Becoming the Mayor of your Gym (Part 1) | Building a Real Company

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Hey guys, good morning! It’s Coach Will of Big Little Gyms and today, I want to talk about becoming the Mayor of your gym. I have my whiteboard behind me and you may or may not be able to see it. And right now, in my video and I look at myself, it shows up backward. I don’t know if Facebook flips it around so you can see it. But anyway, we’re going to talk today, guys. This might be part one of a couple of videos that I do that I think you’re gonna be probably right spot on for just about anybody who runs a gym and is running [inaudible 00:01]. 

Most businesses fail and most businesses think it’s all about strategy and credentials when building their team and they don’t realize that the real, real money shot in their business is the talent and the culture. So we’re talking about that means because gym owners think because they built a business full of people who like to work out and hang out together that they built culture when they often haven’t built anything that has to do with culture. They just built a good place to go workout, they haven’t built at any type of scale. They don’t have any, you know, there’s nothing of real substance there in regards to actual culture and it’s usually done on accident and not on purpose. It was not engineered in, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to stay around. This is also the reason why businesses have customers. That’s the number one reason for businesses that have customers and have cash flow, fail. Actually, I looked this up. I looked this up and I found it and also I found a bunch of graphs and studies. I was looking up the number one reason why businesses fail and they pulled like start-up founders and business people and consultants. And this is like a poll of, like, tens of thousands of people in business that make way more money than all of us and they’re like, “What were the top reasons businesses fail?”. 

And number one was no market need. Okay, the number one was no market need which means that no one in the area wanted it. They may start a business [inaudible 00:01] no one in the market, right? This could be a software company, could be an app, it could be a bulk more business, it could be any number of those things. And the number one reason why they fail is because they invest in something nobody wants, right? Now it might be the case with your gym but it’s probably not, more likely in your market. People want you to sell, more likely every market and even the most pro downtown in the middle of nowhere. There’s a gym somewhere making millions of dollars. Might not be your gym but there are gyms doing it, okay? And every market in the most pro downtown in the middle of nowhere in the country, there’s product-market fit is already done for you, so you don’t need to really worry about that. People want fitness, they want what you have, they want lifestyle, behavior change, they want nutrition, they want all of these things, right? 

Number two is they run out of cash, okay? So they run out of cash, they just, you know, their cost rises faster than the cash flow can accumulate to cover the cost they want in business, right? And for some of you that’s a real thing, right? But for most of you guys, you got a little bit of runway in front of you, you got a while ago and acquired a business tomorrow. But you know, the thing is once you get cash flow, if you don’t fix this next thing then this often kind of comes back around to bite you in the butt, right? 

So number three in this is so we can establish that once you have product-market fit unless you have a little bit of cash flow to cover your bills and you’re able to stay open, the top reason becomes not the right team, okay? The top reason for not seeing a business becomes not having the right team, not having the right people on board and it’s not having a team. Don’t misunderstand me. It doesn’t mean just building a team. It means having the right team, okay? The right people on board. This is how you become the Mayor of your gym and real quick, if you try to figure out what I mean in becoming the Mayor of your gym, become the Mayor of your gym means like what the Mayor does in almost every city is, they are not the person responsible for making, you know for aggregating reports, aggregating data, making delegating you know, in all these different departments. The city has so many different departments, right? It has, you know, it has a bunch of revenue-generating profit centers as a city with taxes and things like that but it also has plumbing and sewer and electrical and just probably a hundred systems that a city runs on. And the Mayor is not responsible for any of that. The Mayor is the face of the city, right? The Mayor is the person who represents the city and their job is to shake hands and kiss babies. They are not in, that they’re not, they’re not down in the plumbing system cranking off wrenches, right? In fact, the Mayor of most cities has probably never got electricity work in their life, probably has never picked up a wrench in their recent life. Maybe they have, maybe they have it but they’re not down there cranking on, you know, not down there cranking on the bolts in the plumbing, right? Like the city, they delegate that to some type of city services division. Someone else in the service division delicate that down further to some sort of managers, that managers delegate that down for this some sort of worker bee, that worker bee goes down there and makes a repair that is necessary for the city to keep running, right? That is what becoming the Mayor means, right?. So doesn’t mean removing yourself from your business. You’re never gonna hear me say, “Oh like I would like you to run your gym if it’s, though your gym as if you can just leave it, with intent to leave it”, right? With intent to leave it. We don’t know gym owners, nobody owns a gym just trying to build this business, we don’t even have to go there, and most of you want to go there, you built this business because of the lifestyle business that serves you, right? This is the business that works for you and has a soft spot in your heart and it needs what we call “Ikigai” which is the Japanese word for a reason for being where it meets these four criteria that make someone feel whole to own the business, right? And that is what you’re good at, it’s what the world needs, that’s what you’re passionate about and it’s where you can make money doing, right? That’s what Ikigai is. And my goal is to become a Mayor so you can achieve that because you want to walk in your business and not feel like you have to do anything. Once you walk into your business, you feel like you want to do it. I’m excited to do this thing with my business. So I wanna put my whiteboard over real quick here coz’ I got a bunch of stuff and this time I want to show you guys it’s very practical in regards to this. So just give me a second when I flip this thing over. I lost a little thing that holds it all together. Of course, we got technical difficulties going on during our live broadcast. I got to fix this. Scott is shaking hands and kissing babies. That’s right. It is all about shaking hands and kissing babies. So I wanted to kind of break this down to another level for you guys, coz’ *inaudible* walk with the actual steps and you spend your time watching things like this, okay? 

So what is building a real company? There are five things that you need to know for talking about building a real company. 

Number one is we’re talking about the entrepreneur’s dilemma. So what is an entrepreneur’s dilemma? An entrepreneur’s dilemma is a situation where you start a business, you figure it out a little bit, you figure out the base moving parts. You like one of the five or six things my business is done every day to run this thing. You did a few customers. You start making a profit and profit to cover your bills and maybe pay yourself a little bit and then have a realization that you’re a slave to your own machine. You built this machine and you’ve got all these different roles you’re responsible for. Making possible these different roles for your business where I can give that today because I only got like 10 minutes to finish this video. And I wanna make sure it’s concise for you guys. [Inaudible 00:03] situation you built yourself into a machine. You kind of like the matrix and you’re plugged into the matrix. You don’t need to realize it and that like matrix can’t run without you, without taking your energy, right? So I’ll tell you some situations where if you stop, the money stops, you essentially bought yourself a job. You probably left your job to do this and then after a couple of years, you like damn it, I have a job again.  Not enjoying this, right? So I’ll switch hands because I am AMRAP-ing holding with my right arm, it is killing me. 

So what is a real company? A real company is a business that runs smoothly, without you. It runs. It doesn’t mean it has to run without you. You know right here, it can run smoothly without you so you can take a vacation. You can walk away from the gym. You can take a week off and it still generates profits and it still runs smoothly and you’re not losing money because the real cost of a vacation for your business is not the cost of the vacation. The real cost of the vacation is the opportunity cost that you experience when you walk away and shit falls apart and revenue stops coming in and no one’s there to do sales. No one’s there to onboard a new client, no one’s there to coach the classes. So business just stops, right? And even if the shortcomings wouldn’t cost you money, they will in the long term. If you have one of those gyms where I coach every class and I could take a weekend off, my clients don’t care, I can close down for the weekend, and they’ll be okay with it because I’ll come back Monday. You’ll get away with that for a little bit but eventually, your client’s better gym down the road, a gym owner that runs this stuff like a real business is uptown on the road. They’re gonna see the fact of that, they’re gonna be attracted to that because that’s the kind that they want to work with, be surrounded by, and just gonna go over there before too long. That’s what’s gonna happen, okay? So you build a business that doesn’t need you. Maybe the business wants you, maybe your staff wants you, maybe your people, I mean your clients want you but they don’t need you, right? They’re gonna have the same experience, same fulfilling experience, right? And really like you coming in as the Mayor and shaking their hands and kissing their babies, just puts it over the top for like, “Will came over to me”. That’s what I did for my gym the last couple of years. It was like fighting over someone and said hi to him and said their first name. It was like they were talking to, you know, a movie star because that’s how I was held in my gym. I wasn’t held in their guard up like some coach that they always have access to. When they have a high level of access to you, they tend to, so I’m looking for, then and not like really value that much, right? But when they don’t see you that often, you forgot their name and you commonly say their name, now sun over the moon, they just became a member for like, two more years coz’ it like “Will cares about me, and here’s this guy that’s to big things and is a mover and a shaker”, right? So you have to be able to remove yourself from your business, right there. Sorry. I just read that. You had to remove yourself from your business right here. You don’t have to remove yourself from your business if you want to coach 2 to 5 classes a week and that fulfills you, fills up your cup and allows you to help be the Mayor of your business, and draws people in.  And if you’re going to coach, you know, 9 AM CrossFit and like all of a sudden [inaudible 00:02]  when I’m CrossFit because you’re coaching today and that helps you be the Mayor of the gym, then that’s amazing. It gives you energy. That’s really how you can encapsulate all of this. Like if your business is built to do the things that give you energy, then you’re succeeding in business. If it forces you to do things that take away your energy, if you feel like after you do something, you have less energy, then you are on the wrong track. If you do something and afterwards you’re energized by it, like I invite you in this video for you guys, then like you are on the right track. You’re operating in your Ikigai, okay?

So number four, you’re hiring and managing a team that’s going to become number one priority once you’ve got cash flow, even if it’s a little bit and you have customers. This is the number one success to freedom in your business. Over the weekend, we have the BLG Flagship Summit and you all the gym owners have done all the marketing stuff, all the sale stuff. They’ve done all this stuff with us in our business and we got to talk and I was, you know. I really then think, you know, hiring and delegation and things like that. We’re gonna be a sexy topic for the weekend so I really didn’t plan to talk about it very much. But by day two, it was all we were talking about,  all these successful gym owners. That’s all they were stressing, but that they had done well that had worked for liberating them to be able to be in Phoenix, here. While the business still, when I turn, profit. Then one gym owner, I was sitting in the elevator, and she was getting a text from her Manager and her Manager sending a smiley face and say, “We just signed up three clients” while she was here and we are going to the pool party at the Flagship Summit. That’s what’s going on. And I was like right there, I smiled and I was like “This person is being the Mayor of their gym”. This is how it must be done, right? She loves being at her gym but she also loves being at this pool party right now. She can do it and not feel bad. And her coach is excited to tell her about how they signed three clients the day she was gone, right? That’s how you build. That’s what a real good team looks like, right? That’s what A’s do. We hire A’s, right? 

That’s the next big part, guys. If A’s hire A’s, and B’s hire C’s, right?  You don’t hire people because of the credentials, you don’t hire people because they’re qualified. That’s not why you hire people. You don’t hire using strategy and credentials and like things like that. You also don’t use the higher, the most skilled person and anything, right? Like you don’t want a specialist or the worst things you can do for your gym. If your gym largely serves normal people which most of our gyms do. Might be the case you’re talking to someone who runs the competitor’s specific gym, where everybody’s against the competitor. I don’t think that’s most gyms these days. Most gyms aren’t making money. Anyways, most gyms are passion projects but if you are a for-profit gym serving normal people, you usually want to hire the best athlete in the gym, right? And the reason why is because that’s a specialist, right? That’s someone really really good at one thing. You probably also want to hire the very very best coach in your gym and that all sounds crazy for me to say but like your job is not to hire someone to fill this one need for a short-term purpose. You’re trying to build a team of A’s. And here’s the thing is A’s hires A‘s. So if you hire someone that’s a generalist that’s really really good at a lot of things, they’re good at, see they’re, see they’re really good at coaching but they’re also really good at admin but they’re also really good in management, in management skills but also really really good at cleaning the gym, they do it all, start out by cleaning the gym, they can do all these things that gives them energy, hire that person, bring them on board. Because it will happen. A’s follow A’s, right? And also a thing about A’s is like these people that have strong core values and it probably aligns really really well with your business and when that happens, like, you really don’t have to give them very much input. Like you really can’t persuade them anyways because a lot of times A’s are smarter than you. As a gym owner, honestly, like I’ve hired some A’s and most of them are smarter than me. Right, most of them are smarter than me. I’m, you know, really really good with a couple things, there’s things that I’m not good at. That’s why I hire A’s because A’s are smart at a lot of things, right? And they’re gonna hire and attract other A’s. We’ve all seen it when like there’s some excess, excess of coaches from a gym and all A’s, because they all follow each other to the next gym. They don’t track each other, right? 

Now B’s hire C’s. You go and hire a B, you gonna hire some kid who’s a specialist because right now, you need a coach. So you hired the kid because he loves coaching fitness but then like it’s beneath him to go, smop the floor. It’s beneath him to go clean the bathroom, it’s beneath him to go do some data entry and spreadsheet work. It’s below him to do all these things. You hire that kid and then when you tell him, “Hey I need you to hire an assistant, I need you to hire a coach”. He’s going to hire a C, right? Because B’s hires C’s and B’s want to be king . B’s want to be king of your gym. And they want to tell you how it should be done. And they only think it’s about this one little thing that they’re really really good at when we know in business, there’s a bunch of things you got to be good at and this business to be good at and to do to be successful at, right? 

So guys, just to bring it all home at the bottom there, the main cause of death for companies that have customers and cash flow is this, okay? This you’re going to see me doing some follow-up content diving deeper on this stuff because each of this is just an overview you know, we got the Entrepreneur’s dilemma. You know, starting a business figuring it out, getting customers, making a profit and then building yourself in that, into that machine as a slave of the machine, right? Like you pretty much are doing with redundant work over and over and over again, low-value work. When you should be doing with high value work of business, so what I mean by that is when you’re doing work that you can pay someone to $20.00 an hour to do, you are, you are putting yourself in a position where you are devaluing yourself and you’re going to go out of a business eventually. Like it’s going to lead to burnout. You know most is finding at the BLG Mastermind this weekend, the Flagship mastermind and the Summit, half the gym owners that were there, there were 20 some gym owners there. Half of them there had bought their gym. It’s a second-hand gym they bought off to someone else and we asked them why the previous owners left the business. Every time, it was burnout. It was burnout every time. Most of the gyms were bought during COVID. These were gyms that were bought because of the COVID thing. The COVID thing, I understand the reason why some people got out. Because some people were kind of getting their exiting anyways. For me, we had extra strategy in our gym and COVID just brought for a couple of months like in we did everything we needed to do and it was with the intention to do that. So the business that did that but most, most gyms were acquired  2, 3, 4 years ago by someone who’d burnout. We talk about like you know, the issues that were all these things. It was all these things. 

So that’s today, guys. That’s we’re talking about becoming the Mayor of your business and what you need to focus on. This is what it takes to build a real company. So if you’re watching and you’re in the program, look forward to more of this stuff. This is where we’re going to do a lot of heavy lifting on the trainees here in the coming. How to do this, step by step by step, break this stuff down, how to use systems to build a team of A’s. So you can remove yourself and become a more powerful business. I’ll tell you, for me and my business, every time I hired an A, my revenues jumped up in a very short period of time afterwards because it allowed me to focus on the revenue generating part of the businesses that I did not focus on all over the things, maybe even make the service better. Whatever the thing allowed me to be freed up to work on that part of the business. So I need to create more content, that allows me to create more content. Whatever the thing was, it just made it so I had free time to do it. It also means like I just enjoyed life a little bit. That’s when we started this business. 

If you’re not in the Big Little Gyms program, go to biglittlegymscom. Check us out, put the information in, book a discovery call with me, and let’s chat. So you have some opportunities. There are some openings to join our program right now that probably won’t be available to you in the near future. We’re doing this kind of special thing right now. So I will leave it at that because I will not spill any beans and this will probably be evergreen and people will gonna see this in the future so I’m not gonna talk about anything special we had going on right now. You fill in a call to hear about that. Talk to you guys, soon. Have a good day. Bye!

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