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In today’s episode, we are tackling “fractals in business” as I want you to start looking at your business fractally.
Did you know the importance and how it affects if we understood how fractal works in our business?
We could probably start to see the strategies and tactics on how to grow our business.
By understanding the patterns, you may already know what is the next move you must take.
You’ll start to figure out the who, what, where, why and what do you need, so you can get what you need!
I am also going to share and explain to you one of the most important Principles
which can actually allow you to run a way more successful business and be a lot less stressed out.
This is the Principle I’m currently deploying on my business and it also the stuff that earns us a lot of clients!
Sincerely,
Will Hurst & The Big Little Gyms Team
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READ OUR TRANSCRIPTION OF THIS FULL EPISODE HERE
Hey guys, what’s going on? It’s Coach Will, with Big Little Gyms. And today, I want to talk about fractals in business.
Okay, so what is a fractal?
First off, a fractal is essentially a pattern inside of a pattern, inside of a pattern, inside of a pattern. It almost continues. It can continue like infinitely, it doesn’t always… but it’s something that exists in nature, right? Like, in nature, these fractals everywhere, like, you can look at a tree. And a tree, for example, will have its branches, it has its root system, and it has its trunk and then it has these branches. Then off the branches comes the leaf, and then you could look at the leaf itself that it produces. And the leaf itself will have a stem, which kind of comes up off the tree, which tree would be the group for the leaf itself. And then the leaf itself, has all these little veins that run through it, kind of almost in the same shape as the tree, right? And then as you zoom in on those little veins that go through it, each of those veins has veins that kind of mimic the shape of the leaf. And then as you zoom in on those, it goes further, further, and further. And we see this all over the place and nature.
We see it, for example, if you were to look at the Grand Canyon, the Grand Canyon has an almost infinite number of fractals. At least, probably so many, you probably couldn’t count how many fractals it has. If you were to look at it from space, it is this big hole in the ground with all these little tributaries and canyons that break off, right? Then, as you zoom in on just one wing of the Grand Canyon, you’ll see that there are more Canyons that kind of look like the Canyon that you’re zooming in on, right? And then as you zoom in on that Canyon, that Canyon has little Canyons that look like the Canyon you’re zooming in on, and it keeps going, and it keeps going, and it keeps going.
And we see this pattern throughout nature and we’ve seen it throughout human life. Your offspring, if you have children, are like a fractal of you, right? They’re fractal of you and your significant other, right? And that keeps on going and continues to be, like, a piece of you throughout generations, right? Because you’re part of that fractal pattern, right?
We see it in that nature, and then we see it all the time, in business too. Like, people think that business is, some like, construct that we’ve created, that doesn’t exist in nature. And the reality we, as humans, created the construct of business. And we’ve been doing it for thousands and thousands of years. And we’ve been trading in commerce, in business this way. And as time goes on, it starts to look more and more and more like nature. We start to find more and more like nature, because ultimately, humans are over time, going to concise this construct down to the path of least resistance, right? There’s no mistake about the way that we do business works, and how it works, and how it works in relation to nature, right?
That’s why understanding these things is so important, and why I talked about them is because we have to zoom out to the bigger picture principles that are at play in nature. If we understand those, we could start to see the strategies, and we start to see the tactics, without really having to show them, right? I don’t have to share with you some like, fly-by-night marketing trick, because if you can see the patterns, if you can see it, you will start to already know what is next. You can almost, like, it’ll raise your level of sensory acuity, which is like a sensory acuity is your ability to pick up on small things, and for your brain to almost subconsciously just deliver to you. Like, what you need to do next, and what you need to go look for next. If you don’t have it, what will happen is, you’ll start to, as you understand these patterns, you’ll start to figure out the who, what, where and why of what you need so you can get what you need, right? Rather than just, like, going and looking for some like, trick. You’re going to say, okay, who do I need to acquire? What do I need to learn? It’s going to become more evident to you, clear to you, who you need to acquire, and what you need to learn, and when you need to do it. And that’s why understanding the fractal of business is so important, right?
And another way that we can look at this as well is, over the last hundred years, there’s a guy named… I think it was Wilmer Pareto, but it’s Pareto’s principle. Which Pareto Principle, is essentially that the 80/20 rule, and it kind of more or less uses math to describe this fractal pattern that we’re talking about that goes on in nature, and that’s that like, for every 100 people, roughly 20% of the people are going to be responsible for 80% of the output or the production, or the opinion, or whatever the thing is you’re measuring, right? And you can see this throughout our business, and if we understand this in our business, it can actually allow us to run a way more successful business and be a lot less stressed out. And I’m going to explain to you this real quick because, if you understand this concept, it’s going to become really clear to you, and you’re going to even see it in your own business. You’re like, “Oh, I already know who the 20% of the people are”.
So, how we see this, is essentially use a gym, that whatever number of members you have, you have within your membership base, 20% of people are going to be responsible for 80% of, say, if you were, if you were to roll out like an upsell program, or like a nutrition program, or something new and exciting, that you want to sell over time. If you were to take out those launches and you were to measure the percentage of members who went for those things, they’re going to find that it’s roughly about 20% of your members that were responsible for the success of that program, right? That’s if you do a really good job, right? If you do a really, really poor job then naturally, like, you’re going to see a lesser percentage. But say, you’re doing an optimal job, doing these things, you’re going to see success rate right around there, right?
And then, say, of a 100 people, and you sell 20 of them into this program, and let’s say, it’s a nutrition program, and the goal is for them to have some sort of transformation, it doesn’t have to be weight-loss, it could be habits based, behavior based, it could be mindset based. It could be, there’s a number of ways you can measure transformation, doesn’t have to be caught up in weight loss. I know everybody’s been talking about that over the last few years. But we know these days that, really, like, the biggest change we can see in people in the biggest impact we can have on someone is in their behavior and their habits, right? So, we could change our behavior, we could change their capabilities. If we can change their capabilities, we can change the results that they can get on their own, right?
Essentially, we can make a more efficient and effective person that doesn’t need to hang on our coattails in order to get success, they can do it on their own. And because we are the ones that facilitated that, we as the business owner, as the coach, as the expert, reap the benefits of that financially, because they’re happy to pay us when we do that, right?
So essentially, like, say, you have a program like that, where you have 20 people in a nutrition program, what you’re going to probably see, is out of the 20 people, roughly 20% of them are going to have the most success, have like, 80% of success. When you go and measure up, like, say, it was weight loss and you’re measuring pounds, right? And say, you have a group of 20 people and you go to measure all the weight loss, and you see between the group of 20 people, you lose a 100 pounds. What’s going to happen is, you’re going to have 4 people who are probably going to lose, like, 10 or more pounds each and be responsible, say, 4 people that lose 20 pounds each, and they’re going to lose that 80 of the 100 pounds, right? And the rest are going to be responsible for the other 20%, right? You guys have probably seen that time and time again, right? If any of you guys have ever run anything like a nutrition challenge or a weight loss challenge, or anything like that, when you go to look at the success rate, you’re like, oh, like 20% of these people had, like, most of the results, right? And then, it’s vice versa. It’s the same when it comes to customer service issues, or churn in your business, or troublesome customers, right? You can always count on roughly that there’s going to be 20% of your people that are responsible for 80% of your hardships as the business owner, as far as the customer service goes or draining the system.
In fact, that’s something that we’re actually working on right now, here at Big Little Gyms. We’ve grown this business really successfully over the last two and a half years. We’ve served over 300 gym owners. And in that process, we have had to expand and contract, expand and contract, right at the tree trunk swells and then it contracts, right? And every time it swells, it creates a bunch of like side effects for the tree, right? Naturally, when we swell, we get bigger, it kind of breaks our systems operationally where we’re like, okay, you know, we need to probably beef up our team a little bit, get our team and probably also realign our team. But also, we probably need to realign our customers, and also probably even be okay with shedding a few customers. And because we’re not shy of growth and neither should you be in your business, you should be totally fine with growth. What happens, and what I see a lot of gym owners do, if they had some experience with growth, and when they grow, and they experience the side effects of that swelling of the tree, they don’t want to experience it again, because they think that’s how growth feels. And the truth is that growth does not feel that way. That’s just what it feels in your first or cycle or two when you experience growth, right? What’s interesting is the second time you go back to swell that trunk again, you’ll find that it’s a different experience as long as you made the adjustments, right?
And a really interesting, like parable that I experienced this weekend, actually, I like the mountain bike. It’s one of the things that I do for fun. And we went up to Sedona Arizona, which is one of the mountain biking meccas. It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world and we went mountain biking there. And last time we mountain bike, that was my first time, and we did this trail, and the trail was a black, it’s a very technical trail, it’s like a world-famous trail. I went to this trail and we went down for the first time. It took us so long, like, it took us so long to get down this trail. And we were out there, like, two and a half hours on this trail. We stopped at like every crack and crevice to see, like, how do we traverse this, how are we going to get past this section and stay on our bikes, and no one gets hurt, and we did that. And we got down the trail, successfully no one got hurt. It just took us a long time, and we were out there so long, and we felt, like, the trip was so grueling, you know? And when we left, we were super, like, you know, we had a strong sense of completion. We were like, man, that was rough. And we looked at our map and we’re like, we rode 12 miles today. And usually if we ride 12 miles on a trail that we know, maybe a couple hours at most that were out there. We were out there like 5 hours, you know. And then yesterday, we went back out to Sedona and we did the same trail. And we rode the trail, and this time, we did it in, like, a third of the time we did the same trail. In fact, we did this trail probably harder. We probably took harder lines up some of the obstacles, and things that we are climbing on our bikes. And we took harder lines going down and bigger drops. And like, we were more aggressive about it and that was because, this time, I kind of knew what a little bit of the obstacles looked like, and I knew that when I came into this obstacle, I can go left or I can go right. And the first time I might have taken the wrong line, or I might have paused too long to stare at the line, and part of what stresses you out about growth, is those decisions you got to make when you’re staring at right and left, not that you took the wrong line. It’s that you just stress yourself out making a decision, right? The second time, you don’t stress yourself in the decision you already know, because you’ve been down it, like, oh, I just take the right line this time, and I fly down on it, right? And that’s really, like, what, you know, swelling, and the expansion, and contraction of these growth cycles feels like, right?
So, you don’t run from them, you don’t run away from them.
You re-evaluate, you step back, and if your business needs to flatline and plateau for just a minute, as long as you’re making progress on the other side of things where you need to make progress, so you can push back on the gasp, then you’re making progress, and it might just not be on paper. It might just not be on paper as new members or more revenue. In fact, it’s going to look flat, right? But you’re making this progress on the inside, right?
And we have this happen with gym owners in our program where they sign up and there’s an expectation set from the beginning, like, hey, you need to make these Coaching Calls, you need to make these Group Coaching Calls, you need to make time. And we set the time because we can’t possibly make a time that for the 24 different time zones on the planet, or how many time zones there are that it works for everybody, right? So, it’s important that our clients make the time to make these Coaching Calls if they want to get the most value out of the program.
And what happens is, a lot of gym owners will join our program, and you know, for a week or two, maybe they’re not present, because they have to coach a class at that time. And that’s normally when they coach that class or whatever, definitely going on. But most about 20% of them make the adjustment, and start showing up on the calls. And then, they as a result, get results. They show up on these calls and a very short period of time. They’re like, “Hey, I did this in a different way, and it worked this time. I figured out something on the technical side of things, that you help me without on a Coaching Call”. They’re able to accelerate their own process because they prioritize getting on the Coaching Calls. But then what we’ll see is, we’ll see the other, you know, it’s a percentage thing, right? We’ll see the next 20%, kind of, sometimes make the effort, right? They sometimes can get coverage as a part-time coach, sometimes they get it covered, sometimes they can’t. And then, we’ll see that fall off pretty hard. And then you get that last 20%, that really doesn’t make any effort, right? See, it’s easy for them for them to just keep coaching this class, that they could pay $20 an hour to have covered, instead of showing up to a call that can make them thousands and thousands of dollars recurring in their business, right? Because really, on Coaching Calls, they do that, right? Like, we’re fixing big, we’re pulling the big levers on this Coaching Call. So, we’ll have these gym owners that they’re not thinking big. They’re thinking small, the thinking, like, oh, you know, and so, we put the pressure on them, and it’s actually we are going to start, we start doing more.
If there’s someone in our program and we need to lose them, because they are abusing our system, and how they would use our system, they would monopolize our time. They would insist on getting one-on-one time with us, when that was never part of the promise, right? I would always tell our new clients, like, hey, I’ll make one-on-one time for you if you’re making the time to show up when you need to show up first. And then we can escalate this thing to a one-on-one call. After a while, we started getting so many that we’re like, “Hey, just this one time, can I do a one-on-one call?”, and then we do one, and then they want another one because we can never fix all their problems on one call, right? And so that’s why they would just abuse this system.
When meanwhile, we have these Coaching Calls, we have a training portal, we have a slack group, we have all these other ways for them to be resourceful and use our system that works really, really well. And the 20% of the gym owners that actually use those things, are responsible for 80% of the results that we see with people that go through our program. It was the same when I owned up my gym, right? Like, we had at one point, 4 of a member gym. And in that 4-member gym, it was about 80 of the members that were like, our core die-hard members, that like, I could offend everybody in the gym, and those 80 members would stay, like, they would stay and they would continue to pay me. And so, I always knew that we would be fine because we had that.
So, that’s it for today guys. That’s really like, you know. I want you to start looking at your business, fractally. And also start looking at this, like, 80/20 process identifying in every system of your business. Like, where’s the 20%, right? Where’s the 20%, like, looking at your clients, who are the 20% that are responsible for 80% of success? Or who are the 20% that are responsible for 80% of my failure rates, or by hardships, or that are abusing my system, and fix those things, right guys?
And I want you guys to have an awesome week ahead. I hope this was helpful for you, guys. This has been like, you know, this way of looking at my business, this is a principle. We’re not talking about some, like, here’s how you click a button and Facebook ads and create 5x or your ad spend. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you guys are out there looking for that stuff. And I swear, like, I promise you, if that’s like how you’re thinking about how you’re going to fix your business, you’re just putting a bandaid on the broken arm, because you’re not understanding and deploying the principles we’re talking about here on these videos. And honestly, as the most valuable stuff I give, is like the stuff I give here for free to you guys. Because, like, really, it’s the stuff that packed you guys the most. And it’s also stuff that also earns us a lot of clients, because after you guys hear this stuff, you’re like, oh, like, I really want to get closer to this guy. You know, I want to find out that next layer of like, how he thinks this way, or what’s the strategy he’s using below these principles, to maybe carry out some of these tactics. Like, how do I do that? how do I be more like that? That’s what we’re all doing. That’s all your clients want from you. You know what I mean? That’s all your clients want from you. It has really nothing to do with you massaging my ego. It has everything to do with me, showing you like how it works for me. So, you can see that it works for you the same way in your business, because your business is pretty much, your gym is a fractal, of like, Big Little Gyms, and how I run Big Little Gyms. It really is. Like, you guys are almost like, the same blueprint on a smaller scale. And it’s like, you know, so I know if it’s working for me, it’s working for you guys. So, I’m here to share it.
So have a great day, guys. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
