Coaches Council Podcast Episode 22: Built to Last

It's not the strongest that survive, it's the quickest to adapt that survive.

You know, the agility in your business is another key component to staying around.

For the long term, especially in this day and age. Nobody cares about that tradition. They care about the value that you're going to give them.

Right now, business is the ability to create a customer and keep a customer. That's all business is.

This is the Coaches Council, made up of six elite coaches dedicated to serving and ending personal struggle for high performers in business, health and relationships. As a collective, we have built and helped build six, seven and eight figure businesses, dominate in multiple industries, coached and played in professional sports leagues, and developed some of the strongest and most intimate relationships, both professional and personal. This isn't your average podcast. It's for the hungry, the dedicated, the doers, for those that have a dream and truly want that dream to become reality. People who want to take action, leave their ego at the door and own every level of their life. If that's you, then step into the coach's counsel as we rewrite the truths to living that high performance life. Welcome back back to another week of the Coaches Council. We got Drew, Perdeep, Craig and Brian. Let's go fellas. So this week talking about business building and it's always so exciting when you're celebrating 5 years anniversary, 10 years anniversary, 25 years anniversary. But how do you get there? How do you build a business that stands the test of time and really build businesses that last? We're coming out of this unprecedented Covid where a lot of businesses didn't make it through. And the fact that people have seen 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 year anniversaries for their businesses, it gets exciting. But then you've got people who understand what it takes to build a business and have it go on for 10, 15, 25, 35, even generations down the road. Now, Craig, what does it take to build a business like that?

Well, I think it takes vision, it takes leadership and it takes the ability to constantly evolve and change. Those are just three. I'm sure the other guys will come up with a few other characteristics. But if. Well, here's what I see. I see a lot of young people, men and women, starting businesses in e commerce space and wanting to flip the business or wanting to leave the business in a year, wanting it to. They love using the phrase passive income. And I'm going to tell you, there's very, very, very, very little passive income available to anybody in the world. You have to do a lot of work either at the start. And then maybe it generates income for you when there's no work later on, but you've already put in so much work that you can hardly call it passive income. But a lot of people, and generally again, it's younger people because that's just what young folks want. They just need to wise up to the world. They don't have a long term vision and they aren't going to become great leaders because they often suffer from poor communication skills, whether it's from their own ego or whether they don't know how to communicate, because that's really not taught that well in school. Leadership is generally taught in organizations outside of school, everything from Girl Guides to, to sports and all that sort of stuff. So, you know, someone didn't participate in those things and didn't have parents who were great leaders. You know, maybe they're great parents, but they weren't great leaders and they don't have a vision. Well, the business is not going to last for a long time, which is fine because they're going to learn painful lessons and go back and then they will, you know, provided they come back, they'll come back stronger and get better. Which goes into the third part, that the business you start today is unlikely to be the business that you're going to be in in a few years from now. So I started out as personal trainer, then I moved into on and then strength coach, which was slightly different than personal trainer. Then into selling workout programs online as books, then into videos, then into coaching entrepreneurs in the fitness world, now into coaching entrepreneurs in general. Along the way I've written books like it's not the same business. Even though it's not far removed, but it's still not the same business. Even Uber, Uber got into it. The whole story of Uber was it was invented by a couple of guys. The first idea for it was at south by Southwest. They were like, man, I wish you could just get like a black car limo to come pick you up on demand instead of hiring one for like 800 bucks a night. Clearly a first world problem. And now the main revenue driver of Uber, I believe is Uber Eats. Now that did the guy think, one day what we'll be doing is delivering tacos to somebody at 4 o' clock in the morning. That's going to be the real business here. They didn't know that, but that's what it has become. Because Uber continues to look for new revenue streams. Some of the old ones get harder to do. Covid comes in the world and all of a sudden DoorDash, six months ago was a company on the verge of bankruptcy. Today, they're worth $14 billion. And some businesses went out of business because of COVID such as a lot of restaurants. But then a company like DoorDash, which requires that industry, the food service industry, is thriving now. I'm not sure if they're profitable yet, but their valuation, because they're privately pre IPO held, their $14 billion valuation now, because they got saved by something that destroyed so many other people. So the agility in your business is another key component to staying around for the long term. And you can even take a look at Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway was a textiles company that he bought, and now it's the Holdman company for all these other things that he owns. And that's just if you're going to be around for 80, 90 years like Warren and Charlie, you're not going to be in the same business that you started in. And that's a very important mindset. A fluid and flexible mindset is also.

A very important thing in doing that. Basically, what you're saying is the evolution comes down to taking smart, calculated risks.

I like what Warren says, is that he doesn't take risks. He looks at things and he goes, everybody looks at what I do. And they say, well, that's risky, but it's all within my circle of competence. So for me, it isn't high risk. Everything has a risk to it, and he's not winning a lot these days, but it's not really risky to him because he knows it so well. It's like somebody walking a tightrope. Well, to me, that seems incredibly risky, but to a person who spent 20 years practicing, it's not that much of a risk. So, yeah, it is. What you just said there, I mean.

You kind of answered the next question that I was going to come out with in terms of the smart, calculated risk is how do you figure out what it is for you? What is it? Because we hear so many people saying, you want to get. You got to get comfortable being uncomfortable. You got to step outside of that comfort zone. You got to really push the envelope in a lot of ways. And for a lot of people, without kind of taking that out of context, it becomes reckless and it becomes taking a. Like swinging at a pinata in the dark. So how do you, Craig, to that point, guys, jump in as you feel free and as you want to tap in on this. But how do you figure out how far is too far?

Well, I'm going To use a sports analogy, Right. So I'm going to use. My favorite sport is competitive eating. So, you know, if you're going into the hot dog eating competition and you've never done this before and you try to eat 51 hot dogs, you're going to be in a world of pain, obviously. But what you need to do is get comfortable being uncomfortable by taking small bites and getting to the point where you're uncomfortable, but not super uncomfortable. And then you come back in another training session and you become even more, you know, get used to even more being more uncomfortable. This is an actual analogy I'm using, but it's the same for business. Like, you don't go and just drop $5,000 on Facebook ads in day one. I mean, you can't actually do it anyways. They won't allow you in your account. But, you know, some people will drop a lot of money. I've seen people drop, you know, go and say, well, I just ordered A back this 15 years ago, people would order 1,000 DVDs of a course they just created, spending 10, 20, 30, $40,000 in inventory. And maybe today it's buying $50,000 worth of a supplement and then not being able to sell it. Well, you don't do that. That's like eating 51 hot dogs on your first day. No, Instead you eat three to five hot dogs. You buy $1,000 worth of inventory. And that is possible in this day and age. You sell an ebook or something and see, like, does this idea even have merit? And then, you know, like, that's uncomfortable, man. It's going to be 500 bucks to create this. Well, that's uncomfortable, but it's not $5,000 worth of uncomfortableness. And so it's the same with Drew doing a hundred mile run. He didn't run 100 miles on day one. He worked his way up. And so you become comfortable with different levels of uncomfortableness. And so it's a matter of experience, trial and error, getting expert advice. And then you start to get, you know, start to be able to be wise enough where it's within your circle of competence to know what risk you're willing to take.

It really goes back to almost what we talked about in that episode about extraordinary versus just out of ordinary, where if you want to go from A to Z, you don't go from A to Z. You go from A to B, B to C. And then that jump from Y to Z doesn't become all that tough anymore. Right now, Brian, your business is very different from really everybody else is on here because you do have a brick and mortar facility, you do have something that stands. Now, what has been the difference for you and your process to be able to be that Gym of the Year, Trainer of the year multiple years in a row leading to this entity that is fns?

Yeah. You know, it comes down to these three things and it's spot on exactly. With having a vision and leadership. So those are like you want to grow. Those are the, you have to have those things. You know, it's one thing we talk about with our team all the time is saying, guys, let's be focused on cause over circumstance. Circumstance is going to happen. Let's put our focus and attention on the cause, not the circumstance. Circumstance is going to happen. If we put too much attention on this thing that happened right now, it's going to make us lose sight of the cause of what we're trying to, trying to do. And the three things that we look at, it's basically just constantly, it's cyclical, it's adapt, assess and act. And when we look at these things is that you have to assess the situation. You have to see where you're at. You have to see, does your business model work? You have to see what's going on. Assessing the gyms in the area, training in the area, or just what's going on in the world so you have an idea, so you're staying on top of it. Innovative, not just relevant. We don't want to be like everybody else. How do we be two steps ahead? By seeing things that are happening within different industries and things we can learn from. Whether that's a lot of, lot of stuff I learned is outside of our industry. You know, when I'm looking at customer service stuff, I'm not saying, hey, how's the gym down the street? Customer service? I don't give a shit about that. I'm like doing full on reports on Audi service, how they took care of us and my car went down. I'm going to learn best practices from typically things that are outside of my industry. And so, you know, when we look at a lot of these things, that was one of the big shift for me in terms of evolving. So many times people stay pigeonholed within the box of the industry they're in. These guys are doing this, these guys are doing this. But actually those best practices aren't the best practices. Maybe in that small, little teeny box, but then you got to start getting outside of the box. So when I really started going out, you Know a couple years ago when I started going out because you know, in the fitness industry, as I'm sure most industries are, whether real estate or they all kind of have their group and they do their things or conferences within. So for years and years and years I was the attendee going to a lot of fitness conferences and then I became one the of one of the presenters at these big fitness conferences. But I was still saying this bubble, but I was like, you know what, I'm seeing a lot of the same stuff, hearing a lot of the same stuff. I got to get outside the box. And then I started going to these different, completely different things with marketing and I start learning about Grant Cardone, which I'm sure most of you guys know, and I start going to sales boot camp and I'm like, this is a whole another world in terms of thinking and acting and assessing. And it just, it blew my mind. And that was the biggest thing, is that getting out of your box, seeing that the four walls that you live in is not the industry that you're in, which is people's biggest problem. They think that the industry is their brick and mortar space. And then the second problem is they think that it's just a couple locations around there and they lose sight of what's most important to the client. What does the client really need? What does the client really want? How are you ultimately, at the end of the day, if you're in any type of service based business, the only thing really people are paying you for is are you making their easier? I mean that's why you hire a coach. Hired a coach. What Pradeep is going to tell you, what Craig is going to tell you is what you could probably see on YouTube with his own content for free over and over and over and over again. But he's going to shrink that time and make sure that there's a high level of accountability, it's personal and it's going to make it done that much faster. And so I think that's really what it comes down to, is always being focused on, on how are we simplifying people's lives, making it easier while still getting them results. What do we need to adapt? What do we need to assess the process, what do we need to act and never ever, ever being married to your old ways. And this is something that I heard from a buddy of mine, Bobby Stroup, he said, he said probably quote it wrong, but tradition, the word tradition is by people, is used by people who are too fucking lazy to think of anything new. And a lot of times we. And I was like the most powerful things. Oh, it's tradition. Tradition. It's a word that people are so lazy to not think of anything new and innovate because that tradition is going to keep you stuck in the mud. That no one, the market, that especially in this day and age, nobody cares about that tradition. They care about the value that you're going to give them right now. So they don't care that we were best gym year after year after year. If I don't serve their ass today and give them an amazing experience today, right now, up, none of that crap matters. They don't care. Personal training here. If I'm off today, nobody. It's we in the service world, in the market, it is. What have you done for me lately? And if people don't have that mentality, then it's going to be very hard to evolve because you're always going to get caught up in your own hype, which is ultimately going to be the anchor that pulls you down. So I think by definitely never believing your own hype that you've made, it is probably the most fundamental thing that is going to help anybody grow. Because the second you feel like, all right, we're cool, we made it, you're effed, you're screwed. Because that next young hungry or whoever is going to come in and they're going to take that marketplace because they're going to focus on what that person needs or what that group needs. And so just having that mindset that, as they say, that white belt mentality that you just. Your best is yet to come. You got to keep showing up day in and day out. And when you have that mindset, it actually becomes. Business becomes a lot more fun because you're constantly looking for new ways to innovate, simplify and maximize the efficiency and the results for the people that you're serving.

We'd be remiss if we didn't take this time to thank our sponsors that allow us to reach you each and every week. The coaches council is powered by cannibrands, a lab tested all natural, pure hemp CBD company without the presence of thc. They encompass our passion for health, wellness and fitness that we have on the coaches council. Visit canibrands.com and at checkout use the promo code coaches20 to enhance your wellness journey. Brian, you surmised. What the coaches council is so well is none of us have come from the same cloth. We all have come from different places, we all operate in different places. And I relate so heavily to what you said about how we all stay in our little bubble. It was what I did in the strength conditioning world for years and until I met Craig and went to his events, that's when I started to open up my eyes to the Grant Cardone's of the world, the Gary Vee's of the world, the Bedros Coolians of the world, these people that thought differently and saw the world differently and opened up my eyes to so many different things. But here we're able to do it all in one place because we've all come from different places and have different backgrounds, different strengths and are ultimately operating businesses, serving people in different ways. And that is. It's incredible what happens. So you're exactly right. I want to touch on something that it's. In any business, there's going to be ups and downs. So what happens when others surpass you or what happens when you fall just short of what you were wanting to do? And Drew, I know that there's been a lot of different ways in which your business has driven to get to where you are right now. What have you had to do in order to make your business something that's built to last, even through the pitfalls and the ups and downs that happen naturally in business?

Yeah, the first thing I'll say, and it kind of hit me when you were explaining this or asking about this, was, you know, what do you do when someone else, someone else surpasses you? If you are focused on what other people are doing so much that you are worried that you're falling behind.

You.

Don'T have that focus that you need to make your business successful, first of all, because if you're comparing, contrasting, you're automatically going to lose. No matter what. Stay in your lane and focus on what you're doing well and what your business is about. And the story that comes to mind that has helped me with my business and seeing success in other people's businesses is the story that David Goggins told one time where he was talking to this NFL player who came to him and said, hey, I, you know, I kind of lost my drive. I've been in the NFL. I made it. You know, I thought that would be this end all, be all thing. And now I just don't have that drive anymore. And the problem that, that, that he, that David Goggin sees and other people see is that you don't. People will have this goal in mind and they think that's the ultimate goal, but when they reach that goal, there's no and then what? There's no thought process past that. As a young kid, when you're dreaming to play in the NFL, the NBA, that's the ultimate dream. But the average person plays three to four years, and they don't have a plan after that because they've only built up enough limiting beliefs in their head that, okay, once I get there, then everything will be taken care of. And that's not the case when it comes to business. If you're only focused on that one goal and then. And then you can rest and relax like Thanos, you know, once the world is over, and then you can relax. That's not. How are you going to build a successful business in the long run? It's not the strongest that survive. It's the quickest to adapt that survive. And you see story after story of all kinds of businesses that, man, it feels like they made it. They're up on top. And then decades pass and what happens? Boom, they're out of business. Blockbuster, for example, there's a good book I read good to great. It talks just about that and how important it is to be quick to adapt but never be satisfied with. Even if you are on top, you have to always be asking, okay, and then what? What's the next thing? Right? And if you get complacent with just that one goal, and then you think that the world's just gonna keep feeding you when you're on top, that's not gonna happen. And so for me, you know, I've only been in business with my business 10 years, but this is the longest job I've ever had in my life, believe it or not. You know, from the. The first career I had after college to where I am now, this is the longest job I've ever had. And I think all of us here are trying to build a business that lasts. Right? None of us are wanting to go out of business anytime soon. So we are all on that journey of building a business that lasts. And what are we all doing? We're all adapting to our circumstances that we're in. Right? COVID 19 was a huge punch to the gut and to the face, to all of us in so many different ways. Okay, what are we going to do? We can't do business the way we've been doing it. We have to learn to adapt quickly, otherwise we'll fall behind. How many gyms have closed, for example, in the fitness industry because they didn't adapt? Right? They had this business model that had worked for decades, and then now all of a sudden, coronavirus happens and boom, everyone's going out of business. You know, I think for me, it's a couple things. Being quick to adapt, but then never being hungry or satisfied with even when you are on top. And I'll be. I'll be totally honest and vulnerable with you guys here. I've had those moments where I felt like, I'm good, I don't need to go any harder. Why push harder? I'm already at the quote unquote top. And then Facebook changes their algorithm and boom, all of a sudden my ads aren't converting and boom, there goes 90% of my profits. And that's happened to me before. And those are some great learning experiences for all of us. You know, when you make mistakes, when you fail, you know, life is happening for you, not to you in those moments. And so I think it's those two things is being quick to adapt and then never being satisfied. And continue to ask yourself, okay, once I reach that, then what?

Yeah, Drew, I really like what you said in terms of adaptability, because I think that's fundamentally the most important thing. So, Justin, when you were talking at the beginning, you were saying seven. You know, having a business for seven, 10, 15, 35 years, I was laughing because that is rare these days. If a business is going to last past 10 years, you know, you give yourself a pat on the back. If you take a look at the Fortune 1000, the average time that they're lasting now is like seven to 10 years, which tells you something. So adaptability is absolute. Like, it is. The most important thing that you can do out there is create an agile organization. That means agile processes. That mean an agile team, a team that can adapt on the spot. When things like this happen, your people are your biggest asset. When it comes to your business. If you have people that are stuck in their old ways, you're not going to be able to adapt. But there's something that, for those of you out there that know Peter Drucker, for example, he is the world's most famous business management consultant. And he said that business is fundamentally, if you want to break it down, it's about two things. It's about marketing and innovation. And I took that very seriously when I first started studying business, like two decades ago. And he was right. Because if you really want to be successful in business, you got to have great marketing and you got to be really good at innovation. And you break that down and you will have a successful business overall. But I think there's something else on Top of this too. And we're seeing that with businesses that, that are going under right now. So Covid, this example, and it kind of sounds harsh, but it's weeding out the weak businesses. It's weeding out the businesses because a lot of businesses, I would say from my personal experience, about half of them operate in the red anyways. They don't have the cash flow reserves, they're not operating effectively where they're actually making enough profit. So this unfortunately is putting a lot of people out of business. But it's actually a wake up call for a lot of businesses to say you have to change how you're operating. Kind of like working out. You've got to be lean, right? You can't be overweight, you can't be super skinny. You gotta be lean, right? You gotta be that lean, mean machine. And for me, I keep reminding whenever I'm working with entrepreneurs, especially not so much executives, but entrepreneurs, business is fundamentally this. And if you can understand this, you will be successful for a very long time. Business is the ability to create a customer and keep a customer. That's all business is. And so if you can continue to do that throughout your career, throughout your life, you're going to be very successful. It's when people get tied into, particularly their product or their service, that's when they drown, that's when they literally die. Because business, and I'm getting into the technical pieces here, but I think it's important for people to know in terms of how to survive through Covid, because these are the things that I'm literally coaching people day in and day out is there's four things to your business right now. There's your product and your service. There's your delivery, there's. There's your offer and then there's your market. Those are the four components to business. If you get stuck in any one of those, your business is going to become old and it's going to dry up. So you can change any one of those. Let's just say, for example, restaurants have changed how they deliver their product, right? It's no longer in the restaurant itself, they're actually doing takeout. So you can switch it up in any one of those four categories and actually create a new business. You can take your product, a one time sale, and turn it into a subscription model, thus changing up your offer. So these are important things to pay attention to. But if I'm going to sum it up for people out there is focus on customers, not necessarily your product or service. If you Find a customer base or a market that needs servicing. Maybe it's under service or it's not being serviced at all, or you think you can service them better. That's where the real opportunity is in making sure that your business is successful long term.

It's such a great summary, Pradeep, because so often we're going down this road of not knowing where to turn, not knowing where to look, and being able to understand that marketing innovation is where it stands from. And ultimately business comes down to creating and keeping that customer. It couldn't get much simpler than that. When something that we've said has resonated with somebody so strongly and they're like, man, I'm looking at my business and it really is built on. It's a deck of cards and kind of maybe duct tape together a little bit. What is the first step that we need to do or that that listener needs to do so that they can go and start the process to really building that business that can withstand the test of time. Craig, what would you say one of those first steps are? And I want to hear from each one of you guys what that first step would be.

Well, you got to audit the business and triage it as to where you have the bleeding neck wounds and then, you know, take care of them. It's just the analogy of like you bring in somebody into the emergency room if they got a broken leg and they have a bleeding neck, listen, the broken leg will have to wait. I got to deal with this bleeding neck so you can stabilize the business. And so it's probably cutting expenses smartly, not cutting everything, and then just focusing on what I call the low hanging fruit. Where's the money just sitting on the table for that business to go out and grab it in most cases, kind of tacking on to what Pradeep said. If you're able to keep the customer, the customer is probably willing to buy from you again. And it shouldn't cost you much money, it costs you a little bit of money. Everything always costs a little bit of money. But you should be able to go out and generate revenue and profit from the current customers that you have. So slash the expenses smartly and then generate profitable sales. And then now hopefully you've stabilized the business. But you have to definitely go hard on the short term stuff too. And I'm sure Brian will have some good stuff on leadership. But you obviously have to communicate clearly to everybody and follow the Stockdale paradox from Admiral James Stockdale, which was confront the brutal facts, but always have long term Optimism. And so you need to be clearly communicating to the end. We actually just did a mastermind with some gym owners and my friend Luca Hochobor was on there and he was talking about, hey, listen, I don't tell everybody on my team that's all rainbows and puppy dogs. I tell them Bryce from FBBC Fit Body Boot Camp was on there too, and he said the same thing. We tell people it's probably going to get worse, and it still probably has room to get a lot worse. You're going to get high hopes and then they're going to get crushed. And you got to be ready for that, because if you think that there are no brutal facts or you ignore them, then you're really going to be in a world of hurt. So those are the things that I would look at.

Yeah, I think a lot of it's dependent on the industry that you're in. You know, if you're in the fitness industry or you're an entrepreneur, it's dependent on the industry. Right. Certain industries are booming right now. Certain industries are hurting really bad right now. And I think it's applicable this, this principle in the fitness industry, you know, 1% better. And if you know what your bread and butter is in your industry focusing on getting 1% better, I think that would be the ideal place to start is, you know, what brings in revenue. So those revenue streams that you, that are your bread and butter, if you could focus on getting 1% better at those, and most of your attention is focused on that, I feel like that's a good place to get started. And then from there, you know, maybe leave 10 to 20% of your time for creativity of, okay, what can I do to add new streams of revenue? What can I do to evolve my business and bring in these other streams of revenue? But I feel like the 1% better approach in the systems that are already in place will help make that deck of cards a little bit more solid. And now you're maybe it's Legos necks or, you know, or pieces of wood and then brick. And I think that's a good principle to apply to your business. No matter what industry you're in, though.

Yeah. I think what these two gentlemen said is bang on. So Craig, talking about the defensive strategy, cutting costs and going offensive, and then the 1% better is absolutely critical. The one thing for me that stands out is really knowing your customers and knowing the people that you're going after. Because if you know your customers well, there's always something that you can service them with that's a challenge. Most people don't understand their customers inside and out. Like right now, there's businesses where we've been able to transition their product and their service offering to the exact same customers because they know exactly what their customers want. They can create an affiliate offer or something else to service those customers because they know them inside. Now, the second thing that stands out for me is look for problems. If you really want to be able to create a successful business, if you want to have a lot of sales, make a lot of money, you solve people's problems. And right now, people have more problems than ever in Covid. And there's a lot of people that are making a lot of money because they're able to come up with these solutions. As Craig talked about doordash and Uber Eats, they've been solving these problems for people that still want takeout but can't go to the restaurants. So if you find problems, you're guaranteed to find a solution that's going to make money for them.

Guys, each one of those solutions are something that is immediately actionable and people can go and take them and implement them right away to see changes so that they can start instituting and bring their business around to stand the test of time and be the last one standing ultimately. Because Craig, as you had mentioned, who knows if this gets any worse, who knows if it what happens in a month, two months, six months from now, the new challenges that happens, if it's not Covid, it's going to be something else. So there's always going to be something there and adaptability and having these skill sets that each one of us has talked about today is brilliant to being able to stand the test of time and build that business that lasts. So thanks again for listening, stay hungry, stay humble, and we'll see you next week. Thank you so much for joining us for another week of the coaches council. If it wasn't for you viewers and listeners, we wouldn't have a platform. So again, it's all about you guys and we want to give you a reward just for listening. We want to give you access to each one of our coaches for a little bit deeper intimate experience. So if you go to coaches-counsel.com coaches-counsel.com subscribe and like to whatever platform you're viewing on, you're going to be entering to have that one on one experience. So be sure to go coaches-cell.com and really interact with us because we would love to interact with you. Until then, stay safe, stay hungry, stay humble. And thanks for listening.