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The fitness industry has always been a cornucopia of hucksters, snake-oil salesmen, underwear models, and knowledgeable coaches and trainers desperately trying to be heard above the noise of boobs and pecs.
The Great Pandemic of 2020 has added one more pitch person into the fray: the life coach/online guru/General Patton of feelings/growth hacker hybrid.
All-in-all, this is probably the best time for you to pitch your tent as a thought leader because it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as how you say it finds an audience needing a lifeline.
Well, just about right now, you should be panicking. Unless you have at least 6 months’ worth of cash in the bank, you would one cool SOB if you weren’t starting to fidget and squirm.
In comes the Internet’s army of aphorism-experts telling you:
It’s always darkest before the dawn
This is when the tough get going
You have value, now is the time to show it
Don’t give up, you can do it
Negativity, no; positivity, yes
Odds are that you probably need to hear some of those pick-me-up pablums. We get it.
Odds are that most of those pablums are also tied to some sort of course or program is self-realization and business preparedness or something that is supposed to teach you the value of showing your value so that you can get value from your business when no one knows what the value is going to end up being in the weeks or months to come.
Your Value Is Not The Problem
The good news is that your value is not the problem. Frankly, if you don’t value yourself and your work doesn’t reflect that and your clients don’t appreciate that then you have problems that are beyond the scope of the Internet.
In most cases, if you had a stable fitness business before the Great Pandemic, you probably had established some value.
Sure, maybe you weren’t as profitable as you could be. Maybe you could use help on your bookkeeping, your staffing, your sales but who cares about that right now.
Your problem right now, the only problem you have, the one problem that almost every consumer-facing business faces, is how do you market, get noticed, and make sales?
Think about it.
The decimation of local services, news sources, and markets means that it is a long, slow road for local marketing and advertising.
The level of noise online and the sheer size and mechanics of online marketing make it almost impossible for a small business to create meaningful impact without speculating. That requires throwing money that isn’t there at the problem. Not just now, but probably for a long time to come. It was pretty bad before but you had brick and mortar businesses. Now, you have online only and it is like being in a Walking Dead zombie horde battle.
Sure, Tik Tok dance videos are going to get you some sympathetic clicks, but they’re not marketing. Let’s just accept that.
The Six Hardest Month Of Your Life
For any small business owner or self-employed gig worker, as many of you in the fitness industry are, the next six months will be among the most challenging you will face.
First, you are limited in your options by the state of the greater economy, by the uncertainties of how people will crawl out of the mess around us, assuming they can, and finally, by the fact that there is no roadmap or historical context for a path forward.
Second, you are limited by the tools at your disposal. How do you market and sell when there are almost no practical marketing channels and selling opportunities left for you?
Thirdly, your resources. Even if you have money in the bank and all the resources in the world, how can you use them efficiently knowing that you cannot afford to make mistakes because of all the uncertainty around you?
You want to know what you should do?
Go back to square one.
Starting From Scratch
Assume that a meteor has hit your business. No one is hurt. That’s good. But, everything is gone.
Start right there. With nothing, start to rebuild.
Take inventory of what you have, how long it will last, and who’s on your team.
Take a step back, and figure out what you need to survive. Survival is good. You survive all of this and you will, undoubtedly, come out stronger and better for it on the other side.
Ditch the usual plans and ideas. They don’t apply. You have to focus on what you can know for certain. That means, you need to talk and engage with clients, strangers even, and figure out what they are going to want in the coming weeks and months. See what that means in business terms. Understand changes in behavior and the patterns of activity.
Curiosity and a deep drill into the psyche of your market is about the only path forward for you. Your fitness gurus, the cert masters, and all the other growth hacking jackholes out there are useless right now. They’re not sitting there with what you got.
We could tell you how to do online marketing but, frankly, it’s not something to be learning right now. No one knows how online marketing will change over the next six months.
We can tell you that you can keep your existing clients and have their loyalty if you remain valuable to them, but no one knows how they will feel in six weeks’ time, let alone six months’ time. Loss of income, behavioral changes, even a desire to focus on other things, will change people’s patterns of activity.
Will people be quick to get back to sweaty and crowded gyms? Maybe, but there is a great deal of doubt that people will go back to crowded malls or stores. They may like delivery. They may like garage gyms. They may like to lighten their workout load and spend more time on something else that really engaged them in isolation.
You have no idea. No one does right now.
What is certain is that we are looking at many, many months of change and uncertainty. Normal doesn’t have meaning.
So, don’t do normal. Work on adaptation and change. That means you have to become a different kind of business person. What that means will be unique to you. Maybe you needed 100 members in a gym to make a living before all of this happened. Maybe you have to adapt to 50 next.
Maybe you were okay with 25 private clients a month. Maybe you have 10 after all of this.
On the other hand, maybe you see yourself with double the business because where you were once one of many in your area, you are now one of a handful of gyms or personal trainers. Maybe.
It’s impossible to tell how things shape up by the individual, by locality, by region, state, and country. There’s no common thread you can pick up so, be your own guru.
Above all, conserve cash, stay laser-focused on your personal plans, and grind away every minute of every day.
It’s not a bad way of retaining your sanity in these trying times. Just don’t look for saviors. Don’t expect any lightbulbs to go off in your head. That’s not how it works when you have to adapt from one day to the next.
Think of the next six months as the longest and worst CrossFit workout ever created. It will make no sense because it will be programmed by a sadistic idiot, it will exhaust you for all the wrong reasons, it will injure you to the marrow, but if you survive it, you’ll be able to lift again.
You’ll just never want to go through that ever again.