How to Grow Your Personal Training Business Without Working More Hours with Matt Reynolds

Yeah, I think finding the balance of working in the business versus on the business is probably the most important for the solopreneur.

And because naturally, as you start to grow a team at some point, and certainly you can end up with a team, a big team, and everybody still just works in the business and nobody works on the business.

So that can continue to be a problem.

But I think specifically for this audience, as we think about this, most of us we're coaching that's why we're on this on this live stream um we are offering a service that is coaching but this would work for any business i mean you could be a pressure washer you could be a you know a lawnmower like what what is the service you provide right Anything that is the service you provide, so for us, coaching, let's say you're a gym owner and you coach.

You've got gym memberships and you coach and maybe you do some personal training, some small group, maybe you can do some large group coaching.

I think anything that is in the primary service And or I wish I had a better way to say this, but what you might consider in the hierarchy of below that is working in the business.

So that's coaching is working in the business.

Cleaning is in is working in the business, working the front desk is working in the business, answering the phone, responding to emails, paying the bills, sending out the invoices, chasing after the bounce credit cards.

That's all working in the business.

Those are things that are like coaching is the thing that we do.

and that and all of the things that kind of come below that are in the business so that's where i want to define the terms because really i think the terms can be squishy so then the question is well then what is working on the business and i think what happens a lot of times with solopreneurs is they end up especially if they if they grow relatively quickly they find themselves working in the business all the time all they're doing is coaching and cleaning and making sure the invoices are paid and sending out the billing to their clients and whatever those things i mean it's just there's a never-ending amount of things that can be done and when you coach especially back when i ran strong gym in my first business Coaching was the primary thing I did, but if you're coaching seven, eight, 10 hours a day, that doesn't leave much room for working on the business.

Here's the problem.

You become the bottleneck and the business can never grow unless you know how to work on the business.

And so coming back to, you mentioned E-Myth, E-Myth Revisited is a great book about standard operating procedures and writing those sort of systems.

I think of working on the business then, if working in the business is coaching and say anything below that, working on the business then are the things I would consider above the primary service of your business.

And that would be things like sales and marketing, Creating content, strategy, aligning employees on direction, like that idea of the game plan.

What are our goals, actions, metrics? It's the direction that we're going towards.

Important meetings that you have to have.

Sometimes those meetings very much feel like it's in the business and sometimes they maybe are.

The important ones are on the business.

They're working on the overarching strategy.

I think metric deep dives.

I think a lot of times when you're drowning and working in the business, you often don't know what your churn is.

You don't know what your conversion rate is.

You don't know what your gross margins are.