s a lot of great books out there. The E Myth revise is a great one. How to Win Friends and Influence People is another one. Tipping points is another one. There’s countless books about going going out that that honestly I’ve probably read dozens and dozens of them that you could just glean piece of information from Like, Oh, that’s an amazing process for me to go after. But remember, 80% of all businesses are roughly the same. It’s how you operate your skill set that will truly make you successful or not in the long term. Now, if you have any certain business books or resources that you want to share, or even courses, I’d love you to drop them in the comments below. So you can help other people out in the resources that you’ve collected. This channel is all about being a community of people who are itching to learn, and share. So I’d love your comments would be in there, I’ll definitely post some after this video gets out on the favorite books that I’ve been using as well. Here’s the third, and the final part of this video, but not the final part of learning about business. You have to hire great people, not necessarily smart people. Now what I mean by that, we are in the business of serving people, it’s a service business, right? We’re like a, like a restaurant. We’re like a Ritz Carlton, right, we’re here to serve people in their journey in their path and their experience. So the most important thing is not how smart someone is. In fact, that’s, that’s something that you really have to watch out for. Because intelligence can be trained. But more often than not a good personality is either comes with the person or doesn’t. So if you’re gonna make that first hire, if you’re gonna hire some of the front desk, you’re gonna hire that administrative person, you’re going to hire that next trainer, to help you with your client load, make sure that you’re gonna hang out with them. And you’re gonna have a beer with them several beers to make sure that you can be around them enough. And their little bit of kind of subtleties don’t annoy you. Because you’re basically trying to replicate yourself. And yourself is not truly replicatable. But your passion and your thought process and your mission statement and your values are. So you need to have that person who is generally a great person who loves people loves being around people gets gets filled by people’s energy. Because if not, then if you just focus on how intelligent that person is, or how good they are at their craft, and they’re not good at people, your brand is going to suffer. Again, we’re in the people business, we want to take care of people. And the biggest thing that I could ever share with you about hiring the right person, the right personality first, the brain second is that we’re in the business of retention. We’re gonna get people walking through our doors regardless. But it’s not the most important things that people walk through our doors is that people stay in our doors, it’s the retention of your clientele. Because what’s gonna give you the next five clients, it’s your first five clients, what’s gonna give your second 100 clients, it’s your first 100 clients. It’s the the fact that this business mostly grows into most of gross because word of mouth is so powerful in this industry. Yes, as more technologists as Facebook ads, Instagram ads, those are only just touch points and reminders that people need to take care of themselves. It’s really the feedback from their friends, from their loved ones from their family. That is really my experience that really sets people in like you gotta go see somebody that I know. Because look what it’s done for me, and may not be physically liquid Assam, but look with some to my mentality looks have done my sofa. So look was sensitive to my movement potential. That’s the biggest seal of the deal. And if you don’t have great people that are smiling, as people walk through your doors, meeting and greeting them by name, allowing them to come alongside them, and they can feel the energy and the help that that trainer that you hired is giving that person if you can’t feel that, thehese people are making just simply around good oln it’s going to rob away at your brand. It’s just going to happen that that waits may not be in the beginning, but it’s going to be a slow kind of drip that will eventually chew up your business and make you work too hard to try to cover up the mistakes that td fashioned human resourcefulness. So you can train intelligence, you can train your process, but you can’t train someone to be a good person. So that’s the third. And the final thing is huge on. But I do have a bonus for you call it a fourth. It’s your network. How many people do already know in your town how many people are in your family that are in your town? How many people maybe or know from a different job. Don’t be afraid to tap into that network and ask for for help. One of the biggest things that have ever learned as a redrawing the three different facilities that we’ve had in this town is that people want to help people that helped people in a sense. We had all these clientele as our say, Hey guys, we’re gonna move into a new facility. And you can just tell they’re like, What can we do? You know, like, I love coming here. That’s what they said and I love coming here. I want your next facility to be successful when you launch on your own when you leave this big box gym and go your own brand. I want it to work because people have when they go to your fitness facility, they’re going to build a connection that is going to be crazy strong. And it’s your job to leverage that in a good way. Right? You let the people that the people that you’ve helped help you. Remember, one of the things is like we didn’t hire a moving company, to move all of our stuff. We literally had our clients parade it and literally walk it point nine miles along the street, we’ve made it a moving parade of people literally wheeling tires, holding on to Vipers carrying kettlebells. And we had a great marketing approach just said we’re just moving to one facility to another facility. It was pretty challenging actually moving all of the other facility by hand. But we did it all because the RTR community rallied around us we had about 60 different clients, just grabbing equipment and walking it over. It was awesome. They also had a lot of people that are helped build our facility, a lot of the contractors, a lot of the people who ran the woodshop at our local high schools, they wanted to help this rack right here that holds the Vipers is custom. You can’t buy that. It’s not on Amazon. In fact, the inventors of Viper came here and they saw that rack, and they took pictures of it like this is amazing. This is awesome. All because of one of my clients, Scott, you’re going to want to get those Vipers off the floor. You want to keep your facility clean and organized. I’m like, Yes, I totally do. But I don’t know what to do. This limit will make this for you. All those things start to play into your community and your network. So wants you to really focus on that. And because your network your community is again, what’s going to gain you the next five, to 10 to 20 to 3030 to 60 clients, it’s those clients you’re already serving is your marketing and sales force. Don’t forget that it’s huge. And 10 years again, buildings are miles about a physical location. I’ve learned so many good and hard lessons. So if you’re trying to build your own facility and have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. You can find me on Instagram at 3d underscore athlete or drop your questions in the comments below so everyone can benefit from your questions. I truly have a lot of knowledge in this and a lot of experience I would love to share and would love to help you out. So that’s all I got for you today. If you enjoy this video, please don’t forget to like and subscribe to our channel, where I’m openly and candidly sharing my experiences my knowledge in the hopes that we can raise the standards within the fitness industry to make long lasting impacts for our clients and the healthcare system. Until the next time cheers.
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