The Fit to Grit Cast
Fit to Grit is an audio/video/newsletter hybrid featuring in-depth conversations with leadership within the athletic space. Guests range from top executives within the athletic space to professionals in adjacent industries with a proven track record of success working in the athletic industry.
We explore visionary ideas and practical strategies driving the industry forward, covering areas such as marketing, finance, branding, equipment, product development, biz dev, and more. Join us as we share actionable insights and real-world experiences while embodying the "fit to grit" spirit.
The Fit to Grit Cast
Is It Time for You to Niche Down?
Ever faced the "valley of death" on your entrepreneurial journey? This episode of Gym Break Cast promises insights on navigating this crucial phase, where growth demands overcoming daunting challenges. We challenge the conventional advice of niching down too soon, offering a fresh perspective on the importance of risk-taking and embracing the potential for failure. As we share our personal experiences, we emphasize the shift away from hustle culture towards a more balanced, holistic approach, where business success is intertwined with personal fulfillment and family life.
Join us as we dissect the transition from being an employee to a business owner, underscoring the need for personal development and effective systems like SOPs. We weigh the pros and cons of different business models—whether it's group classes, personal services, or the decision between a physical gym and an online platform. Personal branding and communication also take center stage, highlighting the power of mindset and connection in building a successful venture. As the episode unfolds, we reflect on our journey, expressing gratitude for the support that brings visionary ideas to life, encouraging listeners to align personal growth with professional goals through collaboration and persistence.
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allowing myself to do things, know I'm going to fail. Do this podcast even though I don't know if one person's going to watch it or listen to it. I'm just really sick of people telling people the niche when they first start a business. I think it's the stupidest move that you can make. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Gym Break Cast, where we like to talk through those visionary and implementer type ideas that come to us while you know we're going on our normal gym break. Today, let's kind of talk a little bit more about niching. I kind of want to go a little bit deeper into something that's been on my mind the last couple of days, and I think it's really important to talk about how to successfully transition your brand into a niche, niche, whatever you want to call it, or even if you should do that. I mean, we kind of went through some stuff on our last podcast, but I want to dive a little bit more into the human psyche when it comes to this particular cast and give you a little bit of backstory with me, because I think it will help some of you that may be in a similar boat and or be at a place where you're having a hard time understanding, like what to do next in your business. I think it's very easy and common for us business owners if we don't have other business owners, like-minded business owners, that we're talking to, consultants that we work with or we go to a counselor. We tend to fall into this trap of what I hear all the time is it's a rich person problem. We aren't necessarily homeless. We have a family. We probably have a decent house. Yes, we may be struggling a little bit in the business, but overall, we know how to run a business. We know how to somewhat grow a business. We may not know everything and we may have a lifestyle business and if we want to stick there, that's okay. And if you haven't already, go and watch my recent TEDx talk how Branding Helps Develop you, because I'll leave it down in the comments of this podcast and on the video version of this. But overall, we talk a lot about connection, personal values, and I really want to dive into a very big topic that doesn't really get talked about too much time. We talk a lot about it in business, we talk a lot about it in personal, but we don't really talk about that correlation, and so what do I mean by that.
Speaker 1:So I don't know how many of you have understood this or have gone through certain business practices and consulting where you have kind of looked at the valley of death. I brought it up a couple of times. The valley of death is this place within your business and your brand that you start making a whole bunch of money. You may have higher profit margins than normal, but for you to make it to that next stage or that next level of business, there's a lot of things that need to happen. You tend to spend more money and so from a business, in a simple graph perspective, you'll just see this kind of wave. It will go up and then it will go, you know, a little bit halfway down and then it will, you know, spurt way up, and then that happens multiple times, as you, you know, make it to a million, you make it to 5 million, you make it to 20. Depending on where you're at in business, you may see these stages already If you're just starting out. This stage itself is something that you will have to go through in different plethoras.
Speaker 1:But one thing that I have noticed, just as a human being, as our own personal valley of death, our own personal well-being, as business owners, as people that are trying to make a difference in this world any way, we can falling into that same valley of death. And, funny enough, those valley of deaths correlate like crazy. And what do I mean by that? You know you may hear a lot of other people talk about mental well-being, being able to work on yourself, being able to understand that, hey, I need to go meditate every day, or I need to go to the gym, or I need to, you know, do this. But I personally fell into the trap of being like well, why do I have to do that? I shouldn't have to do that to have a successful business, and you don't. You just need to find a way to be balanced with your life and your business. If you're one to come in here and say something along the lines of well, my business is my life, I'm all about hustle, hustle culture, good for you. You know, I'm glad if you're like Alex Ramosi and your business is your life, good for you, but it isn't for me. You know, I have three young children, I have a beautiful wife, and when I first opened my business, my business was my baby and I had children that I realized how much I love being around my children and helping them grow. I'm very similar to how I like my clients and my brand to grow. So my business does it kind of takes a second step, but does it kind of takes a second step.
Speaker 1:But back to that point. I went through a business, our personal sorry valley of death period. I was at a point where I was making a whole bunch of money and then I settled a little bit that certain things that were driving me weren't necessarily driving me anymore. And if you want me to be straight with you, what did drive me Money? I ran my business out of fear. I thought how can I be better than everyone else? Everyone from my past, my traumatic experiences, whatever I wanted to do in my life, do some of those still come up? Yes, I still work on them. Do they make me better A little bit every day? I saw this correlation between that and at the same time, my business was stagnant. The business wasn't growing. My business was at that point of valley of death. I needed to come up with a solution to either have it expand or keep it as a lifestyle brand. I mean, I was making. You know not to get too deep into the numbers, which, I gotta say. I dialed out a 40-50% profit margin, making you know multiple six figures, mid six figures to be exact, and I hit a value death within my type of business.
Speaker 1:I still had an ego. I still said I'm the best, I'm going to leverage these high prices for this because I value my time and my energy to do this. But I also didn't take the time to look at my marketplace. So that's where the ego came in. I said, hey, these are my numbers, I'm worth this amount of time. But I didn't necessarily look at my marketplace and said, hey, is this going to suffice for my marketplace? Am I really contributing to the greater good of what I want to do? Because money is an energy. How can we still provide value? But back to the point. You know my personal well-being needed to get worked on. Hence I went down this journey of TEDx.
Speaker 1:I continue to go out and speak more, become more authentic with myself so I can give everyone me who I am, my fears, my failures. I was a pretty down moment the first time back in 2021, beginning of 2021, a lot of half our business, just due to the circumstances of the economy, built that back up. Then it happened again, built that back up. Then happened one more time and I had to look at myself and say, hey, what is wrong? What's really wrong with my business model? I'm seeing all these other people thrive. I still had more personal work to do.
Speaker 1:I was still in this valley of death, of understanding what was the deeper part of what I needed to understand, which I continue to work on, which is my self-worth, building confidence off of myself, allowing myself to do things. Know I'm going to fail. Do this podcast even though I don't know if one person's going to watch it or listen to it. Not overthinking the target, not overthinking who. I'm going to go out there and do whatever to. But there's a correlation there. I don't know if any of you have ever heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, this nice scale of human evolution and what I call human rebranding, because we do branding. I've seen a very similar correlation between the two, right when you're at in business.
Speaker 1:And so me, from a personal standpoint, I had to do multiple things. I was already delegating. I've delegated from the beginning of my brand and my business. I actually had to go backwards, introduce myself a little bit more, but once I started introducing myself, we ended up going from total, 100% delegation to being on strategy calls all the time, where nothing was getting done. There was no follow through. So I went from one extreme to the other, grasping at ways that I can get this business to grow, not realizing that what I really liked was the building. What I really enjoyed was the journey. But I wasn't allowing myself to see that journey, see myself grow it. Does that mean that my emotional side wasn't still making mistakes? No, it was.
Speaker 1:I want to consult, I want to educate, I want to teach, but the other side of me is like how scalable is this compared to our current model? What is the most, what is the smartest way to do this with the team that we have? Our continued evolution? So I just want you to think about that a little bit. Where are you personally? Your business and what you are building is going to be a direct correlation of you. Mine is a direct correlation to me. I know that much. My fear to grow is really what causes me not to grow. Right, but I'm growing. Another thing I know right now. Here's a great example, just so you know my understanding. The valley of death in business really means that you're going to be spending more money on delegating, bringing more people in. You're going to start moving up the totem pole, still doing some inner work, but still starting to work on some higher level tasks.
Speaker 1:I don't have 50 hours a day to do that stuff. I don't have 200 hours a week. I was going to say 50 hours a day. I was going to say 50 hours a week, but I know for a fact that that's pretty common. That's a normal number. I'm not going to do 100 hours a week.
Speaker 1:We'll say when I know that I have a family, I want to spend time with my family. I want to walk my kid to school. Now that he's in kindergarten, I want to pick him up and have conversations with him. I want to be able to give my newborn milk when my wife can't. I want to be able to sit down with all of them and play games and not be overwhelmed and stressed about work. Vice versa, I want to be able to have that free time to think beyond surface level activities, grow my business balance and, as you probably heard out there, balance is kind of not something that we can have. You know you're either working 50% in each or you're flip-flopping right One more than the other. And I know right now it's not because it's my fear to grow, it's because I know for a fact right now is that that time to push my business to what it's going to take to push it there is going to take a lot of time, a lot of energy that I don't want to spend on that, I want to spend on my family. So, with all of that said, all I want to say here is let's look at that direct correlation.
Speaker 1:Back to niching. What is the point of niching? It's to simplify, build momentum probably the two biggest ones. So is it time for you to niche? Maybe not If you're just starting out. I'm just really sick of people telling people the niche when they first start a business. I think it's the stupidest move that you can make, unless you've already run one or two businesses.
Speaker 1:Now that's different. If you've run one or two businesses and you've seen the market and you're getting in with the business plan, where you've gone through the motions and you're basically moving from one to the other, that's different. But if this is your first business or your only business and this is you, love what you do, why would you change it. Vice versa, if something's not working, why wouldn't you try to find a way to change it? And when you look at the valley of death period within business and personal life, I think that what happens is people get so caught up in the things that they're doing in the business it becomes their day to day. They're afraid to push forward with different things and learning new things because they're afraid it's going to take away from their personal time, when in reality, that is the stuff that's going to eventually save you more time, give you more time with your family. Allow you to lead by example creating SOPs, for instance, systems and procedures.
Speaker 1:For anyone who doesn't know that being able to hire people, that you don't have to cycle through employees every single freaking week because you're creating compensation plans and you're bringing them in off the values they relate to you. I mean, snap off the top of my head If you're a studio and you're at the point where you're like dude, like I, have no time for myself. I pay myself 10K a month. Let's say, off the top, off the top line, you pay yourself 10 grand a month. That's just what you do. I'm using this as an example to show money, but let's say that's what you do, but you have no time for your kids. Create a damn daycare, allow your kids to go there, you know. Start a relationship with a local company where they bring clients. Maybe you'll get a discount for your kids because now you can leverage some of that money from a business side to help give you more time with your kids. Maybe hiring a babysitter or hiring a nanny is the right move to make so that you can start giving yourself more time to not go into the weeds of the work or the training, which you could kind of say that's both and doing more high level.
Speaker 1:How are we preparing for next year? What is the overall offers that we're looking to introduce? Are we going to niche? Are we not Niching? In itself is a creative, strategic approach. That should only be done when necessary.
Speaker 1:Not all businesses need it. In fact I've seen a correlation with the bigger businesses liking different services, smaller ones don't. And that's just B2B, that's not B2C. But you may have more luxurious type members. Let's say you're a student in your luxury that has these packages to use these multiple things. Maybe people with more money like that full service. They don't like the one-off approach. Come be something as simple as moving from group classes to personal.
Speaker 1:But what I'm saying is, for you to successfully transition into a niche, you first have to understand if you're in a value death, not just from a business perspective, but from a personal perspective. Allow your personal development, your personal well-being and your personal thought process for where the business should go, the vision. Start creating a vision for crying out loud. Create a vision for what you want out of your life, what you want your daily plan to be. It's hard Time blocking's hard. I will say that's probably the hardest thing I've had to continue to do and every business owner that I talked to. It is just hard, but you continue to go 1% every day. Try to improve it, try to do better, give yourself time and then from there, be able to sit down and say, all right, do I need to create a customized program? Dedicate 50% of our time on this dedicated program to move.
Speaker 1:Here's a good example Earlier on in usually a gym owner's growth. There's usually two people that own gyms. I'm not stereotyping by any means. I'm just saying this is what I've seen. You know it's usually an investor that's saying, hey, we want to build some commercial property. They come in as a silent and they hire a personal trainer to come in that knows the field, to basically manage the location. That's silent, we can't talk to those ones. Those ones usually don't do very well because they don't have the business owner in the business. But unless they've already owned a gym before, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:Then you have the other field. You have personal trainers that say, hey, I don't know, I want to make more income and let's just go off of this example because this is a great one. I'm a personal trainer that wants to go to the next level. How do I do it? When does this usually happen? I'd say from a personal trainer, this is usually pretty small. It's usually between 60 and maybe 80 a year. Even I'd say 60 to 70 to 60, 80. How do we build our own brand? How can I start training more people and turning my time into money? Instead of turning time into money, turn money into time, right?
Speaker 1:I hear a lot of people go against gyms. Don't open a brick and mortar, go all online. I, a lot of people hey, go against gyms, don't open a brick and mortar, go all online. I'll be the first to say they both have their positives and they both have their negatives. Online you're marketing to the world, you're marketing to the United States, you're marketing to a lot of people. So you're gonna have a lot of expenses to really get your momentum going.
Speaker 1:Opening a gym. You have a smaller community, you're local, you have bigger expenses when it comes to facility, but you have a lot less in marketing. In fact, you could usually bootstrap marketing at the very beginning when you're a local gym, unless you're trying to get about 150 members before pre-launch. But I mean, there's systems around that too you could do. You can still bootstrap it. But what I'm saying is that's a correlation. That's the first time when you're gonna have a life value you know your life value to death where you're gonna have to rebrand yourself and start to make a decision you want.
Speaker 1:If you go the gym route, you know how damn well hard it is to go to the. Do the personal stuff. You'll eventually be able to do it online, but I wouldn't recommend it until you're at least franchised or you have three to four plus locations. You're making into the millions because you're just not going to have the budget for it. Vice versa, if you're online to open a location, it's like you're kind of opening a whole separate marketplace. You're kind of segmenting your marketing down. It's basically the difference between an e-commerce store and online store compared to a local gym. So you also have to think about that. So that's going to be your first real personal rebound. So what are the things that you are going to have to do to successfully pick your direction or niche towards online or local?
Speaker 1:Well, who are you as a person? What kind of things bring you alive? I know for me, I'm in marketing. It wasn't until I was in year seven that I'm like damn, I need to get out there and I just need to start being around people again. I need to bring that connection back to my life. I have kids. Yes, I spend time with my family, I spend time with my kids, but the gym is where I like to connect with people. I like to talk to people. I like to. You know I'm not one to sit on a bench with my phone. That aggravates the crap out of me, but I am one that knows that I have other people around me thriving to be better people, if that makes sense, and so it motivates me.
Speaker 1:It's my visionary time, hence the name Jim Bray, coming up with visionary time, but that's besides the point. Do you like to connect with people? Are you a connector? Maybe you don't even open a studio, maybe you don't open an online store. Maybe you become a speaker, maybe you're a motivational speaker. You don't even train anymore, you just you help people in different ways, like a podcast like this, for instance. Maybe you realize that, hey, it's not the training I love to help, but maybe it's the mindset. Maybe I need to go back to school, maybe I need to become a therapist, who knows?
Speaker 1:But what I'm saying is, if you were to have that one personal development, you have to kind of figure out who you are. Me, I ramped right into it, man. I had to go backwards and figure that stuff out. It actually pushed me back a little bit. And one thing you're going to say is well, zach, how does this directly correlate my personal development, directly correlate with the growth of your business? It didn't. Did I see a drastic 200, 300, 400 growth? Not yet. Is it going to help me persevere, to get there? Yes, did it help me find and get closer to the vision that I'm entailing for my life and how I want to live? Yes, and it's going to continue to do that and I'm going to continue to work on myself as I continue to do that. I know we talked a little bit about successfully transitioning into a niche. We talked about that a little bit more in detail on the last cast, so go back and watch that one if you want to hear more about just more of the description details.
Speaker 1:I really wanted this format to be a little bit different. I'm kind of at that point where I'm like dude, I just want to talk to you, I just want to come out here and I just want to riff on some of the challenges I've seen, because no one talks about the personal well-being of business owners, because they're either not a business owner they don't know how much shit we have to deal with or two people are like oh, you make money, you should be happy. No, I'll be the first to tell you money does not make you happy. Does it help? Of course it does, but I don't have any debt. I paid off all my debt. That's just my mentality. I don't like debt. So I have a well-being of, I'm able to allow myself more time to evolve this and I'm not stuck in a grind constantly. But vice versa, I still have to work on myself because I still have that deep feeling of I can be. I'm meant for something more.
Speaker 1:So I think we don't talk about this stuff. We don't talk about the well-being of who we are and we are brands every single one of us even if you don't want to be. If you are going out there and you're becoming a business owner and you're saying I'm going to open my own thing, you are making the conscious decision most people unconscious but you are making the decision that I am a brand. In today's market you better like talking to people. If you're a silent owner, you better like hiring someone that does like to talk to people. It's a whole different story. We can talk about leadership and all that stuff on continued episodes, because I love talking about leadership stuff, but for this one, it's really just giving you guys all some hope, knowing that, hey, no matter where you're at in your journey, it's okay to know that I can solve this issue.
Speaker 1:That's the greatest part about this is, if it's something down to you, you don't understand who you are. Maybe you have to switch your mindset and get away from the ego and more confident building activities. Maybe you need to learn your target market more and become more of figuring out a price point, not letting the money from too high or too low dictate who you are as a person, that all that stuff can be worked on. You just have to allow yourself to work on that stuff and as you chip away at it individually a little bit, so will that valley of death in the business. They'll start meeting like-minded people. I mean, think about it for a sec.
Speaker 1:I'm doing this podcast video cast as well. You about it for a sec. I'm doing this podcast video cast as well. You know, putting it up, someone may make it to the spot here and be like damn, zach has something there, something, I think, the same thing. I'm just so happy someone said it. I'm going to reach out to him. Maybe we'll have a cup of coffee, maybe we'll have a virtual talk, maybe our businesses can align in some way you never know and that will bring in the connection. But getting close to the end here, I didn't want to splurt this for too long, but I thank you all again for continued efforts. I'm watching these ever-growing processes of the Gym Break cast where we talk through our visionary and implementer type ideas that come to us when we're going through our normal gym break. I'm Zach, your host, and again, you all have a good one.
