What Do You Need to Do NOW?

coaching, work, people, hunter, business, athletes, day, identify, weaknesses, plan, gym, talking, social media, piece, content, sucks, john, improve, hours

Tyler 00:00

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the gym owners podcast. I'm your host with a voice Tyler stone over there you are called my co host without a voice today is John Fairbanks say Hi, John. Hi. I'm gonna speak for John on this one since it's too long of a story for him to struggle through. But John has been coaching youth football and baseball and everything at the same time this summer. So this has been as a person who grew up with basketball coaches, about springtime, you're about February or March when your father's a basketball dad. All these guys. They're just dead from screaming and practicing your screaming, practicing your screaming and games, screaming at your kids at home. It's a never ending. So the voice is gone. John will be contributing to this episode. But if it sounds a little strange, just I promise you guys his voice is normally more charming than it's going to be today.



John Fairbanks 00:53

The good news is we got the memo that we were both gonna go sleeveless. On this episode, which I have. Neither of us have done it to date. No,



Tyler 01:04

I've actually never gone sleeveless on a podcast. I don't think I was just in a hurry today and had to run a bunch of errands around the kid playing soccer so they're hot as hell and they're putting a sinkhole back together in front of my house. So we had to delay this whole thing until just now. So we are all set guys, we're ready to go. I hope you guys enjoyed last week's episode featuring Hunter Wooten from Hunters garage Gym up in Alaska. Hunter is one of the great success stories from people we've been working with for a long time. And he dropped some really incredible bombs on that thing. Well, for somebody who these were, a lot of the things he was talking about are things that he has been doing forever. So to hear him come to all these things via his own process and his own understanding and realizing these, what we described as a universal truth about business and marketing and coaching and fitness and human beings and all that stuff. I think it was to be honest, it was one of the proudest I've ever been in this line of work. You know what I mean? Like, even as a friend, you know, I've known Hunter since he started coaching. I met Hunter the very first time at one of the seminars we did in St. Louis. The was back with StrongFit. He was 19 or 20 years old. And his wife had surprised him because he was a big fan of strong fit and the stuff they were doing surprised him with the week of the seminar and coaches week. Like for his birthday, he didn't even know it's happening, she had saved money. And so Hunter flew down and it was, you know, someone who's fully immersed, they're ready to learn, wanting to be good at coaching, wanting to be great at coaching. He's come and visited us for strongfit events overseas in Europe, he spent a month with their training up there, as well as some, I think some of our other short term things. And so props to Hunter, check out at hunters garage gym, on Instagram, they've been doing really good stuff. I want you to emulate his process. Now this content, and that's the thing we're gonna get into today.



John Fairbanks 02:59

The coolest thing I want to do, just as we're talking about Hunter, is watching him take the same approach to his passion for coaching. And now seeing him directly take that same energy and passion, and now applying it to his business. That's really, really cool.



Tyler 03:20

Yeah. And one of the things that he talked about was identifying the bottleneck in your business. Now, that can be a lot of things. It can be a lot of things in a lot of different ways. But that's a very fractal way of looking at it. Is it every point? What's the bottleneck on your time? First for you, as a gym owner? Like? Are you spending too much time coaching? That's where your time is getting bottleneck? How can you get out of that, because maybe that's the thing, you need to figure out how to coach less and do more. Or if you want to be coaching that much, but that you're not getting enough of this other stuff done, then maybe you need to hire more resources towards admin stuff, marketing, social media, whatever, but you can't just leave these things on. I really liked



John Fairbanks 03:57

that you dropped this as a specific poll question into our gym revolution group online. It was really telling, like, we got a lot of interactions in the group. So everybody that's in the group. Thank you for giving us responses. But my hope is It was eye opening for everybody to see. Oh man has a gym. I'm doing a lot of fucking stuff, man.



Tyler 04:22

Yeah, yeah. And so that was the piece that one for Hunter. It's not just your tasks, right? That's the thing, your workload, identifying your bottleneck because once it sunk quite what he meant when he was talking about it really is what is the thing that you need to improve? And it's almost what is your business's weakness right now , what is holding you back and there is a measure of triage to this where you have to pick the most relevant thing that you can do right now. Right And for him, he said he thought it was coaching and he said it well. It wasn't coaching because he knows the people he's coaching are getting good results. What am I going to put more time into than I already am? That's not a very viable plan. It's not very. It's like if you're already, you know, great at shooting three pointers, but you can't dribble the ball, catch the ball, walk or run and you're 400 pounds. Well, you got some other things to sort out before you're gonna make it to the NBA. And that three point shot in it. And hunter did a great job of running through that, then he just realized, alright, well, he had identified fixtures that fixtures offer he had got his sales process kind of figured out, he got a process that now he could practice that he knew at least was tried and true, a little bit, right? And something that he could tune up. And then now what was it? Well, I gotta get the experience, I got to get reps, right? Just like if one of your clients wants to get better at bench pressing. They don't ever do any research or effort or practice with bench pressing? Well, how the fuck are they going to get any better. And I always want to tie these things into fitness analogies, because it really is the same thing. We're trying to get better at something, we need to put resources, we need to put energy, we need to put thought learning effort, practice reps, all of that into it. So one of the things that I want to get into is, let's cover this from an athlete standpoint first, right? If you're an athlete, and anytime when I work with athletes that have a specific goal, one of the first things that I want to that I want to have them do a self identify some of the your three biggest weaknesses that you know need to get improved, because I see guys, so many athletes in combat sports and regular sports in strength sports and team sports, they have weaknesses, they should they know what they are. And yet they never really look them in the face and say, I'm going to make this better. And I can tell you, the ones that are great are the ones that do well all do this talk, I am bad at this, I'm going to get better at this because this is the hole in my game. And I don't see that with gym owners. It's very, very frustrating. Gym owners that can't sell are terrified of selling. And they just go. Well, look, I guess I'm just gonna be poor. Well, I get that, but that's not a plan for progress. So if you want things to be better, doing nothing about it sure isn't a part of that plan. And I



John Fairbanks 07:01

i think you have to be pretty advanced, honestly, to step back and say, Well, I guess I'm just going to be poor. I think I think it ends up being something even more dangerous. I think it ends up subconsciously. Because you know, or you feel like you're not very good at sales, or it's uncomfortable, or how you've seen it done in the past has been so poorly executed. That subconsciously, you're just avoiding it. It's and with that avoidance leaves you staying very busy, being busy doing other things. And then as the room is on fire around you, you're like, well, it obviously is because of this, this and this, like you're not even consciously realizing, oh, like I messaged you the other day, me and my boys were at the CrossFit gym. They're doing the CrossFit kids stuff. And I'm listening to some diehard CrossFit athletes that are talking about how they're just shoulder so pissed when they do muscle ups, or do kipping pull ups. Pull Ups? Yeah, there's like kipping pull ups. It's like, Well, does it hurt you any other time? Well, no, just the kipping. He's like, Oh, that's so weird. I wonder why that is. And like, that was as far as we went No. And, and so that's, I think that's a really good example of exactly what you're talking about. It's a straight avoidance, and then take it the next step, then you are applying the wrong reason. And now we're on to a problem.



Tyler 08:47

And pretending that it's not a problem is insane when it's in the way of you getting to where you want. So it's for a person like that if you're not progressing, you're not able to make progress in your lifts, you're not able to get fitter, you're not able to perform better in competitions, because your shoulder hurts when you do kipping pull ups, you're just gonna sit I guess it's just you know, whatever, like that person is dead in the water, that system is no longer going to progress. And this is the thing when I talk about having athletes self identify what their issues are. So thing that I do in sport, it's the thing that people are good at it do it because they people that are naturally good athletes, the truth is, a lot of the times they just expect better themselves all the time, which means as soon and John, you've seen it, you played sports at a very high level, you played division one football once a national championships. I did none of those things, but I got pretty big and strong. And I tend to be a fast learner when it comes to athletics. And I've been around a lot of really high performing athletes. The thing that all of us have in common is that when I start to do something and I'm not good at it, I get really upset about it. I like it. And to the point where I don't go oh shit, fuck this. Right my response is I gotta get better this was it because, you know, the first time I got into fitness effort, kind of let my health slide in my early 30s The first time I went in, I was just I I was furious because I was getting smoked by people that are, frankly, much less athletically talented than me. Being honest. I was like, no, no, no, that's not what we're doing. So what'd I do when I go? Well, I guess I just should be better. And I just keep it No, I went, I suck at this. And we get better at this. And every step of the way, every one of those things, you put in the effort to improve that piece, you have to zoom in, I talked about this many times spinning plates, right, you see those circus performers are spinning 15 plates on sticks, right? Now they don't get to go through one, you have to put momentum on one, get it really, really, really zoom in. And then that one's going to be okay for a little bit. And you have to decide which one is about to fall, and that's where you go. It's the thing we talk about in everything we do with progressing athletes . The whole system needs to advance what piece of the system is preventing it from reaching critical mass and moving up to the next level. And that is super important. So with athletes trying to self identify, this is the key to getting better. I see this all the time in combat sports athletes, especially if we meet dabbling about this for about the last year. It is crazy the people who get to a certain point. And then all they do is they just come in and do the same stuff they've always been doing. There's an I can count their 10 weaknesses that are frankly, they're getting worse at you can appoint your unit, it's very easy to write down via a checklist like you suck at this, this, this this, these are the things that are holding you back and then just that then there are very specifically drills and development strategies and training that can be done with each thing to improve it right. If your footwork sucks, if your jab defense sucks, if you're you know takedown defense is terrible. Like there's, there's a lot of if your conditioning is bad, if you're just simply too heavy and carry around too much body, all those things are part of the big picture. Okay, let's pick three of those. And let's put our training efforts towards that instead of coming in and hitting the bag hard and feeling like a tough guy and showing up late for practice because we're pros and we don't have to worry about warmups and just later still wrapping our fucking hands and it's like, well, if you're out there doing these fundamental drills, you'd be doing much better. Right? One of the great people that I've seen as I start to look into this boxing and MMA stuff is Coach Barry Robinson on Instagram. It's Coach Barry Robinson all in one name. And his thing is that in all other sports like basketball, what do you see as the pros? What do you see Steph Curry doing? What did you do? What did you see Kobe Bryant do all the time in the gym? They're doing the basic stuff. They're literally doing dribble, dribble, dribble, dribble, they're doing left, right, left, right, left, right, they're doing the same stuff at a higher level more frequently and better. Then third, fourth, fifth graders, they're doing those same drills and getting better. They're not coming in, practicing spinning around and falling over the ship, you're able to make those shots, because you're always able to develop your base and come back to your base consistently because you read it a bazillion times, right? And that's the thing, but kids see a trick shot in a game. And now what you see is kids practicing fadeaways, when they can't even get their fucking feet under them to shoot. And now you have a child who can get good at that thing until it can't get any better at that thing. And then they picked athletically your game over progression stop. And that's the piece I see all the time in combat sports is we see people come in, and they just kind of think that they're good tough guys, and they just do big good tough guy shit. And they're never willing to do the things that I do in this toggle in three hours, three hours a week, separate hours. And I do 10 to 15 rounds of stepping left, stepping back, stepping right stepping back, I step right twice and back for fucking 10 minutes straight partner around a circle, do the same thing to the left, then I go left and then switch stances and move left and the back and forth and I go right and switch stances. Then I go to the right , switch stances and then come left. And then you introduce one strike so that at any given moment, at any given time, I can strike and I can move left, I can move right or I can move back. That's what needs to be what hardwired in you see needs to be your operating system. And otherwise, I'd come in and hit hard and punch hard and do cool guy shit all the time. But if I don't have 10,000 hours doing that, when a shift starts hitting the fan, I'm off balance. Now I'm in a position where I'm not drilled. And I'm not super comfortable to be able to automatically draw on my training. And that is a piece where I have identified this and now you do that work. That is the development work and coach Barry Robinson on Instagram. If you like pattern recognition and coaching and business and all this stuff, you nailed it. But that's the thing. What is your development program, like we talked about with the kids, being a fan of something is really really holding you back watching the sport as a fan is just killing you. Whereas you can really study what these pros are doing, what they're doing in the training, what they the skills that they have and then what you need to do to fill in the gaps for that stuff as opposed to if you want to be an asshole but yeah, let me do a windmill dunk Right. And, and that piece applies to your business the same things that I implore all every athlete that I work with, you know, what are the three things that are holding you back right now? out there, you're It's you. It's your skills, what are they? And then a lot of businesses, it's, you know, I feel like our social media is just adrift or I'm just doing it for nothing. I'm throwing money at it. Maybe it's leads, maybe it's your sales process. Maybe your coaching sucks. For some it's organization and fulfillment. You may be underwater right now, you may have so many clients like more than you can manage. And so you're just upside down on time? And what are you going to do about that? How are you going to better manage it? Maybe it's time management, maybe it's delegation, maybe it's processes? Maybe it's all of these things, but what can you do right now? How are you going to develop this? What is the sale time? What's your fucking plan? Right? So your plan is, let's just pretend you have a big issue with time management, you just wasted a bunch of time you're doing a bunch of unimportant stuff. Okay. Let's come up with a plan. All right, you're certainly one of the things we always start with, right? What do we call it, John? Time audit, yeah. Imagine if you worked for somebody else, if you work for somebody else, you're gonna have to log every hour, if you're a policeman, if you're a technician, you have to log every hour and what you were doing for every hour at least. And that's even zoomed out, it may be every 15 to 30 minutes, you'll have to track. But do that for one week, and see where your time is. And you're gonna go, oh, man, I, I am doing a lot of stuff here that is not worth my time. Or take the money that you need, or the money you want to be paying me. I realized that a lot of that stuff you're doing, you could hire anybody for almost no money to do that stuff. So get yourself then but now you have a plan. How do I get myself out of this, these are actionable tasks, that doesn't even require a skill, unless you're fucking lazy and spend most of your fucking time on Instagram, just scrolling, Instagram and Facebook just popping on stories over and over and over and over again, like a lot of the coaches I see on my feet. I don't know when y'all work, but some of you work a lot less than you seem to lead on. And so you know, definitely as you think you are.



John Fairbanks 16:54

And one of the things you and I teach inside of the gear Academy is how to surgically create the action plan. Once you have that data, that information, because that was the key for me. Right, our coach was like, Guys, you need to be doing a time audit, at least once a year, where you are for a week, auditing every 15 minutes, that is the most miserable fucking week, on the planet, of having a timer that goes off every 15 minutes in your ear, and you're writing down a recording where am i But man, the value we got of being able to say, what was our yearly, quarterly monthly, weekly, daily, being able to get that surgical, has allowed us to man 10x, what we were going to at least just our brain of what we knew we wanted to do.



Tyler 17:54

And then the time that you have also this free time is better, you know what I mean? Like you can actually have free time to it's not just about taking this time and stuffing it in your business, it's instead of grabbing fucking 10 Random minutes of free time, every half hour, because it's in between some inefficient shit you're doing all day long, you know how much that costs you like, it's kind of ended up becoming pretty costly, you just kind of fuck off a lot when you can just be more busy, more focused. And then really checkout like my days are really nice. Now I coach us to do these things, but it's efficient. And then I get to train and my days now are productive, very effective. And I also have a pretty good, pretty good grasp on my own time throughout the day. So that's just on time.



John Fairbanks 18:41

There was one thing that I heard recently on this topic, which was the idea where someone goes, but what about that work life balance? We have to have balance? What about that work life balance that exists? And the guy that gave the response I kind of liked where he's going? Well, it's funny, because when you think about balance, you're talking about equality on both sides and keeping things equal. So you're in an equal playing field. He was but I really don't look at work and life being equal. As far as the balance. He goes, it comes down to priority. And when what is priority when. So for me, I know, family time is one of those things for me, which is a sacred time. So it gets prioritized at a certain time on my day. But I will tell you what, if family time starts to creep in, when work and certain tasks are supposed to be priority. It's like no, no, no. The family time you got your time. It's four hours into the system. Now, and that's it. So I think it's understanding just like you said, when it comes down to time, it really starts to make a priority. But you got to know you What you need to be prioritizing? And what's a total fucking waste of time right now?



Tyler 20:04

So let's go in one other direction, right? The one thing we always talk about a lot, what if you're coaching isn't great? Or what if you're new to coaching? Or what if you have some staff who just needs to be coached up. Also, you have staff, you have coaches who need to be better coaches, is it better for you to work with them for three hours a day, every day, having them shadow stuff, or not being profitable, or you better to farm that out? In my opinion, find someone you trust people you learn from, and just put them into a program and empower them to do this. This is that you want to get better at coaching, pay somebody to teach you how to coach, but that is one piece, right? Again, like our 400 pound three point shooter, you know, like, he doesn't need to worry about the three point shots, he's got to lose some weight in that process and there are going to be more things than just putting down the fort. So there's a lot of things that they can be doing other than just losing weight during that time. And so for you and your business, yes, you have coaches, what's the what's the solution, are you just going to spend more time with them forever, or maybe you are, maybe you're going to coach them up yourself. And that's, by the way, it's viable. If you don't have money, you have someone who's ambitious, maybe you're not spending a ton of money on them, and you want to bring them up to speed on coaching stuff, you know how to be a good coach, then you need to start setting performance goals. And that's another thing that we've talked about is either data, or constantly checking in to hold them accountable to their own progress, which means meeting with them, identifying their weaknesses, as coaches, coaching them through some of those things, each time allowing them then to coach somebody else on it or to prove that they've become what's the word prove their comprehension now of the subject. And they might turn them loose on that. So that way, every single week, this coach instead of just you dealing with them constantly and hoping they get better, they have a real development program, they have a real plan to get them better, they actually have the ability to get better. Instead of you just sitting there going, Man, I wish this guy was sharpened up a little bit.



John Fairbanks 21:59

Having managed human beings in different industries, this drives me more crazy than anything else. Because I got training, and coaching on how to work with people and manage people that helped me escalate my ability to manage humans quickly. And when I watch people just be like, I don't know why. Colleague one, or teacher one or coach, one just isn't doing it the way I want them to do it. Because the very first question I ask is, Well, did you tell them? Yeah, well, no, this is something that just like he just needs to know, I'm like, fuck that. You have to tell people that there is a misunderstanding. There's a lot of folks in this world that are just going to be teachers for 35 years, and they're going to love teaching fourth grade. And that's what they do. They're not going to have aspirations to do anything else. Their wheelhouse is right there. There's some people that are going to be coaches, and that's what they're going to do their whole life. If you're a gym owner, you don't fully connect with that. You had a calling and itch that caused you to go up, which means you are probably doing a couple things extra. You just knew intuitively, or you had coaching to assume that your coaches or the people that you work with have that same itch, or that same calling that intuitiveness to just do the right thing, quote unquote, is your fucking them, you're screwing them over, when you can begin them coached up,



Tyler 23:54

You have seen a lot of this stuff where we don't hold them accountable to their coaching or when you have coaches that you need to do other things that they don't do, because that's not what they want to be doing. And by the way, maybe they could pick up on it. But you didn't really define what the work was, you didn't define some metrics and some measurable stuff to hold them accountable to their performance, or even the effort that they need to put into it. And you just let them go off. You say, here's what I'd like you to maybe kind of do and then you just turn them loose. It is a thing in human nature that we will always find the most comfortable, Pat. It's true. This is how society is defined. There's a reason that we don't go out and I don't wait till I'm hungry, and then go out and try to kill and farm something and eat it. It doesn't work that way. Because that's just not eventually it's gonna be more efficient if I tell you what, let's just get a few guys together. Let's go kill enough food for six months. Let's work and do the whole thing. Now we have all this stuff. I talked to people about nutrition all the time, like, Hey, we're always going to find the easiest, most efficient way, like comfort is the thing. Comfort is what human nature is trying to find more comfort in. That's how we build houses and air conditioning and heat and cars and all this stuff. It's a great driver for innovation. But it also can stifle your ability to really be truly ambitious in the moment. And when it comes to managing employees, you need to understand that human nature is that they're gonna get away with whatever they can get away with. And trust me, they will, if they work for eight hours a day, and they realize that they can get all their work done in seven, but they still need to be getting paid for eight. That's what they're gonna do. What if they figure it out, it's three, or what if you give them they're able to do their work in three hours, and they spend most of the rest of a fucking off and training and not doing shit, there's a lot of stuff out there, we see a lot of this stuff. People don't work as hard as you think. And you look at the look at plenty of bits across the board, the amount of time people spent working in an eight hour day is embarrassingly low. It's a big issue in the United States, a big issue everywhere, but it's much worse in the US. Now, if you've given employees a task, and you never hold them accountable to it, they're just going to do what they can get away with. Because they are not interested in doing more stuff. If it doesn't give them any real benefit beyond the fact that they get to be the person doing it. So in the end, anytime you give somebody something, you need to tell them, here's what you need to do, here's the numbers that we're going to use to make sure that you are and I'm going to check in with you at this frequency to make sure that it's getting done. And if there's anything that I can do to help you to make sure that these things get done, get done well to make him more comfortable with it. You communicate with me regularly . Regular meetings are a big one, to hold people's feet to the fire to make sure you can keep checking in on this. It used to frustrate me the most when working with a larger team of people. Because we get into these meetings, and we're always kind of catering to the lowest performing of the bunch when you're ambitious. And it really sucks having to listen to somebody tell the guy and he did try harder. It's like Fuck, man. Like, it sucks. But it's the reality of managing a team. So that's on the coaching stuff. That's an employee management delegation. If you're not holding them accountable, you don't have a plan. How are we going to get them to better define it, define it with them, and a plan without follow through, a plan without course correction, a plan without expectations and measurable outcomes? That is not a plan. That's my hope. And that's not how you're gonna you've been hoping your business got better this whole fucking time and it has. So you have to actually have a plan.



John Fairbanks 27:15

And you either learn this the slow way, which is you just learn over time. Or you get a fucking coach that knows those business metrics and knows how to support you.



Tyler 27:32

John Yeah, because you know this about me, I am learning the hard way, on your own on an island smash in your head into it over and over. That is just what I do. I'm stubborn, I think I got it figured out. What's the thing we'll get into soon here. But it's a thing that 's very, very, very common for me. I just get into what I have to do, I'll just obsess over the thing to do. And I learned I have not learned many lessons, the easy way, I'll fucking tell you that. So just trust me save these. You don't need to, you're gonna feel every time I get this every time. I feel real fucking stupid. Every single time. God damn it, I knew better. I knew better. I just knew. But John, we've been doing video coaching for quite a while now on some of our videos, demos for ads and our performance videos to watch times the effectiveness of our videos, the attractiveness of the content we're putting out has probably 10x Since that time, up until then, John has had probably 500 hours. And more than that now, like podcast content and multiple different words have been on camera for hundreds of hours speaking over and over again, I thought I had a handle on it. And then every single time we make a 62nd video and she just gets picked apart. bucket that I could just get by being charming. And as you get older, you're not good looking enough, nobody gives a fuck about you. So you can't get by on that either. So you just have to fucking get better at the thing. And I learned every single lesson of this the hard way from ads to copy to, you know, not offering up low upsells and service not offering higher levels of service not making good ads not using your own personal social media, leveraging personal connections not hiring somebody when it's time to just hire somebody when needed. Oh, no. Those are the things that you do need to just be willing to. Those are your shortcuts, right? That is your shortcut to your development. And by the way, do you know why you and I finally hired a coach for videos? It's because we're like, Okay, I think this is a thing we could get better at. Because it seems like we're just talking into the void. I don't seem like I'm getting a big pullback from it. And so we said I fuck it. Let's go. We knew some people. So we came up, identified the problem, came up with a path forward and then we executed that path and we constantly Now we check in every week even if we have to bump some of our, our our time that we do it. Every week we check in on it. We're going to do this then we're going to do this one and now we're going to work on this content here. Just that plan. What do we get like a 20% increase in growth in like three weeks? Oh, yeah, overall, just poof just from sticking to that plan and not even completely sticking to it.



John Fairbanks 30:02

And the way we knew who to choose. So the confidence because there's another piece is the network we had been building. I got a guy that I played ball with, in college, he went to play in the NFL for several years and was really successful. And he's done now. And he's doing tons of highfalutin business, he type shit now when you got millions of dollars to play with, and he had an interesting thing that he spoke about at a recent conference, which was, he wished that he could do the NFL over again, for the only reason for him to fully understand the networking potential that was at his fingertips didn't realize until the last couple years in the league. And it's just as understanding that we cannot overestimate and talk about how important it is the network that has the potential that's available to you by just having the relationships because that's all networking is, yeah, is building really strong relationships in your communities directly. So hyper local networking and relationship building, all the way to now because of what the internet allows us to do. Our coach is on the other side of the goddamn country, another business coach that we work with, is on the other side of the goddamn world. So understand that if you can grow your network, your ability to once you can highlight and identify, these are my weak points, this is what I want to get better at, what do I do next, your network should always be able to help you do that next thing,



Tyler 31:51

the power of the internet, you know, it really is that way. Now there, you can get in touch with the top 10 people in the world at the thing that you're trying to get better at. And by the way, that doesn't mean just hire them to do the thing for you. This is a piece of the same thing with athletic development, everything you do these are skills you have to improve on. Hunter did a great job of this by saying he had a plan for social media, which was if it wasn't, I'm going to post two times a day. And I'm going to hope that this all works out. It's like no, I am going to post frequently, but I'm gonna post intentionally. I'm going to try it then what are the steps to make sure that happens it tries to identify his audience who they are? Then he needed to learn about copywriting because he realized he couldn't speak to them directly, because he didn't know how he had been doing things differently for a long time. So what did he do reading books about writing copy books about marketing books about speaking to people on how to sell all this stuff. Hunters spent Hunter basically got a two year degree in copywriting in fucking eight weeks, a 10 was just like, I'm gonna get as much as I can. And it's not just learning in a book, you have to learn something, you gotta put it out there, you know, run this business run that runs this business concept through that filter through the filter of those concepts, then put it out. And every week, of course correction, accountability, going to meet i What is my expectation, I wanted to get better. I wanted to get leads, I wanted to attract people back, right? This was a dud, maybe it was timing, maybe I posted the wrong time of day. Maybe the picture just sucked. Or maybe I didn't do it. But every single thing is going in and correcting it. And that is a plan. Because like I said before, if you get better at this thing, it's your weakness for a year that's going every week, you get a little bit better at it in a year. Now. It's not your weakness anymore, but it might be the thing you're best at. And by the way, I think hundreds of copywriting and social media now is on par with his coaching. Do you know why? Because he gave effort into actually getting better at it instead of sitting here going? Well, I guess I'll just keep fucking doing it the same way I always have and wonder why nobody comes beaten down my fucking door. And that is what I mean, that is the perfect way to like, that's the perfect tiny little test, right for you that you can do is to pick one of those things and learn about that subject. You need to level up your skill at that thing. If it's time management, if it's social media, content creation, if you're not into content creation, you don't get to do it. By the way, some of these things you can identify that you don't have the time to do and it's not gonna be your thing. So if your business needs to get better, get better at this. It may not be you, it may be a check, you need to write. Okay, but what if you can't write that check how we're going to make more money? How do we come but again, now we're still coming up with a plan. So guys, sit down, I need you to come up with a plan to add John.



John Fairbanks 34:29

Well, what's really important is that the hunter did the one thing. So he knew over the last eight, nine weeks that he had multiple things that he needed to work on. But he did not work on all three, four or five things. He put all of his energy and all of his focus on each thing until he felt like he got it. So



Tyler 34:53

He paid for services , got organized, got a great offer, and learned how to sell. So we went. He basically got the offer sheet sorted out, got his services assembled so that he had some big ticket stuff that was going to be easy for him to fulfill. Right. So that was the first thing that the hunter did. The next thing that hunter did after that was then he went over the sales process, he practiced the sales process, I was messaging him all the time, we, you know, this is what we do. The implementation process we give to people and we help them with their big threaded offer system is now you make sure you schedule meetings with if it's your spouse, if it's your other coaches, whatever. But to go and practice this sales process, it's simple. This isn't some big, slimy thing. So it's just pretend you're gonna buy this stuff, I'll walk you through it. And then you just do that once a week, twice a week for an hour. And you're gonna get real good at that. And well, there you go. Now he's leveled up his potential level and the service offerings, he's now good at selling it, or at least as good as he's gonna be without the practice with actual clients. Then what's the next move? All right, I gotta get reps putting people in front of it. Exactly. So that's what he did. Why wasn't he getting people? Well, he couldn't pay for ads. But he sure had the time to go in and learn a lot and test you have your own business experiment with it. And so we did one thing at a time, one thing at a time, and now you can go, I know how to write some good coffee, I got some good products, I have little money. Hunter ran ads. Now all of a sudden Hunter starts running ads with all these things he has, he's now no longer going to be the smallest gym in that town. Not even close. That's already a foregone conclusion now that with this trajectory of constant improvement, now that those days are numbered, unless he chooses it to be so if he chooses to stay in the small spot, then he can, you absolutely can. But now his system is getting better. The system is about growing his plan as everything improves, until we find something else that needs to improve. But the whole system begins to continue to move uphill. And that's the thing. This is a piece. What we've done for you here right now. This is if you're in sports, this was called film study here, right? We're film studying what hunters did. We're not going. We're not sitting here . I can tell you how much I like Hunter. I don't have many times. But it's coming here and saying, Hey, this guy is great. A lot of seeing them succeed. Yes, that's wonderful. But that's not going to help you as much as actually analyzing what his process was. And that's why I say film study is not about just emulating the things that you see. It's about how we can apply the things that he learned? How can you apply that stuff? What do you need to learn about? And it's not about ripping off his stuff or ripping off his content or ripping off his pricing. Everybody has different products. So it really is what are you going to do? One of the things we talk about a lot with combat sports, and I see it all the time, having worked with athletes from track athletes, endurance athletes, gymnasts, to strength athletes to weekend warriors to weightlifters and powerlifters to bodybuilders. I've worked with a lot of people, high school athletes, sports, football players, soccer players, basketball, I've worked with tons of athletes with a ton of different goals, all I find is the common thread, which is progress. Right? So progress, the thing we need first is a quote from somebody I know I knew before he passed away, Chris more of it is be careful preservation of a forward lean, that's it, keep moving forward, that's the thing you need to continue pushing progress. That's it, some days are gonna move faster than others. You know, it's like moving a pile of dirt or a pile of shit. Some days you use a fork or some days you use a dump truck. Some days, you're using a spoon, but some chips get moved every fucking day, right? That's important. So you need to constantly be moving that forward. But the other thing that I find a lot with a lot of athletes is watching things, watching sports, as a fan. If you're trying to get good at that sport it is just cancer as to your development. There's nothing I hate more than listening to MMA fighters or boxers like low level guys who are trying to get better spend their time watching fights and being mad about who won, who's the greatest who they think won that round. It is the most pointlessly unproductive shit for your own development. It's insane. And what they do is you take what could be a moment where you're gonna watch the best in the world do the thing and you're gonna learn what they do well, what gaps you can bridge between your performance and theirs, what drills now you need to do, right, what things do they very specifically do that you like? Now I can plug in some of those gaps. I can fill those in, I can work on these. If it's footwork, if it's stepping left, it's being able to switch stances if it's head move, what are you actually going to do other than sit there? And just fanboy right just is, you know what I mean, film study versus being a fanboy or fangirl, film study, I promise. And that's what you need to do with business, quit, quit looking around and like liking other businesses out there that do cool stuff. Quit being so enthralled by all this other content that you're seeing. If you're not looking at it and going, What can I do? How does this fit? How does this integrate into my system? What can I learn from this? That's the way you need to look at these things. Because the greats out there, they recognize patterns, and they do the real basic fundamental work and they constantly improve on that. So Kobe Bryant was not walking around here going, Oh, geez. I really think that Michael Jordan was the best the whole time. No, he was in their fucking ripping off Michael Jordan's moves drills to the tee constantly because he wanted to just be the best. And that didn't mean to be the best today. And then I'm going to do the drills at three in the morning, four in the morning, five of them are constantly and that is what progresses and you're not going to fucking get it. If you're sitting around just going, I really liked that guy, or I really liked this. Their social media looks cool. There's nothing worse for your business, I promise than you seeing another gym that has cool social media content. Because I promise you if it's cool to you, it's not as cool to their client to potential clients, I promise. So you need to strip that lens off, quit fanboying over shit, be a professional, be a professional and a professional needs to make progress. A professional doesn't live with weaknesses like that. You don't tolerate it. Every time you get better at something. You should eventually find something else that needs to be improved just as if this is body dysmorphia of your business. Right. I know a lot of really jacked people for me like yeah, if I'm being honest, if I look in the mirror now versus when I was 60 pounds fatter, you know, before I ever got into fitness. Now I still go, Okay, this needs work. This needs work. This needs work. It's just the truth. I'm crazy. I like myself and the way that I look now more than I did back then I absolutely do. Except before you know what I was looking at. When I look in the mirror and see fat Tyler, I would look at it and I would go just not think about it. And that's what you're doing with your business. You go all I guess it just is. This is what I am. This is what this is. And so yes, I didn't go man, I sure wish I had a little less fat under this pack. And a little less here. I gotta tighten this up a little bit. It's minutia. But the fact is, now I am making progress. And I will continue to make progress forever. Because I identify a few things, I get better at them. And I move that needle forward.



John Fairbanks 41:49

Because you have the fundamentals taken care of. Yeah, like once you know you're checking the box of those fundamentals, then you can start focusing on the minutiae. And I think that that would be one of the biggest takeaways, I would want everybody listening outside of having clear action items of what you're about to go do, which is identifying those, what start with those three weaknesses, those three things, if you step back, and you're honest with yourself, of what's going on with your business. Like that's important. But the next thing I want to make sure everyone takes away is being able to identify what are the fundamentals that you should be doing? As a coach, personal trainer, gym owner? And are you getting distracted? By the minutiae by the shiny object syndrome? Because I think there's too many of us that think the solution to our problems are Facebook ads, and social media. And that is why you and I harp so often on the importance of the order in which you do things, the order that hunter did things is directly correlated to the success he's having now. And I think it's so important to avoid that trap. That social media, we should post minimum five times a day Tyler,



Tyler 43:17

I heard that I will tell you what, I will tell you this, I did some work for a company one time, and it was supposed to handle one social media account. So oh, we need to manage the other one of ours too. I was like, okay, yeah, it seems reasonable. I didn't realize it was part of the equation, but I wasn't gonna put my foot down once again, okay. And then, their plan was not anything in particular, it was just we needed to post up the football five times a day. And I said, I'm definitely not looking, just looking dead in the face. I'm not fucking doing that. Stupid, like, you know what I mean? That's how you know, that's a part that's the person checking boxes. It's more bullshit, it's out of that thing. It is some of the dumbest social media ideas I've ever heard was out of those same mouths to where you just know, like, oh, you can't be doing any of this on your own. And I don't know. If they will certainly post five times a day. But there's nothing wrong with posting five times in one day if you have content that's progressive and engaging and moves from one to the next thing, especially with stories and things like this. If you're posting five times every day. That's like a waste of your effort, energy, money and content. Because there's any of it good, is any of it really mad, are you just blowing your own fucking horn,



John Fairbanks 44:25

you better have a lot of the other stuff done.



Tyler 44:29

I was looking through that business's Content Collection if I was just to burn a post and not create anything new just burn all of the photos the organization had around them. I was like, Okay, well, we're gonna be done in 85 days. For this you have a plan for beyond this. Do you have any more content? And so it was Yeah. So. So again, more is not better. Don't start posting five times a day just do a thing and see how it goes and get good to get better at that thing. You know, post once a day, once a day. Every other day is fine. Twice a week is fine. But whatever it is make it have a fucking purpose instead of mindlessly posting five times a day is a lot less effective than thoughtfully posting with a plan once a week. So you don't have to do more. But find a way, guys, we threw a lot of stuff at you, but let's develop your business and come up with a plan. It's the same thing we talked about with assessing clients, right? You know, to get a true assessment of where you're at right now, you know, kind of where you want to be, what are the holes? What are the first steps of triage? weaknesses? What do we need to actually do to fix them? Because knowing that, you know, you have a problem A, B, and C doesn't solve problems A, B, and C, throwing money at A, B and C doesn't solve those problems, either. But all right, what now what actions can we take to improve this, you know, and it may just be effort, focus and accountability. All right, we're going to try. And we're going to look into this hard and we're going to check in on it every other week when I look back. And that's what you can do with coaching. You can do marketing, social media, and your sales process. If you're having sales meetings, depending what state you live in, put your phone down and record it. Have a conversation with the person but just have it recorded. Don't be weird about it. If it's legal, break any laws, but they're depending on the state that you live in, you can record someone without their consent, or you can ask them say, hey, my say for me to get good at this, can I, you know, I like to record our sales conversation just talking to people, some, some may not like if somebody feel it out, but getting a few of those things where you're practicing selling somebody through running through your sales process, hearing your own voice, hearing the objections, hearing how the things flow, hearing that it's maybe not as awkward as you think it is, because it usually isn't, I'm being honest, I promise, any sales process you're recording, you think you sound more awkward than you do. And that is a great way to do it. Now you're gonna go back and you're going to listen to it. And as a person who's been on podcasts for a lot of fucking hours in my life, you're gonna get over the fact that you hate listening to your self talk and you hate the way you think. And you hate your voice and you hate the words you choose. Because eventually, then you're gonna go out, I wish this was a little bit better. That's how everything goes. So do that. Again, if you don't have data, you know, something you can look back on, find a way to get it. So effort focused accountability, identify weaknesses, run through that stuff. We help people with the real specifics, then what are the things you can do in between those, what those really need to look like? How do you identify the right stuff, those are things we all do in the gear Academy. If you want to get out of the gear Academy, we still have it rolling until the end of August, you can get into that for 4000 bucks for the year. Or if you need to go monthly on this we can do it for five grand or five grand. We can do it for 500 bucks a month, the price will be going up after the end of August. It's going to be going up to five grand for the year or 500 for the month. That's kind of a jam. So if you want to know the gear Academy shoot me a message at Tyler effing stone you can also get into the Facebook group for free. We have a lot of good conversations starting in there we're going to continue to offer and more. That is going to be the resource for gym owners here. We're trying to put together that as the gym owners' revolution. That link is going to be in our description for joining the Facebook group. You can also message John or me with any questions John is at Jay banks FL his typing works better than his voice. So thanks a lot for listening to everybody and we will see you next week.