You’re not going to do everything right when you’re starting your boot camp business. You’re going to make mistakes, just as I have and just as every other successful boot camp owner I know has done. Nobody’s born knowing how to start a fitness boot camp business. That’s one of the purposes of the annual Fitness Business Summit – to allow very successful people to share what they’ve learned so that others can avoid many mistakes and do some things right from the beginning.

One of the most popular speakers at the Summit has been Corporal Sean Francis and one of the most popular talks he’s given was about working with what Bedros calls the 95/5 or the 5% Rule. What that boils down to is focusing your time, energy and attention on the things that are priorities in your business and also working as much as possible within your zone of genius, doing the things that you love the most and are best at. This is the key to constant growth of your boot camp business.

Granted, in some ways, this is easier to do once your business is established and your income allows you to hire a full staff of trainers and other help. But there are a number of things you can do now, to not only get your business started on the right foot but also go into it with a 5% mindset that will help you at every level of success in the years to come. So I’d like to share with you two important things about how to start a fitness boot camp business using the 5% rule, with credit to Sean Francis for many of the ideas he shared at a recent FBS.

Hire an assistant as soon as possible.

An assistant may sound like an expensive luxury that a new entrepreneur can’t really afford. But one of the smartest things you can do, even as a start-up, is find even one person to take care of less important or less demanding tasks so that you can focus on the things you really need to do, like getting clients signed up for your new boot camp. The more you’re able to market your boot camp and sell new memberships, the sooner you can afford more help, like great trainers. You don’t need an executive assistant, at least not yet, so you can find plenty of people who would rather make halfway decent pay in a fitness center than make it in a fast food place.

Start creating systems for everything now.

Once Sean hired an assistant, he started following great advice that he’d gotten from the summit. He started creating systems for every single thing that needed to be done, whether it was answering the phones, entering new members into the computer or paying the bills. Then he taught those systems to his assistant so that he never had to deal with those things again.

Sean went even further, though, and created short video presentations that explained each step of each system, which meant he not only never had to do those tasks again, he never had to teach them again, either, no matter how many people he hired.

By creating systems for everything, he was basically programming his business to run without him. This is what all truly successful entrepreneurs do; they duplicate themselves (by hiring and training their own replacements) and he was able to duplicate his business. Now, no matter how many locations he has, he will have systems in place that keep them running as they should.

Bear in mind that at the time he took these steps, which he learned about at a Fitness Business Summit, Sean was not yet the huge success that he is now. He did them when he was still a beginner, just like you.

So what does all this have to do with the 5% rule?

Every time you create a system for handling a certain task and every time you turn that system over to someone else, you free yourself to do much more important things, like making a name for yourself in your community, networking, marketing and signing up new clients.
As a new fitness boot camp owner, this will help you to grow your business much more quickly than if you were still ordering office supplies and answering the phones. Later on, you will have the ability to open another location, hire an assistant or two, hand them the systems you have in place and have everything ready to go. In other words, you will be able to duplicate yourself and your business over and over again, as many of the biggest FBBC owners have done.

Knowing how to start a fitness boot camp business the 5% way will keep you from being your own hardest-working employee.

This entry was posted on July 12, 2014 at 6:13 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Boot Camp Marketing, Boot Camp Strategies, Fitness Business, How To Start a Fitness Boot Camp Business, Uncategorized by Steve Hochman | No Comments Yet