What to look at when things aren't working

You're listening to the PT Profit podcast, episode number 342. Today, I'm going to walk you through a 4S framework to help you dive deep into what to look at when things aren't working inside of your business. 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, 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? Thank you so much for pushing Clay on another episode of the PT Profit Podcast. I do your host, Beverly Simpson, and if this is the first time that you're hanging out with me today, well done. I'm super pumped that you're here. I can't wait to dive in. So, first of all, I know that I've been playing a lot of solo episodes, a lot of replay episodes rather, and I know that I've been sharing with you some of the things that we have built out in our private or secret podcast. I recognize that it's been a minute since I've given you a fresh piece of content that is new for you to consume. And part of it, and the reason why I'm giving you this context is because part of it is my monkey mind, part of it is my ego brain, part of it is me operating from these misconceptions of that it needs to look a certain way, it has to be polished, it has to be perfect. And when I start to talk myself out of just pressing play, and I wanted to just share this with you because I've been seeing a lot of this inside of my accelerator client and also my conversion content numbers where there's just been this resistance or this hesitation because there's all these checklists of things that in their mind and in my mind and in our mind, what needs to get done before we can press play, when in reality, operating from 70% perfect and just pressing play is going to do two things. Number one, it's going to give you the reps that are required to, to get the skill. Because when you have a level of skill or a certain level of skill in communicating, in asking for the revenue and, you know, so on and so forth, then what happens is you can layer on levels of polish and branding and some of the ways that you can elevate the Brand, won't you have some of these cash infusion skills required? Meaning that we need high income revenue generating skills before we start worrying about some of the things like branding and polish and making sure that all of these microphones and you look great and so on and so forth. Okay. So I just wanted to share that with you because I get into that myself where I start convincing myself that I can't hit record because I just got all these things that I need to do before that happens. And I was finding myself getting into that. So here we are on a Sunday morning, which happens to be my favorite day. I don't know why I always tell myself I'm going to do it a different day. I never do. It's Sunday morning, the day after my daughter's birthday party where we actually transformed the basement, which is my office, which is if you're watching this, you can see behind me the, the, the office component and the gym where we work out with, with I, where I work out with some friends in the morning. So it's literally we transformed this to be a 77 year old's birthday party. And it went off without a hitch. It was amazing. I'm so happy. I hope everyone had a good time. I had a great time. My daughter, so. But I was up late last night cleaning it, making sure that we could restore it back to its office nature. And here we are on Sunday. I am, well, I was tired, we went to bed at like 9pm and here I am recording. And so it is not me getting out of my own way because let me tell you, I wanted to just, you know, rats. We had all these reasons why I didn't need to hit record, but here I am hitting record and I'm bringing to you a 4S framework that I gave to one of my accelerator clients when we were taking a look at her debrief and really just working through and asking ourselves what is it that we need to look at in order to move the dial, to generate more revenue to grow the business. And so I'm going to walk you through this. Essentially this 4F framework that I kind of put together on the fly. And when I say put together on the fly, I just mean that it is the checklist that I go through in my mind when I'm auditing people's businesses, when I'm looking at my business, when I'm listening to what people are telling me, I kind of go through this checklist. What I did on the fly, quote unquote is just organized it together. So that you can remember it. But this is what I would be looking at when I'm assessing the health of my business. And the first thing that I also want to share with you, and the reason why this came about is because what I want to offer to you, and this happens to my clients, it happened to me, and I see this all the time, is that people will come to the A call, they'll come to do a conversation with me and they'll say, I need to do X, Y and Z. So let me just give you some tangible examples. I need to lower my price because nobody is buying risk us. So they're coming to me with a preconceived notion of what is the truth or in their mind, like, this is why I need to. They have a reason as to why they want to make this decision. But then when we uncover, when we look through this checker from about to give you, I can see that they're making decisions from data that they have that they are not being discerned, discerning in the data and they're not being able to see what exactly the data is telling them. So when they say, oh, no one's buying my stuff. I need to make it cheaper, I can, I'm, well, how do you know that? And I can see, oh, well, no one's bought my stuff. So it's easy to think, so it's clearly easy to know that, oh, there's one piece of data. But then when we look closer and we're like, well, how many people have you presented this offer to? And they say do, then there's not enough data that I can tell you that it's not the price. And so then when, when we get into places of like, well, I have given it to 50 people. Okay, so then we've got seven other components inside of the offer and everyone wants to go to price. So I'll be honest. And this is something I shared with an accelerator client on Friday when we were looking at her, when we were going through this, this, this framework. Of the seven main components of the offer, price is the last one that I usually mess with because along the way it's usually going to be other, other levers to pull to look at. Sometimes it's the communication of all the, of the value of the component of the offer. Okay, so sometimes we'll look at price, but that's all these other things have to come into play before it's price. Because usually price is not the reason why people aren't buying, even though that's what they're telling you, Price is the easiest one to fall back on. And there's so many other things at play before we even get there. Okay, so let's just take a look at it. As I'm explaining this framework, I'm going to do my best to use a human body as my metaphor. When we are learning the science of humans, we think of the skeleton. Then we layer on the muscle structure of the human body. And then we have all of the interconnected cells and hormones inside of the body that makes the body work. And then we have the outside of the body, the, the skin, the. The esthetic, Everything that is on the outside that we see, that everything on the inside of the body is. Is working together to function and make the outside of the body be what you see. Right? So your business the same way, your content that you create is the same way. Okay, so let's start. Let's strip it down all the way to the foundations, right? So this is the structure of the human body, the skeletal system of your human body, of your business. And there are some key distinctions and decisions that we need to make regarding your business when we are building out this machine, when we're building out this human body. What is the skeletal. The skeletal framework of your business? Okay. And there's so many things that you can look at, like for me and for what we do inside of my business is we have a evergreen, so something to purchase every single day that there's never a day that you can't buy from beans and fitness. And we. So, so we have an evergreen system or evergreen structure that layers on a hybrid. And we have very specific pathways that we have drive traffic, so drive people to new people to see our stuff. And then we have very specific structure. And I like paid lead acquisitions, which I've talked about so many times. And I'm doing another episode next week called A simple plan to 50k month. So tune into that because I'll. I'll share with you the act. You know, how we get paid to acquire leads. So now we have a way that we acquire new prospects and then a way, a specific way that we acquire new clients and customers. So this is the foundation, the structure of our business. And now what happens to so many people. And I say this because it also happened to me. I'm so grateful for every moment that this happened in my business because now I can help so many people who I see do the same thing, and I've tested it all, is that I think of the peaks and valleys it's the Valley of Despair study where people will take action from this place of uninformed optimism. And they make this decision because they're so excited about all the things that are possible and then they take action and then their action wouldn't really give them the result that was A promised or B, what they want. So then they get into informed pessimism where they start to feel like, oh, I've done that, doesn't work right. So your brain is literally protecting you from these, these experiences. This is what experience is, a double edged sword. And so then when you get into informed pessimism and then you keep taking action and you still don't get through, you still don't get the result you want, you run the risk of being of living in the valley of despair. And the valley of Despair is where, oh, nothing's working, everything's not working, it's never going to work. And so then you have one of two options. Usually when you get here, I have one of many options, but I'm going to say one of two. If you're, if you don't quit, right, which is you either go back to this vicious cycle of uninformed optimism and you dump the structure, dump the system, dump the strategy and you restart everything, but the only way out is through. And so what happens is if you just keep going and you keep getting, and you get pushed out of the Valley of Despair, you're going to get into, oh, informed optimism, like, oh, wait, it's working, this is working, this is working. And then you'll get through and then exponentially grow. As long as you do not quit the business altogether, which by the way, if you do, that's fine, that's fine, that's fine, that's fine. I've written an email out there before that was called when's it okay to quit? Because sometimes quitting is the answer. So it's not, it's not that quitting is necessarily bad, but if you are not giving, but if you the desires in your heart and you are going all in on you and you know that what you, that this is what you are meant to do and you trust that and you're like, no, I'm not, I'm going all in. Okay, then we have to get, you have to go through and we can't go back to uninformed optimism. I spent years, years, years, years, years, years of time. Too many to tell you, too many to coward of doing exactly that. Just dumping everything, going back to uninformed optimism. I was like oh, webinars don't work. Went back. Oh, webinars. You know, I just kept making these decisions that were not based in data, or let me rephrase, they were actually based in data. I was convincing myself that I was making data driven decisions. But the problem was that I wasn't actually being discerning in what the data was telling me. And we have to look at all like we have to be able to take a 360 view at your business in order to really understand what is the data that you are, are evaluating and then making decisions from that. Okay, so the first thing that we need to do is just lay and understand what is the structure of the business that you are building out. The skeletal structure. Structure. Now I'm going to put some muscle on this body, baby. We are going to layer in the system. So for me, and what we do inside of our business is we have got three core systems. We have the leveraged fulfillment system. So this is our offer ascension model. Where we go from are our low ticket offers. So our paid lead acquisition layered onto our free, our free content. And then we have our, so we have our free offers, our accessible offers, and then our premium offers. Okay, we have an offer ascension model. And so then in order to communicate the right offer to the right person at the right time, we have our conversion content system. So our conversion content system, people underestimate the amount of content that it actually takes to take someone who's never heard of you before and turn them into a, a client the fastest way possible. Okay. Because there's just so many reasons. So let's just take a look. I. What comes to mind is this Harry Potter experience, whether you've seen the movie or not. And honestly, I see the funniest scenes. Okay, so this is for my. If you're a Harry Potter fan, you're going to get this. But you know the scene where, where Harry is then accepted to Hogwarts and the letters are coming in and they're flooding in and here you can't catch the letter because there are just so many letters that are flooding into the house. Honestly, Dr. J.T. uses this theme specifically to describe insulin resistance. This is what insulin resistance is like right now I always laugh because I see these memes of like the greatest speaker of all time can't catch a letter that's flooding into his house. I was laughing so hard. Only Henry Cottage fans are going to really get that. But anyway, so these letters are, are flying in and Harry can't catch it. This is what's happening in the information age. We are inundated with information that people are just trapped in that, in that vicious cycle of the valley of despair where they just keep going uninformed optimism, valley of despair back to uninformed optimism and they can't get through. They're inundated with information. And then because of this information and experience, they get, they get upper, upper limits essentially of misconceptions. And they get saturated into the fourth level of market saturation, which comes from breakthrough advertising, which is the. One of the most dangerous places to be. Because not only is everyone operating from misconceptions and they have a or not only is everyone inundated with a whole bunch of options, they're operating from misconceptions that are preventing them from getting through. This is why 8 out of this is part of why in my opinion, 8 out of 10 businesses fail in their first 18 months of being a business. Okay? And then another example of what this looks like and experience of what this is is have you seen those reels or tiktoks where people are like, you know, doing funny satire skit on eating air, you know, preparing water and eating air because the inner. Basically the Internet says it's just got so much conflicting information, right? So this is exactly what's happening in the information age. It's not about information. It's about communicating the right implementation tools to the right person at the right time. And this is such a good thing. I hope me sharing this is not discouraging you because because of two things. Number one, you can trust the desires of your heart, but the heart, you are meant to do this. If there is a calling in you, there's a reason that you are called to do this and not called to be a kindergarten teacher or a professional hula hoop dancer or you know, one of the other amazing other jobs or opportunities that are out there. That's number one. And then number two, it means that you're not for everyone. And that is a good thing. Have you ever noticed that every single diet or every single way, every single process has success story? They also have stories that are, that are counter. And it's a good thing I'm here for it all. It means that the people who need you just haven't found you yet. So when you layer in your systems, right? So then this is going to make a case for the strategy. So once you have your structure, your skeleton bold, we put some muscles into the body. We got to get this body to run. So now we are going to layer in all of the moving parts to make this body work, to make this body move. And this is your business. So now we're going to layer in the strategy. So now what is so incredible about, about this space, about this world, is that there's so many paths to wrong. Likely you've been taught something. Whether it's me or whether it's someone else in this space, you've been taught a strategy that works. You just have to ask yourself if this strategy, the strategy that is in alignment with me and with this business, to get this business to run and within this structure and the system and the strategy. Oh, to look at data and be discerning of battle. Because just because someone said no does not mean the price isn't working. Or just because someone signed up for your webinar or signed up for your training and then didn't buy does not mean webinars are dead. Does not mean, you know, video training is dead. Just because we have a Harry Potter situation where there's, or that we're living in the fourth, you know, level of market sophistication or saturation rather, which requires a new level of sophistication and communication, doesn't mean that webinars are dead. Hogwarts still sent letters even after there, you couldn't catch it. Okay, I'm laughing because I'm just like really going in on this, on those metaphors, making me laugh. Okay, so it's not a bad thing. So when we're looking at strategy, however, and you're kind of looking at our systems and our structure, this is when we need to take a look at data to just see, okay, well what does the data say and what is the data telling us and is there something we need to dig deeper to look at? So like my client, for example, when we were going through this checklist and we were looking at all the components, we were looking at open rate, click through rates, we were looking at her CEO dashboard, essentially where we were looking at the business at a glance. Where we had. When we're looking at growth, we're looking at visibility, we're looking at value and we're looking at volume. And so we were looking at this volume component and we were digging, digging, digging. And I said, okay, so now we need to just take a closer look at the offer because based on all of this data where everything acquiring option and growing from, she's growing her visibility, she's adding so much value, people are coming to her class, they are staying till the end, they're opening all her emails so now we just need to take a closer look at the offer. What is in the offer that is preventing somebody from saying yes and yes now? So we look through all of the checklists. What is the promise, what's the process, what is the price, what is the urgency and what is the scarcity? What is the guarantee, the risk reversal? And are you layering in the context of you as to why this exists? Which we're going to talk about number the, the fourth level, which is self, which is going to be what, what is. What is inside of you that energizes a body. So, or this business, this body, this business. And so we took a look at it and we started to just tweak some of the. The offers. And now we've got a plan in place for her specifically to. To make sure that the offer is, you know, one lever is. We're going to pull this one lever in her. In her offer and we're going to watch the floodgates open. So what, what happens here when you know the only way out is through, is that once you have the structure, the system and the strategy in place that works for you and just continue to refine it. Refine it, refine it, refine it. You literally could be one post away from bloodgates open. You could literally be one le pull away from floodgates opening. Meaning you change one bonus, you change the communication of one offer and you test it out. It could just be the like the floodgates open, you address one piece of resistance and the floodgates will open. But that's not going to happen until you have all of the structure, systems and strategy in place. Likely. And maybe it will. I don't want to say never. I've had clients that have had accidental success, which is amazing, but what happens is they oftentimes cannot recreate it. It's much better to have this all planned out and then skyrocket. I've also had another client who we were just in the trenches building this foundation, this house, Bonnie, from scratch. And then we had one post go viral and it just. The floodgates opened, VMs open. But what I want you to know is that none of that worked or would have taken off unless we had done the pre work. Because if it had taken off, then we would have built this house, this body from straw. It would have been like. It would have been like a skeleton with skin on and nothing else between it, and it would not have lasted. It would not have moved. But once you have all these components in place, and then you just guys the limit. So it's not that. And this is what I will tell my clients oftentimes. Right. If you will not show up for one person, what makes you think that will show up for a million? This is not you operating from a place of. Once I have this, then I'll do that. No, that's backwards. We have to get the. The house, the room in place, body in place. I don't know why I'm just having all these metaphors. Maybe it's just because it's Sunday morning and my favorite time to to record. But honestly, I can't prepare for a party when the guests are already here. The the house is ready to go and then I'm going to bring in all the guests and then I'm going to execute the same is true in your bid. Okay, so we want to make sure that we. Most people want to skip that part. Most people operate from like all clean the house when the guests are here. No, no, we are preparing the space for when they come in so that you can handle the floodgates. Because the Internet is so amazing that you literally are just could be one post away from the floodgates just opening. Okay so then we have to layer in that fourth what I want to say that worth most important system essentially is self, you self self. And there is this. This is part of the invisible component to growing a business. This is why owning a business or a personal brand, I should say is personal development work on steroids. Because. And even if you're not the face of the brand, even if you're not the face of the brand, then you are the backbone of the brand. Or you are, or you are responsible for the skin of the brand. This is what people see without seeing everything that's underneath it. And so you have to ask yourself what are the energetic components of me that are preventing me from being visible? This is the X factor. This is this. Have you ever had the moment where it's like, ah, she just had it. And now if you can recognize that in someone else, congratulations, because you have that in you. Oh, I'm just not that good. I'm just not that magnet. That's not true. You cannot see or recognize qualities, whether they're good or bad in other people unless they exist in you or at least have existed in you at one point. So let me rephrase that actually. So if you have an emotional response to qualities in other people, whether it's like desire, jealousy, envy, or excitement or. Or triggered, then those qualities exist. In you, you just haven't recognized them yet. Or rather you can't recognize them unless they exist in you. Now, the one caveat to that is, sure, you can recognize qualities in other people because you know what they are based on descriptions or so on and so forth. But if they are emotionally neutral for you, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have them on you. Like so, for example, I can notice qualities in other people that don't emotionally trigger me, meaning I don't feel desire or anger or envy, or I don't feel, I don't feel happy or elated. I can approach qualities neutrally and that is my sign for me to know that I can recognize it exists. But it's not in me. I am not taking it on. It's not part of my skin. And it's not a good or bad day. It just is what it is. And that type of neutrality comes from work, or it just comes from. It's not in my sphere. When you get to this point in your business, there will be a point in your business where everything is firing off, ready to go, and the last lever is to pump up the visibility. What are the ways that you can increase being more visible? And part of it is going to be magnetizing yourself and how you do that. Oh my gosh, I'll do another episode on this. But it's something I shared with the accelerators in their, in their private podcast. The fourth system of emotional regulation, which is just how you do that, was to go all in on yourself and love yourself like you would love your five year old child, like you would love your animals. If you don't have children, can you give yourself the same grace that you give your children, that you give your animals? Because if you can't, there's work here for you to do. This is not. And, and part of this is because we've been indoctrinated to believe that if we are not humble or if we are not, you know, always, especially my higher achievers, if you are, are feeling like I need to achieve, I need to achieve, I need to achieve and then I'll be ready, set. If, then continue on, then there's work here for you to do because you are enough now. Besides, there is only now. Anyway, can you outside and find me tomorrow? No. Can you go outside and point to yesterday? No. There is only now. And when you can separate the fact that you are not your work, that your value is not, does not come from your work, you will amplify who you are and call in the people who need to be with you. And you will infuse you into all of your work. And this is going to be the, the pumping up of the, the molecules, all hormones, everything inside of the business. This is what is going to glow up your body, glow up your business. And this is what people are going to see, this is where people are going to hear, this is what people are going to sense and feel when they are in your business. And this is what you want and these are that invisible component and you don't ever. And this is what you can. It's like these are the, the IV hydra hydration that you are injecting into your business doesn't mean that you're going to arrive and that as soon as you're going to get there. No, this is going to be the full engaging of new in the business. And so what I'm going to tell you, which is the same thing I told my accelerators, is that I would invite you to take a close look at what is it? If you were really being honest with yourself and you knew that your body cannot lie to you, not your brain, your brain can lie to you, that your body cannot lie to you. So if you are really honest with yourself and you were to just do a full assessment and ask yourself what is it in my business I really am lacking, is it structure, is it the system, is it the strategy? Or is it invisible self component? Now likely it's going to be a combination and it's your invitation, I'm inviting you to look at what is the one that needs the most priority because sometimes people will go too far in one direction. Meaning, oh, they're just. The moon cycles are off, my cycle is off. Like the energy is wrong and they'll go to, they'll get entrapped into perfectionism and they will stop taking the inspired action that is required to get the skill to get out of the valley of despair, okay. Or there will people that will be just so cut off, they're so left brain, they're so in their head that they're cut off from the body, that they're cut off from the self, that they're cut off from listening to what is in alignment. Okay? And so only you are going to be able to know this answer. And if you knew that you couldn't get it wrong. What comes up for you? So that is your invitation to look at this week. What comes up for you when you look at these four essence of like well, where do I really need to look? And then once you kind of get that in place. This is a prompt I gave, that I got from my mentor, that I gave to my accelerators and I'm going to give it to you. What would you do if you had 10 times more confidence than you do right now? What comes up for you? So thanks so much for hanging out with me today. If you really want to go dive deeper and if you want to, if you really want the support, because the truth of the matter is that no million dollar business is built in a vacuum and every single person needs help identifying blind spot and help removing roadblocks. So if that's you and you know you want to go deeper, then schedule a free demonstration and we'll walk you through how we use our structure systems strategy and see if it's a good fit for yourself for your business. So be sure to check the show notes, schedule your free demonstration and I'll catch you on the next episode. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. Catch you on the next one.

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