I just wrapped up teaching a segment of Franchise Training here in Boston for our Athletic Revolution franchise where we went over goal setting.

As soon as I wrapped up I knew I wanted to put together a blog post for you about reaching your personal and professional goals – and an overview of the key factors that will get you there.

Goals: So what is it that you want from your business?  For Nick and me, once this got clear our progress started to skyrocket.  Early on we wanted to grow our two local locations into a dozen in our region.  Just like anyone else, we also had financial goals and a number of other benchmarks that we wanted to hit.

But right before we were about to sign a couple of leases on new locations we stopped and thought about what we really wanted from our businesses.

For me it was very clear.  I wanted financial freedom, but I also wanted a number of other things.  I wanted to be able to take Tyler to school in the mornings.  I wanted to be able to attend his games and school events.  I didn’t get married until I was 33, so I wanted to be able to spend a lot of time with Holly and my family doing whatever we wanted to do without worrying about money. I wanted to be able to help other fitness professionals reach their goals.  I wanted to leave my mark where I could look back one day and feel like I’d impacted thousands of lives in a positive way.  

After thinking about those things, it became very obvious that the path we were on would lead to achieving some of those goals but probably not be very effective toward reaching others.

At the same time Nick reviewed his personal goals and we reviewed them collectively.  At that point it became clear that we could change directions and build a business (ultimately businesses) that would serve us and our goals much much better.

Fast forward a few years and all of those goals have been and are being achieved and they’ve even evolved.

It’s funny what you can accomplish when you get clear about what it is that you want.

So before you go into Business Building Mode, get clear on what it is that you want from your business.

Decide how much money you want to earn.  Who you want to serve.  What you want your life to look like.  What you’d like your legacy to be. 

Once you determine those things, you have a destination.  Then all you need to do is build a map to get there.  Without a destination it’s impossible to create that map.

Your Who: The next step in the process of Building Your Ultimate Fitness Business is determining your who.  Who you want to serve.  Determining if they’re easy to reach.  Deciding if working with them will make you happy.

For me, working with entrepreneurial trainers and coaches is what makes me happy.  It’s who I want to serve.  They’re certainly reachable since you’re reading this. 

So if you could identify your ideal client base – who would they be? Can you reach enough of them to build a successful business?  If you’re in Louisville where I’m at, you might love working with Female Hockey Athletes – but there aren’t enough locally to build a full business around. 

But if you pick the right ‘Who’, you’re going to love what you do.  You won’t struggle to find clients. You’re going to enjoy coaching and you’ll do a great job that will lead to more referrals and ultimately a position as the ‘go to’ fitness professional for that market.

Having Multiple Streams of Income: All truly successful fitness businesses have multiple streams of income. Instead of simply having a couple bootcamps as their only revenue source, they have some semi-private clients or a couple small groups during non-peak hours.  They offer supplements or they sell bands to their clients.  They offer nutritional coaching programs or hold workshops.

But some even think bigger and even add second businesses like an Athletic Revolution or a corporate fitness business – or maybe they even document what they do well and launch an infoproduct that serves that ‘Who’ on a global scale.

We’ve got over a dozen businesses and all of them have multiple streams of income – all together there are a couple hundreds revenue streams.  This provides security, freedom, flexibility and eliminates the stress that comes with being a ‘one trick pony.’  If you have multiple streams of income you’re recession resistant and can withstand any ups and downs that come your way.

Oh – and did I mention that you’ll make much, much more money too;)

Leverage: To really build your Ultimate Fitness Business you need leverage.  So what can you leverage?  You can leverage your time by coaching in groups or in a semi-private setting.  You can leverage your time by having systems in place to maximize your efficiency.  You can also leverage your time by using those systems to hire other trainers or coaches – or so you can delegate things to an administrative assistant or a virtual assistant.

You can leverage your space by working with more people at once.  By adding other time slots. By adding those additional trainers or coaches.  By adding different types of programs or holding workshops during off days.

You can leverage your knowledge by turning the coaching you’re doing locally into a product or program that can be sold globally.  You can also leverage that knowledge by teaching other trainers and coaches to do what you do well – either people that will work for you or others that just want to replicate your success.

Finding leverage points in your business is the fastest way to add a significant amount of income to your bottom line in a hurry.

Recurring Revenue: Having a consistent and predictable monthly revenue stream coming in instead of starting from scratch every month hoping you’ll get the money you need is critical to building the Ultimate Fitness Business. One of the things that we’ve helped introduce to the personal training industry was the importance of using EFT billing and a membership format to sell programs.  In my opinion, this is a must.  I’ve yet to meet a trainer or coach that got into this industry to be a bill collector and there is nothing more tedious and frustrating than having to chase clients around asking them to pay or hoping they’ll renew.

So start selling programs as 3, 6 or 12 month memberships. Use the auto-renewal approach for all of your programs. But don’t stop there.  Offering something like Prograde’s supplements through autoship will give you recurring revenue.  Creating offerings like membership sites or DVD of the Month programs can be a significant source of recurring revenue.

And don’t overlook things like downsells or In-Season programs to keep people involved when their schedule gets busy or they might be considering dropping out for a while. This type of approach keeps revenue coming in and keeps the clients connected with you.

That’s the foundation of the Ultimate Fitness Business.  A business that serves the market you want to work with and can easily reach.  A business that employs multiple streams of income to maximize profitability.  A business that leverages what you have and know.  A business that consistently brings you in a predictable and substantial amount of revenue each and every month.

And most importantly – a business that is designed to help you reach your goals.

I hope that was helpful to you.  Let me know below.

Dedicated to your success,

Pat

“If you don’t feel fear with a heavy weight over your head, then you are probably mentally ill.”

–Charles Staley

Arizona is not for sissies.

As I walk into the local dirty hippie mecca – aka Whole Foods, my fast food of choice when on the road in the US – I notice a sign amongst the usual “No shirt, no shoes, no service” gallery: A finely rendered drawing of a rather large firearm, set within a red circle and diagonal slash. No guns.

The explicit statement of this guideline draws attention to its reverse: If you have to tell people not to bring hefty firearms into the grocery store, it means that, prior to said rule, cowboys/girls were packing heat in the produce aisle.

What did they fear? Mutinous oranges? The social order crumbling when someone brought 11 items into the express lane?

There is, indeed, much to fear in Arizona. Here, the terrain is baked hard.

This ground will chew you up and hork you out along with a mouthful of tobacco spit. The gravel crumbles underfoot and the rocks are spiky.

Everything has poky spines, from the saguaro’s skewers to the barrel cactus’ fish-hook harpoons, to the innocent-looking teddy-bear cholla’s pincushions. Even Camelback Mountain is named after a spine, which it resembles – all bony vertebrae and pithy humps. Our hiking guide carries pliers, in case our tender flesh might need a good yank or scrape. It’s a scary place.

I do this hike twice. The first time, I wear my tried-and-true Merrells, which are the stylistic equivalent of wearing Kleenex boxes on one’s feet. Like the old “It’s boxy but it’s good” slogan for Volvo, these are sturdy sensible shoes that any British Depression-era sanitorium nurse would have been proud to wear.

I clomp with impunity over hill and dale with these bad boys. I scarcely notice the danger. I dare a saguaro to piss me off – I will kick you in the effin face, cactus!! If I had a big gun like the Whole Foods peeps, I would blast baby animals like Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona.

The second time I hike, I wear Vibrams, essentially barefooting over Nature’s minefield. Now my senses are sharp. I am paying attention. My steps are different – I have to chart a course from step to step, dancing from rock to trench to crevice to slippery sand. My toes grip like a gecko’s. I am there, deeply present in the experience.

Fear has a way of capturing our attention.

This is not unlike the experience of dropping under a metal bar directly over my skull. The only things between 55% of my bodyweight and my cranium are my soft pink arms, my will, and the laws of physics – most of which are currently against the success of this mission.

Two men are watching my snatch. (Pause for comic effect.)

I’m training at the Staley Performance Institute in Phoenix, getting one-on-one advice from not one but two kickass strength and conditioning coaches – Charles Staley and David Jack. If it weren’t for the fact that my hands are ground hamburger after several hours of practice, I’d be in ecstasy.

A hulking Mistress Krista with Charles Staley (left) and David Jack (right)

We’re practicing the snatch lift. (Grow up, stop laughing, and Google it. Wait, don’t.)

Charles is making a frowny face behind his spectacles. Dave is crinkling his eyebrows. They have discovered an exciting anomaly in my lift technique, one that Charles – trainer of hundreds, possibly thousands – has never seen before. He is as puzzled and excited as a primatologist discovering a new species of lemur with tentacles.

Somehow my barbell is travelling outward, not upward, when I haul it up overhead. Charles is fascinated yet repelled.

“How can you shrug sideways?” Charles asks, to no one in particular. This is more of a rhetorical question directed at the whimsical universe that has, with impish glee, created a rift in the biomechanical time-space continuum.

“It’s like I’ve dropped a ball, and it’s gone sideways. Dave, are you getting this?” Dave is indeed getting this. He is scrutinizing my lower traps now.

“Are your traps connected to your sternum?” Charles wisecracks. Oohh! Anatomy tittering! I insist I am pulling up. Indeed, I can feel this snatch pull in my earlobes.

(Digression: Geoff Girvitz of Bang Fitness, commenting on the problem of over-active upper traps and Desk Monkey Hunch creating rotator cuff damage, opines that “Ears are poison to shoulders.”)

“Well, I’m stumped,” says Charles, conceding analytical defeat. Yes, dear reader, I have stumped Charles Frickin’ Staley with my bizarre lifting technique.

I feel proud. I am a unique and special snowflake!

We lift and lift. I have catchophobia. As Charles remarks, most lifts are known quantities. When you unrack a squat or bench press, or start pulling a deadlift from the floor, you more or less know what you’re getting. There won’t be too many surprises.

But with the Olympic lifts, each attempt is a leap into the abyss. A lifter must be prepared to sacrifice good sense and the expectation of comfort. Any number of exciting and possibly hilarious things could happen on the way to the top. This would be what Donald Rumsfeld called “known unknowns”.

Frankly, as an O-lifter, the only thing you do know is that you are facing a bar on the floor. As soon as that bar leaves the platform, you’re shipwrecking yourself on the rocky shores of entropy. Good luck, sailor.

Speaking of fear, Charles is no stranger to the sphincter-loosening terror of flinging a barbell overhead. I walk in to our training session to find him snatching a new PR of 185 lb, plummeting sickeningly beneath nearly two hundred upward-hurtling pounds into a deep squat. He pauses beneath the barbell, butt hovering above the floor, in a semi-crucifixion position.

“UP!” barks Dave. Somehow, Charles’ body, hunkered under a hunk of iron, obeys. The lift is solid. Today: Lifter 1, Entropy 0.

In between twice-daily training sessions (heaven!), hikes, desert yoga with a delightfully crunchy, still-beautiful sexagenarian hippie who tells me to open my fire chakra, and getting humiliated by David’s agility ladders, I sit in the sun like a lizard and read while the UV rays toast my white Canadian flesh. While readng, I stumble across a concept that is new to me (yes, I know that the late 1960s called and they want their concept back), but somehow incredibly explanatory:

Fear of negative evaluation: FNE.

I love me some TLAs. I’ve long been a fan of FMO – fear of missing out. FMO is what you experience when you can’t say no to things. ‘Cause, like, what if you miss something? What if something happens and you’re not there? What if there’s some crucial piece of information you don’t have?

If you have FMO you’re nodding right now, except you’re probably distracted because you’re also watching an instructional video and downloading an article and doing some committee paperwork, just in case.

Fear of negative evaluation involves constant preoccupation with other people’s potentially negative judgements of you. You do everything you can to avoid these judgements, because they scare the hell out of you.

• You might be a people-pleaser. Approve of me! Approve of me!
• You might be a pre-emptive self-criticizer – you shoot in like a ninja to crap on yourself before anyone else can. If you ninja crap yourself then you got there first, bitches!! You are the baddest and the best putdowner! Nobody else can hurt you with their slings and arrows like numero uno!
• You might fret and worry and whittle your spirit down to a little nub. What if? What if? What if?
• You might avoid situations where you could look bad or stupid. Looking bad or stupid is shameful and to be avoided at all costs. Consequently, of course, there is no juice in your life because to do anything fun or exciting or adventurous usually involves some potential element of silliness or screwups.

Notice what all these have in common? Two things:

1. Despite being focused on other people’s judgements, FNE is – ironically — incredibly narcissistic (What do they think of me? They must have noticed me! They really really give a shit about every tiny thing I’m doing and saying and thinking! They are so carefully observing me that they totally notice that extra piece of toast I ate!).
2. FNE leaches your life dry of every last bit of joy.

Out of curiosity, I took a quick 30-second FNE test. My score? 27 out of a possible 30. Doh.

To be fair, I’ve made tremendous progress in this department.

As a child, I could barely make eye contact with people. It’s like they could stare into my soul. I was a sideline-sitter, avoiding activities with great determination – anything that could or would make me (I thought) look stupid was cause for shame and angst.

After a pushy piano teacher put me into a music competition at age 7, I developed Baby’s First Ulcer. (Although I wasn’t as bad as the kid who threw a tantrum of humiliation because she didn’t score as well as she thought. I guess that kid is now tallying up their score of 30/30. I just popped a few antacids, quit piano lessons years later, promptly forgot it all – sorry mom and dad – and  got on with life.)

Now I love public speaking, can make eye contact, and only care what some people think of me. And I’m fully prepared to have Charles mock my bizarre Olympic lifting form, because humility is essential for learning.

You must chase fear from time to time.

You must dive in and come out the other side. You must risk this shame and humiliation. You must risk dropping the bar with a soul-shattering crash. It is the only way. Feel the fear, and do it anyway.

And along the way, feel the edges of your spirit crisping up, growing into sharper focus. When I am truly afraid with a healthy fear that says I am having adventures and stretching the envelope of my secure life – that is when I am closest to gnawing on the juicy bones of my existence. I am sucking every last drop of nourishing marrow from that present-ness.

When that bar flies up overhead – and floats – and flutters down gently into my shoulder girdle’s embrace as if guided by angels – for that heart-pounding moment I am touching the universe.