The Gym Owners Blog/Podcast/How to Improve your Business EVERY Week

How to Improve your Business EVERY Week

Friday, January 20, 2023

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EPISODE KEYWORDS

business, decisions, coach, gym, work, owners, people, running, day, important, clients, john, toilet paper, building, plan, delegate, making, point

OUTLINE

  • Today’s topic: decision fatigue - 0:00
  • ​The most productive business owners that I’ve worked with - 1:58
  • ​You have to have someone making the decision of what direction you want to go - 5:48
  • ​Your decision meter does not discriminate between decisions that matter and decisions that don’t - 10:41
  • ​Reverse engineer what you’re trying to do - 13:48
  • ​How do you free up time for programming? - 18:10
  • ​You need to start to insulate yourself - 22:45
  • ​Empowering your people to make the decisions - 27:45
  • ​Don’t wait until you’re a CEO to start your business - 32:50

TRANSCRIPT

Tyler 00:00

Welcome back to the podcast ladies and gentlemen, today we're going to talk about the things that you can do to make sure that your business improves every single day. Just a little bit. I'm your host, Tyler stone, you can follow me on Instagram at Tyler F and stone across West John Fairbanks. You can



John Fairbanks 00:17

follow me on Instagram at Jay banks, f L.



Tyler 00:21

So welcome to the gym owners podcast, you can follow the show on Instagram at the gym owners podcast if you want into our gym owners revolution Facebook group, check the link in our description. So let's get into it. John, we've been doing a lot of stuff here with some gym owners the last few weeks, very specifically on time management and everything from building new programs and launching things, tuning ups, processes, and just all sorts of the development side of a business, not necessarily the operation side. And we've covered this subject before. But I want to talk today about decision making. simply the act of making a decision because guys you notice as a business owner is that decision fatigue is a real thing. Like it's the realest thing, because there is, as a person who's a procrastinator, like me and John is as well is you end up getting to the point where it's just making those decisions and just doing a thing that may only take 20 or 30 minutes that you'll just table it, whether it's the responsibility you're avoiding, or the stress or just the finality of making that decision. But I do it all the time. Or I will stave off for four hours, which might be 20 minutes worth of work that just requires some sort of higher level of thought, something I have to own going forward. And we see it a lot with gym owners guys, as a business owner making decisions is like it seems it I hope it should feel like it's the only thing you do. Because that is kind of you're on the right track if making decisions is the thing that you're constantly doing. John, tell me about that high kind of high performing CEO person that you were talking to the other day. Yeah, so



John Fairbanks 01:57

He was a massive donor. And so one of the things we did back in a previous life of mine, we went and shadowed this dude kind of in his element in his business functioning and working with his people. And it was something that I had never seen before. At this point, when it came to business. It was the dude that was in charge of everything. And he literally just had a person that informed him what meeting he was going into next. He would sit down, he would have all the stakeholders involved in that particular portion of the business, explain or update or give whatever, however much progress they have made. And then all he would do is give them direction? Give a yes, no. And then this is the direction we're going next. He wouldn't wait for anything else, he would immediately stand up and he would move to the next part of their location where their offices were. And he did this all day long. Yeah, just making decisions, just giving the all clear, stepping people back, giving, you know, whatever, giving kudos or whatever. But at the end of the day, that was all I did all day long. Yeah.



Tyler 03:14

Well, and I think that's really important to know, for me the most productive business owners that I worked with and worked under, that was how they operated. They're not stuck in, they're not dealing in the operations of the business. That's not where it works. So if you're still stuck doing the doing, and doing all the things within your business, you're gonna have to find ways to get out of it. Because it's simply not important. That's BS. Yes, it is. You know, the thing that needs to be done all the time, but it is not the most important thing for the development of your business. It is something that somebody else can do if you're still coaching man, you need to probably find a way to let somebody else carry the burden of some of that coaching. Because coaching is the thing that you always do. But there's a point, Steve Jobs was only making computers for so long. And at some point for that business to grow, he cannot be the one turning screwdrivers. That's not the way that was going to work. He's not the one running the soldering gun on the assembly line. Why? Well, because he had more important shit to do. Somebody had to have vision, somebody needed to understand what the next steps are going to be because it was his business. If this is your business, zoom out, what are the things we can talk about this matter? What are the five things that your business needs to do to grow? Any more sales? What's stopping you from getting more sales? What are the things in the way? Is it skills? Is it you? Is it a plan? Maybe when I talk about making decisions on a daily basis, it may be simply a matter of having an idea, coming up with what your first couple actionable steps are going to be? And then making the plan to do those actions when they need to be docked. Meaning I've decided now that we're going to launch a nutrition program, right? Okay, well, what's this gonna look like? What's this going to be? How am I going to fulfill this? Okay, well, what are my next steps? Let's onboard the staff tomorrow. Let's come up with this kind of marketing strategy and boom, boom, boom, now, I've made the decision to do the thing. You're married to that decision, and then you can go forward and decide to take the steps, but that is actual progress, as opposed to sitting going, I want to do this thing and then just not do it. And we see this a lot. You know, we have clients that have worked with us, we have some that no two have said, well, this is what we're going to do, and it's gonna work really well. And then they don't do any of it. Or this is what I want to do. And then they do nothing. And I had made a post about this very recently, too, which is doing things that are not development. It's just not, you need to constantly be laying a brick of something permanent down, that your business that you're building the yellow brick and mortar Road, man, how are we going to get from point A to point B, we need a path that path needs to be built, it needs to be cut, it needs to be movement, going through there, we can't sit back and think about what the route is for very long, we're gonna decide what the route is, and we're gonna gun forward. That's how this gets done.



John Fairbanks 05:48

You have to have someone though that is making the decision of what the direction is you want to go. If you look at, like running a ship, like fucking big pirate ship, right, big sailboats, they require tons of people to all be working and doing things all at the same time to get moving, like kids related to fucking pirate video games right now. So it's on the brain, right. But in order to run that, the captain cannot be helping doing the work. Yeah, because what you're gonna do is you're going to be really, really efficient at running your ship. And you're going to be catching the wind, and you're gonna be kicking a whole bunch of ass. But if you don't have a captain, that is saying, there are rocks up ahead, or we are going the wrong direction, you will efficiently streamlined and kick in all sorts of assets right into the rocks, exactly, you will crash your shit. And that's where for sure. On the other side of this is definitely going to be running that ship well is one thing, but like you said, Tyler, it's being able to identify this is what we want to do. And then clearly start working towards that you reference some of the gym owners that we've been working with. They say, hey, I want to do this thing. And then we realized that they never make progress on it. And they feel like you're always spinning your wheels. So if you're a gym owner that feels like you're constantly spinning your wheels, oh, man, we've been talking about one to like, add nutritional services to our gym and with our clients. We've been talking about that for months. Now it's,



Tyler 07:20

Well, I want to start doing this or I want to get some of this all the time. I really want to get somebody to help take some of this coaching burden off. Let's cover let's talk about this one, John, this is a great one for the coaching one, right? You need somebody to cover the coach you like. You need to bring a coach in there. Obviously, in the end, you need some sort of big plan to bring people in and to, to onboard them and to identify them and then to train them and all those systems. If you don't have coaches that are at that level yet, you may not even have a clue how you're going to, you know, train in a new coach, or how you're going to get them to the point where you can trust them with your clients, right? But right now, you're doing all the coaching, what are you going to do? What is your plan? What is your plan to just sit here and go, Man, I sure wish fucking Santa Claus is going to drop off some fully equipped wonderful coach who's just really a go getter who wants nothing more than $5 an hour to just come in and take over my stuff for me and then I can really worry about the business. Well, that's not going to happen and those people don't exist. So what is your plan? Right and by the way, sitting and stewing is not the plan. So at the very least if this is a problem you identify you need to solve whether it's supplements nutrition, maybe it's new products maybe it's covered bases but coaching getting yourself on hooked from the coaching treadmill in your business needs to be done. All right, perfect. You put a plug in and the paper cost is $65.71 tried just put an ad in the paper go out buy it when maybe don't do newspapers, maybe you put an ad wherever what are the what are the services now for higher end and recruit or last door you can kind of just hit all of them at once for whatever just see what you get. You may get people who are under qualified who don't know or don't have any experience and maybe who will have experienced but not necessarily in your type of fitness if you're a group fitness gym, but guess what, that's better than having zero leads and zero opportunities. Right? You may get 20 People 19 of them will be fools but one of them might be you know what, they got the personality stuff and I can bring them in. But that's progress. That's a step in the right direction. If you have to dialer 20 out of 20 people.



John Fairbanks 09:20

I don't have time. I don't have time to put an ad in the paper. I don't even have time to come up with a plan. Bioenergy homeowner. Yeah, that's why we're here. I don't have 30 minutes. I don't have 30 minutes because my days are slammed



Tyler 09:35

and give up, did you get this? Are you stuck? Or you're just stuck because guess what then you're now you're just working for this business. You're not owning it, you're not building it, you're not doing anything but working for this business. You have a job. What are you doing so make a decision so what is your what is the plan if someone doesn't have this and they say that because I hear this shit all the time John and I usually For me, when I hear that that's a sense of quit, in my opinion, I hear people hiding in their business. That's what I hear. It's the truth, because I have never sat there and gone. Well, I guess this just is what it is. I'm busy. I'm just fucking busy, that I get being busy, but as an excuse that I have no tolerance for if you're actually all in on your business. And if you're not, let's talk about this before, I don't give a fuck to work with you, if you don't need your business to be successful. You're a disinterested gym owner, who's not actually interested in progress. I don't care, much like I don't care to work for clients, who are athletes who are just like, going to pay and show up, but they don't actually want results. And they're not, they just think that writing the check gets it done. Well, owning the gym doesn't get it done for you either. And well, there's no



John Fairbanks 10:41

doubt that they're busy. Oh, right. The fact is, and this is, and this is where we don't want to argue. And this is where you have to start to realize you have to take a step further. And exactly what you said today, which is start to work on your business, which is step back. Your decision meter that you have in a day does not discriminate, versus decisions that matter. And decisions that don't



Tyler 11:06

correct.



John Fairbanks 11:08

There's no discrimination whatsoever. So if you are making a bunch of choices that are irrelevant to you, solving the goal, finding the coach, getting after supplements, learning nutrition, becoming a better coach any of those things. If you aren't actively doing those, you will fill your time. That's the one thing that I've learned about myself. I can be like, Oh, well, I'm not going to take on a lot of these responsibilities. Because I want to make sure I don't fill up my time. And I have time to work on the things that matter. Do you know what happens every time the cup gets full? The cup, always guaranteed it always is overflowing because you feel your time. Whether you fill your time with good shit, or whether you fill your time with bullshit is just totally up to you.



Tyler 11:57

Yeah, well, and that's so decision fatigue is real. Right? That is real. And we've seen it but I want you to know that that is your job is to make decisions. That's it. That's almost like having an idea and coming up with a step for implementation. That's a decision saying we're going to do this thing. And here's how we're going to do it. That's a decision. If somebody else is presenting you with the ideas, and you're saying yes or no, that's making a decision. Now, if you're deciding there's a million little micro decisions that are made on a daily basis, that you just as the business owner have to be the buck stops here. That is the way it works. So at some point, if you can't offload your decision making, which you probably shouldn't, unless you have staff, you can really, really trust that stuff. You do need to offload all the other shit. Because you don't even know how many important decisions you're not making. Right now. That's the worst part. There's all these important decisions that you are hiding from right now, which is what is your next actual move? What is it? What's your next play? Jim was don't have a plan on what their next play is they want new members, I don't know what to do to get new members, I'm just going to wish I had new members wishing and hoping I would say is 90 is the most common thing I would say 90% of gyms that are struggling, are struggling because motherfuckers are just hoping and wishing. It's crazy not doing what they're doing and not doing anything important. And wishing is not doing it's it's it's really, really, really eye. And when I see it, I identified enough to where it gets its, I'm not the best guy to be running those excuses. But I'll tell you that



John Fairbanks 13:26

One of my favorite sayings is wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.



Tyler 13:35

So for you, what do these people need to do? Let's give them something actionable now. So now we do it, we do a much larger, more comprehensive version of this in the gear Academy. But let me give you and give me, let me give you something. Every day, you need to come up with something permanent for your business . It may just be a plan for something you're going to do tomorrow. But it needs to be something that has nothing to do with what needs to be done today. What is your business going to look like in a month? What is it going to look like in two months? What's it gonna look like in three months? But every day there should be some tasks where you're figuring that out? Okay, one of the things is just reverse engineering what you're trying to do, right? Right. If I have a client, a fitness client who wants to lose 20 pounds, perfect. This person is here, they want to be there, here are the things they are doing right now that get them here. So few things need to be moved around so that they can get there. Right? It's easy, right? Cuz instead of doing it 12 pops a day drink six, then we'll gradually tune that up later. But like, you know, maybe just stop eating out five days a week and just eat out twice a week. I don't have to, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. We just need progress, right? So everything you're going to do though, when I make that decision when that person makes that decision, and they stick to it and then they roll through their outs heading towards the place they want to be. Can you run your business the same way? What things do you need operational in your business or do you need fixed about your arrangements in your business? If it's coaching perfect tomorrow? Start looking for coaches. Get a man to think outside the box by the way, it's 2020 to non traditional, non traditional employment arrangements are nothing. By the way, the only way I would ever ever consider working for another human being at all would be the most non traditional thing really would be, I bet I would come in, I want three hours a day, four days a week, and I need the keys to the city the entire time on their remote only, remote only, or if I'm going to come in, I need all that it's just it just is it, it's whatever. But once you realize that you think I do have value, right? And so in valuing, so you can do this with your coaches, you can give them a very fast track to something interesting, don't give them the keys to the city, what a non traditional arrangement is fine. You don't need to give them 40 hours a week, what do they need? What do they want, they want to build a career, maybe they got to have a job somewhere else, you don't have the capacity to feed them full time. But you don't feed them well and invest in their development a little bit. But in doing that you're working with somebody towards the thing. When it comes to hiring staff, do you know how many times that's going to flip flop on your face? It flopped on its own face a lot, by the way. You know, you know the staffing issues across the cluster across the world right now are pretty intense. So just but you're not even playing this game. Our local Burger King is like running limited hours, because they can't hire enough people like just a fast food restaurant. That's a goldmine. Just can't hire enough people. They just can't get people that are reliable, who want to show up. But you as a coach, as a business as a business owner. You're not even like a Burger King. That's not even hiring. And the owners and managers are in there doing all the shit and just staying open all the fucking hours and wondering why this isn't sustainable, wondering why we can't get anything new going and wonder why it can't develop and grow. Because they're not even looking to hire people. Could you imagine if your burger king did that? saw the management staff just running this fucking ship straight into the rocks while they're on the risk of burnout the whole fucking time, like you as gym owners are doing. All the fucking solve the problem is what I'm saying. So what is the path towards this, if it's a staffing issue, you don't have enough time you need to get separated from coaching, well start trying to solve that problem. Because not trying to solve the problem will never solve the problem. I got one. Not trying is never gonna get you there. So start tomorrow, take action. and off you go. John, go ahead.



John Fairbanks 17:07

So if you want to solve that staffing problem, you need to have time. staffing is an issue, fill in the blank, whatever the thing right now is that is that pain point, you need to solve it. But when you look at your time, you realize you don't have any fucking time to even plan it. Now Tyler and I both politely will tell you for Go fuck yourself, your fucking line you don't realize it or pretend to have let's let's give you a clear way that you can identify this. Start to identify something that you do more than one time a week. Something that you're doing once a week, that's the operational base for your business, you'll have a list, there's going to be more than one thing that you're doing every single day, every week in your business that's operational to help your business run. Once you get your list, step back and say, Do I have to be the one that does this?



Tyler 18:01

No, no, hold on. Don't ask yourself that question. That's me that question. you message me or John on Instagram. Because we run into this a lot, we will you know, by the way, we have some coaches, we actually talked about this with someone in the group. And we're not going to give away all the stuff we do in the gear Academy if you want to join. But of course, you 're just really hung up on programming, there's a few different ways to maybe free up time for programming. And they're not in a really great position to hire it out. Because they have a very specific training methodology that they kind of tried to do. So they can't just farm out all their group programming. But it's then we realized, oh, there might be some ways around this, you know, and then so right, there are other options that aren't just what's me, it's gotta be me. And yeah, it really doesn't. And so a lot of these things, what you're gonna say is, it's gotta be me coaching. Every gym owner says this every day, it's gotta be me. And eventually, the ones that finally detach from most of it, it's keep them keep the amount of coaching that you want to do. That's important. Because if you like to coach and keep the amount that you want to do, quit hiding and the things you want to do, do that, give it because it's not helping you. That's the worst part. So if you think you have to do all the coaching, I'm gonna tell you like, let's start by cutting out 20% of it. Right? If you think you have to do all the programming, let's find a way to make programming take you half the time, a quarter of the time, or not, none of the time. There's all sorts of those little tasks, but whatever it was, whichever ones though, are if you think you need to do it, just run them by me. We'll answer I don't we don't have a colossally huge audience. I'll tell you which ones. Matter of fact, I'm sure they are not gym owner jobs. Yes or no. That's it, look at it say is this and take yourself out of the context of the gym or just put yourself in the shoes of any other business. Would any other business CEO be doing this himself? sweeping the floors, mopping the floors? Fucking tidying up accounting like there's just all these little things is a job for fucking anybody, not the owner. So that piece is really important. Make



John Fairbanks 20:00

those repetitive tasks that then can be replaced by some once you identify. And you may have a repetitive task where you take 45 minutes of shit every day. Well, guess what? Let's dial that down to 15. Leave the phone outside the toilet, finish your due and then I'm talentless again. If you feel like you have to sit there for 45 minutes, then do it. But if you're telling me you don't have time to go find that coach. Yeah, to make progress, then let's find you. 30 minutes.



Tyler 20:34

Let's go one step further. I don't know very seriously about the next thing I'm gonna say. But do you really think you couldn't get an indeed read? Indeed an ad like a job listing ad posted and written up and published in the 45 minutes that you take to take a shit? You would probably do it all on your phone, right? Don't do it on your phone right there. So bring your phone anyway. By the way, bring your phone where y'all are productive. That's my strategy. Anyway, That's the new thing. Any coach who comes to us, any owner who comes to us as a way to be busy . I'm like, have you tried doing more stuff while you poop? Or you shit? Or how about this? Maybe you don't like doing work. Waiapu brings your lunch in with you when you get launched on while you poop. Invert and then you can do your work and your lunch block. We will find time for you folks here. Do you want us revolution in



John Fairbanks 21:20

the face? That's the name of this episode.



Tyler 21:22

Shit while you eat. It's like refueling an airplane in midair. It's the most efficient way to go. So anyway, but that's that piece I think really matters. Just assess your bleeding time. And it's not always it's not always like stuff where you're being lazy. That's like the big one if you're not necessarily being lazy. For me. It really is. Like when I procrastinate. That's my big time sink, right? Because the decisions I make and the things we build are so final, everything, John, that you and I are doing by the time we come together, every day it is maximum efficiency. We're building a thing layering subject matter by making permanent products, permanent decisions that we make for our clients. This is what it is that in just two or three hours a day, we're like, holy shit, like I'm done. I can't think on anybody else's behalf anymore. I go in and I'll coach clients for a while then I'll train myself in that. And I'm really busy with training at this point. They're like my days are really busy. But I still have a lot of time to fuck off. And it's true. That's really true. And so if I needed more, if we needed more, there's plenty of room for me to get more. And I know as a gym owner, you're beholden to much larger and more consistent processes than us as kind of a one or two man show. I do understand that. But the key is detaching yourself from a lot of that stuff. There's a lot of things we are not doing within our business.



John Fairbanks 22:45

They're making progress towards that. Yeah. Yeah.



Tyler 22:50

Yeah, so but the decisions that piece, you know, where you're, you're like you mentioned with that CEO whose job he just goes from room to room making decisions, you need to start to insulate yourself into a situation that looks a lot more like that. Because you need to understand that you are important, you are very important. And the time that you have is important, meaning it should be spent doing important things. And I can tell you, cleaning your toilets is not as important as you think it's not as important that you do it. So that's what is really important for the development of my business.



John Fairbanks 23:25

I want to build on the CEO thing, because I think this is important. Understand that he was meeting with department heads. Yes, he was meeting with members of his board. He was not meeting with the folks that were in charge of the doing. The doers weren't meeting with this man. The doers, managers and managers were meeting with this man. Now you're not going to, you're just never going to have a gym. That should have that many layers of bureaucracy. It shouldn't happen. I



Tyler 24:04

I hope not. Yeah, because there's efficiency lost in that process.



John Fairbanks 24:07

Exactly. However, your people should be empowered that if there's no toilet paper, or you are running out of toilet paper, they do not need to ask you that question. Yeah, there needs to be some standards where it's, you don't need to be signing off on calming common fucking sense things that we have seen. We have seen gym owners that find themselves making decisions for people, because their coaches and staff were not empowered to make common sense fucking decisions, and that will wear you down to where you'll just want to like, eliminate M 12pm. You want to get the fuck out of there and you want to go hide for the rest of the day.



Tyler 24:54

A good example of this John is there's a word for business one time who knows work for businesses that had a lot of trust in their employees. And because that's kind of the way it has to be right? Meaning you need to get fuel you need to buy tickets. If you have a travel trip for work, you need to fly somewhere you need to book reservations, you can do all this stuff. And yes, you need to send receipts in and all this shit, somebody's checking on the fucking business account and the business credit cards anyways, every month, if an employee's taken themselves out to dinner, you're gonna find out in fucking no time, it's not like you can actually get away with anything. So whenever for business before that, then that also like, did not let him didn't even have anything set up to where employees could have like the credit card, the business card to do business things with, which meant anytime we needed to update an account, like Oh, shit, I need to add to this thing, it's this fucking $8 A month thing. But it's Firstly, when you need to add this for our business with as I'm trying to build things for this business, can't get it done, got to call, somebody got to get through to the person who's the owner, to get their card and their information in them to verify the shit. And what this does is it makes the business so incapable and so slow, and everything gets fucking bogged down, it's the worst. And it's when the business owner isn't actually going to do all that stuff. What it does is you just have you just shackle everybody to the floor, and they can't get anything done. If I'm gonna travel it is okay, perfect. Let me just decide I know where it went, I gotta be where I gotta be, let me book The flight on the business credit card, I'll send you the receipt, it's all the same thing. It's going to happen if somebody else is doing it. If the owner is doing, he said the owner is now not having to do it. But if so, if your business isn't set up, how is one of your employees going to go get toilet paper, you got to hand them a card, maybe that's what you got to do, maybe you got to have an extra card that's in the drawer that's in the safe, where they can run it, they can run into it, maybe that's how you do it. Because you don't want to just give you know a bunch of part time or just the you know, the keys to all your finances. But you're at some point, literally, how is that gonna get done? What if there's a plumber that's got to come to fix the toilet? What if he just kind of regular maintenance maintenance done on your air conditioning, right? And it costs a certain amount of money and they reset, they require payment? What you have to be there? Do you have to be there? Now you have to be there to just fucking nod your head and except the Hey, get handed or receipts and no stop that. Have that everybody, all your employees know the cards in the drawer, if I can pay the thing, if you have a question about it, or you think we're getting fucked, give the owner a call. But like, they gotta just have to take the good with the bad on all of these things. Just like in hiring staff in delegating out know that any task that you delegate out, you're going to take about a 20% hit on efficacy, quality, production, efficiency, everything, right, they're not going to be as good at it as you are. But they can improve. So wherever they start, you will help them improve. But that doesn't mean you have to do all the work anymore. That's a big, big, big win for you.



John Fairbanks 27:45

And empowering your people to be able to make those decisions, whether it's coaching decisions, I mean, think about how asinine you would be if the head coach that you have, or one of your coaches that you have to sit there and watch them coach and micromanage that, you at some point, if they're going to be a coach, it needs to make it to where you are not wasting two people on a single block. Yeah, it's the same thing. And so another way to level this up of this conversation that I've seen work really well is you just have to spend thresholds. So if you have a GM, you have a manager, you have somebody that has the green light to make a decision for anything that's less than $500. And now, it's only you only get bothered when it starts to matter. And who cares $500 $250 $1,000 You set that threshold? But now you're only now you are now becoming the equivalent of the CEO coming in and having the level of conversations that matter. Do we want to spend $3,000 over here? Should I get the Kleenex brand? Or should I get the Scott brand



Tyler 28:56

just fucking toilet paper I'm gonna give by the way let me let me add to that fines hold the paper free champion nice point nice toilet paper please. And even if you have a service that comes and replaces the toilet paper, you can choose different varying degrees of toilet paper, choose the nicest stuff that you can buy trust me your clients are paying a decent amount of money I my measure the respect that any business has for their Cersei for their clients based on the toilet paper that they choose to put in the in the customers restroom. Because if I go in and it is just raw sandpaper, I know that they're like, I could choose to damage my employees Amos's to save an extra $9 a month and I'm that's what I'm going to choose because they're choosing that by choosing the cheap shit so yeah, that's how I know if you give a fuck about your people at all by the nice stuff. Now, there's a book actually that I think was transformative for me in this mindset of how to delegate how to really make a system efficient and detach yourself from the doing even at extreme costs kind of because your time should be the most valuable. Your time should be the most valuable thing to you. Your business. And that was The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. It really was a thing like, it was really eye opening to see, there was his use of virtual assistants for that was a big one. And those long books have been around for a while too. And that system has developed a lot since then. But that piece has been really interesting where they use it for customer service, an example he gave was one of his like, supplement businesses, right? Where they were getting customer service stuff, shipping errors, there's all sorts of stuff that comes by some that shows up damaged, or somebody doesn't like it, somebody wants a refund. They were handling, he was handling all their own, they had very little staff, everything was dropped, shipped, right. So you didn't have to fear putting your own labels on your supplement company, you're fucking up. If you know what I mean, like there are ways to get done that for zero effort. And that's probably the way you should be doing. So this is a complete dropship thing he had was completely hands off of everything except for them, a customer service shit was coming in. And there were some decisions on production and stuff that had to be made. Well, he just had a, essentially a virtual assistant to handle his customer service calls, there was a phone number and that all calls to hear. At some point though, in the beginning, they were running every decision by him like $100. So we give him the refund we give him. And then he decided, by the way, it didn't mean the decision he made was anything under $250, he empowered the person on the phone to make that decision. Now they still wanted him to make what they thought was the right decision, right for what the customer needed and what you know was right. But he was willing to take the good with the bad. And that's taking the good with the bad is key when it comes to growth, you're not going to be perfect. But taking the good with the bad now means on all of those decisions, maybe 80% of those were getting made the exact same way that he was going to make they're making this they're choosing one or two ways, really. And so that's off he goes now he's offloaded 100% of the work. And the right decision for him was being made 80% of the time. Well, for that extra 20%. What is it? Is it expensive? Is it some customer client satisfaction, like you can kind of follow up and tidy that stuff up as you go. But either way, a 20% Fucking you know, Oopsy daisy Ray is kind of the difference between a person who's not a high performing CEO and one who is. So who gives a shit, that's the name of the game. So learning to delegate that stuff is the key and knowing that it's not going to be perfect. So if you want to get into how to like that book is basically like a how to guide. I'm building a full system for how you can detach yourself from your businesses entirely, or make systems that are really efficient and require so little of your time and are able to make money for our workweek. I think it's available on audiobooks as well. But Tim of Tim Ferriss Four Hour Workweek if you haven't read it and you're in like the kind of entrepreneurial space that you should, it is kind of like a I would say it's kind of an instant classic that's come out in the last 10 years for sure. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I've read that one in the way I thought about everything in business. So



John Fairbanks 32:50

and I think it's important on that subject, because this is a lot of times where for us that are entrepreneurs, when we're early in our we are early in getting started it is bootstrap central it is I'm going to get this done with spit and grit and update. So you get really used to just doing all the things all the time, because the odds are you don't have a whole lot of startup costs if you're not just swimming in debt already. And so because that's your attitude, oftentimes you will feel like I have to be the one that does these things, the one thing that Tim Ferriss talked about. And then also in the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, he talks about VAs as well. And two things that they both are in agreement on are, don't wait to get a VA. Like if you want help if you want assistance to do those highly repetitive tasks, you don't need to wait till you get to be a big highfalutin CEO to offload those things. So that's one of those things where I think a lot of times, we can say like, Oh, I I have to wait to get to a certain earning threshold, or I need to be able to,



Tyler 34:09

I need to keep the VA busy for 20 hours a week. No, you can often and that's 30 minutes worth exactly.



John Fairbanks 34:16

And so it really is incredibly valuable. And again, these are the things that we dive into deeper, not just this is what you should do, but how you do it, how you execute those steps inside of the gear Academy. Because these are the pieces that everyone runs into. You're all on the same ladder. We're all on the same path towards what we want to do in our businesses. It just is the difference of what part of the path you're on, what rung of the ladder you're on. And the good news is as you continue to level up your skill set and surround yourself with people that are doing that. It's amazing how many doors can open. When you feel like a man, I don't even know what to do next. And somebody's like, oh, No, like I've already done this in fact, you know what I can help you with. And now you have a community of people that are assisting each other which is exactly what the gym owners revolution is all about.



Tyler 35:09

So if you want to join the Facebook group, guys that's got us wrapped up for today, I hope there was something eye opening in here for you. It really is important that your time is valuable. Your decision making is what your business is right? Your business came into existence because you made a decision and then you fucking ran straight forward with it. Right? And then once this thing exists, what did a lot of a lot of gym owners do? We stopped making innovative decisions, we stopped building new things. We stopped pressing forward like we did the day you just knew that you guys know this story. You decided you're going to open a gym. You started saving money. You pulled the money. Maybe you went all in. Maybe you got investors, maybe you got partners involved, but then you had to find a facility. It all went right in that beginning phase when your gym went from not existing to existing. What was it? You had to take everything that didn't exist and bring it into existence? You had to have a plan. We got to find a facility. Yeah, we found a facility we're gonna get when we get in? Perfect. What are we going to put in there? How are we going to get it done? Why don't we move? That is what this thing was, you guys did all of that. And then you're sitting there and going, I don't have enough time to make anything else happen. That's the piece that we need you to you need to get back to that little bit of fire that got this thing in front of you in the first place that made this thing happen. You know, that's the piece that I always talk about when I talk about working with businesses clients everything is I like taking things that did not once exist and making them exist that's my passion is the beginning the starting the making of things happen creating and I hate to see businesses just die that that dies within a business that fire I want to take a thing you filling a need in your community, you're serving people, you're doing all this stuff, and then you just fucking decide you don't want to do it any better anymore on a larger scale or make yourself any more money, you just stop. That's fucking crazy to me. So get your foot on the gas, the same fire that took your thing from zero to where it is now. You gotta take that little bit. So take the same thing when you decided you were going to have a gym and started doing all that hustling. Alright, what does your gym need next? Now do that same thing, hustle out that level and then make it happen. So you can do that. We help people do that every day. We do it on a weekly basis while we constantly are doing check-ins and tasks and giving people exactly what they need in order to start moving their business up that ladder. If you want to just learn a little bit more, get into the Facebook group the gym owners revolution that links in our description. Follow the show at the gym owners podcast on Instagram. Follow me at Tyler redstone and John



John Fairbanks 37:37

J banks F Oh.



Tyler 37:41

Thanks, FL thanks a lot for listening, everybody. We'll see you next week.




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