Getting Raw - Ep #4 - Mik Forfa

Okay, it's Richard Mark Toutounji and welcome to Getting Raw. Today, I think we should be on a beach, relaxing somewhere else, not here.

But it's raining.

It's raining. That's the only reason why I've got Mick forfering today, because generally he'd generally be on a beach relaxing. All your systems are in place already for your trainers. So it's a rarity that we see in here at the office, a rarity. If you ever read The 4-Hour Workweek, if you're familiar with this, or The 4-Hour Body, this is— I think you've read this a few times, haven't you?

I have. I read that the moment it came out.

Yeah.

I actually went to the bookshop the day it came out in Australia and I bought myself a copy. And then I bought the audiobook and I've been listening to it, applying the principles for the last— I don't know how long. When did it come out? 2 years ago? I think it was about 3 years ago.

I got this in the States when I was, when I met Tim and I got it back then. So if you haven't seen Vinc, he runs a company called Fitness 2 U.

Personal trainers.

Personal trainers boot camps. And the reason why I have a bit of a joke with him is because he's recently moved to Fingal Bay. Where is Fingal Bay?

It's in Port Stephens, just past Nelson Bay, about 5 minutes outside Nelson Bay.

Okay, so you generally won't see the guy. He'll disappear and then he'll rock up, you know, looking like November every day. And the thing I love about Mick's style is that he keeps it real and he really uses the principles because you've got boot camps running around Sydney, right? And the most relaxed guy I've come across that owns a business. And he's just so relaxed.

Well, it wasn't always that way.

So I want to know your story. Tell me about what you guys do at Fitness2U and your style of owning a business.

Basically, my goal was to not get You know, my primary goal wasn't massive, massive amounts of money. Yeah. It was more lifestyle. Get a nice income, nice amount of money, something that can continue growing while I'm not there, but get a nice lifestyle. So my goal for the last, say, 2 or 3 years was to have a business where I don't have to be there. It will continue growing at a nice rate while I'm not there, but when I'm there and when I'm putting my effort in, it just speeds the growth up heaps more. So, you know, when I'm there, you know, I can double the growth within a matter of When I'm not there, it just continues growing on its own, systemized. You know, I'll check in. I'm probably down to about half an hour a day.

Half an hour a day? So you really are going the 4-hour workweek.

Well, yeah, I mean, you know, it's 2.5 hours. But I mean, there's always, you know, there'll always be one thing or something that, you know, messes up here or messes up there. So you have to correct it, you have to fix it, you know, maybe even put a new system in. But you get to a point where it's so systemized that there isn't really that much more to do other than just, you know, So

really, you know, I think the big problem with that is that trainers and business owners, what happens is they want more and they keep wanting more and more and more. And so you said that you just want to create an income where you can actually have freedom and not focus too much on, you know, supercharging the growth and then obviously you've got, you know, more issues with business growth. You just really want the lifestyle, things to run itself. But how do you stop? Don't you want more?

Look, I guess it comes from, you know, I grew up with parents that were workaholics. And I just asked myself, what the hell is the point of that? You know, you've got to watch out. So many people, rather than creating a business, they create a monster. And they're so caught in it.

An endless treadmill.

An endless treadmill. And yeah, you might be making a good amount of money, but what's the point of rocking up to a crappy lifestyle in a nice car? I'd rather rock up in a crappy car to a really nice lifestyle, or a good car to a nice lifestyle.

That's awesome. Let's talk about your system then. To do this, obviously this is not fairy tale stuff. You've actually put a lot of work into it to actually create this lifestyle. Yeah. Tell me about the systems, if you can reveal some of them to us.

Well, yeah, I don't mind. Yeah, look, you do have to work hard at first. There's no magic. I don't— maybe there are a few people around the world who can pull this off really quickly without any effort, but for the past 3 years, I've been working super hard building systems. As soon as something goes wrong, the idea is as soon as something happens that annoys you, that lifts your blood pressure, that makes you angry, think of What can I do so that this never ever happens again?

What can I do to make it never happen again?

Exactly. You put in a system. If it's a customer complaint, for example, okay, what can I do? Can I manage their expectations in some way by giving some information that they're not getting at the moment, which would then mean that they don't have that complaint ever again? Can I train my staff in some sort of different way? Can I create an induction? I've got induction systems that go for 9 months. I press play on— My client relationship management system, and it sends out emails and videos and stuff to my trainers for 9 months and, you know, it covers all the bases. And the thing I found with setting up systems is you can give someone a 10-page manual, but realistically they're going to get maybe 2 concepts out of that.

Sure.

So the idea is to give them a little bit over a long space of time.

So your trainer signs up and you're literally giving them all the systems as they're going.

As they're going, yeah. You give them the most critical stuff up front and you make sure that they've read it, you know, you give them questionnaires There's online— I've got online assessment things where the trainer goes in and fills out questions, you know.

Yeah.

We can make sure that they're being done, that they've understood those. But if you just give someone a manual, they're not gonna read it. No. So yeah, you've got to read it.

As they need it. As they need it.

And over time, it's like marketing. You've got it. The idea is internal marketing. You know, there's external marketing to clients and internal marketing to your staff.

That's really cool. That's like the golden nugget I think of this conversation is internal marketing. Same

concepts as external marketing.

Repetition. Continue to give them information that they need. Yeah. But a systemized approach.

And you've got to make sure that it's readable. So it's the same concepts. Make it pretty, you know, make big headlines, make the things that you really want to focus on stand out. Repeat them.

Yeah.

Put them into videos. Videos are always better. You know, a video and then a manual.

So you'll sit there with your system to your trainers. Will you actually video yourself? Will you video your computer screen? How do you shoot that?

Whatever you think is going to be most effective.

What do you do?

All 3.

All 3? Yeah. Okay, so you're videoing yourself, you're videoing like Camtasia on the computer screen and—

I try not to video myself too much because I don't want to make myself the focus of the business. I want the business to be the, you know—

The focus.

The focus.

Yeah, excellent. So you systemize, you thought about everything, systemize everything that way.

Well, the systems are pretty much done. I mean, there's not much more I can do on them. It's just a matter of driving the marketing now. I've built the base and now it's, you know, to get that growth that I, you know, haven't had over the last 3 years.

And I think we were talking before, I caught up with you a couple of weeks ago and we mentioned about, you know, sort of that roller coaster where you're pushing, pushing, pushing for work and then you're relaxing and then you're going up again and you're going down. And you're sort of saying from your experience, the down phase, like in that holiday phase when we're just relaxed or that we've pushed work for 3 months and then we sort of chill out, that's the phase that you're really getting things moving, don't you?

That's where you get the results. I mean, we've got to apply the, you know, the ideas of fitness training to I mean, when do you get the results after you've done all, you know, when you're working out? It's in the rest, right? You've broken the muscles, so now you need to get them to recover. It's the same with your business. You just put the hard work in. You put all that hard work in, and when you're resting, you know, magic starts happening. It's because you just put that hard work in.

Now, I want to ask you, do you do any sessions yourself? Do you do boot camp? Do you run any of that sort of stuff?

No, I haven't for about a year and a half now.

Okay, so over a year and a half, so you've really just been focusing on the system. Because I think that's really where A lot of trainers, a lot of gym owners are really getting stuck is if they start one session or 2 sessions, they get stuck in the business.

Yeah.

And they're working in the business like a treadmill. Where you've basically said that, nah, I'm getting out of business and I'm going to work on the business from day one. Even away, I mean, you don't— you're traveling a lot and you're working in different places. So you're literally looking bird's eye view from your business.

Yeah.

Not even next to the business, you're really seeing on a systemized approach. And that's it.

It allows you to see things from a, like you said, a bird's-eye point of view so you can test and measure rather than— when you're in the business, when you're working inside, you make emotional decisions. Yeah. You make, you know, you're too— I don't know, it's like you've got blinders on. You can't see things for what they really are. It's when you step out of it, that's when you can really see things, you know, as the mechanics behind it and you can say, okay, that needs to be fixed, that needs to be fixed there. But also going back to one thing you said, when I got out of personal training, when I got out of taking boot camps and stuff, there's a point at which, if you're serious about your business, if you know, okay, I'm gonna be doing this for the next, you know, 5 years, for the next 6 years, whatever, there's a point at which you need to say, okay, am I— do I want to keep being a personal trainer? Is that my passion? Or do I want to run a business? And at that point, you've got to— you might have to take a pay cut where you're not getting that money from your clients as a personal trainer anymore. Yeah. But the mentality that helps you through that is, for example, you charge your rate $80. Let's just say hypothetically you're paying your trainers $50, just as a hypothetical. Well, some people think, well, if I start personal training, I'm gonna not get that $80 an hour. Well, no, you're not gonna get $50 an hour. So as a personal trainer, you're only making $50 an hour because you can get someone else to do that session for $50. So suddenly, you know, if you look at it from that point of view, if you've got 30 sessions a week, let's just say, at $80 a session, what's that? Anyway, let's just say that—

That's all we're gonna offer you and calculate it for you. Exactly, yeah, that's true.

So you've got to multiply it. You've got 30 sessions, you've got to multiply that by 50 now. So instead of making that, you know, $2,500, you're actually making $1,500 as a personal trainer. So it makes the blow a little bit easier to take.

Sure, no, that makes sense. And it's really thinking that long picture where, yes, you need to get more clients in, but then you've got the time and the systems you're putting in place to do so. And I think that's the biggest key where really fitness industry trainers need to wrap their heads around. And that's the way— but if they want to become personal— if they want to continue doing that personal training, that one-on-one You know, one-on-one, sloshing it out, 6 AM in the morning, you know, 9, 10 PM again, go ahead, do that. But you've just taken a completely different approach, which I love.

I've gone to the extreme, you know. The alternative is you could stay in the morning sessions and not do the evening sessions, because then you could do the morning sessions and build the business during the day. It's hard to do both morning and evening and build the sessions. I did that, I did that for about a year and a half.

Yep.

And it burns you out. It really does. So I wouldn't advise that.

I think that's a good idea. So if you don't want to do the whole, let's, you know, let's move and Relax and lay in a hammock all day long. No, he doesn't do that. But you can do that AM session, so advising trainers from 6 to 10, and be really strong that you can't have those clients in the evening. And be very focused on that.

I like what you said about being strong. It's so easy when you're getting inquiries and you haven't got trainers to take those sessions, it's so easy just to go, alright, well, I'll train you myself. But you have to be strong.

Yeah, because I'll get the $160 a week, no problems. Christmas coming up, I'll put it in my pocket, no dramas.

You've got to be strong. You've got to look long-term. Again, it's that cycle. You know, you're making heaps of money as a personal trainer. You have to take that cut.

Yeah.

You know, and it goes down, but then once you've got the stuff, your business together, you're going to be making twice as much money as you ever did as a personal trainer.

So you just got to take the cuts early on and then watch out for the growth and the lifestyle. I think that's a really important key. I think you really got to figure out what lifestyle. And I think that's the beauty of being in the fitness industry is that you can be a trainer and you can be in this industry and work your own hours And, you know, a lot of personal trainers going, oh, I've got to work in the evenings and mornings. But, you know, here you are, you're changing that and you're moving around. And I remember I used to work on cruise liners. That was, you know, you can go traveling. So you can go traveling doing this. There's so many different options you can be in this fitness industry and what you can do, but you've really got to think about it before you just go leap in.

Oh yeah. Yeah, look, whenever someone asks me for business advice or someone that's got a job, you know, 9 to 5 and they want to get into business and they've got, you know, everyone's got their ideas, you know, oh, I've got this great idea. Look, there are thousands of ways There are ways to make money, you know this, you know that there are, but you've got to go first, where do I want to be, and work backwards from there. You know, it's like with fitness. What do you want? What do you want? Do you want to build strength? Do you want to build power? And then work backwards from there.

With business, do you want to build lifestyle? Do you want to build income? Do you want to work, work, work? Do you want to work less? What do you want? I think that's a good way to end.

Because you can be a personal trainer and make heaps of money. You know, you could charge, if you find the right niche, you could easily charge, you know, $150 a session as a trainer. yourself and do 4 sessions a day, 5, 6 days a week and have the best lifestyle, do the training. But you've got to be smart about it and you have to find that niche and you have to know how to get that niche.

And you've got to remember to stop when that's when you've got to stop.

And not lower your standards. If someone comes along, if you're charging $150 and someone comes along and says, well, how about I give you $100? You're like, you know, $100 is still pretty good, but you've got to say no. $150, that's it.

It's good advice, good tips. I think the next time we catch up with you, I'll be coming up your way and we'll go to the beach or something.

No problem.

And we'll be able to have him and we'll do the video from there. Awesome. And we'll just do like a 6 months on, where are they now sort of thing. How's it going?

Cool.

So it's hard to catch up with him, but when you do, grab him and, you know, have a chat to him and see what he's doing. But what's your website anyway, just so everybody can figure out what it is?

personaltrainertoyou.com.au.

personaltrainertoyou.com.au.

And that's a number 2.

Number 2. Awesome. Thanks, mate.

Thank you.