[00:00:06] Josh Kennedy: Today's topic is why most new fitness businesses fail and how we're avoiding it. It's a very jolly topic for a Friday morning. Um, unfortunately though, the lifespan of the average personal trainer is around 18 months. I don't think that statistic has changed since I started in the fitness industry.
[00:00:23] Josh Kennedy: I think it's probably the same, maybe even less now. Uh, who knows? I haven't Googled it, but yeah, we are here to try and help you avoid that pitfall, that trap. Um, James, you want to talk a little bit about some of the pitfalls and what we're doing with, uh, with Cricket
[00:00:36] James Breese: Matters? Yeah, there's, there's quite a few pitfalls that a lot of trainers make, but even if their business does survive, they continue to make it, uh, well into their professional career and they're always struggling to get new clients.
[00:00:49] James Breese: So yes, a lot of people make these mistakes and they go out of business. But then there's also a lot of trainers out there who are in this perpetual cycle of struggling to find new clients all the time, struggling to [00:01:00] pay bills. And it's quite simply, well, they haven't got the basics in play. And I think over the next coming weeks and in the future, strength matters.
[00:01:09] James Breese: We're going to start talking to you and show you guys what we're doing at Cricket Matters, which is our sister company, which is a new company we've set up from scratch. So the things that we see right at the start is they haven't got the basics in place. What are the basics? Well, I'll share in a second, but Andrew, any thoughts, uh, from what you've seen in the past working with other, other trainers and clients and what you see the mistakes are making?
[00:01:30] Andrew Wallis: Yeah, quite simply, as you say, it's getting those fundamentals. You know, getting those, uh, initial foundations in place and it's like any, any sports, you know, practicing those drills and getting them, uh, down pat, uh, getting them, um, cleanly oiled so that they're working. That's, that's the first part, because once we've got those foundations, we can grow to whatever size we want to be.
[00:01:54] Andrew Wallis: But as we'll discuss in a minute, a second or two, we'll, we'll explain what those [00:02:00] foundations should be in our. In our opinion, yeah,
[00:02:03] James Breese: I think let's let's let's give a specific example now of how we set up cricket matters Now cricket matters is a fitness company aimed Uh, helping to help cricketers both around the world and locally in Cardiff where I'm, where I'm now living here in Wales.
[00:02:16] James Breese: So what we wanted to do is we had an idea after my cricket season last year where I wanted to see, well, I think there's a gap here. I think most cricketers don't know what to do with their training. There was no like Eric Cressy of the cricket world. I think that's the best way to put it, wasn't it, Josh?
[00:02:31] Josh Kennedy: Well, in the nicest possible way from what we've seen of the cricketing world, even the professional cricketing world, they're 15, 20 years behind the U. S. generally in what they're doing in terms of their training. So it's like we saw a gap and we went through it, we went for it.
[00:02:48] James Breese: Yeah, exactly. And it's important to say that we've gone from a gap.
[00:02:51] James Breese: Within a community that I was embedded in, like I'm a big part of the cricketing community, particularly in Wales where I play for Cardiff. I play [00:03:00] for the Wales national side over 40s and I play for local other clubs and I'm coaching a lot of stuff in cricket in terms of Wales over 40s too. So I was embedded in this community and I was seeing this deep handed so what I wanted to do was test it out.
[00:03:15] James Breese: What we're going to share with you now is the proof of concept idea that we did to see if it would fly because it's really important to test things out first before going and developing stuff that takes weeks and weeks and weeks to do. So here's kind of our bulletproof formula that we've done to test proof of concept to see if we have a product that we can market and get to market very quickly.
[00:03:34] James Breese: And how I, after years of creating other businesses as in Strength Matters, how I went about setting up a brand new fitness business. So essentially, number one is with test proof of concept. So what we did wasn't Josh, we spent a two days together recording videos and that was two full days. We recorded I need to broke my arm,
[00:03:53] James Breese: Yeah, you did. You
[00:03:54] Josh Kennedy: didn't provide me with the right handle for the camera and it was ridiculously
[00:03:57] James Breese: heavy. No, it's massive. D S L R wasn't it? It was [00:04:00] brilliant. So two, two days of filming. Right? Two days of filming. But we, in that time we did over 200 videos. Right of short form content, which AC actually, we actually use more of the vid of the phone iPhone stuff than we did actually the D S L R because it got more shares and more likes.
[00:04:17] James Breese: So something to think about here now. So we did these videos 'cause we wanted to test and share these videos to see if it resonated with the cricketing world, and the answer was yes. So we had some traction. So funnily enough, it was TikTok that we started on. And I'm not a TikToker in any way, shape or form, but we essentially posted a video daily for a week and we grew to 2, 000 followers on TikTok, right?
[00:04:39] James Breese: By posting these little daily tips and the, Hey, cricketers, try this for warming up your shoulders. Try this, you know, little daily tips. Go to TikTok at Cricket Matters and you'll see the stuff we did. Some videos got 30, 000 views straight away. So what we knew was straight away, we created the content.
[00:04:53] James Breese: Yes, we spent two days doing it because we needed to figure out what we were trying to do. But we then post it to see if we get a reaction and we did [00:05:00] right that was the main thing we got a reaction Okay, there's something in this so once we created this video to test prove a concept we then write let's do the next step This is where we started setting up of the business, right?
[00:05:12] James Breese: Essentially, so I did this in less than half a day. I, the first step after this was then I created a website for cricketmatters. com that had a few basic pages with some information on how to get in contact and to lead to a strategy call to speak to us and maybe do some coaching. That was it. Half, half a day of four to five pages on a website with some good copy and some, a lead into what we want to try and do.
[00:05:38] James Breese: That was the first step of simple website. I then connected it to Google my business to have a business page associated with it, right? So we can find it. And I optimized it for being in Cardiff. Most people try and optimize for the world, whereas I optimized this page for cricket, cricket coaching in Cardiff.
[00:05:56] James Breese: Was it cricket coaching? Not really. It was more like fitness side of stuff. But I wanted to get [00:06:00] to the top very quickly of hitting Google to, to create authority and build the here. So this is the first step here. Now on this, on this website, I then made the most important thing you need to do is, and that's a way for people to get in contact or to learn more about you in the terms of a free book.
[00:06:15] James Breese: So we put together a free book called the High Performance Handbook. It was basically similar to what we've done with Strength Matters, where there was an opportunity to have an email address and send in your details and Bob's your uncle, Fanny's your aunt, you know, we have their email address so we can follow up with them and do some communication.
[00:06:31] James Breese: That was the first thing. Prove a concept to what we try and do. Nothing else. Literally nothing else. So we then had TikTok. We then created the website, right? Very quickly, just a very quick, rough cut to get it out. And then we started sharing a few more videos and then driving to the website to see what would happen when people went to the website.
[00:06:50] James Breese: And lo and behold, what happened, Josh? People downloaded our free guide to learn more, right?
[00:06:55] Josh Kennedy: Yep. It was, uh, it was very, uh, very popular actually. [00:07:00] Um, and then obviously we went on to, uh, blogging. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Cause I have a question for Andrew, but I'm going to hold off if you want to mention blogging.
[00:07:08] Josh Kennedy: Yeah,
[00:07:08] James Breese: sure. So again, notice the different stages here. Now this is all over the course of a month now. Okay. We didn't do this. So the website was built in half a day to put out along with the video posting on, on TikTok It was interesting seeing the TikTok videos grew really fast. The Instagram videos were still quite small in terms of 400, 500 people, but they're very engaged people on the Instagram thing.
[00:07:31] James Breese: But what we did then was we were like, okay, this is interesting. So I know for myself from writing blog posts and getting domain authority to the website, is we need to create some blogs. So I just repurposed some old blogs from Strength Matters, made it in the voice of cricketers, and aimed it at cricketers, and sent that out onto the website, onto the world, to see and get some more engagement from these blog posts, and then start emailing our list that we collected emails for.
[00:07:56] James Breese: to get more of an engagement here. And again, we got some great [00:08:00] feedback. People read it. They messaged back and asked us questions. We choose topics that were quite topical, including the 2K run test, which at the time was a huge thing in the cricket world because somebody who failed it didn't get into the national team.
[00:08:12] James Breese: Now, that was the key thing. The blog posts came after the website again test some stuff, but I wasn't writing these blog posts from scratch They were purely simple things. I had from Chris strength matters I repurposed for cricketers and then Josh what we do we went to the podcast. That was the next step in here So it's step by step by step creating content and driving people into the page And then suddenly we start having people contacting us or wanting to work with us for coaching from all over the world.
[00:08:44] James Breese: Right?
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[00:09:24] Josh Kennedy: that is obviously we've been doing this for a lot of years. We've got a lot of resources, a lot of blogs we can repurpose. We've been podcasting since 2014. We've got all this infrastructure in place.
[00:09:36] Josh Kennedy: So that's great that we can test this concept and, you know, I take time to do all the videos and everything, but Andrew, if I could bring you in, obviously the topic of this is why most businesses fail and people need. What are some simple actions that they can do to try and give them their best chance of survival?
[00:09:52] Josh Kennedy: Because as we talk about on other podcasts, blogging and doing video, that's kind of more purple belt. We're talking 15 K a month and above. You don't need to worry [00:10:00] about that stuff. Some just give people some basics. Uh, that they can give themselves the best chance.
[00:10:06] Andrew Wallis: Essentially, we need to get ourselves out there.
[00:10:08] Andrew Wallis: Um, people were only going to do, and the terminology we use is, they're going to do business with those they know, like, and trust. And if they don't know who you are, then... There's no way that you're going to potentially get them as a client. So we need to get out there. And in my view, there's two ways we do it.
[00:10:26] Andrew Wallis: We do online and we do offline starting with offline. It's looking at who we know, our friends, our family, our colleagues. Do they know what you do? Do they know what services you offer? Um, do they know the types of clients that you, uh, that you particularly want to work with, you know, knowing your, uh, your perfect client avatar is key because once you understand who that person is, then you can clearly, um, build a Uh, and Define a message that's going to resonate with them.
[00:10:55] Andrew Wallis: And then it's connecting with businesses. This is offline, uh, who [00:11:00] compliment, uh, your own, you know, who service that client, that client avatar that you're looking to attract. So for me as a PT, it was looking at massage therapists, nutritionalists, hairdressers. Uh, nail salons for my female clients, you know, day spas and the likes of, uh, working in partnership with them so that they understand what you do.
[00:11:23] Andrew Wallis: And that's where you can generate referrals online. Hey, looking at social media and jumping into the groups, what communities, where are your clients, you know, where are they meeting? Where are they talking? If you can enter those. Those places online and open up, uh, conversations with them, you know, connect with them, don't sell, uh, connect with them, you know, get to know them, answer questions, you know, be that authority, uh, then they're going to ask, they're going to seek out more information on you.
[00:11:53] Andrew Wallis: And that's a good starting point in my
[00:11:54] James Breese: opinion. And I think it's a good point just to talk about the online offline thing in community. So that's just, just a [00:12:00] quick recap of what I did. We're setting up Cricket Matters and we're getting a lot of traffic to Cricket Matters now and we haven't even started really pushing it yet.
[00:12:07] James Breese: So the first thing was, I was already part of this community. I was embedded in the cricketing community and world. Right? People already knew like and trust me. So the first thing you think about is what communities are you already embedded in that you can reach out and start talking to that they can resonate with you about, right?
[00:12:23] James Breese: So cricketers can really talk to me about cricket and they can talk about fitness now and how to combine the two. So it's a really good winning combination. So I'm embedded in that community and my work started offline. I was talking to people in the communities about this and the cricketing communities to get this set up and ready.
[00:12:38] James Breese: So before I went online. I was doing things offline, right? And then you start to build it too. So when you put it online, you can get your offline community to start sharing this post and started building it here. So in a very quick nutshell, if you want to start, if I was to start a new fitness business from now, or if there's gaps in your business that you, you're not quite sure what's happening at the moment.
[00:12:57] James Breese: This is why I start off. Number one, embed yourself in a [00:13:00] community you're passionate about, and you can talk about, and they can resonate with you about. Number two is start showing invaluable information to help them in terms of videos to see if it's what they want, right? Next step is have a good website.
[00:13:12] James Breese: Simple website that shares a clear communicative message that tells them what they can do, where they can then start building a bigger relationship in forms of email collection, right? Give away a free book, something. And then we can start looking at blogging and podcasting to really cement this idea to build this know, like and trust here.
[00:13:29] James Breese: So most fitness businesses don't do any of that. If I'm being, if I'm brutally honest, it's, it's, it's the simple formula that we followed and we're doing it. And we are really going to try and scale this up and stay with us in the podcast because That's why we're doing this podcast now is to share what we're doing and what's working now with that business.
[00:13:48] James Breese: So you can apply it to your own too.
[00:13:50] Josh Kennedy: Absolutely. And I think in this day and age, it's even more important to probably to find your niche, which we'll definitely talk about more on other podcasts. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, [00:14:00] review and subscribe. And if you want to find out what's holding you back from growing your fitness business, go to strengthmatters.
[00:14:06] Josh Kennedy: com forward slash quiz.