Hard Business Lessons Learned
You can learn a lot from the experiences of others…
…successes, failures and hard lessons.
It’s one of the best things about being in a coaching program or mentorship. You get to take advantage of the collective experiences of your group.
Over the past 11 years Fitness Consulting Group and FR have worked with over 2,689 fitness pros and coached over 3,150 business owners—not to mention running our own businesses. So it’s safe to say we’ve got some experience!
Here are a few of the hard lessons I’ve learned over the past year that you can learn from to make yourself a better business owner.
Lesson #1: Plan and Prioritize
As a business owner you’re going to experience problems and chaos. It comes with the territory, even if there are some entrepreneurs who don’t want to admit it.
Having a plan and knowing your priorities, not just for the day but for the year and quarter, is a critical step in managing the challenges you’ll face. Each quarter we take 2 days to meet, plan and prioritize the next 90 days. We set goals, discuss issues and map out our projects.
It’s the same thing we teach our coaching clients to do in their businesses. And it helps you stay focused when things get a little nuts. You know, stuff like a few clients cancelling, a trainer quitting or a big expense popping up.
You can step back, take a breath, review your plan and take on those challenges.
Lesson #2: Communicate Clearly
Ever feel like your team doesn’t do what you ask of them? Like they just aren’t understanding your expectations.
If so, it’s probably your communication. Effective leaders communicate clearly and concisely. It’s something I’ve had to work on over the last quarter to ensure that the people in our business can do their jobs really well.
A big part of that is having weekly meetings with our teams and everyone working on clear communication. You can communicate and set expectations in other ways as well:
- Consistent and planned performance reviews
- Having an organizational chart for team structure
- Holding daily team huddles for 15 minutes
- Sharing key info with your team on priorities and your vision
These are just a few ways that you can improve communication, but it all starts with you as the leader. If you can’t communicate well, your team will follow your lead.
Lesson #3: Create Systems to Provide Freedom
Seems contradictory right?
To create systems and processes to follow so that you can have more freedom. It’s the curse of the entrepreneur! You don’t want to be tied down or forced to follow things step-by-step.
It takes a lot of energy for you to follow a system. But, if you do it the right way you can create systems that allow you to free up your time and energy to focus on the things you love doing.
Having a process to avoid having to keep track of mundane tasks and to-dos will allow you to free up valuable head-space. Keeping track of those things is eating up more energy than you realize.
Recently I’ve been using project management software to create beginning of the week and end of the week task lists that recur each week. That allows me to simply go in each week to the software and go through my checklist.
No need to manage all the to-do or keep track of the items on that list. It’s done each week for me automatically. It takes about 30 minutes to get through the entire list at the start of the week and end of the week.
It’s not about how much time it takes to do the tasks though, it’s about me not having to remember those tasks. The system reminds me and I just do them. Simple systems like this can be done once and then set on autopilot to help you save time and energy.
Summary
Those are 3 of the biggest lessons I’ve learned, some the hard way, over the past year. Hopefully you’ll use at least one of these hard lessons to make yourself more productive and reduce some of the chaos that occurs when running a business.
Before you go, know that all of us at Fitness Revolution appreciate you and all the great work you do for your clients!
Accelerate Your Business Success…
You don’t have to learn business lessons the hard way. We’ve done all the tough work for you and are willing to show you a much easier route to having a massively successful fitness business.
Join us in The Academy where you’ll get access to the ULTIMATE LIBRARY OF BUSINESS BUILDING RESOURCES! We’ve taken everything you need to know about running and growing a personal training business and made it available to you so that you can avoid all the frustrations that come with learning business on the fly while simultaneously accelerating your success.
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