How To Price Your Product with Vince Del Monte

You're listening to the PT Profit podcast, episode number 110. Today I'm sitting down with Vince Del Monte and we're talking all about how to price your product. Are you ready? Let's get started. Hi, I'm Beverly Simpson, former fitness manager turned online personal training business owner. And this podcast is where smart fitness professionals, including trainers and clinicians, discover how to increase client performance in movement, package and position their products and services, and get out of their own way so that they can increase their revenue to live a life that they love without sleazy sales. Welcome to the PT Profit Podcast. What's up coach? Thanks so much for pushing plan another episode of the PT Profit Podcast. I'm your host, Beverly Simpson and today I have a very special guest. I am sitting down with Vince Del Monte, who is a seven figure fitness business results coach and he helps transition fitness coaches to the online space building six and seven figure businesses. Vince is a best selling author, former WBFF pro fitness model, an online fitness business coach, but most importantly, he's a father of three, a loving husband to his wife, and over the past 12 years, he's helped thousands of people transform their physiques through coaching and online program. He is living proof that you can scale a fitness business without sacrificing your soul or time with your family. He's the only fitness business coach in the world who has built four different seven figure generating businesses over the past decade and now is dedicated to teaching others how he's done it. He's contributed to AskMen.com, eSPN.com, Men's Health magazine and Men's Fitness and additionally his work has been featured on Inside Fitness magazine, bodybuilding.com, t Nation, and many, many more. I'm super pumped to bring him to the show Today we talk a little bit about the differences between six and seven figure business owners, specifically in the fitness space. We also talk about the power of systems and processes and in this episode we talk about pricing your product. So without further ado, let's go ahead and roll that interview. What's up, Vince? Thanks so much for joining me on the show today. How are you?

I'm doing good. Beverly, nice to see you today.

Yeah, it's nice to connect. I really appreciate it. I'm really looking forward to diving in to today's episode. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of learning about you or heard you present, I'd love for you to just share with us a little bit about who you are, who you serve and how you got there.

Great. I'll do a quick past, present, future breakdown. So I got into personal training after university and more by default, not by design, but I ended up loving it. And I really fell in love with the world of sales. And at the same time, I transformed my physique from being skinny Vinnie to a kind of muscular guy enough to, you know, be a more reputable personal trainer. Um, the reason I share that is because it was a few years into personal training that I started seeing people make money online. I got really curious and want to know if I can market my own services, specifically teaching skinny guys how to build muscle. Because that's what I'd done. I wasn't really credible on anything else. And I fell in love with this world called Internet marketing back in 2006. So I was one of the OGs of online fitness marketing. I guess there was. Back then it seemed like it was really saturated. Funny enough, in 2006 my first business coach said, I don't think you should go into this market of teaching guys how to build muscle. It's way too saturated. That was no way. You're going into a very competitive space. So when people say it's so saturated right now, I can relate because back then it felt saturated too. But long story short, I launched this ebook when you could charge $77 for air. And I joined coaching programs, masterminds. Then I learned how to essentially promote myself online, primarily through I utilize YouTube. I was one of also the first YouTubers for fitness. So I grew a following, which is the hardest thing to do when you're starting an online business. That takes a lot of time. That's why most people aren't successful anymore because, you know, it takes so much work. People seem to be allergic to work these days. So I build a following. I offered services, specifically my ebook. And my business was just a function of my transformations. So when I had a new transformation, I sold a new program and I created a line of programs all based on my own personal transformations. And that was my business model. Just keep evolving because my audience wanted to evolve with me. And I did that for over a decade. I built quite a few successful four different seven figure and four different six figure fitness businesses. And when you do that and you've been around for a while, people started asking me, so what do you do? Do you coach? People said, do you teach what you do? And I. And I wasn't. And I thought maybe I should because after 10 years I was ready for a shift. So that was the past I was an online fitness coach helping skinny guys build muscle for over a decade. The present is that I've spent the last three years teaching people how to do what I did. And that's grown to two different coaching programs and one's four figures in price range and one's five figures in price range. And we have almost 1,000 people between both those programs. And that's what I do today and the future, I want to continue serving this market for probably, I can see definitely a few more years to come. And we're trying to help a thousand of our students get to a million dollars a year. So that's the mission. And we specialize in organic marketing, so we don't use paid ad strategies. It's 100% social media based and we keep it super, super simple.

Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to dive in. There's so many different things that I want to talk about. So let's just first start with one. First things that you said, which is. Okay, wait real quick. By the way, I remember watching one of your YouTube videos and you had, you didn't edit. Was like your kids were in the background and you were like, the point of this video is to show you that you don't need flashy sales, you don't need all these flashy things. You just need to deliver your message. And I remember it really sticks out in my mind. But one of the things you said, which I think is so funny because I know that this is a lot of roadblocks for a lot of people is this idea that, you know, the market saturated and that was how. And you said 2006. I started laughing because, my gosh, no. One of the things I say to my trainers all the time is, do you think there are more people going to enter the market space or less? So I'm curious, as someone who's been in the industry for so long, how have you navigated working through the idea of competition and dealing with imposter syndrome and knowing like, oh my gosh, there's more people. I'm not good enough yet. I can't. How can I be that person when there's someone else helping? I'm curious, what are some of the ways you've navigated it?

Yeah, for sure. So one, there it is saturated. It's noisy, it's competitive. But I was always told there's no such thing as too many people, just too many bad coaches. So the market isn't saturated with. It's very saturated at the bottom. Right. There's there's not much competition at the top. So there's a lot of new people coming in, you know, competing for scraps, you know, 2 to 3k a month, 5 to 10k a month, like that's where it's really saturated. But most of those people don't get passed because of what we're going to tell them now, what not to do. So the first thing is to acknowledge that when you're first starting out, no one likes you, nobody knows you, nobody trusts you, and that's normal. So to first normalize that and to really see the marketplace as an opportunity to attract who you are. And you know, something we teach our students is that people don't buy coaching, they buy coaches. And this is why, you know, I share my life, right? Because, you know, if you come into my coaching program, you are going to see a lot of other moms, a lot of other dads who have got kids. Because guess what, they resonate with me. And they are like, wow, Vince is building a business with three young kids. He doesn't work on the weekends. He is a man of God. He shares his faith openly. And that's not a tactic, that's just being genuinely who I am. So I think the first reassurance to anybody who's trying to question, you know, question like, is there space here for me, there's space if you're who you are. But if you try and be somebody you're not, then maybe not, because you're not now. You're going to be the second best version of somebody else. So if you own who you are, you own what you're creating, how you're leading and what you're building, then there's always room. And that's the thing. There's 8 billion people in the world, right? Like if to build a six figure, seven figure, even an eight figure business, you don't need that many people. So we teach people how to build a brand. Being yourself and to lead with who you are, not what you do. Because for most of us, what we do is a commodity, right? Fitness information. You can get it on bodybuilding.com for free. You can get amazing workout apps now for $10 a month. I mean, you can get done for you meal plans for heck, you can find books on Amazon for $14. So how do you command premium prices? And you have to understand that people are buying who you are, they're buying your story, they're buying the belief that you can help them when nobody else can. And that comes down to being able to tell your story. And that's how you separate yourself in a saturated market, your story, because that's the number one thing nobody can steal from you. And this is a very incestual marketplace where everybody's copying each other's tactics and strategies and all that. And doesn't matter if people copy what I do, because they can't be who I am. So those are kind of some of the points that we really just remind people of. And then also just to remind people on the flip side, like, especially in fitness. I mean, fitness people are weird. You know what I'm saying? Like, fitness people are collectors. So when I'm following somebody online, I'm not following one guy's account. In the past 10 years, I've probably worked with a dozen different coaches. I've prescribed to dozens of different programs. Like, we hop from program to program to program. So, like, what an opportunity to collaborate with other people and to tap into other people's networks. Because, you know, people say, vince, why are you doing an interview with so and so? Isn't he your competitor? Yeah, absolutely. You think his following is going to stay in his community for life? They'll probably go through his program for a couple years and they say, I'm going to go check out Vince's program, and vice versa. So you operate from a place of abundance. I understand there's more than enough for everyone. You don't operate from scarcity and survival. And, you know, the number one thing people are lacking in those beginning stages is attention. I love Cardone's quote. He says, there's only two reasons you'll go out of business. People don't know you or people forget who you are. So the number one thing you have to own is attention. Money follows attention. So in the beginning stages, you know, collaborating is a great way to get known and to start standing out. Because now you're tapping into other people's networks. And if somebody trusts so and so and then they see that person collaborating with me, they're going to say, oh, my guy who I trust is hanging out with Vince. If he trusts Vince, I can trust Vince. So there's, again, these things are so simple. That's why people don't do them. And they take a lot of time to compound, but these are the seeds that are going to reap the harvest.

Yes, so true. So there's two things, right? I love that you brought up the fact that simplicity, you know, simplicity wins. So you have kids, right? So I've just now got introduced to Common Core math and I'm like, wait, they took something so linear and so simple and made it complex. Like human beings just love to really make things complicated. That was an example for me. But the other thing too that you said about like, when someone says to you, hey, why are you collaborating? Aren't they your competitor? I'm just a firm believer and I think it's part of the reason why I'm attracted to your message and your work is that you get, you get what you give. So if you're coming from this energy of mind, scarcity, lack, that's what you're going to bring. You're going to call more of that into you. And that's just not a way to be. That's the thief of joy, right?

Yeah. People are attracted to value, right? So if I'm, you know, just last week I had Alex Hormozi on my podcast and I had Martin Rooney on my podcast and Nick Baer. And you know, these are people that my competitors or my following, they could go learn from as well in certain, certain areas. But I want to be a person of value because I find that the person that brings the most value to the marketplace always wins. So I'm not looking at wonder anyways. So I might as well be the valuable person that makes the introduction and that arms them with great people. And a part of my brand is people and it's connecting people and sharing, hey, this person you can trust. This person has helped me. And you know, you're always going to grow faster when you're, when you're around, when you have relationships. I think that's a lot of people forget that if I lost my business, I lost everything for some reason. I could rebuild it through my relationships. And relationships take a long time to form. Right? Like, you can't force a relationship. You can have transactional relationships for sure. But when you form real, genuine partnerships and relationships where, you know, all mutual parties are supporting and promoting each other, that's how you increase your circle of trust, if you will. That's how you get more access to other people's following and that's how you gain attention and you end up attracting high quality people into your world. My best customers are people that heard me on Bedros Coolian's podcast or Dan Locke's podcast. Cause like, they're loyal followers of those guys. And then they see that those guys are endorsing me. Like, wow, these guys endorse them. I guess I can trust them as well. I like this guy's work. He's got a Little different flavor, a little different style. I resonate with this guy a little bit more. Then they come into your DM or you enter theirs, you have a conversation, you schedule a call, and next thing you know, they're signing up for your services. So they're very simple activities, but they require constant consistency. And I always tell our students, when your business starts to get boring, that's when you know you're doing it right. These are boring activities, but you have to do them day in and day out.

Well, I. One of my mentors, James Wedmore, he always says your business is not here to entertain you if you go get a hobby. Right. This is one of the other things, too, especially for people that are at the. And I say that in love. Right. People that are new. And I get that. I've been there. I've been grinding for a while and, you know, working on this business and loving it. Right. Part of it is I wouldn't do it if I didn't love it. Right. But when you're kind of at the beginning, it's easy to pour everything you've got into the business. But eventually you're going to come to a place where you don't. You're going to free up some time and now you can go do something else, maybe build a new business or do a different hobby. Your worth is not determined by what you do.

Yeah.

And I feel like a lot of people will miss that.

Yeah, Yeah. I would say your net worth isn't your. Don't confuse your net worth and your self worth.

Yeah. And I feel like a lot of times when people are asking me that question or even on full transparency, when I feel that myself, I know that, A, my focus is now on me and not on my client or person. And then B, it comes from a place of not valuing where you are right now. And it's. You're either afraid of the future or living in the past and you're missing the present.

Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's probably the biggest problem right now with the Internet. Just even society in general is like. It's like people are afraid of hard work. People are almost allergic to it. Because everything else, like technology is accelerated. Everything else. You know, you got dating apps where you can meet somebody with, you know, just swiping. You can hit a button, have a burrito at your front door in five minutes, you know, instacart, you know, you can pick up the type of banana you want at your house in a few hours. By just, you know. So I think people have this almost expectation that, hey, everything else in my life is getting easier. Building a business should be easier too. No, wrong. Oh. All this other stuff is coming so easily and comfortably. I can access all this other stuff just by the, you know, using my phone. I should be able to get in shape just by, you know, a couple cool apps. No, doesn't work like that. So just. I like what you said. I just affirmed that the work is a grind and it takes a lot more time, money and effort than most people expect. And I think that's where the, you know, imposter syndrome can creep in. Touch on that people start to feel inadequate or they start to feel like they're not going fast enough. And you'll never feel like they're going fast enough. There's always somebody going faster. So, yeah, you really do have to, you know, build it one day at a time, you know, one client at a time, one transformation at a time, and just realize, like, there's a compounding effect that will take place, but it's usually not going to be in three to four months. It's going to be more like three to four years before you really start seeing, you know, the harvest that you're. You're investing into.

Yeah. You know, there's a word that you use and that you said that I talk about a lot. And I think to me, when people hear work hard, when I use that word, work hard, it's not really necessarily about, you know, the amount of work. It's about the level of uncomfortability that you're willing to really push through. Right. Like, if you take fitness, we're in fitness. Nobody is going to get shredded or change their body or do any kind of change without getting uncomfortable. You have to get uncomfortable. Your brain's literally designed to protect you from getting uncomfortable, whatever that means. Change. Right. So that to me, when I hear work hard, it's more about working efficiently and just getting okay with being uncomfortable because that's what it's going to take.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And being okay with suffering, being okay with sacrifice. And yeah, yeah. We live in a shortcut society where everybody's looking for shortcuts, but there's, there's quite a few pieces in building a business that you just can't shortcut and, you know, growing a following, creating goodwill in the marketplace, creating a great product, improving your sales skills, improving your, you know, ability to make content, building a team. Like, those things are going to take years to move from, you know, okay. At the proficient at. So once you appreciate, like the process is going to be much more painful than you anticipated, you can kind of ease your way in and you can kind of find your stride, stay in your lane. But yeah, I see a lot of people implode because they're comparing their results to mine. I've been doing this for 15 years. I'm like, I've got 15 years on you. What are you doing? Yeah.

Now, there was something I heard you say on a podcast, and I can't remember which specifically which specific podcast episode of yours it was, but it was something that I feel like not enough people talk about, in my opinion, and you've mentioned it here, so I'd love for you to just dive into it a little bit more, is that there are a lot of people that stay in, in, you know, the top of funnel, the 5k, 10k month, and they don't get, they don't cut through because they don't spend enough time really refining their product and refining what it is that they do for their people. And I've heard you talk like, get spend time getting people better results. And I feel like that doesn't get talked about a lot. So I'd love for you to expand a little bit more on what specifically you mean by that.

Yeah, well, we found that there's three different levels. Zero to a million is just product. It's just promotion. One to ten million dollars is product, and then ten millions and above, that's people. So to get to a million dollars, you need to be a sales machine. It's just marketing. It's just increasing. It's just increasing volume in certain activities. One, you need more followers, you need more scheduled calls, more received calls, more closed calls. So you're just turning those dials. Those are the only things you need to focus on to get to your first million dollars. You need to schedule more calls, receive more calls, and close more calls. Those are the only activities you should be obsessed about. And then in order to go, say from a million a year to the $10 million level, that comes down to the product, there might be a session from level one, level two, level three, and you now are increasing the ltv, the average order value of a customer, which allows you to invest into more traffic, which allows you to continue to increase the volume in those three areas as well. And then beyond that, that's now empowering leaders to fully own their numbers and their departments and their teams in order to coordinate action faster. But when you are starting out, even when you're starting out, the way you deliver your product is going to determine how many people you can bring on. So I always ask people, if I gave you 50 clients today, would you be able to handle them? And if they said no, my business would break. That means that you're the bottleneck. So now what we need to start doing is systematizing every single piece of the onboarding process. You know what happens the second their credit card goes through? What do they see? What email do they receive? Where do they get directed, what's inside the members portal? What happens after they go through the onboarding videos? Do they have an orientation call? Do they have a call with their coach? What happens on that call? Where are they directing next? How do they, how can you scale consistent delivery? So most people build programs where we call. We've coined it, it's called coach, sorry, client dictated chaos. Where people are offering custom coaching to a point that they can't scale because they can only serve so many people. But what we teach our students how to do is to create what we call the one way play where you would formulate your program for one type of person, not every single person. So this comes down to knowing your marketplace. We serve three types of people. Fit pros who want to go to 10k months, 50k months and 100k months. Everybody's following the identical steps from 0k to 10k. There's no, there's no difference. Everything is the exact same. So when our students come to get help, we're not teaching them new information, we're holding them accountable to the same program, but finding out what they're struggling with in terms of the implementation. And that's how they get results. So for anybody who's trying to figure out how do I offer a service online? You first have to figure out, I'll give you, you know, two simple things. You need to figure out who's the marketplace, right? And once you identify the marketplace in context to, you know, the person and to their problem, then you figure out what's their offer. All right? And then you come up with your program, your process and your pricing. Once you're crystal clear that I help this type of person achieve this result in this amount of days, you build the program so well that a 10 year old could follow it. And the program is designed so well that people who shouldn't be getting results are getting results because it is so step by step, there is no guesswork. It is like writing a meal plan for your clients. Oh, 8am, one scoop of whey protein powder, eight ounces of water, you know, two fish oil caps, one slice of toast, one tablespoon of peanut butter. There is zero room for error. And if they are not doing it, then the question becomes, what are you struggling with? And that is where the coaching comes into play. So we kind of learned early on that what we did wrong was that we were coaching and not checking in. So just like you do with your own clients, when we used to use the term coaching call, hey, schedule a coaching call. Now we say schedule a check in call because I am not. If I set the present, I am going to be coaching you, then I am teaching you. And you don't need more information. The information is already in the portal. Step by step. The question is, is if One of your KPIs is six calls per day and you're not booking six calls per day, the question is why?

What's preventing you?

So, oh, I don't have enough people to talk to. Okay, why my following is not growing. Okay, so you're not doing the influencer infiltration one hour strategy in the morning time? No. Okay, what are you struggling with, with that? I don't know whose account to start to follow. Okay, cool. Well, let's fix that problem today. So I think building a business is very simple when you keep people clear on like committed actions. And that's a term that we use in our program, committed actions. So the actions that are non negotiable that will drive the behaviors that drive the outputs. So we know if you comment on 100 accounts a day that approximately 10% of them will follow you back. And now over the course of the month, you have approximately 300 new followers. Over the course of the year, that's an additional 3,600 followers. These are high quality followers. We now know how to grow your following. So if you're. My following is not growing, like, oh, I don't, I feel weird doing that. Okay, let's talk about that. So what I. The one. My. When I just, Sorry, I don't mean to keep going here, but I find like a lot, a lot of coaches put so much pressure on themselves to impress their clients as opposed to just holding them accountable to the actions that will drive the outputs. So when we kind of just really thought about. Okay. People don't actually need new information. They need repetition and they need the same actions to be repeated to them over and over. Just like changing somebody's body. I don't need to teach them about, you know, the Krebs cycle. I just need to make sure that they're hitting their protein every day, they're getting their water intake every day, and if they're not. Hey, what's the challenge with getting your meal in the afternoon? Oh, I got meetings all afternoon. Okay, cool. Let's work on that today. Okay, cool. So I've got cottage cheese and some nuts and a protein bar. I didn't even think of that. So we're solving simple problems that create high yield and high return for them. And we try not to fix too much. Like, you don't want to change too much at a time. You want these to become consistent habits that produce the predictable results. So I think what we've really learned coaching people is that you need to keep it simple and you need to hold people's feet to the fire with the actions that actually will drive the business forward.

I think so many people get caught up in actions. It goes back to that uncomfortability level, is that people get caught up in the actions that don't actually move the dial and don't move the business forward. Forward. Because it keeps them comfortable.

100%. Yeah. And there's. People confuse the activity with accomplishment. So you know, our students, they have to book two calls per day, and we haven't filled a spreadsheet. So on a coaching call, we can just open it up and we can see, hey, you scheduled five calls this week. What the heck were you doing? And they don't want to hear that. We know we're going to. When they hear, I'm going to say, what the heck have you been doing all week? Because there's no excuse not to book a certain number of calls every single day if your day structured around the right activity. So. And spot on. Yeah. Some of these activities, like, so this is what it actually takes. And then when somebody kind of find. When it clicks and they're like, oh, if I don't do this, I'm going to stay stuck, then you just kind of ask them, so you sure you still want to build this business? And they get to take ownership of the results. But we used to, you know, I used to have same challenge with, you know, a lot of people in a coaching program. People aren't getting results and you're wondering, shoot, do I need a new training? Oh, man, should I bring in a guest speaker? Oh, man, maybe we should. I was like, no, I just. I am not keeping it clear on what they must do in order to grow. And something I learned from a mentor, he said that the students need to be working harder than you. And I felt like on every coaching call I was working harder than them, trying to impress them as opposed to just asking them very direct questions. So how many calls have you booked this week? What's your closing percentage? How many people in your follow up pipeline? And now we can actually have productive conversations around whether they're where they're at and you know, if they're above or under the threshold. And this is, and then repetition, repetition, repetition. It's like just like transforming your body. Say, ok, cool, all I need to lose is half a pound this week. I don't need to lose 3, 4 pounds. Did you lose half a pound this week? Yes. Okay, good. Do it again. And once you really simplify it down to the point that people just need now to realize their results are rooted in disciplining and consistency, it's now like bringing them back to their why. And are you going to choose to be this type of person who is consistent and holds their word to the goals that they set before themselves? And if not, it's now trying to realign and find out what's holding you back. So we just find like we can get to the root issue when we have the standard of performance strong because then we just have to find out why they're doing it or not doing it and getting them to realize that they're in full control of how fast they go. And then once somebody buys in, like, okay, I get it, I'm on board. And then we ask them, all right, cool. How fast you want to go now?

Yeah. There's two things, there's two key things that you are talking about that I really want to just acknowledge and really hope people hear is that number one, you're talking about skill acquisition, which takes reps. Everything you've said has been, okay, we were doing this, I learned this, so I shifted this. Right. And that's not like, oh, I read a book and now I know how to swim, so I'm going to go surf now. Right. That's not how that worked. That took getting in the water. It took doing it and being okay with getting it wrong. I think a lot of people don't want to do that, but it's really important. Go get it wrong action.

Yeah. We intentionally have our students put out a post that attracts their first few clients and even if they don't have a program built. Because what we found is people spend three to six months developing their program.

Yes.

So the number one trait of successful people is imperfect action. Right. Just understanding that messy and imperfect action is better than clean and perfect action because you learn from doing and not from talking about it. And you know, especially in the marketing world. Our head coach, Corby, I'll steal this one from him. He says marketing is just a fancy nine letter word for test. So we don't know what's going to work until we put it into play. Right. Just like probably all your students, they're professionals in their areas, they're going to have a hypothesis and they're going to give clear marching orders. But the student still needs to come back and provide feedback to optimize it. So we're like, put it up there. Like, well, I don't know if I want to market the males or females. We'll put the post out and see who responds. Well, I don't know, like, is my program good enough? We'll put it out there and let the customers tell you.

I always talk about marketing is guessing, testing and assessing. That's it. That's all, that's all we're doing. Right. And then the second thing to that point is KPIs. What are you measuring it against? You need to have some. KPI's is just, you know, performance indicators where you're, where you're actually being able to say, oh, you know, I took this binary action. This is the outcome. It doesn't mean anything about me, but this is the outcome. Is it the one I wanted or do I, is, do I need to adjust? And then how do I do that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, I know what you're saying. You're saying like, don't get emotionally attached to outcomes. And that's probably one of the other most important traits of a really successful, you know, business owner. Entrepreneurs. To detach yourself and to be able to make unemotional decisions, which is probably the hardest thing to be able to look at things objectively and be decisive and get feedback and say, hey, door one didn't bring us to our destination. Let's try door two. Oh, shoot. Door two didn't work either. Door three, my goodness, none of these doors are. And yeah, you might have to open nine to 20 doors before you find out. Ah, this was the, this was the right door. So it's again, it just comes down, I think people really being okay with like, I definitely want to get to my destination. But you also have to appreciate, like you have to respect the journey and I don't think people respect the journey enough and that the journey is going to really reveal who you are. And that's great. If you can Kind of like, see, like, wow, I'm going to figure out what I'm really made of. And you see all these problems as opportunities. Then you can start to reframe all these, you know, troubles as training to become more competent for future challenges. Then you can start to, you know, move through, you know, what we call the messy middle, as opposed to thinking this is what most people do. I'm sure you've seen this. Beverly, what do people do when they hit a roadblock? They quit.

Quit. They give up.

Yeah, they quit. They quit, quit. And they, you know, they get. There's red shiny object syndrome, but there's also red strategy syndrome. Oh, I'm going to try a new strategy. There's red tactic syndrome. I'm going to try this new tactic. There's red coach syndrome. I'm going to try this new coach. There's, you know, red shiny funnel syndrome. I'm going to try this new funnel. There's red shiny business model syndrome. I'm going to try this new business model. And people are avoiding the root problem, which is them. There's nothing wrong with your niche. What's wrong is that you're not getting better at the skill set. And the skill set does take a lot longer to develop, especially at the start, so you've got to keep putting those reps in. So I think when people, these things all start to kind of click and they're in an environment where they're seeing other people work through it and starting to have breakthroughs, people start to say, okay, I'm going to just keep going. They get that first win, and then they get another win, then another win. And then they're like, then they're in the game. They're like, okay, you get to that state of, huh? I didn't go back to the start. I went right through the messy middle. I came out the other side and, wow, I just had to keep going. That was the issue. Now they can transfer that new belief into every other challenge that presents an opportunity to quit or go right through.

Again, which is the value in the compound effect, essentially, in my opinion, is that you never go back to square one. No matter what happens in that outcome, you still have all of those lessons and experiences that got you to where you're at right now. So even if it did disappear tomorrow, you would have all those skills to keep going and do the next thing.

Yeah. You have the belief, too, that the solution is not new, the solution is better.

Yeah. Always just keep going back and honing in your skills. I think it's so important. Now, I am curious just to shift the conversation just a little bit because we are talking about market space and saturation and we hear people. You mentioned Alex Hormozi and I just read his book and I. He's brilliant and talked a lot about how, you know, when it comes to pricing, you know, we're racing to the bottom essentially, and talking about, you know, how price is a commodity and people price or people base their value on price. And so I'm curious, how do you. Because I've heard you talk about making sure that you don't out price your market space. Because it could be easy to hear something like that and be like, oh, okay, so I'm going to charge a million dollars for a month, right?

Yeah, no, there's, there's a good, It's a good conversation. So. And it's one of those things where I don't believe there is a right or wrong. I think there's two types of things we could talk about. Education and training. Training is okay, start at this price point, move to this price point every X amount of clients. And that could be a great strategy tactic. I like to kind of look at the marketplace and try and figure out, you know, what is our strategy here. So it's always easy to talk in story. So a couple years ago when we launched my mastermind, we are a good price point. We were getting, I consider it wasn't underpriced, it wasn't overpriced. But then, you know, I heard the advice, hey, keep bumping up your prices. And we did. And then we started experiencing churn. And what I realized was that this marketplace did have a threshold. There was a certain amount that this marketplace. And again, you could say your product wasn't good enough. That could have been very true. But that's what I'm saying. Like pricing has. You can't talk about pricing in a vacuum. So at the point the price that we started charging started to result in more churn because we weren't. The people we were attracting weren't making the money fast enough. So started thinking, I'm like, shoot. The price point that we went up to is really only going to gear to people already making this amount of money. And I got those insights from some other coaches who are like, yeah, we tried this price point and yeah, we got crushed at this price point too. The only people that could afford it. And I'm like, oh, shoot. So I started to think, how could we tweak this? And what am I trying to Create here, right. Going back to ownership. And what am I a product of? And I'm a product of people. I'm a product of being in a community with a lot of people that are thriving. I do really well when I'm around other people thriving because I get competitive. I see what's possible. I want to, you know, get recognized. I'm like, how do I recreate the environment that made me who I am? So what we did, we actually did something crazy. We went, like, in the different direction. We dropped our prices quite dramatically and we just started getting this sweet spot where, like, we were just enrolling and rolling and rolling to a point where every time I did a success interview, people would say, your prices are too low. But I wasn't. I always stung. It always stings when somebody says that. But at the same time, that's what literally tripled our membership. And we created this community where people were getting amazing results and the members started coaching other members. So I believe that there's like a sweet spot where you can get the volume. I wasn't differentiating my brand on look how expensive we are. And I know that's, you know, that is certainly a strategy to be like, in a category of one. It's actually what I did with my pre workout preload. It's a $99 bottle of pre workouts, the most expensive pre workout in the world. That strategy did well for that product. But for this coaching program, I wanted to build the community. We got up to a point where I could start saying, hey, we have like X amount of members are saying yes to us. So people are saying, oh, wow. And then when we improved our infrastructure and our delivery, we've brought the price points back up and they're almost back to where they used to be. But we're kind of finding a sweet spot where we don't need to really increase the monthlies. Now what we're focused on is collecting more paid in full and getting people to do their 12 months in one, two or three instead of over 12 months. So I think pricing is something that I think you definitely don't want to go so crazy to the point where you're relying on these, like, you know, grand slams. It's. I believe that there's a big value in volume because you're going to get social proof. You're going to get a community of loyal people. You're going to have them start to support other members and you're going to get a load of social proof. So that was our strategy for about Two years. And now we're. We're moving the rates back up. And we're actually pretty soon. I haven't even announced this yet, but December 1st, we're going to change the program from 12 months to 6 months, and the price point is going to be the same. So basically doubling the price of the program effective December 1st, just because we're seeing the value the program produces. So I guess what I'm saying is don't be the cheapest guy in town, but maybe don't be the most expensive price in town. I believe in having that sweet spot, especially for the first couple years, where you're building the community up. And who knows? These people might like. I have eight coaches. A lot of our top students are now my coaches. And they. It's funny because they said, a couple of our top coaches, they said to me on the interview, when I said, why do you want to work with us? They said, this program has given back so much to me for so little. I feel indebted to you.

Yeah.

I'm like, you've changed my life. And, you know, I feel like I should have paid you triple. I'm like, okay, that's fair enough. We'll get those people later to pay triple. But I felt like I just. I created something that you can't break, you know, that somebody just can't copy. So, yeah. So those are some of my thoughts, and I'm comfortable sharing those because they all come from my own personal experience. And I think pricing there's. Like I said, I don't think there's a right or wrong way. I think you just like, whatever your strategy is, you have to own it. Right. So when we were priced lower, I intentionally talked about that. I said, our pricing, you might be shot. It's not a misprint. And people are like, oh, I thought it was going to be a lot more. And we explained to them that, hey, this is a three to four year journey. So we want to see you with us for the next couple years. And I'd rather have you be able to invest into building a team and other things that can help you continue to grow your business. I don't want our program to be so expensive that you can't invest elsewhere and you're just, like, struggling to get by every month. So when I want to protect your credit card so you're pricing whatever you choose can be your marketing. If you're going to be the most expensive person in town, own it and say, why you're going to be the most expensive person in town. So I just believe in owning your pricing and having a very strong, authentic story that supports it. So people can say, okay, so they're cheap because, oh, they're this expensive because. And then if it makes sense, own it and then do what you're going to do.

Yeah, I love that. I think too for people at the beginning, I understand the draw, right? You'll see people who teach really high, high ticket sales and the draw to like, oh yeah, 50k a month right out of the bat in 30 days, that's going to change my life. But I think it goes back ultimately too to what you said, that people don't value the process because the process and the skill acquisition is where you're going to spend most of your time. And when you value that and value and get excited about the lessons that you're going to lean, you're going to learn, you need the volume.

Yeah, yeah. Our space got out of hand. I started seeing some of my competitors start promoting, you know, fitness coaching almost as a get rich quick scheme where the whole, you know, ad was built around. You need a very small following. You can charge crazy high prices and next thing you know you're going to be making 10 to 20k a month. While that is true, you don't need a huge following. You can charge high prices. But here's the funny thing. So you're charging people these crazy high prices, like 3 to 4k for a 12 week weight loss program. I think that's great. But how many people out there can keep spending 3 to 4k every 12 weeks for weight loss coaching? So your pricing has to make sense to the customer. Now if you've got like a reduced rate after those first three to 12 weeks and the whole price, the whole marketing is built on, hey, we have an intentionally inflated rate because this is where the most work occurs. But then afterwards it comes down. But I saw a lot of people saying, oh, I'm, you know, look how much I made this month. But then they have no renewals, they have to keep refilling the bucket. I'm like, yeah, because who's going to spend 6k every single 12 weeks for, for weight loss coaching? The average person can't afford that. So yeah, you got the first sale but you didn't create a community. So I'm always thinking like, how do I create longevity? And I've been around for a while, so I think it's a trait. I don't know if it came from my dad or my distance running, but you know, he Always questioned, like, is this business got legs? Or, you know, you're going to be back in the gym working in a couple of years from now. So I always wanted to create something that I felt like would have some deep roots. I felt like my first step was to build a community of people, get them incredible results. Maybe my profits aren't as high, but that's okay. Now we can start increasing the prices again because we bought ourselves time, improved the program, now we have different tiers of pricing. It's all again, goes back to our original conversation. This is a part of my process. Right.

And you're also, you know, and you mentioned it earlier as you're talking about lifetime customer value. People are so shortsighted in the sense that, you know, they get that first win and they get that sale. Completely missing the fact that you're going to spend more revenue and time acquiring new customers than you are just taking care of the customers that are hanging out with you right now.

Exactly. Yeah. And you know, a big part of our revenue is referrals. Right. It's a huge component. And because people, you know, when they come into a program, you know, the sale doesn't occur in their mind until they get the promised result. So, you know, now you have work to do. And yeah, if your price point is. So if it's so crazy, you know, there might. You got to ask yourself, are they going to see the value? And you know, I know at our original, our lower price point, the value was like just trumping Trump in it. So we never, you know, our churn was less than 3% a month, which, you know, compared industry average of 10 to 15%. We weren't experiencing that. But then when it was higher, it was a headache because I'm. Are you kidding me? We're dealing with who. Who wants to trump they what? Oh, my gosh. There's of these stress, like, who's not paying anymore what? And like, I don't even deal with that anymore. We don't deal with that anymore. It's just, it's so. It really is like figuring out like we want. I wanted to have the flow, and now we've got the flow. You know, we can create a bit more friction in terms of the requirements that we look for for people to come in and yeah, if it just depends, like, what do you want first? Right. Do you want crazy high prices with a lot of friction or you want it the other way around? So.

Yeah. So good. All right. Well, I definitely want to be really mindful of your time so thank you so much for hanging out with me today and for pouring into my community. I really appreciate it. So for those of you who want to learn more about you and hang out with you, where should I send them?

Oh, thank you so much. Instagram. They'll see my Blue Verified account, Ince Del Monte. And I'm also on Facebook and Vince Del Monte YouTube, Vince Del Monte as well as the Vince Del Monte podcast show. But if they're just to pick one because they probably forgot all that. Instagram is the best place at Vince Del Monte.

Okay. I love it. And we'll link all that up, of course.

Cool. Thank you.

Thanks so much, Vince. I really appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the PT Profit podcast. If you like this episode, chances are your friends friends will too. So it would be a huge service to us if you would please leave us a review and share with your friends on your social media channels. When you leave us a review, be sure to take a screenshot of it and email that screenshot to my team atinfo simpson fitness.com and we'll send you a very special Instagram podcast that will show you how to create computer compelling content so that your ideal clients come to you and you go from wanting clients to a waitlist of clients ready for your services. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you on the next episode.